by Eric Nylund
“All these people. .,” Eliot said.
“Dead,” Kino told him.
They rode past orchards of cherry trees in full bloom that filled the air with feather white blooms, and over terraced hills with row after row of trellises heavy with bloodred and amber grapes.
How could this be? If this was where the dead really came, shouldn’t there be billions of them here?
Eliot wanted to ask. But he didn’t, not wanting to appear stupid.
The Cadillac picked up speed.
Kino touched a button on his door, and Eliot’s window slid up.
He turned onto an unpaved branch off the road. The sky was iron gray.
The car accelerated around curves until this road became a single dirt track. The trees became stunted and small, then there were just grass and tumbleweeds, and then just bare rocky dirt. There were no more people here-and definitely no one tossing Frisbees.
Eliot spied a drop-off in the distance.
Kino pressed his foot all the way to the floor, and the Cadillac leaped ahead, leaving plumes of dust behind.
“What’s going on?” Eliot asked.
“Now I will show you the part of the Underworld that belongs to the Infernals,” Kino replied, the bitterness thick in his voice, and his eyes glued straight ahead.
Eliot swallowed. That didn’t sound good.
The door locks thumped down.
Kino drove and said nothing.
Eliot looked to Fiona, and she gave a slight shake of her head. He wanted to get out, but how? They must be going over a hundred miles an hour-rocketing past jagged boulders-straight toward where the land dropped away.
The Cadillac fishtailed to the left, skating along a cliff-continuing at breakneck speed along its edge.
Eliot slid into Fiona. Neither of them seemed to notice or care; both their faces pressed to the window.
The land plunged more than a mile straight down. A river of molten metal carved through jagged spires of black volcanic rock. In the distance, a desert plain stretched to the horizon. Airplanes, meteors, and flaming debris fell from the sky. Tiny figures swarmed, crowds of people among the rocks and on dunes. They ran, and it looked like they were fighting. Winged creatures circled overhead. One swooped and plucked up a double clawful of people.
Eliot wanted to look away. He couldn’t.
“This is what the other family does to the dead,” Kino told them. “They torture. Turn souls into wandering insane things. Take a long listen. Remember this next time you hear one of your Infernal relatives and their lies. . and choose wisely.”
Kino rolled down the electric windows.
There was the rumble of distant thunder and volcanoes, and carried on the hot winds were the screams of thousands of lost souls.
Eliot couldn’t stand the din. It made him want to scream along with them.
He turned to ask Fiona what she thought, but she was pale and stared straight ahead.
Kino flicked on the Cadillac’s headlights. The road they sped along was just a track now through a wilderness of dead twisted trees and whirlwinds of volcanic ash. There was no sun, no stars. . just darkness.
The Cadillac slowed.
Along the cliff’s edge, a fence had been erected. It was giant femurs and rib bones, from dinosaurs, maybe. Concertina wire and long curved talons topped it, pointed away from their side to keep things in Hell from climbing over.
“Why are we slowing?” Eliot asked cautiously.
“The gate is ahead,” Kino said without further explanation.
It was the end of the line-literally, as the road curved toward and off the cliff’s edge.
Eliot realized one of his hands grasped the leather handle on the back of Kino’s seat. He let go.
Mist and smoke parted, revealing a gate the size of their house in San Francisco. It was an interlocked mass of metal and bone and clockwork mechanisms. A half-dozen combination dials sat at eye level. The mass looked utterly impregnable, and like it hadn’t been opened in hundreds of years. . if ever.
“Why would you need a gate here?” Fiona said. “Who in their right mind would want to use it?”
“You would be surprised.” Kino pulled up alongside the structure. “Heroes have come looking for lost loves. There are always fools. And the dead are restless.” He removed his sunglasses, revealing dark, perhaps sad, but otherwise ordinary eyes. “No one living, not even I, understands what moves them.”
The car door locks popped open.
