The Wildcard

by Fallacious Rose

  "And with all this, you decide to dose yourself with poison, in search of more than you already have. You were designed thus - but I do not understand it."

  Ruby looked from one to the other. Orpheus was at death’s door - and they were discussing the dangers of illicit drugs?

  "Maybe we want to be more like you," she said, stroking Orpheus’ damp, greasy hair. "You can understand that, can’t you?" She remembered the feeling, last time she’d got high on marijuana. It was as if she was seeing the world for the first time, clearly. But that was just dope - she’d rarely tried anything stronger. A couple of ecstasy pills, speed once or twice. Then she saw the sores on the junkies' arms, and gave up.

  "I understand," said Ishtar sympathetically, laying a soft hand on her shoulder. "But those who try to approach the gods get burned. Orpheus is not dying - he is in the underworld with our sister Ereshkigal - and he is being taught a lesson."

  "What kind of lesson?" Ruby looked back at Orpheus' pale face. If they didn’t do something soon...

  "A hard lesson. If he learns it well, he will be sent back. If not - then we will have to find another mouthpiece to lead the masses." Isis opened the curtains. "The air is stale in here. How do you bear it?"

  Ruby stood up, shaking.

  "You don’t give a fuck, do you? Orpheus was right. If he dies, you’ll just find another guy with a nice voice and turn him into your perverted tool - and if he lives, you’ll just keep on using him, until you use him right up."

  "So?" Isis Athena stared at her impassively. "Heroes come and heroes go. Have you ever known this not to be so? How is this different?"

  Ruby’s fists clenched

  "Believe me, it’s different. Orpheus is different."

  Isis looked down at her, unconcerned. "I can see that you think so. You love him, don’t you?"

  "She loves him," Ishtar confirmed. "I know love when I see it."

  "You can save him, if you choose."

  "Save him from what? How?"

  "True love will go to the very gates of hell. How much do you really love Orpheus, my dear?"

  Chapter 32

  This place could sure do with some landscaping, thought Ruby.

  Just because you were dead didn’t mean you had to live in a slum. If the gods designed this place, why didn’t they design it like a nice waiting room? Like the way dentists put televisions in their waiting rooms, and magazines, and flowers - the expensive ones did, anyway. This was - such a cliche! It was like all the things everyone had ever imagined about the place where dead people go - except, so far - to her relief - no pits of flame. She could do without that.

  She looked around. So now she was here. Where was the bastard?

  She began to walk, aimlessly. There was no point in aiming for anywhere - because everywhere she looked was the same. Mudflats, stretching out cracked and featureless for as many miles as she could see, like a gigantic abandoned building site. Then where was the river, and the ferryman? There’d better not be a ferryman - if there was, she had nothing to pay him with. But then, she was alive. The only thing down here that was. She shivered.

  The place reminded her of a vast, featureless desert, somewhere far beneath the earth. She could almost feel the rock and dirt pressing down on her. Not so much a cave as a huge grave. With plenty of room to walk around, but no room to escape.

  Escape. They hadn’t said anything about how to get back. Find him, they said, and bring him back to your own dimension - as if there were lots of dimensions, like rooms in a house, that she could choose from. As if she could just take Orpheus by the hand and walk him out the gate, like a mother picking up a kid from a childcare centre after work. As if she wanted to.

  "But we just had a fight," she’d explained. "I told him he was a piece of shit and I never wanted to see him again. He’ll probably tell me to fuck off."

  But the tall, ugly one had just sneered at her, as if to say ‘coward’ - and the tall red haired woman had said,

  "I thought you loved him. Is this all your love is worth, then?"

  So of course, she’d agreed. And she’d been curious. Who wouldn’t have been - to go where dead people go, and not be dead. She bet she was the only person she knew who’d ever done that, and returned. That is, if she returned.

  But now, she was stuck under the earth, dumped willy nilly in this eerie space between earth and more earth, this soundless, lightless place - and she had no idea where to find Orpheus, or what to do when she did.

