Love or Fate (5 page)

A
pollo
appeared just inside the gates. Except that he didn’t truly “appear”—because he couldn’t see himself, nor could anyone else thanks to Hades’ invisibility helmet. This, he thought, was going to be a breeze…despite the fact that there were three paths in front of him to choose from. He turned up his invisible nose and attempted to smell out the Furies’ lair.
Left,
he thought,
the smell of evil is definitely coming from the east.
So he lifted his invisible legs and started to walk.

The path he’d chosen was the darkest of the three. The ground was almost mushy. Not quite as soft as pudding, but definitely softer than, say, a tightly pulled trampoline. And it was thick with the scent of aging dung beetles. Apollo knew that his
sense of smell would help him find the Furies and therefore Thalia and her sisters, but he still couldn’t help wishing at this moment that his nose wasn’t so highly sensitive.

On top of his nasal discomfort, Apollo was very worried about running into the Furies. He knew all too well their ability to seamlessly transform themselves into other beings. Who was to say they wouldn’t confront him here in Tartarus, in unrecognizable form? He resolved to stay on his toes. But not literally, because the path was getting slimmer and slimmer and shorter and shorter, and he had to start walking crouched down and hunched over.

The path also got darker as he descended downward. The ground was covered in slime, and Apollo kept slipping, grabbing the sides of the cavelike walls with his invisible hands to balance himself. Whenever he did, he managed to grab a handful of goop. He didn’t want to know what it was; he just wiped it on his invisible football jersey. Only the goop wasn’t invisible, so now it appeared that a floating piece of goop was walking down the dark corridor all on its own.

Apollo panicked and tried to scrape it off, rubbing against the other wall. That just made it worse. Now he was a walking pile of goop
and
grime.
Despite his fear and his inability to see much around him, he hoped upon hope that it would stay dark all the way to the Furies’ lair.

It stayed dark, all right. So dark that Apollo didn’t see the end of the tunnel coming. Still hunched over, he walked right into a craggy rock wall. “Ow!” he yelped, and then swallowed deep. He turned to his left and walked right into another wall, although this one wasn’t rocky. It was itchy. It was covered in a dried-grass-like material, spiky and scratchy. Apollo turned around quick and tried the third and final direction.

SMACK!

“Owww,” said the wall.

“Yowww, whoa!” said Apollo, not just out of pain, but out of confusion—he had never encountered a talking wall before. And really, who has?

“Please, sir, watch where you’re going,” said the wall.

“So, you can see me?” asked Apollo.

“Of course, I see all. For I am the wall.”

“Rhyming? No! Are you a Fury? Show yourself, Tizzie. Or is it Alek? Meg!” screamed Apollo.

“Quiet, quiet. I’m not a Fury. Do I look like a Fury? No. The rhyming was just a coincidence. Now, do you want to get through or not?”

Apollo nodded, still confused.

“Well, all right, then. But before I let you through, you must first answer a question.”

“Fine, but how is it that you can see me? Is it the goop?” asked a worried Apollo.

“I told you, I’m the wall, I see all—oops, I mean I see everything. No rhyming. I am a gatekeeper. So riddle me this. Recite the Greek alphabet…backward. You have twenty-five seconds.”

“You’re kidding—that’s the question? I thought it would be harder than—”

“Quick, you now have but eighteen seconds!” warned the wall.

“Right, then.” And Apollo recited all twenty-four letters without taking another breath. “Omega, psi, chi, phi, upsilon, tau, sigma, rho, pi, omicron, xi, nu, mu, lambda, kappa, iota, theta, eta, zeta, epsilon, delta, gamma, beta, and alpha. Whew!”

“Well done. Just nine seconds. Could be a record.”

“So that’s all? That was it, I can be on my way?”

“No, no. That wasn’t really the riddle. I just love to torture you dead souls.”

Apollo’s invisible shoulders drooped.

“No, now here is your real riddle. And it’s a hard one. Oh, you’ll never know this one, it’s so very obscure, very hard. I’d say it’s practically impossible.”

Sweat dripped from Apollo’s invisible hands.

“I mean, I don’t know how in Tartarus you’ll ever
know this. Ha! Oh, this will be fun. I mean, have you ever even heard of this being, I wonder? Doubtful!” and the wall laughed and laughed.

