I Never Thought I'd See You Again: A Novelists Inc. Anthology (27 page)
Read I Never Thought I'd See You Again: A Novelists Inc. Anthology Online
Authors: Unknown
Tags: #FICTION/Anthologies (multiple authors)
Caine glared at me, as if his big mouth was my fault, and then he bowed and strode off through the wall.
Through
the wall.
“He just walked through a wall,” I said, wondering if I’d hit my head really hard and this was all a concussion-induced hallucination. Or a coma. Or maybe the bus had actually run me down and . . . I didn’t make it.
“Am I dead? Um, Your Highness?” Maybe she was the queen of hell, and I should be polite. I didn’t think I’d had time in my short life to do anything bad enough to deserve hell, but I had run away from home, or at least tried to, before the carriage guy showed up.
She sat next to me and shocked me by hugging me.
“No, you are not dead,” she said. “How is your mother?”
Before I could begin to think of a response, the scariest man I’d ever seen, wearing black leather pants and boots, a black shirt, and what appeared to be actual flames coating his body from head to toe, marched through the same wall through which Caine had left. The newcomer was pretty clearly pissed off at somebody.
“Persephone,” he roared.
The queen/grandmother/crazy woman ignored him and smiled at me. “I’m Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, but I’m also your grandmother.”
I nodded slowly, careful not to jar my clearly-brain-damaged skull.
“Of course you are.”
It took three or four hours, a lot of talking, and a few magical demonstrations before I started to believe any of it, so Persephone finally dragged me down a silver corridor.
“Here’s a place you’ll soon be very familiar with, Penny,” she said.
She threw open a door that looked like it had been carved from an enormous diamond, and gestured for me to precede her into the room. I shook my head.
“I don’t think so. If you really are the queen of the Underworld, and that was Hades bellows are important.””d ing for you, I can’t imagine there’s anyplace here that I want to see enough to be the first one in the room. After you,
Grandma
.”
She gave me an exasperated glance that was identical to the way my mother looked at me most nights over dinner, and I felt a sharp pang of homesickness stab through me. Not for a place, though; our New York apartment was long gone and I hated the rented house in Ohio. No, I was homesick for Mom and her hugs, and the way she’d sneak into my room and kiss my forehead and fuss with my blankets every night when she thought I was asleep.
How was it possible to miss her so much, when I’d only been gone for a few hours?
“This is the Well of Souls.”
I started to back away from the doorway, but she caught my wrist and pulled me forward. The place was terrifyingly beautiful, or beautifully hideous — my mind almost couldn’t comprehend the reality. Enormous, pyramid-shaped crystal panels lined the walls, and the ceiling was a stained glass dome depicting images of hell — the Underworld — that told me the artist had either been clinically insane or had been the victim of some seriously horrific nightmares.
My resolutely firm denial of the truth shattered into shards of terror when I saw the inhabitants of the room. Gran pointed down, and I realized we were standing on a kind of wrap-around balcony and, on the floor about a dozen feet below us, wraith-like beings milled aimlessly around the arena-sized space in ominous silence.
“Are those — spirits?” I whispered the question, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“Souls. The souls of the dead, Penelope. This is a very temporary holding area for them, until they get called to the light.”
“Penny. Call me Penny.” I turned to her; anything to look away from the souls beneath us. “And what should I call you? Your Highness? Grandma? Psycho kidnapper?”
She tightened her lips. “Persephone will be fine. You are so much like your mother that I find myself wanting to send you to your room already, and I’ve known you for only a few hours.”
I was interested, almost in spite of myself. “You knew my mother?”
“I told you this was a bad idea,” Caine said, suddenly appearing behind us. “She’s an idiot.”
Persephone snarled at him, and suddenly I saw the dark power that shimmered beneath her amiable exterior. Her eyes glowed hot, and she waved a hand at Caine. He flew backward and hit the wall, hard, and then slumped to the floor.
