Cat's Claw

by Amber Benson

  “Come on, now,” Jarvis said, whispering in my ear as he stood, watching me marvel at the looming building that housed Death, Inc. “Shake a leg.”

  “I’m coming,” I said, pulling my eyes away from the gargantuan brimstone skyscraper and following Jarvis through the revolving glass front door.

  Jarvis made it into the lobby without any problem, but somehow I got caught in the revolving door just as a tall cadaverous man in a too-short suit stepped in from the other side. He didn’t seem to notice that I was inside the revolving door with him because he gave his side such a hard push that he was immediately ejected out the other side, but I was caught spiraling around the circumference of the door twice. When I was finally able to escape the door’s vortex, I found that I was right back where I had started.

  Outside.

  I hate this door, I thought to myself as I let out a frustrated sigh and thrust myself back into the spinning glass for another round. This time no one was trying to exit from the other side, so I was able to navigate the door without another roundabout fiasco, but as I stepped into the well-air-conditioned lobby, I was suddenly filled with a sense of déjà vu so strong that it couldn’t have been déjà vu at all.

  I had been here before. I just didn’t know it was part of Purgatory at the time.

  The memory snuck into my brain unbidden.

  I was waiting here in this very lobby with Jarvis right before I’d gone upstairs to meet with the Board of Death and receive the three tasks I had to complete in order to save my family, my dad, and his job. In my mind’s eye, I saw Jarvis and myself sitting over in the small vestibule; me browsing through a magazine—was it Elle? I couldn’t remember—while Jarvis tried to explain how the Office of Death had come into being.

  I vaguely remembered him explaining The Fall and the creation of Heaven and Hell and me, like a numbskull, muttering something about Adam and Eve. Thinking back, I must’ve looked like a real idiot to Jarvis. No wonder he treated me with such disdain. I hadn’t known anything about my family or the Afterlife, and I had flaunted my lack of knowledge in his face like a badge of honor.

  At that moment, I was overwhelmed by the need to open my mouth right then and explain to Jarvis that I finally understood why all this stuff was so important to him. That I really needed him to forgive my ambivalence, because it just came from insecurity and fear, not a true dislike of my dad and the business he gave his life to.

  “Jarvis,” I began, looking down at the little faun who had stood beside me even when he hadn’t known if I was fit to take over my dad’s job or not. “I’m—”

  Before I could continue that thought, a thin woman in a fifties-style golden mohair skirt suit walked over to us and wrapped her arms around Jarvis, nearly choking him.

  “Jarvis, darling,” she purred as she reluctantly released him. “It’s been forever. Still living the good life on Earth?”

  Jarvis looked over at me, embarrassed for some reason.

  “I suppose so, Evangeline,” he murmured before turning and beckoning me over. “By the way, this is Calliope Reaper-Jones.”

  Evangeline’s mouth dropped and the cat-eyed plastic frames she was wearing slid down her nose as she stared at me.

  “Jarvis, you’re kidding?” she exclaimed. “This is the daughter? The one that . . . you know.”

  Jarvis nodded as the woman reached out to shake my hand like I was Ed McMahon offering her a million dollars. It didn’t take a mirror to know my face was turning beet red. Now I was the embarrassed party. I ran a hand through my disheveled hair, hoping I didn’t look as bad as I thought I did. I hadn’t had time to change out of my dog drool ensemble before we’d left, so I was feeling particularly uncomfortable in what I was wearing.

  I knew I should’ve borrowed something from Clio, I thought miserably as the nice woman continued to yank my arm up and down vigorously.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said through gritted teeth.

  All I wanted was to fade into the wallpaper (or in this case, steel, since the whole space was fashioned out of the stuff) and disappear. I hated being the center of attention. It just made me feel all weird and discombobulated, like I was a balloon some little kid had let go of at the fair that was sailing so high it was about to enter the stratosphere.

  “You as well, darling. You as well.”

