Croak (12 page)

“Not exactly. It’s more like whatever you want it to be. You can do anything—hang out with all your dead relatives, eat donuts all day, go skiing for months at a time—”

“Rue the day you were born,” moaned a thin man with a black mustache, digging through a nearby pile of debris and seemingly carrying on a conversation with the sleek, dignified raven sitting on his shoulder. “I
told
you it wasn’t here, Quoth. Has anyone seen my cravat?” he shouted to no one in particular.

Lex fell right out of her hammock. “What the—are you
Poe?
”

“Regrettably.” He sighed, smoothing his pants. “Call me Edgar. Or the Tell-Tale Fart, that’s Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite.” He shot a distasteful glance at the crowd of presidents. “Jerks.”

“Wow.” Lex blushed, starstruck for the first time in her life. “Um, how are things?”

“Lamentable.”

Lex looked at Driggs. He shrugged.

“O . . . kay,” she said, reboarding the hammock and looking around for walls or a ceiling, neither of which she could find. “How big is this place?”

“Huge,” Driggs said. “Bigger than anything you can imagine. It contains almost everyone who’s ever died—”

“Almost everyone?”

“—and has room enough for everyone who eventually will die. It has to be gigantic. But you can live wherever you want—”

Edgar let out a snort.

“Sorry,
go
wherever you want,” Driggs said. “Deserts, oceans, glaciers, the Land of Oz, outer space—anything you can dream up. Some souls have even created entire planets just for themselves.”

“Like Mozartopia,” Edgar said, sulking. Quoth resentfully ruffled his feathers.

“Can I see them?” Lex asked.

“No,” Edgar told her. “You’re still alive.”

“We can’t physically go past the atrium,” Driggs said, pointing. “Only the dead are allowed into the Void.”

She followed his finger into the distance, where the light intensified too brightly to see anything. “Why?”

“We’d get lost pretty quick. With billions of souls warping the space, it would be impossible for any of us mere mortals to find our way around. Plus, if we tried to stay even in the atrium for more than ten hours or so, we would start to, uh . . . how to put this lightly . . . die of exposure.”

She gave him a dubious look and was about to press further, but she got sidetracked as Thomas Jefferson walked by wielding a pair of homemade nunchucks. “They’re very nice, Tom,” Driggs told him. The founding father nodded proudly and scampered away.

“Why are there so many presidents here?” Lex asked.

“Because we’re the Grim town closest to where most of them died. Some volunteer to be ambassadors, and the rest just like to hang out in the atrium solely for the reactions. The looks on new souls’ faces when they meet dead presidents in the flesh, so to speak—those guys just eat it up.”

“So there really are other Grim towns?”

“All over the world,” said Driggs. “In the U.S. alone, there’s DeMyse on the West Coast—which I’m told looks like one big Oscar party—and Necropolis, the capital, in Kansas. Croak’s jurisdiction only covers the eastern third of the country.”

Lex shivered all over for a moment, the sort of shiver a person experiences when they realize how little they really know about the world.

She studied the Void. “So wait, what about religion and the Devil and all that?” She turned to Edgar. “Is there a God?”

Edgar’s face went blank. His mustache twitched.

“If there is, no one’s telling,” Driggs said. “The souls are very secretive about all that meaning-of-life stuff. That’s another reason the living aren’t allowed in any farther.”

“You’ll just have to wait your turn,” Edgar snipped.

Lex swung the hammock a little and looked up at the sky, or whatever it was. “So if this is heaven—”

“It’s
not
heaven,” Driggs said. “And it’s not hell. It’s the Afterlife. Completely neutral. It’s whatever you make of it.”

“Much like life,” Edgar said.

Lex thought for a moment. “But if there’s no hell,” she said, sitting up, “if there’s no chance of punishment afterward, then why even bother trying to be good while you’re alive? Isn’t there at least a pit of hungry snakes or something?”

Driggs shrugged. “Maybe. But we won’t find out until we get there.”

Lex angrily pointed to the crowd. “John Wilkes Booth! What is he doing here? And why do those people seem to actually like him?”

“I don’t,” Edgar said. “He stole my favorite quill.”

“But . . . no fire and brimstone for the bad guys?” Lex sputtered. “That’s just not fair!”

“Well, life’s not fair,” Driggs said quietly. “Why should death be any different?”

Lex fell silent.

