Prospero in Hell

by L. Jagi Lamplighter

  “No,” I admitted, “not even for an instant.”

  “We are not so different, you and I. We just serve different powers. My God, however, never abandons those who serve Him.”

  I pulled away, ashamed. Reaching forward, he took my hands again and squeezed them. “He is a generous God, Miranda. He turns no one away, not even those who previously defied him. Turn to Him now, and He will comfort you. You think your present sorrow is solid, like a sphere of diamond encasing your soul. But, the nature of sorrow is closer to that of ice. Ice melts when warmth is applied. Seek Him, and He will lift your sorrow, freeing you as the spring sun frees the land from winter’s ice.”

  I had never thought of myself as “defying the Christian god.” In fact, I considered myself a good Protestant; however, Gregor, the ex-pope, did not see things as I did.

  I murmured, “I met another Handmaiden once who told me Eurynome was a Holy Spirit that God had granted to some race of creatures from an earlier cycle of creation, a race that has since been entirely saved. She said Eurynome had been offered a place in Heaven, but had chosen to remain behind, helping others.”

  “Pagans often make up stories in an attempt to lend the majesty of our God to their deities,” Gregor replied, nodding. “It shows how much they wish to be objects of His regard.”

  I was too heart-sore to argue theology. “You must be very angry with Ulysses. Can God free you from that, too?”

  “He already has. I was tremendously angry with Ulysses for, oh, the first decade or so. But then I began listening to God. He told me I had better things to do. For myself, I have forgiven Ulysses. I leave the matter of his punishment to the rest of you.”

  “You are a better man than I.” I shook my head and smiled wanly. “I could never do that.”

  “Is that so? Caliban tells it otherwise,” Gregor replied gruffly, a faint twinkle in his eye.

  He had me there. A feather’s breath of warmth brushed against my soul, like a single green sprout peeking up amidst a field of snow.

  Then, I remembered our current plight and my weariness returned. “You didn’t seem surprised by my news—that we were mortal again.”

  “It’s all the others have talked about since your attack,” Gregor snorted in disgust, looking more like his old more volatile self.

  “All? What about rescuing Father? We only have a little over four days left. Haven’t they been putting together a plan?”

  “Four days until what?” asked Gregor, frowning. “Erasmus explained Father is a prisoner in Hell, but no one mentioned a rescue attempt.”

  “But the Angel of the Bottomless Pit said they were going to kill him on Twelfth Night! And today is January Second; that gives us just under five days!”

  Gregor’s frown darkened. “No one spoke a word of this. Apparently, concern for their own eventual demise has erased all more immediate concerns from their minds.”

  “I thought they would be planning an excursion to Father’s mansion in Oregon—so we could use the dogwood in the Wintergarden to summon Father’s staff, the same way we used the mahogany to summon Ulysses . . .”

  Only as the words left my mouth did I realize that I had not had a chance to tell anyone my idea before I met Osae. No one else even knew about the dogwood.

  I picked up my enchanted tea gown. “I had better come out. Just give me a minute to get dressed.”

  When I finally emerged from my room, Mab was standing guard beside my door. I balked, suddenly awkward and uncomfortable, fearing he would say: “I told you so.”

  “Ma’am?” Mab stood against the wall, his hands stuck in the pockets of his trench coat. “I’m . . . It sucks, Ma’am. Should never have happened.”

  I tried to maintain my composure but failed. Tears spilled down my cheeks. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, Mab patted it against my face with uncharacteristic tenderness.

  “Don’t cry, Ma’am. Breaks my heart.”

  Smiling through my tears, my voice faint and breaking, I echoed the words he had spoken to me way back in Chicago. “Didn’t know you had one.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Our Darkest Hour

  My family had gathered in the music room again. The roar of the waterfall was still muted, but the flues in the wall were open, and a lilting windy symphony filled the chamber. Cornelius sat in the corner near the lever, his head cocked as he listened to the music of wind and stone. Near him, Ulysses and Logistilla sat at a small table playing cards with a set of antique tarocco trumps from Father’s library. A length of chain had been passed through one of the fluting holes in the stone wall. One side of it led to a metal ring clamped about Ulysses’s ankle. The other side led to a ring on Logistilla’s leg. Neither of their staffs was in evidence.