“Get on with it, please!” Apollo snapped.

“Oh, back to the gates you’ll go! Okay, then. What is…are you listening? What is the favorite color of the Muse, the middle one, the most rambunctious of the nine Muse sisters, Thalia? Hee, hee.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. That’s your question. Get it wrong and you are bounced out of Tartarus to the Gates of Cerberus. Tee hee. Go on now, take your hapless guess.”

“Easy. It’s purple,” Apollo said, relieved.

“I’m sorry, that is…what? Why, that’s…CORRECT!”

The wall sounded aghast and very disappointed.

“Yes, yes, so I can move on, right?” Apollo eagerly asked, amazed at his luck.

“Well, yes. I guess you’ve won…why, a brand-new path. Have fun cruising the halls. And thank you for playing the game!” With these last words the wall disappeared and became a very narrow entranceway into another corridor.

This new corridor was well lit and filled with strange creatures that had, at one time or another, belonged to the land of the living but were now killing time in Tartarus for the rest of eternity. There were tiny little
devils, the size of large mice, running every which way underfoot. Angry gnomes stomped around, pushing each other. An ugly and disturbed baby dragon came barreling down the hall and just missed Apollo by a mere foot. A dust storm kicked up, and particles clung to Apollo’s goopy yet invisible frame. Three insanely tall, thin men, pale as the brightest clouds, walked toward him, grimaces on their faces. But they apparently didn’t see him. Nor did they see the shapely dust cloud he had become. No one did. They just brushed on by.

There were doors, maybe hundreds of doors, lining this hallway. Apollo didn’t know where to go next. He lifted his nose and expanded his nostrils, but there were far too many things, too many smells. Even the Furies’ atrociously stinky breath was masked by the various scents emanating from all these different creatures.

Should he keep walking down this endless hallway? Try this door or that one? He looked around for clues but found nothing.

Then he heard a loud, clear whistle. It was coming from a small haystack piled in front of one of the doors. He walked over, knelt in front of it, and listened again. And again, there was the whistle. This time the noise attracted Apollo’s attention to a thin, shiny needle gleaming among the strands of hay. He shoved his hand in and pulled it out.

“Hello!” said the needle in a very high voice.

“You can see me?” asked Apollo. He wasn’t amazed that the needle could
see.
Or whistle. Apollo had seen a lot of strange things in his time. But then he remembered, gatekeepers could see all.

“You betcha,” the needle replied. “Now, if you can answer this question, you can go through this door. And yes, it’s the door that you’ve been looking for.”

“Argh! More rhyming! Are you a Fury? Oh, this is so confusing!”

“A Fury? Nonsense. It’s often boring down here in Tartarus, especially when you have to spend all your time in a bale of hay. We rhyme to pass the time. Besides, the Blessed Ones copied me—I rhymed first. I rhymed all the time till they started imitating me and then, well, now I just do it occasionally for fun.”

“I see.” Apollo looked around impatiently. He didn’t know how much time the Muses had left—there was no way to tell time in a place like this. But he knew every second was valuable. “So you have a riddle for me? Thalia’s favorite food used to be blackberry and elderberry jam on toast. But since she moved to earth, it’s probably nacho-flavored corn chips. Her lucky number is nine; her favorite hobbies are star hopping and skateboarding. Are any of these the answers you’re looking for?”

“I do indeed have a question for you, but no, it
has nothing to do with anything like that. No, no. Your question is this: What pair runs over fields and woods all day, sits by your bed at night, and has two long tongues that simply hang out and about?”

“I don’t see what this has to do with finding Thalia!” said Apollo, just a bit bothered. This needle was wasting valuable time.

“I’ll ask you again. What pair runs over fields and woods all day, sits by your bed at night, and has two long tongues that simply hang out and about?”

Apollo thought about it. “A pair of dogs is too easy,” he muttered to himself.

He thought about the Muses and their pet, Pegasus. Pegasus ran over fields all day, but there was only one of him. No, that wasn’t it.

The needle rocked back and forth expectantly. “I’m thinking,” said Apollo.