“Remember your place, Soul Shepherd,” she warned him, but he only nodded and then picked himself up off the floor.
“This
is
my place. You told me you were apprenticing your granddaughter to me, so I have a right to know if she’s as stupid as she looks. I don’t need help, if it’s going to be beautiful and brainless. She’s a distraction,” he said, scowling at me.
Unfortunately, he was totally hot even when he scowled; all tall, lean deliciousness. Also, he thought I was beautiful? I distracted him?
“Wait,” I said, rewinding the conversation in my frazzled mind. “You want me to as are important.””d pprentice to him? And he’s a Soul Shepherd?”
Persephone avoided my gaze, but Caine folded his arms over his chest and nodded.
“First, you’re out of your mind. Second, not that it matters to me, because I’m so not doing it, but what is a Soul Shepherd? Finally, when do I get out of here?”
Caine smiled mockingly. “No, we’re not; a Soul Shepherd is exactly what it sounds like; never.”
“Caine,” Persephone snapped. “That’s enough. Penny, I’d hoped to tell you all this in a gentler way, but a Soul Shepherd is someone who helps a dying person make the transition to the afterlife. Because you’re the child of my child, you must serve out your time here, just like your mother did.”
My mother had served time in the Underworld? My mother was Persephone’s daughter? As unbelievable as it seemed, I hadn’t thought at all about the full implications of the relationship.
“When did my mother ever live down here? I think I would have known about it if she’d taken a long vacation to hell,” I said, all but challenging her to deny it.
“1865 to 1905,” Caine said, glancing down at a device that looked suspiciously like an iPad mini. “And this is not hell.”
For the second time that day — the second time in my
life
— the world swirled down to black all around me, and I fell. When my overwhelmed brain decided to switch back on, I realized that Caine was sitting on the floor, holding me in his lap, and I scrambled to get away from him. I was still dizzy, so I sat on the floor next to him and leaned back against the wall. Persephone was nowhere to be seen.
“It can be a lot to take in,” he said, and it was the first note of anything but nastiness he’d spoken, so naturally I didn’t trust it.
“Yeah, how long did it take you?”
His black eyes narrowed and he stared off into the distance. “Maybe seven or eight years, I think.”
“This is nuts, you know that, right?” I closed my eyes, fighting back the tears trying to well up. “I took a hard hit to the head at the bus stop, didn’t I? Any minute, I’ll wake up back in Kansas with Toto, right?”
“I thought it was Ohio?” He sounded so puzzled that I almost laughed.
“Never mind. Tell me about a Soul Shepherd. Not that I’m planning on being one.”
“You don’t have a choice, Penny. It’s in your blood — it’s your heritage. Your destiny.”
I opened my eyes. “Really? You had me till the word
destiny
. Now we’re in cheesy horror movie territory.”
“Denial is a common coping mechanism among the dying, too,” he said. “But it will be better if I simply show you.”
He stood up and held out his hand, but I shook my head and refused to take it. He sighed and snapped his fingers, and suddenly a vortex of silver and black sparkling lights surrounded us both and we were swept into the scariest roller coaster ride of my life.
##
I stumbled out after Caine and immediately realized we were in a hospital room. The twin scents of antiseptic and sorrow, the blinking and muffled beeping of monitors that rhythmically echoed a patient’s hopes — there was no mistaking it. A thin, pale girl who looked about eight years old lay asleep in the bed, covered by a crisp white sheet but also by a fluffy pink down comforter, which was jarringly out of place in the sterility of the hospital room.
A woman I assumed to be her mother sat next to the bed, her head in her hands, crying.
“Caine, we shouldn’t be here,” I whispered, grabbing his arm. “Give these people their privacy. That woman — ”
“Can’t see us,” he explained. “Nobody can see us until it’s their time.”
The girl opened her eyes as if on cue and stared straight at us. “Are you angels?”
