All Our Pretty Songs (22 page)

We are standing on the edge of a vast bone-white plain that glows with an unholy light of its own under the empty sky.
So Death’s great city welcomed armies of the dead
. But there are no armies here, only me and the hot blood in my human veins. Ahead of us stands a palace. There’s no other word for it: looming, massive, rising out of the white rock like a tumor. Black stone walls, grease-shined like the river. I can see hundreds of doors all around it, and all of them are open. Locks don’t matter, here. My stomach knots, and I can’t catch my breath. This is more than anything I bargained for. This is not a place I should be, not a place anyone from my time or my world should ever have to see. Minos does not turn around, but he pauses. I can feel him, at the edges of my thoughts. Amused, contemptuous. His disdain kindles my courage. I take the first step forward, walk past him. I know where I’m going, now. He can follow me.

It takes longer than I think it should to cross the white plain and draw close to the nearest door.
Aurora
, I think,
Aurora, Aurora, Jack.
Holding their names under my tongue like talismans, I take the first step inside.

I am back in the penthouse apartment Aurora took me to. The room is empty and the chandeliers are unlit, the greasy candles melted into long strings of wax. Beyond the windows I see not the plain we crossed but the black ocean, the black sky of my dreams. It’s colder here than anywhere I’ve ever been. I draw my sleeves over my knuckles, but it’s no use. Nothing can keep out this chill. It slips between my ribs and down my throat. I shiver and tug at Raoul’s rosary. I’m starting to wonder if I will spend the rest of my life in places that aren’t entirely real, and then I think about where I am and how the rest of my life may not be a very long time at all, and then I decide to think about something else. Ripley. Thomas the Rhymer.
Weetzie Bat
. Plum sauce. Wendy Wanders. Raoul’s tamales. Oscar Wilde. Cheetos. JD with his homemade bomb. Cow tipping. Staying frosty. Keith Richards. Keith Richards is definitely cooler than Minos. Maybe even older. I think about bringing this up, decide against it.

The room is smaller than I remember from the party. One wall is windowless, painted white and lined with oil paintings in simple frames. I walk closer, unable to help myself. Security guards at museums hate me; I’m forever trying to touch the art. These are a series of murky oil landscapes all done in a similar style. Each one is populated with tiny figures, their faces rendered in perfect detail. A man rolling a boulder up a hill, his shoulders covered in gore, his face full of pain. A man tied down, mouth open in a scream, while vultures tear open his belly. A line of sad-faced women trying to carry water in sieves. And people I know, too. People who lived too fast and died badly. When I find the picture of Aurora’s father, I am not surprised. He’s in the garden of Aurora’s house, looking at something outside the frame of the painting. His face looks the same way it does in my memory. At the very edge of the picture, there’s a half-obscured figure in a dress that might be Maia. Or Aurora.

“This is fucked,” I say. I turn back to Minos, and then I see him. The tall pale man from the party, the one whose touch burned my skin. Minos’s boss. I can’t pretend anymore that I don’t know who he is, don’t know who the two people I love most in the world have been cutting bargains with. His ice-blue eyes are mocking. He’s standing by the windows on the far side of the room, as casual as if we were all at a cocktail party. Aurora lies crumpled at his feet.
Please, let her be alive
, I think.
Please. Please.

“Come forward,” says the ice-eyed man. I can feel my shoulder burning where the thorns pierced my skin. I cross the room. Slow, slow steps. If Aurora is dead I don’t want to know yet.

But she isn’t: I can see that, when I’m standing in front of the god of hell. Faint rattle of breath in her throat, faint rise and fall of her chest. She’s so beautiful now she is transcendent, as though passing over from the realm of the living stripped her of any remaining imperfection. I am so filled with love for her I can hardly talk. “I came here for her,” I say.

“I know what you came here for,” he says. “What will you give me for her?” The terrible eyes are amused.

Once there was a musician who fell in love with a girl. When she died too young he followed her into darkness, played so beautifully that even the lord of death was moved.
Take her
, he said to the musician,
and bring her to the world above. But if you falter on the path, she is ours forever
.

But I am not the musician, and I am not the girl. I am only myself, muscle and bone, stubborn and jealous and sometimes too mean, selfish and in love. I am only all the things that make me, and the best of those is her. I have nothing to offer the god of hell, no sweet-voiced song to trade, no unearthly beauty, no rare and precious gift. I can’t charm animals or fight kings or sail a fleet of ships to a hundred monster-haunted islands, trick a Cyclops, make a goddess fall in love with me. I curl my hands into fists and stand there, helpless and out of luck. I don’t even win at board games.

