April 2025 Volume 15 No 4

Horror Vacui

by

A.V. Greene

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

There’s evidence of the map everywhere if you know where to look. Orpheus strums his lyre on his way into Hades to rescue Eurydice. Osiris, Odin, and Jesus Christ all serve their time in the lands of the dead before their triumphant resurrections. William Blake painstakingly etches the particulars of a diabolical printing house. Emperor Yudhishtira bravely journeys into Naraka. Dante confronts the terrifying monster at the root of his concentric inferno. Underworld, otherworld, dreamworld. Descent, return.

It’s everywhere.

That’s not to say it’s clear, or even usable. Just that it exists. It’s not easy to bring the contours of our millennia-old collaborative cartography experiment back topside. And even if it were, the venture is still so hindered by time, war, famine, migrations, and an abject lack of a shared vocabulary to describe and catalog what we’ve found, that the map is fatally riddled with wild inconsistencies and impossibilities.

But to be fair, so is Hell.

1995

I found Hell the same way everyone does--by stumbling through a door.

Mine was tucked inside a dark offshoot of a cavernous walk-in storm drain alongside the artificial lake downtown. The drain, the dam, the lake, and the entire Spring Heights Park glittered with macabre small-town lore of floods, drownings, and drunk underage head injuries. The tunnels themselves hosted a boilerplate slate of requisite Appalachian fables: a serial killer (unconfirmed), a subterranean hillbilly dynasty (unlikely), the last of the true moonshiners (too poorly ventilated), and a few iterations of ghostly murder victims.

Part of the tunnels’ sordid reputation had to do with their easy proximity to the junior high—the dark, hidden space drew teenagers like flies to a carcass. They were a perfect spot for the class ditchers, the smokers, the druggies, and the lovers; a secret loophole buried out of sight just past the edges of the adult world.

The Spring Heights Park drain, nicknamed Hell by its newly pubescent visitors, looked like the edifice of an Egyptian tomb with its cement trilith façade slathered in spray paint hieroglyphics. Inside, it smelled like sewer water, marijuana, and seafood, but it was dark and cool and full of water sounds: drip, trickle, hiss. There’s a gate and heavy padlock on it these days, of course, and I have no idea how anyone ever thought it was a good idea to leave it wide open so that any curious kid could walk right into its jaws.

Hell’s counterpart, Heaven, opened a couple of blocks over in the alley between Rick’s Pool Hall and Kara’s Fashions. It was possible to travel between the two drains, but Heaven was smaller, and you had to shimmy through it on your stomach. Hell, the saying went, was so much easier to get into.

I was thirteen the first and only time I went into the tunnels. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise I found the real Hell down there. I’d been looking for it, in a way, my entire life. First, in books—Narnia, Middle Earth, Prydain, Earthsea. Then in vacant places—overgrown lots, ditches, the abandoned house down the street. And most recently, in love—which I understood through the swooning, desperate, powerplay-tinged media of the nineties, bristling with libido and completely uninterrogated misogyny.

I wanted to be overcome. I wanted the world to be more than it was.

But that wasn’t why I thought I was headed underground that day. I went to the tunnels because I’d just had my heart broken for the first time.

I was genuinely hurt and shocked, but I’d be lying if I said a part of me wasn’t also enjoying this juicy, melodramatic new role. My sorrow felt important, definitional. And also, wildly out of proportion to the pimply baritone player who’d just ended our six-week-long relationship in the hall after second period, but like I said—I’ve always wanted the world to be more than it was.

I was reveling a bit in my new status as Meghan the ruined woman (I’d let the baritone player put his hand up my shirt on the band bus, which had caused a bit of a scandal), so when my best friend Aaron offered to get me high, I accepted. I was generally a good kid with good grades who read too much and had a lot of imaginary conversations where I was cooler and smarter and more popular than I’d ever actually be. I was nervous about trying it, but it also seemed appropriately dramatic and glamorously self-destructive to take up drugs under the circumstances.

I think I sort of knew Aaron was gay, but we lived in a tiny and extremely conservative Baptist town where there was no middle ground between starting a meth addiction and/or a family before graduation and leaning on your church’s youth group as your sole social outlet. Coming out would have been a thorny proposition. I did know that everyone thought Aaron was the finest guy in our grade, though, in spite of some muddy rumors. When he told me he had weed, I instantly fantasized about the rumor mill delivering the tale of my trip to the tunnels with Aaron to the baritone player. He’d be so jealous that he’d run into the darkness after me, seize my hands, and take back his breakup speech on the spot (“Sorry, I just… I’m just not into it anymore. We’re cool, though, right?”).

It was unseasonably warm for October, and the wet coolness of the tunnels was a relief. I listened to the muffled echoes of our breath and the laughter and lighters of our unseen fellow delinquents while Aaron meticulously packed a sweet-sick-scented bowl into a crumpled Pepsi can.

I was trying to psyche myself up for this, telling myself I could be a bad girl and maybe that would be my ticket to whatever it was I’d been missing in the world, when someone shouted, “5-0! 5-0!”

“Shit!” Aaron yelped. An officer’s radio crackled near the tunnel’s entrance and a flashlight beam swept the walls. Kids started sprinting into the darkness, making a break for either Heaven or the further entrance near the Baptist Church’s low-water bridge. Either way would be an easy scoop-up job for the truancy officers.

“Come on, we’ve gotta run!” Aaron tossed the Pepsi can and it landed with a splash. “When it forks, you take one side, I’ll take the other. Then maybe they won’t catch us both.”

My pulse hammered and my blood sang. This was it. I might be about to get into real trouble.

Aaron and I were both white and had houses in the right part of town. We'd grown up with a safety net of privilege we had no knowledge of, and the worst-case scenario for us looked a little different than it did for others. So, while I fled cops by dashing into a sewer, it never occurred to me to fear for my life. If anything, I felt excited about the story I was about to own and the more interesting person I was about to be because of it.

We reached the fork, and Aaron took the right. I headed to the left, just like Aaron had told me to do.

Except the path I took didn’t exist.

Aaron and about six other kids clambered out of Heaven’s mouth and into the arms of the waiting resource officers. A couple more wiggled out by the church and hid in the woods until the final bell rang and they caught the bus in their creek-soaked clothes.

And I staggered, alone and lost, onto the cool gray banks of the Lethe.

2019

“Sam!” I bellowed up the stairs. "Tyler!” It was nearly eight in the morning, and both of them were supposed to have been up and dressed forty-five minutes ago.

I heard the creak of the mattress that meant my husband Tyler was rousing himself, and then the soft, rapid footfalls of Sam toddling into the upstairs hallway.

“Mama up!” he called from the other side of the baby gate at the top of the stairs. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, hoping against hope that Tyler would get to him and change his diaper and then bring him down for breakfast before I could reach him.

Instead, I heard our shower turn on.

I swore a little under my breath and thought unkind thoughts about my life partner. But there was no one else to save me, so I got a grip on myself, swallowed down the resentful, exhausted mess I defaulted into these days, and managed to greet my son with a real smile.

I took the stairs two at a time and swept him up in my arms for a quick cuddle before taking him back to his room for a change.

Sam, with his flawless baby skin, generous baby rolls, and enormous green eyes hidden behind a flop of thick brown hair, was easily the most beautiful and perfect thing to have ever existed (in this world). There was no way to meet his unquestioningly adoring gaze without falling into it.

His diaper, however, was a crime scene.

Half a pack of environmentally problematic wet wipes later, I wrestled him into a pair of soft gray joggers and a little blue shirt with an outline of a hawk on it. I wanted the whole world to always be as soft for him as his wardrobe, even though I knew it wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

“Breakfast?” I asked him, rubbing my nose against his.

His eyes went wide in delight. One of my favorite things about Sam was how easily overcome he was with the wonder and joy of a world which contained such marvels as squeezy yogurt and grape jelly toast.

