The Gatekeeper's House (5 page)

“
You don’t suppose that was
the purpose of this attack?” Ares asked. “Who would gain by freeing
Sisyphus?”

“
The Furies will investigate
that angle.” Then Hades added, “Hecate, I need you to stand guard
over these three goddesses and make sure no further harm comes to
them in their vulnerable state.”

“
Yes, my lord,” Hecate said.
“But, please sir, where is Therese?”

Hades turned to Than, who explained to
the others what had happened. “I can sense those who are about to
die, but I’m no longer bound to those who’ve already passed. In
short, I can’t find her.”

The grim looks on their faces made him
feel less, rather than more, confident that he would ever
successfully reunite Therese’s soul with her body and restore her
as the goddess of animal companions.

***

After knocking on all the doors and
windows for twenty minutes, Jen and Pete sat in rockers on the
wooden deck of the Melner cabin to wait for their new handler to
return.

“
Tell me the truth,” Jen
said again. She wanted to wring her brother’s neck. “I can tell
something’s up.”

“
I just got a bad feeling is
all,” Pete replied. “Hip will know how to get a hold of
Than.”

“
There’s more to it than
that. You saw her, didn’t you,” Jen said without inflection. “You
won’t tell me, but you saw Therese’s ghost. You think she’s
dead.”

Pete looked down at his
boots.

Jen covered her face with her hands.
“Just tell me. I can handle it.”

He was silent for several more minutes.
Then he said, “Okay. I saw her.”

Jen’s face shot up. “Can you see her
now?”

Pete shook his head. “It was in the
woods, earlier, during the trail ride. You assumed it was a snake
that spooked the horses, but it was her.”

Jen narrowed her eyes. She knew Pete
wasn’t lying, but maybe there was something wrong with him. And
yet, how could she explain all the other supposed ghost sightings
and unexplainable events on the news? She thought of the crown and
wondered if she should share its secret with Pete. Maybe whatever
had made the crown work had also given Therese the power to be
invisible, and maybe Pete had the ability to see her anyway. Maybe
Therese was fine and was wandering around incognito, like Jen
sometimes did. But then why couldn’t Pete see Jen while she was
wearing the crown?

Jen hadn’t worn the crown much lately,
now that her father was permanently disabled from a stroke and
staying at the assisted living center in Durango. But there was a
time when that crown had meant the world to her. It had saved her
from running away—or from something worse. She thought of Vicki and
of Vicki’s mother and shivered.

The sun was beginning to set behind the
mountains on the other side of the reservoir, but the pretty pinks
and orange hues spread across the clouds only added to Jen’s
frustration. She was willing to sit on the deck of the Melner cabin
all night, if that’s what it took to finally get some
answers.

“
Please, Hip,” she said in
her mind. “Come back. I’ll do anything.”

***

Ah, hell,
Hip thought as he flew alone in the evening sky in
the treetops of Greece. Just when he was finally making a little
progress with the mortal girl, all hell had to break loose. He’d
been so close to touching her. Her face had been inches from his.
He’d had the feeling Jen would have been in his bed within the
week. He could hear her calling to him, prime for kissing. She was
saying she’d do anything…

He held the siphon Hades and Hephaestus
had constructed with a reservoir of water from the Lethe on one
side and a funnel inlaid with magic crystals on the other. He’d
never used one of these contraptions before, but apparently it was
meant to suction up the souls, like a vacuum cleaner. Than,
Aphrodite, Ares, and he had divided up the global territories and,
each with a siphon, had taken up the boring, uneventful task of
sucking up the dead. Weren’t there lesser gods who could take this
job? He had overheard Ares and Aphrodite recruiting their kids—the
twins, Cupid, Harmonia, and even Anteros, who often went and undid
the very love Cupid inspired. Talk about sibling rivalry. Aphrodite
and Ares seemed to have made a specialty of creating children of
opposites. Cupid and Anteros kept mortal love interesting, and
Harmonia and the twins made sure neither peace nor panic stayed too
long in the mortal mind.

He wondered if Aphrodite and Ares had
abandoned their mission and had snuck away for a little
“something-something.”

Hold on, he thought, focusing in on
Jen’s prayers. Now she was asking if Therese was dead. Pete had
seen her ghost in the woods. If Hip could help Than reunite
Therese’s soul with her body, he’d have less work and make his
brother grateful all in one fell swoop. He god traveled back to the
Underworld, deposited the souls he’d accumulated so far with
Charon, and, without telling anyone, decided to take a brief
reprieve from soul sucking to call on his mortal girl and her
brother.

Twenty minutes later, he sat behind the
wheel of a red Ford Mustang convertible speeding down the country
road toward Lemon Reservoir. He couldn’t very well arrive without
any sign of transportation. There’d be explanations to make and
excuses to give, and Hip didn’t want any part of that. He couldn’t
help it if he had to take measures to blend in with the other
occupants of the Upperworld. Might as well do it in
style.

Chapter Four:
Reunions

Therese and her parents sat on
Therese’s old bed in her childhood room, now oddly vacant compared
to the days before she left to live in the Underworld over a year
ago. The bed and dresser remained, but she had taken her desk,
Jewels’s tank, her flute and stand, some of the clothes from her
closet, and two of the posters from her wall, along with the framed
photo collage of her and Jen. She’d also taken most of her photo
albums, but this earliest one, which her mom had made, Therese kept
beneath her bed so she could look at it when she
visited.

