The Ferryman Institute

by Colin Gigl

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  To Kate,

  for being the rambunctious kid sister every brother should be so lucky to have.

  To Tim,

  for always being my best man.

  This story is for you.

  To Mom,

  for your unconditional love and support, and for never letting me forget how good well I did in eighth-grade English.

  To Carly,

  for sharing your life with me.

  I took on this book in an effort to impress you, and never would have been able to finish it without you.

  To Dad,

  for the annotated copy of Lamb.

  You hoped for a note from me in a copy of my own book one day.

  Here it is, in every cover: We did it. Thank you.

  CHARLIE

  * * *

  I’VE JUST SEEN A FACE

  Suicides were Charlie Dawson’s least favorite part of the job for two reasons. The first was the inherent tragedy of the whole thing. Death was never pleasant, but there was a pretty dramatic gulf between an eighty-year-old man passing peacefully in his sleep and a young woman demonstrating her outlook on life via an exit wound blown out her skull. The second reason was that suicide assignments were never easy. There were few guarantees in the Ferryman world, but that was certainly one of them.

  The young woman currently standing in front of Charlie—Alice Spiegel, according to the report—seemed awfully casual for someone who was about to call time on her life. She’d straightened up her room, changed her clothes (not that Charlie was watching, of course—or, maybe he was, but he was trying not to . . . mostly trying not to), and lightly made up her face. It was only after she ran out of mundane things to procrastinate over that she walked into her closet. She reappeared several minutes later, the handle of a silver box held tightly in her right hand. Alice set the case down on her bed, carefully lifted the top, and pulled out the implement of her impending demise.

  Charlie couldn’t say what type of handgun she produced, matte black and heavy in her dainty hands. He was willing to bet it fired bullets, though, which currently topped the list of things that mattered at the moment. Alice’s eyes, half lidded and calm, studied how the gun nestled in her fingers, flipping her hand back and forth in the subdued light cast by her desk lamp. Satisfied, she slammed a clip into the pistol, cocked it, and flicked off the safety, all with a remarkable nonchalance.

  No, tonight was definitely not going to be easy.

  There was no anxiety in the way Alice carried herself across the room, no nerves on display as she sat behind her desk. Charlie peeked at his watch. Just under a minute now. With a shake of his head, he pulled out the president’s envelope from inside his suit jacket. A golden seal had been pressed over the flap, an embellished key—the president’s insignia—embossed in the wax. He’d been told in his initial briefing that said envelope would only open when it was supposed to . . . which, as instructions went, was about as useful as a sandwich bag on the moon. It was his first Presidential Assignment—a corporate classification he didn’t even know officially existed until an hour ago—and he was in no mood to blow it.

  Truth be told, Charlie was having trouble figuring out what was so special about this case. There didn’t seem to be any wrinkles to it (girl gets gun, girl ends life—undoubtedly tragic, but not exactly unique), and he’d handled far more heart-wrenching suicides than this. Still, the assignment came directly from the president of the Ferryman Institute, which had to mean something. That’s what he hoped, anyway.

  A small pop shifted Charlie’s focus back to the envelope in his hand. Unlike moments ago, the top flap now waved gently free, the seal having split and fallen to the floor in two identically sized pieces. As Charlie watched, the two halves silently disintegrated, each one fading away into nothingness.

  There’s my cue, he thought.

  He gripped the contents of the envelope and pulled, expecting the letter inside to slide right out. It didn’t. Out of the corner of his eye, Alice was bringing the gun up to her right temple. Charlie tried again with the same emasculating result. Man, how did they stick this in here? he wondered, all the while yanking furiously on the piece of paper inside.

  Charlie’s mind, masochistic as ever, began to prepare the explanation he’d inevitably have to give the president detailing his failure on the assignment. Yes, sir, I couldn’t get it out of the envelope, sir. Yes, sir, very stuck, sir. Only King Arthur would have been able to pull it out, sir. No, sir, I can assure you I have absolutely no pride or dignity left to speak of. That sounded about right. However, just as he’d resigned himself to that humiliating fate, the letter popped free of its standard number 10 prison.

  Charlie stole a glance at the time. Twenty seconds and counting.

  The piece of paper inside had been folded in half. Almost immediately, it opened of its own accord. He began to read.

  Fifteen seconds left.

  Charlie wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it definitely wasn’t this.

  The letter inside contained nine words handwritten in big, bold letters on an otherwise blank sheet. Charlie read it, then read it again. Nine stupidly simple words, and he still couldn’t believe what they said.

  Ten seconds.

  There was a horrifying moment where Charlie’s mind seemed to shrivel up and disappear. It was as if having the ability to think had been nothing but a pleasant memory, erased in an instant by two measly sentences. Thankfully, his faculties returned quickly enough. Not so thankfully, they’d essentially taken to running around inside his head with their hair on fire.

  Five seconds.

  It was a wholly unbelievable choice he was being given, in the most literal sense of the word. But it was a no-brainer, wasn’t it?

  With a fluid but frantic swoop, his hand dove into the interior pocket of his jacket, a place it had gone many, many times before, and wrapped around his Ferryman Key.

  Two seconds.

