Bottled Abyss Read online

  And mine as well? thought Herman.

  “I don’t mean to upset you,” Evan explained, smoke rolling over his short cropped brown hair. “But those jerks are still free to go on robbing banks and maybe hurting more people. Melody is gone and they’re still on this planet. That just isn’t right.”

  Herman smiled. Even in this discussion, he loved to hear his daughter’s name. It almost brought him to tears sometimes. Joyful tears. It was calming to know that other people hadn’t forgotten her. Melody wasn’t gone completely.

  “Finding them wouldn’t bring her back,” he added.

  Evan turned to him now, his baby face thoughtful. “What would you do, if you found them?”

  Herman had thought on that a hundred million different ways. There was no right answer for it. “Show them what they took from me, make them feel the same way, I guess.”

  “Yeah…” Evan twisted his cigar in his hands, lost for any new thoughts.

  Herman tapped off the end of his cigar and gently put it out on the wall. “So enough with all that. Okay? I’m just really happy for you and Faye. Really.”

  “You’re the godfather, you know.”

  He took Evan by his neck and gripped softly. “That’s talk for another day. All right?”

  “All right.”

  They went back inside. Faye was cleaning up the kitchen, the house arrested by a mausoleum stillness only broken by the running water of the sink and the murmur of the television in the living room. Evan went over and grabbed a towel from the counter. He scooted in beside Faye and she giggled softly at his presence.

  Good grief, thought Herman.

  Janet had excused herself to the sofa with the bottle of wine and a jelly jar. She hadn’t poured any, though; both sat on her TV tray, awaiting use. An old game show got Herman’s attention for a moment. He stood, sofa-side, watching the big screen with his broken wife, uncertain whether to stay and watch forgotten 70s celebrities make sterile jokes about everything and nothing, or to go and help clean the garbage palace that had once been Janet’s kitchen.

  “I had fun yesterday,” Janet told him. The game show trained her eyes, making the statement seem robotic. “We needed that, right?”

  No, thought Herman. You needed that. Everybody knows you don’t celebrate by fucking when you find your dog.

  Janet didn’t even know the half of it. You don’t celebrate when your husband has a psychological breakdown. No, fuck it all—you remember, you sad, single-minded woman, that just a little over a year ago, in this very room, you had a little one dancing to her favorite cartoons, her whole life ahead of her, a vast ballroom floor to cover in too many dances to count, and you respect that her memory means everything now; you don’t rut on the sofa where she drank her juice from her little sippy cups, where she may have dreamed about Disneyland, or if dad would take her to the library because she got a sticker at daycare.

  That gold had to stay.

  It must.

  Putting filth over that memory, darkening that particular corridor of their life, devaluing that once priceless artifact, was something Herman couldn’t easily get over.

  Janet had gone back to watching her show while he gawked at her. She had her answer now: yesterday had not been fun, it had been dishonorable and wrong. A silent treatment would ensue now. Herman would only break it with an apology or by not coming home for dinner in between shifts.

  He went into the kitchen and tried to help with the remainder of the mess. Evan brought up the gym again and how people still commented on Herman’s photo on the “5000 Pound Club” wall. Herman told him he would probably start back on the weights after February. The club was too crowded with New Year’s resolutions right now.

  Not long after, they said goodbye to their friends. Janet actually gave both Evan and Faye a big, thankful hug, which was uncharacteristic of her lately. Once the door was closed, Herman expected to be plunged back into the never-ending Dawn of the Dead reenactment, but Janet gave him one of those warm hugs too.

  Instantly, everything flipped, and he reviled himself more than he did her. Yesterday had been his fault. He should have controlled the situation. He should have told her what he saw. And he still could.

  As it went, there were no easy approaches to the subject.

  Later that night, he lay in bed beside her, on his side, turned away from her, as the new norm required, and the words sieved through his mind. Different scenarios played out and none of them seemed desirable.

  Then Lester jumped up on the bed and curled up next to his feet.

  “Do you believe miracles can happen?” he asked Janet.

  He expected her to be sleeping already but she made a smacking sound with her mouth, as though to try it out for talking.

  “That’s a weird thing to ask.”

  Herman could see that bottle behind his closed eyes. Cool, smoky black glass, fluted neck with that hammered mouth at the top…

  “You know how sometimes you can splash water on your face and it feels like you’ve started over again?”

  “Refreshed,” she commented dully.

  “What if that water really healed you? You know, like it came in a magic bottle, like a potion.”

  “Are you talking in your sleep?” Janet sat up. Her words were slurred but semi-concerned.

  Herman caught himself. “Yeah, yeah I think I was.”

  “Go to sleep,” she said. It may have just been the perplexing moment, but Herman detected a new sadness in her request. He thought about asking her what it was, but let it go, as he so often did now.

  What if he went back to that cave? Would the man sell the bottle?

  Or could I just take it from him?

  New plans formed and died and Herman stayed up far too late thinking them over. The idea of going back was unsettling. He didn’t know much about miracles, but if they did exist, they probably shouldn’t be abused. Still, he would think more about it tomorrow during work.

