by Jeffrey Ford
The man stared up at him, holding out a hand.
“You’ve escaped from the pit, haven’t you?”
The backside of the flint hill that his home sat atop overlooked the enormous pit, its circumference at the top, a hundred miles across. Spiraling along its inner wall was a path that led down and down in ever decreasing arcs through the various levels of Hell to end at a pinpoint in the very mind of the Master. Even at night, if Charon were to go behind the skull and peer out over the rim, he could see a faint reddish glow and hear the distant echo of plaintive wails.
The man finally nodded.
“Come in,” said Charon, and held the door as the stranger shuffled past him.
Later, after he’d offered a chair, a spare cloak, and a cup of nettle tea, his broken visitor began to come around.
“You know,” said Charon, “there’s no escape from Hell.”
“This I know,” mumbled the man, making a great effort to speak as if he’d forgotten the skill. “But there is an escape in Hell.”
“What are you talking about? The dog will be here within the hour to fetch you back. He’s less than gentle.”
“I need to make the river,” said the man.
“What’s your name?” asked Charon.
“Wieroot,” said the man with a grimace.
The boatman nodded. “This escape in Hell, where is it, what is it?”
“Oondeshai,” said Wieroot, “an island in the River Lethe.”
“Where did you hear of it?”
“I created it,” he said, holding his head with both hands as if to remember. “Centuries ago, I wrote it into the fabric of the mythology of Hell.”
“Mythology?” asked Charon. “I suppose those wounds on your body are merely a myth?”
“The suffering’s real here, don’t I know it, but the entire construction of Hell is, of course, man’s own invention. The pit, the three-headed dog, the rivers, you, if I may say so, all sprung from the mind of humanity, confabulated to punish itself.”
“Hell has been here from the beginning,” said Charon.
“Yes,” said Wieroot, “in one form or another. But when, in the living world, something is added to the legend, some detail to better convince believers or convert new ones, here it leaps into existence with a ready-made history that instantly spreads back to the start and a guaranteed future that creeps inexorably forward.” The escapee fell into a fit of coughing, smoke from the fires of the pit issuing in small clouds from his lungs.
“The heat’s made you mad,” said Charon. “You’ve had too much time to think.”
“Both may be true,” croaked Wieroot, wincing in pain, “but listen for a moment more. You appear to be a man, yet I’ll wager you don’t remember your youth. Where were you born? How did you become the boatman?”
Charon strained his memory, searching for an image of his past in the world of the living. All he saw was rows and rows of heads, tilting back, proffering the coin beneath the tongue. An image of him setting out across the river, passing between the giant oaks, repeated behind his eyes three dozen times in rapid succession.
“Nothing there, am I correct?”
Charon stared hard at his guest.
“I was a cleric, and in copying a sacred text describing the environs of Hell, I deviated from the disintegrating original and added the existence of Oondeshai. Over the course of years, decades, centuries, other scholars found my creation and added it to their own works and so, now, Oondeshai, though not as well known as yourself or your river, is an actuality in this desperate land.”
From down along the riverbank came the approaching sound of Cerberus baying. Wieroot stood, sloughing off the cloak to let it drop into his chair. “I’ve got to get to the river,” he said. “But consider this. You live in the skull of a fallen god. This space was once filled with a substance that directed the universe, no, was the universe. How does a god die?”
“You’ll never get across,” said Charon.
“I don’t want to. I want to be caught in its flow.”
“You’ll drown.”
“Yes, I’ll drown, be bitten by the spiny eels, burned in the River of Fire, but I won’t die, for I’m already dead. Some time ages hence, my body will wash up on the shore of Oondeshai, and I will have arrived home.”
“What gave you cause to create this island?” asked the boatman.
Wieroot staggered toward the door. As he opened it and stepped out into the pitch black, he called back, “I knew I would eventually commit murder.”
