Moon leaned forward and blew the dust off a copper rectangle attached to the wall. It was to the right of the locking mechanism and the handle. Lissandra could barely make out what was stamped into the metal in the bare light which crept over it. Moon seemed to be able to see just fine, and ran her fingertips over the words as she read. What Lissandra could make out looked a lot like hieroglyphs in some mummy's tomb.
Satisfied, Moon pulled away from the plate and gave a command in the air with her fingers that the party should continue moving.
“Not what you wanted?” Lissandra regarded the door over her shoulder as she fell in step with everyone else.
“No, that's his stupid flying saucer.”
“Oh, yeah, who'd want one of those.”
“No reason to go in there unless you want to pay your respects.”
“I already saluted at the last flying saucer-man parade.”
Lissandra looked back again, and she blinked because her eyes couldn't be sending the correct signals to her brain. It had looked like she'd seen the flash of an old man in a suit with big ears cradling a puppy in his arms. The puppy had big ears too.
When she was done blinking, the image was gone.
“Was that…”
Moon didn't look back. “Probably.”
“But…”
“A good lesson for you, Lissandra. You live by the flying saucer, and you'll surely die by the flying saucer.”
Lissandra looked back one last time and didn't see the door anymore — but it was dark. It was really dark and that had to be it.
II.
“Medusa? I love that bitch!” Moon was completely excited, almost star-struck. “I wonder if she's like all those stories about her?”
Lissandra stood next to Moon in front of the sixth door they'd come to since the flying saucer door. This had been going on for hours. Lissandra's stomach was screaming for food, and the headache which throbbed in her brain, like slow Chinese water torture, just wasn't going to go away. “You mean like mane of serpents and turn people to stone?”
The gypsy was past the point of even arguing with Moon about how ridiculous any of this was. If she wanted to believe that a Greek monster myth was on the other side of that vault door, she wasn't going to argue with her — beyond snarky color commentary.
“Lissandra, that was all just tabloid fodder. She was a much more complex and tragic figure than all that mythological hoodoo attributed to her.”
“I talk to Artemis in the forest sometimes.”
Moon didn't look away from the copper square of hieroglyphs when she gave her completely unimpressed response. “That's nice, sweetie.”
“It's the whole deer thing…”
“Uh huh.” Moon raised her hand into the air. “Alright, boys, set up for a Class 9 Mythological Threat. Standard classical divinity mutations with a dash of cockatrice. We're going in hot in forty-five seconds.” Lissandra watched as goggles were re-adjusted and weapons were replaced with bigger and more intimidating weapons.
“So much for it just being a bedtime story.”
“I never said Medusa was a bedtime story. Besides, those are handled with different defensive protocols.”
Moon was punching a code into a keypad at the door handle. “You might want to hold back at first.”
“Oh, no issue there.”
The last number was keyed in, and there was a loud sound of a seal breaking around the door. Steam rose from the floor as cogworks and gears could be heard turning inside the door.
The entire army was positioned with weaponry drawn. They all had looks on their faces like they were ready to do serious damage to anything on the other side of that door that acted up. Lissandra decided to take a step back — then another step back.
“Don't get too far.” Moon was in the center of her army and watching as the door split in the center and began to slowly pull open like an exaggerated sideways grin. “You don't want to get separated from the group.”
Lissandra planted her feet and braced for whatever monster was locked inside the room.
“Oh, and Lissandra, you should close your eyes.”
“I'm not closing my eyes.”
Moon's hands rose and took hold of her swords. She unsheathed them, then in a cross-motion sliced the air with them, suddenly extending them to her sides. “Suit yourself, I'm closing mine.”
Lissandra watched Moon begin to step forward as the dark passage in was revealed and the soldiers began rushing in. “Damn this,” Lissandra muttered as she closed her eyes tight.
The only comforting thing about having her eyes closed was that it was so dark in this magic dungeon they'd been walking in all night, it wasn't much different than having her eyes open. Lissandra instinctively lifted her arms out in front of her and walked forward slowly. She could hear the footfalls of many military grade boots up ahead and the clicking of equipment and weaponry.
She didn't know what they were finding ahead, if anything, but she wasn't getting left behind — especially in an underground facility that supposedly had a propensity for re-mapping itself in ways that would have taken a physics genius to try and explain. Lissandra hated adventures even more than she had thought she would. She also hated him at the moment even more than she had before, because adventures made her think of him, and how he was always storming off to have them.
No wonder he was dead. Truth be told, she'd probably be joining him sooner than later.
Just then one of the soldiers barked a very loud, “Clear!” Lissandra bumped into something, her knees slamming into it and almost causing her to tumble over whatever was in her way. She'd heard the soldier yell the clear code but was reticent to open her eyes, and felt she might do just as good by tripping over whatever this thing was.
Her hands grasped at it. Stone? Her grip closed on what felt like a shoulder and her other hand ran over a smooth dome which became what felt like a face.
When Lissandra did open her eyes, she found Moon and thirty-one flashlight beams staring at her. She looked down and found that from their perspective, it must have looked like she was trying to climb onto the statue of the man she clutched below her. He was sitting in the lotus position, arms to his side and palms up at his knees, facing away from Lissandra. He was definitely made of a smooth, grey stone.