  He tried to get comfortable and couldn’t. For a breathless moment he mangled his pillow and folded it under his head. The pillowcase stunk with sweat. They really needed to do some laundry and start acting like real people again. Herman turned over and refocused on sleeping. Sheep jumping over a fence turned into coyotes and his eyes cracked open...

  Janet was not beside him. He hadn’t even noticed when she left the bed. A thin bar of light came from under the bathroom door across the hall.

  He shut his eyes.

  Opened them again.

  Got up.

  The floor was cold.

  Went to the bathroom door.

  The fan was whirring inside.

  Knocked.

  Waited.

  Knocked again.

  “Janet, you okay in there?”

  “I’m taking a shit,” she replied drowsily, “go away.”

  Herman retreated back to the bed, plopped down and pulled the pillow over his head. In a few minutes, he could hear a rumble in his throat.

  Snoring.

  Then blissful black nothingness.

  The clock read 3:02 AM. Herman’s eyes found the numbers and he loathed their burning bright reality. How did he always manage to wake up half an hour before his alarm went off? The next thirty minutes of sleep would feel like thirty seconds. He might as well get up…

  He turned over and glanced across the empty side of the bed.

  Janet still hadn’t come back.

  The bathroom light was still on, the door still closed.

  “Oh my god,” he breathed.

  He rolled off the bed and went into the hallway, brain overloading with horrible endings to this short trip.

  The bathroom wasn’t locked.

  When he opened the door, the tableau spread before him might have fit any of the nightmare scenarios he’d created.

  Facedown, arms propped to the sides as though taking flight, Janet lay naked in the bathtub. An empty bottle of vodka sat on the toilet seat and in the tub was a nearly full bottle of whiskey th
at rested on an uncannily round saucer of cherry colored vomit.

  “Janet! Baby?”

  Adrenaline flooded his body. Herman dove at the tub and pulled his wife up to a sitting position, on her knees. Her eyes were shut and she didn’t seem to be breathing. Her body was blue-tinged and icy. He rattled her gently at first, then harder, and then called out her name again. He could not hear his own voice over the hammering of his heart.

  “Hold on honey, hold on.”

  Leaving Janet propped over the side of the tub, he went for his cell phone. He called 911 for an ambulance, told them where he lived, who he was, who his wife was, everything, told them it was alcohol poisoning; they informed him they were sending someone and in the meantime Janet had to be turned on her side. The exchange seemed to last forever, but rushing from the room, he caught sight of the clock, and it was only 3:12 AM.

  Back in the bathroom, back in the tub, Janet convulsed in violent seizures. The bottle of whiskey poured out around her, diffusing through the vomit, creating a disturbing brown river floating with organic debris. Herman wrangled his wife onto her side and embraced her.

  He prayed for the sound of the medics arriving at the front door.

  4

  The Ferryman looked lovingly up at the stars as nighttime faded to dawn. He’d gazed on them for the entire evening and still hadn’t tired of their twinkling. Never a god, never a demigod, never a human being, he’d always had a fondness for constellations and the eldritch stories they told with a shine, wink and glow. In this current era of false lights and fuel clouds, the wide display above wasn’t as overwhelming as his memory told, even out in the middle of a desert, miles from the city. Still, he relished the time he could silently worship all these jewels of the night. With the coming of the largest jewel in that celestial cache, however, he could only think of what really mattered now.

  Time was running out.

  Already the waters of Styx in the bottle had dropped, when at once they had been plentiful enough to drown the universe. The cave to his back was made from erosion from the River. It was the same place he’d once anchored his boat and deposited coins for Nyx. When the Gods ceased to be and removed their work from all the galleries of Time, the cave narrowed to nothing because that erosion never happened.

  This was a problem.

  Without that erosion, the area of rock stripped away with the River’s caustic claws would close, effectively crushing the Ferryman where he lived. It didn’t matter if he tried to escape; no matter where he went in the entire world, he would always return where his essence had perished before, this unintended burial site where he bottled the River Styx and made the greatest mistake of missing one single drop.

  That mistake had, however, formed an option for the River to emerge again. All it took was a bead of living blood to touch that drop and the River had a purpose again. The old system returned into being, as did the erstwhile sailor of the River and its constant patrolman.

  Charon shook his head. And what of that patrolman?

  Why did the Fury not want to live?

  The creature could not possibly be happier being nothing. It should have conspired with him to lure more people to the bottle, to bring about a new spiritual currency. Then the Fury could feed all that vengeance burning incessantly in its furnace heart. There should have been a lust to be what you once were, and without that desire, what really was the point of going on? Weren’t their needs similar that way? Did the Fury not want to stare up at the stars with a bellyful of justice? It was insane to think otherwise.

  They were the same creature with different jobs. The Ferryman had always thought so. He provided passage for the price of life and the Fury provided justice for the price of death. They were partners in a way. More coins were created from murder, wrongful deaths and stolen life, and those were all punishable offenses, which gave the Fury something to feast upon.

  But that was in the time of Order.

  Things had made sense then.