“I should go,” Edgar said, giving Quoth a gentle pat. “Roosevelt’s probably turned my cravat into a pirate flag by now. Ingrate.”

“Okay,” Driggs said. “Later, Ed.”

Lex grumbled. “Sorry we weren’t better company.”

Edgar gave her a stately nod. “I enjoyed when you fell out of the hammock.”

Driggs watched him trudge away, then turned to a troubled Lex. “It’s a lot to digest, I know,” he said. “But it’ll sink in.” He stretched and got up from his makeshift seat, which melted back down into the ground. “We should probably take off, too. I still have to show you the Lair.” And it was just as well that they decided to leave, because by then an angry, frizzy-haired Mark Twain had arrived to chase them out of his hammock.

As they neared the vault door, Lex noticed a desk sculpted from the fluff, which the sudden blindness had prevented her from seeing before. “Omigod! Hi!” exclaimed the perky blond girl who sat behind it.

“Crap,” said Driggs.

“You’re Lex, aren’t you?” The girl jumped up and grabbed Lex by the shoulders, which her head barely reached. She wore a green sundress, a gold necklace, several bracelets, and a huge smile. “I’m Elysia. Sorry I couldn’t greet you on the way in, I was dealing with another one of Taft’s hissy fits. But I’m so glad you’re here! We’ve been waiting for you for forever. What happened to your eye? Have you already started Killing? I know you were going to stop by yesterday but then you didn’t so I’ve been wondering what you were up to. I manage the front desk in here, so I’m stuck inside all day. This is your first time to the Afterlife, huh? What do you think? Pretty cool? I told the presidents to behave when you arrived and it seems like they all acted okay. Ugh, except for McKinley. Bill!” She scolded into the distance. “He’s just so enchanted by the invention of boxer shorts that he can’t help showing them off. Personally, I think he might be a little retar—”

“Elysia!” Driggs interrupted. “Slow the hell down.”

She grinned at Lex. “Sorry. I talk a lot when I get excited.”

“That’s okay,” Lex said with an impish nod. “We all have our flaws. Driggs here loves
Titanic.
”

“Really??”

Driggs folded his arms and studied the girls. “I can already see the ramifications of an alliance between you two. And they are troublesome.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Elysia. She took Lex’s arm, her warm hazel eyes aglow in the brightness. “I’m so glad you’re here. These guys can be such idiots sometimes.”

A loud rapping clamored from behind the vault door. “I heard that!” Ferbus’s muffled voice rang out.

“Well, it’s true!” She gestured at the door. “He’s the grumpiest of all. The only thing that cheers that kid up is some quality alone time with his precious Nintendo.”

“Xbox!”

“Whatever!”

“Listen, shorty,” said Driggs, “we gotta run. I want to show her the Lair before lunch.”

“Ew.” A look of disgust spread across Elysia’s face. “Well, have fun with that.” She opened up the vault for them. “I get off for my break in a few minutes, we can go to lunch together! I can show you the Morgue, it’s really—”

“Yeah, we’ll be there, okay, bye,” said Driggs, shutting the door.

Lex frowned at him.

“What?” he said innocently. “Hey, I love the girl to death, but if you don’t actively stop her, she’ll talk herself right into a case of laryngitis.”

“Which makes her talk even more,” said Ferbus in a tone suggesting that he knew this all too well.

“I like her,” Lex was surprised to hear herself say. Driggs and Ferbus stared in disbelief.

As everyone knows, the only population more catty than a pack of actual cats is a clique of teenage girls. Back home, it sometimes seemed to Lex as though her violent beatings couldn’t cause nearly as much pain as the popular crowd’s sharp-tongued wickedness. Eventually it got so bad that she had come to forever swear off the possibility of friendship with another girl, aside from Cordy. But Elysia’s congeniality was infectious. It had been so long since Lex was on the receiving end of such well-intentioned exuberance from a female that it was impossible not to get excited about it.

“Anyway,” said Driggs, eyeing her strangely, “the Lair’s over here.” He walked across the room to the shiny black door, turned the handle, and stopped. He looked at Lex.

“If I’ve been reading you correctly—and I like to think that I have—I’m gonna guess that you’re not the type of person who will scream when we enter this room. But just in case I’m wrong—don’t scream. It disturbs them.”

“Them? More jellyfish?”

“Elysia screamed,” Ferbus said from his desk. “Even though you told her not to. Remember?”