  Erasmus lay stretched out on the divan, his hands crossed behind his head, a half-empty bottle of wine beside him, and two more empty bottles on the floor. Theo was sitting in one of the plush green armchairs, sipping from a long-stemmed glass and frowning. Gregor had joined them in the second armchair. He appeared to be drinking coffee.

  In the opposite corner from Cornelius, Titus smiled with paternal pride at two boys, the same two that Father Christmas’s scrying pool had shown in the library that held the dollhouse version of Prospero’s Mansion—apparently someone had used Ulysses’s staff to fetch them from Georgia. The elder, a slender nervous boy, wore glasses. He sat upon a stool reading a book. The younger, who was rounder of face and more athletic build, had taken one of the antique mandolins off the wall and was running in circles making a zoom-zoom noise, pretending it was an airplane.

  Caliban sat near the fireplace, just beside the grand piano. He had taken apart one of the trombones and was tapping out a dent in the brass with tools from Father’s workroom. Mephisto sat near him on the piano bench, singing softly and accompanying himself on one of Father’s lutes.

  As I approached, Mephisto was still singing his rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

  Like a mighty army

  Moves the Church of God

  Brothers we are treading

  On some gooey sod.

  “Please, Mephisto,” Cornelius called from where he sat trying to hear the fluting of the winds. “I beg of you! Can’t you play somewhere else?”

  “Miranda!” said Theo, coming to his feet. He looked both frightened and relieved to see me.

  Everybody else looked up and stared.

  They gawked at me. My brothers and sister stared as if my shame were visible to the eye. I would have been too ashamed to move, or even breathe, but was rescued by my mounting indignation. How dare they! They did not deserve the effort I had gone to upon their behalf! Oh, if only I had listened to Mab and stayed home.

  Glancing across the room, I noticed that Erasmus looked faintly amused, as if he had expected this.

  Oh. Of course, it was not the loss of my virtue that caused this unexpected scrutiny, but the return of my jet black locks.

  Mumbling something about Erasmus, I collected the scraps of my dignity and greeted Titus’s sons, whom he immediately brought over to meet me. The elder one, the bookworm with the glasses, was Teleron. The younger one, the nine-year-old, was Typhon. As they returned to their corner, it struck me that I would always be just another brunette aunt to these nephews. They would never know the calm, level-headed woman with silvery hair whom I saw in my mind’s eye. Nor could I ask Erasmus to put it back. Erasmus’s staff could only age my hair, making it colorless and fragile. In order to achieve my former lustrous silver-white color, I would have to bathe that aged hair in Water of Life—a luxury I would never again be able to afford.

  Only then did I realize: We were all together! All of us, except for Father, were in one room. It had been nearly a century since that happened and that had not included Typhon and Teleron, of course. I wondered if it would ever happen again.

  “So, you’ve come to join us in our misery,” mocked Erasmus, without getting up. I heard the slur of his words, but still my m
ind balked, hesitating to come to the conclusion that he might be drunk. I could not recall the last time I had seen Erasmus drunk. Mephisto? Yes. Ulysses and Titus? Certainly. Even Theo. But, Erasmus? He had been drunk as often as I, which was to say, hardly ever. Usually, he preferred keeping his wits about him.

  No wonder no one was organizing a rescue for Father. When I had thought “someone would be doing something,” I now realized that what I had really meant was I thought Erasmus would be doing something. Much as I hated him, I had to admit, he was by far the most organized and self-motivated of my siblings.

  “What are you doing?” I cried, perhaps more stridently than was necessary.

  “Awaiting the bitter end.” Erasmus waved a hand at the bottle. “Care to join us? I would get you a glass, but you know where they are, and I don’t. Come, Sister, drink and be merry, for on the morrow, we all shall be dead.

