by Carmen Kern
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s overactive imagination and love of myth/folklore, and the supernatural. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and a little scary. Although stranger things could happen, just watch the news.
Djinn & Tonic Publications
Copyright ©2021 by Carmen Kern
All rights reserved.
Cover & interior book design by Carmen Kern
ISBN 978-1-7325498-4-5
For all of you who need a break from reality,
whatever that is...
ONE
Stan Shimmer bolted upright on his mattress seconds before his silken sheets were flung from his skinny body. He was jerked from his bed and his wrists bound behind his back. He didn’t fight back. After all, it was only a dream. The kind that turned into something hot. Something sexy. If only he could will himself to stay in REM sleep. If only—
A well-placed slap across Stan’s cheek jerked his head to the right. His eyes blinked against the sting of tears. The blue glow of the numbers on his alarm clock were unreadable, blurred by sleep and the farsightedness he had been cursed with even in life.
The subtle musk of moonflower drifted through the room, stirred by the sweeping of black wings that wisped in and out of shape like morning mist over mountaintops.
Stan’s knees buckled. Bullish arms caught him from behind and stood him up, but not before he smashed his kneecap on the bed frame. That was the moment he knew he wasn’t dreaming. And in that moment, his body betrayed him. If he hadn’t relieved himself less than a half an hour earlier, he might have soiled his lime-green boxer briefs and left a mess on the imported hardwood floor.
Nyx, the goddess of night, towered over Stan. Her slender fingers gripped his chin, forced his face up to meet her gaze. Galaxies swam in those eyes. Stars died and were born within them.
The goddess’s voice was neither friendly nor vicious. “You know who I am.” The words were flickering flames, blowing in, then out.
Stan’s mouth was dry and smelled of the bourbon he drank before bed. He couldn’t seem to form the words, so he nodded.
Nyx allowed the motion. “This is the counselor to the Underworld’s elite?” she asked the thug holding Stan. “He doesn’t look like much.”
She inspected Stan carefully. “You, Stan, are in a most difficult position.” Nyx’s breath was the source of the moonflower. “You have counseled my son, Thanatos, no? Do you have his files?”
Stan nodded his head again. His pained look deepened the lines around his eyes. “Well, kind of.” He managed the words with a pinched mouth and dry tongue.
Nyx released Stan’s face, dropping her hand to her side with a dramatic slap. Her teeth flashed with self-made moonlight. “Either you do, or you don’t. Which is it?”
The thick forearms encircling Stan’s scrawny chest tightened. A half-familiar voice said, “Answer her.”
With the air slowly squeezed from his lungs, Stan wheezed out, “I had the files.”
Nyx touched the moonstone necklace around her long, graceful neck.
Stan’s eyes followed her finger to the large circle pendant that lay between the goddess’s round breasts.
“Meaning you no longer have them.” Nyx pointed to a plush reading chair sitting by the window. “Put him there. Comfort is paramount in the first stages of interrogation. It puts them at ease—at least in my experience.”
Stan’s legs dragged across the floor, and then he was tossed unceremoniously onto the thick cushions, his thin legs kicking to keep his body upright. Perched at the edge of the seat, Stan looked up to the partially tusked man who stood over him. It was the same ugly, squashed face he’d met at the gates of the Underworld the night he died. Charon. The ferryman of the Underworld, and one of Nyx’s other children.
“Where are they now?” Nyx claimed Stan’s attention once more with her whiskey-burnished voice.
Stan glanced down at his green underwear. “I gave the files to Hermes.” He swallowed and swallowed again, willing moisture into his mouth. “I want you to know that I strongly believe in the concept of patient-doctor confidentiality and would never betray a client in this matter…except at the request of Hades or Persephone or under threat of a thorough beating, such as this.” Stan sat up straighter and wiggled his hands behind his back to start the blood flow. “Persephone sent Hermes to retrieve Thanatos’s file. I have the request in my office desk if you want to see it.” Stan was very aware of his narrow chest and bony rib cage.