  She gave me a quick once-over as she dropped my hand, appraising me with a sharp eye, but seeming to like what she saw. Even though there was no judgment behind her eyes, once again I wished I’d taken the time to change my clothes. At least I’d done a cursory wash of my face and hands in the foyer bathroom, spritzing myself with the Esteban jasmine-scented room spray my mother kept in all the bathrooms in the house. I had no idea whether it was safe to spray that kind of stuff on your bare skin, but I was willing to take the risk if it meant I wasn’t going to stink anymore.

  Clio had wrinkled her nose in disgust when I’d come out of the bathroom, but hadn’t said a word. I guess she decided that me stinking of jasmine was better than me stinking of dog drool.

  “Are you going upstairs?” Evangeline asked Jarvis, but I could tell that she was more curious if I was going upstairs.

  “We’re just going to the Hall of—” I started to say before Jarvis stamped his hoof hard on my toes, instantly shutting me up.

  “I’m giving Miss Calliope a little tour of the building. She’s only seen the lobby and the Board of Death’s domain,” Jarvis said, his voice smooth as butter. “Her father thought it best she acquaint herself with the rest of the building.”

  “Of course,” Evangeline said as she licked her lips.

  “So we must be going. We are already late for one of our meetings,” Jarvis continued, grabbing my arm and leading me toward the bank of elevators that presided over the back of the lobby.

  Evangeline gave me a curious little wave as I followed Jarvis’s lead, then before I realized what was happening, I was being bodily forced into an open elevator by my faun escort. As soon as the doors shut, Jarvis let out a long sigh and slumped against the side of the elevator.

  “What floor?” I asked, looking at the panel of buttons that seemed to stretch almost to the elevator’s ceiling. I didn’t take an official tally, but there had to have been at least one hundred buttons on the steel-plated sucker.

  Jarvis looked up and shook his head.

  “Please press button seventy-three,” Jarvis said, starting to relax a little.

  “Okay,” I said, counting two at a time until I hit seventy-three and pushed the button.

  “Now press twenty-one.”

  I counted again, pushed the correct button, and suddenly the elevator shot upward so quickly that I fell forward, catching myself against the smooth steel of the elevator wall.

  “That’s better,” Jarvis said, not at all fazed by the rapid ascent the elevator was making.

  “Who was that woman?” I asked as I held on to the elevator wall for dear life.

  “She’s the Secretary of Passage. She used to work with your sister Thalia.”

  “No way,” I said, feeling woozy, more from having touched an enemy than from the elevator’s speed. “And she had the gall to shake my hand?”

  Jarvis shook his head.

  “She had nothing to do with your sister’s kidnapping plot,” Jarvis replied. “At least, the Board of Death cleared her of any complicity. But still, it’s always best to keep people like her at arm’s length. She’s very ambitious and extremely calculating.”

  I nodded.

  “And it was very strange, indeed, to see her in the lobby. She has no need to use the lobby entrance. She has access to her office via wormhole. I suppose the only thing that makes any sense is that someone clued her in to our arrival and she scurried down to make sure she accidentally ‘bumped’ into us,” Jarvis finished unhappily.

  “How would someone know that we’re even here?” I asked curiously. “You didn’t tell anyone we were coming and neither did I.”

  Jarvis s
ighed.

  “They keep a log of all wormhole transport in and out of Purgatory. No one is supposed to have access to it, but that means nothing. Information can always be had here for a price,” Jarvis said uneasily.

  “Crap.”

  Jarvis nodded in agreement.

  “Crap is definitely apropos, Miss Calliope.”

  At those words, the elevator came to a smooth stop and the doors slid open, revealing a small, cramped antechamber. It was probably no less than fifteen by twenty-five feet, but it felt smaller. The walls were done in a shade of pale green that I could only call “sickly mint” and the floors were made of neatly fitted white linoleum squares. There was a tiny brown reception desk in the back flanked by four metal folding chairs. As I followed Jarvis out of the elevator, I realized that there was no one in the room, not even behind the reception desk.