  “Well, maybe not on the morrow,” he continued. “But, soon enough. Ironic paradox we’re in. If we conserve Water and take it less often, we grow weaker and slower. On the other hand, if we don’t conserve it, it will soon be gone. Then we follow in the footsteps of good Theo, here, becoming prey to no end of maladies. Either way, we’re screwed.”

  Raising his glass, he recited:

  I that in health was and gladness

  Am troublit now with great sickness

  And feblit with informity:

  Timor mortis conturbat me

  Our pleasance here is all vainglory,

  This false world is but transitory,

  The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee:

  Timor mortis conturbat me

  The state of man does change and vary,

  Now sound, now sick, now blithe, now sary,

  Now dans and merry, now like to die,

  Timor mortis conturbat me

  “Enough. We have years to discuss this matter,” I snapped. “We need to make plans to rescue Father.”

  Erasmus scowled, “What do you want us to do? Go spit upon the fires of Hell and hope our saliva puts out the flames? I suppose we could sit back and watch the hands of the clock move until the hour of his predicted death. We could use my antique grandfather clock. Oh, wait, no—destroyed by bears.”

  I crossed to the middle of the room, closer to Erasmus and Theo. “Father recently made himself a staff. It has a tree, just like the trees in the Grove of Books. Couldn’t we use that to summon him back, the way we summoned Ulysses?”

  “Ah, and the demons have conveniently left Father’s staff in his hands, just so we can use it to retrieve him. Good thinking, Miranda. That’s brilliant. Any other bright ideas? Perhaps, if we asked the demons nicely, they’d let us buy our father back. Maybe we could offer to install modern air-conditioning. I hear it’s hot down where they are.”

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on her,” Theo began sternly. Then his voice faltered, his face going red, as he was called upon to put into words exactly why Erasmus should go easy on me.

  Erasmus sneered and raised his glass, paraphrasing The Tempest. “O, for those idyllic days, Miranda, when “more to know did never meddle with thy thoughts.”

  From his seat by the piano, Caliban replied. “She came to learn that the magician Prospero was more than the master of a full poor cell and her no greater father.”

  “O bravo!” Logistilla threw Caliban a come-hither look. “He can even duel in Shakespeare!”

  Titus gave Caliban a long, dark look.

  I stood there at a loss, staring at my siblings. What had happened to the Family Prospero? Once, nothing had been able to withstand us. Now, we could not even organize the rescue of our own father.

  I had been so certain that, if we ever got back together, we would again be able to overcome any obstacle. Was it just Father who had held us together? Were we worthless without him, mere dogs without a master? Puppets with no string to guide them?

  Were we fated to fade away, as Abaddon had predicted?

  “Look, I admit it’s a long shot,” I said, “but what if Father does have his staff, and we don’t even try?”

  “No good,” called Mephisto, from where he sat near the hearth. “It’s the nature of the Staff of Transportation to travel. Most staffs would be much harder to summon. What’s Daddy’s staff do?”

  “It’s called the Staff of Eternity. He wanted to use it to resurrect—” I began.

  “ ’Nuff said,” interrupted Mephisto. “Let’s try it!”

  When everyone else just stared at him, Mephisto continued, “That’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it, get someone out of Hell? It resurrected that Eli Thompson guy. Why not Daddy?”

  “He’s not dead,” murmured Ulysses, discarding a card.

  “So? He’s in Hell, almost the same thing,” Mephisto responded. “Only, I better warn you. It’s going to take more than a wee drop of Water to convince Mr. Swift-Guy-Psychopomp to go to Hell and back. And there’ll be no chance of a two-for-one this time! You all ready to spend the wet?”

  “We have to spend it whether he finds Father or not, don’t we?” asked Erasmus. He sighed. “I don’t see we have a choice . . . unless someone is going to suggest we abandon Father in order to keep the Water to ourselves? Anyone? Do I see any hands for being the ingrate who suggests we abandon our Pater Familias?”

  The chamber was silent except for the fluting of the wind and the whirrr noise of Titus’s son, the human airplane.