“And why do you suppose the queen would request the notes to my son’s private sessions with you?”
Stan smacked his dry lips. “Could I have some water? It’s right there.” He swung his chin toward his bedside table. He always kept a liter of water beside his bed. That, and a small bottle filled with pink liquid, a sure cure for the bourbon hangover that would become an all-out head-and-gut monsoon if he didn’t have it.
Nyx nodded. Charon grunted but retrieved the glass and held it up to Stan’s mouth. The water spilled down his chest as he gulped the still-cool water. He was strangely sober.
Wings, black and misty at the edges, unfolded into a flowing gown of feathers that covered Nyx’s body. The subtle movement of the feathers reminded Stan of those Hubble images of the Milky Way, or endless space and galaxies too far away to tell if they were real.
But the wings were real, and the feathers that moments ago seemed soft and ruffled, now cut shallow lines into his skin like the edges of razors. “The file. Tell me what the queen wants from them.”
Welts, thin red threads opened along Stan’s arms, across his chest, and down to the waistband of his underwear. Stan strained against the pain, against the cords cutting into his wrists. “Thanatos…your son is refusing the dead from the Overworld.” Stan whimpered. He didn’t want to. But as usual, his body had other ideas, and those ideas won out. “You must know this.”
“I know much, but not of the schemes of the other gods, or of all of my children. What dirty secrets will they use against my son? Surely that’s what they are looking for in the most intimate details of my son’s life, is it not?” Her wing breezed over Stan’s back, leaving behind thicker, deeper slashes in his skin.
A groan rolled up Stan’s throat and over his tongue, escaping before he could hold it in. “Thanatos hates this place, the god and goddess who rule it, and the humans he carries to these gates.”
Nyx swept her wings above Stan’s body. They hovered over him like a deadly canopy.
Stan didn’t even try to stop the words. “He has anger issues. Many of them stemming from his relationship with his—”
“Tread carefully, Stanley. I don’t want to kill you…again.”
Stan slowed his breathing, then took one deep inhale, stilling his mind and body. With a slight sigh, he said, “Your son is killing immortals. He has committed an unspeakable act. The other gods know this, and they will find him. They sent Hades to hunt him down.” The time for straight talk had come, like it did in most counseling sessions. “And Persephone will use whatever information she can find to bring Thanatos back to the Underworld. To bind him once more to be the bringer of death.”
One of the most important skills Stan had picked up during his stay in the Underworld was knowing when the gods wanted the truth or, in some cases, bullshit and lies. Knowing when to spout either one was a talent of survival. Despite the whining, the sniveling, or crying out with pain, the soiling of pants and drinking to forget, Stan was a survivor.
“Thanatos shared his hatred of the gods with me, but mentioned nothing of his plans to kill the unkillable and keep the mortals alive. But you knew. Didn’t
you?” Stan thrust his chin at Charon. “He spoke of you in our sessions. He named you as his confidant. You and Phobetor, who helped nurture his hate into a literal horror comic come to life. You knew and did nothing.” Stan locked eyes with Charon but was the first to look away.
Nyx’s wings thinned, turned to mist, drifting in long black ribbons before disappearing. The eye of night turned to Charon. “Your brother spoke to you of this treachery and you said nothing?”
Charon, an ancient being and a dark myth in his own right, shoved his fists into his pants pockets and studied his scuffed boots. “Since we were little, Thanatos spoke of ruling the Underworld in place of Hades. We all heard his fantastical stories.” The ferryman met his mother’s eyes. “But he didn’t mention his plans to bring death to our kind and take it away from the humans.”
Stan’s gaze shifted from Nyx to Charon. “The other gods want your son to do his job, deliver the dead to our gates, that’s all. They call for his servitude to the job he was given by the Fates. But they need to find him first.” Stan shifted his shoulders to ease his bound hands. The wounds caused by Nyx’s wings stung. Some wept blood. “They hope to find mention of a place, or places, that mean something to Thanatos from my session notes. Maybe a place from his childhood? He spoke once about creating his own world. Do you know anything about that?”
