The game would soon be over, and the sands in the huge egg timer that marked out the shifts had nearly run out. Alice had agreed, after much persuasion, to meet one of her new friends, Sector A’s Risk champion, for a drink after work in one of the musical revue bars. She wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. Alice had never drunk much when she was alive, and she didn’t drink much now. And aside from that, in the underworld, it wasn’t alcohol they drank but the waters of the river Lethe, which helped you to forget your life before. Everybody in the underworld wanted to forget. Everybody except Alice. She wasn’t ready to forget yet.
Her afterlife wasn’t so bad, Alice often reminded herself. Although it was a little too sociable for her taste, Alice enjoyed her job and was grateful to have a challenge and a distraction. The other members of the Scrabble team were friendly, and at least their work gave them something in common aside from being dead. But Alice missed her friends and family from the upperworld, and most of all, she missed Neil. When he died, she told herself, maybe he would come looking for her, or even find her by mistake—he had always liked playing board games. But by then, if he was lucky, he’d be an old man who would have moved on since her death and probably found love with someone else. Hopefully found love with someone else, she had to force herself to think. Hopefully.
She never mentioned Neil to any of her colleagues, but listening to them tell her about their former lives, it soon became clear that all members of the dead had had to undergo similar losses. Some had died only a matter of months apart from their partners and had still been unable to find them in the vastness of the underworld; others had devoted eternities to rediscovering long-lost friends and relations, even their own babies who had died, only to find that they had been irrevocably changed by the passing of time. Everyone agreed that it was best to forget, to not go looking for the past in this endless sea of present. And Alice nodded and pretended that she agreed, but the moment that she had any time off from work, she would go walking the streets of Sector A looking for Neil’s face in all of the men that passed, both young and old; she didn’t know what he would look like when he got here, she didn’t know how old he would be, but he had to arrive here eventually.
The Victorian scientist had just put the Z down on a double-letter score—quite good, but Alice could see a triple that would have been better—when suddenly she experienced a powerful pull to go outside, as if she had got caught up in the current of a river dragging her in that direction.
She leaned over to the man at the next table, a friendly Norwegian with a bullet through his head, who was right now between clients.
“Lars, can you cover for me?”
“Of course,” said Lars.
Alice apologized to the scientist and hurried to the door as Lars took her seat and resumed the game.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to her supervisor. “I have to go.”
“Have to?” repeated the supervisor, more confused than annoyed. The dead never had to do anything.
“I have to go,” said Alice again, and under the amazed eyes of her colleagues, she ran out of the bar and down the street, not knowing where she was headed.
She knew better than to question the direction of her feet, since soon enough she’d arrive where she needed to go. But she was astonished when she found herself at the gates to Hades and Persephone’s palace. What possible reason could they have for summoning her? Had they somehow found out about her connection to the gods in the upperworld?
She had never been to the palace compound before, but it was legendary among the dead. When Persephone had first been kidnapped by Hades to be his bride, the underworld had been a bleak and featureless wasteland, more haunted than inhabited by the souls of the dead, and the palace itself a twisted and grim and darkly foreboding tower, the kind of place that would make you long for a brief sojourn in a nice prison. But once Persephone had finally accepted that this really was going to be her home, she had taken it upon herself to brighten up the place. She had started with the palace. Cherry-picking the best of the world’s dead architects and engineers, Persephone had exploited their talents to indulge her every whim. The palace was bathed at all times—unless she was in a very bad mood—in the glow of imagined sunshine. The building’s exact appearance changed constantly, depending on her preference at that exact moment. It took on the form of the past and present upperworld’s most glorious buildings, from the Taj Mahal to the Pyramids, as well as some that were completely original designs of her architectural team. Only once Persephone had improved her living conditions to meet her exacting standards did she allow the less experienced members of her team to work on the outside, bringing the rest of the underworld up to scratch so that she would have a nice place around her to go on walks.
The palace compound spread over hundreds of acres and was entirely surrounded by high stone walls. The entry was through ornately fashioned golden gates, leading into an exquisitely manicured park dotted with groves of pomegranate trees. The palace compound was the only place in the whole of the underworld, aside from the Elysian Fields, that had vegetation of any sort. An enormous team of landscape gardeners and horticulturists worked exclusively on the plant life there, but the mental power it took to imagine each individual leaf and blade of grass meant that it was considered a nonessential service and therefore not extended to the rest of the underworld. To Alice, the presence of nature had become an unimaginable dream, and even if she hadn’t felt the calling from inside, she would have found it hard to resist slipping through the gates and into the park beyond.
The driveway was made of gravel—an astonishing luxury, as each individual pebble had to be imagined by someone—and it actually crunched under her feet. It was just a trick of the design, but even so, the feeling that her body was having an impact on something was a bliss so intense as to be almost frightening. Alice’s feet led her all the way up the main drive to the palace. She could see it through the trees in the distance, gleaming under the false sunshine. It was Versailles today.