“Hey!” Elysia’s muted voice came through the wall.

“In fact, if I recall correctly,” continued Ferbus, “I think she almost cried.”

“So?” the voice shot back. “Most sane people would! Seriously, you should put a warning sign on that room or something. One of these days it’s going to give some poor rookie a heart attack, because I know mine almost friggin’ exploded—”

Ferbus had begun slamming his head down on the desk. “Just go,” he said between pounds. “It could be a while.”

Driggs pushed the handle forward to reveal a dimly lit room. Draped in what looked like a terrific amount of velvet, the walls almost seemed be pulsating, though Lex couldn’t quite tell why—until Driggs snapped on the lights.

Covering the room from floor to ceiling were thousands of black widow spiders.

Lex wasn’t scared. She wasn’t even grossed out. She was transfixed, hypnotized by the rhythmic writhing of the massive colony, its shape heaving more like one gigantic organism than heaps of minuscule entities. Their shiny black bodies glimmered menacingly in the harsh fluorescent lighting.

“You okay?” asked Driggs, closing the door behind them.

“Yeah,” she whispered.

“You mind if I turn down the lights now that you’ve gotten a good look?” he said, returning to the dimmer. “They don’t like it so bright.”

“Sure, whatever,” Lex said, barely hearing him. The buzzing bulbs above them softened to a dull glow, and indeed, the spiders seemed to relax. Test tubes full of a pale liquid lined the wall next to the door, and a pile of Vessels sat in the corner. In the new lighting, the silken webs surrounding the hordes gave the room an ethereal, dreamlike quality.

“So these are my lovely ladies,” Driggs said, affectionately gazing around the room. “What do you think?”

“I think you must be a very lonely boy.”

He reached out his finger, allowing a large spider to crawl onto it. “You sure you want to mock the guy in charge of the venomous spider room?”

“Who in their right mind would put you in charge of anything?”

“Mort did, as soon as he started noticing I was hanging out with them all the time. Love at first sight, I guess.”

Lex snorted. “What are they for?”

“Here,” he said, casting a white blur into the air. “The fruits of their wee labors.”

Lex caught it and gave him an incredulous look. “Vessels are made from spider silk?”

“One of the strongest materials in the world.”

“Cool.” She picked at the soft fibers of the ball. “Is that it?”

“Is that
it?
A roomful of spiders toiling twenty-four hours a day to make thousands of Vessels per week, and you’re asking if that’s
it?
”

“Yeah.”

He grinned. “Actually, no, it’s not. We also extract their venom.”

“Why?”

“So we can isolate and make airborne the chemicals in it that induce memory loss. That’s how we confuse any outsiders who wander into town. We show them a good time, take advantage of their travel budgets, and send them on their way with only a marginal recollection of their visit and an eerie feeling that they should never return.” He pointed at the test tubes. “Kilda’s our main line of defense—she douses herself in Amnesia every day. One whiff of her brooch and tourists forget their own phone numbers.”

“But why doesn’t it affect us?”

“We build up immunity. You’ve been breathing it in small amounts ever since you got here.” He leaned into a web and let a spider crawl onto his nose.

She winced. “Don’t you ever get bitten?”

“Nah, they love me,” he said with a certain warmth that even Lex found endearing. “I wouldn’t touch them if I were you, though. They can sense ineptitude.”

Lex ignored this. She carefully blew another strand of silk aside and examined the crawling walls, noticing that among the thousands of black, lustrous eyes, the colony was also speckled with a bunch of tiny red spots. She inspected a spider within a nearby cluster. Sure enough, centered directly on the underside of its bulbous abdomen was a large crimson marking in the unmistakable shape of an hourglass. “How frighteningly appropriate.”

Driggs nodded. “Nature is not without a dark sense of humor.” He gently picked the spider out of his hair, placed it on the wall, and opened the door. “And that’s the whole Bank,” he said as they exited into the office.

Elysia was sitting on Ferbus’s desk, waiting for them. “Gross, huh? You guys ready for lunch? My replacement just headed in, but we’re still waiting for Ferbus’s. Oh, and he still needs to slay this dragon or whatever.” She looked at the screen. “Left! Down! Stab!”

“Shut up, woman!”

They didn’t have to wait for long. After a few more minutes of frenzied keyboard pounding, a man entered the room and walked over to the desk. “Great, he’s here,” Elysia said, snapping off the computer screen. “Let’s go!”