by S. A. Hunt
“House of the Rising Sun, huh? Groovy. Was your mother a tailor?”
“I have no mother. None that I remember.”
“So, you don’t have a name-name?”
“If I ever chose for myself a name, I do not remember it. Only what I have been given.” She held her hand up to a peephole light and Robin glimpsed a woman strolling down a forest path in the sun. She was startled to recognize a twenty-years-younger Marina Valenzuela, all the gray gone from her hair, the wrinkles erased, her eyes bright and clear.
“You said you’re taking me to my mom?”
“You will not be here long,” said the Mother of Rivers. “The power of the Queen of the Earth is going to send you back soon. I have taken it upon myself to bring you to your mother while you are here, because it is going to be a long time before you return.”
“The Queen of the Earth?” asked Robin, stopping in the hallway.
“You know her as the goddess of death Ereshkigal. To the Greeks she is known as Hecate.”
“Oh.”
Robin eyed the door, the one that led to Marina’s personal afterlife. “Is there any way I can take this one back to Earth with me?”
“No,” said the Mother of Rivers.
“Why not?”
Instead of answering, the cow-headed goddess turned and walked deeper into the maze. Reluctantly, Robin tore herself away from Marina’s door and followed. “Why not?” she tried again. “She’s got a daughter she needs to take care of. She’s got unfinished business. Ain’t that why ghosts always get stuck on Earth?”
No answer.
“I mean, not that I want her to be a ghost—she needs a body and shit.”
Nothing.
“You sure we can’t swing it, just this once?”
They moved on. The god’s obstinance irked Robin significantly, but what was she going to do, challenge a deity? That didn’t sound like it would end well.
Still.…
“So, Western Sizzlin’, what does Queen of the Earth mean? Does Ereshkigal actually rule the world?”
“Once,” the god said, “a long time ago, when I was young. A beautiful queen of the ancients, a half-god with immense powers gifted to her by the Father of the Moon. But she was exiled to the Desert of Anguish for murdering her sister, and there she has been ever since, scheming to return to her kingdom.”
“And that’s where my knowledge begins. Thanks for the backstory.”
The Mother of Rivers stopped in the middle of the hallway. Even when she was standing still, the floor groaned and complained as if it were about to come apart under her feet. The ceiling was at least twelve or thirteen feet tall, and the cow-horns protruding from her skull often came very close to upsetting the china lanterns. “We are here,” she said. No expectation in her black bovine eyes or, really, any emotion at all. All of her personality was in her voice. She was monumental, immovable, stoic.
“Lady of Joy, huh?”
Approaching the door nearest the Mother of Rivers, Robin held her hand in front of the peephole.
In the palm of her hand were two faint smudges of light—a little portable television, and sitting in front of it, the recliner where Robin spent her childhood watching Saturday cartoons. Her skin crawled with recognition.
Sitting in the recliner was a very familiar woman.
“Mom,” said Robin.
The Mother of Rivers said nothing, but the nothing sounded like agreement.
“Why is it so dark in there?” Robin peered at the picture in her hand. “Not much of a Heaven. That ain’t her personal Hell, is it? To sit in the dark for all eternity?”
“I told you what these rooms contain.”
“You did.”
“If you could see what is on that television, you would know what your mother is in want of.”
Suddenly, Robin very much wanted to open that door and walk through it.
So, she did.
* * *
Warm summer breezes came wafting through the window-screen, carrying the soft chirp of crickets. She was in the Winnebago—hers, the Brave that was supposed to be smashed into a guardrail somewhere in the Texas scrublands—but the thing was in pristine condition and it was nighttime outside. The little kitchen booth was removed, replaced by the recliner, and the weapons Robin had bracketed onto the walls were now ceramic figurines of foxes and fox Beanie Babies. Her mother loved foxes.
On the little black-and-white television, Kenway and the others were kneeling beside her lifeless half-demon body on Fort Bostock’s rain-soaked tarmac. Robin and Annie watched her friends mourn or perhaps wait patiently for something to happen. Elisa had gone to the truck to comfort Carly, but Kenway and the magicians were still kneeling in a huddle around Robin’s corpse.