There were a couple of bored guards lolling at the entrance to the palace, members of the squadron recruited by Persephone from the hordes of soldiers who had died in battle. She picked them based not on ability but on whose bodies and uniforms had remained the most intact in the process of dying. In practice, this meant that most of the men in question had been killed by poison gas. Their distinctive sallow skin tone made the rest of the dead refer to them by the nickname the Yellow Pages, a handle that had started among some of the most recently deceased and subsequently spread, even to those who had died long before the invention of the telephone. Alice eyed the guards warily. Her one meeting with Cerberus had been enough to convince her that there were ways in which the dead could yet die.
Seeing her coming, the guards shuffled into a position that might approximate standing at attention.
“Halt, who goes there?” said one of them, just as the other said, “What are you doing here?”
The look they then exchanged was suffused with mutual irritation. Alice wondered how long they had been stationed together at these gates.
“Hello,” she said. “My name’s Alice Mulholland.”
The less formal of the two guards looked at her with some recognition.
“Alice Mulholland?” he said. “Aren’t you a premiership Scrabble player?”
“Oh no,” said Alice. “I’m just first division.”
“I’m sure we had a game once,” said the guard. “You won.”
“I probably just had better letters,” said Alice.
“What’s your business here?” said the other guard.
“I don’t know,” replied Alice.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I felt a . . .”
The rules of existence in the underworld were different than those in the upperworld in any number of ways that she hadn’t got the hang of yet, so Alice didn’t know whether what she was about to say would sound ridiculous to the guards or
not.
“A force.”
“A force?”
“Drawing me here. I thought maybe it was Persephone. Or Hades.”
“You’d better hope it wasn’t Hades,” said the guard.
“Or Persephone,” said the other guard.
“Oh dear,” said Alice.
“Tell you what,” said the Scrabble-playing guard. “Why doesn’t Dieter go inside to find out what’s going on, and you and I can have a nice game of I Spy while we wait.”
“Why do I always have to go inside?” said the guard called Dieter. “I’ll wait here, you go in.”
“I said so first.”
“But I went last time.”
“Maybe I could just go in by myself,” said Alice.
“No,” said both guards at the same time.
“Okay,” said the game-loving guard. “Paper, Scissors, Stone.”
“No,” said Dieter. “You always win.”
“It’s random,” said the other guard.
“Fine,” said Dieter.
Dieter chose Scissors and the other guard chose Stone.
“Off you go, then,” said the other guard cheerfully.
“Best of three?” said Dieter.
“Okay,” said the other guard.
They played twice more with exactly the same result.
“See you later,” said the winner, waving.
“But—” said Dieter.
“It was a fair contest,” said Alice.
“Fine,” said Dieter eventually. “I’ll go. But next time, Eddie, it’s your turn.”
He stomped off to the huge doors that formed the main entrance to the palace and disappeared inside.
“He always chooses Scissors,” said Eddie once he’d gone. “And he never remembers. I think the gas went to his head.”
“It must have been very hard, being a soldier,” said Alice.
“Actually, I think Dieter misses it,” said Eddie. “He was a career soldier, you see, skilled with a bayonet. Very efficient, good at his job. Every so often we meet someone that he killed, and that’s a bit embarrassing. We were on different sides, you know. But no hard feelings, all’s fair in love and war, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t hold a grudge for a thing like that.”
“What about you?” said Alice. “Have you ever run into anyone you killed?”
Eddie looked around him before replying. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said when he was sure that there was no other guard creeping up behind him, “but I never killed a single person. Not one.”
“Did you die before you got the chance?” said Alice.
“No,” said Eddie. “I was a big fat coward. I was in loads of battles, never once shot my gun. But please don’t tell. If it got out I’d be a laughingstock with the lads.”
Alice smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone. Cross my heart and hope to . . . Well, cross my heart, anyway.”
“You can still die, dear,” said Eddie. “And maybe sooner rather than later, by the looks of things.”
“What do you mean?” said Alice.
“It’s Cerberus.”
“Cerberus? Here?”
Eddie pointed down the drive behind her, and Alice turned to look. He was still a long way off, but even at a distance Alice could tell that Cerberus was a changed animal from the last time she had seen him. He walked slowly, his six huge shoulders stooped as he advanced with his magnificent heads bowed. As he shuffled closer, she could see the places where his hide was ripped open, glistening patches red with blood. His serpent tail hung motionless, dragging in the gravel behind him. And pulling him forward by his leftmost ear was a woman, a woman who Alice initially thought was just another of the dead, but as the unlikely pair approached she suddenly recognized her.
“Artemis!” she couldn’t help but cry out, waving.
“You know that lady?” said Eddie.
“Oh no,” said Alice. “That isn’t a lady. That’s a goddess.”
