The Book of Doom (13 page)

AC WAS NOT
wrong. Once the Nether Lands had darkened, the night had passed like slow treacle, the hours – or whatever the numbers on the watch represented – oozing lazily towards the dawn.

When the watch reached the high six hundreds, it reset to zero. The moment the display ticked over to four, green sparkles had illuminated the centre of the wooden hoop. The sparkles began to spin like a giant Catherine wheel until the entire hoop was alive with a shimmering jade glow.

The three of them stood together watching the swirling light, expecting the rat-creature to step through at any moment. It was a different figure who emerged in the end, though. An old woman with a cheerful cardigan and silvery-blue hair stepped from the portal, supporting herself on a walking stick. When she saw Zac and the others she screamed with fright.

“Ooh, you near scared the life out of me,” she said, once she had regained her composure. She looked them up and down. “Who are you?”

“Three travellers, oh dweller of the Nether Lands,” began Herya, but the woman quickly shushed her.

“We don’t bother with all that these days, dearie,” she said. “Too much effort. It’s all much more relaxed now. Where you headed?”

The Valkyrie looked a little put out, as if she’d wasted months rehearsing a speech she wasn’t getting a chance to deliver. Which, as it happens, was precisely what she had done.

“The Greek underworld,” she said. “Also known as—”

“Yes, yes, Hades, Asphodel Meadows, I know the one.” She waggled her crooked fingers in the vague direction of the portal. Nothing appeared to happen. “There you go, then. That’s you,” she announced.

Zac eyed the green circle suspiciously. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, dearie,” said the old woman. “I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. Look.”

She raised her walking stick and pushed the end of it into the glow of the portal. A moment later, she pulled it back. An egg-shaped green blob was clinging to the end of the stick, gnawing furiously on the wood with its jagged teeth.

As the blob came through the portal, it stopped chewing. It raised its eyes and stared at the old woman. The old woman stared back. Slowly, she popped the stick back through the portal and gave it a flick. When it came back through, the green thing was gone.

“Let’s try that once more,” she said, then she waggled her fingers again. This time, the light dimmed briefly, then brightened again. “That should be it now,” she said, smiling sheepishly. “What can I say? It’s still early.”

“Herya, why don’t you take the lead?” Zac suggested. “You know your way around better than we do.”

“What?” mumbled the Valkyrie. “I mean, yes. Of course. Plus I’m the best fighter, so it’s safest if I go first, so I can protect you from... things.”

“That’s good of you,” said Zac.

Herya stepped up to the swirling vortex. She glanced back at the old woman, who nodded encouragingly. Then, with just the briefest moment’s hesitation, she stepped through the portal and vanished.

“I’ll go next,” said Angelo, bouncing excitedly from foot to foot.

“Wait!” yelped the woman. She had a pair of spectacles on a string round her neck. She pulled them on and looked Angelo up and down. “Whatever happened to your clothes, dearie? You’ll catch your death.”

With a bit of effort she wrestled off her brightly coloured cardigan. It had a rainbow knitted into it, and a picture of a kitten. Zac recoiled when he saw the lump sticking out of the woman’s stomach. He recoiled even further when he realised the lump was a face.

“Oh, come on,” Zac groaned. “That’s just weird for the sake of it.”

“Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” grimaced the extra head. Its rat-like features pulled into a sneer. “Thought you’d be well dead by now.”

“Oh, don’t mind him,” the woman said. She handed Angelo the cardigan and he slipped it on gratefully. The darker colours – the reds and greens – faded slightly, but they didn’t drain away like the black had in Zac’s room.

“Thank you,” Angelo said, fastening the cardigan. “It’s very nice.”

“Think nothing of it, dearie,” the woman smiled. She stepped aside, leaving the way to the portal clear. “Now off you pop to Hades, and thank you for visiting the Nether Lands,” she beamed. “We look forward to welcoming you back soon.”

Zac’s senses went into shock when he stepped through the portal behind Angelo. The green light filled his head like a flash grenade, blinding him and making his ears ring loudly.

A wall of cold hit him as he stepped out of the vortex. Dazzled, he stumbled, fell, and landed with a
splat
in a puddle of foul-smelling mud. He shook his head and blinked several times, until the glare behind his eyelids faded back to black.

He stood up and wiped away as much of the dark sludge as he could. His vision had cleared, but a piercing shriek still overwhelmed his ears. He’d emerged from the portal beside a wide river. A black, bubbling liquid babbled between its banks. It looked like tar or burned oil, but smelled like sewage. Whatever it was, he had no plans to go swimming in it any time soon.