Charon followed out into the night and heard the man’s feet pacing away down the flint hill toward the river. Seconds later, he heard the wheezing breath of the three-headed dog. Growling, barking, sounded in triplicate. There was silence for a time, and then finally … a splash, and in that moment, for the merest instant, an image of a beautiful island flashed behind the boatman’s eyes.
He’d nearly been able to forget the incident with Wieroot as the centuries flowed on, their own River of Pain, until one day he heard one of his passengers whisper the word “Oondeshai” to another. Three or four times this happened, and then, only a half-century past, a young woman, still radiant though dead, with shiny black hair and a curious red dot of a birthmark just below her left eye, was ushered onto his boat. He requested payment. When she tilted her head back, opened her mouth, and lifted her tongue, there was no coin but instead a small, tightly folded package of flesh. Charon nearly lost his temper as he retrieved it from her mouth, but she whispered quickly, “A map to Oondeshai.”
These words were like a slap to his face. He froze for the merest instant, but then thought quickly and, nodding, stepped aside for her to take a seat. “Next,” he yelled and the demons were none the wiser. Later that night, he unfolded the crudely cut rectangle of skin, and after a close inspection of the tattoo cursed himself for having been duped. He swept the map onto the floor and the night breeze blew it into a corner. Weeks later, after finding it had been blown back out from under the table into the middle of the floor, he lifted it and searched it again. This time he noticed the freckle in the length of Lethe’s blue line and wondered.
He kept his boat in a small lagoon hidden by a thicket of black poplars. It was just after sunrise, and he’d already stowed his provisions in the hold below deck. After lashing them fast with lengths of hangman’s rope cast off over the years by certain passengers, he turned around to face the chaotically beating heart of the craft. The large blood organ, having once resided in the chest of the Queen of Sirens, was suspended in the center of the hold by thick branch-like veins and arteries that grew into the sides of the boat. Its vasculature expanded and contracted, and the heart itself beat erratically, undulating and shivering, sweating red droplets.
Charon waited until after it died, lay still, and then was startled back to life by whatever immortal force pervaded it chambers. Once it was moving again, he gave a high-pitched whistle, a note that began at the bottom of the register and quickly rose to the top. At the sound of this signal, the wet red meat of the thing parted in a slit to reveal an eye. The orb swiveled to and fro, and the boatman stepped up close with a burning tallow in one hand and the map, opened, in the other. He backlit the scrap of skin to let the eye read its tattoo. He’d circled the freckle that represented Oondeshai with his quill, so the destination was clearly marked. All he’d have to do is steer around the dangers, keep the keel in deep water, and stay awake. Otherwise, the craft now knew the way to go.
Up on deck, he cast off the ropes, and instead of uttering the word “There,” he spoke a command used less than once a century—“Away.” The boat moved out of the lagoon and onto the river. Charon felt something close to joy at not having to steer between the giant white oaks. He glanced up to his left at the top of the flint hill and saw the huge skull, staring down at him. The day was hot and orange and all of Hell was busy at the work of suffering, but he, the boatman, was off on a holiday.
On the voyage out, he traveled w
ith the flow of the river, so its current combined with the inherent, enchanted propulsion of the boat made for swift passage. There were the usual whirlpools, outcroppings of sulfur and brimstone to avoid, but these occasional obstacles were a welcome diversion. He’d never taken this route before when on holiday. Usually, he’d just stay home, resting, making minor repairs to the boat, playing knucklebones with some of the bat-winged demons from the pit on a brief break from the grueling work of torture.
Once, as a guest of the Master during a holiday, he’d been invited into the bottommost reaches of the pit, transported in a winged chariot that glided down through the center of the great spiral. There, where the Czar of the Underworld kept a private palace made of frozen sighs, in a land of snow so cold one’s breath fractured upon touching the air, he was led by an army of living marble statues, shaped like men but devoid of faces, down a tunnel that led to an enormous circle of clear ice. Through this transparent barrier he could look out on the realm of the living. Six days he spent transfixed between astonishment and fear at the sight of the world the way it was. That vacation left a splinter of ice in his heart that took three centuries to melt.