  Acting purely on instinct, he drew the key out and tossed it underhand toward Alice Spiegel’s desk. Charlie only realized after the key was well out of his hand that his plan (possibly a strong word for it) hinged on the need for an absolutely perfect throw. Willie Mays, Charlie was not.

  Everything in that moment, time included, seemed preoccupied with his Ferryman Key as it arced through the air. Charlie felt like there wasn’t a single detail that escaped him. He watched intently as Alice noticed the key in her peripheral vision. The gun dipped ever so slightly as her focus shifted to the golden object first sailing past her head, then clattering loudly against her desk. It was impossible for Charlie not to see her look of undiluted shock reflected in the mirror when it skidded to a stop. It was also impossible to miss her reaction when their eyes locked in the mirror. Without his key, she could see him now, standing behind her, staring at her, a stranger suddenly consuming the reflection. And the look in her eyes . . . Charlie knew that to be a dangerous one.

  Alice screamed.

  She spun around to face him with an undeniable grace. In that fraction of a second, Alice shifted the barrel of the gun from caressing her skull and instead leveled it at him.

  She held it there, her body in a sloppy Weaver stance, her breath frantic, her arms trembling. Charlie needed to defuse the situation, and fast. The unfortunate truth, however, was that in his haste to come up with the first part of his plan, he’d failed to consider
anything beyond that. Throw key on desk? Check. Get her attention? Check. Panic because he didn’t know what to do now? Sure, might as well check that off, too.

  “Uh, you have a very nice bedroom,” he said, mainly because he had no idea what else to say. In terms of first impressions, it was probably not Charlie’s finest work.

  A magnificently loud BLAM cut off any follow-ups to that with a well-placed bullet straight to his forehead.

  Charlie Dawson’s head snapped back, his whole body tumbling with it. The instructions he was holding in his left hand went flying into the air. He caught a glimpse of the paper, now parallel to the ceiling, right before his world went dark.

  Written in bold black letters on that ordinary sheet of paper were those nine, short words:

  BE A FERRYMAN OR SAVE THE GIRL. YOUR CHOICE.

  ONE WEEK EARLIER

  CHARLIE

  * * *

  CLIFF DIVING

  Charlie Dawson slammed into the canyon floor with a force that would have made Wile E. Coyote blush. His limbs splayed in directions they really had no business being in, like a discarded marionette with its strings cut. A particularly sharp spear of rock skewered him through his shirtless chest, piercing nearly two feet out his back.

  A few seconds passed in silence before Cartwright yelled after him. “I would award the dismount top marks,” he called down in his late-Victorian accent. “However, I must deduct points for the improper positioning of your toes. For my final score, I give a seven-point-five.” His voice carried easily in the desert’s desolate stillness.

  Charlie, his face buried several inches into the earth, replied with a muted but distinctly audible mmph.

  Several additional seconds ticked by before Cartwright called down again. “I sincerely hope you’re not talking into the strata again, Charles.”

  A modest crunching sound filtered through the air as Charlie removed his head from the layer of sandstone it had been embedded in. “Only a seven-point-five?” he yelled back up.

  “Ah, much better, thank you,” Cartwright said as the words reached him. “As to your question, I’m afraid so, my dear fellow. I would even go so far as to suggest my scoring was rather generous. The foundation for an excellent score is built on impeccable fundamental technique.”

  Charlie hadn’t the faintest idea what he looked like after his feet left the cliff’s edge, nor did he particularly care. As far as techniques were concerned, Charlie’s list began and ended with hit the ground. But while the score was meaningless, the resulting opportunities to try and fluster the otherwise completely unflappable Cartwright were not.

  “Fine,” Charlie called up, “I’ll take your word on my toes. Can we at least both agree that I stuck the landing?” He paused, then added, “Get it? Stuck the landing? Because I’m stuck on this rock right now?”

  Awful puns were the only weakness of Cartwright’s that Charlie had managed to discover thus far. They were a tenuous form of attack at best.

  True to form, Cartwright continued to smile gamely and merely shook his head. “Charles, I will admit there are moments when your misguided attempts at humor make me question our friendship. Heinous wordplay notwithstanding, your score stands.” Even from fifty-some-odd yards below, Charlie could see the British gentleman look out in the direction of the vanishing sun before returning his gaze to the depths of the canyon. His eyes twinkled in the last slanted rays of sunlight. “In any case, do hurry up, if you so please. It appears as if our only source of light is retiring for the evening, and I daresay I wouldn’t mind doing the same. Oh, and I made tea, should you be interested in partaking.” And with that, his head disappeared from view.

  Charlie sighed. He’d hoped to get in one more dive before the sun completely set, but there was no stopping Cartwright when he had tea on the brain. In the many years they’d been acquainted, Charlie had known Cartwright to be an almost painfully polite and pleasant person. Yet even Charlie couldn’t say for sure what unspeakable things the man might do in the name of Earl Grey. So, with a slight huff, Charlie began to get up.

