“The big deal is that there are dozens of kinds of asphodel in the lands of the living, but this kind grows only in the lands of the dead. Persephone wears crowns made of them. Which means they’re sacred to her, and picking them isn’t likely to endear you.”
“See, that is an argument I can get behind.” I straighten, tucking my hands into my pockets to prevent any further temptation. The gesture jostles my backpack, reminding me that it’s still there, which reminds me in turn—“Why are you still hauling your suitcase around?”
“What would you have suggested? That I leave it on the Tube and trigger a bomb scare?”
“Well, when you put it like that . . .”
We resume walking, the living ghost and the woman who’s spent her life on the dead. The feeling of closeness doesn’t go away, but the small white flowers become more and more common, their spreading petals perfuming the air with a scent that’s a little like lilies, and a little like baby’s breath, and a lot like my mother’s perfume, which is impossible, because no one’s made my mother’s perfume in decades. The scent of it is leaden in my nostrils. I have to fight to keep breathing it in.
“Is this all?” I ask. “We just walk?”
“For now,” says Laura. “There may be trials. There may not.”
“If this used to happen so often that they had a specific word for it, you’d think someone would have written it down.”
“Lots of people did,” says Laura, looking briefly amused. “Most of the time they started with ‘sing, o Muses,’ and from there, went into rhapsodies about the life choices of some demigod or other, someone who chose to risk everything in the Underworld for whatever reason. But it was different for everyone. No two people got the same journey down. Maybe because no two people were going to ask the same thing of the dead.”
There’s a lot I want to ask the dead. Mostly, though, I just want to ask if I can come home. I worry my lip between my teeth and keep walking. The glow from the flowers gets brighter, until I realize that it isn’t them at all—or at least, not entirely them. Most of the light is coming from the tunnel ahead of us, where a thin membrane has been stretched between the walls.
It gleams like opal and shimmers like starlight, bands of bright color rippling across its surface. I stop where I am, staring at it. I want to touch it. I want to turn and run the other way. Somehow, these desires aren’t contradictory at all: they make perfect, painful sense.
“It’s the only way forward,” I say.
“Yes,” says Laura, glancing at me, like she’s measuring my response.
I am Rose Marshall. I am the girl in the green silk gown, even if my dress has gone to dust along with the rest of me. I don’t run away from soap bubbles. Chin high and shoulders back, I say, “Only one way forward,” and step into the membrane.
It wraps around me like a piece of tissue paper, glowing and glittering and smelling of asphodel. Then it bursts, and I’m stepping through onto the scarred-up wood floor of the Buckley High School auditorium. Paper streamers and balloons hang everywhere, like a few decorations can hide the fact that we’re at school, we’re at stupid school, because there’s no money to hire a hall, not even the Grange. There’s no money to let us have a night out, not with the town still licking its wounds from the war. Seven years gone, and you’d think our boys who fought and died in Europe were still warm in their graves, with the way there’s never any money for anything.
But when I tilt my head and look at the ceiling, it’s all silver stars and fairy lights, white and twinkling and perfect, and when I squint I can almost believe we’re somewhere spinning through the cosmos, somewhere shining and distant and better than here, so much better than here.
A hand touches my shoulder. I turn. Gary smiles at me, so handsome in his suit, hair slicked back until it looks like the sleek brown shell of a roasted chestnut, and I want to break that perfection, I want to run my fingers through it until everyone knows he’s mine, he’s mine, and I’m never letting him go.
It’s nineteen fifty-two, and I’m in love like no one has ever been before or ever will be again. Everyone who came before us was just playing when they said they understood what love was. We’re mapping an undiscovered country, Gary and me, and I want to keep charting it with him until we’re both old and gray.
“Where are you, Rosie?” he asks, and taps my forehead lightly with one finger. “You’re supposed to be here with me tonight. I got all dressed up and everything.”
“Says the guy who didn’t have to buy a dress,” I tease. I don’t mean it. I look amazing in this dress and I know it, better than I’ve ever looked before. People keep looking, and it’s just what I want them to do. Everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. We’ll dance, and we’ll drink bad punch, and we’ll clap when they crown the prom king and queen, and then we’ll go up to Dead Man’s Curve and I’ll let him put his hands beneath my skirt, I’ll let him show me what to do. I love him. He loves me. High school is almost over, and it’s time for us to start thinking about our futures.
I can’t think of a single future worth wanting where Gary isn’t there.
The band is playing “You Belong to Me.” The floor is a sea of swaying, pastel-clad bodies. I glance wistfully over at them, and Gary catches my chin between his thumb and forefinger, pulling my gaze back to him.
“Would you like to dance?” he asks.
“Would I ever,” I say, and smile, and he leads me out onto the dance floor, and everything is the way it was always meant to be, and everything is perfect. He puts his hands around my waist and I put my arms around his neck and my head against his shoulder and we sway to the music while the rest of the room seems to fade away, taking the gossip and the glares and the looming shadow of the future with it. This moment, right here, is the one I wish could last forever.
