Crossing the Acheron
by Jamie McNabb
COPYRIGHT © 2011 by Jamie McNabb
Published by Soapbox Rising Press
Cover illustration: Josep Benlliure i Gil/commons.wikimedia.org
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook in its entirety is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, events, or locations is purely coincidental.
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==<BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS>==
Bonus Short Story: The Bottling
A Preview of The Man who Taught Iron to Fly
by Jamie McNabb
The newbie patted down his pockets. His wallet was gone, his money clip was gone, and even his parking-meter feed was gone. "I'm sorry," he said to the toll collector. "I don't have any money."
The toll collector sat in a booth at the top of the ramp leading down to the ferry dock. He was dressed in a white robe and wore a helmet with silver wings. "Did you arrive with anything of value?"
The ferry was alongside, and the ferryman was bullying a fresh load of passengers into their places. "You! Yes, on that thwart. Yes, the benchlike board! Will you never learn? Oh, what I wouldn't give for a few right seaman!"
"Value?" Basil asked. "No, I don't think so."
The toll collector's face took on a suspicious expression, as though the newbie were trying to deceive him. "No coin? Not even one? Under your tongue perhaps?"
The newbie, who'd begun and ended his life as Basil Wainwright, hadn't thought of that. He poked his tongue into the various corners of his mouth. Empty. "No, nothing."
A sharp sense of urgency sniggled through Basil's gut. Weren't they going to let him across? It wasn't his fault they'd buried him without any money.
"Coins can be very small," the toll collector said. "Perhaps you swallowed it."
Basil was sure he hadn't. He would have remembered swallowing a coin. "I don't think so."
"No!" the ferryman bellowed. "We have no cabins!"
The ferryman wore a short, mottled brown tunic. His beard, which was unkempt and gray, hung to the middle of his chest.
"What did you say?" a tremulous male voice asked from the middle of the boat. "I didn't hear."
"No! Cabins! Are you deaf as well as dead?"
"Yes, I am. Deaf. Was deaf, I guess you'd say. I don't know what I am now."
"Hold on!" Basil said. He checked his left hand, but his wedding ring was gone. "Shit! She must have kept it." Then he noticed he was wearing his watch. She mustn't have had a use for it, or maybe her good-for-nothing brother hadn't wanted it. Basil showed it to the toll collector. "How about this?"
"Watches don't mean a lot here. We're on the border of Eternity, you see."
Basil's heart sank, which, in a way, was what had landed him here in the first place. He stared at his watch. No meaning? How could that be? After all, the second hand was jumping from mark to mark. "But my watch is working," he said. "The ferryman—"
"Charon's his name," the toll collector said.
"Charon," Basil repeated. "Thanks. Yes, well, anyway, Charon could use it to time his crossings, establish a schedule, and so forth."
"Schedules mean even less than watches. No time, you see, not in the conventional sense."
"But I can feel it passing."
"You only imagine you can," the toll collector said. "It's all part of the Great Mystery of Eternity."
Charon climbed aboard and worked his way to the stern.
Basil was suddenly gripped by an urge to run down and jump aboard the ferry, to fight his way onto it if need be.
He looked on in horror as the boat's mooring lines were cast off.
Charon sculled a few yards away from the dock and harangued his charges through running out their oars.
Horrified or not, Basil found the process of getting the ferry under way fascinating, so fascinating that it overshadowed his sense of abandonment.
"Sir?" the toll collector prompted impatiently. "Step aside, sir, if you please."
"But I do not please," Basil said. "I have to cross the river."
Finally, the rowers and their oars were ready. "All right, you lubbers! Together now. Give way!" The sound of Charon's voice boiled up the riverbank. "Stroke!" The oars dipped into the water and pulled aft. The ferry glided forward.
The toll collector jutted his chin in the direction of the fields behind Basil. "They all feel exactly the same way you do, but they won't get across unless they pay the toll."
Basil hadn't taken much notice of the fields before, but now he gave them a careful look. They flanked the line that ran down from the Valley of the Shadow to the toll booth. The fields were covered with grass, dotted with oak trees, and sprinkled with flowers. The whole was blanketed in patches by those who couldn't cross, by those who'd arrived without a coin or similar object of value.
Here and there, lights strobed. They made the place look like an enormous picnic attended by people who'd forgotten to turn off the flashes on their cameras.
"There must be millions of us," Basil said.
"Billions."
The toll collector's apparent indifference was staggering. Basil said, "Billions of us can't be left to mill around between life and death forever!"
"No, you can't. Which is why, if you stay on this side long enough, you'll wink out of existence."
Basil felt his legs go rubbery. "What?"
"See those bursts of light? They're what happen when someone winks out." The toll collector smiled admiringly. "I'm told it's a dandy way to go."
"You're insane!"
"Granted, it sounds harsh, but you said it yourself: everything has to be in one state or the other. You can't be left in between."
"Now, sir, I need you to move along. You're holding up the line. Next!"
An old woman in a green suit and pearl necklace elbowed Basil aside. Ever the gentleman, he mumbled, "Sorry. Excuse me," and stepped farther out of her way.
She made no acknowledgement, but took his place at the front of the line.
Furious at her, and at himself, and at his wife, and at the toll collector, Basil put a few more paces between himself and the tollbooth. From there, he watched the old woman, curious to find out whether or not her luck would be any better than his had been.
