Prospero in Hell

by L. Jagi Lamplighter

  I froze.

  He had a point.

  In a warehouse in Maryland, my brother had transformed into a sapphire-eyed bat-winged entity that looked sickeningly like a demon. It was our family’s policy not to traffic with Hell. At least, it had been in years past—though now it was beginning to seem as if half the family had violated this creed. If a search of Mephisto’s house could reveal clues as to whether he really was Mephistopheles, Prince of Hell, I owed it to Father to investigate.

  An eight-foot-tall primate with thick, curly white fur came shuffling into the foyer carrying a mop and pail. When it saw us, it flinched back, hunching bashfully behind its great shoulder. Then, gathering its courage, it lunged at us, swinging its mop and baring its big yellow fangs.

  “We better get a move on, Ma’am.” Mab retreated cautiously toward the nearest arch. “We’re making the help nervous.”

  Mephisto’s mansion was like no house I had ever seen. Rooms spilled one into the next in no discernible order. Some overflowed with chairs that faced no particular direction. Others were nearly empty except for piles of junk. Still others could have been chambers in a museum, with priceless statues and artifacts arranged in an eye-catching manner, each with its own brass plaque.

  Nearly every room on the first floor had a pool. Underwater tunnels, similar to the passage Morveren had taken to fetch the yeti, led from one to another giving the mermaid the run of the house. There were other passages as well, doors that opened into narrow hallways, or crawl spaces that led from one room to the next. And everything, everywhere, was plastered with Post-It notes.

  “ ‘Remember to water the asphodel,’ ” Mab read aloud. He looked left and right but saw no sign of a plant. Looking up, he paused, squinting at the ceiling. “Guess he wasn’t kidding about uncovering the will-o-wisps. Do you think he really keeps a salamander in his furnace?”

  I followed his gaze and saw that the illumination came from glass globes holding balls of brightly glowing flickers of light. “Very likely. How else would he heat this enormous place? He certainly could not afford to heat it with oil.”

  Mab performed several thaumaturgic experiments involving sextants, brown rice, peony seeds, rose petals and a slide rule. Eventually, however, he threw down his tools in disgust.

  “It’s no good, Ma’am.” He shook his head glumly. “The place stinks so of magic, I can’t tell anything. The inhabitants are magical. Half the objects are enchanted. Heck, the place has probably even got dimensional gateways similar to those in Prospero’s Mansion, leading to only Setabos knows where.” He gestured off toward the distance. “Maybe if I had access to some of the specially calibrated equipment from Mr. Prospero’s study . . . but, as it is, this line of thaumaturgic investigation is useless. Might as well press on.”

  The next chamber might have been a drawing room, had it not been so crowded with statuary and stacked furniture. Mab paused and scratched at his eternal stubble. “Have you noticed all the wooden surfaces have been carved?”

  Throughout the house, cabinets, doors, wainscoting, tabletops, and even chair legs bore signs of my brother’s handiwork. Bas-reliefs of famous people, pastoral scenes of shepherdesses and their sheep, funny little faces that peered out from door lintels, carved doodles of ketchup bottles and Campbell’s soup ads: every place we looked, another wooden surface had been transformed into three-dimensional art.

  “Does any of this mean anything? Or is it just artistic babble?” he muttered, adding under his breath, “By Setebos and Titania, I wish I’d thought to bring a camera!”

  “Some of both, I suspect,” I replied. “Some of it probably has meaning—mnemonic images he still remembers from the period when he studied the Ancient Art of Memory with our brother Cornelius. Some of it is probably just the product of his madness.”

  “You mean he just carves on things because he’s cuckoo?”

  “He likes to carve. Sometimes, he does it without thinking.”

  Mab scowled. “Like on the boat, when he tried to carve a figurine that would force me to let him summon me? Sure, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Suuure.”

  Mab examined the fairyscape at length, writing copious notes. Then, he peered at a cluttered table stuffed in between two china cabinets. A golf bag embroidered with the letters T.A.P. leaned against one leg, tilted at an extravagant angle, as if it were about to tumble to its doom. The yellow note stuck to its tan leather read: NEVER STOP LOOKING!!!

