Bottled Abyss

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Another round discharged and the Ferrywoman’s head bucked back. A red eel pushed free, fell, hit the bridge of her nose and made a dark auburn crescent next to the other carpet stains.

  “Don’t any of you fucking die?” The mortal grabbed the bottle off the bed and held it above her head.

  “Hand it over and I will leave you alone.”

  “Really?” The mortal gave an uncertain look to the window.

  “Let’s just end this.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Give me the bottle. NOW.”

  The mortal straightened. “You know what, fuck this. Catch, you bitch!”

  There was no way to stop it. The bottle flew past the Ferrywoman and struck the wall, breaking into onyx fragments. From the source of impact, dark water shot across the room, punching through the opposite wall. The mortal ducked under the torrent and escaped the bedroom.

  Water springing and spouting everywhere, the Ferrywoman stood in the midst of it all, dumbfounded. She brushed a glassy bit of bottle floating on the water’s surface, now at her waist. What does this mean? Am I undone?

  “No,” said Nyx.

  The God stood near the bed, now almost completely submerged.

  “The bottle held no value for that mortal and the waters have been freed sooner than I planned, but we will work with the outcome. Even with a middling Fury, we have no choice but to move forward.”

  “I’m sorry, mother.”

  “You’ve done better than expected.” Dark tears spilled from Nyx’s eyes, and at the same time a hungry look filled her face, like she intended to eat Janet to the bone right where she stood.

  “What do I do now, mother?”

  “Your new job,” answered Nyx.

  Suddenly the bedroom floor buckled and split. The Ferrywoman dropped through the opening and nearly lost her oar on the way down. She clenched it tight to her chest and recalled Nyx’s past reprimand about losing the oar. It would mean finding it again and that could be an ordeal. The River spread far and wide, filling everything in sight, above and below.

  A large piece of the house ripped away with a wave—the Ferrywoman clutched the side in one skeletal hand and managed to pull herself on top. The portion of wooden framing floated on the water. With the siding still attached, it made for an ideal raft. For a while the Ferrywoman thought of the craft as nothing more than a way to reach the distant shore, but then it became clear that what she’d discovered would be the dais of her new trade, as Nyx called it.

  Behind her, the world dropped away to a barren gray land of burned trees and monotonous boulders. It went as far as the eye could see or the mind could imagine. On the other side of the River Hythia, waiting before her, on a shore that might have once been the middle of a California desert, was the mass gathering of spirits that would pay everything they possessed for a single ill promise. The Ferrywoman stuck the oar in the waters and went to them, her lips peeled back in a primeval grin.

  CHAPTER V

  The Ferry

  All manners of souls flooded the shoreline, mostly those who’d shed their bodies, but occasionally those who still held fast to their fleshy firmaments. It didn’t matter to Nyx, or to the Ferrywoman for that matter—the River was fed either way.

  The job was a difficult, but rewarding one. Day and night did not exist aboard the Ferry, and the journey back and forth ceased only when the weight of coinage became too much for the Ferrywoman’s mind. She would then have to deposit all the coins in a special vault on the Underworld shore.

  Nyx would watch the deposits carefully, her face on the River’s every wave, dark rimmed eye sockets with cold jet eyes, crying, always crying, gray pallor of skin, pointed teeth that parted as though ready to bite. It didn’t matter how small or large the deposit, peals of sad laughter would always erupt from the God and the Ferrywoman would experience the euphoria of the passings. That made it difficult to leave the shores of the Underworld, step back onto the ferry and resume the laborious job.

  From the ferry, the Living World was a blurry drive-in movie seen from a great distance off. Across a brace of recently abandoned track homes, the Ferrywoman could see a freeway still bustling with trucks, cars, motorcycles and the like. Except for the adventurous sort who did not view the passage across the River as suicide, but rather an opportunity for an encounter with the sublime, the freeway was the closest humanity got to the River—other places in the world had evacuated all areas around the River, far and wide, for miles and miles. Southern California, the River’s birth place, was a global exception.

  There was, however, a brief time when reporters came to the shore to investigate the mysterious new River that had divided continents and the even ocean itself—the reporting teams thinned substantially after many reporters stepped into the Hythia’s waters and inadvertently paid for passage to the Underworld.

  People began to go spirit watching at night and in recent months, a Catholic church at the base of some nearby foothills had been torn down and a temple to Nyx erected in its place. Several other larger super-church sized temples followed.

  Sporadic victims of the Fury would appear in the crowd of spirits. The rat-headed monster would shuffle along at their side and hand the Ferrywoman the coin it had extracted from them. Nyx was not completely content with the random nature of the Fury’s choices, or its slowness at resolving tastes for punishment and sin. Overall, it brought less spirits to her shores than any of its predecessors, but Nyx allowed for its modest beginnings, since its primary function was to keep the Ferrywoman from ever escaping the River if such a thing should ever come to pass.

  The Ferrywoman would often lose herself in studying the ghosts who clamored to get aboard. She could fit close to eighty thousand souls on the ferry and yet would become completely consumed by how one particular spirit changed its form from young to old to fat to skinny and back.