Kino faced them. “This is the Gate of Perdition, where the world of light meets that of darkness. The lands of our family and theirs. When they tell you of the wonders and pleasures of Hell, remember what you’ve seen here.
“Now,” he told them, “get out.”
Three heartbeats passed as Eliot and Fiona sat stunned.
“No way,” Eliot said.
“I want you to see and hear for yourself firsthand. . unless you’re too scared?”
“I’m not scared,” Fiona said. She opened her door and clambered out.
Of course Eliot wasn’t scared; his sister was crazy, though, to leave the car.
He sat there a moment, feeling like a total loser and coward. Okay-fine. Eliot couldn’t let her go by herself. He opened his door, too.
The only thing that ever felt like this was when he had to open the door to the basement incinerator at Oakwood Apartments. The air was so dry here, it hurt to breathe. He steeled himself, then stepped out.
Kino remained in the car. “Touch the other side,” he said. “Feel damnation and the absence of all hope.”
“I’m not touching anything,” Fiona told him.
Eliot hesitated-but only for a moment. What harm could it do to touch some dirt?
He knelt and wiggled his hand through a gap under the fence.
The earth felt older than anything he had ever touched before. Like it had been dust before the beginning of time. . totally without life. More dead than dead could ever be.
But it was not nothing. Not exactly.
It felt to Eliot more like an empty page: blank, yes, but perhaps the beginning of something. If only the right person would come along, with the right pen. . they could fill that page up with anything they wanted.
He left the earth where it was and pulled his hand out.
Kino watched him and Fiona. He put his sunglasses back on, and the windows of the Cadillac eased up and sealed with a thunk.
Eliot was glad this little demonstration was over.
He and Fiona moved toward the back doors.
The Cadillac’s engine revved; the car jumped, fishtailed, and sprayed them with dust.
Uncle Kino sped off.
11. BORDERLANDS
Fiona couldn’t believe it. “He ditched us!” she cried.
She picked up a rock and chucked it after Kino’s Cadillac. It was a futile gesture. The red taillights winked in the distance, obscured by dust and smoke, then swallowed by shadows.
It was very dark. The only light was from a smoldering river of lava in the valley below.
“Eliot?” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said. “Hang on.”
He snapped on a flashlight, the same one they’d had in the sewers when they hunted Sobek.
“You’re still carrying that around?”
“A first aid kit, too,” he said. “Some water, and a few granola bars, just in case. I even have Cee’s lunch if we get really desperate.”
It was one of the few times her brother had impressed her. Fiona would never in a million years, though, tell him this.
Eliot looked through the gate. “Do you really think it’s-?”
She stood next to him. Wind blasted her and carried with it a thousand screams and cries of pain from the depths. A plume of magma blasted from a giant fissure and sent a shower of sparks a mile high into the rust-colored sky.
“What else could it be?”
Eliot held up a hand, fingers outstretched. “I feel it’s something terr
ible,” he whispered, “but part of me belongs down there. I can’t explain it.”
Fiona pulled him back from the gate. The heat must have boiled his brains.
“Are you crazy? Nothing belongs down there.”
But she felt it, too. A little tug. . as if just on the other side of this valley of nightmares there might be something terrible and wonderful, waiting for them. Or maybe it was that feeling you got when you looked down from a tall building or bridge, wondering (but never seriously) what it would be like to jump.
“There!” someone called.
The voice was far away, on the other side of the gate, and so faint, Fiona wasn’t sure if it had been real or not.
It came again, this time more urgent: “A light-I saw a light! Up there! Quick!”
Shadowy shapes scrambled up the steep embankment toward the gate. Men and women, wild eyes gleaming, and carrying with them a scent she’d smelled too many times: on Perry Millhouse, and when Mike Poole dipped his hand into the deep fryer-burned human flesh.
“We better go,” she said.
Two figures ran up the path on the other side of the gate. . then six. . then dozens.