  “This mean anything to you, Ma’am?”

  “No, though T.A.P. are our brother Titus’s initials,” I said. “He’s the golf fanatic in the family. Perhaps that’s his bag.”

  “So, why is it here? And what’s this message mean? That Harebrain wants to beat his brother at golf? Is that why Mr. Titus disappeared? Your brother took him out to ax the golf competition?”

  “I hardly think so,” I chuckled.

  “Snicker if you like, Ma’am,” growled Mab as he stalked over to a red trunk. “But I say something’s fishy about Mr. Titus’s disappearance.”

  Mab turned back to the table and picked up a plastic pillbox that lay amid dozens of other knickknacks.

  “ ‘Check on this once a week,’ ” Mab read the pink note on the plastic pillbox. After dutifully recording this message in his notebook, he opened the pillbox and peered inside. “Check on what? The thing is empty. And . . . oh, this is precious!”

  He pointed at a faint blue Post-It that read: THIS IS A MNEMONIC. DO NOT MOVE. An arrow had been drawn next to the words. The place the arrow pointed to was empty.

  “Pour sucker.” Mab chuckled, shaking his head. He moved along, reading other messages as he copied them down.

  This is a ring from the high wire of the Greatest Show on Earth! I gave Barnum my tiger.

  Stirrup from the Steppe. Check monthly.

  This is to remind me to catch the Thunderbird.

  Wind this bandana in January, May, and September.

  This is a hairbrush. I use it to brush my hair.

  Mab ran a hand over his face. “Boy, Ma’am, your brother is a certified loony. We’re not going to get anything out of this.”

  “You can say that again,” I murmured, my fingers drumming impatiently against the cover of the Book of the Sibyl. As Mab’s pencil still scratched away, recording my brother’s babblings, I added, “Mab, there’s no point in copying it all down.”

  “A detective is nothing if he is not meticulous, Ma’am. One never knows what’s going to turn out to be important.”

  “Nothing here is important, Mab. It’s just nonsense, babble!” I gestured briskly, knocking over a silver flute that had been leaning against the wall. I propped it up again and pushed the attached note back onto the mouthpiece. It read: BONEHEAD, MONTHLY.

  Beneath the flute, a photograph lay on its face. Righting it, I discovered it was a silvery daguerreotype of my family, taken back in England before the days of proper photography. A pale green sticky note pasted to the glass read: THIS IS MY FAMILY, EVEN THE DORKY ONES.

  The note made me smile. I looked at the picture and felt an unexpected fondness for my siblings. I could not help smirking at their muttonchop sideburns, which had been all the rage in that day. They made my brothers look so serious and so ridiculous at the same time.

  Mab leaned over, peering at our faces. “I recognize most of them, Ma’am. You, Harebrain, the Perp . . . er, Mr. Ulysses—hard to miss him. He’s the one wearing the domino mask around his eyes. That’s Mr. Theophrastus when he was a young man, isn’t it?” Mab tapped on the picture above Theo’s face. “Even back then, he looked like a decent fellow.”

  “Yes. That’s him,” I said softly, blinking tears from my eyes.

  “And Madam Logistilla,” Mab continued, unaware of my sudden sentimentality. “I recognize her. She looks exactly the same as she did when we met her a couple of weeks ago. This big one must be Mr. Titus. Oh, and that’s dead one, Mr. Gregor. Your father showed me a picture of him once. Who are the rest of these g
uys?”

  “That’s Cornelius.” I pointed at one of the shorter figures. “This is actually a rare shot of Cornelius’s face. Usually, he covers his unseeing eyes with a blindfold.”

  “So, that’s Mr. Cornelius.” Mab squinted at the picture and then picked up the blue and white bandana to which the note about winding in January was attached. He sniffed it carefully, frowning thoughtfully. “He’s the one your sister thinks put the whammy on Mr. Theophrastus, right?”

  “Right.” I shivered, though the chamber was not particularly cold, and I was still wearing my cashmere cloak. “Logistilla claims she saw Cornelius use his staff, the Staff of Persuasion, to make Theo keep his vow to give up magic. Retiring from the family work was bad enough, but Theo had come to the bizarre conclusion that the Water of Life that keeps us young counts as magic.”

