“So let Styx deal with it,” said Hermes.
“She obviously isn’t going to,” said Artemis. “You know Styx. She deals with the letter of the law. Apollo must have found his way around her, otherwise Alice would still be alive or he’d be in a coma somewhere.”
“So take revenge,” said Hermes.
“That’s what I intend to do,” said Artemis. “But I need your help.”
“But I don’t do revenge,” said Hermes. “Nemesis does revenge. I can call her if you want.”
“No,” said Artemis. “Nemesis can’t do what I want you to do.”
“You mean . . .”
“Exactly.”
Hermes shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “You know I can’t interfere with the dead. Not in my position. If Hades found out . . .”
“Why should he find out?”
“If you start messing around down there he’s going to know,” said Hermes. “Don’t be an idiot, Artemis. Can’t you just smash up all of Apollo’s guitars or something?”
“She’s my cleaner,” said Artemis, “and she should never have died. Don’t you care about justice? Do you think she deserved this?”
Hermes sighed. “She was a nice girl,” he admitted.
“So you agree with me,” said Artemis.
“No,” said Hermes. “I don’t.”
“I don’t care,” said Artemis. “I’m going to do it anyway.”
“You can’t,” said Hermes. “The second you set foot down there you’ll be toast. You’re a god, Cerberus will sniff you out in seconds.”
“So I’ll send a hero,” said Artemis.
“There aren’t any heroes anymore,” said Hermes.
“I’ll make one,” said Artemis. “I know some mortal men.” She scanned her mind, thinking of the dog owners who employed her. “Mr. Simon? No, he’s too wishy-washy. Alex Waters? Too lazy . . .”
“Are those the only mortals you know?” said Hermes. “The ones whose dogs you walk?”
Artemis thought about the estate agents she had met.
“Pretty much,” she said.
“That’s not going to work,” said Hermes. “Heroes walk their own dogs. You can’t use one of them.”
“I’m going to have to.”
Hermes had had many opportunities over the last several thousand years to learn exactly what Artemis’s determined expression meant.
“You seem pretty keen to do this,” he said. “Why?”
“Apollo gets away with far too much,” said Artemis.
“And?” said Hermes.
“And she belonged to me.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” said Artemis.
“Most gods would do anything to avoid going into the underworld.”
“It’s a moral issue,” said Artemis.
Hermes was not about to start debating moral issues with Artemis.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I liked her. And I’m sick of doing my own ironing. So listen, as long as you promise not to tell anybody—nobody at all, otherwise everyone will want one—I can get you a hero. Someone decent. Someone who is actually going to want to help you. I’ll send a message, summon him, disguise it a bit so it’s not too obvious. But just this once. And just because she was a nice girl. And to piss Apollo off. And to stop you from getting disemboweled. And because maybe it was slightly my fault she was here in the first place.”
“And you’ll show me the way into the underworld?”
“So long as you keep it to yourself.”
“Thanks, Hermes,” said Artemis. “You won’t regret it.”
Hermes looked down to the bottom of the garden, where the flowers lay dead in a heap.
“Be careful, Artemis,” he said.
24
ALICE WASN’T PARTICULARLY religious, but she counted herself as Church of England and used to go to church for the usual festivals—Easter, Christmas. She hadn’t given much thought to matters of the afterlife, but when she did, her views were quite conventional: heaven above, hell below, angels, clouds, that sort of thing. That was on days when she had believed in an afterlife of any variety. Most of the time she had suspected that it didn’t exist at all.
As it turned out, she was completely wrong on all counts.
She had found the train to the underworld exactly as Hermes described—down at the bottom of Angel Tube station and through the back wall. The platform looked like just another Tube platform, only much longer, stretching farther than she could see. It was packed, like the busiest of rush hours, and everybody there was—she had expected this, of course, but it still shocked her—dead.
There were those that she thought of as the “proper” dead—white people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, or even older, largely in hospital gowns or nightwear, and relatively unmarked. They looked the way dead people were supposed to look. But then there were those who, it was graphically clear, had died mid-surgery, or from accidents. Almost all of these seemed too young to die. And worst of all, everywhere she looked there were black and brown faces, far, far younger than any dead person should be. The majority of the adults were emaciated, from AIDS, Alice supposed, or malnutrition, and among them thronged thousands upon thousands of babies and small children, some wailing tearlessly, others seemingly stoic about their fate, probably failing to understand what had befallen them and no longer subject to the relentless stimuli of hunger and disease. Many of the adults were trying to lift and comfort the children, but their arms swept uselessly through them. Watching them, Alice realized that she would never again experience the sensation of holding someone, or being held.
Just as she was working up the courage to go and talk to some of the children, a train pulled in—a totally ordinary Tube train—and they piled inside it, at first allowing one another their personal space, then squeezing up closer, and finally overlapping completely. Closing her eyes, it was as if nobody else was there. Closing her eyes, it was as if she wasn’t anywhere at all. When she opened her eyes, they had left the station—she hadn’t even felt them go. In the darkness of the tunnel it was impossible to tell whether the train was moving, though the sound of the rattling carriage suggested that it was.