“Bikfat,” he murmured reverently.

‘Bikfat’ was summarily consumed—about fifteen percent into Sam’s belly and the other eighty-five percent smeared into his clothes. There were crusts of yogurt in his goddamn eyebrows, somehow, so there went another completely unsustainable amount of wipes.

I scooted him out the door in a completely new outfit, and we ran into Tyler in the hall. Tyler— tall, handsome, fun at parties, calm and decisive in a crisis. Famously not a morning person. I wasn’t a morning person either, I thought often and grouchily, but someone had to get up to do all this shit.

Tyler and I had met a few years after college during my freewheeling stint as a river guide on the Pigeon River. We’d spent the summer curled up like eels inside each other’s sleeping bags, having a ton of outdoor sex and scoring bug bites in unmentionable places before launching our years-long ramble around the world. We rafted rivers on three continents, climbed in the Himalayas, broke limbs (his wrist, my ribs) in a terrible scooter wreck on the streets of Bangalore, and swam through the ruined USAT Liberty off the coast of Bali.

When our wanderlust felt sufficiently itched, we settled back in Knoxville to be near his ailing father. After the funeral, Tyler looked at me. “What are we doing?” he asked.

So, we got married. And then I got pregnant.

And now here we were, and here was Sam. Sam, the bright light of my world. Sam, who’d chained us both to desk jobs and turned us into the kind of housebound parents we’d sworn we’d never be. Sam, who was supposed to finally, finally be enough for me.

Sam, who could never live up to that unfair and impossible task.

Tyler pawed at the coffee machine, and I tried to choke down my irritation. His hatred of mornings had been charming before Sam. Now it felt like living with a perpetual teenager.

I thought about asking for some help with clearing the table but decided it would cost too much emotional energy, and instead focused on getting my family out the door and on their way to daycare and work.

After I’d swept up the toast crumbs and yogurt drizzles and started the dishwasher, I sat down at the kitchen table with my own cup of coffee.

Be grateful, I reminded myself. I’d been seeing a therapist who was trying to talk me into taking a low-dose SSRI. She said I was clearly suffering from anhedonia, and she thought it stemmed from depression. An inability to feel joy. I didn’t want to do it, and so we were trying some lower interventions first, like a “gratitude practice.”

I stared out at my backyard. I was thirty-seven. I owned a home, thanks to Tyler’s inheritance, something wildly out of reach for plenty of people my age. I had a loving family and a beautiful yard being carefully pecked over by a well-fed host of cardinals and blue jays. A beautiful winter day, a beautiful life. So much to be grateful for.

I chose this, I reminded myself. I chose a life where I could enjoy a hot cup of coffee, a nice view, and a few minutes to myself before work. I’d had worse mornings.

And much, much better ones, a shameful part of me growled.

I fed the cat, gave the dog his heart medicine, and did a quick sweep of the house for toys and sippy cups and other frequently left-out objects that I alone seemed capable of seeing. Then I gathered the laundry out of the dryer and headed to my bedroom to fold it.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror, my face noticeably lined now, my eyes duller, my teeth not as white as I’d like.

I sighed. No life to live but this one, I told myself as I folded a tiny pair of Sam’s shorts.

Then I looked up and screamed.

Because Shax, my abyss that gazed back, was standing there between the laundry hamper and my dresser, staring at me balefully.

1995

I didn’t know the Lethe’s name that first day, but I recognized it for what it was all the same. I could feel its call as surely as I felt my ribs expand with my breath.

The five diabolical rivers were a common presentation for venturers like me, who came to Hell already steeped in poorly understood Greek and Christian imagery with a soupçon of half-learned Egyptian mythology. Later, in my underworld career, I’d occasionally catch glimpses of other Hells: fleeting echoes of Kur, Xibalba, Tuonela, Naraka, Avaiki, Guinee, and all the rest. Sometimes I even scented the shadow Hells whose stories and legends no one on Earth remembered anymore but had left trace evidence in our collective psyche, nevertheless.

This is part of what makes the venture an impossible one. How can you map a place that changes depending on who’s doing the mapping?

I had staggered out of the Spring Heights sewer into a heavy wet gray mist. I guess I’d thought I was moving toward the light from Heaven’s mouth, at least for the first few steps. But the mist lifted enough for me to take stock of my surroundings.

Beneath my feet, dark gray stones smooth as glass clicked against each other. The air was infused with a soft light that was gray as a rainy day, but overhead, nothing made sense. We look up so thoughtlessly at the blue curve of atmosphere above us all our lives, and it’s hard to explain a skyless world. There’s weather and motion in Hell, but it’s all generated by intention and some strange resonance between Hell and its visitors I don’t pretend to understand.

There is no sun over the Lethe, and it’s disorienting. But the soft velvet ribbon of the river smoothed over the impossibility of my situation. Its slate-colored water lapped against the shore, infused with the same soft light with no origin as everything around me. I watched the waves, and decided it didn’t matter how I’d come to this place, and it didn’t matter if I never left. All that mattered was here, now, this river, this moment. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was living with every cell in my body with no thought of a past or a future.

Acting without thought, I knelt by the water’s edge and dipped my cupped hands in to drink. I probably would have fallen in, unable to control myself, swallowing lungfuls of the siren water until I drowned.

The Lethe, as gentle and easy as it appears, is far and away the most dangerous of all the infernal rivers.

But before I drank, I was interrupted by footfalls so heavy they rattled the pebbles on the beach. I scrambled to my feet and whirled around, preparing to face something monstrous.

The best my brain could serve up from the incomprehensible signals from my optic nerve was something that looked a bit like an impossibly tall waterbird, long-legged like a stork, with a cruelly sharp-curved black beak like an ibis. Its blue and gray feathers seemed to ripple like rain on a river, and its dark blue eyes were as bottomless as outer space.

Still, I knew it wasn’t a bird.

It lifted one foot and then the other, stepping calmly and rather primly toward me. My back was to the water, and there was nowhere to run.

As the bird thing approached, it unfurled itself with each step. Its wings bobbled and shuffled to reveal something almost human, skeletal and sinewy, hunched beneath its feathers. Its long neck coiled and looped under its hunched wings—horrible, naked, and pink—and I had the distinct impression of a number of secret, hungry eyes peering at me from somewhere in the creature’s center.

It stopped in front of me and cocked its head. “And you are...” It asked in a whispery voice that sounded like dead leaves scraping across stone.

I stammered against my will. “M-Meghan.”

It gave a satisfied nod. “Very well. Meghan. On this day, would you live or would you die?”

“Live!” I squeaked immediately.

The bird smiled. Or rather, the thing my terrified brain had arranged into the shape of a bird who was also a person and also an unseeable monster grinned from beneath its illusion of a mostly rational form. “So be it,” it rasped. “You shall live. Today. As a seal, I give you my name. Shax, the Forty-Fourth Spirit of the Goetia. Welcome to my home. I mean you no harm, and yet I will harm you nonetheless.” It cocked its head to the other side, and there was a note of sly humor in its graveyard voice. “But not today.”

I stared at it like a mouse watching the hawk begin its dive.

“Meghan,” the monster said, its voice reverberating in every empty pocket inside my skull. “I cannot recommend strongly enough that you say my name immediately, if we are to reach terms.” It opened its mouth, revealing rows and rows of jagged teeth, like a shark, the inside of its throat impossibly bigger than its beak.

“Shax!” I mewled, throwing my hands in front of my face in a pitiful attempt to defend myself.

Shax closed its beak and took a polite step backward.

“Nice to meet you,” I added, like an idiot.

Shax laughed, but its dark blue eyes remained unreadable. “Likewise, human. Now, terms.”

“Terms?”

“Terms. You and I must broker a deal, if you are going to continue standing on the banks of my river unscathed.”

