Chapter 19
All Dogs Are Good Dogs
“THAT’S CERBERUS,” says Laura. There’s a dazed note in her voice, like she can’t believe any of this is actually happening. An eighty-year-old teenager sends us to England to follow a headless horseman to a secret doorway into the Greek Underworld, hidden inside the Elgin Marbles? Okay, sure. The path to Persephone includes walking through a lotus-eater’s paradise of everything we ever thought we wanted, forcing us to reject the futures we always thought were ours by right? Sucks to be us, but fine. Three-headed dog covered in snakes?
Nope. Big nope. Hard pass, do not continue forward, do not go anywhere near the jaws that bite, the claws that catch.
The dog—Cerberus, his name is Cerberus, and I learned about him when I was in grammar school, removing him was one of the labors of Hercules, which means it’s totally unfair for him to be here now—continues to growl. Laura puts a hand on my arm, restraining me. It’s not necessary. I wasn’t going to charge the three-headed dog with the snakes growing out of his back. That’s another thing. Why does the dog have snakes growing out of his back? This is entirely unreasonable. I do not approve.
“He guards the exit from the Underworld, to keep the dead from leaving.” Laura sounds like she’s about to faint. “The jaws of his canine heads can snap a strong man’s spine in a single bite. The venom from his serpent heads can turn the blood to dust in your veins. It took a demigod to defeat him. Once. Only once. He’s never been beaten, save by Hercules.”
I turn and frown at her. “He guards the exit from the Underworld,” I echo carefully, “to keep the dead from leaving. But there’s more than one exit, right? Hades and Persephone weren’t planning to send us back out via the giant monster doggie door.”
Laura nods silently.
“Okay. Great.” I shrug off her restraining hand. “Let’s go.”
“Yes.” She sags in relief. “We should still be able to go back from here. We should—” She stops talking mid-sentence. Good. That means she’s realized I’m not turning around. I don’t look back to see her expression, tempting as it is. We’re close enough to our goal that I don’t know if I’m allowed to look back anymore. I will not lose this on a technicality. I won’t.
Cerberus growls louder as I grow closer. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and my skin crawls, every inch of me anticipating pain, pain, pain. I keep walking until I’m right in front of the beast, close enough that he could probably get me if he really tried.
“Hello,” I say.
The growling stops. Cerberus cocks his head, looking at me. His eyes are intelligent. Too intelligent for an ordinary dog. He’s like a Maggy Dhu, a Black Dog of the Dead, only bigger and with more heads and also a lot of snakes. He’s nothing like a Maggy Dhu at all, except for those eyes. Those eyes, that tell me he understands more than any dog has any business understanding. When I speak, he listens.
“My name is Rose Marshall,” I say, pressing a hand flat against my chest. Maybe not my best idea: I can feel my heart pounding, and every beat is one step closer to my own demise. This whole “physical flesh that can age and die” thing is bullshit. “I’m not currently dead, but I was once, and I’m here because I’m hoping I can be again. My friend back there tells me you’re the one who guards the door to make sure the dead don’t escape.”
Cerberus ducks his heads, all three of them, coming a few inches closer to me. He inhales, six nostrils pulling in vast jets of air. Then he snorts. The smell of dog breath is nearly overwhelming.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know. This whole resurrection thing wasn’t my idea. I’m here to set things right, and I guess what I’m wondering is . . . if you guard the door to make sure the dead don’t get out, is it your job to make sure the living don’t get in?”
Three thick pink tongues loll. Cerberus sits down, snakes tangling together in what I can only interpret as amusement, tail—which is naturally another snake, this one as big around as my thigh—waving merrily. I am being laughed at by a dog the size of a bear.
“Didn’t think so,” I say, and grin. “Thank you.”
I step forward. I’m immediately stopped as a dog head the size of a boulder slams into my chest. The impact is enough to knock me back a few feet, but it isn’t bruising, isn’t painful; this isn’t an attack. This is . . .
Understanding dawns. “You want me to scratch behind your ears, don’t you?”
Cerberus pants agreement.
“I guess every road has its toll,” I say, and start scratching.
Three dog heads means three sets of ears, and each of them is larger than my palm. The smell of the beast is overwhelming, like the biggest mastiff in the world crossed with some sort of ridiculously filthy hog. The snakes get in on the action, hissing and twining around my wrists, making me cringe even as I keep on scratching. They don’t bite, don’t even open their mouths, and their tongues tickle as they brush against my skin, testing me, tasting me.
If I ever wind up in this Underworld for real, one of the dead this great dog guards against, I won’t be sneaking out through this gate. The snakes are too aware of what I taste like, the dog is too aware of my scent. I am locking this door forever in order to get through it now. I don’t care. I have no intention of winding up in this particular afterlife ever again.
