Coils

by Barbara Ann Wright

  A man sat at the front, ankles crossed over the control box. He held a newspaper in front of his face, but as Cressida watched, it mutated, looking like a magazine for an instant before shifting into a book in an eye-watering shimmer that made her look away, blinking, to study the man instead.

  He’d dressed like something out of the San Francisco tourism guide: blue trousers with a gold stripe, a white shirt, and a blue vest. He wore a dark blue cap and had a gold watch hanging from his pocket. Then as the light shifted, he was suddenly wearing denim coveralls and then a crisp white uniform. For a second he wore all of them at once, and she could see each through the other. A headache pinged through her temples, and she had to focus on the trolley car instead, only letting her gaze pass around the driver.

  “Charon?” Medusa called sweetly.

  Cressida tried not to stumble. She’d have to get used to people throwing around famous names. Now here was the ferryman of the Underworld, who was supposed to guide the dead to their rightful places. When she got home, she’d have to make a scrapbook devoted just to the people she’d met. She could see it now: the Charon page with its skull and bones motif and Medusa’s page covered in snakes.

  Or not covered in anything at all. Her gaze slid to Medusa without her permission, and she told it to pay attention.

  A young, mustachioed face peered at them over his newspaper, but when he lowered it, the shadowed half of his face shimmered, looking for a second like a bleached skull. Cressida mewled and then coughed, clearing her throat loudly and masking a sound that a terrified person might make when confronted with half a face.

  “No rides to Tartarus today, love,” Charon said.

  Pandora pushed her glasses up. “There haven’t been any rides to Tartarus since people stopped committing crimes against the gods.”

  He tilted his head and ran through his faces and costumes, adding a very old man to the mix along with the young man and the skull. Cressida focused on his boots and clamped her teeth shut to stop dry heaving as her head swam.

  “No fares anywhere of late,” he said. “No river crossings, no rides from one part of the Underworld to another.” He sighed. “Still, leaves me lots of time to catch up on my reading.”

  The magazine turned newspaper turned book shifted as he went back to it.

  Cressida looked away and tried to breathe shallowly. “I wish he’d stop doing that,” she muttered into her chest.

  “Temporal displacement,” Pandora said near Cressida’s ear. “Charon is in charge of transportation across the Underworld, so he’s in lots of places at lots of times.”

  Arachne rested one combat boot on the trolley’s cow catcher. “Look, we need to get into Tartarus, all right? Surely we can make some kind of deal?”

  Charon coughed a laugh and kept reading. “I’ve heard every bribe and plea and threat in the books. Go on; surprise me.”

  Agamemnon started some speech beginning with, “Look here, fellow—”

  “Next,” Charon said.

  Arachne sniggered. Agamemnon puffed up, but Medusa pulled him back. Cressida took a step away from them, bumping into Pandora, who steadied her, but as she regained her feet, she turned and looked toward Charon.

  He’d lowered the book enough to watch them, the corners of his eyes creased in a smile that said he didn’t get much entertainment and enjoyed watching people stumble and argue. Their eyes met, and he shifted again, making Cressida wince as her insides roiled.

  Charon stood, and everyone fell silent. “Are you alive?” he asked.

  Cressida stared at a point to the left of his ear. “Um hmm.”

  “How did you get past the dog? How did you get past me?”

  “Charon—” Medusa started.

  He leaned forward, over the controls, peering at Cressida. At least, she thought he was peering. She was studying the space over his head. “Well,” she said to it, “Cerberus was in the mortal world, trying to stop Nero. He’s the last hierophant, you see, and—”

  They gasped and muttered, Arachne whistling softly. “All the hierophants are dead!” Pandora said.

  Cressida shrugged, fighting so hard not to look at Charon that her eyes were beginning to water. “And yet, here I am. I came through a tunnel. I didn’t even see you, Charon, and I’m sorry you missed out on your fare.” She didn’t want to pat her pockets. She knew she didn’t have any change.

  She couldn’t tell if he narrowed his eyes, but his stare continued. “And why would a living person want to go to Tartarus?”