I stared at it.

“When your lifetime reaches its inevitable conclusion, you grant me permission to devour your soul.”

“What?” I choked.

Shax shrugged its wings, briefly revealing the twisted mess of bone and ropy muscle beneath them. I caught another glimpse of the mystery inside peering out at me, with its longer, sharper teeth, and hungrier, sadder eyes.

“It’s our nature,” it said apologetically. “For one of you to meet one of me can only have one outcome. The end is written, I’m afraid. Your soul is mine. But the timing is negotiable.”

I swallowed. Of course, I’d recognized Shax as soon as I saw it. It was my death. But I was also a thirteen-year-old with next to no experience with mortal terror, and my nervous system couldn’t keep pace with my situation. As a result, I was oddly calm and able to easily accept these facts. Because they were facts, and I knew it, as surely as I knew my skin was the only thing separating my component parts from the rest of the universe.

“The timing,” I repeated.

Shax bobbed its head and seemed relieved that I seemed to be keeping up. “Correct. Now, the standard offer is simple. You choose between now and the death you would have died if you’d never come here.”

“When does that happen?”

“That’s between you and your world. But in the moment before your last breath leaves your body, I will be with you, and I will devour you. But you have my word that this moment will not take place here.”

“And if I choose now?” I asked.

To be clear, I wanted to live. I wanted to continue getting ice cream with my dad after school on Friday afternoons, practice driving around the church parking lot with my mom, and stretch the phone from the kitchen wall to my bedroom and stay up all night talking to Aaron.

But I also wanted to be sure I understood my options.

“Well, we end it all, here and now,” Shax said in a no-nonsense, professional tone. “It would be quick. And you’d be spared a lifetime of anticipation. You’d be surprised how many of you prefer that.”

I blinked stupidly. Something that almost looked like pity flashed in the depths of the demon’s blue eyes. “You wouldn’t suffer,” it added. “I swear it.”

Later, I’d learn how lucky I’d been to fall into Hell on the shores of the Lethe and to have been found by my Hellkind so quickly. If I’d been marooned on, say, the Phlegethon, I might have been overjoyed at the prospect of a quick, painless end to my torment in its flames. Or if Ammit’s gaze had landed on me first, I might have been so mind-scrambled I could have instantly filed into a Hellkind’s jaws as docile as a lamb.

Or, of course, I could have already been obliterated by the Lethe itself.

So Shax’s role in my life was more complicated than it seemed at first. Yes, the monster would be my undoing. But it also gifted me every moment of my life lived past our first meeting.

“Well, Meghan, what will it be? Now, or later?”

“Later,” I answered. My voice sounded like I was ordering nachos at the school cafeteria. Shock does strange things to you.

Shax bowed deeply. “Very well. Should you leave Hell, then, your life is at risk, as it has always been. But should you return, you return under my protection. Here is your key, to guarantee safe passage.”

It turned its wicked black beak on itself, abruptly puncturing a shadowy patch beneath its left wing. It made a sound like air hissing out of a balloon, or the faint echo of a faraway scream.

There was a terrible crunch, and Shax pulled out a thin, black spike from its own body and extended it toward me.

I reached out and gingerly took it from Shax’s beak.

Shax indicated my torso. “You’ll have to...”

“Huh?” I looked at the spike, and then, at Shax. “I have to stab myself with it?” That broke through some of my adrenalin-overload calm, and I felt panic start to rise.

“It’ll be easier if you find someone to help you, but you can also do it yourself. Either way,  human hands have to drive it in.”

“No way.”

Shax shrugged. “Your choice. But it’s a key. And without it, you won’t be able to travel between the worlds. You won’t be able to ever go home.”

“How... if I stab myself with this thing, how do I get home?”

Shax seemed to soften a bit. “Find your own kind. They can help you.”

“How do I do that?”

Shax sighed. “There are rules. Things I can tell you and things I can’t. But to find them, walk away from the Lethe and tell yourself the story of how you got here, and you’ll get to where you need to go.”

I nodded, barely understanding. Shax bobbed its head one more time in farewell. Then it turned away from me, unfurled its wings and took flight. I watched it stream away into the gray sky, as ribbonlike as its river.

I gripped my key. It never occurred to me to doubt anything Shax had told me, though I’d learn later that it’s impossible to lie while speaking the Helltongue. But I was starting to get cold, and the adrenalin was subsiding, leaving me shaky and dizzy.

But I had instructions. There were other people here who could help me, and I’d have to find them. There was no other move, other than surrendering myself to the Lethe.

“Okay,” I said out loud. The English sounded foreign and thin, and I realized Shax and I had both been speaking something else that had left me with a terribly sore throat.

“Okay. So. After I got dumped, my best friend Aaron offered to skip class with me so we could get high in the tunnels. But then the cops showed up, and we had to run.” As I talked, I turned my back on the Lethe, like Shax had told me to do, and started walking. Sure enough, there was a clear white path under my feet that cut through the Lethe’s pebble beach.

I kept talking, telling myself the story of how I’d come to find myself here, and the words conjured the path.

Now, of course, I don’t know if any of it was true. But it was the story I told myself.

It’s the story I’m telling now.

2019

“No.” I stumbled backward away from the demon that had materialized in the middle of my laundry. “No, not today.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen Shax since giving up the venture. Being on a first-name basis with my death made all the near-misses much more apparent. I’ve seen Shax perched on the side of an icy interstate, alongside a Florida beach with strong riptides, and at the bottom of a crevasse in the Khumbu Icefall.

It had been in the hospital room where I’d given birth to Sam.

“One more,” Dr. Thatcher had said. “Give me one more good push.” I’d looked up and seen Shax standing right behind her.

“Now?” I’d whimpered.

Shax shook its head, and the doctor answered firmly, “Now.”

One night, two years into our relationship, another river guide had made his way into Tyler’s bed, and we’d decided to give our relationship a break. My old hopelessness sank in, the world felt wrung out and like a dead end, and I thought seriously about swallowing a bottle of Ambien.

I’d looked up from the orange prescription bottle into Shax’s face.

“Now?” it had asked.

“I don’t know,” I said miserably.

Shax laid its beak on my shoulder in a gesture that felt both comforting and threatening. “Doesn’t have to be now,” it murmured. “We can do this later.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, after a moment. I set the bottle down. “Later.” Shax had vanished before I’d finished saying the word.

But there was no reason whatsoever for Shax to come collect right now, while I was in the middle of folding towels. Aneurysm? Heart attack? Intruder? What?

Shax glared at me. “No,” it rasped. “Not today.”

Relief flooded through me. “Then why are you here?”

Shax looked around my messy bedroom. I watched it take in the scope of my tiny but perfectly serviceable life. “This is what you gave up Hell for?”

I blinked and worked to come up with an appropriately cutting comeback. Hardly anyone kept it up past their mid-twenties or so, even without the brain melt I’d experienced in my final venture. And I did not need a demon judging my life choices.

“The loophole is right there,” Shax continued. “Right there, out in the open. Only an idiot would miss it. We offer immortality. All you have to do is stay in Hell, and you can never die. But none of you ever do it. You all always come back. For this?” It cocked its head at a stack of Tyler’s tiny folded shorts.

“You know why I left,” I answered.

Shax shrugged its wings irritably. It didn’t look healthy, I realized with a jolt. Its feathers had lost their sheen and it seemed thinner. The thing beneath its wings was upsettingly less hidden; I could see yellow bones and pale green tendons hanging gaunt under the scraggly gray plumage.

“Shax. Why are you here?”

“I need your help,” it replied. “We have to destroy the map.”

“What?”

“The map,” Shax said in a voice like gravel scraping over glass. “The map is an abomination. It’s killing the rivers. They’re drying up. All of them.”