  The elevator doors shut with a loud screech that nearly made me jump out of my skin. Jarvis seemed oblivious to the sound as he beckoned me to follow him over to the reception desk. As we passed the first metal folding chair, I realized that I had been wrong. We were not alone in the room, after all. An almost-transparent figure sat hunched in one of the chairs, its hands clasped together expectantly, watching us.

  I paused midstep as I realized I was seeing my first ghost. Part of me wanted to stop and get a better look, but I could feel a steady hum of weird energy emanating from the thing, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

  I felt Jarvis’s warm hand on my arm and let him lead me away.

  “Stay far away from that Shade,” Jarvis hissed under his breath. “Only the Devil makes creatures such as those.”

  I nodded, not needing to be told twice.

  Before I could ask Jarvis any more about the creature, I heard a loud buzzing sound—which made me jump—immediately followed by another, longer buzz. I looked over and saw Jarvis pushing a little button on the desktop. Beside it sat a tiny golden plaque that read: PRESS FOR SERVICE.

  I expected someone to appear instantly, but apparently things ran at their own speed in Purgatory. Jarvis knew the drill because he shrugged and walked over to one of the folding chairs facing the Shade and sat down. I didn’t want to stand at the reception desk by myself, so I hightailed it over to the chair beside Jarvis and plopped my butt into it.

  We sat there for what could have been an hour—but was probably more like three—waiting for God knew what to happen. I tried to put things in perspective; the Shade had been sitting there longer than we had, so he had it worse than us, but that didn’t really make me feel any better.

  I pulled the little rubidium clock out of my pocket and looked down at it, watching the numbers whiz by.

  “How much time do I have left?” I asked, not really expecting it to respond, but suddenly the numbers on the face stopped whizzing, and in their place I saw: twenty hours, seven minutes, thirty-six seconds, 5.4 × 10-44 s.

  Now, what the hell does that last equation mean? I wondered to myself. Maybe it is that weird Planck-unit thing Cerberus was talking about.

  But before I could give it any more thought, a door behind the reception desk—one that I hadn’t noticed being there at all—opened and a small, slim, dark-haired girl in a yellow shirtwaist dress came out, her porcelain features set in a bland mask. She looked over at the ghost and nodded, then turned to Jarvis, a smile lighting up her face.

  “You’ll be next, Mr. De Poupsy.”

  Jarvis inclined his head in response. “Thank you, Suri.”

  She gave Jarvis a wink before turning back to the Shade. I watched her, surprised to witness her face instantly resetting to its previous state of detachment as she moved to address it; she obviously didn’t care for the creature any more than we did.

  “This way, sir,” Suri said, her voice neutral.

  The Shade didn’t seem to notice the girl’s coolness toward it as it stood up and followed her out of the antechamber.

  “Weird,” I whispered as the door closed on the Shade’s back and I slipped my rubidium clock back into my pocket.

  Jarvis nodded.

  “You called it a Shade?” I asked, curiosity always a bad habit of mine.

  “Well, I don’t have much experience with creatures like that,” Jarvis began, “but yes, it’s called a Shade. It’s a soul that has chosen to be released from the Wheel of Samsara—that’s basically the cycle of reincarnation—so that it could remain in Hell and offer its services to the Devil.”

  “Creepy,” I said, shivering. “Why doesn’t it have a body?”

  “It does, but the Devil is a wily fellow, as you know, so when he sends his minions to do his bidding outside of Hell, he keeps their bodies with him, forcing them to return to Hell once they have completed their task or forever remain disembodied.”

  I had never heard anything so awful in my life—someone keeping your body hostage so you can’t run away? That was just plain mean.

  “He’s a real jerkoid, isn’t he?” I said, my mind instantly returning with gut-churning fear to the memory of the one face-to-face I’d had with the Devil.

  The jerk had pitched me headfirst into a bottomless pit at the edge of Hell, so that his protégé, Daniel, could take over my dad’s job instead of me. Luckily, God had intervened and I hadn’t been forced to spend my life in free fall like the Devil had intended.