Lissandra regained her faculties as she climbed off the statue's back as daintily as was possible. She found that Moon was sheathing her swords as half the flashlight beams turned away from her to go about more closely checking the rest of the room.
When Moon's swords were in their holders, she regarded the statue for a moment before falling into a similar position, sitting across and facing it. Lissandra had been walking through these tombs for hours and decided to have a seat to Moon's left.
The statue was of a pleasant looking man, the stonework of his bald head blended down towards facial features that were definitely Asian, and he wore the robe of a Buddhist monk. Moon regarded him curiously.
“Is the secret that Medusa's really a man?”
Moon shook her head.
Lissandra couldn't believe how detailed the sculpture was; she'd never seen such fine craftsmanship beyond pictures of the work of the grandmasters in art books.
“Wait…”
Moon nodded. “But why? Who was he and how did he get in here to her?”
Lissandra only had one concern eating at her. “Where is she now?”
“I have no idea.” Moon reached out and caressed the stone monk's face. “I knew a boy who was this beautiful. He too became a monk when I was just a little girl.”
“You used to be a little girl?”
Moon nodded her head quietly. “He was so pure, yet he was troubled, as pure things often are — even though they don't often show those deeply hidden troubles to the world. They keep them locked down deep and retreat from the rest of us, as if it were possible that if they stayed close, they might reveal too much of themselves. And that longing they feel within them, as a splint
ering crack, might in some way spread wider and pull us in to their growing, tortured vortex.”
Moon stared into the stone eyes. “Such a beautiful sacrifice.”
Lissandra stared at the quiet man that Medusa might very well have turned to stone. She watched Moon's face travel lovingly over the lines.
“You don't think that this…?”
“No.” Moon went up on her knees as she cupped the stone smiling face in her hands. “This is not the same boy that I once knew. I'm sure of that.”
Lissandra watched as Moon leaned in and gave the stone monk a soft kiss on the forehead before she rose to her feet. “I know all too well the fate of the tender boy who dreamed of becoming a monk when I was just a girl.”
Lissandra pulled herself up and dusted off her jeans. She was regarding Moon in ever changing ways as the night progressed towards the morning. “It's okay to admit you miss him, you know.”
“It would be, yes, if it were true that I did miss him.”
Lissandra crossed her arms — the badass was back.
“What about you, Lissandra? Do you miss him?”
Lissandra ran her hand along the robed shoulder of the monk before stepping around him to follow everyone back out into the hallway. She didn't want Moon to be in her head any deeper than she had already gotten. She thought about the boy Moon had spoken of — and she also thought about the boy that Moon had mentioned, who had come in and out of her life since she was a little girl.
It felt wrong to lie, it cheapened her memories. “Yes, I miss him.”
Moon turned to her as the last of the soldiers filed out the doors and into the hall. “I know that you do. Holding on to that is why the stars offer you no direction and you've wandered your entire life. You claim to speak to a goddess. She sends her very life force to guide you through the forests, with her wild herds of deer. And yet you can still make no rhyme nor reason of what your place is in it all.”
Lissandra thought about Moon's words. She decided not to react on impulse, as she was prone to when she heard things she didn't like hearing and really considered them.
“You're right.”
Moon smiled warmly, which caught Lissandra very off-guard, and was a bit unnerving. “Don't worry, I'm going to help you rid yourself of him forever. Only then will your full path be revealed to you. Only when Billy Purgatory draws his last breath.”
Lissandra's eyes went wide. Lissandra had believed her dream, and felt in her heart that Billy Purgatory had left this world, was on a boat somewhere sailing towards the lands of the old gods. “Hasn't he already drawn his last breath?”
“Lissandra, of course he lives. Are you not more lost at this very moment than you have ever been?” Moon swept her arms into the air and did one of her ballerina spins, indicating the maze that had been constructed for LBJ.
“I'll never be free of him.” Lissandra believed her own words more than the words of Moon. “He'll always come back.”
Moon and Lissandra fell into step with one another as they moved in the center of the little army of the tunnels. The door began to make its mechanical singsong mechanisms behind them to close.
“He won't come back, not this time. He's stolen something valuable, from both you and me. I'm going to help send him away from you, to a place he will never return from.”
Lissandra's head still pounded. Her whole body ached from walking, and she just wanted all of this to be over. She just wanted relief. She wanted a goddess who could point her towards all those things. “How?”
Moon leaned in and whispered her words into Lissandra's ear. “Just ask the little boy who wanted to be a monk. The sacrifices of the Moon are final.”
III.
The energy bar was the most delicious thing that Lissandra had ever eaten. She leaned back in one of the chairs in the back of the room and let her legs stretch out fully, far in front of her. One of the storage lockers off the room was filled with food meant to survive a nuclear holocaust. Lissandra had no idea how old the granola and dried fruit which had been pressed into a compact high-caloric snack was, but however old, it had kept well.
She wore a jacket with a decal showcasing the symbols of the office of the President of the United States over the left breast. Although eating anything was fantastic, being warm was just the creature comfort she had needed to gain her second wind.