  Ruby decided to scream. Not a scared scream, like the one you’d give if you saw a spider on your dashboard, but a loud, long, high scream - the kind you let off when you’re in a train tunnel, or at a rock concert, or somewhere else where you can’t be heard but you kind of want to let off steam. She screamed as hard as she could, then stopped. Her throat hurt. Nothing moved, nothing even squeaked in reply. She watched her feet moving, one in front of the other. Then she saw a faint glow, like a marsh light, a presence coalescing out of the dead air.

  "Welcome. I was expecting you."

  Ruby eyed the skeletal woman floating in front of her, stilettoed feet floating several centimetres off the concrete plain.

  "I’m Ruby...and you must be Ereshkigal. I’m here for Orpheus. I’ve come to take him home," she said, with as much confidence as she could pretend. Sometimes, looking like you expected to get what you asked for meant you did, actually, get what you asked for. Sometimes not. The goddesses hadn’t told her much - they’d just wished her luck and shoved her in. She wished she’d got a better briefing. About this white-faced, creepy lady, for a start.

  She played it cool, hands in pockets, relaxed stance. Hell, she’d collected Orpheus from enough jail cells to know all about the routine. And this woman, she didn’t look so bad. She could have been a full-on skeleton with burning eyes and flesh hanging off and -

  "Oh my god! Oh, that’s horrible!"

  Ereshkigal coiled herself through the air, her eyes decaying pits of horror.

  "You like this?"

  "No! Don’t! Turn it off!" Ruby shut her eyes. But then, she found it was worse with them shut than open, because she imagined Ereshkigal turning into all kinds of things when she wasn’t looking. Her skin crept, covered with goose bumps, and her eyelids popped open of their own accord. The things she did for love. But now the woman who stood there was rounded and voluptuous, a beauty with blonde curls and spring-green eyes and a daisy chain around her slim waist. Ruby blinked.

  "So I used to be," Ereshkigal remarked bitterly, "before I came to the underworld. I was pretty, once."

  "You were gorgeous. You are gorgeous, I mean. So I take it..." Ruby searched for the right words. "you’re not living here by choice, then?"

  She didn’t blame her. It was the worst place she’d ever been - worse than the badlands of LA. Not a green grass stalk in sight.

  "I hate it," Ereshkigal confessed, glancing about with loathing. "But now, at least, I have something to amuse me for a while. And you - you have come to take it away from me. Haven’t you."

  It was a rhetorical question. Ruby felt the hate burning into her chest.

  "Um, not exactly." Ruby dug her hands further into her pocket. This was going to be much harder than they said. They could have warned her! "I mean, only if he wants to go. And he’s going to die eventually - I mean, soon, probably - so he’ll be right back with you? It’d only be temporary. I’d just be borrowing him from you for a while, really."

  Ereshkigal regarded her through pale, narrowed eyes, her skin stretched in a humourless smile.

  "When he comes back to me, he will be old, wrinkled and bloodless as a dried prune," she said sourly. "I want him as he is now. Young. Juicy."

  At least he was definitely here, thought Ruby, and alive. And, as usual, pursued by groupies - at least, one, very powerful, groupie. She tried to organise her thoughts. She hadn’t thought she’d have to diplomatise her way out of here.

  "And willing. You want him willing, I guess."

 
; Ereshkigal grimaced. "Not necessarily. I like pain, you see. It arouses me that he is unwilling. I, too, was unwilling, at first, when they thrust me down here."

  "You didn’t like it," said Ruby eagerly, seizing on this sliver. "So if you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t want anyone else to go through that, right? Anyway, you did promise - they said. They said you agreed to just teach him a lesson, and then let him go."

  There was a grim pause. Ereshkigal licked her lips, goth-black.

  "You know what they say - if you love someone, let him go, and if he was meant to be yours, he’ll come back," Ruby added winningly.

  "A puerile human saying," sniffed Ereshkigal, her narrow nostrils contracting. "All of you are mine, and meant to be so. But come, I will show you where he is kept, and he can decide."

  She trudged after Ereshkigal, who had discarded the daisy chain in disgust, over the endless dreary expanse, until finally the concrete ended. At last the city of glass reared above them, like nothing so much as a block of Communist-era apartments or slum ‘projects’, and yet somehow insubstantial.