None of his previous getaways ever resulted in a tenth the sense of relief he already felt having gone but a few miles along the nautical route to Oondeshai. He repeated the name of the island again and again under his breath as he worked the tiller or manned the shallows pole, hoping to catch another glimpse of its image as he had the night Wieroot dove into the Acheron. As always, that mental picture refused to coalesce, but he’d learned to suffice with its absence, which had become a kind of solace in itself.
To avoid dangerous eddies and rocks in the middle flow of the river, Charon was occasionally forced to steer the boat in close to shore on the port side. There, he glimpsed the marvels of that remote, forgotten landscape: a distant string of smoldering volcanoes; a thundering herd of bloodless behemoths, sweeping like a white wave across the immensity of a fissured salt flat; a glittering forest of crystal trees alive with long-tailed monkeys made of lead. The distractions were many, but he struggled to put away his curiosity and concentrate for fear of running aground and ripping a hole in the hull.
He hoped to make the River of Fire before nightfall, so as to have light with which to navigate. To travel the Acheron blind would be sheer suicide, and unlike Wieroot, Charon was uncertain as to whether he was already dead or alive or merely a figment of Hell’s imagination. There was the possibility of finding a natural harbor and dropping the anchor, but the land through which the river ran had shown him fierce and mysterious creatures stalking him along the banks, and that made steering through the dark seem the fairer alternative.
As the day waned, and the sun began to whine with the pain of its gradual death, Charon peered ahead with a hand shading his sight in anticipation of a glimpse at the flames of Pyriphlegethon. During his visit to the palace of frozen sighs, the Master had let slip that the liquid fire of those waters burned only sinners. Because the boat was a tool of Hell, made of Hell, he was fairly certain it could withstand the flames, but he wasn’t sure if at some point in his distant past he had not sinned. If he were to blunder into suffering, though, he thought that he at least would learn some truth about himself.
In the last moments of light, he lit three candles and positioned them at the prow of the boat. They proved ineffectual against the night, casting their glow only a shallows pole length ahead of the craft. Their glare wearied Charon’s eyes and he grew fatigued. To distract himself from fatigue, he went below and brought back a dried, salted Harpy leg to chew on. In recent centuries the winged creatures had grown scrawny, almost thin enough to slip his snares. The meat was known to improve eyesight and exacerbate the mind. Its effect had nothing to do with clarity, merely a kind of agitation of thought that was, at this juncture, preferable to slumber. Sleep was the special benefit of the working class of Hell, and the boatman usually relished it. Dreams especially were an exotic escape from the routine of work. The sinners never slept, nor did the Master.
It was precisely at the center of the night that Charon felt some urge, some pull of intuition to push the tiller hard to the left. As soon as he’d made the reckless maneuver, he heard from up ahead the loud gulping sound that meant a whirlpool lay in his path. The sound grew quickly to a deafening strength, and only when he was upon the swirling monster, riding its very lip around the right arc, was he able to see its immensity. The boat struggled to free itself from the draw, and instead of being propelled by its magic it seemed to be clawing its way forward, dragging its weight free of the hopeless descent. There was nothing he could do but hold the tiller firm and stare with widened eyes down the long, treacherous tunnel. Not a moment passed after he was finally free of it than the boat entered the turbulent waters where Acheron crossed the River of Fire.
He released his grip on the tiller and let the craft lead him with its knowledge of the map he’d shown it. His fingers gripped tightly into the eyeholes of two of the skulls that formed his seat, and he held on so as not to be thrown overboard. Pyriphlegethon now blazed ahead of him, and the sight of its dancing flames, some flaring high into the night, made him scream, not with fear but exhilaration. The boat cleaved the burning surface, and then was engulfed in a yellow-orange brightness that gave no heat. The frantic illumination dazed Charon, and he sat as in a trance, dreaming wide-awake. He no longer felt the passage of Time, the urgency to reach his destination, the weight of all those things he’d fled on his holiday.