There were banks of antiquated computer monitors ahead of her, and most of the army was with Moon, standing past them and opposite the room from where Lissandra lounged. They hovered around a vast floor to ceiling window which looked out into what presented itself as an underground cavern. They all seemed quite interested in whatever it was they had found; Lissandra couldn't have been less interested in it all.
The only good news had been that Moon was convinced that this was the room she had been looking for. If this turned out to be true, then this might finally signal the end of her night of spelunking.
Several of the soldiers walked past Lissandra from the passageway they had used to enter this space from the never ending hallway. One of them carried an instrument which made an annoying beeping sound and abounded with blinking lights. “Mistress, we have detected what we think is movement down the north passage.”
Moon didn't look away from the window. “Take six more with you and start tracking it.”
No sooner had she spoken than six more personnel broke from their gazing at the giant window. They joined their two companions to make their way back past Lissandra and towards the hallway.
Lissandra watched them walk; a few of them didn't look half bad to her. She felt she must surely have been getting her strength back if she had begun to enjoy the view the invaders to the center of the Earth had to offer.
She rose lazily from the chair and stretched her upper body as she made her journey past the dead computer consoles. She dropped the wrapper that had kept her dinner preserved since the Cold War into an abandoned coffee cup sitting on the console. Sooner or later, whether she did it of her own accord or she waited for Moon to come bug her out of her solitude at the back of the room, Lissandra knew she'd have to go see.
So, Lissandra decided just to go see.
She slid up to the window beside Moon. “What's so interesting?”
Moon pointed out and down. The roof of the cavern was lost to darkness; it must have extended up much higher than the room. Two sheer face cliffs formed a narrow passage, like a cut over millions of years between two mountains. Lissandra could make out no water below, but instead the scattered fires of what she assumed were campfires and torches.
“What the Hell…?”
Moon kept her eyes trained on the scattered fires. “Yeah, kind of.”
“Is that an encampment?”
“It's LBJ's Hobo Village.”
“How could anyone survive so deep in the Earth?”
Moon shook her head at the spectacle of fires so far below. “So much wasted potential.”
Past the window to her right, Lissandra heard the mechanism and hiss of one of the doors opening and turned her head to see. Moon's soldiers had opened another of the doors. They slid open with much creaking and thumping, as a broken elevator would.
Lissandra could feel the pressure change in the room when the seal of the doors broke. A cold wind blew into the room and impacted the soldiers standing in the opening. The gypsy zipped up her jacket and then brought her arms to fold tightly at her chest.
“Where are they going?”
Moon began walking towards the opening doors. “We're going down there.”
Lissandra looked back out the windows at the fires far below. “Down there?”
“Yes.”
“Who's down there, Moon?”
“Plenty of good lessons for you, Lissandra, my dear.”
Lissandra didn't want to learn anymore lessons, but she didn't feel like she had much of a choice. “What are you teaching me this time, Mistress Moon?”
Moon motioned for Lissandra to join her at the ope
n portal, which looked out over the mountains deep below the Earth. “I'm going to show you once and for all that I'm not a Demon.”
Lissandra stole one last glance at the fires as she crossed to the edge of the window. “If I say that I believe you, can I stay up here?.”
Moon shook her head.
The soldiers had filed out into a large open elevator, enclosed by another yellow metal railing. It was frigid out there to a degree that made the hallways they had walked through seem cozy and warm. Ten of Moon's soldiers had already stepped onto the lift, and Lissandra stepped out with them, along with their leader. The track which the lift ran on was cut into the side of the cliff face which contained the window.
Lissandra couldn't imagine that this was actually some enormous cavern deep within the Earth, and stopped herself from internal conjecture as to where she actually was. She knew that questioning Moon would only give her half-truths and more riddles.
If she kept it up, Moon would prove an excellent replacement goddess to Artemis. There must have been some supernatural human resources correspondence course they'd all graduated from.
Moon threw a switch and the lift shook a bit, then began its decent towards the canyon floor and all those torches. The rest of the army stayed vigilante at the door as the lift sank down and away. Twelve of them were going down. If all the tiny firelights Lissandra was staring at over the railing represented a person holding a torch, they would be far outnumbered with only ten soldiers, a psychopath in a unicorn shirt, and a fortuneteller.
Lissandra peered over the railing along with Moon and tried to block the cold wind which blew through the canyon from her mind. “Demonic hobos?”
Moon relaxed and leaned on the railing as she monitored their descent from the big window room. “I really don't have a better name for them. They are the captured and the lost.”
“Why would anyone capture a demon?”
“They went through a phase when it was very en vogue to capture monsters and study them in an attempt to somehow weaponize. The Soviets were doing the same thing.”
Lissandra was no fool, and knew full well that things like demons existed. Her grandmother had told her those stories since she had been a little girl, and her relationship with Billy Purgatory was always bringing some vampire or creature into her life. She had spoken with her goddess, Artemis, and knew the deer that had run with her for much of her life were divinely sent.
Billy Purgatory and the Curse of the Satanic Five Page 24