Cerberus allows his tongues to loll, finally flopping onto his side and exposing the vast expanse of his belly. He can’t roll onto his back, not without crushing the snakes. I start scratching.
“Laura, come on,” I call, as loudly as I dare. I don’t want to hurt Cerberus’s ears. Not considering the potential consequences. “We need to keep moving.”
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Paying our toll.” The fur isn’t as rough as I would have expected. I scratch, and the dog’s back leg kicks in canine ecstasy, and I can almost forget how bizarre this all is. Only almost. Nothing will take the scent of asphodel out of the air, or stop the sound of hissing.
Footsteps mark Laura’s approach, until she’s standing somewhere behind me. Still, I don’t turn. This is not where I lose everything. I refuse to let this be where I lose everything.
“Keep walking,” I say. “Get through the door. I’ll be right behind you.” Cerberus’s back leg is kicking lazily, in the way of utterly contented dogs.
“What if he attacks you?”
“Then he attacks me.” I keep scratching. “Go, Laura. This isn’t going to last forever.”
Softly, so softly that I’m barely sure I hear what I hear, she mutters, “Damn you, Rose Marshall.” Her footsteps move away. One of the big dog’s heads lifts, ears cocked, and looks after her. He doesn’t otherwise move.
“Did she go through?” I ask. “Can I follow her?”
Cerberus whines, and another head lifts, this one running its vast pink tongue along my cheek. Drool drips down the line of my neck. I want to wipe it off, possibly taking a layer or two of skin with it. I also don’t want to offend the giant guardian dog. So I force a smile and pat Cerberus on each of his heads in turn.
“Good dog,” I say. “Here’s hoping we never meet again, because I don’t think we’ll be friends when I’m a ghost.”
Cerberus whines soft agreement. I push to my feet and follow Laura through the archway.
She grabs me as soon as I’m past the threshold, digging her fingers into my arms and giving me a short, sharp shake. It feels like my teeth rattle in their sockets, shifting like bones in an earthquake.
“Hey!” I pull away, glaring at her as I finally wipe the drool from my cheek. “What’s the big deal?”
“You’re asking me that? You’re the one who decided to run off and pet the dog from Hell! Literally!” The fury in her eyes could ignite paper.
“This isn’t Hell,” I say. “This is the Grecian Underworld. You know that better than I do. And while we’re slinging blame, you’re the one who told me he was here to stop ghosts from getting out, but didn’t stop to ask whether that also meant he would stop the living from getting in. I did what you said was safe.”
“I didn’t know I was saying that.”
“Now you do. Hooray for knowledge.” I glare for a moment more before I let it go and look around our new surroundings.
We are in a cavern, even bigger than the one where Cerberus stands eternal guard, and the floor is carpeted entirely in asphodel flowers, so that every time we move, we crush them and fill the air with their perfume. New flowers sprout to replace the crushed ones, an eternally self-renewing ecosystem of impossible beauty. I feel like Dorothy standing in the poppy fields of Oz, except that I’m not falling asleep.
There are three doors on the far side of the cavern. I frown.
“Which one?” I ask.
“Where do you want to go?” Laura sounds weary beyond all words. “The left will take us to the Asphodel Meadows, the land of the peaceful, unremarkable dead. We’d never truly join them if we stayed here—wouldn’t age, wouldn’t die—but we could be happy there for as long as we wanted to be. It’s not where the heroes go. It’s not where the villains go, either. It’s just peace, forever, peace and flowers and the kind comforts Hades can offer to his subjects.”
“But it’s not home,” I say.
“The right will take us to the River Lethe,” says Laura, as if I hadn’t spoken. “That’s where you get the waters of forgetfulness. I always thought they were a metaphor, but we just met the actual Cerberus, so I guess they’re probably real. You could forget it all, if you wanted to. You could be an ordinary teenage girl. You could start over, completely clean, and see who you grew up to be.”
It would be another form of suicide if I did that. I know it, and she knows it, and she’s suggesting it anyway, because apparently killing everything I’ve ever been—killing my heart, killing my memories, killing the pieces of the story that no one knows except for me—is less terrible to her than killing one fragile little body that was supposed to have died more than sixty years ago. It’s such a predictable, pedestrian, living way of looking at things that I laugh before I can think better of it, a short, sharp bark of a sound that hangs in the air like an accusation.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “That leaves us with the middle.” And I start walking.
The asphodel flowers slow me down. It’s like wading through the wheat in spring, back when I had to walk from our house to school every morning. We weren’t supposed to cut across the fields, since none of us could afford to pay for any crops we might happen to spoil, but we all did it anyway. The sun on our backs and the wheat tangling around our knees, and that was the smell of summer coming on, that was the feeling of the world set right.
The asphodel smells nothing like wheat. It comforts me all the same. I am setting the world right, one step at a time. I am going to find my way home. I am going to beat this.
The door looms large in front of me.
I step through.