The ringing in his ears was beginning to ease off, and he could hear another sound now. It was a low steady thumping, over and over again, three or four times a second.
Dum-dum-dum-dum.
There was a
tss-tss-tss
mixed in with it, faster than the thuds, but still somehow matching their rhythm.
Dum-dum-dum; tss-tss-tss.

Zac turned to find Herya and Angelo standing just a few metres away. Like Zac’s, Herya’s front was smeared with wet dirt. Angelo, on the other hand, appeared completely clean, aside from his bare feet that were caked with squidgy mud.

“Is this it?” Zac asked. “Is this Hades?”

Herya looked around. A glimmer of doubt passed over her face for just a fraction of a second, but then was gone. “Yeah, this is it,” she said. “I’d recognise it anywhere. Welcome to the Greek underworld.”

Angelo was staring past them both, his gaze focused on a large skyscraper that stood on its own about half a kilometre away.

It loomed impossibly tall. Even at that distance, Zac couldn’t see the top floor, which was lost in the high clouds. He guessed there were around four hundred storeys below the clouds. How many were above that was anyone’s guess.

In all the sparse, barren landscape it was the only building in sight, and it seemed to be celebrating that fact.

Rows of flashing lights ran up the side of it, stretching all the way from the bottom to where the clouds blocked his view. They lit up in time with the sounds coming from within; sounds that Zac now realised were music. Or an attempt at music, at least.

Down the front of the building were six letters, each around twenty or thirty metres tall. They glowed bright red and flickered slightly as the music continued to pump out.

“
Eyedol
,” Zac read. “What’s that?”

“A nightclub,” explained Herya, with only a moment’s hesitation. “The most famous nightclub in Hades. In all the underworlds, actually. And the most dangerous.”

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” Angelo said, putting on an old man’s voice. “We must be cautious.” The others looked down at him blankly. “
Star Wars
,” he said, grinning. There was still no reaction from Zac and the Valkyrie. “Oh, come on,” Angelo sighed. “Not even
Star Wars
?”

“What have you brought us here for?” Zac asked Herya.

“You want to find out about the tenth circle of Hell? You ask Argus,” Herya told him. “You want to find Argus? You go to Eyedol. He owns the place.”

“How do we know he’ll be there?”

“Well, because... he’s always there.”

“How do we know he’ll see us?” asked Angelo.

Herya glanced at the mud-slicked grass and the withered trees all around them. A cool breeze tickled the back of her neck. “Trust me,” she said. “He’s seen us already.”

“Have you been here before?” Zac asked.

“What? Yeah, I come here all the time,” Herya said. “Like I told you, I get around.”

“And you know Argus?”

Herya gave the briefest of nods. “Yep,” she said quietly.

“Right, then you can lead the way.”

The Valkyrie hesitated. “Of course,” she said.

She took a step in the direction of Eyedol. Her fingers went to the sheath tucked up inside her leather bodice, and to her mother’s knife that she had secured there.

She had a feeling they were going to need it.

AC HAD BEEN
expecting doormen at the entrance to the club, but he needn’t have worried. The music had gradually become louder as they’d got nearer the building, and then become almost ear-shatteringly so when a set of double doors slid open at their approach.

“Welcome to Eyedol,” chimed a mechanical voice. It had to be coming from somewhere around the door, but it sounded to Zac as if it were right inside his head. “You’ll never want to leave.”

He and Herya stopped inside the doorway, which swished closed unnoticed a few seconds later. Angelo hid behind them, mumbling a prayer beneath his breath. As far as he was concerned, they’d just entered his own personal Hell.

He found the noise overwhelming. Every beat shook his bones, making his entire skeleton tremble a hundred and fifty times per minute. Red spotlights swept across the high ceiling and walls. Purple lasers painted pictures in clouds of blue smoke. Enormous flat-panel TV screens showing nothing but flames hung on every wall. The fires were only illusions, but Angelo could swear the heat from them was real.

A mass of heaving, sweaty bodies filled the dance floor, gyrating and twisting as if in the grip of madness. The dancers themselves took many forms, but the way they moved and thronged together gave them the appearance of a single living thing with too many limbs and heads to count.

The whole ceiling was designed to look like a bulging bloodshot eye, ogling endlessly down at the masses moving below. It was the single creepiest thing Angelo had seen in his life.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

“What?” asked Zac.

“I said I don’t like this,” repeated Angelo, raising his voice.

Zac pointed to his ear. “Can’t hear you. What?”

Angelo’s wide eyes darted around the cavernous room. The noise, the lights, the movement, they were all doing something to him, making his heart race and his head feel light.

Deep down inside the boy, something stirred.