  “No? Good. “Then, we are all in.” Erasmus again raised his glass. “At least, we’ve established we are all overly dutiful children willing to die, and thus endanger all of mankind, rather than let our old Daddykins down. That out of the way, what do we need to do, Mephisto?”

  “Same as last time. Wait for dark. Do the spell. Where is this tree?” asked Mephisto.

  “In the Wintergarden,” I said.

  “You mean in the one at Daddy’s house? Right next to the Faery Glade? Ouch!” exclaimed Mephisto. Then, he shrugged cheerfully. “Could be worse. It could be outside the Wintergarden, in the Glade! Let’s gather our stuff, teleport there, and check it out.”

  “No need,” Mab came walking into the music room. He pulled a baggy containing sawdust and wood chips from one of the many pockets of his trench coat. “This is from the dogwood in the Wintergarden. Sent one of my men down there after you mentioned it, Ma’am. One of the perquisites of us spirit types, easier for us to move through that house than you humans. I think there’s enough here to cast the spell. What do you think, Mr. Theo?”

  Mab tossed the evidence bag to Theo, who hefted it on his palm and nodded.

  “This should do,” he said.

  “Then, it’s decided,” Mephisto declared cheerfully. “We do the spell here, tonight.”

  “Might as well linger at the scene of the crime, letting everyone know where we are,” muttered Erasmus. “Maybe demons can rape my other sister this time.”

  A silence followed, interrupted only by the rise and fall of a hundred windy flutes.

  “That was uncalled for,” Cornelius remonstrated gently. He turned to the rest of us. “Perhaps there is a seed of truth to the taunts of the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. If all the remaining Water of Life were given to one of us, that one could live another five hundred years. By then, Father’s work might be complete and might be able to continue without our guiding hand.”

  “Ah, but which one, Good Brother?” slurred Erasmus. “Which one? Funny isn’t it, Miranda? After your recent protestation about how it was Father who decided who lived and who died, the decision is now in your hands, after all. You have the Water, and if Father is gone, you will have to decide who gets it.”

  The irony of his comments only made the truth more painful. How could I make any decision now, with neither Father nor Eurynome to guide me?

  Theo spoke, his voice gruff and low. “I am willing to forgo my share. I have been expecting to die for some time now. And while I would embrace life again, if the situation warranted, I am ready to let it go, if that
is the more noble course.”

  “Theo!” I whispered. “No!”

  Cornelius spoke softly, his face turned half away from us. “I as well. Over the years, I have grown accustomed to the darkness, and perhaps, fear its coming less than the rest of you. I will not run from its cold embrace.”

  His sentiments shocked me. I had expected him to fight greedily for his share to the end. Apparently, they surprised Erasmus as well; when he spoke, he sounded as shaken as I had felt when Theo made his offer.

  “Cornelius! How extraordinarily noble of you,” Erasmus said. “I fear I lack your aplomb. I want to live!”

  “It’s in God’s hands now,” Gregor said quietly. “Let us leave it there. If He wants us here, we shall remain. Otherwise, we shall depart.”

  Ulysses looked up, a brace of diamonds in his hand. “Say, here, I have an idea. The Elven Royal Court occasionally offers Water of Life as a reward for daring quests.”

  “Use our staves to try to beat the Elven knights errant to their quarry?” said Theo speculatively. “Interesting idea. We may be able to accomplish feats elves could not normally perform.”

  “Perhaps,” Ulysses shrugged, “but, why go to the flowers when you can go to the bees, I always say? Let’s steal the Water directly from the Royal Court. They must have buckets of the stuff, or they couldn’t offer it to their knights.”

  “Don’t mess with elves!” Mephisto warned. “They’re bad juju.”

  “Isn’t that the kind of thinking that got you into this mess?” asked Logistilla, without looking up from her cards.

  “Not at all,” replied Ulysses blithely. “Curiosity is what did me in. I asked my staff to take me to the first place it had ever been, and I found myself in Hell.”