Awaken

9

“Wherefore, here where thou seest, am I lost … ”

DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XXVII

The twinge of hope I’d felt turned to a spark.

I knew that was ridiculous. Dead was dead. If anyone knew that, it was me.

Still, I couldn’t help noticing Mr. Liu’s head jerk up, as if he, too, had felt a spark of hope.

Nor could I help repeating, “Wake up? How could John wake up from being dead?”

“Like me, you mean?” Alex asked. Now that most of my tears had dried up, I could see that the book he was holding was A History of the Isle of Bones, which Mr. Smith had loaned to me, and which had caused John and me to have one of our biggest fights.

I couldn’t remember who’d won that fight. I couldn’t remember why we’d fought — why we’d ever wasted what precious little time we had fighting about anything at all — in the first place.

“Not like you,” Mr. Liu growled at Alex from the darkness, his tone disapproving.

“Mr. Liu is right,” Mr. Graves said. “You were granted a second chance at life by your cousin and Captain Hayden. The captain, on the other hand, was granted a second chance at life by the Fates, along with a set of extraordinary gifts, one of which was the ability to grant life himself. He then brought all of us back to life. We’ve all been attacked by Furies before, but none of us has ever been killed.” He turned his head back towards me. “It was from a Fury attack that I lost my sight, you know. Though we heal much more quickly here, we’re not immune to injury or pain. But this is the first time death has been the result of a Fury attack.”

I glanced involuntarily at John’s supine body, taking in the long white scars that marred his otherwise perfect skin. The fact that the full-time residents of the Underworld weren’t immune to injury had been plainly obvious to me for a long time.

The fact that they were immune to aging, but apparently not death, was only just dawning on me.

“So?” Alex asked rudely. The jibe at his not deserving his second chance at life had evidently stung a little.

“So while it’s not likely,” Mr. Graves said, “I’d say there’s every reason to be hopeful that the captain will recover his heartbeat, just as I’m hopeful that with time, I’ll recover my sight.” He reached out to pat my knee, the part of me that was closest to him. I don’t know how he’d known it was there. Maybe he felt my body heat, the way I could feel Typhon’s hot breath. “Time heals all wounds, you know, Miss Oliviera, even in this place.”

I suppose he did it to comfort me, the way Kayla had patted my shoulder. But I didn’t feel comforted, neither by the gesture nor his words. The spark of hope I’d felt died as surely as if someone had doused it with a cup of tea.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Mr. Graves was supposed to make everything better, not tell me the same kind of platitudes my own doctors had told my parents back when they’d been convinced I was crazy because I kept seeing a leather-jacketed mystery boy every time my life was in jeopardy.

Every reason to be hopeful? Time heals all wounds?

When someone in the medical field started spewing those golden oldies, it was time to give up all hope entirely.

I wanted to leap from the bed and strangle him, but I was pretty sure people who strangled blind doctors didn’t get to go on the nice boat after they died.

“So we’re just supposed to sit here and wait, while the Furies are out there, most likely preparing to attack again? We’re supposed to hope John comes back from —” I shook my head, overwhelmed with confusion and, suddenly, frustration … though at whom or what, I wasn’t sure. “Where is he, anyway? His soul, I mean? Where would the soul of the lord of the Underworld go when he dies while he’s in the Underworld?” In my imagination, John and Hope were somewhere together, enjoying a nice plate of waffles. But I highly doubted this was the case.

“Now that,” Mr. Graves said, his unkempt gray eyebrows furrowing, “is an interesting question, and one over which the captain and I have had some lively discussions. According to the myths — in which of course I do not believe as a man of science — there was a Greek god of death, Thanatos, and he —”

I shook my head, images of John and Hope dining on waffles instantly dissipating. “Thanatos? Who’s Thanatos? I thought Hades was the Greek god of the dead.”

“Only of the Underworld,” Mr. Graves said. “Thanatos was a very minor god, but it was he who was in charge of bringing actual death upon mortals and then escorting them to Hades.”

“Like the angel of death?” Chloe asked, innocently, as I felt the ground seem to rock beneath me.

“Oh, he was no angel,” Mr. Graves said. “Even the gods themselves, including Hades, hated Thanatos, because he would take life indiscriminately. And once taken, he would never surrender it. Nonsense, of course, but the Greeks weren’t known for their scientific expertise … although interestingly, it’s from the name Thanatos that we get certain medical terms, such as euthanasia, which literally translates to a good death —”

“You knew about this Thanatos guy all along,” I asked carefully, having recovered from the shock of his revelation, “and you never thought to mention him before?”

