Rain tumbled out of the night sky and cratered in the oozy mud waiting to receive it. It ran in glutinous tectonic streams, thrusting up unstable mountain ridges and transient continental oceans in an accelerated parody of geologic time. It dripped and streamed from the hair and clothing--too sodden to absorb any further--of three men stood in a tangled copse of birch trees. It sputtered from lips and noses, and fell cloudy with gun oil from the barrel of a nickel-plated revolver. Rain fell also on the milky white body half submerged in the mud, and on the canvas bonnet of the 1930 Buick Phaeton that lit the scene with its headlamps.
Orpheus knelt in the dirt beside the body, looking but not seeing the swollen, nibbled corpse in front of him. He saw a young woman, rosy and electric with life, running carefree through the goldenrod and hyacinth of a Kentucky summer. Try as he might, he could not reconcile that vision with the one before him, and when he reached out to touch the cold, spongy reality, some repulsive force stopped his hand as surely as a galvanic shock.
Orpheus stood and turned away, facing the other two men who shared the night with him. One was chiselled and swarthy, and held the revolver by his side in one fist. The other was soft and splotchy with burst capillaries, and took short, sharp breaths as he dangled by the scruff of his collar from the grip of the first man.
Not two days before, Orpheus had been in New York when the first man came to him. His name was Jason, and he had been Orpheus' best friend since childhood. Their paths through life had orbited across many separate spheres, drifting far from one another before coming briefly back into convergence, but the bond between them had never soured, and they remained fiercely loyal to one another.
The middle-rate jazz club where Orpheus performed had been busy that night, illicit drinkers packed in amidst the smoke, music, and bakelite tabletops. It was reached by way of a false wall in back of a reputable laundry, but Jason entered through the secret back route, somehow worming his way past surly bouncers and hidden passageways that he shouldn't have even known existed.
Jason had caught Orpheus coming off of his second set, and the look on his face had forestalled any attempt at pleasantries. He said only four words, but they were more than enough. Indeed, the first alone would have sufficed.
"Eurydice is in trouble."
They had taken the soonest train from Pennsylvania Station, West to Indianapolis, then South to Louisville. From there, Jason had conjured up the Buick and the .44s as if by magic, and taken them down the dusty unpaved roads of their youth towards the Tennessee border.
Somewhere along the way he had shown Orpheus the telegram he had received. The message's panicked tone was crushed neatly flat by succinct prose and Courier font, but was still visible for those who knew where to look. Something in Orpheus stung bitterly that she had reached out to Jason instead of him. Rationality kept the feeling from cresting, but he could not deny its simmering presence beneath the surface.
They had arrived in the ancestral homeland and found it smaller than they remembered. Not in size, for the clapboard housing still measured two storeys high, and the green pastures still rolled off further than the eye could see, but rather in scope. Both men felt the shape of the hole they had left in this place, and discovered immediately that they had grown too large to be contained by it.
They had travelled straight to their destination as the sun went down and the clouds rolled in. Depression had hit here as hard as anywhere, but as they meandered further and further into the back roads, it became clear that these scrappy homesteads were cut from a common cloth of poverty that far preceded any recent developments.
Single storey, long and rambling; wood-shingled roof sunk lower in the centre than at the eaves. Raw wood fence posts, tangled chicken wire; animal skulls hung like Christmas ornaments. Weeds in the yard, dust in the fields; rust-ravaged tricycle abandoned to time.
They had parked and approached as the rain began to fall. They had gone wordless and armed and unexpected by those inside.
Back in the birch grove, the third man continued to gasp and squirm, and to spray a continuous mist into the air. His fear seemed almost magnetic to the falling water, as though sensing a commonality between him and a drowning sailor, and it found its way into his eyes and mouth far more heavily than his captors.
Orpheus drew his own weapon out of a coat pocket and levelled it at the man. Jason maintained his hold, but shifted his position almost subliminally to one side. Questions crowded Orpheus' mind, beginning with 'why' and ending with a gunshot. None seemed adequate, none seemed relevant, and he defaulted woodenly to clinical fact building instead.
"How?" he asked. "How did you kill her?"
The man did not reply. His glassy eyes flickered ophidian-quick, and his brain ticked over molasses-slow as he processed the complexities of his situation. The silence lasted a beat too long, even for so tense a scene as this, and Jason did something fast and precise to force the man to his knees with a gasp and a squelch. He brought his own gun around and pressed the barrel against the man's temple, ratcheting back the hammer with a click.