  Ruby peered into the first building she came to, making out the writhing shadows, a huge struggling tank of pale bait worms. This must be the entire human population of the earth, since - ever! Incredible! This would have been fantastic - if it wasn’t that somewhere, Orpheus was being held as a sex slave by a sado-masochistic hell bitch. If this woman’s vibe was anything to go by, he was probably stretched out on some kind of rack, with his nuts in a vice.

  It was like looking into a gigantic abandoned aquarium, where the fish have developed into strange and unnatural monstrosities, and the water into grey soup. Dimly, she made out sperm-like shapes swimming in circles, tadpoles in the murk. Only, unlike tadpoles, they had faces - rudimentary faces, but she had the feeling that if she’d known the person, she might have recognised them. The expressions on the trapped faces registered crude emotions - bitter, angry, bored, crazy. None of the souls looked happy - and neither would she, if she was stuck in an enormous fishbowl for eternity.

  "Don’t touch!"

  Ruby jumped, as Ereshkigal laid a skeletal hand on the back of her neck. She brushed the hand away, shuddering. It felt like a frozen fish finger.

  "Don’t touch - and I won’t touch you," Ereshkigal said dryly, crossing her arms. "The dead are not some kind of sideshow."

  Ruby looked back at the shapes, then at Ereshkigal.

  "So these are all the dead people that have ever been alive - ever?"

  Ereshkigal inclined her head.

  "These - and those, and those..." She waved her hand towards the other buildings. Now Ruby understood why they were all so big. She frowned.

  "So why people? Where are all the animals? And insects? And, you know, fish and stuff. And why does everyone look like a tadpole."

  Ereshkigal smiled. She obviously looked after her teeth - but maybe she should cool it with the whitener.

  "Animals die. We have no interest in them. They remember little from one day to the next, not enough to be tokens in the Great Game, certainly."

  "What about elephants? Elephants remember things for ages." Ruby said rebelliously. It seemed unfair. Although she was glad there weren’t pets locked up in those glass towers. Humans kind of deserved it. But not cats, and dogs, and guinea pigs...and elephants.

  "I do not collect elephants. I collect human souls, reduced to their essential components, for storage purposes. I classify them, I weigh them - and then I keep them until..."

  "Until what?"

  "Until the day of Judgement," Ereshkigal said indifferently. "Then they will all be discarded, as refuse."

  "There’s a Day of Judgement?" Ruby said doubtfully. "You mean, when all our sins will be judged, and some of us will go to heaven, and some of us will go to hell, and..."

  "Your sins mean nothing to us. I refer to the day when the god - or goddess - who has won the most souls is judged as the winner of the Game."

  "Oh. And then?" Ruby envisioned medals, maybe a heavenly ticker tape parade.

  "And then it begins again." Ereshkigal shrugged. "I take no interest. I am not allowed to play the Game, only to keep score - down here, in this foul place. But I am becoming bored - I am not here to provide tourist information. You wanted your lover, and here he is."

  Ruby gasped. She’d almost forgotten Orpheus in the novelty of this place and of being the first - live - person ever to set foot in hell and actually talk - talk! to its ruler. And then she ran forward, her arms open.

  Orpheus was not chained to a rack. He looked just as he’d always looked - dreamy, messy, and devastatingly sexy in a filthy-cute, badass kind of way. He stood behind Ereshkigal, his blue eyes dazed, naked to the waist, one hand casually looped into the left hand pocket of his jeans. He didn’t move when she threw herself on him, squeezing him in a great, relieved bear hug.

  When she’d finished hugging him, she stood back and looked into his face. He stared back, no trace of recognition in his eyes, the sensual lips frozen in a sullen pout.

  "What’s wrong with him? He doesn’t recognise me."

  Ereshkigal snaked her long white arm around his waist, possessively.

  "The dead cannot see the living."

  "But he’s not dead!" objected Ruby, exasperated. "He’s alive - isn’t he? You promised you’d keep him alive and return him!"

  "I promised I’d teach him a lesson and return him. I didn’t say I’d return him alive."

  Ruby gave her a long, furious stare.

  "You’d better return him alive, or..."