Mr. Graves looked a bit startled. “Of course I knew about him. But you can’t think that means I believe him to be real. I only mentioned him because you asked me —”

“What if he’s real?” I demanded, climbing to my feet. “What if he’s real and he has John?”

“But that’s preposterous,” Mr. Graves said with a humorless laugh. “He doesn’t exist.”

“We’ve never seen the Fates before, either, but we know for a fact they exist, don’t we?”

Mr. Graves blinked. “Yes, but we’ve seen empirical evidence of their existence.”

“We may be looking at empirical evidence of the existence of Thanatos right now!”

“My dear Miss Oliviera,” Mr. Graves said. “It’s good not to lose hope. But keep in mind Thanatos is a fictional character made up by an ancient civilization in order to explain death, a natural phenomena, to a frightened populace in the absence of science.”

“Like Hades and Persephone?” I countered. “And the Underworld? That kind of fictional?”

Mr. Graves’s mouth fell open, but he seemed at a loss for what to say. I’d stumped him.

“What if Thanatos is the one who’s behind this Fury attack,” I demanded, “and he has John? If he does exist, I want to find him, so I can do something to help John” — I flung my arm out to indicate the next room and the courtyard beyond it — “and maybe even all of those people out there, other than sit around and hope.”

I half expected that at the mention of her name, there’d be a flutter of white wings and Hope would show up. But she didn’t. Either she was lying dead somewhere on the beach with all those other birds, or she’d fled — along with the Fates — for some place where hope actually existed.

Mr. Graves cleared his throat, but it was Mrs. Engle who spoke.

“You’ve already helped all of us a great deal, dear,” she said kindly.

“You really have,” Chloe agreed from where she sat on the floor, stroking Typhon’s head. The two of them made an odd-looking pair, like something out of an illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast … if Beauty had had blood in her hair.

“Well, I’m not so sure,” Henry harrumphed as he came clomping back into the room, a newly warmed pot of tea in his hands and an apron tied around his waist that was so large on his childish body, the hem trailed nearly to the floor. “All the people you’ve helped can barely fit into the castle as it is. They’re spilling over into the back gardens and the stable yard and into the hallways, not to mention my kitchen —”

For a second, the room seemed to turn as red as the flowers that grew on the tree across from John’s crypt in the Isla Huesos Cemetery.

I didn’t panic. It seemed like a good sign to me, the first indication that the blood was beginning to pump again in my veins. I’d been almost sure it had frozen solid when I’d first seen John’s body floating in the water.

“What was I supposed to do?” I demanded. “Furies are on the loose, birds of prey were dropping out of the sky like feather bombs, there aren’t any boats coming, and it’s raining blood. Do you think I should have just left them there?”

“Miss Oliviera.” It was Mr. Graves’s voice. I couldn’t see anything too well, due to the red staining everything. But I could hear perfectly well. “Need I remind you that they’re already dead?”

“Souls of the dead.” I pointed at John, though of course Mr. Graves couldn’t see my finger, and to be truthful, I could see only the dimmest outline of it. “He could be one of them. I was one of them once. She’s one of them.” I pointed in the general direction of Mrs. Engle. “So are they.” Chloe and Reed. “No one gets left behind. No one.”

“I understand that,” Mr. Graves said gently. I’m certain he couldn’t tell what was happening with my vision — no one could but me. But he must have recognized by the tremor in my voice how upset I was. “All of this — everything you’ve done — serves the dead and serves them well. But a physician’s responsibility must always be what’s best for the living. Regardless of the strength of our feelings for the dead, we must always think to ourselves, How can I best serve the living? For it is the living whom we serve and who matter most.”

Slowly, the red began to recede from my eyes.

“I know that,” I said, slightly ashamed for my outburst. “I went to Coffin Fest.” With the very person for whom it had been named — whether its organizers knew it or not. “I do understand how important it is to properly dispose of the dead” — my gaze slid towards John’s body — “when the time comes.”

“Then you know,” Mr. Graves said, “that it isn’t only because of the threat of disease. It’s because of the very real possibility of revenants.”

“Could you people please speak English?” Reed asked. “What’s a revenant?”

