“So what are we going to do?” said Neil.
Artemis sighed and tried to make it sound like the worst-case scenario. “I suppose I’ll just have to fight him while you make a run for it and look for Styx,” she said, and was grateful that the darkness hid the excitement twitching around her mouth. “The river Styx circles the underworld nine times. It doesn’t matter which direction you head in; you’ll reach her.”
“But what about you? What if you get hurt? What if Cerberus kills you?”
“Well, then the world will just have to live without hunting, and chastity, and the moon. Come on, let’s go. Try to look dead.”
Neil and Artemis crept down the last part of the tunnel and stepped into the thin light, which after all that time in the dark would have made them blink, had they had real eyes to be dazzled. In anticipation of the fight to come, Artemis wordlessly regained corporeal form as they walked, feeling the ground becoming solid beneath her feet. Maybe it was knowing what was to come, but she didn’t feel the moment of exhaustion that she generally experienced after using her power. Instead, she felt strong as a flexed muscle. Beside her, Neil was doing his best not to stare at the hordes of assembled dead who had been ejected from the train and now mingled on the platform in disoriented solitude or comparing injuries in low voices.
Artemis scanned the crowded station but Cerberus was nowhere to be seen. She pulled herself up onto the platform and Neil followed her, attracting some confused glances from the mortals nearby.
“We missed the train,” explained Artemis. “Come on,” she said to Neil. “There’s no point hanging around here. He must be outside.”
“He?”
“Cerberus.”
“You sound like you’re actually looking forward to this,” said Neil.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Artemis, looking away from him.
They made their way quite literally through the crowd and to the exit, comprising the most pointless ticket barrier ever created, which they also both walked straight through. A few of the dead had already made their way out and were standing around in visible confusion, staring off down the identical unmarked streets.
“Is this really the underworld?” said Neil. “It’s very different from how it’s described.”
“This is probably just the suburbs,” said Artemis. “I’m sure the center is more distinctive.”
“Alice could live in any one of these houses,” said Neil. “If this is dead time, can I knock on all of the doors and still be back in time to save the world?”
Artemis shook her head. “Time here passes in a completely different way,” she said, “but it does pass. Sorry. If we didn’t have anything else to do here, then maybe. But . . .”
“I will find her,” said Neil.
“I’m sure you will,” said Artemis. “Now listen. You remember the plan, don’t you? When Cerberus makes his appearance, I fight—”
“And I run. Yes, I know,” said Neil. “It doesn’t feel very heroic being the one doing the running.”
“Just make sure that you run fast,” said Artemis. “The last thing we want is him getting both of us.”
“Do you think he’s going to get you?”
“When I win,” said Artemis, “I’ll take his body with me to the palace, so you’d better meet me there. Somebody has to tell Hades and Persephone what’s going on.”
“And if you lose?”
“I’m not going to lose.”
“Where’s the palace?” said Neil.
“I have no idea,” said Artemis.
“Artemis, is this actually going to work?”
“Look, I’m doing my best,” said Artemis. “Ares and Athena are the ones for strategy, but I wouldn’t fancy either of their chances fighting a triple-headed . . .” She tailed off.
“What is it?” said Neil.
“Run.”
Neil didn’t wait to be asked twice.
She had never seen Cerberus before. Watching his wild silhouette stalking toward her against the neat black-and-white stripes of the mock Tudor buildings, she felt a constriction in her chest and a buzz racing through her limbs that might just have been the presence of another immortal—she could always sense when there was one near—but seemed to be more than that. It gripped her, nailing her to her place on the dismal pavement yet also pulling her toward Cerberus. Her mouth was dry. She hadn’t met anything like her match in so long.