There was another long silence filled with the steady hiss of rain, and then unexpectedly, bubbling up out of his chest, the man suddenly began laughing. It was an ugly and guttural laugh, but filled with genuine mirth; it came in tedious hiccupping spurts like a record on a three second loop.
Orpheus seemed to deflate at the sound, the stone fury on his face replaced with sudden sorrow. His whole body swayed as though the tension filling it had abruptly been released; his arm dipped at the elbow so that the gun jerked up, then flopped bonelessly to his side.
Jason blurred in an explosion of movement, and the butt of his weapon pulverized one side of the man's face, slamming him sideways into the ground. The man stopped to eject a rectangular squirt of blood through the new gap in his teeth, then carried on laughing, higher pitched now, and almost breathless with the uncontrolled force of it.
"She ain't in there no more," he said, looking between Orpheus' feet at the body, then up to his face. "But she didn't go far."
In the yellow light of the car lamps, the rainwater coating the man's face looked like paraffin wax, and his eyes were cloudy cadaverous globes. The blood from his shattered mouth slopped and bubbled out as he spoke in a near-black waterfall, but he paid it no mind.
"Always thought she was better than us, that one. Always thought she was better than this place. Thought she'd run off to the big city. Run off like you boys." He looked back and forth between Orpheus and Jason, and smiled a cracked-pottery smile at them like a proud teacher catching up with alumni.
"Never did do it, though. Never could leave this place. This place wouldn't let her. You boys think you've seen hunger in them city bread lines? Think a few dead bankers is the worst it can get? You boys don't know nothing about hunger. There's things out here with mouths that never stop. Bellies that never get full. Run from them's like running from quicksand. Running from--whassitcalled--running from gravity."
He stopped to laugh again, and a great bubble of blood inflated like a frog's throat, glowing fever red and swollen, then popping like bubble gum.
"You oughtta head on up to Bowling Green and pay her a visit. Bet she'd be
real happy to see ya'll."
Something in these words slotted into Orpheus and closed like a circuit. He surged forward unconsciously and shoved his revolver under the bloody man's chin. His voice hissed like hot lead dropped in water.
"What does that mean? What are you talking about? She's dead. She's dead, you monster, and you killed her."
Laughter shook the man, and his Adam's apple thunked up and down against the barrel of the gun.
"Dead is dead, but what happens next, huh? That's what you gotta worry about. You sold your soul yet, up in that big city? Funny thing is, sometimes you don't get to be the one does the selling. Them dead bankers mess up, and regular folk get their homes sold out from under them. Same with souls, simple and true. She ain't up in heaven, I can tell you that."
Orpheus flashed back suddenly to what they had seen inside the slumping house. Amidst the uniform scattering of squalor and refuse that coated the place, a sudden upwelling along the curve of a bell graph. Thin prairies of grime mounted rubbish foothills up to a great peaking altar of detritus. Each brambly twig and lump of pig iron placed with obsessive, almost manic precision to form a nautilus spiral shot through with radial spokes. At its centre nestled a vacant hollow surely intended to bear some idol or relic, now left empty and gaping like the mouth of a cave. The whole elaborate contraption glazed with the sticky red streaks of recently shed blood.
He glanced to Jason, who took the hint--who was used to taking such hints--and delivered a swift kick to the prone man's midsection. The man curled around the foot in spasm, and something wet and broken entered his continued chuckling.
"If she's still here ..." Orpheus said. "If she's still anywhere ... You're going to tell me how to find her."
There was a morbid sucking as the man drew in breath through tubes and ventricles decidedly more crumpled than would have been ideal. He seemed to hold it for a moment, then blew all the wind out in a tremendous guffaw, spraying hunks of blood and not-blood as he went.
"Boy," he said, seeming positively insoluble with laughter now. "All you have to do is ask."
*****
The Buick slid and clattered across the fields away from the birch copse. There was no road, and visibility ended entirely beyond the narrow cone of light, but Jason seemed assured enough to drive and talk without difficulty.
"Hades," he said, spitting the word from his mouth as though afraid it might lodge there.
"That's what the man said," Orpheus replied. "Shouldn't be too hard to track down in Bowling Green. Not too many Hadeses running around, I bet."
Jason said nothing for a moment, in a manner that suggested he actually wanted to say quite a bit.
"Orpheus," he said finally. "Look, do you really buy the oil that snake's selling? I know it sounds good, but it also sounds crazy, and given the option I tend to bet on crazy."
