He walked down our road, turning his long, hooded head from one house to the other, searching. He seemed to glide effortlessly, and yet each footstep hit the pavement with the sound of cracking ice. Fear exploded in my chest, and I yelled for Jeremy to hide. I ran outside, locking the door behind me. I couldn’t find a weapon and didn’t have time to go back inside for my bow and arrows, so I picked up a shovel. I walked toward the robed figure, holding the shovel out in front of me with shaking hands.
“Pass by our house,” I told him. “I won’t let you come in.”
He stopped and leaned on his scythe, long insectlike fingers clutching it for support. I couldn’t see his face, just a black opening under his hood, but I could tell he was considering me. Then, his dark face turned from mine and gazed past me to our house. He straightened up as though about to walk in that direction.
“Take me instead,” I said. My voice was no more than a gasped whisper, but I knew he’d heard me.
He shook his head slowly, and when he spoke, his voice, hollow and grating, left the air around me cold. “Do you think I deal in years or decades? You’ll be with me soon enough. I don’t need to make bargains with your kind.”
He moved as if to go on, but before he could pass me, I swung my shovel and knocked the scythe out of his hand. It tumbled to the street with the rattle of endless chains.
I went to grab it, but it jumped away from me and flew back into the hands of its master.
“You haven’t the power to defeat me,” he said.
“Then I’ll delay you.”
But I couldn’t. He walked right through me and then was beyond me, gliding toward my house.
My heart pounded so hard it seemed to catapult from one side of my chest to the other. “No!” I yelled.
The Grim Reaper disappeared, and I found myself sitting up in the motel bed.
Madison clumsily reached for the light between us. “What’s wrong?”
I put my hand over my eyes to shield my face from the light. “Nothing. What time is it?”
“It’s three-thirty. Did you have a nightmare?”
I blinked, trying to locate my cell phone among the scattered contents on the nightstand. The frustration made my hands feel clumsy. Even though the light was on, even though I knew it had only been a dream, the feeling of panic hadn’t left me. “I think I should call home to see if Jeremy is okay.”
“At three-thirty in the morning?”
“I just . . . I think I should check to make sure all the doors are locked.”
She rubbed one hand over her eyes. “Annika, you want to wake up everyone in your family to ask about the doors? Who are you afraid is going to break in?”
I couldn’t find my cell phone on the nightstand, and I picked up my purse to check there. My voice came out too fast. “Anyone. The Grim Reaper, maybe. You should just always make sure your doors are locked.”
She looked at me silently, her eyes trying to adjust to both the light and my logic. She could have said the obvious, which was “Are you insane?” or something a little less obvious but still to the point, like “I don’t think the Grim Reaper uses the front door. He goes down the chimney like Santa Claus.”
Instead she said “Oh, Annika,” climbed out of bed, and walked to the dresser. She sifted through its contents until she retrieved my cell phone, then came back and handed it to me. “Call if it will make you feel better.”
I looked at the phone in my hand, but put it on the nightstand. “I can’t call. They’d tell me to come home, and I’m four hours away. I’ll call him in the morning.”
She nodded and climbed back into her bed. “He’s going to be all right.”
“I know,” I said.
She turned off the light, and I reached over and took my cell phone from the nightstand. I laid it against my cheek on my pillow and shut my eyes, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep.
In the morning, we ate most of our stock of food, then drove to a drugstore for hair dye. Madison didn’t say anything about our conversation from the middle of the night. She didn’t even comment when I called Jeremy before school and told him a story about a sister who loved her little brother so much she went to the underworld to retrieve him. Usually I tell Jeremy stories about a heroic little boy, but today I needed the sister to be the hero.
“It’s supposed to be about a mother and a daughter,” Jeremy told me. “You know, Persephone.”
Jeremy always says her name Purse-n-phone, probably because that’s the way my dad first pronounced it when he read the story to him. No amount of my insisting that it’s pronounced Per-se-fon-ee has made a dent in either Dad’s or Jeremy’s pronunciation. I became eternally grateful when Jeremy stopped idolizing Hercules and we no longer had to listen to Dad’s butchered versions of Greek and Roman names.