My corsage is a flowering froth of pink rosebuds and green baby’s breath and little white flowers I don’t quite recognize, which seem almost to glow. Their perfume is like nothing else I’ve ever smelled. I breathe it in. I close my eyes. The music is soft and Gary is firm and I know—I know—that if I let this keep happening, the night will finally go the way it always should have gone. Me and him, alive and young and innocent and stupid, up on Dead Man’s Curve. His skin against mine, his mouth at my throat. And tomorrow, prom night, and every tomorrow from here until eternity. It will never get boring. It will never get old. It will only be perfect, over and over again forever, me and Gary and the girl I was, the one I buried, the one I left behind.
Reluctantly, I push myself away from him. The cloth of his suit is rough beneath my hands, and the look on his face is pure shock, painful and confused. Oh, Gary. I know he’s not real, I know none of this is real, and I still want to fall back into his arms, just to take that look away.
“You made it to my house,” I say softly. “You picked me up on time. My brother’s car is parked in the driveway. Bobby Cross found some other girl to kill. It would be in the morning papers, if we were ever going to see the morning papers. There always has to be a sacrifice.”
“Rose? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you, and me, and the prom we never had.” I lean forward, and I kiss him. I kiss this version of him like this version of me never dared, like the world is coming to an end and no one’s going to judge me for being young, and foolish, and in love.
I kiss him like I should have kissed him all those years ago.
He stares at me when I pull away. He’s not the only one. Half our classmates—people whose names I forgot years ago, who’ve gone to the silence of their own graves, one way or another—are gaping, shocked by my wanton willingness to do what most of them are dying to do.
I smile. I salute, two fingers to my forehead and a quick outward snap. It’s a gesture that won’t catch on until the mid-seventies, and it leaves them looking even more confused.
&nbs
p; “You were great,” I say. “Lovely people. I’d say I was sorry I didn’t appreciate you when this was real, except I’m not, since most of you were assholes. I hope you had wonderful lives. Please, go back to your lotus-eating.” I turn before any of them can respond, and walk across the room to the exit.
The metal bar on the gym door is undecorated, unadorned. I shove it open, revealing the glimmering membrane on the other side.
“Nice try,” I say, and step through.
* * *
The grass is gone, replaced by a smooth stone path that’s probably slippery as hell when wet. The air still smells like asphodel. Laura is nowhere to be seen. That’s going to be a problem. I need her to play Orpheus when all this is over. I’m back in modern clothes, which is a letdown for the first time ever: if this funhouse can give me my dress to fuck with me, you’d think it could let me keep it. I miss the swirl of silk around my ankles, the feeling that I know who I am and where I’m going.
There’s nothing to be done for it. The membrane is still there, but I’m not diving back into a fantasy just to change my clothes. The walls are still deep velvet shadows, spangled with the glowing stars of asphodel flowers. I sit down on the path and begin using my thumbnail to dredge the dirt from beneath the rest of my fingernails. And I wait.
And I wait.
And I’m starting to think I may need to go on without her when the membrane pulses, bursts, and deposits a shaking, sobbing Laura on the path. I lunge to my feet, rushing to help her up. She grips my arms, raising her head to stare at me with wide, wet eyes.
“Tommy,” she says, and breaks into another series of sobs.
What did it show her? Another outcome of that fateful race, one where Tommy walked away free and clear, and they were able to run into the future together? Or—somehow more likely—an ordinary day in an ordinary apartment, one unclogged with demonology texts, one where the closet space was shared and maybe there was a dog. One where two people who loved each other had been allowed to grow up and grow older side by side, changing as only the living can change, becoming better, becoming more. One where she got her happy ending.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I help her to her feet, suddenly, uncomfortably aware of how thin she is, of how much of herself she’s spent on her lifelong pursuit of vengeance against a dead woman. I won’t say I ruined her life—Tommy’s the one who chose to race—but I’ve been her focus for so long that I’m not sure she ever had anything else.
She and Gary are two sides of the same coin, the living wasting their lives on the dead, and it aches to know how much we’ve hurt them without ever intending to.
Laura wipes her eyes, turning her face away. “A little late for that,” she says.
Her suitcase is gone. So is my backpack. This place is stripping away our material possessions, piece by piece, and that would be a good thing—who the hell wants to haul a suitcase through the Underworld?—if it didn’t make me worry that we were never going to need them again. That we were going to stay here, trapped forever, among the asphodel.
“We have to keep moving,” I say.
“Yes,” says Laura, voice still thick with tears. “We do.”
The path is smooth and easy, descending slowly beneath our feet, like it doesn’t want to trouble us by making us risk a fall. It’s not comforting. We’re walking into the Underworld, if we’re not already there, and that sort of descent shouldn’t be comforting. If anything, it should be difficult, verging on impossible.
Laura seems to share my concern. She frowns, looking around. “There should have been a river by now,” she mutters. “We should have crossed the Acheron before we got anywhere near the first trial.”
“What’s that?”
“The river of woe. It’s where the dead pay Charon the Ferryman to carry them across.”
“Ah.” I frown. “Is it a real river, or only a river for dead people?”
“Both. The ancient Greeks believed the real river extended all the way down into the lands of the dead.”
“Okay. So you had to cross the river to get into the Underworld?”