"You and I have both seen a lot of weird shit, Jason. Way I hear it, you've been responsible for more than a little of that weird shit yourself. If there's even a chance that Eurydice might be alive somehow out there ..."
Jason raised a placating hand, then quickly returned it to the wheel as the Buick began to drift rapidly sideways.
"I get it. I remember how you felt about her. I just want to make sure you know how crazy this sounds, and not get your hopes up."
"Believe me, I'm aware," Orpheus replied. "I just have to try. Sometimes when you bet on crazy, it pays off."
Jason cracked a smile for the first time in two days.
"All I needed to hear, brother. Let's go talk to Hades."
The car and its rapidly ablating suspension neared the darkened house and its dismal excuse for a driveway. As they drove up, a beanpole young man in denim overalls and no shirt came rushing out holding a rifle whose tip bounced back and forth like a tennis ball as he ran. The first shot went a mile wide, and Jason had time to calmly roll down the window and fire his revolver as they drove past without slowing. The gun cracked louder than the storm, and knocked the young man clear off his feet and into a waiting wheelbarrow.
There was a shrill scream from inside the house, but the Buick rolled on and shortly followed the winding country capillaries back to a main road.
When they arrived in Bowling Green it was still dark, but the rain had slackened to a torpid drizzle. The central avenue was lit by steady electric lighting along its length, but the windows of the various haberdasheries and general stores that seemed to comprise the entirety of its commerce had long since been shuttered. Jason took them slowly into progressive back alleys that darkened and narrowed even as they began to show signs of life. Eventually they left the car parked in an out of the way vacant lot and proceeded on foot.
Bowling Green hosted several tens of thousands of residents, and had once been a fairly straightforward Kentucky town. However, Depression had engendered a chaos in the once orderly streets, as ramshackle hovels and plywood lean-tos encrusted themselves along the city's less reputable buildings, barricading and bifurcating existing streets into a complex warren not shown on any map.
With Jason leading the way, he and Orpheus navigated this confusion, and began to drift into the various bordellos and speakeasies that made up the city's night life, following the dictates of an undisclosed search pattern. Jason would enter the establishment, sometimes ordering a drink or exchanging idle chatter with the barman, sometimes just standing in the doorway and listening, and then would leave again having found the place lacking in some esoteric criteria of underworld notoriety.
As they spiralled deeper into the nest of insolvency, Orpheus began to notice the hints of peculiarities unknown in the spheres of daylight and civility. At first this was merely the ordinary totemic superstition of the poor and the uneducated, seeking metaphysical solutions to real-life problems. Mystics and fortune tellers demarcated small booths for themselves with incense and crushed velvet, and themes of voodoo and druidism and other pagan folk-cults began to creep into the general décor.
However as they went even further, not everything could be accounted for as such. Amidst the regular aroma of gin and opiates, strange and unexplainable scents would momentarily penetrate and then vanish just as quickly; noxious alkanones and crude petrochemicals. So too would shadows and silhouettes glimpsed round corners defy correlation with regular human anatomy, both in their shape and in the clockwork palsy of their gait.
Stepping around an eye-watering cook stall and over a cluster of blanketed sleeping transients, Orpheus was confronted with a doorway that was little more than a hole where several two-by-fours had been removed from a wall. It was surrounded with a grim mandala disturbingly reminiscent of a slathering mouth, and further incorporated with a number of whorling designs that looked suspiciously similar to the alter upon which Eurydice had been condemned.
They proceeded cautiously down a stairway they found on the other side (descending, Orpheus could have sworn, well below ground level) and found themselves practically in the middle of a silent, joyless orgy, grudgingly swelling towards some perfunctory completion. Orpheus, himself not exactly an innocent or a prude, felt his mouth drop open, and found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the sweating, grumpy sex heap as Jason hustled him quickly past.
Through a stack of interconnected modules affixed to the side of a building like frog eggs stuck to a leaf, they witnessed in quick succession: a menagerie of Frankenstein livestock sewn into new and agonizing chimaeras. A tiny cathedral of pasty worshippers prostrating themselves before the statue of a tentacled horror. Two men knife-fighting in an empty room, wearing the coiled intestines of two men who already lay dead. And an ancient hag, cadaverous face muscles pulled painfully into a permanent smile that revealed teeth carved from glassy black obsidian.
It was in an out of the way gambling house particularly steeped in this sort of atmosphere--reached via a daisy chain of crooked corridors connecting several similar establishments--that Jason and Orpheus first drew the attention of the people they were looking for. They were crossing the dim and smoky room together when Jason announced that they were about to be attacked by a man, a woman, and something else entirely.