  “Why do they do that?” she once asked Nyx.

  “They project their appearance in this place. This is why most of these souls appear youthful, when in fact they died at an advanced age.”

  “But what about those who go through several forms, over and over.”

  “Other souls also can project their impression upon a spiritual form. A wife who thinks of her older husband as younger, can change his appearance here. Of course, this ends in the Underworld.”

  “As it should,” the Ferrywoman agreed, knowing that the River’s essence depended on reaping the fattiest bits of a mortal’s history.

  How wonderful that the Ferrywoman could view these last drippings of a person’s life! She could see them fight through the other ghosts, finally making their way to the shoreline, where they would wet their ethereal toes and watch as a gorgeous skull-headed coin grew in their hands. Or the mortals, as said earlier, who would walk to the shoreline, not seeing anyone else around and go about the more visceral process of coughing the coin up from their throats.

  They all paid, either way.

  Some had things to say to her, but most were silent, in awe of the River before them.

  One man, bald and bearing a goatee, seeing himself dressed in an executive’s suit with a diamond studded tie tack and brilliantly polished loafers, approached the Ferry one day. For a moment, he stood there, looking dapper, and then for a blink he lost the clothes, wore a t-shirt and shorts, and in the next his head was crushed, the neck ending in a gory imprint of a tire track.

  He questioned why he should hand over the coin. Although he admitted the dancing silver spirits on the other side of the river were beautiful, he didn’t know if becoming one was worth spending his coin.

  The Ferrywoman ignored him and accepted others in his place. After a few days of pondering the choice, the man finally made payment and crossed with the others.

  “Vincent Baker,” Nyx said with a hint of disappointment in her watery voice. “He was… so perfect.”

  A pang of jealousy struck the Ferrywoman’s jellyfish heart. Had she not devoted h
erself entirely to building the River? How more perfect in this job could someone be? The red fishes of Hythia’s waters had become so abundant in recent months the water was harder to navigate. This was success! What did perfect even look like?

  It bothered her, but she made no reproaches of the God.

  She thought it possible to just let her feelings go past her, like the churning of the River’s current, but her initial frustration and self consciousness kept with her, and although the passings of souls continued to be exhilarating, the experience began to seem manufactured somehow, placation for the despicable job of leading wayward spirits to a void of permanent amnesia and aimless, brainless wandering.

  Such a pointless line of thinking. So very mortal.

  The Ferrywoman ordered herself to be content.

  But content, she was not.

  2

  The Ferry would not move without the oar’s help, so every stroke counted. There were so many souls to attend and stopping even for a moment could delay the daily deposit of coins. Some souls got impatient and tried to wade out into the water, only to find they couldn’t move through the River. The Ferrywoman relished her uniqueness in the universe; no creature, not even Nyx herself, could convey souls across her waters.

  The Ferrywoman hadn’t always known this. In her recent self denigration, she wondered if anybody could use the oar as she did, since several mortals had used the bottle’s properties without a problem.

  Then her question was answered: a particularly relentless mortal attempted to steal the ferry one day as she collected coins. Tongue hanging from his mouth like a hound, laughing and heaving for breath, he vigorously paddled in place, going nowhere. Shortly afterward, the Fury was summoned at Nyx’s behest, and the man was punished.

  The difference, Nyx explained, between the bottle and oar was their composition. One had been made from the materials bordering the Underworld (the oar) and one had been constructed from materials bordering the Living World (the bottle). Since the Underworld populated itself with catatonic spirits, there wasn’t any chance some ghost would confiscate the oar to escape. So the Living couldn’t use the oar, the dim-brained dead wouldn’t conceive using it, and that left only the Ferrywoman, who was now of neither world.

  She was special after all.

  But that was the only consolation some days, for the barrage of souls was endless and sometimes maddening in its scope. The Ferrywoman toiled away and watched what little flesh she had melt from her bones, leaving her a bare, bleached skeleton inhabiting robes. The passings were still delicious but she became more and more jaded about the experience.

  Life on the River Hythia was, in a word, lonely. The nameless spirits jolly to cross over gave the Ferrywoman no joy and Nyx’s face constantly watching from the water made her uneasy, fearful of a scolding the longer she withheld a coin deposit.

  From time to time, watching the Fury work would fascinate the Ferrywoman, just to see something new happen. The monster would waddle on its reptile legs toward its prey, canine midsection hunched over with humanoid hands that stretched forth with dreadful black claws, rat’s face always parted in a buck-toothed gape that promised the return of the plague. The Ferrywoman always sought its eyes. There was something comforting and real in them. Several times she thought laughingly of that rat wearing glasses and had no idea what the image meant.

  A year later and Nyx had not warmed to the Fury, although she must have been stuck with the monster, just as someone might be stuck with a particular storm to provide necessary rainwater. The Fury changed its punishable crimes every day and the number of souls it brought was unpredictable. Nyx had communed with some of the local temples and the mortals were in disarray over the Fury aspect of their new religion. Nobody could build a dogma around its random choice of sin and punishment. There was no pattern to its punishment and the indecisive nature of its pursuits added a level of chaos to a system that Nyx had recalled as quite structured at one time.