Nyx whirled around and seemed to glide over to the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out to the river Styx. Her silhouette was a black cutout against the flames from the fire pots lining the mighty river. “My children are my legacy. More than the night, the skies, or the galaxies.” Her sigh was deep and dark. “Thanatos was my morbid child, his drawings dark and his speech coarse and scorching, as if he was made from the very pit of Tartarus.”
Stan played the silence, counting to seven, which always seemed the magic number for such things. And then he said, “Did your son have a favorite hiding place? Or holidaying with another relative?” The last question was a bit of a gamble. Questioning the values of a family member could get one’s hackles up. But Stan was willing to take the chance. Anything to make Persephone happy, to ease her pain. Even if that meant helping her find Hades, who had been missing for more than three weeks.
Charon crossed the room and stood next to his mother. He towered over her tall form. His broad shoulders and misshapen head were a strange and horrifying form against the outside firelight. Mother and son spoke in hushed tones.
Stan rolled his shoulders, easing the strain on his back and wishing he had his spa slippers on his feet. He felt better, more in charge, with snappy footwear that fit the occasion.
Nyx turned to Stan, and with a wave of her hand, the cords binding him dropped to the velvety cushion behind his back.
He eased his arms forward and rubbed the raw skin around his wrists.
“Charon reminded me of a place Thanatos spoke of when the world was younger. He drew a world into being with the magic of Tartarus. But that was a long time ago, and I haven’t heard of it since.”
A wing unfurled to cover the window, cutting all light from the room. Stan stood slowly in a nothingness that only unadulterated blackness could bring. It wrapped around him, tightening, encasing his body like an airless cocoon. Stan screamed. At least, he thought he did. The darkness was wet, shimmering as it dissolved, like stardust falling.
And then Stan stood alone in his green briefs. The sting of the small cuts on his skin had disappeared along with the darkness of Nyx. His spa slippers were tucked beneath his bed. He slid his feet into their furry plushness and shuffled a few steps to the right, grabbed the neck of the bourbon bottle, and strangling the glass, he poured a healthy shot down his parched throat. It didn’t help his thirst, but it would numb the reality of what his afterlife had become.
He took his bottle for a walk across his bedroom and into the large walk-in closet. The lights brightened into a soft glow as he opened the frosted glass doors. Stan sat on a round tufted seat in the middle of his shoe closet, admiring the many styles, materials, and brands he had accumulated through the years.
“I’m living the dream.” He took another deep drink, and then another.
He was sprawled out on the cool closet floor when he awoke to the bellowing of his alarm. His head clanged with a hellish ache, and the smell of moonflower remained on his skin.
TWO
Two large retina display monitors hung above a desk made of petrified wood. The only sound in the dimly lit room was a light scritch, scritch of a pen nib on an oversized tablet.
An endless row of windows, unshuttered, bared to the night sky, were to the left. There was no moon. Only stars. An endless cascade of glowing spheres splattered about by an overly wet end of a brush. Thanatos had painted them into the blue-black sky himself. A rolling cloud of gas, pink and green, expanded and collapsed like giant breathing lungs in the northernmost part of the stratosphere. A thin silver line split the sky and sea. Without it, there would be no way to distinguish between the two, the reflection in the water bright and vibrant as the sky.
Scritch, scritch. He darkened the shadows on the promotional image he was working on.
Here, the god of death was the god of everything. That was the way he’d created it.
Thanatos had learned at an early age that magic was in his blood. The kind of magic he could manipulate with pen, ink, and paint. As kids, Thanatos, and his brother Phobetor, the god of nightmares, had been banished for a day and night in the bowels of Tartarus. It was there the brothers discovered the magic of art and dreams. They told each other stories to keep their minds from straying too far into the dark caves of Cronus’s domain, where giants, murderous beings, and sharp-fanged beasts picked meat off the carcasses tossed in to keep them from starving.