“I… I’m sorry,” I said helplessly. I loved the rivers as much as any person could, but I was only ever a tourist, a ridiculous mortal steering a magic boat to chart the curves of a river I was never meant to see, let alone sail. But the Lethe was Shax’s home.

“Sorry,” Shax repeated furiously. “You’re sorry. We all knew there would be consequences for the doors, the map, letting you, you, you vermin crawl all over it. But we didn’t know what you’d do. What you could do.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The map. You’re almost finished with the fucking map.”

“Huh? But that’s impossible. It can’t be finished,” I argued. “Besides, how do you know that it’s us—”

“Use that lump of clay you call a mind,” Shax snarled. “It wasn’t enough for you to see my world. You had to study it, map it. Turn it into something smaller, something weaker, something easier for you to comprehend.”

Understanding dawned on me. Hell changed depending on who traveled it. It was malleable. Hell was becoming the map, and for Shax and the Lethe, the map was a fatal reduction.

I stared at the demon over a wobbly tower of washcloths. “Shax,” I said slowly. “I’m a data analyst and a mom who goes rock climbing on the weekends. I’m not exactly hero material anymore.”

“Oh, get over yourself,” Shax retorted. It sounded so angry and dismissive it actually sounded human. And had it really just dropped an f-bomb earlier? I swallowed to be sure of the throat burn that meant we were using the Helltongue.

“We’re hunting down every venturer we can find,” Shax continued. “You aren’t special, you’re just part of the problem.”

I looked past Shax at the picture of my family on the wall. I might not be special in Hell, but I was special in this house. I would be missed here.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Drink the Lethe.”

“What?!” I exploded. No way. No fucking way. There was no predicting what might happen to your mind if you swallowed so much as a drop of the Lethe, let alone a full swallow. If you drank deep, the way your body wanted you to if you didn’t have a contract with the Hellkind, it could reduce you to a completely blank slate, as innocent and thoughtless as a corpse. But even a small sip could do serious damage. You could lose every memory you ever had of dandelions. Or your own mother. Or how to play the Moonlight Sonata or keep your own heart beating. And memories were complex. Even small losses had big ripples. For example, if you lost every dandelion, then every spring afternoon, every picnic, every idle moment glancing out at the yard where your husband played with your baby might be ripped out of your mind along with them.

“Absolutely not,” I said and crossed my arms. “Besides, if you’re trying to get us all to just forget the map and blink it out of existence, you know as well as I do there’s no way to guarantee what the Lethe will do.”

“I know better than you do, human,” Shax said. Its tone was conversational, but there was a hint of murder just under it. “Memory loss is a side effect. The Lethe is protective. Its main purpose is to break links between worlds, to keep mine safe. If the connection breaks, you won’t be able to think, to dream, or to map it.”

I shook my head. I must have met hundreds and hundreds of other venturers in the Citadel.  For better or worse, there was no uncoupling our cosmoses. “Uh uh. You don’t seriously think you’re going to be able to talk enough of us into this, do you?”

Suddenly Shax threw its wings open, knocking over a lamp with a glass base we’d been filling with the “beeful wocks” Sam collected on our walks and sending a framed picture from our wedding underneath a Costa Rican waterfall crashing to the ground.

Any illusion that Shax was a bird, or an animal at all, vanished instantly.

But it wasn’t frightening to look at the true Shax, because my brain mostly just shut down. There was the monster, with its lamprey-like mouth looking ready to devour the entire world, clusters of eyes, gnarls of cartilage and keratin, an overpowering scent of mud and rot and rain. I cataloged all these things calmly, my ears buzzing with static.

The demon screamed, and I involuntarily stepped toward it. I understood I had lost any control I’d ever thought I had over my limbs and my life, and that I would do whatever Shax commanded. There was something like relief in the knowledge. The roller coaster had left the gate and I was going for this ride. It’s going to kill me, I thought dazedly as I walked toward the furious whorls of teeth.

But then I stepped on a pebble. It was a minor sensation, but the pebble was one Sam had picked up during a lazy afternoon playing and splashing in Quail Creek. Quail Creek was nothing compared to the infernal rivers, but my whole family loved it. My family loved me.

The sudden break in the supernatural undertow I’d been caught in felt like the moment when Shax’s footsteps wrenched me away from the Lethe. But it was just enough of a reprieve for me to remember the rules. I had a key to pass between worlds, but Shax didn’t. And it couldn’t stay here without permission.

“Go,” I yelled. “Shax the Forty-Fourth. You are not welcome here.”

There was a sudden, intense pressure in my ears, and a feeling like a rushing suction, and then, a violent push that knocked me off my feet.

But when I staggered back up to my feet, I was alone with my laundry, a carpet full of broken glass, and the knowledge that Shax would be back for me sooner rather than later if it could figure out how.

1995

I don’t know how long I followed the path of my own tale, but it did eventually lead me to the Citadel (all credit to Dante, it was generally agreed). The Citadel is a waystation and rendezvous point. It’s the only place in Hell where you meet other venturers.

It’s also the most disorienting spot in all the underworld. Because of the push and pull of other people’s cultural gravity, nothing is nearly as solid as solitary ground. My brain automatically spun up a classical Grecian scene, complete with stately marble columns, temples, and a meadow carpeted with delicate asphodel blossoms. But it was like looking through the world through wildly incorrect prescription lenses, except instead of seeing the world refracted on top of itself, there was a mishmash of realities layered on top of one another.

“Hello?” I called.

A man materialized in front of me. He seemed old to me at the time, but had to have been in his early twenties at most. It’s rare for anyone to stay in the venture much longer than that.

“Are you new?” he asked with a wide, warm smile. “I’m Kunle. Welcome to the Citadel!” He had to repeat it several times before I caught on. I hadn’t even noticed the Helltongue when Shax spoke it, but it was much more slippery when passed venturer to venturer. It’s sort of the aural equivalent of looking at a Magic Eye illusion where you have to let your eyes relax out of focus until the image swims off the page.

“Watch your step,” he said and extended a hand to steady me. “It’s easy to trip in here.”

I looked down at my flower-studded meadow and wobbled vertiginously at the vague impression of stalagmites, jade thresholds, tall reeds, golden shields, and the vacuum of starless space beneath my feet.

Kunle lifted my hand like I’d just won a boxing match. “A new venturer!” he called. Five or six other people emerged and cheered. I couldn’t help grinning bashfully. They cheered like I’d won something. I’d never heard that sound made for me before.

The welcoming ritual is one of the few continuous venturer traditions. Without it, none of us would ever make our way out of Hell. New venturers are celebrated, assured that this is, in fact, really happening, and are given the rules of the game.

Rule 1: Travel by intention.

Rule 2: Never look behind you.

Rule 3: Never tell the Hellkind your name.

I probably visibly blanched at Rule 3. A kind-eyed girl named Qiao squeezed my shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said. “Most of us have broken that one. Some of them will eat you on the spot if you don’t give them your name.”

I thought of Shax’s teeth and shuddered.

“What happens if they know your name?”

“It means they can find you in our world or this one,” said Qiao. “But, there’s Rule 4. Presence by Permission. If you made it here, it’s because one of the Hellkind gave you permission to travel here. But that’s not automatically reciprocal. If they bother you before it’s, you know—” she looked at her shoes, “—time.” The other venturers shifted awkwardly. “All you have to do is tell them to go.”

“But it’s not always a bad thing that they can find you,” Kunle said quickly. “You can call them, too, if you want to. Some of them will help you. And they can show you things here, things you wouldn’t find on your own, if you come back.”

“People come back?”

They laughed good-naturedly. “Most of us can’t help it,” Qiao said. “I guess there are venturers who go back topside and stay there for the rest of their lives until…” Everyone looked at the ground again. Venturer etiquette meant that no one talked about the fact that we’d all put our mortal souls on layaway. “But it’s hard to know this is here and just, you know, forget about it.”

