“God!” Adam exclaimed. “Are you that stupid? Think about it for a minute. Think about where we are.”
I did. I still didn’t get it. Then: “Wait a minute. You sold your soul for a vacation? Like, to the devil?”
Adam glared at me. “There’s no devil mentioned in the contract. It talks about ‘powers who sustain the Underworld and rule the dead.’ Which you’d know if you had read yours before signing it.”
“Yeah,” I retorted, “well at least if I had read mine I wouldn’t have signed it.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” David pointed out, his voice mild.
But I wasn’t finished. “Who sells their eternal soul for a vacation?”
Adam swore at me. “You have no idea. You think that Club Med crap is all they offer? You can have anything you want. Anything. There’s stuff going on that makes Asian sex tourism look like Disneyworld.”
David must have seen that I was still having trouble believing anyone would sell their soul for a vacation, no matter how much kinky sex was involved. “Remember,” he said. “People have tried to sell their souls on online auction sites.”
“People who don’t believe they have souls,” I said.
“Or who don’t believe they can be transferred to someone else’s possession. Imagine you’ve been everywhere, seen everything. You’ve climbed Everest, you’ve taken a cruise to Antarctica, you’ve trekked to the source of the Amazon.” I nodded slowly. The six people who’d disappeared had all been very well-travelled. “So one day, you find out that there’s a way to cross over into another world. Maybe it’s a parallel universe. Maybe it’s even the Land of the Dead. It’s so exclusive, only a handful of living people have ever been there. What’s more, if you want to join that elite club, it won’t even cost you anything. All you have to do is sign over your non- existent soul.”
“Okay,” I said, “but if the place does exist, and it isn’t some huge scam to harvest your kidneys, doesn’t that suggest that maybe your soul is real too? And that the cost is too high?”
“Twenty-five percent of the people who try to reach the summit of Mt. Everest die,” David said.
Adam spoke up. “The contract says that you get two months’ vacation here, starting from the day you first eat Underworld food. It doesn’t say how they intend to get their hands on your soul, after. I figured that you got to return to your regular life after the two months, and they took your soul years later when you died. Not that they shoved you onto a barge and sent you across the River Styx.”
“But you’ve already been here four months,” I said.
“Yeah, well, once I got here and saw what this place was really all about, I told them no deal. I pointed to the clause that says guests are free to leave at any time. They said I was free to go, but that they were under no obligation to show me the way out, and if I wanted to leave I had to find it on my own.” He shrugged. “I told them they’d better give me food from Upstairs while I was looking, and when they said no, I said fine, I guess I’ll starve to death.”
“The contract allows that dying before tasting the food of the Underworld voids the agreement,” David said.
“Right,” Adam said. “Then David shows up a couple days later, and he’s not even here of his own free will, and tells me about a lot of other shady stuff Hammond’s involved in.” He shrugged again. “It’s not clear to me that they would hold him to the contract if he ate, because he never signed anything. But we figured he’d better not take the risk. They backed down after a few days and brought us food we could trust.”
“How do you know the food is safe?” I asked.
“They told us it was safe,” David said. “And we’re still here, four months later.” He tilted his head to the side, considering. “It was a gamble. But the specificity of the contract’s wording suggested that the magic involved in maintaining this place has to follow rules. There might be loopholes, and they might be able to trick someone into a bargain he didn’t realize he was making. But I don’t think the contract could apply if they cheated outright.”
I shook my head. “So all those people who disappeared came here on purpose. They’re all guests at the resort.”
“Or else they used to be guests at the resort,” Adam said, ominously.
I wondered about my vanished colleague from The Times, Tina McCarthy. Was she here, biding her time until they sent her across the river?
“What does James Hammond get out of this?” I asked David. “One of the wealthiest men in the United States is acting as a travel agent for the Underworld? Why?”
Neither one had any idea.
They had tried to escape. Of course, they had tried all the obvious ideas I came up with. Asking a guide to take them to the exit, or Upstairs, or the path that led Upstairs, plus as many variations as they could think of. Trying to find the disappearing door David and I had entered through. Adam had knocked a hole in the wall, but outside was only the same bleak countryside you found when you walked out the front door. The wall had regenerated itself just like the food in the picnic basket, and you could no longer tell where the hole had been. They had tried walking along the road outside, in either direction. It seemed to be circular, and returned to the same place after a mile or two. The forest was no better; even with a homemade compass Adam had rigged, they ended up walking in circles until back where they had started.
It had been a month since they had tried anything at all.
I didn’t want to keep staying at the hotel, so David and Adam invited me to move in with them. Adam had been too “creeped out” to stay at the hotel more than one night, so he had wandered off by himself with a few blankets on day two, curled up near the edge of the road to sleep, and woken up on the floor of this small cottage. It had a bathroom with a toilet and sink, but no shower.
