Cat's Claw (12 page)

Read Cat's Claw Online

Authors: Amber Benson

Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy fiction, #Fiction - Fantasy, #Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Fantasy - Contemporary

BOOK: Cat's Claw
5.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
As I watched the three little Satanists huff and puff, but not blow anything down, I tried to remember Jarvis’s exact words on how the whole Heaven/Hell thing worked.
In my experience, the Afterlife
can
get a tad confusing, so you just have to remember one very important thing: Even when you
think
you have a handle on the way the whole setup runs, it can turn around and surprise the crap out of you anytime it wants.
Okay, let the Jarvis-style lecture begin:
I know everyone thinks Death is just some old, skeletal guy in a robe, skulking around with a scythe in his hand, looking for his next victim, but in actuality, Death is run a lot more like a multinational conglomerate than one might ever imagine. Every person has his or her place in the process—and without their participation, the whole thing would just fall apart into a million pieces.
I mean, even my dad, Mr. High and Mighty President and CEO of Death, Inc., was really just a cog in a much bigger piece of machinery. He has to answer to a higher office, just like everyone else, because, yes, even in Death there are checks and balances to keep one entity or another from trying to stage a coup in the Afterlife.
Far from being a one-man operation, Death was really a bureaucracy, with enough red tape and paperwork to make you ill. In fact, I think my dad spent more time trying to appease his Executives and the Board of Death than he did anything else.
And I knew from experience how hard to please those people could be . . . but I digress. Back to:
“Death 101, or How
Does
That Persnickety Afterlife Work?”
Okay, when a soul dies, it doesn’t just magically move on to the next dimension. A soul is actually pretty helpless right after it’s passed, so it has to be
collected
by a group of people called
harvesters.
The harvesters usually work in teams of two, using something that I think resembles a butterfly net to scoop up the floundering soul, thus beginning its progression into the Afterlife.
Once a soul has left the earthly plane and moved into the supernatural realm, it becomes solid again. At this point, the harvesters have finished their job. Another person called a
transporter
takes over from there, explaining to the soul the basic principles of the Afterlife and what the process will be like as it transitions from one dimension to the next. The transporter shepherds the soul on its journey to Purgatory, where it is then judged, sentenced, and sent to either Heaven or Hell (based on how naughty or nice it was on Earth).
After the soul has done its allotted time in the Afterlife, it will then be returned to the Soul Pool for recycling—and then the process of Rebirth and Death begins all over again.
When I was a kid, my dad made us watch this documentary on television called
The Power of Myth
. It was really just this mythologist named Joseph Campbell talking to the camera and telling stories.
Basically, he was pitching the idea that all myths are variations on the same themes—if you break them down to their essence—that, whether humanity wanted to believe it or not, different cultures and religions were way more
alike
than they were different.
Afterward, my dad sat down with the three of us, Thalia, Clio, and myself, and explained that Mr. Campbell, who he promised was just a normal human being with no supernatural ties whatsoever, had hit on a very essential truth: that mankind was all the same on the inside, no matter how different they seemed on the outside.
It was only years later, when I was a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, that I found Joseph Campbell’s book
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
sitting proudly on a shelf at a used bookstore and remembered so vividly the night that I had first learned that Death was an equal opportunity employer.
Joseph Campbell had the right idea. All you had to do was hang out in the Afterlife for a little while and you’d see that no matter what mask you happened to be wearing, it was always just that . . . a mask. Underneath it, we were all the same.
“I wanna go home!!”
the Goth girl shrieked, making my ears ring and reminding me that while we might be the same on the inside, some of us were definitely more annoying on the outside.
“I so did not, like, ask to die,” the girl said, her cadence like that of a Valley Girl on speed, “so, like, send me back
right this instant!
”
I realized that the girl was obviously the leader of the group because, along with being the most vocal of the three, she was also the most aggressive. As I watched openmouthed, she marched right up to Cerberus, who was waiting patiently by the towering stone gates, and demanded once again that he send her back to Earth.
While the girl screeched, the two boys she had come with appeared to be about to pee on themselves in terror. I’m sure that during all the Black Magic summoning parties they’d had they’d never really expected to be calling up any beasties from the depths of Hell. Now, faced with something straight out of the
Clash of the Titans
movie, they didn’t have a clue what to do with themselves.
I couldn’t really blame them for their fear. Cerberus
was
a pretty terrifying fellow. With three monstrous dog heads and a humongous, muscled body, he resembled an overgrown black Lab that was ready to rumble at a moment’s notice. Believe me when I say that he was definitely a force to be reckoned with.
I had spent enough time with Cerberus to know that two of the giant dog’s heads were dumber than a bag of rocks but relatively normal looking, while the main head, old “Snarly head,” as I liked to call him, was supersmart but totally vicious. Its one yellow-colored eye shone like a beacon from the middle of its head, and every time it spoke, it revealed two rows of jagged, limb-biting-off-ly sharp teeth.
As the Goth girl continued with her abrasive invective, I waited for Cerberus to bite her head off or something equally as gory, but instead, he just let the girl go on yammering.
The girl didn’t seem at all threatened by the massive three-headed dog—rather the opposite, actually. She just kept running her mouth off while Snarly head stared at her. Of course, I suppose when
two
of the dog’s heads were engaged in licking their balls, there was less to be frightened of.