“A revenant is someone who’s come back from the dead,” Mr. Graves said, “the way many in Isla Huesos believe the captain had, because they often saw him roaming the cemetery. That’s how Coffin Night became a tradition …. The people of Isla Huesos came to believe if they enacted a yearly funeral pyre tradition, the captain, whose spirit was restless from an improper burial, would rest. But a revenant is dead, not alive, like you and the captain.”

“Wait. You mean a zombie?” Reed’s voice rose excitedly. “Is that what those Fury things are that everyone keeps talking about? Zombies?”

“Or ghosts?” Alex asked. “If you guys say we were running from ghosts back on that beach, I swear to God, I’ll —”

Henry slammed the teapot down on a side table with enough force to shut up both Alex and Reed. When he spun around to face us, the expression on his pink-cheeked face was as angry as I’d ever seen it.

“Ghosts? You think a ghost did that?” He thrust a finger at John.

“Well, isn’t that what those Fury things are?” Alex asked. “Really badass ghosts?”

Mr. Graves rolled his sightless eyes towards the ceiling.

“Ghosts want to hurt people on earth who wronged them while they were alive.” Mr. Liu’s deep voice came from the recess of the staircase. “Furies only want to hurt the captain — and those of us close to him — for wronging them after death. The closest thing to a zombie is what any of you would be, if you left this world and reentered your corpse after it had begun rotting.”

Looking a little shame-faced, both Reed and Alex lowered their gazes to the floor. In the silence that followed, the sound of a scuffle could be heard breaking out in the courtyard. Then Frank’s voice, grounding out a curt warning, drifted towards us: “Everyone keep your hands to yourself, or I guarantee you’ll lose ’em.”

The warning was accompanied by a curse word or two colorful enough to make Chloe blush. Mrs. Engle seemed offended, too, since she said, in a scandalized tone, “Really, I’ve had as much of this as I can take. Ghosts and Furies and zombies? Could we please try to remember that a young man is dead?”

She seemed to have forgotten that she, too, was dead.

“Sorry, ma’am.” Frank appeared in one of the archways, pushing back the gauzy curtain and striding, panting and bloodied from a cut on his forehead, into the main room. “But it’s getting a bit dicey out there.” To me, he said, “It’ll be dark soon. What are we going to do about that lot?” On the words that lot, he tilted his head in the direction of the courtyard.

“They’re hungry, but there’s nothing to feed ’em or to give ’em to drink, except beer,” Henry added. “We’re already running low on tea.”

All eyes, I noticed with alarm, were on me, as if I were supposed to do something about the fact that we were running low on tea.

“What are you looking at me for?” I asked. The anger flowing through my veins had definitely been preferable to the despair that had been slogging through them before, but now that it had faded, along with the light outside, I felt tired and confused. “I’m not in charge.”

As if in direct denial of this, John’s tablet began to chime again at my waist to indicate that yet another new soul had entered the land of the dead.

“Actually,” Mr. Liu said, rising to his feet, “I think you are in charge. The captain gave that to you.”

“Right. He chose you. You’re the one.” Henry sounded exactly as he had the first day we’d met, when he’d been just as quick to assure me that I was not, in fact, the one. “Don’t you remember?”

I looked from the chiming tablet back towards their inquisitive faces.

“Well, I don’t know what to do,” I said, though I knew this wasn’t a good thing for anyone in a management-level position to admit. “What have you guys done before when this has happened?”

Mr. Graves’s shaggy gray eyebrows rose to their limits as he stared at a point several feet above my head. “Miss Oliviera,” he said. “The Furies have never destroyed two of our boats and killed the captain before. And certainly no one has ever invited the souls of the dead up from the beach and into the castle.”

I didn’t miss the unspoken accusation in his voice. No one until you, you strange girl who sees red — literally — whenever you get angry.

“True,” Frank said. “But then the Fates have never left us before, either.”

The Fates have never left us before, either. The words caused a chill to go down my spine and the fine hair on the backs of my arms to stand up. I glanced over my shoulder at the still, waxen form of John stretched out upon the bed. Wake up, I attempted to will him with my mind. Don’t leave me alone with this mess. Don’t leave me alone, ever.

His wide chest didn’t move. His eyelids remained shut.

“What are Fates?” asked Chloe in a small voice, from where she still knelt beside Typhon at John’s bedside.

“The opposite of Furies,” Mr. Graves explained to her. “Spirits of good, instead of evil.”

“Well,” Reed said dryly. “There definitely aren’t any of those around here.”