They didn’t know why the house was so shabby, compared to the rest of the resort. Adam thought it was to try and convince them to spend more time at the main complex with the other guests, in hopes that it would weaken their resolve. David’s theory was that the whole resort was really just as bad, but that a spell had been cast to make people think they were someplace nice, and that the effects were not as strong farther from the centre.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to look for a guide every time I went outside and then wanted to come back. The house still disappeared once you stepped out the front door, but a footpath down the road led to the resort, and once you were on that path you could turn around at any time—no matter which direction you had been walking—and find the cottage waiting for you around the next corner.
Food appeared each morning in the cabinet, in a dozen of the identical wicker picnic baskets. Meals were usually vegetarian, but both David and Adam shared fond reminiscences of the fortnight of smoked fish.
David went out the next morning. When he returned, he seemed pleased. “Good news. They’re giving Alison a chance to escape.”
A flame of hope flared up in my heavy heart. “That’s great!”
Adam was more cynical. “What sort of chance?”
“The same one we have, only with a time limit.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Adam demanded.
David addressed his answer to me. “I’ve been told that if you can find the way out, you’ll be allowed to leave.”
Adam slammed down the notebook he had been scribbling in, and cursed.
David continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “The same allowance will be made if Adam or I discover the exit and share that knowledge with you.”
“That’s no bargain,” Adam insisted. “They’re just telling you what we already know. She can leave if she finds the way out. If she doesn’t, she can’t. Same as us.”
“Originally they told me she couldn’t leave at all, regardless. Because of the pomegranate.”
“Crap!” Adam snapped. “She hadn’t read the contract. They can’t hold her to a contract she never read.”
“They intend to. If she doesn’t f
ind the exit before two months from yesterday.” “They can’t do that.”
David regarded him calmly. I wondered if David ever lost his temper. Finally, he said, “Perhaps you would like to argue with them?”
Adam muttered something rude under his breath, and looked away.
Adam left after lunch. When I asked David where he had gone, he sighed, and said, “Swimming, I expect.”
He told me why Adam had come. Two years ago, his wife had died in a plane crash. “This was supposed to be the Land of the Dead. He thought he might find her here.”
“But he didn’t.”
David shook his head. “The true Land of the Dead is across the river. The barge is the only way to get there.”
Adam returned close to evening and collapsed into a chair. His clothing and hair were damp, his face sickly.
“How was it?” David asked. I heard a surprising gentleness in his voice. Adam drew one hand over his eyes as if trying to clear them.
“I was so close this time. Twenty or thirty feet, no more. I could see the faces on the other shore, and when I looked back over my shoulder this side was so far away that I couldn’t imagine how I had crossed all that water. But I was so tired. I kept sucking down water instead of air. . . .” Silence, then: “I remember going under; next thing I knew I was back on this side, face-down in the sand.”
“Did you see her?” David asked. “On the other side?”
Adam screwed his eyes shut. “Not this time. But . . . I keep forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much.”
“You’ll recognize her,” David said.
Adam didn’t answer immediately. At last, he said, “I know we went to Belize for our honeymoon, but I don’t remember any of it. The way the sea smelled, the taste of the coffee we drank, the way she would have smiled at me, the feel of her hand on mine . . . it’s all gone. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back.”
“Maybe when we find the way Upstairs,” David offered.
Adam was silent. Before much longer, he had fallen asleep in the chair, his mouth open. It made him look younger than he was, and vulnerable.
Later, David told me that, although it did not seem to condemn you to the terms of the contract, drinking of the river brought forgetfulness.
For the first two weeks, I returned to the resort complex each day to shower. But I started feeling more and more uncomfortable. The initial obsequiousness of the staff had been supplanted by open contempt. They still gave me all the soap and clean towels I asked for, but with mocking grins and long delays.
One day I caught a glimpse of my colleague from The Times, Tina McCarthy. She was sitting at a table in an open-air bistro with a man I didn’t recognize. When she saw me watching her from across the plaza, she ducked her head to avoid eye contact, then got up in a hurry and disappeared around the corner of the nearest building. By the time I got there, she was gone.
I stopped going back to the resort after that. I didn’t need to shower that badly.
“If crossing the river takes you to the true Land of the Dead, what about going all the way upstream or downstream?”
David looked up from scrubbing his shirt in the bathroom sink. I had been with them over a month, and was starting to get desperate. “Maybe. We’ve never tried that.”
“It won’t work,” Adam predicted. “It will be like the road. We’ll end up going around in circles.”
“Not necessarily,” I argued. “We know there’s something different about the river.”
“What do you suggest?” Adam demanded. “We all hop in and start swimming downstream? Or upstream? It’s probably farther to get anywhere along the length of the river than it is to cross. We won’t last that long.”
I smiled. “Who said anything about swimming?”
None of us had ever made a raft. We had, however, all seen movies in which rafts were constructed. Of course, we had all seen different movies, featuring incompatible raft-making techniques.
“We need to take all the leaves and small branches off,” Adam insisted, as we ripped larger branches off the trees. “Extra weight.”
“No,” I argued, “the leaves add buoyancy. If we strip them off, the raft won’t float.”