“Hi, Mama.”
“Hey, baby.”
“Where do you go when I can’t see you?” she asked. “When you’re not around—where are you? Here?”
Annie seemed to mull it over. “Yes, I’m here. When I run out of steam and I can’t hold on to the real world anymore, I snap back here. Not a bad place. Warm. Quiet. A damn sight better than Marilyn Cutty’s tree. Little bit like a phone going back on the charger. I can still see what’s going on with you, but it feels far away, like you’re a TV show and I’m watching you on a little portable television.” She pointed at the tiny Magnavox. “This one. Like the kind we used to have when you were little.”
“The one we took camping.” Robin took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, surveying the facsimile of her now-destroyed RV. “Pretty nice, actually. I could use a little peace and quiet.”
“Oh … no, honey, not yet,” said Annie.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not your time.”
A childish petulance Robin hadn’t experienced for a long time came over her just then. “Why not? Why can’t I stay here with you? Why do I have to go back?” The petulance evolved into a panicky knot in the middle of her chest. “If I ever had a debt in my life, fuck, fuck, I’ve repaid it a thousand times over. The notches on my gun, those horrible people I took out—the pedophile in Florida, the rapist in Louisiana, the serial killer in Oregon—and God, all the witches. All those fucking witches. I’ve been shot at, bitten, stabbed, cut, burned up. I’m like fucking Rasputin over here.” She just stared at her friends on the little TV, shaking her head. “I died yesterday and now I’m dying again today. How many times do I have to die before I make up for those child molesters, rapists, killers? I’m ready to pay off this loan and stick a fork in it. Yeah, I hurt them, ran them out of town, got them arrested. Killed them. Hey, the state does it. All I’m doing is cutting out the middleman.” The more she spoke, the faster the words tumbled out. “If I didn’t stop them, they’d just keep on hurting people. The system is bullshit. The system doesn’t work. I—”
“Baby.”
“I’m not Batman!” Robin continued trying to rationalize. “Killing these assholes doesn’t make me as bad as they are! Doesn’t make me a monster! There’s a line and they cross it! They’re not innocent, and I’m not a monster!”
“Baby,” said Annie, touching Robin’s arm, trying to calm her.
Robin flinched from her mother’s hand—not in horror, but in surprise. She’d visualized her mother regularly since last Halloween, but Annie had never been tangible before.
“You touched me!”
“Come here,” said Annie, reaching out to her daughter.
The sounds of sobbing came from the people gathered around her body. Kenway was on his knees, his forehead on Robin’s lifeless chest, and he was crying his eyes out.
“Damn,” said Robin, sighing in defeat. “Damn.”
She wrapped her arms around Annie and gave her mother the biggest hug she thought she’d ever given anybody.
“You’re not being punished, honey,” Annie said over Robin’s shoulder. “I know you think you are because you’ve dealt with so much these past few years. This is just part of being a hero. Most of th
e time, the good guy gets the shit end of the stick. Know what I mean? We can’t win ’em all, but we can keep fighting. That’s the point, isn’t it? Winning isn’t what makes you a hero; it’s continuing when you lose. And as a hero, you’re helping good people. You’re keeping them safe. What’s that quote? ‘We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.’ And who said you had to be a man to be rough?”
Her daughter only clutched her tighter.
“Being bad means doing the easy thing. Being good means doing the hardest thing. You’re not an easy woman. That’s not how I, or Heinrich, bless his rotten heart, raised you.”
“Don’t leave me again,” she said into Annie’s shoulder, squeezing.
“I never did.” Annie freed herself from Robin’s desperate embrace. “All right. Time to go.” She smiled, holding the girl’s shoulders. “Kick it in the ass, kiddo. Nobody is gonna beat my daughter. I meant what I said—you’re a rough woman. Go out there and do your work.”
Same feeling of patronized relief came over Robin as those halcyon days of skinned knees and emergency cookies. “How am I supposed to get back?” Robin stared at the TV version of herself, sprawled on the ground, covered in blood. “Look at me—I’m dead as hell.”