“And maybe some people stay,” a short boy named Asim added. “I mean, if you’ve got nothing to lose, why go home? We can’t die here.”

“But other things can happen,” Kunle said quickly. “This place can be hard on your mind. Most of us go home. We have family, friends.”

“Some people think the Hellkind are the venturers who never left,” Qiao said quietly. Kunle shot her a look like he wanted her to stop talking.

“But,” she continued brightly, not looking at Kunle, “if you just pop in and out, it’s unbelievable. This whole place is full of monsters, miracles, magic. And it’s all yours, risk free. Well, mostly risk-free anyway.”

I got it, I realized with a dizzy jolt. I got what I wanted. All the adventure I could ever want was right here, and it was perfectly safe, apparently. I remembered the thrill that tickled my spine when Aaron and I took off running from the cops. And that hardly even counted as a thrill compared to what Hell was offering. Down here, I didn’t have to be a shy, dreamy, gym-class-hating girl in coke bottle glasses who wanted to be something more. I was something more, standing there in a magical parallel dimension, chatting in a cosmopolitan supernatural language with a demon’s rib clenched in my fist.

This, of course, is the real reason people return to Hell. The monsters and magic are great, but the real hook is the overwhelming sense of having found the thing you were meant to find, of suddenly being the person you want to be. Nothing I tried after I left the venture—mountain-climbing, whitewater rafting, spelunking, or taking mind-breaking doses of hallucinogens—would ever compare to that sweet, shivery feeling.

“Come on,” said Asim. “You should see the map.”

I let my new friends, who I’d never see again, because Hell never allows venturers to run into each other more than once, usher me into a nearby temple (cavern, cloud, wave, hall, dream, star, lodge, bottomless lake of fire…).

“This is the map,” said Kunle reverently.

“Huh?” In front of me was something that looked more like the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine my parents had pulled over for in the middle of a family road trip once. It didn’t look like any map I’d ever seen before.

But as I squinted at it, I started to understand. The gigantic ball consisted of strands of fibers, each of which in turn was made up of innumerable strands. My mother did a lot of counted cross stitch and had a canvas-covered binder where she organized her EMC floss, and I loved to flip through the jewel-colored threads. I got the same feeling looking at the map, except these colors were infinitely deeper, richer, and more beautiful.

“It’s made of magic,” I gasped.

“Yep!” Qiao said proudly. “And we made it.”

“How?”

Kunle grinned. “Look.” He pointed at a short shimmering silver thread darting in and out of the map.

I don’t know how I recognized it, but I did, immediately.

“That’s yours,” Asim said. “It’s the story you told to bring yourself to the Citadel.”

“Wh… what?”

“Every time we travel here, we add to the map,” Kunle said. “Now, do you want to help us?”

I stared at my story, a little piece of magic woven into something that connected me to the history of the human race, to the history of this other place.

“Yes,” I mouthed.

I’d never wanted anything so badly in my life. I wanted it bad enough to allow Qiao to gently lift my shirt so that Kunle could deftly hammer Shax’s rib into my side while Asim held my arms back.

I passed out, I think, and when I came to there was a different group of venturers wandering through the hall.

“Siobhan,” a red-headed girl announced brightly.

“Meghan,” I answered with a grin.

“Oh, look,” said Siobhan. “A newbie.” I glanced over at the staggering little boy making his way toward us.

“Hello!” I called out, astounded by the sound of my confident Helltongue. “Are you new? I’m Meghan. Welcome to the Citadel.”

~~~

I don’t know how long I stayed in the Citadel. There’s no night or day cycle, and you don’t need to sleep. It wasn’t Dynastic-Narnia-long, I don’t think, but perhaps somewhere on that scale. Time in Hell and time topside aren’t pinned together, though. You leave and return in the same moment, so I had no yardstick to measure how much time passed.

Eventually I started feeling a burn behind my eyes, and then a sort of washed-out feeling. Then, in the middle of welcoming another venturer, a wave of fatigue struck so powerfully it literally knocked me to my knees.

“Hey,” a more experienced venturer named Sarika said. “Hey, I think you need to get topside. You’ve been down here too long.”

I left the Citadel and began charting my course. “So, I decided to go home, and I left the Citadel.” The path appeared, like I knew it would.

Rule 1: Travel by intention.

Rule 2: Don’t look back.

The venturers who had welcomed me spent a long, long time on the importance of Rule 2. Turn around in Hell, and there’s never any going home again.

“The path was short,” I said out loud. “And not too steep. Before too long, I found the door, and—”

I fell and splashed into the standing water in the storm drain.

“Holy shit, are you okay?” Aaron gasped.

“Hey!” An officer yelled behind us.

“Shhhh,” Aaron hissed. We pressed our backs against the concrete wall and waited.

We didn’t get caught. My clothes were ruined. But everything on Earth was right where I left it.

Except for me.

2019

As long as I had Shax’s key in me, it could find me. I didn’t know if Presence by Permission reset itself or what, and if Shax came back and caught me unaware, I might not have time to say the words to send it back to Hell. Our deal had been that I would die the death I was meant to die, but I’d read enough contracts by then to be a little savvier than I had been at thirteen. There was no clause that stated Shax couldn’t cause my destined death itself. My peripheral vision was full of teeth and secret eyes for days.

But my life spun on around me, running on the strong inertia of routine. At one point, I thought about telling Tyler the whole story, taboo about talking about the venture be damned. But he wouldn’t have believed me, and besides, we hardly ever had time to really talk any more. If he noticed my agitation, he didn’t say anything.

One night while Tyler was making dinner and Sam was parked in front of a YouTube channel featuring a host of uncanny valley denizens singing in computer-generated children’s voices about pasta, I sipped a glass of wine and scrolled thoughtlessly through social media on my phone. There was a grim article about another climate change milestone passed, someone musing about the new respiratory virus circulating China, more protests, more American-grown white fascism heartily endorsed by the smug monster in the White House. I glanced at Sam, oblivious and clapping his sticky toddler fingers for his CGI friends.

I put my phone down and sighed. I wondered if this was how Shax felt watching the Lethe dry up. Unlike me, Shax was at least trying to do something to save its world from annihilation.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t know how to save my world. The problems felt too big and the doom spiral too strong. And apparently we were just going to continue on posting pictures of Sam at the Christmas tree farm, counting calories, punching a time clock, and arguing over dinner until the bitter end.

But even if I was useless here, did I owe something to Hell? If it was really failing, could drinking the Lethe really help save it? Shax had been a friend to me, even after I stopped coming to Hell. It didn’t have to let me see it on that interstate or in that crevice in the Himalayas, and it didn’t have to intercede before I stupidly choked down those pills. It had saved me that one time in Hell, too.

her eyes like supernovas her jaws dripping blood and time and memory

I grabbed my phone and opened Instagram, quickly. I liked pictures of a friend’s new acrylic nails, a pretty bird in a cousin’s backyard, a coworker’s selfie in workout clothes at the start of a half-marathon, an acquaintance’s children in Santa’s lap, until the memory of Ammit faded.

I wish I’d had the courage to call Shax and to offer my help of my own volition. I’d like to think I might have if I hadn’t had to distract myself. But by the time dinner and bath and bedtime and cleanup and laundry and one thirty-minute episode of a workplace comedy were over, I couldn’t pick up the thread, and it all felt overblown. I fell asleep thinking that things were most likely going to be okay.

~~~

I woke up and groaned. I stopped breastfeeding months ago, and Sam, for the most part, slept through the night like a champ. I still woke up in the middle of the night, though, no matter what I did.

I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock glowing red. Four forty-four A.M.

“Fuck,” I muttered. It was close enough to my wake-up time that it was hardly even worth it to try to go back to sleep. I glanced at Sam’s baby monitor out of habit. I think I looked away and snuggled under the blanket before I realized the absence. It was too inexplicable.