Some time after they had left Angel Tube station, Alice heard a voice calling, “Tickets, please!” and she looked up as a man pushed his way through the passengers. He wore blue overalls and a cap, skin a clammy, maggoty white untouched by the sun. Although it went against her nature, Alice remembered what Hermes had said and kept her ticket out of sight. Next to her, though, Jean-François, the old French man, held his ticket out.
“Don’t—” cried Alice.
But it was too late. Charon took the ticket, and the moment that it left Jean-François’s hand a gust of wind blew through the carriage, taking hold of him and sucking him out through the wall. Alice shrieked and tried to grab hold of his flailing arms, but her hands went right through him, and he was engulfed in the blackness beyond. Within a second there was no sight of him.
Nobody else in their carriage gave up their ticket.
Alice was still feeling shaken as the train pulled in at its destination. It was with scant relief that she got off; who knew what awaited her here? The platform was entirely unremarkable, just another Tube station. They could have been in some suburb of London that Alice had simply never visited before, if there was a suburb of London called Underworld. The only difference was a conspicuous absence of maps and of passengers waiting to get on. Apart from that, from the cement floor to the tiled, sloping walls, it was all completely familiar.
She followed the directions to the exit. The station was completely deserted and, except for the low conversational murmur of a few braver members of the dead, completely silent. The escalators were working, though—upward only—and she stepped onto one and was carried, soundlessly, to the top. There was no sensation of movement, just the walls passing behind her, the light of outside getting closer. She hadn’t realized how
much her body had felt until she stopped feeling anything at all.
She abandoned her ticket to an automated machine and stepped out into the underworld. Nobody here either, aside from a few of the newly dead who had also found their way out. Alice wondered what would become of all the babies who couldn’t be carried out, but there was nobody around to ask.
Outside the sky was dull and the land was flat. The light gave no indication of the time of day. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, stretched featureless streets of unvarying mock Tudor semidetached houses. In any case, she assumed they were mock Tudor; who knew how long they had been there? The only variation that she could see was the concrete block housing the Tube station that she had just left, a NO ENTRY sign above the door. There was no buzz of traffic, no birdsong. Nothing natural at all. Not a tree to be seen, no insects in the air, not even a blade of grass poking its way up through the gaps between the paving stones.
As she tried to figure out what to do next, Alice felt something cold and wet touch her ankle. There was no mistaking it; she actually felt something real against her, touching her, as if her body truly existed. She spun around. Beside her was a monstrous creature, some immense kind of dog, taller than she was, with three slathering heads—one of which was currently sniffing at her feet as if considering having her for lunch—and a writhing snake for a tail. Something in its solidity, contrasting with her unpresent presence, and in the cool damp trail it was transmitting across her not-real calves made her understand that although she was made of little more than air, this dog-thing was real, it was corporeal, and, moreover, she was real to it—solid, with a form and a smell. It could consume her if it wanted to—the look on each of its faces told her that. She felt terrified, or her brain told her that she was terrified, and the small part of her that was touching the dog head experienced the sting of adrenaline. The rest of her was—well, dead. In the face of the monster, she realized that this wasn’t heaven; of course not. It must be hell. Why would she, of all people, have been sent to heaven? She tried to resign herself to her fate and waited for the dog to eat her soul.
But behind her, the other members of the dead were spilling out of the station, spreading slowly outward like a slick of oil. The creature lost interest in her and took off in their direction, its three heads reaching out and sniffing each of them in turn. Alice felt little relief. The dog had spared her. But she was still dead. And she was, in all probability, in hell. She would have to make the best of it.
She picked a street at random and began to walk.
25
NEIL WAS AWARE that time was passing, but it didn’t feel like time as he was used to it. Time had split in two. There was time before; time that seemed so real and sharp, and short and over. And then there was time after; there was now. And this time had no features, and no end. A slow, lugubrious present without future, without hope. A hideous now that he would be stuck in forever, always on the wrong side of the cruel, finished, intransigent past. A past that he could look at whenever he liked, and often when he didn’t want to, but that he could never touch again.
He didn’t have the energy to be angry, and yet he was angry, without the strength to support it. He sat in strange places in the flat, in the hallway, on the stairs, because he didn’t want to be in any of the rooms, and he looked at the floor because he didn’t want to look forward. Sometimes he stared at small spaces, the bottom shelf of the cupboard under the stairs or the gap between the toilet and the bathtub, and he imagined crawling into them and tucking his limbs up, like a tiny animal, hiding. He would never come out.
Most of the time he lived in silence. At other times he would try words out. “Dead,” he might say, to see how it sounded. “Dead.” Or “Alice.”
Or he tortured himself. He tortured himself by thinking of all of the missed opportunities, all the things she didn’t have a chance to do, the things they never had a chance to do together. He had never even told her how he felt.
