"I don't really know," Zee shrugged. "But I wanted to find out." He shook his head. "She was one of the first to… you know- they took her shadow"
"Oh."
"Yeah, so.."
"So." Charlotte looked at Zee, and Zee looked at Charlotte, and they both nodded and proceeded on their way.
It was about a half hour later, when they were just beginning to despair of ever reaching the end, that they noticed the change. Something had opened up, the air moved more freely, and off in the distance-in the very great distance- they could see something that looked very much like light.
Charlotte's heart started throbbing, and not from the exertion. Her grip on Zee's sweater tightened. He reached back, grabbed her hand, and squeezed it (Charlotte noticed his palms were as clammy as hers), and together they moved toward the light.
A few paces on, Zee stopped and started to look around carefully. He leaned back and whispered, "Did you hear something?"
"You know," Charlotte whispered back, "I really hate it when you ask that." She listened. Yes, she did hear something. Wings! She heard wings! Their bird was coming toward them! Well, good, that would be a big help…
No, no, wait-not their bird. Too big to be their bird. Really, those wings sounded awfully large -very, very large…
"Duck!" Zee hissed.
"Du-? Oh!" And Charlotte ducked.
A huge mass of a thing flew by them, a thing that was definitely not a duck, a thing that made their bird look like a chickadee. The thing was the size of a bear-a flying bear-with vast wings like those of an eagle. It was an eagle, a bear-size eagle, or it would have been, had its face not been that of an old woman. A nasty old woman, like the one who sat in the ice cream aisle of Charlotte's grocery store shouting mean things at whoever passed her by. The thing (the ugly bird, not the ugly ice-cream-aisle woman) had claws the size of sickles, the tips of which seemed to gleam.
The Harpy- for that is what the woman-faced, eagle-bodied, impossibly enormous, and, while we're at it, quite bad-smelling creature was -was singing a little song to herself. If it could be called singing, if singing were a tuneless, phlegmy, cackling, screeching sort of endeavor, which it's really not. But anyway. The song went something like this:
"I'm a little Harpy, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. I'll be back soon, so start to shiver, Cuz I'm coming to gnaw on yer liver." {Repeat}
Charlotte and Zee remained as still as they could possibly be, long after the sounds of the flapping wings and the raspy song had faded into the air.
"Is it gone?" Zee whispered after a time.
Charlotte checked behind her. "I think so."
"Man," said Zee. "I hope there are no more where she came from."
But as they continued on, they found that there were at least two more where she had come from, or so they learned as a pair of them swooped in from behind them, heading toward the light. Charlotte and Zee ducked again, but the Harpies had no interest in them, they were too busy singing, in a round, this song:
"Twinkle, twinkle, little man, I wonder how you'd taste with jam, Chained above the world so high, Like a lamb chop in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little man…" {And so on}
The Harpies weren't the only creatures Charlotte and Zee encountered. There was more flapping, more scurrying, more crawling, and a great deal more creeping. Two-headed bats flew by; rats with fire for eyes and a squadron of fist-size beetles scurried past as if they had somewhere very important to be.
And then, suddenly, they were out. The cave ended and launched them into… not light, exactly, but not blackness, either. Grayness, maybe-a strange, glowing grayness that seemed to flicker as if lit by fire.
They stood at the mouth of the cave, looking out at what lay before them. It was a world made of rock-a deep red rock that looked like nothing on Earth, craggy and cliffy and endless. Perpetual fog rolled in front of them. And there was not a creature in sight. Charlotte felt suddenly a distinct and terrible sense of loneliness, as if she were the only person in the world, as if she would never see anyone again, never hear another voice, never feel another touch. Her very bones were lonely. Next to her she felt Zee shudder- and the cousins stepped closer together.
Charlotte gulped. They had better get moving. "I don't think… I don't think," she started. "I don't think we're really there yet. There's a river we have to cross…"
Zee nodded slowly. "Okay, let's keep going."
They exchanged a look, then began to move forward.
"The Outer Banks are where people, um, line up and wait after they've died," Charlotte said after a few moments. "And I guess Charon-that's the Ferryman – won't take you over unless you've got a coin. And if you haven't been buried, well, you can't go into the Underworld for, like, a hundred years, so you wait on the Outer Banks."
Charlotte realized Zee probably knew most of this and was simply too polite to tell her to shut up already; he'd seemed pretty caught up with the whole Greek myths unit. (And… hey! Wasn't it funny that Mr. Metos had started with a Greek myths unit? It was like he was trying to prepare them. Which he probably was. Wow… cool.) Anyway, it was reassuring for Charlotte to say it. As if she had some idea what in the heck they were in for. As if it didn't matter. Zee didn't seem to be listening anyway. He was off in Zee land again, staring at something that wasn't there.
"Hey, um, Charlotte?" he said quietly. But then he pursed his lips and shook his head.
Charlotte stared at him. "What?"
"Well…I'm just wondering…," he muttered, looking down at his feet. "Do you think we might be able to, you know, find people who have died?"
"Oh!" she gulped. "I… I don't know" She bit her lip and looked at the ground.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. So anyway, to the Styx…"
They walked up a small hill and looked down. A valley stretched before them, long and dark, filled with that strange, glowing fog. Rock formations were everywhere, cliffs rose from the ground, and at the end of the valley, just beyond the cliffs, they could see the river. Which seemed to be, by the way, steaming.
And there was nothing else. Just… nothing.
"Shouldn't there be, you know…" Zee trailed off.
"People?" Charlotte said. Yes, there should be. People… or whatever they were now. She hadn't known what to expect in the Underworld, but she certainly didn't think it would be empty.
"Maybe they're all… somewhere else," Zee said weakly.
"Yeah," agreed Charlotte, gulping. Not that she actually wanted to encounter any Dead, now or in the rest of her life, but she'd at least like to know where they all were.
Slowly they began to climb down the rocky hill. Charlotte gasped as her foot hit a small rock and she started to skid. Then Zee reached out and grabbed her arm before she fell down completely.
"Thanks," she muttered.
"We better be…"
Zee stopped. He was staring at something just beyond, looking as if he had seen a… well, you know. Charlotte turned. Just ahead of them hovered a bright, ghost-like form, and before Charlotte could really process that, another appeared before them. And then another. And then another. The cousins stood, wide-eyed and trembling.
"I guess those are the Dead," Charlotte said, nearly inaudibly.
"I guess so."
And then the cousins realized that these ghosts were everywhere, had been everywhere the entire time-what they had thought was fog was a great mass of Dead. Charlotte and Zee were surrounded. Hundreds, thousands, of ghosts floated about. They were indistinct, faceless, like shadows without a body-but these shadows were made not of darkness, but of an eerie, pale kind of light. Charlotte felt tears rise to her eyes, chills wracked her body, and somehow despite herself she could not help but feel that there was something oddly beautiful about them, these creatures of light illuminating this dark, dark place.