But I looked again.

The crib was empty except for Sam’s stuffed lion, the crocheted blanket my mom made him that he wouldn’t go to bed without but kicked off as soon he fell asleep every night, and a few wrinkles on the polka-dotted crib sheet where Sam was supposed to be splayed out like a starfish.

I sat up and looked under our covers on the off-chance Tyler had brought him into our bed. A nightmare, maybe. An upset tummy. But there was no one there but Tyler, snoring soundly, and our cat Moth curled up in the crook of Tyler’s body.

Any reasonable person would have woken her husband up to help her. But a reasonable person probably wouldn’t have noticed the way the air smelled like stone, water, and feathers.

No. Nonononononono.

I slipped out of bed and hurried to Sam’s empty room.

Shax had left a feather for me to see in the middle of the floor. It would have wanted to be sure I got its message.

“Shax,” I hissed. “You win. I’ll do it. Just don’t hurt Sam.”

1995

I wasn’t even sure what had happened to me by the time Aaron and I were toweling off in the Kwik Trip bathroom near the school.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Aaron said, and he sounded genuinely concerned. “I shouldn’t have brought you down there. I just wanted to cheer you up, but I didn’t mean to almost get you in trouble.”

I told him not to worry about it, that I was just shaken up.

At home, I worried that I’d hit my head and the whole thing had been a crazy concussion-induced hallucination. But the world felt different to me, even if it seemed like nothing had happened. Smells were more precise, sounds were more complex, and colors were more vibrant. I could feel my blood sluicing through my veins and the perfect machinery of my musculature contracting and relaxing.

Eventually, though, all that wore off, because magic always does eventually.

I realize it sounds implausible that I’d just move forward with seventh grade after bargaining with a monster over the date of my doom in a shifting underworld that reflected all of humanity’s faith and nightmares.

But what else could I do?

I felt like I was sleepwalking through band practice and pre-algebra. I still wandered over to Aaron’s house to watch TV with him in his basement on the weekends, but I didn’t have much to say. I didn’t even try to make the skating rink and mini golf birthday parties my other friends were hosting. TV was full of the same commercials, my favorite books and movies had become chores, and everything felt stale and flavorless.

Aaron finally inadvertently saved me. “Made you something,” he said one summer afternoon when he’d rung my doorbell to hang out. He held out a drawing.

Aaron was an artist and was always sketching and doodling. My walls were plastered in his work. But this was something else.

It was a map. He’d labeled it “The Infernal Rivers of Hades.” And sure enough, there they were: Styx, Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus. And the Lethe.

I stared at Aaron, not sure what to say. “Remember?” he asked awkwardly, scratching the back of his head. “That story you wrote in sixth grade about the rivers? I found it in an old notebook. I mean, we were little kids, but it was actually kinda good.”

“Huh?”

“About the little girl who died, and Hades and Persephone gave her a job charting the rivers? You wrote it right after that Girl Scout trip with the canoe.”

“Fuck that,” I muttered. During that trip, I’d just gotten my period and our canoe had tipped over, soaking me and my itchy, uncomfortable pad. I’d had to change on the banks of the lake, and Sarah Fullerton had caught a glimpse of the blood, and everyone had made fun of me.

“But the story was cool!” Aaron said. “I just, I don’t know, wanted to cheer you up.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey,” he snapped a finger in my face. “Meghan. What’s with you?”

~~~

That night I traced the snaky gray line of the Lethe on Aaron’s picture for hours. I didn’t remember writing the story about rivers, but I wrote a lot of little things like that. I’d recently graduated to fan fiction, although I’d stopped posting to FFML after the afternoon in the tunnels.

I did remember that awful canoe trip. I’d always wanted to go canoeing, but I hadn’t realized how hard it was, or how sweaty and uncomfortable I’d be, my too-large maxi pad chafing, sweat dripping between my confusing new breasts, the paddle rubbing blisters on my palms.

I rubbed my side. The side I’d dreamed a stranger had driven a demon’s rib into me like a railroad spike.

Rule 1. Travel with intention.

“I closed my eyes,” I said softly, flipping my eyelids shut. “And I journeyed down. Down to the rivers, where my canoe was waiting for me.”

I opened my eyes in Hell and smiled for the first time in days.

I stood on the banks of the Lethe, and my boat was waiting for me. It was a far cry from the aluminum rental canoe that had capsized on me, though. This thing would make Charon proud. It was rust red with shiny black trim and a wickedly curling prow.

“Meghan.”

I jumped and turned around to find Shax behind me.

“You came back.”

“Shax,” I said slowly. It seemed like a good idea to utter its name, just to be on the safe side.

Shax rustled its blue gray feathers. “You’ve nothing to fear from me, little venturer. Remember? You’re safe while you’re here.”

It flapped its wings a few times and hopped into the boat.

I felt my other self, my venturer self, blossom in me like a jellyfish. I had nothing to fear, and everything to gain.

I carefully climbed into the boat. Shax nudged a paddle over to me.

“Use that,” it instructed. “The Lethe’s gentle enough. Just don’t drink anything, and you’ll be fine.”

I picked up the paddle. Unlike the splintery thing from my scout trip, this one felt cool and smooth, like it had been carved for my hand.

“Try it,” said Shax.

The thing about the infernal rivers is that they respond to you, almost like riding a horse. It’s hard to explain, but the first thing I became aware of when I stepped on the boat was the quiet power of the Lethe, waiting for me to make a move.

I dipped my paddle in the cool gray water, and a new thread began weaving itself into the map as the Lethe languidly revealed itself to me.

After that, I visited Hell almost every night for years. Shax patiently taught me how to pry paddle, ferry, and cross draw. It showed me how to find my course in white water by finding the “v,” and how to keep my toes up and pointed downstream, mouth closed, after capsizing. The Lethe and the Acheron were gentle, but Cocytus and Styx were more technical, full of rapids, boulders, and strainers. Shax wouldn’t let me anywhere near Phlegethon for several years.

I grew to love the pulse-pounding excitement of fast and high water, but also the quiet stretches where the rivers felt like veins of a secret kingdom. I watched mysteries drift by on shore, otherworldly trees dipping their roots in the water, enormous mushroom blue flowers opening and closing as we passed, and violet and indigo moss clinging to cliffs like hair. Other Hellkind moved through the forests and fields, sometimes quietly and sometimes crashing like elephants. Dark water snakes zipped through the water in neat isosceles patterns, and occasionally the beautiful and sad song of a river siren bubbled up from the depths.

I started practicing topside on the weekends, but not even the Smokies could compete with the wilderness where I truly learned to thrive.

2019

When Shax didn’t answer, I took a deep breath. Then I searched the house until I was sure Sam wasn’t there. Either he’d crawled out of his crib and over the baby gate at the top of the stairs, undone the deadbolt, and left the house, or he’d been kidnapped.

There was no sense in reaching for a more rational explanation. Shax had taken him, and I knew it.

But if it needed Sam for leverage, at least it meant he was still alive.

“Come on,” I whispered furiously. “Where are you?”

I thought again about waking Tyler up, but he couldn’t help me with this. Besides, I knew what I had to do next.

Rule 1: Travel with intention.

I hadn’t made the descent in nearly fifteen years, and I wasn’t sure if I could even do it anymore. But I had to try.

“I knew I had to try,” I said out loud. “So I closed my eyes, I thought about Sam, and then I thought about where I wanted to go. So I went to Hell, and I opened my eyes, and there was Shax and my son, safe and sound.”

I opened my eyes, and there I was, still in Sam’s room. “Fuck!” I half sobbed.

“Perhaps we could continue our conversation now?” Shax rasped behind me.

I jumped and spun around. “Where’s Sam?” I demanded.

“Safe,” Shax shrugged. “For now.”

“Look, I’ll do it, okay? Just don’t hurt him.”

Shax nodded. “Then let’s go.”

“Wait, no. Swear it.”

Shax sighed. “I swear, no harm will come to your child.”

“And you’ll bring him home?” I added quickly. As soon as I said it, I realized I was admitting the possibility that I might not be coming home myself.

“Yes. I swear your son will return home, safe and unharmed.”

“Okay. Can you… can you take me there?” It felt bad to admit that I couldn’t travel. “I don’t think I can do it anymore.”

“I know. Why do you think I came back to collect you? Are you ready?”

No one is ever really ready for a demon to drag them to Hell. But I nodded anyway, closed my eyes, and gritted my teeth. Shax seized me with powerful teeth—it had shed the birdlike form my mind had imposed on it, and I knew better than to look—and shook me loose from reality.

Intending your way to Hell is painless. Arriving in the jaws of a demon is something else entirely. It’s not entirely unlike the hard stage of birth before the baby has resolved into a concrete physical problem to solve but after it’s far too late for there to be any going back. It’s a complete dismantling, like being ripped apart and put back together into something new.

Shax let go and I staggered and fell. But when I felt the cool breeze and smelled the Lethe, all I could think was how glad, how grateful I was to be back.

2004

I was twenty-two years old when I gave up the venture for good. In nearly nine years of charting courses along my five beloved infernal rivers, I’d watched my work weave itself into the map. I’d stood in the Citadel beaming with pride at my contributions. I lost count of how many new venturers I’d welcomed to the fold.

And yet somehow, along the way, the shine started to wear off.

In college, I’d climb into my rickety twin bed and close my eyes, meaning to descend, but more often than not, nothing would happen. I’d just fall asleep instead, or my mind would wander to something else—the boyfriend I was seeing at the time, the paper I was writing in my Paradise Lost seminar, whether or not I should try to find an apartment with better insulation. I made friends and we started going on real-world adventures. My reputation as a river expert made me proud, and I started to truly love real rivers too, with their green waves and blue summer skies.

Meanwhile, the infernal rivers were starting to all look the same. Even seeing my courses glowing inside the map lost its thrill. It was all starting to feel a bit mindless.

This was a natural progression. As I’ve said, most people stop venturing young. And I could have let it fade away altogether, like it does for most people.

But Ammit happened to me instead.

My last day in Hell was beautiful. I was strapped into the fireproof kayak that I’d taken down Phlegethon time and time again. I thought I knew Phlegethon well—it was the most melodramatic of the infernal rivers and awfully fun to float. It felt sort of like a fire level in Super Mario in some sections, but others, where the river deepened and slowed, were gorgeous.

I was paddling slowly through one of those spots, Shax flying languidly overhead, just high enough that I couldn’t make out anything but its silhouette, when Ammit found us.

The water was a deep, vibrant flame color that Dante had described as boiling blood, as shiny and reflective as a mirror. I dipped my oar in and out, making the surface ripple like a tiger’s eye stone. Overhead the sky was a warm, expansive black, and the sentient stars burned above in hues that matched the Phlegethon. It was always night on this river.

I took a deep breath. The Phleg smelled like smoke and spice, and my heart was just starting to settle after a new section of very fast rapids—the kind of water that’s exciting when it’s just whitewater, and even more so when it’s more like shooting through curtains of sparks.

Overhead, Shax suddenly squawked. It wasn’t a sound I’d ever heard it make before. It took me a second to realize that what I was hearing in Shax the Forty-Fourth’s raspy voice was fear.

Shax landed behind me, making the kayak wobble.

“Hey!” I protested.

“Land,” Shax commanded. “Meghan, land now. We have to get off the river immediately. We’re in trouble.”

“What?”

“Now!” Shax shrieked, but we were too late.

The dark flaming river parted, and Ammit’s jaws rose out of it, dripping glittering embers.