I wished really, really hard that the floor would open up and swallow me. “No!”
Caine glared at me, but then smiled at the little girl, and the smile transformed his face from sardonic to darkly beautiful, so much so that I could completely believe that people would believe he was an angel.
“Yes, Becky, we are here to help you move into the light,” he told her.
She looked doubtful. “I don’t want to go to the light. I’d rather go to Disney World.”
“I’m with you,” I said fervently.
Becky’s mother, oddly enough, didn’t seem to realize that her daughter was awake and speaking to two invisible people in the corner. Caine made a complicated gesture with one hand, and the woman leaned forward, folded her arms on the bed, rested her head on her arms, and fell asleep.
“You don’t seem like a very good angel,” Becky told me. “Although you are very pretty, and I like your white dress very much.”
I glanced down at my jeans and faded T-shirt, then up at Caine.
“She sees a projection of you that fits with what her faith tells her to expect,” he whispered. “White dress, probablhalo.”
www.janet-woods.com
.
People move on, taking with them bittersweet memories of the past –– a father and son relationship, a boat that waits for a voyage that never happens, a favorite dog or two, or a photograph in a frame of that special someone from our childhood, who we never expect to see again . . . this is the stuff stories are created from.
When I’m seated my window is high enough to hide the view of Mrs. Tenby’s rusting tin roof and leaves exposed to my gaze the dunes and the stretch of sea beyond. When it’s open I’m close enough to the bent spines of the coastal grass to hear the hiss and whisper of wind through them, and to listen to the waves suck in golden grains of sand and spit them out again.
“Shusssssh,” it says, comforting me like a foster mother soothing the fractures in an abandoned child.
The path worn through the dunes is a twisted tangle of roots, affording a firm foothold, yet it yields under my feet. I can imagine the shadows the roots make and transfer them to my canvas as the deeper shadows that left them there.
Discount Dog used to leave trot marks in his youth, but he waddles now. Having to balance on three legs when he lifts the fourth to renew his territory markings is the only exercise he gets. He’s eleven . . . but seventy-seven in dog years and nearly deaf. His tail still whips little dents into the sand when he’s pleased, and the wind fills them up again after he passes by.
I like the wind, it sweeps the past into the future and sometimes you have to run after it to catch the essence of it — like the smell of moving on — like the smile on the photograph of Mrs. Tenby’s granddaughter. Annamarie gazes from the photo frame on the piano, gaps in her gums where the baby teeth once resided.
Discount Dog can’t smell or see very well now, and sometimes he plods trustingly along behind the shadows of strangers. I don’t think he can remember barking at seagulls or twisting in the air to catch his yellow Frisbee, or recall where bones are buried. His salt and pepper coat and grey muzzle doesn’t bother him; neither does the thought of death, as long as he has a patch of sunlight to warm him on his way.
Discount was a gift from my father when I was sixteen. He’d found the pup in a supermarket bag in the middle of the road when he’d been staggering home from the local drinking hole. There had been a moment of embarrassment when he’d handed him over, tears flooding his eyes.
“I know you wanted a dog. Here it is. Happy birthday, son!”
“My birthday was last month,” I pointed out, because I’d reached an age when my voice had broken and I feared nothing.
I’d been six when my first dog Wolf had appeared. He’d been imaginary, a fearsome creature, big and black with dripping fangs, blood red eyes and a ferocious snarl. We swaggered around the dunes together doing heroic deeds, and disposing of pirates, smuggle in the twenty-first centuryDd rs and avenging armies. Sometimes Annamarie came to stay with Mrs. Tenby. And she’d become the princess he and Wolf rescued. One day he noticed she was no longer in his life. “Gone abroad to live with her mother,” Mrs. Tenby said, her expression sad.
Wolf turned out to be a disappointment too. One morning I woke and he’d gone. But for all his might and power, I never loved Wolf as much as I loved my gentle Discount Dog.