The old woman and the toll collector went through the business about coins and watches, and then she took off her pearls and handed them over.
"Very nice," the toll collector said. He put the pearls in an iron-bound chest and handed the woman a boarding pass. "Enjoy your crossing."
Basil moved farther off.
The ferry, now in midstream, was a double-ender. It was longer than an old-fashioned lifeboat, but about as wide.
"You there, forward!" Charon yelled. "Yes, you! Row dry!"
Charon eased his steering oar to starboard and the boat swung to port, clearing a piece of driftwood.
#
Basil went and stood under one of the oak trees a dozen yards up from the river. A man was sitting there, his back to the tree trunk. He was middle-aged, had a neatly trimmed beard, and was wearing a black frock coat.
The man looked up. "Cancer. How about you?"
It took Basil a second to catch up. "Heart attack."
"Too bad," the man said. "Take a load off."
Basil sat down.
The man held out his hand, "George Odysseus Taylor."
After the introductions were out of the way, George said, "You've met Mercury."
"Come again?"
"The fellow in the tollbooth."
"Yes, I've met him." Further comment seemed pointless.
George shrugged. "Well, what are you going to do?" He pointed at the river. "Not much to look at, is it?"
"The Styx?"
"The Acheron."
"Sorry." It was more of a question than an apology.
George laughed. "Don't fret yourself. Almost everyone confuses them. The Styx is miles away."
As for the Acheron, Basil couldn't think what he ought to have expected, but a sluggish, narrow stream wasn't it.
This sparked an unsettling question. "I'm not comatose, am I?" Basil asked.
"No, you're dead, all right. Mind you, we're not completely dead, not yet. We have to cross the river."
"To enter the afterlife itself?" Basil asked.
"That's right. It happens just beyond that ridge on the other side."
Hoping for the merest hint of an explanation, Basil asked, "How did I get mixed up in a Greco-Roman myth? I'm a Congregationalist."
"I'm an atheist," George said. "Imagine my surprise."
"Ha, ha, ha," Basil said, letting his sarcasm off its leash. "I suppose it's all part of the Great Mystery of Eternity."
"Mercury couldn't have said—"
A light strobed thirty paces away. A split second later, a scream followed, and then hysterical sobbing.
"What happened?" Basil asked. Then realizing what had happened, he asked, "Who was it?"
The sobbing rose to a wail, then subsided into a dull keening.
George stood, looked hard in the direction from which the flash had come, and sat back down.
"The woman crying is Molly Sheraton, twenty-five, automobile wreck. The person who winked out must have been Bob Lewis, thirty-one, fisherman, drowned at sea," George said. "They were close."
The sobbing quieted, and Basil saw a knot of women walking uphill, away from the Acheron. The woman in the middle had her face buried in her hands.
Desperation threatened to swamp Basil.
"How long do we get?" he asked.
"Winking is random. Could be hours, could be millennia. One instant you are, and the next instant you are not."
A few minutes later, Basil made his excuses and walked down to the water's edge.
Charon had discharged his passengers and was sculling back. His face was grim. Back and forth, back and forth—he had to be bored out of his mind.
Basil considered the Acheron. It couldn't be more than two hundred yards across. Maybe as little as a hundred and a half.
A plan hatched.
Basil waded into the river. The bottom was sand—fine, white grains, the sort that came in egg timers. The first few yards were easy, but then the bottom dropped away. He pushed off and swam.
The landscape on the other side was similar to the one behind him: rolling hills, trees, flowers. The hills rose up to form the ridge George had pointed out. No one was around.
Never a good swimmer, Basil quickly tired. He rolled onto his back. He could see George is the distance, sitting under their oak tree.
When Basil crossed what he took to be the middle of the river, he heard a dog barking from ahead. It had to be Cerberus.
Basil swung around to have a look.
Cerberus was a yellow Lab. He was pacing back and forth at the edge of the water and barking his head off, not a threatening bark, but the bark of a dog who wants to play.
A happy yellow Lab—another surprise in what was turning out to be a surprising . . . eternity.
Deciding to cross that canine bridge when he came to it, Basil rolled onto his back and settled into a gentle kick-drift motion. He gazed up into the vault: no rock ceiling, but a blue sky with high white clouds.
George and the oak tree were still in position behind him.
Basil's head hit something hard. Startled, he bolted upright in the water. He'd run into a log. He worked his way around it, checked his course, and took up where he'd left off.
The dog stopped barking.
It was going to work! So much for Mercury and his demand for a coin!
Basil touched bottom, stood, and turned around.
George came forward and offered him a towel. "Here, let me help you out of those wet clothes."
"What are you doing over here?" Basil asked. "How did you get across?"
"I didn't."
Basil jerked his head around, searching back the way he had come. George had to be lying! But he wasn't. There on the opposite bank was the guardian hound of Hades, smack on the beach where Basil had thought he had landed.
Basil's jaw clenched and his eyes burned.
Annihilation. It seemed inevitable now.
He blinked back his tears. He had to keep his emotions in check. Panic would solve nothing.
"You might have warned me about the river," Basil said, and tugged off his sodden jacket.
"New arrivals are a lot like babies," George said. "Most of what they need to learn, they have to teach themselves."