“This is a different story,” I told Jeremy. “In this one, a sister and brother were out playing catch by their house. They lived by a cliff and their parents had told them not to play near the edge, but on this day they didn’t listen.”
“What’s the sister’s name?” he asked.
“What do you want her to be named?”
“Annie,” he said. “And the brother’s name is Jeremy.”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to use his name for this story, as if even connecting his name with the underworld would endanger him.
He didn’t wait for me to come up with a logical reason to protest this decision, though. “So Jeremy and Annie were out playing,” he prompted. “And then what happened?”
“Well, the little brother ran to catch the ball, and he fell off the edge of the cliff all the way down to the underworld. In fact, when Hades first found him, Jeremy was trying to retrieve the ball from Cerberus, the three-headed dog. You know how dogs are. They love to play catch. One head had the ball, and the other two heads wouldn’t stop licking Jeremy’s face.”
Jeremy laughed but didn’t comment, so I went on. “Jeremy’s family missed him in the worst way, so Annie decided she had to go after him and bring him back.”
“How did she get to the underworld?” Jeremy asked.
“She cried so hard her tears formed a river, and tears of grief always run into the river Styx. She simply followed their trail there. Well, of course, Hades didn’t want to let Jeremy go. Hades has a no-leaving policy when it comes to the underworld. But Annie walked right up to Hades and explained that she had to take Jeremy with her.”
“What did Hades say?”
In my mind I tried to picture the cartoon character of Hades from Disney’s
Hercules
movie. I meant to answer in his voice, complete with New York accent. But I couldn’t picture him. I saw only the Grim Reaper from my dream, with his empty, dark face. I saw him so clearly it made me catch my breath, and a wave of anxiety swept over me. He stood on the highest precipice in an endless cavern of gray, one never pierced by sunlight.
Since I didn’t answer, Jeremy went on. “Did Hades fall in love with Annie because she was so beautiful?”
“No, the Grim Reaper has no heart, so he doesn’t care how beautiful a girl is.”
“The Grim Reaper?” Jeremy repeated. “I thought it was Hades.”
“The Grim Reaper is just another one of his names,” I said.
“So how did Annie rescue her brother?”
I had meant to tell him she cut off all her hair, wove it into a rope, and used her bow and arrow to shoot the rope of hair to the edge of the underworld. Then they both climbed up together. But the vision of the gray cavern was too strong in my mind. I could still see it, and there was no edge.
“She cut off all of her hair,” I said.
The Grim Reaper turned an icy stare in my direction. “It won’t work.”
“And she braided it into a rope, like in the story of Rapunzel.”
The Reaper’s hollow voice echoed toward me. “It’s impossible.”
“Then she used her bow and arrow to shoot the rope to the very edge of the underworld.”
I must not have sounded convincing because Jeremy let out a “nu-uh” of disbelief. “Your hair isn’t that long,” he said.
“It grew during the walk to the underworld.”
“Isn’t the underworld a long way down?”
Apparently that ending wasn’t going to satisfy him. In the background, I heard my father calling Jeremy’s name.
“I’m not finished with the story,” I said. “When the arrow flew away, she saw the rope wouldn’t be long enough. But she took Jeremy’s hand and told him they’d figure out a way to escape from the underworld together.”
My father’s voice became louder, and I knew he stood near Jeremy. “Come on, buddy,” I heard him say. “It’s time to go.”
Jeremy said, “But Annika’s telling me a story.”
“She can finish it later. The school bus is coming.” Next my father’s voice came on the line. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“I’m taking a break.” Which, technically, was true.
He didn’t question me about it. Instead he let his voice drop to a whisper and added, “Thanks for the you-know-what you left on our bed. You-know-who is going to love it.”
“Don’t make him wait for Christmas to open it,” I said. “You can let him have it whenever.”
“Maybe later tonight,” he said. “Now you’d better get back to class.”