Strange knowledge twinkled in her mother’s eye. “Go find Marina, daughter of mine. My little hellion.”
“Marina?” Robin asked, confused. “I saw her Heaven door, but—”
“Trust me,” Annie said, smiling. “Get out of here. Go find Marina. Ereshkigal, she knows you’re here; she’s looking for you. She’s coming.”
“I don’t understand. What am—”
“Did you forget what I am?” Rising from her chair, Annie turned off the camp television. “I am inseparably linked to Ereshkigal through my heart-road, even without a flesh body.” Something about hearing her mother mention having a heart-road—a term she’d been associating with witches, these raving, shark-toothed hags that had chased her screaming down dark alleyways and slashed at her arms with dirty fingernails—caught Robin mid-stride, gave her a cold, hollow feeling, as if she’d been scooped empty and refilled with a breeze from a cellar door. “I’m like a Marine; just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I stop being a witch.” She led Robin to the RV’s door. “Go find Marina. Take her back with you; take her back to the living world. For Carly.”
“How?”
“You’ll figure it out, little demon.”
The blunt way her mother said demon took Robin by surprise, leaving her further disoriented and maybe a little offended. She gave Annie a strange look, as if seeing a new facet of her for the first time. “Even if I could, Mom, I don’t think the rules say I can do that.” She pointed at the door. “Becky Buttermilk out there said no. I already asked.”
“Since when have you let a little thing like no stop you?” Annie peered into Robin’s eyes, fists on her hips. “What’s she gonna do, throw you out?” She opened the RV door. “Go. I’ll be right behind you,” she said, and shoved Robin through it.
Track 38
Back in the celestial hallways of Cosmotelluria, Robin tried to gain her bearings. To her relief, the Mother of Rivers wasn’t waiting to ambush her. “How now, brown cow?” Robin murmured to herself, taking off at a power-walk pace, eyes dancing over the doors and their luminary peepholes. Wandering through the maze of corridors, she tried to backtrack to where she thought she remembered seeing Marina’s heaven in the palm of her hand. “How the hell am I supposed to get you past the Lady of Joy and Cheese?” A beam of light across her fingers. A small woman in thick glasses perused the stacks in a huge library, accompanied by a tall, thin dog.
Behind the next door, a man rode a golf cart through what looked like an abandoned Walmart.
The door after that yielded a woman sitting at a table in a crowded coffee shop, happily sipping a foamy latte, watching customers come and go. “Where are you, Marina?” she asked the darkness. The lamps did not ignite for her the way they did for the cow-god, so Robin crept through cloistered hallways illuminated only by the soft cones of light.
Holding up another hand, she inspected the image. A man sitting on a stool overlooking a desolate beach, painting the landscape on a huge easel.
Behind her, the floor creaked. Lamp glow gave shape to the doorframes.
Looking over her shoulder, Robin saw the familiar bulk of the Mother of Rivers striding toward her, the galaxy between her horns a distant smear of light in the darkness. The lamps came to life as she walked, extinguishing in her wake.
“No,” said the witch-hunter, pointing. “I’m doing this, Elsie. You can’t stop me. I’m taking her home.”
The cow-god followed, inexorable, ponderous, each peephole-light flashing bucolic scenes across her chest and face as she passed. Her massive, sloping shoulders cut an ominous silhouette. She said nothing, but Robin had the idea that, for a god, elaborating on no was probably unnecessary. Gods had no need to rationalize their edicts and decisions. This was her domain.
Another peepshow. A man riding a roller coaster. A woman sitting in a window nook, watching rain fall onto a gleaming gray city. A woman in a mid-century modern living room, covered in a horde of puppies.
Robin began to panic. “Where are you, Marina? We need to go.”
Over her shoulder: the Mother of Rivers was right behind her, no more than twenty feet away. Robin held up her hand to another light. “Come on, come on.” A man eating a huge sandwich in a New York bodega. “Come on, where are you?” A woman climbing a mountain in the badlands.
