Chapter Twenty-Eight
Charon stepped onto the dock and held out a hand. I accepted it and climbed after him. His fingers were calloused and rough, but his grasp was gentle and his arm steady. With one foot still in the boat and the other just stepping ashore, I felt a sudden chilling pressure wrap itself around my ankle. Without warning, the underworld spun and I began to slip backward.
Something from beneath the surface of the burning waters was pulling me down. My foot slid into a widening gap between the dock and the boat. Too startled even to cry out, I clutched desperately onto Charon’s arm. To my unspeakable relief, his grip held fast. I hung in the air for a sickening moment, suspended between the ferryman above and the something below.
I craned my neck frantically to see shapes in the rippling blue flames beneath me. Tendrils of blue and black swam along the surface of the burning water, shadowy coils of smoke and flame, writhing and twisting and reaching out hungrily. They were eerily beautiful as they spun and beckoned. Their motion was hypnotic. The boat, the dock, the cavern walls around me all faded away as I stared, faded away until there was nothing but the tendrils and the infinite darkness beyond.
Charon pulled firmly, and I found myself suddenly lying facedown on the weathered old dock.
“I would advise against straying from your path,” Charon said as calmly as if I had just stubbed my toe on the mooring. “There are things below that you might not care to encounter.”
I pushed myself up and made for solid ground with alacrity. “What was that?” I asked breathlessly when the dock was behind me.
“I do not know.”
“You don’t—but you’re the boatman!” I said. “You’ve been ferrying souls for hundreds of years.”
“Thousands,” said Charon.
“Then how do you not know?”
“In the same way, I suppose, that you can observe a rainbow without knowing its cause. Some things simply are.”
“Refraction!” I said. “Rainbows are caused by light bending and splitting. It’s called refraction—and we know because usually when people observe a curious phenomenon they want to learn more.”
“Refraction.” Charon tested the word out on his tongue. “Is that how it works?” he said. “I think perhaps someone should tell the Vikings.”
“Thousands of years of traveling across a body of water that occasionally catches fire and tries to eat your passengers, and you never even learned what to call it?”
“You are in the underworld now,” said Charon. “The natives here are as numberless as nightmares and equally unfathomable. To plumb the depths of such a place in an effort to understand it would be the paradigm of futility, Abigail Rook, and almost certainly the path to madness.”
“You learned Ammit’s name,” I said.
“So I did,” conceded Charon. “I will inquire about the fire at my earliest convenience. In the meantime, you should follow your path.” He turned and walked back to the pier, leaving me to my quest. A stairway had been cut into the cave wall just ahead. It wound upward. Light poured down the steps from somewhere up above. I inched forward.
“Is that where I’ll find Professor Hoole?” I called back to Charon.
He had already returned to the boat. He took up the long pole and pushed away from the pier. “That is where you are meant to be.”
“Wait, you’re going? How will I get back?”
“I will return when I am needed. Good-bye, Abigail Rook.”
The ship drifted away down the river of living flames, wavering like a mirage until Charon had vanished into the distance. What had I gotten myself into? I had no idea what I was doing! I was completely alone, standing at the foot of a mysterious staircase in an underworld that had tried to kill me not five minutes earlier.
I took a deep breath. “Nowhere to go but up.”
As I climbed the winding stone steps, I tried to imagine what I would say when I reached Lawrence Hoole. “Hello. We’ve never met, but some policemen I know fished your body out of a bunch of sewer muck and I’d very much like to know who put you there.” Not exactly the sort of conversation they teach in finishing school.
Bleaker thoughts crept in and I began to worry that I might not find my way to the professor at all—or worse, that I might not find my way back again. The stairway seemed to tighten with each step as I ascended until I was sure it would seal me in before I ever reached the light. And what if it did? What if it locked me into place deep beneath the ground, my body above and my soul below? What would Jackaby and Jenny think if I never reemerged? What would Charlie? What would my parents? I closed my eyes. And what would become of them all if I failed? I took a deep breath and pressed onward.
The stairwell fell away behind me at last and I blinked into the light.
Had I breath in my body the sight before me would have taken it. There was no ceiling at all in that space atop the stairs. The mantle of the sky bore not so much as a wispy cloud or field of blue, it simply went on forever into the cosmos. I could see whole worlds high above me, not mere pinpricks of light, but vast spinning globes in the heavens, some with pockmarked surfaces and others encircled by swirling gaseous clouds. There were shapes moving through the air all around me as well, intricately woven braids of matter and light coiling betwixt one another. They spun and pulsed, changing all the time. Where they touched, the threads twisted and rearranged themselves in an elegant dance.
What I took at first to be tremendous mountains in the distance whirred and clicked. They were not earthen mounds at all, but enormous brass cogs, spinning and glistening when they caught the light of the naked sun. The breathtaking view put every exhibit of science and industry I had ever seen to shame. The principles of chemistry, astronomy, and mechanics had been made manifest—magnified and heightened and woven together into the tapestry of an impossible living universe.
The ground was marked by long, sloping ridges that defined an enormous spiral, like the curves of a giant sidelong snail shell. The humps narrowed toward the center as they wrapped around and around one another in tighter and tighter curls. Movement caught my eye toward the center of the spiral and I stepped forward. My feet failed to meet the ground. I would have tripped and fallen had there been forces pulling me downward. Instead I found myself floating, weightless.
I blinked.
Back on earth, Jenny’s feet never touched the ground either, I reminded myself. I had no body. I was technically dead now, and ghosts didn’t need corporeal luxuries like gravity. I willed myself forward and found it fairly easy to direct my spirit into a smooth glide.
In the center of the spiral was a man. His back was turned to me as he hovered six feet in the air, fixated on his work. His shoulders heaved and his arms swung rhythmically, like a maestro conducting a symphony. In front of him, patterns emerged as three-dimensional waveforms, intertwining and overlapping—at once invisible and somehow brilliantly lustrous. It was like watching a billowing sheet of liquid diamond take shape. All the clever prototypes and models in the Hooles’ house were to this place what Michelangelo’s childhood scribblings were to the Sistine Chapel. The inventor’s hands could finally keep up with his imagination, and the results were staggering.
“Professor?” I said, approaching. “You don’t know me, but I—”
The soul turned. I froze.
He was not Lawrence Hoole.