Eventually, after a prolonged bright trance, the blazing waters became turbulent, lost their fire, and a thick mist rose off them. That mist quickly became a fog so thick it seemed to have texture, brushing against his skin like a feather. He thought he might grab handfuls until it slipped through his fingers, leaked into his nostrils, and wrapped its tentacles around his memory.
When the boatman awoke to the daily birth cry of Hell’s sun, he found himself lying naked upon his bed, staring up at the clutch of bat bones dangling from the cranial center of his skull home. He was startled at first, grasping awkwardly for a tiller that wasn’t there, tightening his fist around the shaft of the absent shallows pole that instead rested at an angle against the doorway. As soon as the shock of discovery that he was actually home had abated, he sighed deeply and sat up on the edge of the bed. It struck him then that his entire journey, his holiday, had been for naught.
He frantically searched his thoughts for the slightest shred of a memory that he might have reached Oondeshai, but every trace had been forgotten. For the first time in centuries, tears came to his eyes, and the frustration of his predicament made him cry out. Eventually, he stood and found his cloak rolled into a ball on the floor at the foot of his bed. He dressed and without stopping to put on his boots or grab the shallows pole, he left his home.
With determination in his stride, he mounted the small rise that lay back behind the skull and stood at the rim of the enormous pit. Inching to the very edge, he peered down into the spiraled depths at the faint red glow. The screams of tortured sinners, the wailing laments of self-pity, sounded in his ears like distant voices in a dream. Beneath it all he could barely discern, like the buzzing of a fly, the sound of the Master laughing uproariously, joyously, and that discordant strain seemed to lace itself subtly into everything.
Charon’s anger and frustration slowly melted into a kind of numbness as cold as the hallways of Satan’s palace, and he swayed to and fro, out over the edge and back, not so much wanting to jump as waiting to fall. Time passed, he was not aware how much, and then as suddenly as he had dressed and left his home, he turned away from the pit.
Once more inside the skull, he prepared to go to work. There was a great heaviness within him, as if his very organs were now made of lead, and each step was an effort, each exhalation a sigh. He found his eelskin ankle boots beneath the table at which he’d studied the flesh map at night. Upon lifting one, it turned in his hand, and a steady stream of blond sand po
ured out onto the floor. The sight of it caught him off guard and for a moment he stopped breathing.
He fell to his knees to inspect the little pile that had formed. Carefully, he lifted the other boot, turned it over, and emptied that one into its own neat little pile next to the other. He reached toward these twin wonders, initially wanting to feel the grains run through his fingers, but their stark proof that he had been to Oondeshai and could not recall a moment of it ultimately defeated his will and he never touched them. Instead, he stood, took up the shallows pole, and left the skull for his boat.
As he guided the boat between the two giant oaks, he no longer wondered if all his journeys across the Acheron were always the same journey. With a dull aspect, he performed his duties as the boatman. His muscles, educated in the task over countless centuries, knew exactly how to avoid the blue serpent and skirt the whirlpools without need of a single thought. No doubt it was these same unconscious processes that had brought Charon and his craft back safely from Oondeshai.
Gesnil and Trinkthil inquired with great anticipation about his vacation when he met them on the far shore. For the demons, who knew no respite from the drudgery of herding sinners, even a few words about a holiday away would have been like some rare confection, but he told them nothing. From the look on Charon’s face, they knew not to prod him and merely sent the travelers forward to offer coins and take their places on the benches.
During the return trip that morning, a large fellow sitting among the passengers had a last second attack of nerves in the face of an impending eternity of suffering. He screamed incoherently, and Charon ordered him to silence. When the man stood up and began pacing back and forth, the boatman ordered him to return to his seat. The man persisted moving about, his body jerking with spasms of fear, and it was obvious his antics were spooking the other sinners. Fearing the man would spread mutiny, Charon came forth with the shallows pole and bringing it around like a club, split the poor fellow’s head. That was usually all the incentive a recalcitrant passenger needed to return to the bench, but this one was now insane with the horror of his plight.