Draw for us
, Minos says. That death’s-head mask is as expressionless as ever. For the first time it occurs to me to wonder why he brought me here, why he shot me full of the same glimmering stuff that pulled Aurora down into the dark and then sent me home before I could cross all the way over. Why he led me down that long passage to this wretched palace of death. Why he’s offering me good advice now, reminding me of the single thing I know how to do better than anyone else I know. The two of them are watching me, inscrutable.

Fine. Draw for them. That I can do. I sink to my haunches, take out my brushes and ink. My sketchbook. I turn to a blank page. Breathe in. Start to draw. I draw me and Aurora, the story of us. I draw us as little girls, clasping our bloody palms together and making promises about forever. I draw us in the pit, clothes sticking to our bodies, our faces jubilant, waiting for the next chord. I draw us in the woods, sleeping under a canopy of leaves. I draw the map we made on the walls of my room, the world we swore we’d find together. I draw the wretched mess of my own envy, draw the poison I let creep into my heart, draw how much I wanted her broken fairytale life, how much I wanted her perfect face, her endless charm. I draw us in her bathtub, laughing at each other. I draw Aurora as Ripley, battling aliens in the far reaches of space; I draw her as Aphrodite rising out of the ocean; I draw her as the mermaid Ondine singing mortals down to the deep. I draw her as I know her: capricious, fierce, lovely, beloved. I draw Raoul and Oscar Wilde, Raoul and the fish-stall boys, Raoul bringing me back to what matters over and over again. I draw what it cost me to leave Jack standing in that terrible room, draw how much I hope he’ll find what he’s looking for, the future bright and hopeful still. I draw a way out, a way through. Draw the light of his music moving through me, that impossible gift, the music that started all of this, that drew these old gods to us like cats batting mice for sport. I draw Cass and her tarot cards, counting out the ways to keep from saying sorry; Maia kicking aside the life raft and plunging into the deep. Both of them letting us go too far until we got to here. I draw as though I’m drawing for my life, for Aurora’s life, drawing us a way out of here, a way back to the world we lived in before, where everything was simpler and the only things that could hurt us were the things I already knew. I draw until my hands cramp into claws and my vision blurs and my fingers are black with ink. Sweat runs in stinging rivulets between my breasts. Aurora’s chest rises and falls. I draw for hours or days or months or years, I draw until time stops meaning anything at all. I draw until Minos bends down and gently takes the brushes from me. He stands and faces the ice-eyed man.

Let them go. I wish it.

“Take her, then,” says the god of hell. I can see eternity in his bored blue eyes, all the dusty centuries that have passed while he waited in this room for something to happen. No wonder he likes to fuck with people. We’re the daytime soaps for him.
The Real World: Hades.
“Take her, and see how far you get, child.”

I don’t wait for them to change their minds. When I try to stand my legs buckle, and the pain in my knees makes me suck my breath in quick and sharp. Minos reaches out one bony hand but I shrug it away, struggle to my feet alone and stand there breathing hard until the room stops spinning.

“Aurora,” I say. “We have to go.” She doesn’t stir. Nobody said this was going to be a free ride, but I wish I had at least a couple of crafty fates on my side. I take a deep breath and pick Aurora up like I’m a newlywed carrying her across a threshold. One of her arms slung around my shoulder. Her white hair spilling down my back. She murmurs something and opens her eyes at last.

“Babycakes. You came.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say into Aurora’s cheek. I carry her out of that room with my own two hands, and I do not look back.

The ferryman is waiting where we left him, silent in his dark boat. I heave Aurora’s legs over the side, sit her in the front of the boat. Aurora slumps forward, and I climb over her. We sit like that, her nearly unconscious, me expectant, but the boat doesn’t move. I rack my mind for fairytale passwords, but everything I know is out of Grimm’s. “Open sesame” is probably a little
au courant
for these purists. I’m still freezing, and the empty night is not particularly cheering. Somewhere in the distance a dog howls, and I shudder. That thing, I do not want to see again.

I don’t hear Minos, don’t see him crossing the plain. One minute he isn’t there and the next he is.
You have to pay the ferryman. Cross the river and follow the path. It will take you a long time. But I think you are stronger than you look.