  Everyone else went silent so quickly, it felt like a shout. They didn’t even fidget, and that was more telling than if they’d coughed and given Cressida significant looks that said, “Mind what you say.”

  Cressida tried to keep her face neutral and said the first thing that popped into her head. “Scrapbook fodder?”

  For a few seconds, Charon didn’t speak, and she felt the urge to pull at her collar or play with her hair, anything to break the nonmoving silence. She continued to stare to the left of him and wondered if their entire party seemed frozen in time.

  Finally, Charon sputtered a laugh that turned into a guffaw. “Scrapbooking. Did not expect that.” He sighed deeply and gestured to the trolley car. “Well, you might as well climb on board. A laugh isn’t much of a fare, but I haven’t had a good one in a long time.”

  Cressida hesitated, remembering Adonis and how she should have asked more questions. “Um, you don’t want us to do anything for you, right? Like, fetch anything?”

  “Nope, the laugh is enough.” As everyone else piled into the car, he leaned closer, and Cressida resisted the urge to leap away. “I think you’re in deep enough as it is.”

  “What do you mean?” Still suspicious, she took the bench across the aisle from Medusa.

  He didn’t answer, only sat back down at the controls, and the trolley hummed to life and began to roll gently forward.

  When Medusa touched her knee, Cressida jumped then laughed a little breathlessly. “Sorry. I’m on edge.”

  “It’s all right.” Her hand lingered, and Cressida tried to breathe through the little fire the slight contact started within her. “Don’t worry. He freaks everybody out, and he often says things no one understands. Part of the ambiance.”

  Cressida smiled, but even to her it felt strained.

  “I won’t let anything bad happen to you, Cressida.”

  And that did make her feel better, but she wondered how long Medusa had been following her and Adonis. Had she been wandering by the fence in front of the Elysian Fields, or had she been with them for some time? Cressida supposed it didn’t matter in the end. What was done was done. She had to focus on getting June back, which meant a mission for the goddess of magic to retrieve not one but two artifacts from Tartarus, a place that, if their motley crew was to be believed, was even more dangerous than Asphodel.

  Cressida poked her head out the empty window, watching the cave mouth come closer. The upper lip of the tunnel had large, jagged stalactites. The cliff face itself was a mass of rough shapes, the shifting shadows creating depth where there couldn’t be any. Like, that outcrop above the tunnel couldn’t be a huge nose, with two littler caverns for nostrils, and those sunken bits to the sides weren’t dimples. Couldn’t be. But now that she peered, the stalactites and stalagmites inside the cavern did look an awful lot like teeth, and holy shit, it was a giant open mouth.

  Massive, the lower jaw was buried in the rock to make a flat track, and as more shapes swam out of the dimness, Cressida realized the jaws were held open by a series of giant chains, each as thick as the cables that held up the Golden Gate Bridge. They wound up into the shade fog, heading for the top of the head, and she was so glad she couldn’t see if it had eyes.

  It couldn’t actually be a person, could it? She breathed deeply and tried to tell herself it was just a carving, but in the myths, Tartarus sometimes referred to the place and also to a Titan. But that was like saying the Underworld was sometimes called Hades af
ter its ruler. She stared at the teeth again, the massive cheeks. He’d been buried in rock, body secured under the Underworld. A faint, warm wind passed over the car like a shallow breath.

  Or a breeze, she screamed at her inner self. Nothing unusual about a breeze in a cave. But now the idea was in her head. She pictured those huge jaws snapping closed, doing away with the trolley as easily as a normal-sized person would treat a crumb. If he moved, he would shake the entire Underworld loose from its moorings, and if they were actually inside the Earth, the whole planet would swing out of balance.

  Unless they were someplace outside of time and space, just as Pandora said. Then Tartarus would just eat the people here and be done with it. Cressida was thrown back to thoughts of Cerberus and wondered how many times she’d have to worry about someone eating her in the Underworld. She’d have to keep a tally.