The ground trembled as they stampeded the gate. They cried and screamed and shouted: “There! They’re opening the gates! Give me that flashlight! You, come here!”
Eliot backed up.
The gate look impenetrable by anything less than an atomic bomb. . but the adjacent fence was bone and metal and barbed wire heaped together. Fiona wasn’t sure it would stop all those people.
She grabbed Eliot’s hand and pulled him along faster-running.
A tide of flesh crashed upon the gate and spilled over to the fence. There must be a hundred people pounding on the gate from the other side.
The bones and rusted barbed wire flexed and groaned and shuddered.
And all those people screamed.
The noise stabbed at Fiona’s ears. She dropped her brother’s hand and instinctively covered her head. It felt like her skull split.
Eliot had one hand over his ear, but the other held his violin and pointed up.
A great bird swooped down from the sky. It was the size of a small airplane: a collection of black feathers and outstretched steel claws and glistening black eyes-and screaming the sounds of breaking glass and nails on blackboard.
The thing tore through the crowd near the gate. There was an explosion of feathers; bone snapped and limbs tossed into the air.
Fiona’s heart beat in her throat.
She and Eliot ran.
Behind them, human cries mingled with the bird’s and there was a whoosh of wings.
Fiona looked back.
In the glowing sky, the one giant bird disintegrated into a swarm of swirling feathers and claws like a Salvador Dalí tornado of bird parts. It spiraled up and then toward them.
She looked for cover. Eliot’s flashlight illuminated a stand of twisted trees ahead, but that was too far away.
Fiona froze-only for a split second, though. She grabbed and stretched her rubber band. The air about its edge hummed as she focused her mind. . to cut.
“Come and get me,” she said. “Just try it.”
Eliot stood next to her, his face flushed, and his violin on his shoulder. Bow on strings, he drew out a long, sad note.
The birds hesitated and lost cohesion hearing this-but their momentum still carried them straight toward her.
Fiona braced.
Countless caws and screechings enveloped her. Grasping claws caught her clothes and hair, but failed to find purchase on flesh.
She cut-bone and sinew and feathers-severed even their screams midair.
Behind her, Eliot played: a song of sorrow that bridged to something lighter.
The birds scattered and fell silent before her brother’s music. So did the people on the other side of the gate. Even the erupting volcanoes in the distance quieted. Like the entire world paused to listen.
His song spoke of life and love. . and hope.
Fiona’s picked up their flashlight, looking again for cover or a way out of this mess.
There was no trace of Kino’s tire tracks in the volcanic ash. The wind had already blown them away. That shouldn’t matter, though; all they had to do was follow the cliff edge back the way they had come.
Those birds, however, would come back if they saw them out in the open.
She cast her gaze to the thicket of dead trees. They looked like skeletons with outstretched arms and fingers. Their shadows lengthened and wavered in the beam of the flashlight.
She spotted another flicker of light deep in the forest.
Eliot stopped playing.
“Keep going,” she whispered. “There’s someone, or something, coming through those trees.”
Eliot shook his head. “I can’t do any more. The song hurts too much.” He held one trembling hand to his chest.
That hand of his had never recovered from that infection. Fiona knew he should’ve seen a doctor. She was about to tell him that he’d been an idiot, but decided now wasn’t the time for that. Besides, Eliot looked like he was in real pain.
“It’s okay.” She looped an arm around her brother and helped him toward the trees. “I think someone’s coming to help. And if they’re not, I can take care of them.”
Fiona wasn’t so sure. Her legs were leaden, and the adrenaline that had given her strength before was gone.
She waved their flashlight back and forth.
The light in the forest answered, doing the same.
She and Eliot made their way to the edge of the trees and pushed through until they saw a figure with a lantern. It was all shadow first, and then she saw an arm, a body, a man’s rugged face.
She knew him. . but couldn’t place exactly from where. The man looked like a retired athlete, with gray hair and hands that could have grasped a basketball as easily as an apple. He wore camo sweatpants, sneakers, and a black AC/DC T-shirt.