I didn’t quite understand why Snarly head was letting the Goth girl drone on until I realized that Snarly head must be impressed by the headstrong girl’s lack of fear, not upset by it. Old Snarly was enjoying her diatribe because forthrightness was the one thing he responded to in people—which only made me wish I’d done my research before I used subterfuge to try to steal Runt.
Maybe then I wouldn’t owe the guy a favor.
“I have no interest in whether you wanted to die or not. You’re dead,” Snarly head said sagely.
The girl, shocked, not by Snarly’s words but by its eloquent speaking voice, shut her mouth for the first time since I’d gotten there.
One of the boys reached out and pulled on the girl’s sleeve.
“Don’t make him mad, Chanduthra. He might eat us.”
The girl only snorted at her friend’s stupidity.
“You heard him, Raphael; we’re already dead. So who cares if he eats us? Like,
duh
.”
I had to admit that the girl
did
have a point—even if her acid-laced tongue was extremely annoying.
“But . . .” Raphael babbled.
“Just, like,
shut it
, Ralphy.”
The boy glowered at her.
“Hey, don’t call me Ralphy. You know I hate that name.”
The girl snickered. “But it’s your name,
Ralph
.”
“ENOUGH!” Snarly head bellowed, its large yellow eye raking over them like a searchlight.
“Sorry, sir,” Raphael né Ralph said meekly, his legs quaking underneath him like a little schoolboy’s. The girl, Chanduthra, wasn’t at all cowed by old Snarly head’s outburst.
“Look, mister, it was, like, an accident, you know. No one kicked the candle over on purpose or anything,” she said matter-of-factly. Her pale blue eyes looked up imploringly at the three-headed dog.
“If you, like, have to, you can keep Ralph and Richard,” she continued. “I won’t tell a soul.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was the Goth girl really trying to sell out her friends for her own freedom? What a ballsy chick. I looked over to where Ralph and Richard stood cowering together, shock at Chanduthra’s offer clearly apparent on their faces.
“Are you trying to bribe me?” Snarly head said, watching the girl intently. The two dumb heads moved away from their balls, transferring their attention onto Chanduthra. Immediately, they started drooling.
I wondered what
that
meant.
“No,” Chanduthra said, “not bribe really, just, you know, like, making an observation.”
“And how did you die?” Snarly head asked, moving its great bulk closer to the girl so that the two dumb heads could sniff her better. Chanduthra didn’t flinch; just let the dumb heads sniff her up and down without protest.
When they were done with “smell and tell,” Chanduthra turned back to glare at the boys, just daring them to contradict whatever came out of her mouth next. She cleared her throat and yanked at the hem of her dress before wiping the sweat off her upper lip with her cape. For a heavy girl, there was very little perspiration going on.
I, on the other hand, was sweating like a stuck pig.
Just another reason why I hated Hell so much . . .
the oppressive heat
.
“Well,” Snarly head said, starting to look bored now. “Go on.”
I was very interested as to what old Snarly head’s next move would be. I had a feeling he didn’t get too many souls sassing him right outside the Gate to Hell—
or
maybe I was just naïve and this stuff was business as usual. I had no way of knowing what the protocol was for entering the interior of Hell, so I just stayed put, my curiosity more than piqued as I tried to guess what Snarly head would do with this ragtag bunch of Goth kids.
“We were calling forth the demon Abalam, and Ralphy had a little accident with the candles—”
“I did
not
,” Ralph cried out indignantly.
“Shut up, Ralphy,” Chanduthra said, licking her lips. “Like I was saying, we had,
like
, just laid the pentagram and were chanting and stuff. Ralph knocked the candle over and, like, everything just started
burning.
”
The other twin, Richard, opened his mouth to say something, but another look from Chanduthra silenced him. I couldn’t tell which creature the brothers were more scared of: Cerberus, the three-headed Guardian of Hell, or Chanduthra, the Goth Bitch.
“That’s not what happened,” Richard said, sticking up for his brother finally. “Why are you lying, Sandy?
She
was the one who accidentally kicked—”
Without warning, Chanduthra walked over to Richard and punched him in the gut, hard. The slender young man fell forward, clutching his belly and gagging as he gasped for air. Chanduthra raised her fist high in the air, then pointed it right at Ralph, shaking it in his weasely face as a reminder that she was not above punching him, too, if he crossed her.
“Like, where was I?” the girl said, turning back to face Snarly head, her pale blue eyes glinting bright red in the sunlight.
Wait a minute. Did I just say her blue eyes were glinting red?!
I stared harder at the large, black-clad girl, trying to catch another glimpse of her eyes, but she wasn’t facing me anymore. I replayed the last ten seconds in my mind, checking to see if I’d
imagined
the whole thing, if my mind was just addled from the overwhelming heat.
Not getting any help from my compromised memory, I decided I was gonna have to get a closer look at the girl’s face in order to discover if there was more to “Chanduthra” than met the eye.
I left my spot in the tree line and moved forward, strategically placing my body between the Goth girl and a small outcropping of rocks about the size and shape of a rollaway hot dog stand. I was well positioned, hidden behind the rocks, so that the girl couldn’t see me, but I could get a decent view of her face.
As she continued to talk—explaining in more detail about the candle getting knocked over “by accident” and the lock on the door getting jammed (by accident again, I wondered?)—I watched her eyes for some sign that I wasn’t crazy. Ten seconds later I saw it: pale blues eyes, flashing red in the sunlight like an animal’s. It only took an instant to realize what kind of game was afoot here.
Our little friend Chanduthra is not alone in that body.
I stood there, unsure of what to do, but then I had the most amazing idea: I would save Cerberus
and
knock my favor out at the same time! It was a perfect plan and I couldn’t believe how quickly it had come to me.
I was getting to be a regular genius these days, if I didn’t say so myself.

Other books

Want To Play by PJ Tracy
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Jo Goodman by My Steadfast Heart
Negative Image by Vicki Delany
Throne of Glass by Maas, Sarah J.
Between Flesh and Steel by Richard A. Gabriel
Hold on to the Sun by Michal Govrin, Judith G. Miller
Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow