“There must have been some kind of spell that was broken when he … when he died,” Venice says. “The whole island was some kind of enchantment.”
He died.
The king died. Burned to death.
Burnt offering.
It was all an enchantment. The harpies were poisoned, decimated girls dressed in rotting feathers; the king transformed them to appear as beautiful winged girls. Why would they have killed him? They said something about me making them do it. Why?
Because you slept with him! Because they wanted him and he betrayed them. Because you betrayed your lover.
“Hex!” I say. “Where’s Hex?”
There’s silence filled only with the cold salt wind. Then a voice says, “Right here, Queen Penelope.”
I still can’t see him, but, “I need to talk to you,” I say. “In private.”
Ez makes clucking sounds, trying to discourage me. Too weak. Need rest. Not yet. It can wait.
He must have guessed already. And if he knows, then Hex knows. Queen Penelope. He knows. Did I say something before? Why did I speak?
But I have to tell him the truth now that I’m more lucid; it has to come from me.
“Please let us talk alone,” I say, coughing. There’s a cloud of tobacco on the air. Maybe I’m imagining …
Ez makes a pillow out of leaves and eases me down onto it. He and Ash walk away. I notice that they’re not touching each other the way they usually do. Venice follows them, looking back at me with his gray eyes, a worried half smile, which means he’s afraid. Only Argos stays.
Hex squats down beside me but he doesn’t touch me. He’s smoking a cigarette and I wonder where he got it. The cigarette is gripped between his fore and middle fingers and he brings it to his lips and rolls his eyes upward as he inhales, not bothering to direct the smoke away from me, even when I cough again.
“Where’d you get that?” I say.
He takes another drag and blows the smoke directly at me this time. “Don’t be a hater.”
“I just wondered.”
“Score, huh? Found them in the cave.”
“Are you okay?” I ask him.
“Of course I’m fine,” he clips without looking me in the eye. “What’s up?”
“I’m sorry I drank the wine. I know that’s hard for you.”
He smiles and the coldness of it makes me shiver. “Actually, that’s not really an issue. Knock yourself out and party.” Nodding around us at the dark landscape. “We better live it up while we can, homegirl.”
I gulp and take a breath. The pain in my shoulder almost helps; it’s like the punishment I deserve. “I need to tell you something. The reason the king was killed. You left me. I thought you were gone.”
“Yeah, I wanted to find a way to get us out of there safely?” He says it like a question. “I built a little boat? That’s what I was doing with my time while you all went swimming and shit. Or whatever you were doing. So when you got rammed by that spear I had a way to get you the hell out of there.”
“But you could have told me.”
“Actually, Pen? No. I couldn’t. You were drunk, which, you know, is completely fine with me, and high as fuck on King Bucky Horny whatever-his-name-is.” Hex pushes up his sweatshirt sleeve and examines the tattoo that reads Faithless. “Virgil mentions the Agathyrsi people? They were known for their tattoos, dyeing their hair indigo blue, wearing lots of gold, and taking multiple wives.”
Hex knows everything. How does he know? Did he guess? Did I tell him?
As usual, he can read my thoughts.
“‘Rumour, the swiftest traveller of all the ills on earth
Thriving on movement, gathering strength as it goes, at the start
A small and cowardly thing, it soon puffs itself up
And walking upon the ground, buries its head in the cloud-base.
… A swift-footed creature, a winged angel of ruin,
A terrible, grotesque monster, each feather upon whose body—
Incredible though it sounds—has a sleepless eye beneath it,
And for every eye she has also a tongue, a voice and a pricked ear.’”
It’s the passage from The Aeneid where the secret liaison between Aeneas and Queen Dido is revealed. “Stop speaking in Virgil. Please, Hex.”
“‘But who can ever hoodwink a woman in love? The queen
Apprehensive even when things went well, now sensed his deception.’”
“Hex!” In this passage, Queen Dido realizes that Aeneas is leaving her but I know that’s not what Hex means by quoting this; he means that I have deceived him and he’s right.
“Speaking in Virgil? Wouldn’t that be Virgilese, technically? Virgilesque? Virgellian? You like to make up words, remember?” He’s returned from his epic reverie and his eyes move over all of me like punishing fingers. “Ez and Ash told me what the harpy things said. About blaming you for them killing him. And I figured the only thing that would have made them kill their precious king was…”
“I’m sorry, Hex. I didn’t know what I was doing. Please…” My pulse is spreading the pain faster through my body. Good.
“Yeah, good times, man. My girlfriend forever partook of bold debauchery, or, in layman’s terms, fucked around on me.”
“I’m sorry, Hex, I’m so sorry.”
“GFN. Girlfriend Never. Girlfriend No More. I like the sound of it.”
“Forgive me, please. I don’t know how…” I reach my hand out to him but he makes a face like he’s smelled something rotten—the harpies without their enchantment—and moves farther away.
“I think you do. Basically, it’s Copulation 101. You get naked with the antler dude and you spread your legs. Actually the antlers aren’t basic. That’s a little kinky.”
“Stop it. Don’t do this!”
“It’s not me who did shit,” he says. He smiles sweetly, showing his pointed incisors.
“He had control over me,” I say. “I swear, Hex. You said yourself. It was a spell.”
“None of the rest of us slept with him, though, huh? So he reserved his sex spell just for you?”
“I don’t know what he wanted. I don’t know why.”
“Although from what Ash says, Ez kind of liked him, too. I guess Horny King wasn’t into him, though.” Hex stretches the sleeves of his sweatshirt down over his fingers, exposing his clavicle. He gets up, dusts dirt off the butt of his jeans, and walks away from our camp.
Don’t do this.
But, like he said, it isn’t Hex who did anything. My mother, she did this to my father. It’s not an excuse but maybe it’s part of the reason. It’s in me, like bad blood, like the ability to kill that I got from Merk.
But maybe this was different. Merk was my parents’ best friend and he and my mom consciously betrayed my father. I didn’t know the king at all. I was under his spell. He controlled me; I couldn’t say no. I wish I could have made it stop. I couldn’t make it stop.
Or maybe any kind of “love” is a spell. You can choose to let it own you. Or not.
“Hex!” I cry with what feels like my last breath. Argos sits up on his hind legs as if on alert.
Hex turns around. He pauses.
A young tree grows nearby and he reaches over and snaps off a branch, tosses it at me. The leaves glim-glint in the moonlight like strange gold.
That dainty, jagged smile again. “Go to hell,” Hex says.
I will, I think, as I press my face down into my bed of leaves. I will go straight to hell.
* * *
When I open my eyes the little girl is squatting in front of me with her hands on my shoulder. We’re in a cave, illuminated only by the glow from her irises, like a cat’s. Tapetum lucidum is the term for the light-reflecting tissue of the cat’s eye, just behind the retina.
I wonder if this is the cave Venice was sitting in front of, the one where Hex found his cigarettes.
“Where’s everyone?” I ask.
“Xandra wants me to tak
e you to her.”
I’m relieved to see the girl is all right but I need to know where my friends are.
The girl answers, but only cryptically. “Xandra says if I take you to her she’ll set us all free.”
* * *
A woman with cropped fair hair is seated in a dark chamber with three huge black dogs surrounding her. Ez, Ash, Venice, and Argos are all there, at her feet. Argos is growling at the dogs as if he thinks he’s larger than they are. I don’t see Hex.
* * *
What the girl is saying is true.
“Who’s Xandra?” I ask her. I realize that the wound on my arm doesn’t hurt anymore; the skin has healed. “Where’s your family?”
“My family is gone.”
I recall the vision I had when I first saw the girl. A woman with skin darker than hers, wearing a pink nurse’s uniform, hiding under a table, trying to shelter her children with her body.
“Xandra is the Queen of the Shades. She lives underground. I have to take you there.” The girl’s eyes fluoresce, casting a beam of light farther into the darkness, revealing a low, dark tunnel.
Things are starting to add up and I don’t like what I think they mean. No pain. Darkness. A journey underground. The disappearance of my loved ones.
“Where are my friends?” I say again.
“If you go to her she won’t hurt them,” the girl tells me.
“What does that mean?” I can raise my voice now without it hurting to do so, like I’m on some kind of strong medication. Or dead. I press on my shoulder, testing, and don’t even wince. “How did my wound heal?”
The girl holds up her hands, palms facing me, stained purple. Petals that same color lie in a pile beside her.
“Did you heal it?”
She nods. Her worried smile reminds me of Venice.
“Thank you for helping me. What’s your name?” I ask.
“Acacia.”
“Where are you from?”
She shrugs. “There was a sea monster. She looked like a pretty girl but she had a dolphin’s tail and a wolf’s belly and three blue dogs.”
I’ve seen Giants but I choose to believe that this sea monster is a figment of a child’s imagination, a child faced with the loss of her family and (mysteriously, but then again, it’s all mystery now) schooled in The Aeneid. The sea monster Scylla with her dolphin’s tail, wolf’s belly, and three “sea-blue hounds” was yet another obstacle Aeneas had to overcome.
“How do you know about Scylla?” I ask.
“My mother read to me and my sister a lot.”
“The storm separated you from your mother and sister?” I wish I hadn’t asked. The little girl’s eyes cloud over as if with the mist that lies on the ocean. “Acacia,” I say, “thank you again for healing my arm. Now can you show me how to help my friends? And then we can help you.”
She takes my hand and pulls me to my feet; she’s incredibly strong. “Come,” she says, handing me a branch. I recognize it as the one Hex tossed at me before he left. “We don’t have much time.”
Go to hell, Hex said. Now it’s my chance to go where I deserve to be and maybe save the ones I love if it’s not too late.
* * *
This is the journey to hell, down through darkling tunnels, toward the center of the earth. I have to stoop over to fit in the low passageways. I can hear water trickling, smell a sulfur stench, and when I reach out the walls feel jagged and slick with slime. As the little girl leads me down, through corridors of rough rock, I think of all the ways I have sinned. Fighting with my mother, making my little brother cry, not appreciating how hard the man who raised me as his own daughter worked to care for us. All the Chimeras and Gorgons and Centaurs and Furies that I have been parade before me in the darkness. I think of how I stabbed a Giant in the eye and killed two people and now, perhaps worst of all—because the killing was in self-defense—betrayed my lover. I don’t really believe in sin or hell but then I never believed that Giants and witches and fairies and harpies and antlered illusionists were real either. I worried about global warming but I didn’t really believe the world would end. It’s not just me who has sinned, but all of humanity by neglecting the planet.
And then I see him.
He is missing his eyes; his nose and left ear have been cut off. Much like Aeneas’s comrade Deiphobus, who was mutilated this way by his wife’s lover during the battle of Troy. I know this modern-day incarnation of Deiphobus. He is my father, Merk.
I didn’t realize until now how much I still need him. Who will bring me food in the night? Who will rescue me from monsters?
“Who did this? Why did this happen to you?” I say, forcing myself to look at his ruined face that speaks of all the destruction I have witnessed in these months since the world came to an end. His empty eye sockets like mine. Is that what I look like? Father and daughter.
“The harpies did it in their fury. It is as it was meant to be,” he says.
“You’re really dead? It’s not an illusion this time?” Each word feels like a small shard of glass cutting my throat.
“Yes.”
“So we are in hell?”
He frowns. “I prefer to call it the Land of the Shades.”
“Then I’m dead?”
“All true heroes have to make a descent to the underworld in order to be reborn” is his cryptic answer. Why is he speaking like an epic hero all of a sudden?
“Staying dead might be better,” I say, holding back a sob that threatens to tear through my chest.
“No, it wouldn’t. Sometimes it takes a while to realize that what we want isn’t what’s best. You were meant to be here and to find the king. It’s for the greater good.”