She remembered him then: Their last birthday at Oakwood Apartments, this man had dropped by, just as they had been opening their presents.
“Mr. Welmann?” she whispered.
“Miss Post? It’s Fiona, right? And Eliot?” He smiled, but it faded fast. “You’re not dead, are you?”
“No,” Fiona told him, at first thinking this a stupid question, and then remembering where they where.
Mr. Welmann exhaled.
“We just got here,” Eliot said. Her brother had recovered from whatever happened to him back there, because he pushed her arm away and set Lady Dawn back in its violin case.
“I saw that damned Cadillac race past,” Mr. Welmann said, “and figured there’d be trouble. Come on. The way out of these Borderlands is back here.”
As they started walking, Fiona remembered one thing about Mr. Welmann.
He was dead.
Uncle Henry had told them Audrey killed him to keep the League from finding them. She’d done it with the knife they’d used to cut their birthday cake. It was so creepy.
Eliot asked him, “You called this place the ‘Borderlands’?”[13]
“Kind of a demilitarized zone,” Mr. Welmann said. He broke through the woods and onto a footpath. He looked around as if he expected someone to come along.
“I don’t mean to be rude, sir,” Fiona said, “but you are dead, aren’t you?”
“Sure, kid.” He shrugged. “It’s not a big deal. We all go sooner or later.”
“Our mother-?” she started to ask. . but couldn’t quite articulate the entire question: Did our mother really kill you?
Mr. Welmann started up the path and answered, “Yep.”
They followed his long strides until patches of sunlight broke through the branches and they heard birdsong.
“I’m so sorry,” Fiona said, knowing this could never make up for what had happened. “That’s horrible.”
“I’m not holding a grudge,” Mr. Welmann replied. “I got the impression I’d stumbled into a mother-bear-protecting
-her-cubs situation. If I had kids, I might have done the same thing. I hope it turned out all right for you two.”
“We’re in the League now,” Eliot told him.
“And Paxington,” Fiona added, pointing to the symbol on her uniform.
Mr. Welmann looked them over, nodding. “Yeah. . I see it in you now. A spark.”
Fiona sensed Mr. Welmann’s friendly nature cool toward them.
He led them across a grassy field. Dew soaked Fiona’s loafers, but she didn’t mind. It was clean, and washed away the volcanic ash.
Mr. Welmann waved at a group tossing Frisbees. He caught one of the flying disks and flung it back. “You must have had some adventures accomplishing all that,” he said.
She and Eliot told him everything that had happened that summer: the three heroic trials, the box of chocolates, the return of their estranged father, and the final confrontation with Beelzebub.
Mr. Welmann took it all in without question.
He halted at the top of the hill. Fiona saw the fields stretch out, fading into a distant purple horizon. A river wider than the Mississippi meandered across the plain, seeming from this angle part doodle and part quicksilver reflecting the sky.
“So this is what happens when you die?” Eliot asked. “You come here? And some people go to Hell?”
“I couldn’t tell you, kid. I see a few hundred people show up from time to time. The people who go to Hell? I’m happy to say I haven’t a clue.”
“But that doesn’t make sense.” Eliot’s brows bunched together. “There should be billions of people here, then.”
“That is the question,” Welmann said. “Where do they all go?” He knelt, picked a long blade of wheatgrass, and stuck into his mouth. “No one knows. Not me. Not the Infernals.” He chuckled. “And certainly not the ‘gods.’ ”
“Someone has to know something,” Fiona protested.
“Do they?” Mr. Welmann asked. “Well, the closest thing I have to an answer is that from time to time, the dead move on. Some make rafts and float down the river. Others just start walking.” He pointed to the distant horizon. “No one sees them again.”
Fiona remembered what Kino had said: “The dead are restless. No one living, not even I, understands what moves them.”