~~~

Ammit is traditionally depicted as part crocodile, part lion, and part hippo: basically, the sum of all the man-eating monsters prowling the sands of ancient Egypt. And that’s roughly what she looked like when she rose out of the Phlegethon. But when she looked at me, I saw the barrel of a gun, the bottom of a ravine, a semi-truck hurtling toward me. Except, there was more to her than that. She was an asteroid strike, a nuclear war, a tsunami.

Ammit was Death, and to look at her was to look at the death of all things.

Even Shax, my own personal death, was clearly frightened of her.

“We beg forgiveness,” Shax stammered, bowing low. It kicked me in the small of the back to encourage me to bow, too. “We did not know Ammit bathed here today. We did not mean to disturb you.”

“No?” Ammit asked quietly. Her voice was the voice of wildfire, of hurricane winds, of bombs, of drowning, of flies swarming over plague victims. It was all I could do not to clap my hands over my ears. “I am not found by accident. You know this, Shax the Forty-Fourth.”

She waddled out onto the beach, revealing her massive, shining bulk, and settled onto the beach. The Phlegethon’s water level shrank rapidly, like a drain had been opened at its bottom.

“Listen to me,” Shax whispered urgently. “This is real. She is real. And she doesn’t give two shits if you’re under my protection or not.”

Ammit continued to regard Shax through her hellfire eyes. I tried to paddle, but the boat wouldn’t move.

Then Ammit’s gaze turned on me.

“Meghan Rollston,” she said, her words reverberating inside my skull, my ribcage, every empty closed off space inside my body.

And she just looked at me. She saw the real me, the me I’d been shielding from everyone and everything, the me I’d been building a fortress around, brick by brick. Me, terrified, unhappy, lonely, jealous, mortal me.

Shax shoved me, hard. “Travel with intention,” it growled. “Now!”

I wrenched my eyes away from Ammit and shrieked, “And Ammit saw me, and judged me worthy, and allowed me to pass.” The boat started moving through the flames again. Something brushed my face. A feather. It was raining feathers. But as soon as they touched the surface of the Phlegethon, they sank like hailstones.

Shax was gone.

I let out a huge, shuddering sob, but kept going. “And when the river rounded a bend, Ammit was gone, and I was free to go home. So, I disembarked, and followed the path.”

Shax might as well have pecked its key out of my side in that moment. I would never be able to return. I could never willingly return to that scared, pathetic excuse for a person Ammit had seen in that ridiculous dream kayak, and I never wanted to.

“My path took me back into my life and I started living it.”

And I never would have looked back, either, if Shax hadn’t taken Sam.

2019

There it was, the Lethe, my Lethe, as beautiful and quietly terrible as ever, singing its same song of promise and oblivion. I can’t describe how intense my relief was to see that the Lethe was still there after so many years, that Hell was still there, and even that Shax was still stalking its banks.

But it hadn’t been lying. The river was low, and the magic of the place felt muted. I thought about the recent trip to our hometown that my old friend Aaron and I had taken last summer so that he could help his dad move into a retirement home.

“Where are the bugs?” Aaron asked, and I realized he was right. It was too quiet.

“Fuck climate change,” he muttered.

That was the feeling I had now, the sinking feeling of a world slipping away, dying from a disease that was entirely my fault and entirely everyone else’s fault, and far too big for me to fix.

“Do you really think this will work?” I asked Shax.

It shrugged its wings. “It’s the only thing I know to try.”

“All I have to do is take a sip? And then I can go?”

Shax nodded.

“Where’s Sam?”

“He’s here. He’s safe. He’ll follow you out, I swear, but you know the rule. You’re going to have to trust me.”

Shax’s hidden hand tipped in skeletal claws reached out, holding a dark gray cup. I took it and dipped it in the Lethe.

“The river of oblivion rules her watery labyrinth,” Shax quoted quietly, like a prayer.