He looked around, up and down. And then he spotted it. Yes, this pair did run all over fields. It did sit by his bed at night. It indeed did have two long tongues that hung about!

“My shoes!” Apollo exclaimed. “My shoes, my shoes, my shoes, my shoes, my shoes…”

Apollo stood up to his full height, filled with pride. And hope. “Now if you will, please let me through!”

And the door opened, just like that.

“W
hy
do we need to wash their clothes by hand?” Era moaned. “The Furies have powers. They could just blink this stuff clean.”

We were in our small gray cube of a room, the floor deadly cold, the Venus flytraps snapping away, me in no shoes (they were somewhere back on the River of Moaning).

“Why, isn’t it obvious?” replied Polly. “The Blessed Ones want us to suffer. They want us to smell their evil. They want us to see the stains from the elegant feast they had last night. They want us to know their dirt, feel their dirt, be their dirt. Oh, I can’t stand it!” and she threw up her hands. Tizzie’s velvet robe went flying and hit me on the head. “Sorry,” said Polly sheepishly.

“It’s okay. We’ve all about lost it, and why not? This is ridiculous! Absurd! We are goddesses!” I yelled. The sound bounced back at me off the walls.

“If you say that one more time, I am going to scream,” yelled Polly, pretty much already screaming. “Of course we are goddesses. Era and I already know that, and Era and I are the only ones who can hear you say it over and over. It doesn’t matter to anyone here.” Polly covered her face with her hands. “Oh, Zeus, we’re doomed. I can’t bear this life. I can’t.”

My older sister was on an emotional Pegasus ride through the sky. Up, down, up, down.

“
You
can’t bear this? What about me?” asked Era, slumped over an old tin wash basin, which was a major step backward from the washing machine we’d had in Athens, Georgia. “Look at what this cheap soap is doing to my hands! They are dried and cracked and itchy and freezing! I feel that my skin may never recover. And I need a bath; I need one baaaad. When will Daddy get here?”

“Daddy,” I quietly said.

“Daddy,” echoed Polly.

But he didn’t appear.

I went back to scrubbing silently, trying not to notice the sands of time draining on my wrist. It
was just too depressing since there was nothing we could do about our situation. Our “room” was tightly locked. We had washed dozens of black gowns, black shawls, black stockings since we’d arrived, after a nap that seemed all too short. According to our hourglasses, our arrival had been almost twelve hours ago. And still no one had come to save us.

“I’m sick of all this black! It’s making me even more depressed! I wish they could at least have some orange or pink in their lives!”

And then it happened. POOF. The pair of stockings in my hands went from a dark and dreary black to pink and orange stripes.

“Whoa.”

My sisters and I looked at each other, then down at the socks. Powers? Powers!

“That was my powers, right? These were black a moment ago, weren’t they?” Era nodded, while Polly just stared. “Powers! I have powers!”

“Let me see that.” Polly snatched the stockings out of my hands. “There must be some mistake. How could you have powers?”

“I dunno. Maybe they’ve recharged or something, like on those Duracell commercials back in Athens, remember? Like, maybe Hera took them away, but now that we’ve been here for a while, in
the godly realm, we’re getting them back because, well, we’re goddesses.” This time Polly didn’t get mad; she just listened quietly. “You try. Wish for something!”

“Oh. Oh, no. This is trouble, I know it!” erupted Polly.

“Oh, c’mon, Pol,” I exclaimed, but Polly wasn’t budging. “Fine. Era, you try!”

“Okay, I want…um, I want a candy bar!”

“A candy bar?” But before I was even finished questioning her choice, a paper-wrapped bar appeared at her feet. Era squealed with delight. That is, until she looked at it closely.

“It’s not candy! It’s one of those granola bar things!” she pouted.

“Who cares! We have powers!” I cried.

“Don’t get too excited,” said Polly. “I fear this is a trick. And besides, if we do truly have our powers back, they don’t seem particularly powerful.”

“Maybe we’re just adjusting to them,” I reasoned.

Just then Tizzie popped in. Literally. Popped. She didn’t bother to use the thick door, let alone knock. How rude.

Era quickly slid her granola bar behind her.

Get back to work, and Thalia, put away that smirk.