“To reach the entrance.”
“Right. Sort of like paying to get into an underground transit system that flows all through a city, while being guided by a headless horseman? Because I’m sort of thinking that was what got us to the entrance.”
Laura stops walking, going pale. I stop in turn, not letting myself get ahead of her. I need to follow the rules if I want to get out of this.
“Pippa was our Ferryman,” she says, in a hushed voice. “That means we’ve already passed . . . damn.” She closes her eyes. “We’ve passed under the elm. The false dreams didn’t catch us. Next should be some sort of monster.”
“Monsters, I can do.” Monsters will almost be a relief.
Laura opens her eyes and gives me a dubious look. “Have you ever ‘done’ a monster while you could bleed?”
“No.”
“If you die here, you die. The idea is to get you to the exit alive and then fail to save you, not to get you killed by something made of teeth and talons.”
What sort of ghost would that make me? Not the right kind, that’s for sure. I shudder. “Then I guess we’d better be careful.”
“Guess so,” Laura agrees.
We start walking again. The slope is more severe now, the ground bending more quickly under our feet. It’s like by acknowledging that we were in the Underworld, we gave it more of a hold over us. The glow of the asphodel is still the only light we have. I wish my corsage had stayed with me when I left the phantom prom. Maybe I could have used it as a flashlight.
The road evens out. The walls drop away, and we are standing in a vast cavern. At the far end is an archway, too big to be called a door, stretching almost to the vaulted ceiling. Standing in the middle of it is a dog the size of a bear, with three heads and snakes surrounding them, spade-headed and terrifying. The dog is chained in place. That’s good.
It starts to growl when it sees us. That’s bad.
“Well shit,” I say, and there has never been a truer statement, not in the history of mankind.
Chapter 19
All Dogs Are Good Dogs
“THAT’S CERBERUS,” says Laura. There’s a dazed note in her voice, like she can’t believe any of this is actually happening. An eighty-year-old teenager sends us to England to follow a headless horseman to a secret doorway into the Greek Underworld, hidden inside the Elgin Marbles? Okay, sure. The path to Persephone includes walking through a lotus-eater’s paradise of everything we ever thought we wanted, forcing us to reject the futures we always thought were ours by right? Sucks to be us, but fine. Three-headed dog covered in snakes?
Nope. Big nope. Hard pass, do not continue forward, do not go anywhere near the jaws that bite, the claws that catch.
The dog—Cerberus, his name is Cerberus, and I learned about him when I was in grammar school, removing him was one of the labors of Hercules, which means it’s totally unfair for him to be here now—continues to growl. Laura puts a hand on my arm, restraining me. It’s not necessary. I wasn’t going to charge the three-headed dog with the snakes growing out of his back. That’s another thing. Why does the dog have snakes growing out of his back? This is entirely unreasonable. I do not approve.
“He guards the exit from the Underworld, to keep the dead from leaving.” Laura sounds like she’s about to faint. “The jaws of his canine heads can snap a strong man’s spine in a single bite. The venom from his serpent heads can turn the blood to dust in your veins. It took a demigod to defeat him. Once. Only once. He’s never been beaten, save by Hercules.”
I turn and frown at her. “He guards the exit from the Underworld,” I echo carefully, “to keep the dead from leaving. But there’s more than one exit, right? Hades and Persephone weren’t planning to send us back out via the giant monster doggie door.”
Laura nods silently.
“Okay. Great.” I shrug off her restraining hand. “Let’s go.”
“Yes.” She sags in relief. “We should still be able to go back from here. We should—” She stops talking mid-sentence. Good. That means she’s realized I’m not turning around. I don’t look back to see her expression, tempting as it is. We’re close enough to our goal that I don’t know if I’m allowed to look back anymore. I will not lose this on a technicality. I won’t.
Cerberus growls louder as I grow closer. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and my skin crawls, every inch of me anticipating pain, pain, pain. I keep walking until I’m right in front of the beast, close enough that he could probably get me if he really tried.
“Hello,” I say.
The growling stops. Cerberus cocks his head, looking at me. His eyes are intelligent. Too intelligent for an ordinary dog. He’s like a Maggy Dhu, a Black Dog of the Dead, only bigger and with more heads and also a lot of snakes. He’s nothing like a Maggy Dhu at all, except for those eyes. Those eyes, that tell me he understands more than any dog has any business understanding. When I speak, he listens.
“My name is Rose Marshall,” I say, pressing a hand flat against my chest. Maybe not my best idea: I can feel my heart pounding, and every beat is one step closer to my own demise. This whole “physical flesh that can age and die” thing is bullshit. “I’m not currently dead, but I was once, and I’m here because I’m hoping I can be again. My friend back there tells me you’re the one who guards the door to make sure the dead don’t escape.”
Cerberus ducks his heads, all three of them, coming a few inches closer to me. He inhales, six nostrils pulling in vast jets of air. Then he snorts. The smell of dog breath is nearly overwhelming.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know. This whole resurrection thing wasn’t my idea. I’m here to set things right, and I guess what I’m wondering is . . . if you guard the door to make sure the dead don’t get out, is it your job to make sure the living don’t get in?”