“Nothing,” Charon said.
“For how long?”
“Forever, or until I’m feeling generous.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s…fair.”
Charon raised an eyebrow. “Whoever said death was fair, young miss? Wait until it’s your turn. You’ll die soon enough, where you’re going.”
“We’ll get out alive,” I said.
“Ha.”
I got a sudden dizzy feeling. We weren’t going down anymore, but forward. The air turned misty. Spirits around me started changing shape. Their modern clothes flickered, turning into gray hooded robes. The floor of the elevator began swaying.
I blinked hard. When I opened my eyes, Charon’s creamy Italian suit had been replaced by a long black robe. His tortoiseshell glasses were gone. Where his eyes should’ve been were empty sockets—like Ares’s eyes, except Charon’s were totally dark, full of night and death and despair.
He saw me looking, and said, “Well?”
“Nothing,” I managed.
I thought he was grinning, but that wasn’t it. The flesh of his face was becoming transparent, letting me see straight through to his skull.
The floor kept swaying.
Grover said, “I think I’m getting seasick.”
When I blinked again, the elevator wasn’t an elevator anymore. We were standing in a wooden barge. Charon was poling us across a dark, oily river, swirling with bones, dead fish, and other, stranger things—plastic dolls, crushed carnations, soggy diplomas with gilt edges.
“The River Styx,” Annabeth murmured. “It’s so…”
“Polluted,” Charon said. “For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across—hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.”
Mist curled off the filthy water. Above us, almost lost in the gloom, was a ceiling of stalactites. Ahead, the far shore glimmered with greenish light, the color of poison.
Panic closed up my throat. What was I doing here? These people around me…they were dead.
Annabeth grabbed hold of my hand. Under normal circumstances, this would’ve embarrassed me, but I understood how she felt. She wanted reassurance that somebody else was alive on this boat.
I found myself muttering a prayer, though I wasn’t quite sure who I was praying to. Down here, only one god mattered, and he was the one I had come to confront.
The shoreline of the Underworld came into view. Craggy rocks and black volcanic sand stretched inland about a hundred yards to the base of a high stone wall, which marched off in either direction as far as we could see. A sound came from somewhere nearby in the green gloom, echoing off the stones—the howl of a large animal.
“Old Three-Face is hungry,” Charon said. His smile turned skeletal in the greenish light. “Bad luck for you, godlings.”
The bottom of our boat slid onto the black sand. The dead began to disembark. A woman holding a little girl’s hand. An old man and an old woman hobbling along arm in arm. A boy no older than I was, shuffling silently along in his gray robe.
Charon said, “I’d wish you luck, mate, but there isn’t any down here. Mind you, don’t forget to mention my pay raise.”
He counted our golden coins into his pouch, then took up his pole. He warbled something that sounded like a Barry Manilow song as he ferried the empty barge back across the river.
We followed the spirits up a well-worn path.
I’m not sure what I was expecting—Pearly Gates, or a big black portcullis, or something. But the entrance to the Underworld looked like a cross between airport security and the Jersey Turnpike.
There were three separate entrances under one huge black archway that said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING EREBUS. Each entrance had a pass-through metal detector with security cameras mounted on top. Beyond this were tollbooths manned by black-robed ghouls like Charon.
The howling of the hungry animal was really loud now, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. The three-headed dog, Cerberus, who was supposed to guard Hades’s door, was nowhere to be seen.
The dead queued up in the three lines, two marked ATTENDANT ON DUTY, and one marked EZ DEATH. The EZ DEATH line was moving right along. The other two were crawling.
“What do you figure?” I asked Annabeth.
“The fast line must go straight to the Asphodel Fields,” she said. “No contest. They don’t want to risk judgment from the court, because it might go against them.”
“There’s a court for dead people?”
“Yeah. Three judges. They switch around who sits on the bench. King Minos, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare—people like that. Sometimes they look at a life and decide that person needs a special reward—the Fields of Elysium. Sometimes they decide on punishment. But most people, well, they just lived. Nothing special, good or bad. So they go to the Asphodel Fields.”
“And do what?”
Grover said, “Imagine standing in a wheat field in Kansas. Forever.”
“Harsh,” I said.
“Not as harsh as that,” Grover muttered. “Look.”
A couple of black-robbed ghouls had pulled aside one spirit and were frisking him at the security desk. The face of the dead man looked vaguely familiar.
“He’s that preacher who made the news, remember?” Grover asked.
“Oh, yeah.” I did remember now. We’d seen him on TV a couple of times at the Yancy Academy dorm. He was this annoying televangelist from upstate New York who’d raised millions of dollars for orphanages and then got caught spending the money on stuff for his mansion, like gold-plated toilet seats, and an indoor putt-putt golf course. He’d died in a police chase when his “Lamborghini for the Lord” went off a cliff.
I said, “What’re they doing to him?”
“Special punishment from Hades,” Grover guessed. “The really bad people get his personal attention as soon as they arrive. The Fur—the Kindly Ones will set up an eternal torture for him.”
The thought of the Furies made me shudder. I realized I was in their home territory now. Old Mrs. Dodds would be licking her lips with anticipation.
“But if he’s a preacher,” I said, “and he believes in a different hell.…”
Grover shrugged. “Who says he’s seeing this place the way we’re seeing it? Humans see what they want to see. You’re very stubborn—er, persistent, that way.”
We got closer to the gates. The howling was so loud now it shook the ground at my feet, but I still couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
Then, about fifty feet in front of us, the green mist shimmered. Standing just where the path split into three lanes was an enormous shadowy monster.
I hadn’t seen it before because it was half transparent, like the dead. Until it moved, it blended with whatever was behind it. Only its eyes and teeth looked solid. And it was staring straight at me.
My jaw hung open. All I could think to say was, “He’s a Rottweiler.”
I’d always imagined Cerberus as a big black mastiff. But he was obviously a purebred Rottweiler, except of course that he was twice the size of a woolly mammoth, mostly invisible, and had three heads.
The dead walked right up to him—no fear at all. The ATTENDANT ON DUTY lines parted on either side of him. The EZ DEATH spirits walked right between his front paws and under his belly, which they could do without even crouching.