He was huge. She could see the hard muscles almost bursting out as they pushed with every step against his gleaming black hide. His body was a compressed ball of power ready to explode. Each leg was like a tree, rooted in the iron curve of his claws. In place of his tail writhed a snake as thick as her torso, whipping back and forth with vicious hisses that sliced through the air like hail. And his heads: all three identical in size and might, glowing red eyes rolling as large as her fist, leathery lips pulled back revealing teeth as big as her palm and sharp as honed blades, dripping in thick, foaming drool. Two of the heads were sniffing to either side, but the one in the middle was staring straight at her, unblinking.
“Now that’s what I call a dog,” Artemis breathed. Without waiting another moment, she launched herself at Cerberus, picking up speed in the few steps that separated them before flying off the ground, both feet forward, stamping into the eyes of the central head to blind it as the two outer heads turned inward, snarling, fangs ready to rip.
34
NEIL WAS RUNNING. He could hear the sounds of a dreadful fight taking place behind him, growls that shook the ground like an earthquake and the wordless battle cries of Artemis. He didn’t turn around. If Artemis lost, he knew that he’d be pudding to her main course, and he didn’t think he’d be able to put up quite as much of a fight as she clearly was. The only thing he could do was put as much distance between himself and Cerberus as possible. And anyway, he didn’t need to know what Cerberus looked like, as he was fairly certain it wouldn’t make his vision of being eaten any more pleasant.
Not knowing where he was or where he was going, he decided to keep heading straight as far as possible. He ran easily, without tiring. When he passed the other dead, they invariably looked at him strangely, as if they couldn’t understand why he was there or what he was doing. At first he thought it was because he was still wearing his dressing gown, until he realized that, of course, many or even most of the dead were walking around in variations on nightwear. It was only when he had been running for a while that he noticed the disjunction between his velocity and the pace at which the dead moved: strolling, loitering, dawdling. Nobody here was in a hurry; they had no time to run out of. He, however, had to keep moving as fast as he possibly could. The only times that he slowed were whenever he saw a petite blond woman on the pavement and thought it might be Alice. But it never was.
The streets went on and on. They never varied and he never tired. He felt as if he was floating through a strange, repetitive dream where nothing was real, not even himself. Maybe he was dreaming. But when had the dream started? When he had left his body behind in his icy bed and his spirit had followed Artemis out into the cold, black day? When Apollo had come around to his flat and then collapsed, taking the sun and Neil’s skeptic soul with him? When he had seen that old man’s face in the sky and the lightning had come down and murdered Alice? When had his life last seemed real? Ultimately the unreality of everything that was happening now just seemed to underscore how false his sense of security had been before, when he thought that everything was clear and obvious and easy to understand, and that people who thought differently were gullible fools. And all along it had been he, thinking that everything could be so easily explained, who was the gullible one.
As these thoughts propelled him onward, he realized that something had changed. For all the time he had been running—impossible to say how long that was—the two rows of fake Tudor houses had stretched endlessly out ahead of him, breaking only from time to time to branch off into equally endless, identical fake Tudor
streets. But now, for the first time, the street seemed to have an end. He couldn’t see what lay at that end, only that where the houses had once extended as far as his eyes could see, they now were finite, stopping at some future point that his running feet drew him closer and closer to with every step. This world, apparently, did have an edge, and he had finally found it.
He didn’t know how fast he had been running, but as he reached the final few blocks, he slowed and eventually stopped. The river was here, as Artemis had said it would be, cutting off this freakish suburb as cleanly as a scalpel. The river was wide and the water was black. He could see the far shore, but the light was hazy and the shore indistinct, hidden behind a wall of fog. Where the asphalt of the street ended, the riverbank beneath his feet sucked away the light like the water before it, and lay flat, colorless, devoid of life. There was nobody within sight, and the river moved swift but silent.
There was something else, but it took him a moment or two to figure out what it was. Then he realized that he could feel the river. The touch of icy damp in the air, the cold smell of the water, the sharp sour taste in his mouth. This river, somehow, was a real, physical thing. Even if he was not.
Neil cleared his already clear throat, feeling foolish, and the sound echoed out over the water.
Nothing happened.
“Hello!” he called out, feeling more foolish still.