  “Which is why he stopped taking it and began aging.” Mab patted his notebook. “I got that down.”

  I nodded glumly and thought about Logistilla’s accusation. Ironically, the thought that someone had forced Theo to keep his vow cheered me. Then, his decline became someone else’s fault, someone who might be capable of fixing the problem. I just did not want the responsible party to turn out to be a family member. I hated the idea that any member of our family would do such a thing to one another.

  I glanced at the picture again. It was so nice to see us all together. What a team we used to make! Nothing could withstand us when we worked together.

  How had it happened that we had grown so far apart? Why could we not always be the way we were in this portrait?

  “And that fellow?” Mab pointed at my last brother, who smiled wryly through the long lank hair that fell over his eyes. He was the only one without sideburns.

  “Oh. That . . .”—I could not keep the disgust from my voice—“is Erasmus.”

  Mab squatted down and examined him more closely. “The professor, right? He’s the one you don’t like. Got it.”

  “ ‘Don’t like’ is putting it mildly,” I murmured. I glanced at my brother again and quickly looked away. Just seeing Erasmus’s face again brought to mind a thousand offenses he had committed against me. I fought off the wave of loathing that assailed me.

  “And that, of course, is Mr. Prospero.” Mab pointed at the imposing figure of my father, with his gray flowing hair and beard. The print had captured the wise yet humorous gleam that lit his eyes.

  I paused, struck by a sudden pain in my heart. Father! How I missed him. Until he retired three years ago, I had been his constant companion, helping him in everything he did. And now? If my Lady and our Ouija board séance were to be believed, he was a living prisoner in Hell, hardly a fate I would wish on an enemy, much less a loved one.

  Behind me, Mab moved on. He prowled around on the far side of the cluttered chamber. Pausing be peered at an elaborate scene of maidens playing Ring Around the Rosy in a meadow near a pond that was surrounded by cattails.

  Surreptitiously wiping my eyes, I joined him. The quality of the carving he was examining was exquisite. I trailed my finger along the curlicues of a complicated filigree.

  Mab squinted at my hand, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and ran it over the curves and narrow angles of the carving before us. Then he peered at his handkerchief and sniffed it.

  “Weird. Everything’s spotless. You’d think a house kept by your loony brother and his menagerie would be dusty, if not filthy. Oh, and this is a door.”

  “Huh?” I glanced around, confused.

  Mab chuckled. “Look.”

  He tapped the carving three times, then pushed hard on the nose of a laughing girl in a kerchief and dirndl. The whole panel opened, swinging away from us to reveal a descending spiral staircase. The wonderful aromas of pastry and bubbling stew wafted up to meet us.

  Mab and I glanced at each other. Mab grinned. We headed down. The passageway led into a wide kitchen with shiny copper pots hanging from a rack overhead. The maenad stood before the stove, sautéing vegetables and stirring a big boiling pot. Nearby, in yet another pool, the mermaid peeled potatoes. She was wearing earphones and humming to herself, her tail tapping the water to the beat.

  “Welcome to our humble kitchen,” she purred in her husky voice.

  “Thought you and Harebrain were off . . .” Mab’s voice trailed off, and his face became somewhat red.

  The maenad snorted, rolling her eyes dramatically. “The master’s all smoke and no fire. He was just trying to flatter me, so I’d agree to cook dinner for his guests.”

  “Probably wise that he abstains, considering what happened to your last son,” Mab muttered. Realizing she had heard him, he flushed more deeply. “Er, sorry . . . Your Majesty.”

  The maenad gave him a withering look but restrained her comments to, “The master’s out in the barn, seeing to the comfort of the wounded gryphon.”

  “Are you really that Agave?” I asked. “Queen Agave of Thebes?”

  “Once of Thebes, long ago. Later of Illyria and of other places. Yes.”

  “But, weren’t you . . . mortal?”