It had been a tough fight. Satisfyingly so. She couldn’t remember the last time she had met a real physical challenge, couldn’t remember the last time she had had a fight that she might lose. In Cerberus, at last, she had found a worthy adversary. She’d had the advantage at the start, the element of surprise: Cerberus was not used to coming under attack, was not expecting her assault, and had stumbled back for a few precious seconds, away from her two-footed onslaught. Then he had gathered himself and fought back, giant paws beating her away, all three heads and that vicious snake of a tail tearing at her flesh with their terrible, hungry jaws. It was fantastic. Here in the land of the dead, facing the possibility of her own demise, Artemis had never felt so alive. She fought back, kicking, biting, snarling, scratching, as much of a monstrous beast as her opponent. She felt his skin and muscle tearing under the force of her fingers, tasted the steel of his blood in her mouth. They rolled together on the ground, their deadly fight making them one, a single, writhing mass with the solitary intent of destruction, impossible to separate. Artemis felt pain and the pain felt good. She knew she was inflicting as much on her partner. She felt stronger and stronger the more Cerberus hurt her. Sounds emanated from her throat, growls and shrieks, as she fought harder and harder, every ounce of herself determined that she would defeat this beast, knowing that he was fighting back with equal determination, and that only one of them would prevail. But as they tumbled and tore at each other, she felt her exhaustion growing even as she found more strength to fight. This had to end soon. She gathered together her power, drawing it from every last part of her aching body, and hurled everything into a final assault. She was hardly aware of the last moments of the fight, her body taking over entirely, acting with some instinct that was beyond conscious thought. And then she came back to herself, and she realized, panting, that it was over, that she had the monster down, motionless on the ground, utterly vanquished. She had won.
Leading her conquest up the long drive to the palace of Hades and Persephone, she walked with pride, though her body throbbed with pain, knowing that she had defeated their champion. Not through trickery like the others, but in an honest battle of equals—or near equals, she thought, watching the beast following at her command. In the upperworld she had grown accustomed to thinking of herself as weakening, deteriorating. Here she was no such thing. She wondered what special power this place had that made her feel so mighty.
As she and her conquest approached the palace, she heard, much to her surprise, a voice calling her name, and she looked up to see a small blond mortal waving at her with huge enthusiasm. A fan? Had word of her victory spread so soon? As she got closer, though, she recognized her: it was her cleaner, the mortal who had started off all of this fuss! It was astonishing, thought Artemis, that such a small girl could cause so much trouble. In a fight with a large rat, she looked like she would lose. Still, Artemis did recall that before all this business with the impending apocalypse she had had every intention of bringing the girl back up into the upperworld, so it was a happy coincidence that the mortal was standing there now.
Artemis swept up to the girl and spoke to the pasty-faced guard who was apparently holding her prisoner.
“I am the goddess Artemis,” she announced, “and this is my slave Cerberus.”
“Your slave?” said both the guard and the girl at the same time.
“That’s right,” said Artemis. “I fought him and I won, and now he belongs to me. Thank you very much for looking after my mortal for me, and now I am taking her in to see Hades and Persephone.”
“Your mortal?” said the guard and the girl.
“Strange,” said Artemis, peering at them. “You look like two separate individuals.”
“Sorry, Eddie,” said the cleaner to the guard. “I think I’d better go with her. I’m sorry we didn’t get to have our game of I Spy.”
“That’s okay,” said the guard. “I would have let you in anyway. I was just enjoying the conversation.”
The cleaner carefully positi
oned herself on the far side of Cerberus’s three heads, and they proceeded toward the palace entrance.
“Artemis, it’s lovely to see you,” said Alice when they were a safe distance from the guard. “I do hope you’re not dead, though.”
“No,” said Artemis. “I’m alive. For the time being.”
36
AFTER LEAVING STYX, Neil hurried as fast as he could to Hades and Persephone’s palace. He had asked Styx for directions, but she told him that there was no need; if he wanted to go there, eventually he would. And eventually, just as she’d said, he had indeed arrived at a long stone wall, on the far side of which he could just see the tops of some trees. He went to walk through the wall, but to his surprise, it was solid. He could actually feel it when he touched it with his hands, and where his palms met the wall he could feel them, too. For a moment, he pressed himself up against it, just to enjoy the sensation of having a body again. But he didn’t have time to waste. With some difficulty, he hauled himself up to the top of the wall, gripping at cracks between the stones with his fingers and toes. He paused at the top for a moment, scanning the parkland in front of him for any sign of dead people. But there was nobody to be seen. The bright grass extended in front of him, sloping gently upward, and in the far distance he could just see the palace, looking like a Lego brick on the horizon.
He jumped down onto the grass, feeling nothing again, and headed up the hill. As he got closer, he could see that he was approaching the palace from the back. He still couldn’t see any guards. This had to be the worst-defended palace he had ever heard of. He wasn’t even sure whether he needed to be sneaking in anyway. Artemis had been vague on the subject of Hades and Persephone. On the one hand, she’d implied that if they caught him in the underworld, they’d destroy his soul, which he definitely didn’t want. But on the other hand, Artemis was planning to ask them for help saving the upperworld, so they couldn’t be entirely bad. Not to mention that they were the only ones who could give him Alice back.
Marie Phillips Page 22