  The thought made her chuckle, and she knew it was because she was getting lightheaded, giddy from the enormity of her own thoughts, the enormity of the jaws around her. But the mouth stayed open, and they passed through, traveling into darkness and away from the bright lights of the city. The trolley’s dirty yellow headlight winked on, barely penetrating the infinite blackness and only illuminating the track a few yards ahead.

  And then, as big as she knew the mouth was, it didn’t seem big enough. Cressida had never thought of herself as claustrophobic, but she couldn’t help picturing the mouth giving way to a throat, a throat that could swallow, closing on her, crushing her. She squinted into the dark, trying to see whether the “walls” were slick with saliva, though the air wasn’t as humid as she would expect. The trolley kept up a sedate pace, and the track in front of them seemed clear.

  “Tell us about the last hierophant,” Pandora said.

  Cressida jumped, heart fluttering at the sudden noise. She turned and tried not to recoil at the shadowy faces. A weak bulb overhead made all of them look like the specters they really were, with only black pits where their eyes should be. Cressida tried not to latch on to the thought that these were in fact dead people. Famous dead people, dead people who didn’t seem in the habit of eating brains, but dead people nonetheless: walking, talking corpses.

  She closed her eyes and counted, trying to calm her pounding heart, the screaming parts of her brain that wanted to go running back to the city. “Okay.” Talking was better than thinking, anyway. She blurted out what had happened with Nero, and Pandora listened eagerly. Even Arachne took a break from crossing her arms and staring at nothing to listen.

  “A practicing hierophant means we might get other living chumps down here,” Arachne said. “Especially if your guy seems to have gotten the hang of it now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Cressida said. “He only sent me to get my aunt back. Once Cerberus showed up, I think he knew he’d done something wrong. He’s supposed to induct people into the Mysteries, not send them to the Underworld, especially if it’s just my aunt being curious.” And sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong.

  Still, they looked thoughtful, all but Medusa, who glared at everyone but Cressida as if she didn’t like them asking after details and would petrify them if they put a foot wrong. Cressida wondered if she was still angry for the dressing down Hecate had given her, but living in the Underworld, she was probably used to gods and goddesses pushing people around.

  “Think what an influx of living people would do,” Pandora said. “The trade in ambrosia alone—”

  Agamemnon cleared his throat. “Not our business, really.”

  “Screw that, Pops,” Arachne said. “If we do this job right, we could climb up the food chain in any number of organizations, and if we know more chumps are coming, we can get our hands on them before anyone else.” She glanced at Cressida. “No offense.”

  “So much taken,” Cressida mumbled.

  “So what about you, Snakes?” Arachne asked Medusa. “What are you in this for?”

  Medusa shrugged.

  “She’s helping me,” Cressida said.

  “In exchange for what?” Pandora asked.

  Medusa gave Cressida a warning look, so Cressida shut her mouth. The other three looked back and forth between them, clearly waiting.

  After a moment, Arachne sat back with a satisfied look. “It’s all right. You don’t have to say. It’s no secret. She’s been nursing the same grudge for millennia.”

  Medusa gave her another dark look, and to Arachne’s credit, she lost a little of her smugness and scooted back in her seat.

  “Revenge,” Pandora said with a sigh.

  They all sighed, and Cressida realized the Underworld was probably full of people who’d been done wrong, the kind of people blues songs were written for. The air turned thick with nostalgia as they all wandered into their own little worlds. If living people did begin trickling into the Underworld again, the dead wouldn’t be the only people who could profit. Cressida pictured living people offering courier services or handing out discounts on revenge packages. Of course, she also wondered what a living person could take back to the mortal realm besides their life.

  The ride rambled on and on, heading steadily down, and Cressida remembered reading that Tartarus was supposed to be as far below the rest of the Underworld as the gods were above it. She dug into her backpack for a granola bar, feeling a nagging in her stomach that might be hunger or boredom. She didn’t feel tired, nor did any of her companions seem to feel the need to sleep. Maybe that just wasn’t something they did.

