Chapter Nine #2
“Right. I just don’t understand. It looks so…normal. I mean, the sky is strange, but there’s water and trees and…”
“The moon? Constellations?” Luke supplies.
“What makes the underworld so dangerous is that it is just like the overworld. Everything will seem normal until it isn’t.
The same moon, sun, and stars, but the sky itself is purple instead of blue.
The same grass and greenery and trees, but instead of squirrels and songbirds living in them, there are vultures that feast on flesh and bones.
A general rule of thumb is stay away from all shores, whether river or pond or lake or sea.
Sirens and sea nymphs are known for their trickery. ”
My mind swims with the information. “Aren’t those like…mythology?”
“Where do you think mythology stems from?”
“The books? History? Years and years of ancient lore dramatized with each new interpretation? Next, you’re going to tell me vampires and werewolves are real.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course they’re real.”
I throw my hands up. “Maybe we should start with what isn’t real.”
“Maybe we should start with you keeping your voice down,” he warns. “Right now, everyone assumes we’re souls doomed to eternal damnation. We need to blend in so that doesn’t change.”
“Should I be praying?” I ask semiseriously.
“You should be quiet,” he says. “Sleep while you can. As we get farther through the underworld, more people will board. They won’t all be souls. Monsters and demons have places to be, you know.”
“How inconsiderate of me to assume they don’t just roam the underworld wailing,” I mumble. But I am tired, and the more I think about the darkness outside, the harder it is to calm my frantic thoughts. “You’ll take first watch and wake me up if anything happens?”
He nods. I settle my forehead against the cool glass, imagining it’s a freshly flipped pillow and I’m in my bed back at home. Not my apartment in Tarrentown, but the colorful house I grew up in, that I inherited just to leave behind. That, and everything else.
I clutch my phone in the pocket of my denim jacket. I never replied to the texts from my ex. Maybe I should have, but now it’s too late.
I doubt hell has cell reception.
· · ·
The nightmare starts like all the others.
The ball dropping on New Year’s Eve. The press of Mom’s lips to my cheek.
Dad screeching “Happy New Year!” so loud in my ears, they ring.
The restaurant filled with cheers and noisemakers and glistening cheap party decorations that gave it a dream-like quality in real time.
It was the same neighborhood haunt we spent every major occasion at.
Birthdays, graduations, my parents’ anniversary dinner that I was always brought along to.
Outside my body, I watch my parents and Past Me make our way toward the car.
The pavement is wet from the recent rainfall.
Dad says something that makes Mom’s laugh chime into the night, but Past Me doesn’t hear it because she’s waving goodbye to our fellow partiers.
Despite having this dream nightly, I can never hear it.
Dad and Past Me stand outside the driver’s door until she finally coaxes him to hand over the keys. I only had one glass of champagne, she reasons. Home is less than a mile away. We could walk.
We should have walked.
I try to scream that to Past Me, but she can’t hear. She slides behind the wheel while I’m in the back seat beside Mom. “Put your seat belt on,” I urge her. “Mom, put your seat belt on.”
She doesn’t listen. She can’t listen, because it’s too late for me to warn her. Past Me adjusts the mirrors in the front. That’s the me that matters, not Dream Me, who replays this night like a scratched record, growing more warped and ruined with every iteration.
Past Me turns down the back road leading home. A street lined with trees that tower over the cracked pavement. A path I drove so many times before, I could have done it with my eyes closed.
I reach for Mom’s hand to squeeze one more time, but as always, it slides through my fingers.
Then suddenly, it all slides through my fingers.
The car disintegrates around me in a whisper of smoke, like it was never real at all.
My parents curl up with it, along with my past self.
I stand on the broken road, the darkness pressing in on all sides.
My heart hammers. “Hello?” I call out, peering into the tangle of trees. “Is anyone there?”
A branch snaps, then another. I tell my feet to move, but they can’t. Roots push through the cracks in the pavement and wind around my ankles, ensnaring me in their grasp. A scream rips from my throat, but not even the moon is out to hear it.
Pinpricks of golden eyes shine through the dark.
The same golden eyes I saw in front of my car that night in the middle of the street.
“An animal,” the coroner said. “Likely a deer. It isn’t unusual for them to cross the road around that area.
You swerved to avoid it and lost control, spinning into the tree. ”
A deer killed my parents. I killed my parents.
Another rustle of leaves, a snapped twig, the thump of something hitting the ground repeatedly. It sprints toward me, its golden gaze growing closer. The roots have made it halfway up my body, leaving no hope for escape. It bursts from the trees—
I wake with a start, banging my head against the glass window it was resting on.
For a disorienting moment, I don’t know where I am.
Then the murmurs reach my ears, and the violet sky comes into focus as I blink the blurriness from my contacts.
I must have been out for longer than it seems because a sort of twilight has fallen, the sky shifting in color, like dawn is coming.
I slept long past first watch. The realization makes me remember I’m not here alone, even if the empty seat across from me suggests otherwise. Luke’s seat. He left me.
Or maybe he was never here at all, and this is another appendage of my ever-changing nightmare. Perhaps I’ve been stuck in it since Friday, when I first saw Luke perform an exorcism on Debra. I’m trapped in a dreamlike state that only gets weirder and weirder as time goes on.
I thought the same thing when I woke up in the hospital after the crash. It’s all a dream. They pumped me full of drugs to staunch the unending panic attack, making it easy to bridge the gap between reality and delusion. But when it all wore off, it was impossible to ignore that it was all real.
And so is this, despite every protection my mind is trying to conjure to explain why I’m sitting on a train of damned souls.
Where the hell is Luke?
I kneel on my seat so I can scan the car, but it looks the same as before, if not fuller. His backpack is gone and someone sits in the seat where it once rested. Did he ditch me and run off? Did I miss our stop, and he was just so kind, he didn’t want to wake me?
There’s no way I missed the stop. Luke said it would take two days of train travel, and I may have slept longer than intended but it’s only Wednesday. He’s coming back. He wouldn’t leave me.
At least, I don’t think.
I try to wait, but the most evident sign of the passage of time is that my bladder is about to burst. Once the realization hits, it’s all I can think about.
The only thing that might make a train ride through hell exponentially worse is to pee my pants like a toddler who chugged too much apple juice.
“Excuse me,” I say to the man beside me. It doesn’t dent his prayers. “I’m so sorry, can I sneak past you to run to the bathroom?”
He doesn’t register my words.
“Scusi scusi,” I say, resorting to climbing over him. He doesn’t move or shift to make room. When I step over his legs, mine go through his. Just like the glass made him look, he’s a phantom.
He’s also the same temperature as a cold plunge. That’s why a chill hangs in the air, why I’ve felt it since being on the platform. It’s them.
I follow the signs toward the bathroom at the end of the car, the need to pee quickening my pace. When I get there, the door is locked. A patch of red indicates it’s occupied.
Somehow, the idea that monsters and souls in the underworld still need to excrete is the most ludicrous similarity yet.
Regardless, I don’t have time to waste. I push through the door and transfer to the next car, whose bathrooms are, of course, at the opposite end.
I hurry through, huffing in relief when the green patch on the door signals it’s vacant.
It’s like any other train bathroom in that it’s small and the floor is suspiciously sticky, a thought I force myself to dissociate from.
There’s soap over the sink, the chalky pink kind that plagues most public dispensers.
I do my business and get out, hoping Luke will be at our seats when I return.
I’m halfway down the car when something rough wraps around my wrist.