I stop on the path. A dark mist from the bowels of the earth swirls around us so I can barely see him now. “What about Hex?” I ask. “What about Hex? Why did I do that to him? Was that meant to be, too? Because you and my mother betrayed my adopted father? Is that why I was cursed to betray Hex?”
“That’s not why. And I don’t regret what I did, even though it hurt my best friend,” he says. “Because if I hadn’t been with your mother, you wouldn’t have been born.”
Then, before he vanishes into the miasma he speaks these last words: “What was also meant to be is your meeting with the Queen of the Shades.”
At this, Acacia squeezes my hand as if to urge me on.
I don’t know who the Queen of the Shades is but I know I have to go to her and try to redeem myself in some way—save my friends, help this little girl, pay the price. I don’t know why I’m allowed underground like this at all, assuming I am even still alive.
When I ask my young guide why I am allowed here, she answers, “Anyone who sets foot on this island is in the in-between.” This does not exactly reassure me.
Virgil said it better than anyone as he recounted Aeneas’s descent to the underworld:
“The way … is easy;
Night and day lie open the gates of death’s dark kingdom:
But to retrace your steps, to find the way back to daylight—
That is the task, the hard thing.”
That is the task.
There is no choice.
* * *
The tunnel opens out into a dark cavern dripping with stalactites and lit only by torches. A teenage girl is seated on a chair and surrounded by three low-growling black dogs with one large black-, red-, and yellow-striped snake draping itself around their necks.
I think of Merk’s revulsion of the phantom snakes on the ship. I am not a fan of serpents, either.
In contrast to the dark animals, the girl’s hair glows like a flock of fireflies, crowning the long sharp angles of her face. As I come closer I see her ice eyes and I remember the vision of the girl in the room with the young king, her brother.
“Xandra the Queen of the Shades,” Acacia whispers to me. She hasn’t let go of my hand the whole time and I’m surprised my palm is dry, not sticky with sweat.
“Welcome,”
says Xandra. She’s beautiful in a strong, almost masculine way. “I’m glad to finally meet the famous Queen Penelope.” She’s smiling but it’s a dangerous thing on her face.
“Where am I?” I ask.
“Underground on the Island of the Shades.”
“Are you the king’s sister? Because I think you aren’t alive anymore. And neither are they.” Meaning the dogs and the snake.
“Getting right to the point,” she says. “I admire that. Yes, I’m Dylan’s sister, Xandra. I killed myself when I was sixteen. I couldn’t deal with all the pain in the world, and the pain I knew was on its way. Dylan stuck it out. He knew you were coming—something about a picture I made. He devoted his life to you. But look what happened.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, aware of the weird lack of pain in my body, even the dull or sharp aches of emotion. It’s as if I’ve sipped from the river Lethe and forgotten what it was like to feel.
“Yes, it was a tragedy. Another tragedy. And now you’re here.”
I look around the cavern but I can’t see past the circle of torchlight where Xandra sits. “Where are my friends?”
“Do you mean the boys? And that yappy dog? They’re a motley crew. I have them.”
“If you have them … does that mean…?”
She grins skeletally. “No, don’t worry. They’re still alive for now. At least in part. You all entered the realm of the in-between when you arrived here.”
“Please, may I see them?” I say.
“First you must eat something.” Xandra points her finger and more torches flare, revealing a table piled with silver platters and crystal bowls of food. Whole fish with shining eyes and garnished with snails and small, gelatinous eggs. Turkeys stuffed to overflowing with sausages. Giant whole grilled fungi. Heaps of pastries oozing cream and bloodred sauce. A great white pig with an apple in her mouth and a litter of piglets surrounding her on the platter.
I’m not exactly hungry or thirsty anymore but I’m drawn to the vile food anyway. I lick my lips. They’re very dry and tiny flakes of skin stick to my teeth. I remember the words of the harpies. If you leave us here you will face famine, fire, and flood.
The Island of Excess Love Page 11