  As the journey stretched on, someone stirred behind her back. Agamemnon leaned over her bench, and she could almost see herself as one of those ghosts selling favors to the dead. Still, she waited to hear what he had to say.

  “My wife…”

  Cressida sighed and wondered if he’d ask her to kill his wife or just lure his wife close so he could kill her. Well, he could forget it. She could only entertain thoughts of one death at a time. “What about her?”

  “I haven’t seen her since I died. If she’s in Asphodel, I don’t know where, and no one seems to want to tell me.”

  Cressida tried to remember if his wife had done anything heroic but came up empty. “The Elysian Fields?”

  “I don’t know. She could be in Tartarus, though I don’t think so. If she is in the Elysian Fields, well…”

  “You want me to lure her out so you can kill her?”

  He was silent a moment. “Is that what Medusa wants you to do?”

  She turned to look him in the eye. “What’s it to you?”

  He shook his head and leaned closer as if he feared the others would hear him. “If you do see her, my wife…”

  “Yes?”

  “Can…can you find out how she is?”

  Cressida waited for more, but he just stared hopefully. “That’s it?”

  “I’d like to know that she’s happy.” He sighed deeply. “I never made her very happy. I never made any of them very happy.”

  In the near dark, she couldn’t read his expression, but he sounded like someone with regrets. By the way he acted, she didn’t think he thought himself deserving of the death he got, but maybe all his years had made him realize he was partly to blame for what happened to him. She wondered if he’d ever spoken to the daughter he sacrificed, though some tales claimed she was saved by the goddess Artemis and whisked away to another land, though her mother still thought her dead. Maybe she was in the Elysian Fields, too.

  “I’m sorry for yelling at you earlier,” he said softly.

  He’d paid the ultimate price for his crimes, getting murdered and all, but he still went to Asphodel instead of the Fields. Fair treatment didn’t seem to exist in the Underworld, even if a person never got it in life. They could only have whatever kind of life they managed to build, and if people forgot them, they became shades. Cressida wondered then if Agamemnon’s wife was living it up somewhere, or if she had regrets like her husband and just couldn’t face him.

  “If I see her,” she said softly, “I’ll ask.”r />
  He gave her a kindly smile. “Thank you.” He put on a smarmy grin again, and she thought he was going to say something that would sweep all her sympathy back under the rug, but he seemed to think better of it and sat back.

  Chapter Seven

  The tunnel opened into a room of infinite black except for a large wall that stretched across it, cutting the darkness in half. The ground was featureless gray, and if there was a ceiling or a sky it was hidden in black; the wall continued until it too stood shrouded. Torches burned white hot on either side of the wall’s wooden gate, but they barely held back the suffocating darkness that seemed to push against them, wanting to snuff them out so Tartarus could finally swallow them.

  Cressida pushed that thought away as quickly as it could go, remembering Hecate’s basement of horrors. She didn’t know if any other parts of the Underworld could be shaped by her thoughts, but she wasn’t about to risk it here in the belly of a Titan.

  The trolley came to a stop at another dimly lit platform at the end of the track. Charon set the brake handle, and the car wheezed and shuddered before going dead. Without looking at them, Charon resumed his former position: legs up on the controls, newspaper or book or magazine perched in front of his nose. “I’ll wait for you,” he said, “because that’s the kind of guy I am.”

  The others mumbled assent as they peered around interestedly.

  Cressida caught Pandora’s eye. “Is this like you remembered?”

  “The gates are the same. As for the rest, we’ll see.”

  No more than large tree trunks banded with copper, the gate sported geometric shapes carved in the wood and filled with metal that glinted in the light so they seemed to move with every flicker. Cressida wondered how many people had stood before them since Zeus had ceased chucking people into the enormous Titan. As she came closer, she picked out scenes like those on the sides of ancient vases: Sisyphus doomed to roll his rock uphill for eternity and Prometheus having his liver eaten each day by an eagle only to heal overnight and start again the next morning. Cressida swallowed hard at scene after scene of torture, beginning with the Titans imprisoned inside another of their kind.