I hung up with him, called in sick to the school, then phoned Mrs. Palson and asked her to pick up Jeremy from school again. I had until one o’clock—well, one-thirty if I drove fast—until I had to leave for Nevada.
It took a good part of the morning to dye our hair. Madison and I both went medium golden brown. She bought the temporary kind that washes out after a few shampoos, but I went for the permanent. Part of me wanted a permanent change—as though if I changed my hair color, I could leave everything behind.
Madison fussed over her hair, but I liked mine. It made my blue eyes seem darker, more mysterious. I curled my hair so it was wavy and voluptuous. I flipped it around so it fell in my face, then I gave the mirror sultry looks. This, I thought, must be how Leah feels all of the time.
Madison stood behind me, applying foundation, but watching me. “I thought you were going to be an animal wrangler, not a starlet.”
“I am an animal wrangler. I’m just one with starlet potential.”
Madison steadied her face for mascara and blinked. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“I can’t believe you are either.” I left my hair alone and picked up my eye-shadow compact. “Although I notice neither one of us said we couldn’t believe
I’m
doing this.”
She laughed but didn’t comment. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bad influence on Madison.
We found a pet store and then had to wait until ten o’clock, when it opened. Using Madison’s credit card, we bought a cage full of rabbits and an aquarium with a five-foot Burmese python. I purposely chose a snake because enough people didn’t like them that if I was, say, walking across the studio lot with a large one draped across my arm, people might stay away from me.
The lady at the pet store assured me the snake—Herman, she called him—was a sweetheart and not at all venomous. She took him out of his tank and hung him around her neck like a feather boa just to prove the point. He held his head up, surveying me with piercing black eyes, and licked the air. Then the lady put the snake around my neck and I felt the muscles in his body pulse as his smooth skin slid over mine.
“Oh, yes,” I said in a voice several degrees higher than my normal one. “I can tell he’s a sweetheart. I’ll take him.”
I was able to make it back to the van before I started shuddering uncontrollably.
Besides the rabbits and snake, we bought a couple of doves in a large wire cage so our van would look convincingly like one belonging to a pair of animal wranglers. It was a good idea, except that both doves and all the rabbits had apparently picked up on the fact that a large carnivorous snake rode in the van with them. As I drove, the rabbits bounced about their cage, alternately running into each other and the walls, while every so often the doves would flap their wings in a frenzy. It was nearly as distracting as Madison gripping her door handle and hissing, “Would you please slow down?”
Almost as if in answer to her wish, we hit construction coming into Burbank and progressed through town at a crawling pace. It was almost eleven when we pulled into the road that led to the studio. I grabbed my dad’s old baseball cap from underneath the seat and put it on my head in hopes it would somehow make me look older, or at least less recognizable. Then I leaned back in my seat and draped one hand casually across the steering wheel as we pulled up to the guard booth. A middle-aged man in a white uniform looked at me with the same expression a cat gives you when you’ve disturbed his nap.
I smiled up at him. “Hi, I’m dropping off animals for the shoot.”
He gazed down at the cages, and the doves made an impressive attempt for freedom by trying to fly through their food dish. I heard birdseed scattering across the van.
“Where’s your pass?” the guard asked.
I looked around as though I’d misplaced it. “I know I brought it. . . . I remember having it in my hand. . . .” I flipped through pieces of paper on the seat between Madison and me, then flipped through them again. “Do you think it’s under one of the cages?”
Madison shrugged. “It could be.”
I turned back to the guard. “This might take a minute. I’m going to need to pick up all of the cages. Could you maybe help me out and grab the snake for a minute?”
Madison let out an impatient groan. “We can’t be late. You know how Mr. Powell gets when he has to wait.”
“It won’t take long,” I told her.
She held up both hands. “Fine, but he’s not yelling at me. You can tell him you had to play show-and-tell with the security guard.”
The guard let out a sigh and waved us through. I had to suppress a shriek of joy as we drove past him. We were inside.
Chapter
6
We parked outside of the studio. I took my cell phone and Jeremy’s Robin Hood picture from my purse, slipped them into my jeans pocket, then shoved my purse underneath the seat.