Nothing happened. What had he expected? He was talking to a river.
“Hello!” he called out again. He thought of Artemis, locked in mortal combat with some hideous monster that he had been too afraid to even look at. The least he could do was speak to the river. “Are you Styx?” he said.
A woman appeared. Neil could not say where she had come from, or even exactly where she was. She seemed to be in the river, or above it, or in some way part of it. She had long, straight black hair that flowed like the water, was wearing some sinewy black garment that twisted into the river, and her slender arms and face had skin so white it seemed to be tinged with green. Her eyes and lips were black.
“I am Styx,” she said.
“You’re the river?” said Neil.
“I am the river,” said Styx. Her voice came from her mouth, but it also seemed to come from the river itself.
“I’m Neil,” said Neil. “From, ah, Earth. Unless we’re still on Earth. In which case I’m from Essex but I live in London now.”
“You live?” said Styx, or the river. “Are you therefore not yet dead?”
Neil hesitated. He had quite clearly said the wrong thing—that hadn’t taken long. From everything Artemis had said, it was obvious that the living were far from welcome in the underworld, with all kinds of dire repercussions for those that broke this rule, notably having their souls eaten. He wasn’t sure what the river could do to him, but were she to drag him inside her, he didn’t much rate his chances against that fast-flowing current of ink. Nonetheless, he didn’t feel that lying was the best way to start a relationship with a body of water whose principal function, from what he understood, was to keep people from breaking oaths.
“I am a hero,” he said eventually, hoping that this was a category that transcended notions of dead or alive.
The river raised an eyebrow. “You are most unlike any hero who has visited me before,” she said.
“It was an emergency,” said Neil.
“It always is,” said Styx.
“The world is ending,” said Neil. “The world above. Or possibly on the far side. I’m not too sure of how the geography works . . . Anyway, we were hoping you could help us.”
“We?”
“I’m here with Artemis. Or I was . . . The thing is, earlier on today—I think it’s still today—”
“Days mean little here.”
“Apollo came to my flat. Apollo, the god of the sun?”
“I know him.” Styx quoted Apollo, his sulky voice suddenly filling the dank air around them: “‘I swear, on Styx, that I won’t cause any unnecessary harm to mortals for the next ten years or until I get stronger again, whichever comes first. Satisfied?’ ”
“We argued and he put out the sun. The next thing I knew he was unconscious on the kitchen floor and there was nothing I could do to wake him up. Until then I didn’t even know who he was.”
Neil paused, remembering the sick thud in his gut followed by the stinging thrill of icy hysteria that had accompanied the realization that all the spiritual superstitious bullshit that he had been so dismissive of all his life was actually true. He swallowed by instinct although he had no saliva in his mouth to swallow.
“I called Artemis,” he continued, “and she thought that maybe . . . maybe . . .”
“Maybe I was punishing him for breaking his oath by putting him to sleep for nine years?”
“Exactly.”
“And you hoped that by your coming here, I would relent and revoke his punishment, so that the sun would be restored and your world would be saved?”
“That was the idea,” said Neil.
Styx shook her head and the waves in the river rippled.
“You won’t do it?” said Neil.
“Why should I do it?” said Styx. “We are immortals, all of us, and we have power, but we live by rules. There are rules that I must obey. I must stay in this lifeless place, surrounded by the souls of the dead, drowning all those that would attempt to cross me. In either direction.” Styx held his gaze for a moment. “And there are rules that I enforce,” she continued, “and one of those is that no god who swears an oath bound on me shall break that oath without losing nine years of his or her existence. I cannot change that even for the pleas of a brave, if minor, hero such as yourself.”
“But without the sun everyone on my planet will die,” said Neil. “Or on this planet. I’m not entirely sure where we are.”
“I have explained to you,” said Styx, “why I should not help you. But I did not say that I would not help you.”
“You mean you will?” Neil took an eager step forward, dangerously close to the brink.
