The Mythniks Saga

by Paul Neuhaus

  But, again, the incident with King Odysseus came long after the time of Perseus. In Perseus’ day, the sirens were still a harrowing trap for the unwary. The boy knew, if he were to survive an encounter with the cursed monsters, he would need to be both cautious and clever.

  Perseus flew inland behind the shore where the sirens dwelt. Since he would not be passing them on the sea, he reasoned they would not predict his coming. Before he rushed into their midst, Perseus crouched down behind some bushes for it occurred to him his plan was incomplete. Would he need to kidnap one of the sirens and take her with him to his battle with the Kraken? He could not imagine such a scenario going well since the siren would be unlikely to cooperate. The boy realized he’d have trouble getting his prisoner to sing on command. And what if she did sing on command? Wouldn’t Perseus be just as vulnerable to the music as the sea monster? Here was a difficult problem. Fortunately, his half-sister Athena came to him again. She showed the boy the rocky stretch where the sirens lived and bade him look closer. Perseus did as the goddess instructed and noticed the bones of several creatures strewn about. At first, he assumed they belonged to herd animals (for, surely the sirens must eat). But then he looked closer and saw the human character of the bones. He thought these must be the remains of the sirens' victims. Sailors who’s bodies had washed ashore after they’d drowned. Athena corrected this misconception. “You’ve seen with your eyes,” she said. “Now listen with your ears.” Perseus trained his vision upon a particular skull and willed the background din out of his hearing. When he did that, he heard a quiet song—and it seemed to be coming from the skull itself. It was then he realized the skull belonged not to food or to an unlucky mariner, but to a long-dead siren. As the gentle breeze blew through it, its song resonated once again. In that moment, Perseus knew exactly what he must do. He stood and approached the rocks. Before he got more than a few steps, Athena grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Here,” she said. “You’ll need this.” She handed him a golden sword which matched his golden bridle. The boy thanked his kin and started off once again. Before he got more than a few steps, Athena stopped him once again. “Here,” she said. “You’ll need this too.” Perseus looked down into the goddess’ open palm and saw two plugs of sheep’s wool. He smiled and placed one into each of his ears.

  After he’d taken the head of a siren, Perseus bagged it and mounted his steed once again.

  As Pegasus flew high above the peninsula of Greece, all the suffering caused by Acrisius’ campaign of terror was plain to see. Decades of burning and pillaging and death. So much misery, and for so long, Perseus thought. It ends today!

  When the boy was within sight of Argos, he saw two miraculous sights. First was the total eclipse of the sun and second was the steam rising up in many places from the ocean surrounding the city. Past Argos’ harbor there was much volcanic activity. Vents far below the surface set the water to boiling. The adventurer had no time to linger over either marvel for the appointed time had come and the Kraken rose from the sea.

  Perseus rode harder and cast away the bag covering the siren’s head. The strong wind blew through the gory prize and drove the dead creature to sing as if it had life. The sea monster turned away from the object of its wrath and looked back at the enchanting song. For a time, it resisted, but, being born of the sea itself, it could not but follow the plaintive melody. With the Kraken at his command Perseus arced backward toward the part of the ocean where the steam rose. The boiling water burned the Kraken across every inch of its body. Finally, it sank to the bottom, badly wounded and much reduced in size.

  There it would stay for many hundreds of years.

  With his mission accomplished, the son of Zeus flew back to Argos. He landed his steed amidst an outdoor wedding. Even as Argos’ king bound himself to the fair Andromeda, Perseus ran him through with Athena’s golden sword.

  Acrisius’ long reign of terror was over.

  As the evil monarch bled out upon the ground, Zeus appeared and declared his son king of Argos. He told those in attendance that Perseus would rule long and with wisdom and that he would take Andromeda as his queen.

  When things had settled, Perseus talked to his true father for the first time. After Zeus had explained to Perseus the circumstances of his birth, Perseus stated his confusion. “Wait,” he said. “Let me make sure I understand. Rather than kill Acrisius outright, you impregnated his wife to make the hero who would one day be his downfall. But, of course, that hero had to come of age, so all the people who were suffering had to suffer on for another twenty years. Which means there was a lot of unnecessary pain. Can it be you wanted to help, but you wanted to fuck my mother more? Also, I’m still unclear on the part Poseidon played... Why was there a Kraken even involved?”

  Zeus, his cup halfway to his lips, gave his son a sour look. “Look,” he said. “Do you wanna be king or not?”

  1

  Dora

  I found Hope and the Evils hovering in an angry swarm above Vasquez Rocks. If you don’t know, Vasquez Rocks is a badass rock formation north of the San Fernando Valley. You’ve probably seen it lots of times without knowing it. It’s been in tons of movies and car commercials.

  When I arrived there, the atmosphere was spooky. The sky was dark, the wind was whipping up, and no one was around. Even the ranger station was empty. There was also a low thrumming noise, right at the edge of being intolerable. Above the Rocks themselves, a little maelstrom boiled, alternating black and white. I had my new pithos strapped to my back and I carried a gladius in my right hand.