  Wasn’t I just a lucky little ducky?

  “He’s the worst of the worst, but necessary,” Jarvis replied. “Very necessary.”

  I nodded. I completely understood what he was driving at. Without the Devil, Evil wouldn’t flourish, and then Good would overwhelm the world, creating an imbalance in the universe. You had to have both of them—Good and Evil—or else things just didn’t work properly. Weird, but true.

  Before we could continue our conversation, the invisible door behind the reception desk opened again and the cute girl in the shirtwaist dress stepped out into the antechamber, dark pigtails bouncing at the sides of her head. She motioned to us and we stood up.

  “This way, please, Mr. De Poupsy,” she said cheerfully, no sign of the insipidness she’d shown the ghostly Shade. “It’s always such a pleasure to see you.”

  And with that, we followed our guide through the doorway and into the Hall of Death.

  twelve

  The Hall of Death was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  If the antechamber was a model in Spartan chic, then the actual Hall itself was the antechamber’s antithesis. Part medieval monastery, part steel, skeletal behemoth, the Hall was nothing if not an architectural masterpiece. A hulking monster of a place, it had been created with such an intermingling of old-world munificence and cold modernity that standing before it made me feel as if I were in some kind of hallowed temple.

  Sturdy, interlocking limestone blocks that appeared as if they’d been cut by hand stretched so far beyond my field of vision that I couldn’t see where the hallway ended. Each block fitted so elegantly with the next that even when I looked, I couldn’t find a mortar seam. The floor was hewn out of larger blocks of the same limestone, but its length was covered in long Oriental carpets fashioned in repeating patterns of black, crimson, and russet. Upon closer inspection, I saw that each carpet contained such a wealth of intricate detail that no two had been woven alike.

  Each one contained a plethora of animals, heavenly bodies, and other strange symbols—some of which I had never seen before, making me wonder if they might be the letters of some archaic dead language that had ceased to be spoken by human tongues anymore. However you cut it, the carpets were beautiful and so fragile looking that it almost seemed sacrilegious to be treading upon them.

  On each side of the passage were arched, open doorways that led into smaller rooms containing long, thin wooden tables and matching benches, neither of which looked very comfortable. Every table had three green glass reading lamps set on top of it, giving off a warm, scholarly glow. Here and there I spied people reading from huge, ancient tomes—some of
them taking notes, others just casually flipping through pages. In the far corners of each room we passed, I saw hulking suits of medieval armor standing at attention, arms ramrod at their sides, helmets obscuring the faces of anything or anyone that might be hiding inside.

  At the side of each archway, a tall, flickering torch stood sentry, filling the Hall with the scent of burning cedar, a smell that was somehow comforting and invigorating at the same time. On some of the walls we passed hung rich tapestries from the medieval period, representing two-dimensional interpretations of crusading knights and their infidel victims.

  Some of the tapestries were superviolent—one even showed a guy getting his guts pulled out—while others offered more sedate imagery. I wanted to stop and look at a couple of the ones that had animals on them—animals I had never seen before, like this one crazy creature that had a lion’s body, an eagle’s head, and a set of rainbow-colored wings—but Jarvis grabbed my sleeve and wouldn’t let go.

  “Follow me, please,” Suri said, her voice pleasantly chirpy. “And please don’t touch anything, thank you.”

  “Sorry,” I said, embarrassed that she had caught me edging toward one of the bloodier tapestries.

  She had a slight accent that made me think Arabic might’ve been her native language once upon a time, but it was so obscured by a Mid-Atlantic twang that it was hard to tell.

  As we followed our guide down the hallway, I looked up, dazzled by the more modern part of the structure: especially the intricately woven steel frame that made up the foundation of the glass-enclosed ceiling. It was like staring up through the hulking skeleton of a transparent beast. I had no idea how the thing was even possible because, from what I remembered, we were somewhere in the middle of the giant brimstone and steel skyscraper, not at its apex.