Orpheus hardly had time to process this information before three figures loomed towards them out of the purple neon haze. Two of them were hulkingly muscled, two of them were lightning quick, and two of them were human; together they formed a tripartite Venn diagram of antagonism.
Like most of the fights Orpheus had been in, this one was vicious and confusing. Like most of the fights Jason had been in, this one was over quickly. He moved in a series of short, sharp bursts, eschewing form and showmanship for competent footwork and devastating impact. Two of the attackers dropped immediately with sucking and popping sounds. The third took somewhat more convincing, but followed its companions to the ground shortly. Orpheus had a brief impression of scales and membranes under a rough cloak before it was swallowed up in a fogbank of cigar smoke.
Jason advanced without looking down, his revolver appearing in one hand. Gambling patrons were scattering into various bolt holes hidden behind strategic statuary and diaphanous shawls, upending tables covered in fetish dolls and far-East brassware. A reinforced steel door was set into the back wall of the den, marked with puckered welding scars in the shape of pagan demonological symbols.
Despite the door's intimidating appearance, it proved unlocked and yielded easily. Inside, a pale grey man in a pale grey suit was seated behind a desk. When he reached for one of the drawers, Jason put a round through one shoulder, and he fell backwards out of his chair. Jason rounded the desk, and brusquely set to the work of inserting his thumb into the bullet hole, and speaking a series of questions in a crisp, deliberate voice.
Orpheus, however, was not paying attention to the man behind the desk. His attention was drawn to the back of the office, where a set of oiled canvas drapes hung heavily in front of a gaping black hole. The drapes bowed outwards under the rhythmic exhalation of some pungent miasmic wind, making the small office smell of cordite and bitumen.
Without thinking, Orpheus rushed forward and pushed his way through the dense cloth. He heard Jason's muffled voice cry out behind him, but he was already descending swiftly down a rough-hewn tunnel braced with square timbers. It was deathly quiet in the tunnel, and pitch black besides, forcing Orpheus to feel his way along the wall. The floor sloped steeply downwards, but was lined with a cart track that functioned almost like stairs, and Orpheus realized this must be the remains of a coal mine.
As he continued on, Orpheus became slowly aware of the absence of Jason's comforting presence at his side. Even as he rushed ahead, he had absently thought that his friend would catch him up quickly. But either some delay had arisen in the office, or else the tunnels were more labyrinthine than Orpheus realized, because there was no sign of him.
The silence had taken on that weighty, oppressive perfection that seemed to possess its own decibel volume. For a long time Orpheus was unsure whether the faint and guttural whisperings he sometimes heard were real, or a hallucinatory product of his own starved perception.
After a time, the tunnel's hewn walls became more smooth, looking almost organic. It joined frequently with other tunnels into twisted knots and ganglia, and Orpheus was forced to pick randomly from the set of available passages. Growths of luminescent mould began to provide a pale and watery light, revealing twisting sigils cut into the walls, and weird vapours issuing from cracks in the floor.
At a broad convergence of several large tunnels, Orpheus found the curling spiral pattern of the altar once more. This time however, rather than trash and underbrush, it was marked out with runnels cut into the stone floor, set with regularly spaced objects. Orpheus neared the objects and found them to be rough ovoids made from some translucent jade material. Looking into the faceted depths, he thought he could make out faces and flashes of movement, like half-glimpsed lithographs or snippets of cinema.
At the furthest edge of the spiral the ovoids were nearly the size of his torso, and their caged images seemed sluggish and indistinct. As he moved inwards, however, cutting across the sweeping curves, they became steadily smaller and more animated. At the very center stood a stone plinth, curled around an egg-shaped mass the size of two fists held together.
Orpheus reached out hesitantly to touch the object, and suddenly he was back in that Kentucky summer once again, laughing in the sun and stealing kisses beneath the old willow trees. Eurydice was alive and vital and, more than that, aware. Aware of what had happened to her, aware of who he was, and aware of why he had come. Orpheus drew his hand back with a gasp, and knew instinctively that he could still save her; that he could still bring her back.
He picked up the egg with both hands and wrenched it free from the plinth. Shapes and colours flickered through the air around him, and a monochrome spectre of Eurydice seemed to hang in the air, connected to the object by gauzy liquid tendrils. Orpheus turned around to return the way he had come, and was confronted by a creature not six feet behind him.