  I won’t lie: I was scared shitless.

  I knew exactly what the little maelstrom was. The black bits were the Evils I’d accidentally let loose. The white bits were Hope—my friend, the personification of a state of mind.

  Right then, she was killing herself to keep the Evils in check until I arrived.

  Scared as I was, there was no way I was gonna leave my old companion hanging.

  I reached around and undid the straps holding the pithos in place. The clay jug dropped into my left hand and I brought it around, so the opening pointed forward. The pithos was a more important weapon than the gladius. In fact, the blade was useless since I was dealing with spectral enemies. I brought the sword along as a pointy security blanket. I was ready to cast it aside at a moment's notice but, right then, I found the weight and the feel of it reassuring.

  I wasn’t afraid of any one of the Evils by themselves. Hope and I had gathered them up in the first place. Over the course of several thousand years, we'd managed to collect over nine thousand of the monstrosities. Funny thing was, all that effort had been undone by a single bullet from a love-crazed track star. As I walked toward the Rocks, I wondered how I was going to deal with all the beasties at once. There were more of them in one place than the pithos could process efficiently. Or so I assumed. I felt sure that, as I was sucking in one, the other eight thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine would rip me limb from limb. Banishing the thought from my mind, I took a deep breath and willed relaxation to pass through me. Top to bottom. Head to toes. If Hope can keep these motherfuckers corralled for this long, I sure as hell can do my part, I thought.

  At the base of the stone formation, I stopped and looked up. “Hope, I’m here. Tell me what you need.”

  At first, nothing happened. Hope didn’t answer. I was afraid she was so occupied we wouldn’t be able to communicate. I was also afraid she’d been irrevocably altered by her ordeal and couldn’t answer.

  She answered. “Dora? Dora! Thank the gods! I’m at my breaking point. You’ve got to help me.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Tell me what you need. Can we get all these dirty little fuckers back into the pithos?”

  “Pithos? What pithos?” Hope didn’t know I’d gotten a replacement jug from Zeus himself. That story could wait, though.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a pithos, and I wanna put as many of the Evils back in as possible. I don’t wanna chase them all ove
r creation again.”

  “Um, lemme think...” I could hear the strain in Hope’s voice. Usually, she was bright and optimistic. Right then, she was exhausted and brittle. “As soon as I back off, these guys’re gonna scatter to the four winds,” she said. “They’re fast and they’re mean. I don’t see any way we can stop them.”

  “What was your plan when you penned them up in the first place?”

  “Umm...”

  Fair enough. I couldn’t fault the girl for a little off-the-cuff thinking. Up to that point, Hope had never been much of an improvisor. It was nice to see her exercise that muscle—even if her scheme hadn’t been fully formed. “We’ve never fought more than one Evil at a time. Can the pithos handle this many?”

  “I... have no idea.”

  “I assume they’re not just swarming around the perimeter you’ve set up. They’re also attacking you, right?”

  “Oh, my yes.”

  “How riled-up would you say they are? On a scale of one to ten?”

  “I dunno... Probably a fifteen.”

  I thought for a minute, trying to connect the dots inside my head. “Okay. Here’s the plan... I’m going to stand underneath you with the pithos pointed up. You’re going to open on the bottom so you’re in the shape of an upside-down bowl. The Evils are going to spill out and we’re going to see how many of them I can suck in at once. I’m sure some of them will flow out along the edges, but I have a theory about that... None of them are gonna leave until they’ve turned around and eaten you for breakfast. So, you’ll make like a rodeo clown. Force them to chase you. Pull as many of them as you can back to me and the jug and I’ll nab them. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess so. I don’t think I’m too crazy about the me-for-breakfast part.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think there’s a way around that. You’ve done a bang-up job keeping them fenced in—which means they hate you something terrible. We can use that.”

  “Okay... I trust you.”

  I looked up the face of the Rocks. They were steep and jagged, and I was in lousy shape. I regretted it immediately, but I asked Hope for a favor. “Say... Do you think you could scootch over so you’re above me? Where I’m currently standing? At the bottom of the rocks?”

  There was a long pause. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Hope said. “I’ve been keeping these sons of bitches here for days and you wanna get out of a little climbing? Fuck you.”

  That was only the second or third time Hope had sworn in the last millennia. Still, she wasn’t wrong. I was being lazy. “Alright, alright. Gimme a minute.” I took a deep breath and began trudging up the side of the Rocks. For the umpteenth time in a short period, I cursed myself for going to seed. I had a little roll around the middle and I was paying the price for my years of sloth. I stopped about halfway up, put my hands on my knees and sucked air. “Gimme. Just. A. Minute.”

  “Oh, fer crissakes.”