  "Or what? You have no power here - and none in your own world. Watch your tongue, young woman, or you’ll be swimming around in one of those fish tanks yourself shortly."

  Ruby breathed heavily. It was hard to breathe the air here - it seemed to weigh more than normal air. And taste worse.

  "You’re a bitter, twisted woman. Just because you’re stuck down here, you want everyone else to be stuck here too. Misery loves company, right?"

  Ereshkigal rose to her full height - a towering twenty feet or more. The white blizzard of her rage nearly knocked Ruby to the ground.

  "I am a goddess. You had better pay me the respect I am owed, girl - or I will keep you both here forever as my playthings. God knows I have little enough to do - and the two of you may amuse me more than just one."

  Ruby leaned into the wind, stubborn and angry.

  "Goddess my eye. You just live a long time, that’s all. You’re not the boss of me. I came for Orpheus and I’m going to get him. I may not be able to do anything but I bet your cousins up there will be pretty bloody annoyed if you keep us both here."

  Ereshkigal shrank to a less imposing eight feet, and shoved Orpheus towards her.

  "Take him then. I am tired of him anyway. Walk back the way you came, and I will see that the gate is set open for you. But look back - just once - and I swear that I will keep you here for good."

  Ruby grabbed Orpheus by the hand. There was no point in hanging around. She gave Ereshkigal one last blistering look, and pulled him behind her like a child. He came unresisting, but slowly, as if he’d forgotten how to walk.

  "Come on, you idiot," she said, and dragged him after her, one step at a time, out of the glass city and across the white concrete plain. She didn’t look back. There was no way she was staying in this godawful place. Each step was like walking in lead-lined shoes. She had a feeling Ereshkigal was making it as hard as she possibly could. She didn’t want Orpheus to escape. Ruby had seen the look in her eye - it was the same look all those bimbos got when they got Orpheus in their sights and started having fantasies about him and them, alone in a hotel room - or with twenty other groupies in a hotel room. Rock stars had that effect on women. Even goddesses, obviously. She pulled him doggedly along, an elderly dog being reluctantly led out for a walk.

  She could feel Ereshkigal’s cold gaze following her steps, even as the glass city sank into the plain. She felt an enormous urge to turn and look back, as i
f there was something she had to do - but she wasn’t stupid. There was no way she was looking back. She’d read the stories. How hard could it be - to make it out of hell without looking back.

  "You’ve forgotten something," came the cold, high voice.

  Ruby laughed.

  "Forget it. You told me not to look back, and I’m not looking back. Not even if I’ve left my phone - you can have it. It has games on it, by the way. Maybe that’ll amuse you so you don’t have to torture people."

  "You’ve forgotten that down here, promises are made to be broken."

  She wouldn’t turn. Nothing - not the screams of dead relatives, not a briefcase full of greenbacks, not her own mum yelling for help - would make her turn around. Ruby pushed on, shoving Orpheus ahead of her. A pair of ghostly gates opened ahead - like some star’s mansion in LA, seen in the early morning mists. Through the gates, Ruby could see the even glare of shopping mall fluorescents, and people’s shoes clicking, padding, sliding over a bland tiled floor. She could smell food - curry, spring rolls, the gluggy tang of mayonnaise-laden burgers. She was nearly there - close enough to wonder how the gates of hell managed to open on what looked like a big suburban mall.

  Orpheus picked up speed, his eyes clearing. Maybe the smell of burgers had woken him from his underworld trance - probably he hadn’t had anything to eat for weeks. He moved ahead of her, almost running towards the gates. Wait, she wanted to say - slow down and wait for me. But if she called out, he might turn around - and given the apparent rules about looking back in the underworld, she wouldn’t put it past Ereshkigal to keep him. She hurried after him - but each step seemed to take her further away from the gates, while Orpheus got nearer. It was like swimming against a rip - you swim and you swim, and then you look at the beach, and it’s further away than before you started, fading away despite all your desperate efforts.

  Orpheus reached the gates and passed through. With a supreme effort, Ruby rushed at the gap - only to find the way closed. There were no gates - only concrete, as far as the eye could see. The smells, the noise, the feet - they’d all disappeared.