And he tortured himself by thinking about how it was all his fault that she’d died. He had been the one who suggested going on the walk; she had wanted to stay in the flat. Farther back, he had been the one who had told her to go freelance; if it wasn’t for that, she would never have got the job in the house, and she wouldn’t have been so upset that night, would not have come round to his flat. And it was his fault that she’d needed the job in the first place—if it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t have been fired for being in the audience of that damn television program with Apollo.
Apollo. That was a source of torture too. Apollo and Alice, kissing. And who knew what else? He tortured himself thinking about what that second thing was, the thing she never told him. He wanted to know, he didn’t want to know. He would never know. But if he could have just brought her back, if she could just be alive, it didn’t matter. Apollo could have her. As long as she was happy. As long as she was here.
When he was done torturing himself with all of the bad things he could think of, he tortured himself with the good times, just thinking about her, how wonderful she was, and all of the fun things they’d done, all of the good times they’d had. And if, at any moment, a part of him started to feel better, he would torture himself all the harder because he didn’t want to feel better, because that would mean letting go.
Sometimes, he lay on the bed just for the smell of her that lingered on the sheets. Or he took her coat into his arms and buried his face in it, as he had once wanted to do with that cardigan he would never see again. He could barely pick up a trace of her; she wore no perfume, used no particular soap. But just knowing these things had touched her skin was enough.
It seemed strange to him that he still had to do normal, everyday things. Eat and sleep, use the loo. He did them when he had to. There was no routine. Sometimes he might sleep for an afternoon on the sofa, then sit up all night leaning against the kitchen counter. At some point he must have called work to tell them he wasn’t coming in, but he couldn’t remember having done it.
There must have been a funeral but nobody knew to invite him. So he didn’t go.
There had been phone calls from friends, concerned that they hadn’t heard from him. He answered in monosyllables, got rid of them as quickly as possible. From journalists, too, interested in what they called the “lightning angle”; he had hung up on them. Now when the phone rang, he ignored it.
He wasn’t eating much, never sitting down to a meal but picking at things from the fridge or cans from the cabinets when his hunger threatened to distract him from thinking of Alice. He didn’t run out of plates, because he was eating straight out of the packets. He did, however, eventually run out of food. This made him violently furious. He opened up all the kitchen cabinets, searching for some last thing, slamming the doors again when there was nothing but salt and Marmite. He kicked the fridge. He went back to the cabinet with the Marmite in it and took it out and threw it at the wall. The jar bounced off the wall, leaving a mark, and landed on the floor. It didn’t break. He picked it up and threw it again, harder, but with the same result. Then he kicked the jar across the room. This time it finally broke. Neil watched it, and then he sat down at the table, heart pounding.
He found a calm voice with which to reason with himself.
Come on. It’s not a problem. You’ll just go and get something. There’s nothing to be angry about. It doesn’t matter. You have to eat.
He thought he was going to cry. Over having no food. He kept thinking about Old Mother Hubbard. He kept repeating in his head, The cupboard was bare. The cupboard was bare. The cupboard was bare.
Come on, said the calm voice again. You’re being silly now. What’s the problem? Just go and get yourself something to eat. You can do that. If you make yourself ill, you won’t be able to think about her anymore.
He decided to go and get a takeaway. He had absolutely no idea what the time was or even what the day was, but it didn’t occur to him to wonder whether anywhere would be open. Mechanically he went to
the front door, took a jacket off its hook, and pulled it over the clothes that he had been wearing since he last changed them, which was something he couldn’t remember having done. He picked up his keys and wallet from the table by the door and let himself out.
It was cold. The light was gray. It might be early morning or late evening. The light seemed bright to him, though; he hadn’t had the lights on in the flat for a while now. He started walking in the direction of the High Street. The wind pinched at his cheeks, and he rubbed them, noticing for the first time that he had a beard. He kept his head down, looking only at the pavement in front of him. He didn’t want to see any people. Most of all, he was terrified he might see someone he knew. Or someone he didn’t know, looking happy.
He wasn’t hungry for anything in particular so he stopped at the first place on the High Street that was open and walked inside. There was a strong, hot smell of fat in the air, but even so the young Asian man behind the counter flinched when Neil walked in. Neil realized that he must look and smell terrible. Like death, he might once have said. There was nobody else in the shop. It was probably a strange time of day to buy food.
“Hello,” said the man behind the counter. “What can I get you?”
“Um,” said Neil. “I don’t know.” His voice sounded odd to him. “What have you got?”
“Cod, haddock, plaice . . .”
“Yes,” said Neil. “Whatever. Cod.”
“Chips with that?”
“Um,” said Neil. “Yes. I suppose so.” That meant longer before he had to eat again.
A silence as the man got his order together.
“Ketchup? Vinegar? Mayo?”
“No,” said Neil.
The man shook salt onto the chips.
“Open or closed?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Open or closed?”
Neil felt a wave of panic. He had to make a decision and he didn’t know how to. He didn’t want to eat here and he didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to do anything at all.
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