  “I know,” I replied. “After this, Jenny Craig’s my new BFF.” Finally, I reached the top and stood under the maelstrom. I spread my feet apart, dropped the gladius on the dusty ground, and wrapped my right arm around the pithos. I held my left hand over the stopper. I leaned in and said, “Are you ready, Orpheus? You’re gonna get some company.” Orpheus was the new jug’s only inmate—and I was looking forward to expanding his circle of friends. I looked up and said, “Okay. On three. Are you ready?”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Hope said. “Do you mean go right at three or right after three?”

  “Are you asking me that because you wanna know, or because you’ve seen this exact conversation in a million movies and you’re confusing reality with a pop culture simulation?”

  Hope sighed. “I don’t wanna discuss psychology right now. Let’s go at three.”

  “Deal. One... Two...” (At two I pulled the top off the jug and felt the reassuring vacuum cycle up.) “Three!”

  What happened next was, I assume, like standing under a manure silo right as it opens. A plummeting mountain of metaphorical shit crushed me to the ground.

  Hope shaped herself into an upside-down bowl and the Evils didn’t so much flow out as plop down like one of Godzilla’s turds. Even though they were incorporeal, they had enough collective weight to slam me to the ground and keep me there in a sweaty, breathless heap. I wanted to scream. I wanted to say, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything with that dank mass pressing down on me.

  Hope did something smart right then. She dropped down on top of us, creating a cell with herself as the walls and ceiling and the Rocks as the floor. I didn’t see her do it, but I felt the change in air pressure and saw the quality of the light alter.

  On the one hand, we were in a good place. Without much effort, I had access to the Evils, and the Evils were still contained. On the other, I was suffocating. I was suffocating, I could hear the air escaping my lungs, and there was a horrible din all around me. The Evils began to murmur to one another. They knew something had changed but they were disoriented. Their confusion didn’t last long. They realized the shape of their cell had changed and there was someone in there with them.

  Someone they recognized.

  As much as the Evils hated Hope, they hated me more. Sure, I was the one that’d liberated them in the first place, but I was also the one that’d gone around and systematically re-imprisoned them. When they were all shoved into the pithos by Zeus, I’m sure he told them, “Look, everybody crowd into this tiny little space, but don’t worry: I found a stupid girl and she’s gonna let you out again. Once that happens, you can run roughshod over humanity causing whatever pain and misery you like.” I can easily imagine the Evils replying (with a single, enthusiastic voice), “Fucking-A! Sign us up!” But Zeus hadn’t told them the second part. He hadn’t told them he’d given me an out. Well, he’d given me an out if you wanna call a full-blown curse an out. The allfather told me I had to find the escaped Evils and put them back in the jug. Until I caught ‘em all, I was doomed to, as Samuel Jackson once said, walk the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu. The baddies weren’t aware of that clause in the contract and none of them liked it when I stuffed them back into the crock.

  Now, for all intents and purposes, I was inside the crock with them and they’d begun to suss out it was me.

  Even with all that going on, I heard a sucking sound over the murmurings of my fellow inmates. The sucking sound made by the pithos. Despite the oxygen shortage, I tried to home in on the noise. Because of the wriggling mass on top of me, I couldn’t figure out the exact orientation of the jug. As best I could, I ran my right hand up the contours of the container. Finally, I felt the neck followed by the lip around the opening.

  The opening had slammed into the ampleness of my right titty and fastened itself there, forming a seal.

  Because of course it had.

  I pulled my right hand back down, so I gripped the fat end of the pithos. I did the best I could but, because of the weight on top of me, I couldn’t turn the jug—and my left arm was pinned underneath me, so it wasn’t much help.

  As I laid there, wondering how I was going to get the pithos away from me (and where I was going to get my next hit of oxygen), a voice broke through the din. It was the voice of a leader, urging the others to silence and attention. “Wait! Wait! Quiet! Do you smell that?” it said. I recognized the voice. It was Pestilence. He always did have a surprising gift for organization.

  “What’re you doing?” Hope said to me. “Do something.”

  “I’m... trying. I can’t move my arm and the pithos is suckered to my boob.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “I know, right?”

  Meanwhile, the natives were growing more restless. “It’s Pandora. I’d know that rutty whore anywhere!” It was Famine. He always did have a gift for character assassination.

  I felt a rustling in the pile. Someone near the top was working his way to the bottom. “I’ve got dibs,” it said. It was the minotaur. Believe it
or not, I didn’t get him into the pithos until 1978. He was a relatively new inmate to be so gung-ho. His passage from on high caused a lot of grumbling and groaning. It also caused a split down the middle in the pile. As the minotaur burrowed, other Evils fell inward on top of him. That didn’t stop his progress. It also didn’t help me get closer to pulling the jug off my jug.

  “Can you roll over one hundred and eighty degrees and then seal yourself on top again?” I said to Hope. My voice was faint. I really was close to passing out.

  “And not spill out most of the Evils in the process? I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, sure, but I’ll be dead soon which doesn’t do either of us any good.”