"I needed you to stop," the specter said. "We don’t have a great deal of time."
Clay narrowed his eyes so tightly that his flesh seemed to alter with the expression. "Has Medusa left the train?"
"Oh, I’m almost certain she has. And we’d best hurry if we want to search before the authorities arrive. It’s a matter of minutes, I expect."
Squire’s head hurt. "Search what? You lost me, Doc."
The ghost seemed suddenly more solid, and the expression on his spectral features was bitter. "The wreckage, Squire. The train has derailed."
Dr. Graves pointed to the northeast, where several columns of dark smoke were pluming into the sky. The crash sight was two or three miles away from the highway, but he and Clay had been caught up in conversation and had not even noticed the smoke.
"Damn," the goblin whispered.
Dr. Graves floated right up through the roof of the car and hovered above it. "I think we ought to leave the car here for the moment. We’ll reach the site faster by our own means."
"Agreed," Clay said. He put the car in drive and pulled further onto the shoulder, then locked it up tight.
"Any survivors?" he asked, just before he transformed, his flesh popping and rippling as it diminished. In a handful of moments, Clay was gone and a hawk hopped about the ground in his place.
Dr. Graves floated toward the crash site. "We’ll find out soon enough," said the ghost.
Squire went to the shoulder of the road. Beyond it were only olive trees and open ground, with some power lines in the distance. Clay and Graves flew toward the pluming smoke, just a bird and this blur against the sky that looked more than a little like a jellyfish, distorting the light that passed through it.
"Don’t wait up, guys," the hobgoblin muttered.
He went back to the car, glanced over his shoulder at the power lines, and then dove into the long shadow the vehicle cast on the shoulder of the road.
The darkness swallowed him. His senses spread out through the shadow paths, fingers on Braille, and he began to run. A short time later he emerged from the shadow beneath an electrical tower. He did not step into the sun, but emerging from the darkness he still had to shield his eyes from the brightness of the day. A quick scan of the sky showed him that he was slightly ahead of the hawk and the ghost. Not far from him he saw the railroad tracks. The crash had happened perhaps a mile east. The smoke was thinner, now, wispy.
Like ghosts.
Squire gauged the distance to the crash and slipped back into the shadows. The darkness caressed him as he slipped along the path, feeling the various conduits all around him, touching the shadows intimately. He knew them.
Even so, he almost missed the path he wanted. It was so dark that he did not notice it at first. Then he moved along it and let his instincts feel for the egress.
The hobgoblin slid from the shadows inside the wreckage of the train. The car was turned on its side, windows shattered and metal walls torn like paper. Seats had been ripped from their moorings. Squire breathed through his mouth, prepared for the wretched stench of blood and death.
But all he could smell was smoke and dust.
Confused, he looked around the wreckage. It took a moment for him to realize what he was seeing. There were no bodies. None of flesh and blood, at least.
Medusa had turned the passengers to stone.
The crash had reduced them to rubble.
The River Styx did not crash and churn, no whitewater foamed its banks, yet it ran deeper than imaginable, fast and steady and inexorable in its strength. To attempt to swim its breadth would be foolhardy. Suicidal. And though Nigel Gull knew his soul was likely damned — whatever that really meant — he did not want to discover what would become of his spirit if his body was destroyed here in Hades’ realm. There was the additional complication of Eve. Hawkins carried the vampire over one shoulder. The man was stronger than he looked, but no one was strong enough to swim the Styx carrying one hundred and thirty odd pounds of dead weight.
They had to cross the Styx. And according to both myth and reality, there was only one way to do that.
"This is it, then, huh?" Jezebel asked.
Gull glanced at her. She looked so small, so young to him now, this teenaged girl who had left her whole world behind for him. He wanted to protect her. But there were other things he desired more.
"Yes, Jez. This is the Styx. It only gets worse from here. We’ve been descending all along, but once we cross the river it will not be a simple thing to get back." He fixed her in his gaze. "In truth, we may not come back at all."
A flicker of fear went across her face but it disappeared quickly. "If you’re going, Nigel, then so am I. What are we waiting for?"
Hawkins shifted Eve from one shoulder to the other, spreading out the burden of her weight, and took a step past them, nearer the river’s edge.
"Isn’t it obvious, love? The ferryman. We’re waiting on the ferryman."
Gull nodded. "Charon."
Jezebel glanced past him and she flinched with a sharp intake of breath and pointed out across the water. "That would be him?"
A trickle of dread ran down Nigel Gull’s back and he shivered, even as he turned to gaze out over the river. In his long life the twisted mage had seen extraordinary things, impossible things. Hideous and terrifying things. They were in the Underworld, now and were about to cross into the land of the dead. Yet the sight of that small craft skimming across the top of the river gave him a chill that made him feel very small, as though he were a child again.
This was no nameless demon, no Slavic bogeyman, no trickster spirit. This was Charon, a figure unique in myth. Not a god, not a man. Not a monster or a demon. Simply Charon, who carried the spirits of the dead to a land of endless nothing, a place of waiting, where waiting was the only destiny, and at the end there was only more waiting. Gull had always envisioned this ancient vision of Hell, left over from the Second Age of Man, as an asylum filled with muttering, ghostly madmen, their eyes darting to follow imaginary pests, their bodies rapt with anticipation of something, anything, that might happen next.
But there would never be a next.
Not on the other side of the Styx.
The fabric of human faith had created entirely new Hells, new spirit destinations, in this Third Age of Man. Gull had reasoned that very few crossed the river anymore.
Yet Charon frightened him. That eternal asylum frightened him.
The ceiling of the cavern was so high above it was lost to sight, and though there clearly was no sky there, no sun, still a strange illumination cast a dim gray light upon the river and its banks.
The boat moved swiftly toward shore. Gull felt he could not breathe and both of his companions seemed equally unsettled. Hanging from the prow of the boat was a lantern whose jaundiced light shone upon the surface of that perhaps bottomless river. The current ran swift and deep and yet the narrow launch was uninfluenced by its power. No sway or eddy nudged that vessel from its course.
In the rear of the craft stood a solitary figure in dark robes the color of river silt. If the ferryman had hands, they were lost within those robes and whatever grim countenance might be hidden beneath his voluminous hood, there was only darkness.
So entranced was Gull by the ferryman’s progress that when the prow of the boat lightly touched the riverbank he flinched away as though he had been slapped. Jezebel watched him, gnawing her lower lip and twirling a lock of her hair in her fingers. Hawkins dumped Eve’s inert body on the shore, her arms flopping onto the damp black soil. The vampire’s eyes were wide and unseeing, but a glimpse of her heartened Gull’s resolve. He thought of all the planning that had gone into this excursion.
He thought of Medusa.