“Pay him what?” But Minos won’t answer. “Why are you helping me?”

Minos steps forward and reaches over the gunwale, rests one hand on Aurora’s forehead. He bends down and kisses her at the place where her dark roots meet her brow.
It has been a very long time
.
But once I too knew how to love.
He reaches into his black coat and hands me my sketchbook and brushes.
These are yours.

“Thank you.”

He shakes his head.
You will not thank me.
In his dead eyes there’s something like a very human sorrow. He raises one hand, in farewell or in benediction, and then he is gone, nothing where he stood but the empty plain and the dark palace in the distance.

I have to pay the ferryman. Maybe the ferryman wants blood. But when I take Jack’s knife out of my pocket, flip open the blade and press it against the thin pale skin at my wrist, the ferryman shakes his head. He leans forward, the hood still covering his face, and touches Aurora’s hair.

“No way,” I say. “That’s not up to me. That’s hers.” I offer him Cass’s amulet, Raoul’s rosary—not that that’s mine to give either. The knife. My hoodie, my sketchbook, my boots. But he ignores me. “Goddammit,” I mutter. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “It grows.” I put Jack’s knife to her hair and start to cut. The knife is sharp but too small for what I’m using it for, and Aurora has a lot of hair. Long moments pass as I saw away, hanks coming off in my hands. I cut my finger and yelp, put it in my mouth for a moment. When I go back to cutting the white of Aurora’s hair is stained with my blood. At last I have a pile of pale strands, a larger mass than I would have thought possible. I offer it to the ferryman. “Rumpelstiltskin,” I say, but if he gets the joke it doesn’t register. These guys don’t have much of a sense of humor.

The ferryman poles us back to the other shore. Maybe it’s imagination or fear, but the crossing seems to take too long. The boat’s sluggish, the current strong. I chew on my fingers and close my eyes. I can feel the palace pulsing behind me, tugging at me with some unsubtle force.
You will not thank me.

The boat scrapes against sand at last. “I could use your help,” I say to the ferryman, but he doesn’t move. He has Aurora’s hair in his lap, stroking it as though it’s a pet. It quivers like a living thing under his touch. I watch for a moment, fascinated, and then heave Aurora to her feet, careful not to rock the boat. To get her out I’ll have to more or less throw her. “You have to help me,” I say to her, shaking her. She lifts her head, opens her eyes. Looks right at me.

“I saw my dad.” Her voice is clear and high.

“Aurora, you couldn’t have. Your dad’s dead.”

“Everyone here is dead.”

“Not you. And not me. Can you take a big step? Over the side?” She obeys. The boat tips madly as she steps out, and I think for a second I’ll go flying, but I hop clear before I can lose my footing.

“He’s going to teach me to play the guitar,” she says happily. “Like Jack.”

“Aurora. We have to walk now.” Her eyes roll back in her head and her knees buckle. She tumbles forward into my arms, nearly sending me backward into the river. She’s out cold. It wouldn’t be hell if it was easy. “Piggyback it is,” I tell her.

She’s so light I barely notice her weight at first, as I move through the forest. But by the time I reach the tunnel my shoulders are beginning to hurt. I hitch her body up against my back, get my hands more firmly underneath her thighs, walk into that yawning mouth. Begin to climb.

If I thought the way down was long, it is nothing compared to the way back up. Aurora’s limp body is a dead weight. My shoulders burn, my thighs ache, my calves knot. Sweat runs down my chest, drips from my forehead and into my eyes, but I can’t move my arms to wipe it away without dropping her. I put my head down, think about putting one foot after the other. One step, one step, one more step. My throat is so dry I can’t swallow, my lungs are on fire, my hands are cramping, one step, one step, one step. I have no idea how long I’ve been climbing or how long I have left. Pain travels up my spine and shuts down reason, shuts down everything but one step, the next step, the next step, the next. The walls of the tunnel closing in. Suffocating heat, darkness, silence. One step, one step, one step. My feet are wet, and I wonder dully if I stepped in the river after all, if the taint of that water is enough to keep me in this hallway forever, doomed like Sisyphus to carry my burden until the end of time. The darkness presses against me. I can feel raw fear rising in my chest and threatening to choke me, but if I stop now I will never start again. I close my eyes. It makes no difference. But there’s something about the darkness behind my own lids that’s strangely comforting. Cass’s amulet burns against my chest. One step, one step, one step.