Chapter Thirty One - The Underworld

We turned and followed the spirits up a well-worn path. I'm not sure what I was expecting, to be honest. Pearly Gates, maybe. Or a big black portcullis, or something. But the entrance to the Underworld looked like a cross between airport security and the Jersey Turnpike. The spirits were queued up in three lines that passed beneath a huge black archway that read YOU ARE NOW ENTERING EREBUS.

"So much for accuracy," I mumbled.

"What?" Grover asked.

"You know?" I said. "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate?"

"Do inot/i start quoting Dante," Andromeda said.

"What?" Annabeth asked.

"'Abandon all hope, you who enter'. It's a line from Dante's Inferno," Andromeda said.

"What's wrong with the classics?" I grinned.

Two of the queues were noted as having an ATTENDANT ON DUTY, and the third was marked EZ DEATH. That line was moving right along. The other two were crawling. Each entrance had a pass through metal detector with security cameras mounted on top

"What do you figure?" I asked.

"The fast line must go straight to the Asphodel Fields," Annabeth said. "No contest. They don't want to risk judgment from the court, because it might go against them."

"Makes sense," Andromeda said. "We'll probably draw less attention to ourselves by going in that way."

"Less attention is good," Grover said. "No attention is better. Let's keep our heads down."

A sudden commotion in the line ahead caught our attention, and for a moment I thought we'd been discovered. Then I saw that a couple of black-robbed ghouls had pulled one particular spirit aside and were frisking him at the security desk.

"That's that preacher who made the news, remember?" Grover said.

"Oh, yeah." Now that he said that, I could vaguely recognize the dead man's face. I'd seen him on TV a couple of times at the restaurant while serving the tables. He was this super annoying televangelist from upstate who'd apparently raised millions of dollars for orphanages and then got caught spending the money on stuff for his mansion. He'd died when his Lamborghini for the Lord went off a cliff during a wild police chase.

"What are they doing to him?" I asked.

"Special punishment from Hades," Grover guessed. "The really bad people get his personal attention as soon as they arrive. The Fur... er... the iKindly Ones/i will set up a special eternal torture for him."

The thought of the Furies made me shudder. I realized I was in their home territory now. Hell's Grannies must already be licking their lips with anticipation of round two.

"But if he's a preacher," I said, "and he believes in a different hell..."

"There's enough crossover thanks to Dante these days," Annabeth said. "It doesn't hurt that most mortal media depicts Hades as a satanic figure."

Grover shrugged. "Who's to say he's seeing this place the way we're seeing it? Humans see what they want to see. You're very... er, persistent, that way."

We got closer to the gates. The howling was so loud now it shook the ground at my feet, but I still couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Then,as we got about fifty feet away from the gate, the green mist shimmered. Standing just where the path split into three lanes was an enormous shadowy monster. I hadn't seen it before because it was half transparent, like the dead. Until it moved, it blended with whatever was behind it. Only its eyes and teeth looked solid. And it was staring straight at me.

My jaw hung open. All I could think to say was, "He's a Rottweiler."

I'd always imagined Cerberus as a big dalmatian. I mean, I remember reading somewhere that his name meant spotted, so I just assumed... But he was obviously a purebred Rottweiler, except of course that he was twice the size of a woolly mammoth, mostly invisible, and had three heads. The dead walked right up to him—no fear at all. The ATTENDANT ON DUTY lines parted on either side of him. The EZ DEATH spirits walked right between his front paws and under his belly, which they could do without even crouching.

"I'm starting to see him better," I muttered. "Why is that?"

"I think ..." Annabeth moistened her lips. "I'm afraid it's because we're getting closer to being dead."

The dog's middle head craned toward us. It sniffed the air and growled.

"He can smell the living," I said. The middle head snarled at us, then barked so loud my eyeballs rattled.

"Can you understand him?" I asked Grover.

"Oh yeah," he said. "I can understand him."

"What's he saying?"

"I don't think humans have a four-letter word that translates, exactly."