  Regardless, the Fury had not made its intent unknown. It would rather dry to dust all over again, become purposeless and forgotten, than to exact justice on sinners as it had done so beautifully in the past. For shame and everlasting bloody woe, the creature had never been the same since he ate his two sisters for conspiring against him.

  Well, it didn’t help to over-think the Fury’s motivations. That helped about as much as trying to locate the one blessed drop of Styx that needed fresh blood—no, there wasn’t time enough for that. More coins had to be spent and the Ferryman needed more days to do it. More days than he unfortunately had left.

  That mortal had to be returning, or at least thinking it over by now. They always came back. They would show up to the shores of the River with a sick friend or a dying relative and request a transfer from the waters. In those times he never took any offers, not unless the Gods were at play. Why switch deaths? The coins had come in regularly then and it made no sense to make deals, even despite the excellent rhetorical ballets danced by the woeful people who approached him.

  This time was different though. He scoffed at it then, but now he saw the rearrangement as steps to bring the old monetary system back into place once more.

  The Ferryman traced his finger on the bottle that rested next to him on his straw bedroll. With all things great as titans and all things small as dust on dust, he did not want to leave the world again. To keep the River to himself, to stockpile the coins, to experience the endless passing of souls, maybe his would be the origin story of a new God.

  One more coin paid would give him another three days to add to that story…

  The Ferryman shuffled back down into the cave, which might soon be his tomb again. The walls looked closer together than he remembered and the rocks had a flexing aggregate surface, as though gradually building pebble by pebble, a hard death-making moss that would spread until it had no more space to fill.

  He reminded himself that he mustn’t let this sight claim his optimism, not when that was all he had left now. It was best to think on the good and relish every moment here. So while Charon the Ferryman anxiously waited for the big man to return, he daydreamed about all the brilliant nights he would watch the stars from the bow of a new ferry.

  Herman let it slip out in the ambulance. Janet came to, momentarily, and he wasn’t so certain she could hear or see him, for all her bewilderment behind the oxygen mask, but he told her, “I’ll heal you with the magic water like I did for Lester. Hold on baby. Hold on! Don’t die.”

  She was unconscious a few blinks later. He thought perhaps the paramedic would be giving him sidelong looks, leaning over and whispering to the driver, oh man do we have a fruit loop in our vehicle, but the medic went about finishing a form without a change of expression or demeanor. Herman concluded these guys must hear crazy shit every day and what he’d said was probably not even the half of that.

  Maybe he was nuts, but he had intended to go back out to the desert and find the man from the cave.

  At first.

  When they arrived at the hospital, however, and went through all the processes that came with such a trip, he began to feel a trip to the desert wasn’t necessary. Janet had opened her eyes once already and a mousy P.A., who reminded him of an older Faye, told him Janet had awakened several times, so they were feeding her activated charcoal, getting her to vomit more, and they wouldn’t start the stomach pump just then, just hold on Mr. Erikson, take a seat, it will be okay, there’s some coffee over there in the lounge, there’s a cafeteria downstairs if you get hungry, we need to get all of the alcohol out of her stomach, will she die from this?, we’re doing everything we can, sit tight, we’ll touch bases in an hour or so, and Herman then thought an hour means three or four in doctor speak, but they actually came out not forty minutes later and told him that Janet had slipped into unconsciousness again and they’re doing the stomach pump now, and this was not unusual for acute alcohol poisoning.

  Herman sat there in the lobby and waited for more
news. A criminal forensics show played on the TVs but the sound was too low to hear the dialogue and the closed captions were pitifully lagging behind. He buried his face in his hands. His heart went from cold hate to hot panic every few minutes. How could Janet do this to herself? They were supposed to be healing, not getting worse. They were both atheists—she didn’t believe she would see Melody “in a better place,” so why this? And especially the method…this was a painful, miserable way to exit life.

  That made sense then, when he thought about it. Janet was atoning for being a bad mother, even when he believed they’d both been fine parents. It wasn’t their fault what happened that day. They’d sent Melody to good daycare in a decent neighborhood. Mrs. Horrace, who ran the home business, was classically educated and taught the children all sorts of practical things they’d never use in everyday life.

  Herman’s laughter turned cold inside him. It wasn’t anyone’s fault except those idiot motherfuckers who used a residential street as their drag strip.

  So why all this aftermath?

  Why not do what Evan wanted and hunt them down?

  You’re both convinced you’ll never find them, thought Herman, so you’ll never try.

  If Janet lived through this, maybe they could put their fears aside and resume the search. She’d been the one to call everything off, but perhaps being hospitalized would change her outlook. He hoped so. He hoped this scared the fuck out of her.

  A gaunt, redwood of a doctor strode out of an automatic door like a thing from Frankenstein’s table. He wore round lenses similar to Evan’s but had a weathered face and a black Van Dyke that was shot with white. Had the man had longer hair and a full beard, he might have played Jesus in a local pageant play.

  Despite his messianic appearance, he was strikingly cold.

  “She’s on life support now, still critical.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “We’ll let you know.”

  “When?”

  “We’ll let you know. Have a seat and hang tight.”

  Completely under the man’s power, Herman did just that; he sat back down in the row of uncomfortable bench seats next to a young black man with an eight-ball afro.