  It was slow going at first, but before long his body settled into its usual rhythm of self-repair. Misplaced limbs gingerly rotated back into place, broken bones set themselves, cuts and lacerations simply closed up and disappeared. In a span of seconds, Charlie’s anatomy shifted from abstract Picasso to something actually recognizable as human physiology. When his body was more or less back in working order, he casually slid himself off the pointed rock and stood, dusting off his shorts and ruffling his hair as he did. Save for the flecks of dirt that fluttered out and a few new rips in his shorts, Charlie appeared no worse for wear. Not that he’d been expecting anything different.

  His focus turned to the exit rope he’d affixed several hundred feet away down the canyon floor. As Charlie padded toward it on his bare feet, his hand unconsciously reached for the key nestled in his shorts’ pocket. Charlie traced it with his right hand, feeling the ornate inscription carved into the shaft beneath his fingertips. He eventually pulled the key from his pocket and held it high in the fading light, staring at the word inscribed on it as if he were seeing it for the first time. PORTHMEUS, it read. Translated from Latin, it meant Ferryman. At least, that’s what Cartwright had told him. Regardless of its translation, that word had changed Charlie’s life. He was a Ferryman, an immortal guide tasked with leading the souls of the dead to the afterlife. A man who, in exchange for his service, had received the many gifts of immortality: perpetual youth, lack of pain or sickness, boundless energy . . .

  Gifts, Charlie thought, a sad smirk pursed on his lips.

  He reached the rope and began to climb. By the time he arrived at the top edge of the canyon, the sky had graduated from its rich pinks and vivid reds to be ensconced in a somber midnight blue.

  “Ah, Charles. Alive and in one piece, I see,” Cartwright said as Charlie hoisted himself over the canyon’s lip. Cartwright was sitting comfortably in a folding chair several yards back from the cliff’s edge, a well-worn copy of Moby-Dick cracked open in his hands. Cartwright’s build—not to mention choice of facial hair—was probably best described as nineteenth-century pugilist. His lanky frame and narrow shoulders belied the cords of muscle Charlie knew were hiding underneath his loose button-down. A finely trimmed crest of slicked-back hair the color of coal rode atop his head while his mustache—that luxuriant, neatly twirled, pinnacle-of-masculinity-itself mustache—flexed on his upper lip in a never-ending tribute to an era of manliness long since past. A lacquered yet otherwise ordinary pipe was perched between his lips, a veil of hazy smoke drifting out of its bowl. To the right of Cartwright’s chair sat a small, battery-powered teakettle, complete with a pair of unadorned white teacups. His full name, as introduced, was William Henry Taylor Cartwright IV, but he’d insisted from the very beginning that Charlie simply refer to him by his surname.

  “If I didn’t know any better,” Charlie said, “I’d almost say you sound surprised.”

  Cartwright waved his pipe in the air to dismiss the statement, causing the smoke to trace indistinct patterns in the darkening sky. “As a friend who has watched you inflict countless acts of gratuitous violence upon yourself, I must be honest in saying I’m not. Rationally, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be fine.” He finally looked up from his book. “But that doesn’t mean a small but irrational part of me isn’t always relieved to see you as you stand before me now.”

  Charlie took a look at himself. “Covered in dirt?” He brushed off the modest layer of grime he’d acquired scaling the canyon wall in nothing but a pair of shorts.

  Cartwright sighed. “I was implying something much more profound, but I should have known better than to think you would gratefully accept such heartfelt intent.”

  “You’re right. You should have known better, and on both accounts, I might add.” Charlie wandered over and sat down on a bare patch of dirt beside Cartwright. The stars winked into existence above them as the sky grew darker.

 
Despite the remarkable celestial panorama—despite the cliff diving, the amusing banter with Cartwright, the sunset, despite all the things he enjoyed—Charlie’s mind wandered elsewhere. A much darker elsewhere.

  The elsewhere it always seemed to be these days.

  He thought of last week’s assignment, of the young man lying in front of him, alone and helpless. He thought of himself, standing there, waiting for the man—practically a kid, really—to die. He thought of all the things he could’ve done differently, of how, in the end, he’d done his job, just like he always did.

  Without fail, it was always the job first. Always the job, forever and ever.

  “May I ask you a slightly personal question?”

  The sound of Cartwright’s voice snapped Charlie’s attention to the present. He turned to see Cartwright looking over at him, his book now closed in his lap. Though Cartwright’s expressions were almost always perfectly neutral, Charlie couldn’t help but notice the slight tint of concern in his friend’s eyes. Worse, Charlie had a feeling he knew exactly what—or, more accurately, who—Cartwright was truly worried about.

  “I have a feeling even if I say no, you’re going to ask anyway,” Charlie replied.

  Cartwright gave him a mischievous smile. “I’m not sure I’d put it quite so brusquely . . .”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Charlie said, waving him off. “Ask away with my blessing.”

  Even with Charlie’s permission to continue, Cartwright hesitated. A moment of silence followed, after which he placed his book on the ground. Cartwright gave the stars a searching look, as if they might contain the answer to the question he’d yet to say out loud. Finally, he turned again toward Charlie.

  “Rightly or wrongly, I can’t shake the notion that there is something weighing heavily on your mind,” he said. If his eyes had only hinted at concern moments ago, then the somber tone of his voice removed any remaining doubt.