  “I was born mortal. I lost my humanity when my son and I offended Bacchus.” She scratched the slate tiles with the pinecone on top of her thyrsos, and a fountain of wine sprang up, filling the kitchen with the sweet scent of crushed grapes. Deftly sticking a bowl under the fountain, she caught some of the deep purple liquid and, measuring it out, poured two cups into the stew. The newly sprung fountain slowed to a dribble and then dried up, leaving a dark stain like old blood upon the floor. “Or maybe I lost it when I twisted off my son’s head. Either way, I belong to the Vine God now.”

  “What about your immortal soul?” asked Mab.

  “Don’t know.” The maenad tasted the stew from a long wooden spoon, washed it, and continued to stir. “We didn’t know about such things back then. If you ask me, souls are a new invention.”

  “Humans have always had souls,” Mab countered. “They can be good or evil, but they can’t be lost, in the sense that you mean. Once a human, always a human, at least at some level. Not like me and the mermaid here.”

  “Hey, don’t drag me into this,” objected Morveren, who had removed her headphones. “I might have a soul. My father was a Cornishman named Matthew.” She pouted thoughtfully, her girlish chin tilted upward, a finger twirling her red tresses. “What does a soul do for you, again?”

  “It’s the part of a human that allows him to remain who he is. Even if his situation changes, he can always find his way back to his original self,” Mab said. “Unlike us supernatural creatures. If we change, our very natures transform. We have no essential self to fight off external influences.”

  A chill ran up my spine. Did Father know this? I thought of the stacks and stacks of naked Italian bodies, lying like corpses in the caverns beneath my sister Logistilla’s house. If I was right, Father intended them for the Aerie Ones, so they would all have bodies like Mab’s and could develop human judgment and feelings, as Mab had. But what would be the point if the Aerie Ones would automatically revert to their old ways the moment they returned to their original airy forms?

  Surely, Mab’s seeming humanity, his kindness, his gruff concern, was not just a side effect of his fleshy body?

  Thinking of Father reminded me of another of his projects, his translation of Orpheus’s poetry in an attempt to decipher the Eleusinian Mysteries.

  I turned to Agave. “You’re a maenad. Were you involved with the death of Orpheus?”

  “I was there.”

  “Why did the maenads kill him?”

  “Why did he have to die?” She picked up the pan and gave her wrist a twist. The sautéing vegetables flew into the air and came down again. “He was a prude. He spoke out against our rites, always preaching temperance and moderation and other hogwash. Besides, he knew secrets the gods did not want men to know.”

  “Like how to get reincarnated without losing one’s memories?” I asked.

  “Yes, like that.” She gave me a s
ly, calculating look, and her hair began to rise up like a cat’s.

  Mab quickly changed the subject. “These Post-It notes everywhere, what are they for?”

  “To remind the master of things he may have forgotten.” Agave turned back to her cooking, her hair flattening.

  “A bit of overkill, don’t you think? He’s goofy, I grant you, but his memory problems seem a bit exaggerated. Everyone talks about it, but I’ve seldom seen him actually forget something.”

  “That’s because Miranda is here.”

  “Huh?” Mab peered at me suspiciously. “How so?”

  “Just seeing members of his family reminds our master of all sorts of things. He’s much worse when they’re not around, especially when he gets into one of his morose moods. Sometimes, he can’t remember a thing for days. Not even his name.” Under her breath, she murmured, “He could use a bit of Orpheus’s wisdom, if you asked me. One too many sips out of the Lethe.”

  “What was that?” Mab snapped.

  “Nothing.” She tossed the vegetables again.

  Mab frowned thoughtfully but did not pursue the topic.

  The mermaid tilted her head and sighed. “Phisty. He’s so dreamy! I’m so glad he’s home and has his staff back! I missed him!”

  “Couldn’t he just have come back to this house and visited you?” Mab asked.

  Morveren shook her head. “We don’t live here year round. We all have our own homes and haunts. We’re only here now because the master called us all together for a big party—to celebrate finding us again!” She sighed again. “I’m so envious of Chimie for saving him and helping him get back the staff. I wish I could have saved the master!”

  “Tush, tush,” commented Queen Agave, as she slid chopped leeks from her cutting board into the stew. “We all have our purposes. No reason to covet someone else’s role.”