We disagreed on the relative merits of branches all pointing in the same direction versus branches woven in a criss-cross pattern. Also, should we try to make a rudder, or would long poles suffice? David said we were wasting our time with branches and saplings small enough to wrench out of the ground, and needed full-sized logs. A little difficult, considering that we didn’t have an axe.
It was getting dark by the time we finished. Our raft was about ten feet by ten feet, and we had compromised by stripping off all the leaves and branches but weaving some thinner saplings through the warp of the thicker. We opted for the pole steering method, after fidgeting through an hour of watching David try to carve a rudder with a chef’s knife I’d stolen from one of the hotel kitchens.
A grey fog rolled over the surface of the river. It began to rain. I wondered if the weather was an attempt to dishearten us.
David dragged the raft into the river. “It’s listing to the right,” I pointed out.
“Starboard,” Adam corrected. “And only because David’s holding it up.”
“It’s actually listing to port, or left,” David pointed out. “The directionality depends on the direction the boat is facing.”
“That’s not a boat,” I said. “And it’s half-submerged even without any weight.” “Yes,” David agreed. “I believe we discussed something earlier, about the need for bigger logs?”
Adam muttered something about consigning David to some realm on the other side of the river, and sloshed into the water. The raft tilted precariously under his weight, until David stabilized it.
“Now it’s listing even more to port,” I said.
“Then you had better get on the starboard side, hadn’t you?” Adam retorted.
I hiked my skirt up and splashed in. I almost fell as I rounded the corner of the raft, but Adam caught my arm.
I sat down. The raft sank even farther. “I don’t know about this,” I said.
“Shut up and grab a pole.” Adam took one, and pushed himself to his feet.
“I would recommend that you both remain in a seated position,” David cautioned, sitting on the edge nearest him.
“We can’t steer sitting down,” Adam said. He stuck the pole into the riverbed, on the side of the raft nearest the river’s edge (the port side), and pushed. Our craft lurched forward. Adam lurched in the opposite direction and almost fell. His corner tilted dangerously into the water as he struggled to free his pole.
I decided that the best thing I could do was sit very, very still on my section of raft. To stabilize it. David shook his head.
Adam’s second foray with the pole went a little better. Then a current caught us, and we sped forward.
Adam dropped to his knees. He held his pole in a ready position, but we seemed to be an appropriate distance from the riverbank, and we certainly didn’t need additional speed.
We rolled along, drifting toward the centre of the river. I ground my teeth together and wedged my fingers into the gaps between branches. We were still experiencing a pronounced list to the rearward port corner of our craft, which was entirely underwater. David had the driest seat, and I considered invoking chivalry, but reconsidered when I recalled that he outweighed either of us, and was probably stabilizing the raft by sitting where he was.
I glanced over my shoulder at Adam. He grinned, and turned with me to look at the stretch of riverbank we had passed. “We’re definitely moving. Look.”
The forest had dropped away, and we were passing a wide stretch of white sand. The hotel rose up behind the beach, its lights casting a baleful image onto the water next to us.
“Was that lightning?” Adam asked.
“Lightning?!” I looked around wildly. I hadn’t seen any, but a moment later a low rumble echoed its way to us from downstream.
/> “Right where we’re headed,” David pointed out unnecessarily.
What are we going to do?” I demanded.
David shrugged. “They’re trying to frighten us back to shore.”
A second flash illuminated the river ahead. That one I did see. I thought the crack of thunder followed more quickly that time.
“Isn’t water an excellent conductor of electricity?” I wondered.
“Normally,” David agreed.
“But we all know that the river is different,” Adam quipped.
The gesture I wanted to make would have required loosening my death grip on the raft, so I made an unpleasant face at him and turned away. The second half of his snicker was drowned by a third thunderclap.
“Hold tight,” David warned, glancing over his shoulder.
We were passing the jungle now, on our left. I could see the tops of the palm trees in black silhouette against the greyish gloom of the sky. Then we were speeding past low rolling hills crowned with olive trees. I think the English country garden came next, but it was difficult to tell, because as we were passing the Mediterranean zone the light misting rain suddenly started falling in sheets, curtains of icy, dagger-like water stabbing at our heads, faces and hands. I gasped. I could see nothing now beyond the edges of our raft.
The next lightning bolt knifed down so close to our raft that I felt a sudden, searing heat as it hit the water. Geysers of steam shot up. It was so loud that I screamed and couldn’t hear myself.
But we were untouched, except for ringing ears; a second or two later we were rolling through the cloud of steam, and then we were past.
“I told you it’s not like other rivers,” Adam said.
“Shut up,” I retorted. “That’s my line.”
He laughed, not a snicker this time, but a real, honest-to-goodness laugh, the kind that you share with old friends when you’ve been up too late drinking and all the masks have come off.
David glanced back at us with an indulgent smile. Then his eyes opened wide.
I was turning my head to look when the swell of water bearing down from behind lifted us up about ten feet. Adam started swearing. “Hold on!” he shouted as we rushed forward.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 37