“I said,” he began, his voice cracking. The next few words came out as a deafening roar: “I don’t like this!”

Zac ducked away, a hand clamped over his ear, a bubble of pain bursting on his lips. Down on the dance floor, a dozen heads glanced in their direction, before going back to thrashing and writhing around.

Angelo was trembling when Zac turned to look at him. His skin was slick with sweat, and in the dark centre of his eyes there was a dim red glow.

“It’s OK. Relax,” Zac said. He put his hands on the boy’s shoulders, then recoiled from the heat. “Angelo, listen to me,” he said more urgently. “Calm down, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Don’t like it. Don’t like it.”

“I know, but you have to calm down.”

“D-don’t like it.” The words came as a strangled wheeze from Angelo’s cracked lips. “Make... it... stop.”

Herya elbowed Zac out of the way. She smiled down at Angelo and pointed to the door. “Maybe you should wait outside.”

Angelo turned to Zac. The boy’s eyes were a shimmering haze of heat that flickered in time with the thumping beat of the music. “B-but...”

“It’s fine, we’ll call if we need you,” Herya said. She looked to Zac. “Right?”

“Um, yes. Of course. We’ll call if we need you,” Zac said.

“O-OK,” agreed Angelo, and there was a stench like sulphur on his breath. “I’ll w-wait outside.”

With a stuttered nod and a final glance around the inside of the club, Angelo backed towards the door. It slid open at his approach, making him jump. He waved gingerly at Zac and Herya, and then he was gone, leaving behind footprint-shaped scorch marks on the floor.

“That was close,” Zac said, staring down at the footprints. He looked up at the door as it closed shut. “You think he’ll be OK out there?”

“Better than he’d be in here,” Herya shrugged. “This way’s safer for all of us. He’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, I mean it’s just the Greek underworld,” Zac said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“He could have his skin and flesh flayed from his bones by the—”

Zac raised his hands, cutting her off. “Yeah. I was joking.”

Herya considered this. “Oh, right. I wasn’t.”

“I guessed that. So, how do we find Argus?”

The Valkyrie’s gaze was sweeping like a spotlight across the room. There were a number of doors dotted along the walls. “He’ll be on one of the higher floors.”

“OK. So how do we get there?”

“Through one of those doors, I think.”

“You
think
? I thought you knew this guy?”

“I do,” Herya insisted. “But it’s not like I track his every movement. One of these doors will lead us to him.”

“That one,” said Zac, pointing to a door set in the furthest corner of the club. He shoved past her and took to the steps leading down to the dance floor.

Herya was at his back almost immediately. “You’re a mortal. How can you possibly know which door it is?”

“Because it says
Staff Only
on it. And because it’s the only one being guarded,” replied Zac, not looking back. He pushed through the crowds, avoiding arms and legs, and heads and tails, and other appendages he’d never seen the likes of before – and which he sincerely hoped he’d never see again.

Some of the dancers looked like demons. Not Angelo-grade demons, but demons all the same. The majority of them thrashed around and clawed at the air, as if re-enacting their favourite scenes from
The Exorcist
. Some of the others played air guitar, their faces contorted in concentration, their clawed fingers flying across an imaginary fretboard, joyfully oblivious to the fact that the pounding dance beat contained no whiff of guitar whatsoever.

There were other shapes in the crowd too. Something ogre-like with a dog’s head. Something that looked to be part lion, part bird. In the middle of the dance floor a woman with a brown paper bag over her head gyrated along to the music’s beat. Snakes wriggled up through holes in the top of the bag, and Zac realised she must be a Gorgon. He and Herya pushed on through the crowd until they reached the door and the man standing before it.

And he
was
a man, or close at least. He had exactly the right number of arms and legs and heads. Granted, he had one more mouth than was strictly necessary, but after everything he’d seen of late, Zac wasn’t about to quibble over that.

The man wore a black bomber jacket and jeans that looked far too tight. His head was shaved and his arms were folded across his chest. He wasn’t particularly big, but everything about him gave the impression that he was precisely big enough.

His two mouths sat one above the other. Both appeared perfectly normal, and if Zac just squinted a little, he was reassuringly human-looking.

“What do you want?” demanded the man’s top mouth. His bottom one was chewing gum, like it was up against the clock.

“We... we want to see Argus,” Herya said. The music was quieter away from the speakers, and she was able to talk at something like her normal volume.

The bouncer looked her up and down. His bottom mouth continued its frantic chewing. “Do you now?”

“Yes. So I’d advise you to let us through,” the Valkyrie continued. She thought for a moment, then gave her knuckles a menacing crack.