The third peephole made Robin’s breath catch in her throat. Marina Valenzuela strolled through idyllic storybook woods. “Jackpot,” she said, and a fist like steel closed on the lank curls of her hair.
She wrenched around to face the Mother of Rivers.
“You were warned,” the god said imperiously, sternly, but not evilly. Not meanly. “Marina Valenzuela cannot go back with you. Death—real death—takes something from those who pass beyond its walls. It exacts a toll.”
“What’s that something?”
The cow-god did not answer.
“Part of her soul? Is that what it takes? Like it’s some kind of spiritual currency, or train ticket?”
Her hair was still gripped in the Mother’s immense fist, holding her fast. Robin realized that the god wasn’t entirely cow, just her head and shoulders—the rest of her was human, familiar, if gargantuan in frame and musculature. The Mother of Rivers was truly enormous, she saw now. The galaxy between her horns spiraled silently, glittering in the dark like the finest tinsel.
Robin waited for further elaboration. “That all you got?”
The cow-god said nothing else.
“Then peace out, Steak ’n Shake. I don’t have time for these games, and at this point, I’m willing to take the risk,” said Robin, and she put her foot on the cow-god’s thigh and twisted. Hair ripped free of her scalp with a brief stab of pain, leaving the Mother holding a clump of chestnut locks.
“She won’t remember,” said the Mother of Rivers, tossing the hair on the floor. “That is the toll, witch-hunter. When you pass into your after, you are freed of your memories, for good or ill. Freed of your regrets and pain. You give up your broken heart. That’s what Heaven is.”
“Sublime contentment,” said Robin, the doorknob warm in her hand.
“And Hell,” said the cow-god, “is sublime regret.”
“That’s the joke,” said Robin.
“That’s the joke,” the cow-god replied, presenting the first bit of levity she’d seen out of that terrifying face since she’d set foot in this weird labyrinth.
“You give up your broken heart.”
“Yes.”
“Why would I ever want to do that? My broken heart is what makes me who I am. It’s my best feature.”
“If you go in there after the woman,” said the Mother of Rivers, “Hell is going to come looking for you. It seeks t
hose who do not belong, the lost ones, the trespassers. It is the Great Corrector. And it will punish you.”
Robin opened the door.
“Fuckin’ bring it,” she said, and stepped through.
* * *
Gilded sunlight filtered through emerald treetops, shattering softly across feathery grass. The air was kind with strong, sweet honeysuckle. Robin found herself following an earthen path. She blinked, taking it all in, and screwed her fists into her eyes—something about this was strangely romantic, all the colors were a little too saturated, the details a little too blurry, as if she were looking at it through a lens smeared with Vaseline, like old Hollywood used to do for Ingrid Bergman and Rita Hayworth. But it felt fake, like painted scenery on a stage.
She hated it.
“Marina?” she asked the stillness.
No answer but birdsong that had the canned quality of a recording being played on a public address system.
“Okay,” she said, pushing her hands through what hair she had left, “enough screwing around. I need to find Marina and get out of here.” Cupping her hands around her mouth, she began to yell. “Marina! MARRIIIINAAAA! Where are you?”
Cresting a small hill, she slipped through a tangle of supple pine branches and found herself looking down at a crystalline lake of a pale, tired aquamarine blue. Sunlight glittered across its surface. Jutting out into the brilliance was a long wooden dock, and sitting at the end were two people holding fishing poles.
“Marina?” she called. “Is that you?”
Coming closer, she realized that one of them had goat horns not unlike her own broken antlers. The horned figure turned to admonish her, and Robin saw that he had no shirt on, or really any clothes at all, except for a red scarf. What she’d thought were pants were actually a coarse, woolly coat of hair. He wasn’t a devil; he was some kind of goat-man.
“Not so loudly!” he said, “You’ll scare away all the fish.”
“What the fuck?”
The horned figure scowled. “Don’t be a boor, ma’am.” Marina cast an annoyed glance over her shoulder and went back to fishing.