As we were trying to wrack our brains to come up with a plan to handle the monstrously massive three-headed hellhound in front of us, Andromeda let out a sound that could only be described as a keening exhalation of unbridled excitement.

"Oh, no," Annabeth groaned.

"Oh, no?" I blinked.

"Oh, no." Grover emphasized, eyes wide.

"Puppy!" Andromeda squealed.

"Puppy!?"

Before any of us could stop her, she launched herself at Cerberus, reaching up for him to sniff her hand. For one horrible moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, I had the image running through my head of my friend being ripped up and devoured by a giant, hungry hellhound. Instead, to everyone's immense shock and disbelief, Cerberus seemed to calm down. At least - he stopped growling at us. His left-side head tilted in apparent confusion as the middle head leaned down to sniff her hand. The right-side head immediately lunged forward and began licking her face.

"What."

I stared blankly as the gatekeeper of the Underworld - a mountain of a monster with pitch black fur, three heads, and eyes like glowing coals - was reduced to nothing more than the world's largest lapdog by a small preteen girl with unruly hair.

"Who's a good boy?" Andromeda crooned, running her hands through Cerberus' short, dark fur and scratching slightly - the three heads all competing for equal attention. "Who's a good boy? You are, aren't you? Yes, you are."

"Um..." I hedged, noticing the spirits in line had all stopped moving and were staring at us. It was only a matter of time before the security ghouls took notice, and then we'd be in real trouble.

"I see them," Annabeth said, quickly taking charge by grabbing hold of Andromeda's shoulder and whispering in her ear. For a moment, it looked like Andromeda was going to argue, but thankfully she relented. Cerberus gave out a soft whine as the attention was pulled away from him. Annabeth turned, and in a no-nonsense tone, commanded Cerberus to "Sit, boy."

Whether it was because he was well trained or simply dumbfounded, the massive dog immediately sank to his haunches - crushing a couple of spirits that had been passing beneath him in the process. Several ghouls came running toward us to see what the sudden commotion was all about.

"Come on," Annabeth said, pulling Andromeda forward though the metal detectors, keeping their heads down and trying not to look like they were running. Grover and I pushed through after them, which immediately set off flashing red lights and a screaming alarm.

"Unauthorized possessions! Magic detected!"

"So much for not getting their attention," I said.

Cerberus started to bark.

"Just shut up and run!" Annabeth snapped.

We burst through the EZ DEATH gate, which started even more alarms blaring, and raced into the Underworld. A few minutes later we were hiding, out of breath, in the rotten trunk of a huge white poplar tree while the security ghouls scuttled past, yelling for backup from the Furies.

"Why did the alarm go off when you went through?" Annabeth asked me.

"I don't know," I said. "It said something about detecting magic items. I've got the amulet from Jo, the 'frigerator bag, a couple of runes in my... Hey, maybe it flagged my backpack? I mean, it was a gift from Ares."

"The alarm didn't trigger when I went through," Annabeth said. "My Yankee's cap was a gift from my mom. So even if your backpack was flagged for being a gift from a god, that wouldn't make sense."

"Oh! Maybe because I'm wearing these shoes?" I gestured to my feet. "Didn't Luke get these from his dad?"

"That makes some sense," Andromeda said, slowly. "He may bring certain souls to the Underworld, but I'm pretty sure the Big Guy wouldn't want the god of thieves wandering freely around his domain."

"Hey, weren't those broken?" Grover asked. I blinked, then looked at my shoes again. He was right, they were broken. Except now they looked brand new.

"Huh," I said. "I guess magic shoes are self repairing. That's good to know. Actually, I'm really glad. It means I don't have to give them back all damaged."

After a few more minutes had passed, and we were sure that the ghouls had moved on, we climbed out of the stump and stretched. Black grass and white asphodel flowers, trampled down over the eons by the innumerable dead, spread out around us in a vast, almost endless, meadow. A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Poplar trees grew in clumps here and there. The cavern ceiling was so high above us it could have been mistaken for a bank of storm clouds - if not for the stalactites, which glowed a faint gray and looked wickedly pointed. I tried not to imagine that they'd fall on us at any moment, but dotted around the fields were several that had fallen and impaled themselves in the black grass. I guess the spirits here didn't have to worry about little things like being crushed to re-death. Was that even possible? At the very least, it had to be uncomfortable.