“Would you now?” asked the bottom mouth, in a voice slightly higher than the first.

Herya hesitated. “Yes.”

“Right,” the man said, the top mouth taking control again. He stepped to the side. “Well, you’d best go through, then.”

Another hesitation. “What?” Herya glanced at Zac, then rallied a little. “I mean, yes. Right.” She reached for the door, but the bouncer was back in front of her, both mouths grinning.

“Nah, only joking.” His expression turned serious. “No one sees Mr Argus.”

“It’s important,” Zac said.

“Oh. Right. Is it?” asked the bottom mouth. The bouncer stepped aside once again. “Well, in that case maybe you
had
better go through, then.”

“Yes, well... I should think so too,” Herya said. She was midway through grabbing for the handle when the man blocked her again.

“Joking again,” said the top mouth. “No one sees Mr Argus. I thought I’d made that clear?”

“You did,” confirmed the bottom mouth.

“Thanks,” replied the top.

“Look,” said Herya firmly. “Get out of the way or I’ll... I’ll... kick your ass.”

The bouncer laughed. “You know why I got these two mouths? It’s so I can eat twice as quick.” All four sets of teeth snapped the air just a few centimetres from Herya’s nose. “Now fly away, little birdie, and take your mortal with you.”

Zac caught the Valkyrie by the arm and pulled her away. She resisted, but only for a moment.

“What did you do that for?” Herya demanded. “I’ve fought bigger than him. I could’ve taken him.”

“Well, maybe you could, but you don’t have to,” Zac told her. “There’s another way through.”

Herya reluctantly tore her gaze from the bouncer. “How?” she asked.

“The lock on the door. It’s a five-pin deadbolt.”

“And? What does that even mean?”

Zac reached into a pocket and pulled out a slim leather case. He unzipped it and showed Herya the tools wrapped within. “It means I can open it. I just need to get that guy out of the way.”

“I could slice out his lungs,” the Valkyrie said, “and, er, make him wear them as a hat.”

Zac blinked. “Well, there’s that, but I was thinking something a bit more subtle,” he said. “Just cause a distraction. Get him to walk away. Thirty seconds, that’s all I’ll need. Do you think you can do that?”

Herya snorted. “Well,
yeah
. I cause distractions all the time.”

“Do you?” frowned Zac. “Why?”

“What?”

“Why do you cause distractions all the time?”

Herya chewed her lip. “Practice,” she said at last. “Now let me do my thing so you can do yours.”

Zac nodded. “Fair enough.” He took one of the tools from his bag. It looked like a thin screwdriver with a slightly hooked point.

Herya turned and slipped off through the crowds, cursing herself below her breath.
I cause distractions all the time
, she thought.
What in Thor’s name did I say that for?

Contrary to everything she’d said to Zac, she had never actually been in Hades before. The creatures dancing and gyrating around her were like images from her childhood nightmares, all twisted and misshapen and wrong.

As she sidled through the throngs, Herya felt her mouth go dry. Zac would be watching her, she knew, waiting on her making her move. But what move? She had no idea how she was going to lure the bouncer away. She had no idea about anything.

Maybe there was a fire alarm somewhere that she could activate. That might work. She changed course and set off in the direction of the nearest wall. With any luck, it would have a fire alarm button on it somewhere.

A flailing foot caught her on the back of the knee. She cried out in shock as she stumbled forward, before thudding into the back of someone standing by the edge of the dance floor.

There was a
crash
as the person she had collided with dropped their drink and the glass shattered into slivers on the dirty floor.

“Not again,” Herya groaned. She looked up, past a washboard stomach and a bodybuilder’s chest, and up to the bull-like head of a Minotaur. A hot swirl of steam snorted out from the creature’s nostrils as his mouth pulled into a snarl.

“You spilled my pint,” the Minotaur growled.

“Um, yeah,” said Herya, her voice coming out as a squeak. She glanced over to the bouncer and took a shaky breath. “What you going to do about it?”

Even over the sound of the music, Zac heard the roaring of the Minotaur. There was a sudden commotion and a frantic scuffle as the creature swung its arms in a wide arc. Herya ducked out of the way. The Gorgon wasn’t so lucky. The Minotaur’s fists sent her sprawling to the floor, the brown paper bag slipping off as she fell.

There was a scream as several dancers who had been looking the Gorgon’s way turned to stone.

“Sorry, everyone, sorry!” stammered the snake-headed Gorgon, but panic had already gripped the crowd. It surged away from the Gorgon, only to be battered back by the raging Minotaur.

Demons and monsters alike began to clash, and in seconds the club had become the scene of a full-scale riot.