I was not smirking. I was giving her a sideways glance filled with hatred.

Next up I need you to lance Alek’s boil,
then make a likeness of her from aluminum foil.

“Nope, can’t do it,” I said matter-of-factly, going back to my cleaning. I had no patience for Tizzie right now. I wanted to think about our powers. How could we use them to get out? Did we all have them? Would they be stronger if we used them together?

That wasn’t a question, but rather a demand,
lest you forget who has the upper hand.

I just stared down at my work, biting my tongue.

I’m leaving now, but we can see all.

Fight us and you’ll find yourself against a wall.

And poof, she was just a cloud of smoke.

“Arrgh!” I yelled. “Oh, I wish she were an eight-toed toad with giant lymph nodes, ohhh, à la mode!”

And then out of the smoke cloud appeared an eight-toed toad, swollen to the gills with a single
scoop of cherry almond fudge ice cream on its head.

My sisters and I gasped.

“Ribet. Cough, cough, ribet,” said the toad.

“Did I just turn Tizzie into a toad?” I asked.

“It couldn’t be, could it?” asked Polly.

“Well, it looks like I did. No, I’m sure that I did. Our powers are back for real!”

“Shhh,” said Polly. “Not so loud. And we’re not supposed to use our powers, remember? It will get us into even more trouble.”

“How can we be in even more trouble?” I asked. “Lancing Fury boils is about as bad as it gets. We’re here for an eternity unless we get out of here soon.
Eternity
—that’s forever. If we have a chance, we need to grab it by the horns and go!”

“But Tizzie said they can see us in here. Surely Meg and Alek will be here shortly. Surely they will know. Oh, what will they do to us now?” Polly cried.

“We
can
use our powers, and we will,” I demanded. “This is our ticket out of here.”

“Maybe we should just use them to do the chores while we wait for Daddy to come get us,” suggested Era, looking at Polly, then back at me like she didn’t know who to agree with.

“No! Daddy is not coming, Era. Hera has pulled
the wool over his eyes; I’m sure of it. We can’t take a chance,” I argued. “This is our only hope. We have to act fast before those other two realize Tizzie is a toad!”

Meanwhile the aforementioned toad, which had been eating the ice cream, was now hacking up milky balls of phlegm. If we didn’t leave soon, I could guarantee we’d have to clean them up.

“No, we are not using magic—that is what got us into this mess,” said Polly frantically.

“Are you insane? We can get out of here. Beam us home to Olympus!” I yelled, disregarding Polly’s protests.

But nothing happened.

“We wish to be home in Olympus, my sisters and I!”

But still, nothing.

“Era, help me! Wish it, wish to go home with me now!”

“Yeah, okay, I wish to go home, too.”

But nothing happened.

“Okay, okay. What about the gates? We can figure something out from there. We wish to go to the gates!”

Nothing. Our powers couldn’t be gone that easily, could they?

“Well, fine. So it’s not that easy. We need to find
another way to get out of here. We’ve got to try it. Are you with me, Era?”

Era nibbled on the already jagged nails of her right hand. Her eyes were huge. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to risk a scary, dirty escape. It sounds exhausting. You know, if I could just have a bath, I could think clearly afterward. Let’s blink a bathtub and some of that delicious lavender soap, the French kind.”

And just like that, a tub appeared, with a cube of scented soap hanging in the air above it. Thank goddess, our powers were still with us. They just weren’t strong enough to get us home on their own.

“Yay!” squealed Era. “I want to decide after my bath.”

“There is no time. C’mon. Polly, please! We can’t waste another minute. It’s ridiculous that we’re even arguing about it.”

“But your powers aren’t even working correctly,” said Polly. “They’re simply too weak.”

“Too weak? Too weak?” I was frantic. I was desperate. I noticed that Era had already doffed her clothes and was climbing into the bath. I was losing control of the situation. “We’ll just have to walk out. I can do it; I can get us out of here!” I said.

“Thalia, no!” yelled Polly. But it was too late. I was already making the decision that would get us out of this place and back where we belonged. I was commanding the heavy stone door to open wide. And this time it worked. The door opened just like I commanded.

And then it promptly fell on Tizzie the sick toad, squishing her with one loud SMACK!