The boys’ stories were thick with fantastical adventures and flame-mouthed beasts. Phobetor told of a water serpent rising from the river Styx, breathing its fiery breath on them. Its massive tail bashing the rock above their heads to bury them alive. When he said the words, it was made so. From the cold water in the depths of the cave, a large lizard-like head surfaced. In the dirt at his feet, Thanatos drew the beast’s eyes with his fingers, placed horns on the beast’s head, needle-sharp fangs in its maw—not long in length, but rows and rows of them—along with a serpent body that writhed and curled under and above the water. The beast’s skin gleamed as it rose from water. Phobetor cried out, “Bang, bang, smash,” and the beast beat the rock ceiling of the cave with its mighty tail until earth rained down on the boys. Thanatos shielded his head while drawing an escape tunnel for them in the dirt.
It was then they knew that the depth and width of their imaginations were the only things that could stop them. It was merely a week later when they began to create their own world. This world.
Thanatos placed the pen in its holder and shook out his fingers. He flared the tips of his wings, the black feathers dipped in gold. He made himself larger, darker, almost endless with the ever-growing expanse of his wings. He stretched, arching his broad back, cracking his tattooed fingers. The inked words death comes seemed to leap off his flexed fingers. The dark letters, one on each finger, contrasted his ash-gray skin.
There was something about using a tablet and pen that cramped him up. He’d never felt that way sketching with pen and paper but drawing on the tablet sped up production and brought their stories to life quicker than before.
Thanatos cracked his knuckles and watched the monitor. The image on the right screen flickered every three seconds, rendering a heavily shadowed arm jerked back to reveal a still-pumping heart clutched in a bloodied hand. A single long vein slapped against the bodiless arm before it was plunged back into the chest cavity of a faceless man. The arm plunged in and out, flickered, and plunged again. Thanatos had found that animated monster gifs were a new fan favorite. He used them for everything—advertising, on their website to promote their comic series, and he embedded at least one in every chapter of the digital versions of
their books. Their fans could easily share the gifs on most platforms, although the level of gore sometimes got them blacklisted. That suited the god of death just fine. It meant his art evoked something. Horror. And of course, that was the whole point.
Thanatos grinned as he watched his latest gif. The vertical barbell that pierced through the top and bottom of his lower lip clicked against his teeth.
Behind him, the heavy-duty bolt lock slid open with a loud shlick. He preferred the kind of lock with wheels, pins, and combination dials to the high-tech retinal scans. Anyone could pluck out an eyeball and hold it up to the scanner for access, but a good ol’ combination, well, that was harder to tear out of a person.
It was early morning, and typically, this side of the tower stood empty between dusk and dawn, all but for the sons of Nyx. Sleepless nights were in Thanatos’s DNA.
Without turning around, he checked the star dial watch around his wrist and said, “Thought you were otherwise occupied, brother, what with all the sleeping minds ripe for nightmares.”
Phobetor shuffled his feet, stopped, and waited a few seconds while the vault door resealed itself with a clang and the click of the lock.
Thanatos placed his boots on his desktop, careful of the keyboard and tablet. He leaned back in his chair, eyes on the gif. “I can tell by your shallow breathing that you are either wearing your deranged pug dog face or there’s a glitch in our plan to wreak havoc on both the Underworld and Overworld.” Locking his fingers behind his head, Thanatos gave the slyest of smirks. “Which is it, brother?”
“I haven’t put on the pug face in more than a decade, so I guess that leaves me the bearer of bad news.” There was a thump and the shuffling of feet and grinding of a small rock under a wheel. Phobetor, sitting in an ergonomic chair at one workstation, glide-walked it over to Thanatos’s desk, rolling to a stop beside his brother. “Turn on the cameras. Section D.” Beady black eyes popped from the bird mask Phobetor wore. The long thin beak clicked shut every time he swallowed. A red plume of feathers fanned out over his head.