It was a shambling, lumpy mass of rough scales and smooth fibers. It had two arms and two legs, but any resemblance to human life ended there. Eschewing bilateral symmetry entirely, it seemed to be made up of wanton tumerous outgrowths, sprouting randomly from around a central mouth ringed with teeth like a lamprey's. The mouth hung hungrily open in perpetuity, but it seemed only to breathe out; Orpheus idly theorized that for inhalation it must rely upon pressure differentials like a bird, or oxygen diffusion through the skin like a worm.
He hugged the egg close to his chest and stood painfully still as he looked for a way past. The creature had no eyes he could make out, but it faced him directly and seemed to be crouched in a predatory stance. It took a step towards Orpheus, and he watched in horror as a sudden violent peristalsis ejected a long barbed proboscis from the center of its mouth. The fleshy stalk bobbed closer, and Orpheus could see that its stinger was formed from the same jade material as the egg objects, only dull and lifeless, as though this specimen was still empty of its spiritual cargo.
Orpheus stood paralyzed, and the prong was only inches from his face when a gunshot rang out painfully loud in the enclosed space. The creature jerked sideways in a spray of fluid. The quadrant surrounding its wound seemed to deflate as though losing some critical hydraulic support, but the rest of its body seemed unaffected; individual segments isolated from one another like grapes on a vine. The gun rang out twice more, and Jason charged into the room from a side tunnel, shoving the rapidly crumpling monster to one side.
"Orpheus! Orpheus, Jesus. Come on, we have to go. There's more of those things down here, and something else as well. I heard ... movement in the walls. We have to leave."
"Jason! Jason!" he was shouting over him. "I found her! She's
here. We can save her!"
Jason cast a suspicious eye over the egg and looked about to say something when a sudden tremor shot through the chamber. Both men looked up in alarm as stalactites broke free from the cave ceiling and tumbled towards them, and Jason grabbed Orpheus by the front of his shirt, pulling them both into one of the tunnels.
The pair raced up the narrow passage as vibrations coursed along its length in waves. One of the cancerous creatures loomed out of a side hall and Jason's revolver cracked several times, the sound indistinguishable from the noise of cracks splitting open in the walls and ceiling, releasing more of the humid vapour in spurts.
Orpheus saw something soft and green glisten through one of the cracks, and ducked instinctively as a thick tentacle lashed out of the wall at the place where his head had been. Further ahead, more and more tentacles began to ooze from the living rock and thrash wildly. Jason pulled a knife from inside his coat and it flashed in the dim light as he hacked away.
At a nexus of many corridors, Jason paused momentarily to determine which of the passages sloped in the direction they had come from. There was no warning as a bundle of tentacles crashed through the stone directly beneath his feet and lifted him into the air. Orpheus had a single horrified moment of watching his friend held aloft in their crushing embrace--screaming as bones splintered and blood gushed forth--and then he was gone, sucked down into the ground without a trace.
Orpheus fell to his knees, the egg pressed against his heart, then shakily regained his feet when another pulse of tremors came up from below. He picked a passage at random and stumbled down it, tears streaming down his face. Before long the glowing moss had vanished and Orpheus was in darkness once more, thunders and roars echoing in the distance behind him.
As he ran he became aware of memories pouring back and forth between him and the egg he still carried. He saw the carefree snapshots of young love at first, but he also began to see what came after.
He saw the scars that Eurydice carried. The fear and the pain that wasn't her fault, but that nevertheless came to define her as she grew older. He saw himself, breaking free from the stagnation of his childhood and forging a new life in New York. He saw Eurydice's murder, terrible and agonizing but also almost a relief from her abuse, transforming into more horror when she realized that even death wouldn't free her.
He saw them both as the people they were today, and realized that those pieces no longer fit together.
Orpheus found himself unexpectedly back at the entrance to the mine. A narrow strip of light leaked between the two sheets of cloth. He looked down at the egg in his hands, and suddenly he could see the shade of Eurydice again, floating just in front of him, close enough to touch.
He looked into her eyes and he could see her longing for a rescue from this nightmare, but he could also see the fear for what came after. The expectation that life would always find a way to punish her, which had become an indelible part of her soul.
Orpheus reached out a hand, and Eurydice's ghost did the same. Their fingertips stopped millimeters from one another, and Eurydice nodded almost imperceptibly. Orpheus blinked away tears as he smashed the jade egg to the ground. It shattered with a concussion of light and sound, and Orpheus had one last fading impression of warm sunlight and the smell of hyacinth on the breeze.
He pushed through the oiled curtain and did not look back.