I saw Chloe give Reed’s foot a nudge with her own. “How can you say that?” she whispered.

“I didn’t mean you.” Reed smiled at her. “Your spirit’s looking plenty good from here.”

Alex, having overheard this, curled his lip in disgust.

“Not me,” Chloe whispered, and nodded in my direction. “Her. How can you say that after everything she did to help us?”

Reed glanced towards me. “Oh, right. Her spirit’s looking pretty good, too,” he added generously.

Alex rolled his eyes and said, “Fates aren’t the kind of spirits you can see, you idiot. They’re like Furies. You can only —”

“I always thought that the Fates were Greek goddesses in charge of mankind’s destiny,” Mrs. Engle interrupted, seeming anxious to break the sudden tension between the two boys, both of whom were clearly attracted to Chloe. When Mrs. Engle saw that she had their attention, she went on, “I worked as a school nurse for thirty years — retired now, of course. But those kinds of things do tend to sink in and stay with you —”

“Who cares what the Fates are?” Alex burst out. Mrs. Engle’s scheme wasn’t working. “The question is, where’d they go? And how do we get them back?”

“I don’t think it will be easy,” Mr. Graves said. He sounded annoyed with Alex. Welcome to the club. “I believe they’ve been driven away because there’s an imbalance here. An imbalance is virtually always caused by pestilence —” A note of primness crept into the surgeon’s voice, as it always did whenever he gave a lecture on pestilence, his favorite subject (aside from beer). “Whenever an imbalance occurs and pestilence is able to slip into a system, it causes infection.”

“Like when I got my eyebrow pierced,” Kayla asked, “and I didn’t clean it well enough, and it got infected?”

“You pierced your eyebrow?” Mr. Graves turned his head towards her, his expression horrified. “Good God, young lady, why?”

“Never mind that now,” I said impatiently. “What can we do to fix the imbalance … drive away the Furies and get back the Fates?”

“Well,” Mr. Graves said, returning his attention to me. “If we could determine what’s caused the imbalance, I’m quite certain we could correct it. But until then, I’m afraid we, like the captain, have only one thing to hang on to, and that’s —”

I held up a single hand. “Don’t say it.”

Mr. Graves looked taken aback. “How did you know what I was going to say?”

I lowered my hand. “Because it was going to be hope. And I don’t want to hear the word hope again. I don’t believe in it anymore.”

Hearing this was apparently more than Chloe could bear. She rose from the floor — leaving Typhon looking sad to have lost his ear scratcher — and hurried towards me.

“Pierce, you mustn’t say that,” she said. “These light momentary afflictions are preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison —”

I cut her off with a grim look. “I’ve got bad news for you, Chloe. There’s not going to be any eternal weight of glory unless we get you, and all the rest of these people, to a boat. Mr. Graves, I’ve got some news for you, too.” I turned towards him. “In twenty-first-century America, where I’m from, we’ve got better weapons against infections than hope.”

Mrs. Engle coughed politely. “Dear, if you’re speaking about antibiotics, I believe the doctor was using the term infection as a metaphor —”

“Why, yes,” Mr. Graves said to Mrs. Engle, looking pleased. “I was.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said. I lifted the diamond on the end of my necklace. “I’m talking about this.”

“I don’t know what an antibiotic is,” Henry said, reaching around his waist to untie the apron he was wearing, then tossing it to the floor. “But if you’re talking about killing Furies, I’m ready.”

“So am I,” Frank said, drawing a knife from his belt. “Only where do we find them?”

“The same place we can find food for our guests,” I said. “And a couple of new boats to take them where they need to go.”

Mr. Graves looked bewildered. “And where would that be?”

“Isla Huesos,” I said.

Mr. Graves’s expression of bewilderment turned to a frown. “Isla Huesos? That port of degradation and sin?” I’d forgotten he wasn’t a fan. “And how do you think you’re going to get there? Only the captain possessed the ability to travel between this world and the next, and he is, to put it mildly, indisposed.”

“That isn’t strictly true,” I said. “Well, it’s true John’s indisposed, but it isn’t true he’s the only one who possessed the ability to go back and forth between this world and the next.” I glanced down the hallway at the curved double staircase I knew so well. “Does anyone know where John keeps the keys to the doors at the top of those stairs?”

For the first time in a long time, I saw Mr. Liu smile. “No,” he said. “But I know where there’s an ax.”