She and her parents flipped through the
pages of the photo album. The family photos sparked happy memories
and made them less aware of the other ghosts occupying the room.
Their happiness was briefly sobered by Therese’s explanation of her
parents’ murder by McAdams and his men, but they were pleased to
learn the details of Therese’s immortality.

“
Clifford’s immortal now,
too,” Therese added.

“
Really?” her father
laughed.

Her mother smiled. “Where is Clifford
now?”

Therese bit her bottom lip. “I’m not
sure. Hopefully, he’s with Than.”

She told them about how she met Hypnos
and Thanatos while she was in a coma, and how Than had come to the
Upperworld to get to know her. She told them how they fell in love
and what a kind and caring god Than was. She told them about the
deal he had made with his father, and how, in the end, she couldn’t
kill another human being, especially a defenseless one.

“
That’s how we raised you,”
her father said with admiration, and then leaned his ethereal lips
to her transparent forehead.

She thought she felt the ghost of his
kiss, and though she longed for more, was grateful. If she’d been
capable of crying tears, they would have been falling down her
cheeks by now.

She told them about Vicki’s mom and
what had happened when she and Vickie took the ketamine. Therese
felt ashamed to admit her role in Vickie’s death, but also somewhat
liberated by the confession. She also told them all about carrying
the black box of beauty from Aphrodite to Persephone, stealing the
apple from Hera’s garden, which was guarded by the
one-hundred-headed serpent, and navigating through the labyrinth
where the Minotaur dwelled. Here she explained that the Minotaur,
Asterion, and his sister, Ariadne, were actually good friends of
hers.

“
I visit them every chance I
get,” she added. “As the goddess of animal companions, I help
Asterion by driving my arrows into the hearts of the visitors who
plan to do him harm. Some people think it somehow proves their
manliness if they can kill poor Asterion. And since he’s part
animal, my arrows make the intruders really fond of him. They even
pet him like I do Clifford.” She giggled, recalling one man who had
wanted to stay and play fetch in the palace ruins of Knossos on the
island of Crete for as long as he could. Therese had been left with
no choice but to ask Phobos and Deimos to get the man to leave. The
twins had been happy to oblige.

“
So you’re the Minotaur’s
protector?” her mother asked.

“
I suppose I am,” Therese
replied.

Therese then went on to tell about her
adventure with the Hydra.

“
You actually baked it a
cake?” her father asked.

“
The Hydra’s a
she
, Dad. Not an
it
.” Therese insisted.
“And yes. And she loved it. But things didn’t go as
planned.”

She went on to tell them about riding
on the Hydra’s back and plunging into the sinkhole.

“
We’re friends now, but back
then, we terrified one another,” Therese added.

She then told about the final challenge
in the Underworld and how stupidly she had failed. “In the end, I
couldn’t stop myself from looking back.”

“
So how did you become a
god?” her mother asked.

Therese told them about Demeter’s
method, and her parents gaped.

“
You’re not serious,” her
father said.

“
And Than poured kerosene
all over himself, and then held me until it was over.”

“
How horribly morbid!” her
mother cried.

“
He suffered because he
loves me,” Therese insisted.

“
But burning alive? Was that
really necessary?” her father asked.

“
Unfortunately, yes,”
Therese said. “But it was totally worth it.”

“
Wasn’t it painful?” her
mother asked.

“
Excruciatingly,” Therese
said. “The worst I’ve ever experienced.”

“
You must really love this
boy,” her father said.

This comment should have made Therese
smile, but instead she frowned, and although she had no body, she
felt her phantom heart tighten in her phantom chest. Before she
could share with her parents the awful doubts about Than that had
taken root and festered within her psyche, an earth-shattering
shriek filled the room and caused every spirit present to howl in
agony, including Therese and her parents.

***

Than flew above Canada with the siphon
fashioned by his father and Hephaestus, gathering the souls into
the device and wondering if they could feel anything, especially
since there were so many of them compressed together in one small
space. Unlike the souls who were presently dying, which he could
sense and with whom he could communicate, these lost souls were
disconnected to him in every way. If he could sense them, his quest
to find Therese would be a cinch.

As it was, another of his disintegrated
selves combed the woods near Therese’s house, wondering if her
attachment to her childhood home might have called her spirit back,
as he’d seen happen to other ghosts who, for some reason or other,
could not or would not enter the gates of the Underworld. Sometimes
spirits were unleashed by powerful malevolent forces who managed to
deceive Hades and his family. Invariably, those loosed spirits
found their way back to their mortal dwellings.

Than wandered along the path through
the woods to the house now belonging to Therese’s aunt and uncle.
He could hear Lynn’s cries before he saw her, wrapped in a blanket
in her mother’s arms. The house was haunted by at least fifty
ghosts, but so far, none was Therese.

He started up the stairs toward
Therese’s old bedroom. He wondered now whether her reluctance to
marry him had more to do with missing her mortal family than with
not loving him enough. Maybe it was a combination.

Whatever the cause, he hadn’t seen it
coming.

He tried not to think about it because
it hurt too much.

When he reached the top step, he
entered Therese’s bedroom to find her seated on the edge of her bed
between the souls of her parents. Although he could not hear what
they were saying to one another, he could see them deeply engaged
with one another and recognized that Therese’s parents must have
recovered at least some of their memory. This made him frown,
because he was sure a second separation from them would be less
bearable than the first. And there would have to be a second
separation. Therese must know that if there were a way for her to
be with her parents, he would have helped her to make it happen by
now. Bonding with them again in this ghostly state was going to do
none of them any good.

Before he could think much more about
the second round of grieving Therese would have to endure, a
familiar shriek resounded off the walls and caused the souls to
howl.