Andromeda, Annabeth, Grover and I tried our best to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghouls. I found myself trying to spot familiar faces among the spirits, but it was tricky. I blinked on my aura sight, and was shocked to see that everything still looked mostly the same. The biggest difference was that there were no more concealing shadows. The spirits all had the same uniform greyscale aura, with only a handful of muted colors marking the more recently deceased from those that had been here a while. Most of the wandering spirits had lonely or confused expressions creasing their faces.

One seemed to notice our passing, and approached. I think he tried to speak - his mouth opened and moved - but all that came out was a sort of chirping whistle.

"I'm sorry," Andromeda said, shaking her head. "We... We only just got here. Haven't seen her."

The spirit nodded, his face showing that he had expected that answer, and drifted away.

"If we do, I'll point her your way."Andromeda said, then noticed that we were all staring at her like she'd grown a second head. "What?"

"What was that about?" I asked.

"He and his daughter arrived at the same time," Andromeda said. "But, they got separated in line. He wanted to know if we'd seen her."

"You could understand him?" Grover asked.

"He was speaking plain English," Andromeda said. "Okay, so the dialect was outdated, but I'm not going to hold that against him."

"Could either of you understand what he was saying?" Annabeth asked, looking to me and Grover. We shook our heads.

"Maybe you just need to have your ears checked," Andromeda huffed, though it sounded forced. "Come on, we need to keep moving."

After a few miles of walking, we found ourselves cresting a large hill and were finally able to fully take in our surroundings. Try to imagine the largest crowd you've ever seen, Times Square during the New Year's Eve countdown. Now imagine if Times Square was a million times larger, packed with people, and the electricity had gone out. Something tragic has happened, and the entire world is collectively holding it's breath. There's no light, no sound. Only whispering masses of people milling around in the darkness, waiting for news that will never come. If you can picture that, you have a pretty good idea what the Fields of Asphodel looked like.

To our left, spirits flanked by security ghouls were being marched down a rough, rocky path toward a vast, cracked and desolate wasteland full of active minefields and miles of barbed wire. The Fields of Punishment. Even from this distance, I could see spirits being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches, or sit through screenings of movie adaptations of classic videogames. Squinting my eyes, I could just make out a tiny hill, with the ant-size figure of Sisyphus struggling to move his boulder to the top. Of course, I saw worse tortures, too - though I'll spare you the details.

The line coming up from the right side of the judgment pavilion was much better. This one led down a narrow path toward a small valley surrounded by walls. Beyond the security gate were entire neighborhoods of beautiful houses from every time period in history. Roman villas and medieval castles stood next to Victorian mansions and more modern Brownstones. Gem-colored flowers bloomed on the lawns and the grass rippled in rainbow colors. False sunlight gleamed overhead, and I could hear music and laughter and smell barbecue cooking. The gated community of Elysium seemed to be the only happy part of the Underworld.

In the middle of that valley was a glittering blue lake, with three small islands like a vacation resort in the Bahamas. The Isles of the Blest, for people who had chosen to be reborn three times, and three times achieved Elysium. I wondered if I'd ever make it there someday. Would I even be me at that point?

Shaking off that train of thought, I turned my attention to the distant horizon. There, looming in the darkness, was a vast palace of glittering black obsidian. Above the parapets swirled three dark batlike creatures: the Furies. I got the feeling they were waiting for us.

"I suppose it's too late to turn back," Grover said wistfully. "Hey, maybe the bolt isn't even in his palace. We should look other places first. Like, maybe in Elysium?"

"Hey, it's fine," I tried to sound confident. "We'll be okay. We've made it this far, haven't we?"

Of course, it was at that precise moment that all hell broke loose.