“No,” said Styx. “Unfortunately I cannot. Because I did not do this.” She sighed and the river shivered. “Apollo did not break his oath to me. It would seem that his intention in eliminating the sun was not to harm mortals. I cannot think why else he did it, though. Perhaps he wished to harm himself?”
“I don’t think so,” said Neil. “Actually, I think he might just have been showing off. I didn’t believe in him then, you see. I think he was proving a point.”
“In that case, it is possible that he only meant to take away the light of the sun for a few seconds, causing no harm, but the effort he expended made him collapse before he was able to restore it. That would not fall under my jurisdiction, so it is not something that I can reverse.”
“So there’s nothing you can do to help me?” said Neil.
“I would like to,” said Styx. “But I am just a river.”
“You’re hardly just a river,” said Neil. “I’ve seen a lot of rivers, and they don’t look like you. They don’t have bodies, for a start.”
Styx shrugged, and a spattering of foam broke the river’s surface.
“All rivers have a spirit,” she said. “To see it, all you need is to know their name.”
“What, like, even the Clyde?” said Neil.
“If that is a river,” said Styx. “Though I doubt very much that her real name is Clyde.”
Neil stood for a few moments watching the black water pass. He could sense Styx’s eyes on him, pitying but cool with distance.
“Do you know a girl called Alice?” he said eventually.
“Many of the dead are called Alice,” said Styx.
“This one died only very recently,” said Neil, “on March twenty-first. She’s thirty-two, very petite, blond hair. She’s beautiful.”
“That could be many women,” said Styx.
“No, this one’s unique,” said Neil. “Pale skin. Blue eyes. A little beauty spot just above her right c
heekbone that she used to call a mole.”
“She has not been to the river,” said Styx.
“I need to find her,” said Neil. “I desperately need to find her.”
“I cannot help you,” said Styx. “I do not find things. I stay in this place. Things find me. All I can do is bind a god to his oath. That is all I can do.”
Neil half turned to go, but then he turned back.
“What about mortals?” he said. “Does it work on them? Can you bind a mortal to his oath?”
“It is a long time since any mortal knew of me to swear on,” said Styx.
“But I know you,” said Neil.
Styx didn’t reply but Neil thought he saw encouragement in her face.
“And if I did swear something on you, and it was completely binding, then you might be able to help me keep that oath?”
“I might,” said Styx. “I am not entirely without powers.”
“I swear,” Neil said, “on you, on Styx, that I will find Alice. I swear it.”
Styx smiled, and for a moment, the surface of the river danced with light.
“Then you must,” she said.
35
ALICE WAS PLAYING Scrabble against a Victorian scientist who had drowned when he fell off a boat while trying to collect algae samples off the side. She was beating him quite comfortably, though she could see that, with more practice, he had the makings of a very good player.
“Such a marvelous game,” he kept saying. “Such a sadness that we didn’t have it in my day.”
Their table was in the twentieth-century gaming zone of a huge entertainment complex in downtown Sector A. The twentieth-century gaming zone consisted of a chain of pubs—literally a chain, a series of individual pubs from different eras that interconnected, each room providing games from an appropriate era. The Scrabble area was modeled after a spit-and-sawdust boozer from the 1940s, with grimy tiles, sticky-looking carpet, authentically yellowed paintwork, and fake cigarette smoke hanging in the air, which Alice didn’t mind too much as it smelled of nothing and didn’t irritate her eyes or throat. They were lucky enough to have a piano player—the coordination necessary to play an imaginary piano was one of the toughest skills to acquire—which was far better than what the Boggle professionals had to cope with, housed as they were in a 1970s underground bar with a series of punk bands who had certainly not learned much in the way of coordination. The twentieth-century gaming zone was just one of the gaming zones that formed one of the districts in the entertainment complex, which was the size of a small town and featured every kind of entertainment that could possibly be imagined—every kind, that is, aside from sex shows. For the decorporealized, thinking about sex was frustrating enough without having to look at it too.
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