  As the Fury concerned them, temple leaders tried to instill acceptance in their followers, because the monster inevitably sent a soul to the River sooner. Mortals would nod and smile and agree with the temple brethren, but in actuality, at home and not in the presence of their congregation, they would hide in fear, waiting for some dark day when the Fury came unexpectedly for whatever sin, small or large, they’d committed.

  During what was a painful afternoon of collecting, loading, oaring, oaring, oaring, the Ferrywoman had an encounter with a mortal who came down to the shores, stopping just short of touching the water. Some people had learned this would keep them alive. Some hadn’t.

  This policewoman had.

  She tried to elicit a conversation with the Ferrywoman and called her by the name of Janet, several times… The name meant nothing, and this woman meant nothing…yet, the encounter was disturbing. Later, after Nyx became incensed and the woman escaped, the Ferrywoman had time to think about why the woman so disturbed her. Something about the woman’s face reminded her of the Fury’s eyes. The more she dwelled on it, the more the name of Janet felt different to her. She didn’t recollect the name, but now it seemed like a piece of a large puzzle she’d thrown away long ago. With no other pieces to connect, she would never understand its value.

  The Ferrywoman hoped the woman would return.

  She stopped hoping the day she saw the Fury disemboweling the policewoman over a series of rocks near the shoreline. Its clawed hand held up a coin pulled from the woman’s intestines, its dumb rat grin looking justified in triumph.

  The woman’s spirit came aboard that afternoon.

  The Ferrywoman waited patiently for the woman to address her again; will she call me Janet now? But the woman had become lost in her own internal strife, and developed the mute quality most of the dead possessed. She watched as the woman stepped off the ferry into the Underworld. Her shape collapsed into silver cursive light and fled at once into the nothing-land, interspersing with other dancing nebulas.

  “Janet,” the Ferrywoman whispered quietly in wonder.

  CHAPTER VI

  The Dancers

  They were as beautiful as they were mysterious to onlookers. Only the Ferrywoman and Nyx realized they were empty energy, bouncing here and there, with about as many profound thoughts as a bursting firework in the night sky. Those poor ghosts, colliding into each other with no memories and no possible way to lead any meaningful existence now, they had reached a place of eternal life, as spiritual vegetables.

  It was a worse fate, the Ferrywoman supposed, than the terminus death in the interim between the God’s destruction and Nyx’s resurrection. At least those parting spirits might have had one final look at their existence before thinning out into the ether. The end result would have been cessation from the terrible agony of trying to derive who you are out of nothing, a soul cheapened to dust.

  The denizens of the Underworld were valueless.

  And the Ferrywoman understood their plight all too well. How had she gotten here? When did Nyx give her life? Why didn’t Nyx have any other children? Was there an end to this job? Would the River always crave new tragedies from these pathetic things that walked the planet? Would Nyx’s appetite ever become satiated on these delicacies? How could the River stay the same length and yet feel so much deeper with every passing soul?

  More questions came with every boatload of passengers, although the Ferrywoman never asked the God for answers. She knew enough about Nyx to know that she would be asking in vain. It was impossible to ask for guidance from a being that spent its time submerged under the River, laughing and orgasming at all the anguish surging around her. No, the Ferrywoman knew better than to approach Nyx with these startlingly mortal-like emotions.

  She began to wonder then, even how unlikely, if she had once been mortal. It was another question never to find an answer, but an important one, so she decided to let it be the only question she addressed to Nyx in this vein.

  “The mortals have the same bone structure as I
do—I wondered if I’d been born of mortal parents?”

  “Nonsense, little one.” Nyx wiped fresh tears from her reddened eyes and a hearty laugh burst from her cavernous mouth. “You are above these creatures. I shaped you in their image so that they would approach the Ferry with less reluctance. Make no mistake, you are born of the River and nowhere else.”

  At one point that answer might have satisfied the Ferrywoman, but it simply made her wallow in more unspoken questions. The only comfort came in the daily deposits of coin. But such a shallow comfort that was... She would have had to be an extremely fanatical miser to revel in the coins for very long.

  Still, she had nowhere else to go but on and on. This was her existence. It wasn’t about being content or malcontent. It was only about being.

  CHAPTER VII

  The Dark Shore

  It was a day like all others, and the Ferrywoman had gone about it, laboring ever on, as she always had. She wouldn’t have suspected how different everything could become in one single moment.

  She rowed steadily toward the dark shore where the shifting masses waited for passage. The Ferry bumped against the shoreline as it always did. She dropped the ropes, as she always did. The first spirit reached out, coin in hand, as always…

  The woman standing there held a little girl by her pale, flickering hand. She proffered two coins for passage. The Ferrywoman normally would have taken them swiftly and moved the rest aboard.

  But Janet could only stare at Faye and tremble at her presence.

  Faye pressed her hand farther out with the two coins.

  Janet looked at the little girl…it was a smaller version of Faye, only she wore glasses. This was how Faye saw the daughter who never came to be. But they were together now. Hand in hand. But not forever; they were focused on crossing the river to complete nullification, where neither would conceive of each other again.