I wondered what exactly the Lethe would take from me. I’d had a few near-death experiences, but it was Shax that had flashed before my eyes, not my life. Now, though, memories washed over me. There’s me and my mom building snow forts and coming inside afterward for hot chocolate. My dad’s eyes watering at my college graduation. There’s me and Aaron, hanging out in the cemetery behind his house talking about the future. There’s Tyler, grinning at me on our hotel balcony after his father’s funeral, reaching in his pocket and saying, “I’ve got a proposition for you.” There’s Sam, giggling in delight as he mushes green peas with his baby fingers.

I didn’t want to give any of these up.

But what about all the nothing days? The commutes half-listening to podcasts I’ve already forgotten, the evenings spent doing dishes and reading the same pages over and over again, listlessly checking apps on my phone and fidgeting with the household budget. If the Lethe took those colorless, flavorless memories—and I hated how much of my life they represented—would I be any the worse for it?

And would I lose all memory of the venture? Would I be okay without that? I’d have to be, right? If the Lethe took that from me, I wouldn’t be able to miss what I couldn’t remember. And if the stain of Ammit’s gaze could be erased…

“Can I see Sam?” I asked.

Shax pointed with its beak to the white cypress tree by the water’s edge. Sam was sleeping, like an enchanted prince.

“He won’t remember anything,” Shax assured me. “I saw to that. He’s perfectly safe. And when you leave, he’ll follow.”

“Okay.” Every cell in me wanted to run to Sam and pick him up and kiss him and run with him. But that wasn’t the way out of this mess.

I took a deep breath and knelt by the gray river, my first friend down here, the most painfully beautiful river I’d ever known, the only river that truly seemed to know me back. I knew its magnetic pull, its low, seductive song.

“Will it hurt?” I asked Shax.

It shook its head. “No.”

For a moment, I had the irrational fear that I might forget Shax. Shax, who was destined to destroy me at the end of my life, who had kidnapped my son. But it had also been my lifelong companion, the only witness to everything I’d seen and done in Hell. And it had saved me from Ammit. I couldn’t have survived her judgment, and Shax and I both knew it.

“Do you really think this is going to work?” I asked.

“No idea,” Shax said. It laid its beak on my shoulder for a moment. “But thank you for trying.”

I glanced at Shax, and for a moment, there was no monster. It was just me standing there, with my hand on my own shoulder, thirteen again, confused, lonely, and full of dreams.

But then Shax was Shax again, and it was starting to look impatient.

I would never know if it worked, I thought. At least, not until the moment of my death, when either Shax would come to collect, or it wouldn’t. Because no matter what memories the river took from me, it would cut me off from Hell forever.

“If you ever loved this river,” Shax said gently, “and if you ever want to see your son awake again, you’ll drink.”

So I did.

The water was clear and cold and surprisingly sweet. I’ve never lived in a time or place where you could drink fresh water without tablets or filters, but the waters of the Lethe tasted like I’ve always imagined a cold fresh spring in a fantasy novel would taste.

It didn’t hurt, but it also didn’t quench. I wanted more, and I instinctively moved toward the river.

Shax blocked me. “That’s enough,” it said, still my friend as much as my enemy.

“Sam,” I said. I tried to quickly inventory my memories, but nothing seemed out of place. But of course, that’s how the Lethe works. I’d never know whatever it was that it took.

But I still recognized Shax.

“You’ll have to walk out,” it rasped. “Sam will follow. You know this story.”

I did know the story. But why did I still know the story? Wasn’t I supposed to forget everything about Hell? And why was Shax looking at me so sadly?

I saw the entrance of my door ahead. I also knew Sam’s bedroom was going to be on the other side, just as I left it, my husband still snoring, and Sam safe in his bed—as long as I didn’t make the blindingly obvious, easy-to-avoid mistake of looking back.

I nodded at Shax. “Till the last time, then,” I said.

It smiled. “Till the last time. And thank you.”

I put one foot in front of the other. This was easy, I reminded myself. Sam would be fine as long as I kept moving.

And you’d walk straight ahead and back into your life, wouldn’t you? What kind of selfish idiot wouldn’t keep walking without so much as a glance back?

As I put one foot in front of the other, I start to get a sense of the absence in my mind and my heart, carved out like limestone by the Lethe. I remembered everything, everything, except how it felt. I couldn’t remember how it felt to be overcome by the beauty of Hell, the sweet surrender to its call, the ecstasy in falling to my knees before its majesty.

I knew my time in Hell was thrilling. But I couldn’t remember what it felt like. I couldn’t quite believe it was real.

I reminded myself that my sweet little boy was standing right behind me on his chunky toddler legs, counting on me to lead him out of this. That was real, and I remembered Sam perfectly, and all the specificities that add up to parenthood.

I was close to the door. I could feel Sam’s breath behind me.

All I had to do was walk through.

2069

I’m truly old now, not pretending, like I had as a middle-aged working parent. Now it’s real. I’m healthy enough at eighty-seven. I go for daily walks, though they’re slower and not as long.

The world is different, and everything feels like it’s moments away from a true reckoning. Humanity will either survive, or we won’t. They won’t, rather. I know I won’t be included on the roster for very much longer.

Tyler died in a storm. It was one of those January thunderstorms that have become so common, during the last year we owned a car. The interstate was wet. We were told it was quick.

But my family has grown, nevertheless. Sam is happily married to a wonderful person he met online during the covid-2046 lockdown. Sara is great. They work as a public defender, and Sam is still as completely besotted with them as he was when they first met. My second child, Laura, is married to a geologist named Liv and a video artist named Aiden. The three just had their first baby, whose head smells just like her mom’s and her uncle’s, and whose starfish hands wrap perfectly around my pinkie. They’ve named her Meghan, and it’s the greatest honor I’ve ever received.

Sam and Laura had a bit of a falling out over it, though. Sam and Sara had agreed it wasn’t fair to have a child, given the state of the planet (on fire, underwater). Laura, Liv, and Aiden saw a different future, though, stemming from sequestration, the abolition of personal automobiles, and the dismantling of the beef and poultry industries. Little Meghan’s presence has made this argument far too human and the stakes far too high. I don’t tell them what I think, that both households may be right, and that we’ve always lived under the twin stars of doom and salvation. It would just make them all mad at me.

The kids were decent to each other over the holidays, at least, and we had a good time at dinner. Aaron and his partner Max, who both my children always referred to as their uncles, came too. I miss Tyler every day, and I know I’ll lose my dear old friend Aaron soon, if I don’t go first. But I feel so unimaginably blessed that he’s still here and that he’s had such a long, happy life.

It felt good to wake up to my children sprawled in the living room, cracking each other up over their coffee, bickering over movie choices, and rummaging in the fridge for leftovers. They’re grownups, but they’re still my kids, and there’s immense comfort in that.

Of course, it’s also a guilty relief to see them go and for my house to return to stillness. I love them dearly, but they’re so big now, and their families are loud and wonderful and big too, which is what I wanted for them. But I need more quiet now than I used to.

I sigh and settle back into my chair. In the past few years, I’ve stopped reading fiction, for the most part. It just doesn’t hold my attention the way it used to, and I find myself more drawn to histories. They’re usually written by people younger than me who tease out all kinds of surprising truths about my own lifetime.

For a moment, I see Shax’s hulking shape in the reflection of my dark TV screen. “Not today,” I whisper. Our evening ritual.

“Not today,” it agrees, still willing to pretend along with me like our time hasn’t already come and gone.

Because, of course, I looked back. All I’ve ever been able to do is look back.

___

Copyright 2025 A.V. Greene

A.V. Greene is a writer living in the Ozarks with her family and a collection of carnivorous flora and fauna. Her work has appeared in Apex, Uncharted, and elsewhere. For more, visit http://avgreene.com or follow her on BlueSky and Instagram at @avgreenewrites.

Giganotosaurus is published monthly and is edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.

http://giganotosaurus.org