Not bodies. Not corpses. People. Translucent, drifting, their forms visible just beneath the surface, features soft and indistinct, moving downstream with a slow, peaceful inevitability that would be beautiful if it weren’t the most unsettling thing Sidney has ever seen. They’re not struggling. They’re not suffering. They’re just going somewhere, all of them, together, and the murmur he’d been hearing in the tunnel is the sound of their passage.
The ground is cracked dirt, old and hard, the kind of earth that hasn’t been turned in centuries. The structures scattered across the landscape are gothic and severe, all pointed arches and dark stone, built for permanence and not for hospitality. They look like churches that have forgotten what they were for. They look like the kinds of buildings that exist because something required them to exist, not because anyone wanted them.
“It’s better during the day,” Penny says, which raises questions about the concept of daytime in the underworld that Sidney is choosing to table indefinitely.
She guides him past the river and across the cracked ground and toward a structure set apart from the rest, further out, at the edge of where the green light reaches. It’s larger than the others. Stained glass windows line the upper walls, catching the glow from the river and breaking it into colors that have no business existing in a place like this: purples, blues, golds, splashing across the ground in fractured patterns that shift as the river’s light pulses.
The door is wooden and enormous, four times Sidney’s height, and it opens when they approach. Sidney doesn’t know if it’s automatic or sentient and decides that ignorance is the healthier option.
Inside is different.
Inside is warm. The space is wood and plaster, the walls draped in heavy fabrics, dark greens and deep reds, that mufflethe sounds from outside and hold the heat from the fireplace that’s burning in the main room. There’s furniture. Not thrones. Not altars. A couch, deep green and old and sagging in the middle. Two armchairs flanking the fire. A table with four chairs, one of which has a cushion on it to boost a smaller person taller. A kitchen that has a stove and a sink and cabinets and a coffee mug on the counter with nothing on it because the lord of the underworld apparently doesn’t go in for novelty dishware.
It looks like a house. It looks like someone’s house, someone who has a child and a life and a preference for warm colors and old furniture and who has done their best to make a home in a place that was never designed for one. The cognitive dissonance of it, the stained glass and the fairy lights, the river of souls and the coloring books, is so total that Sidney has to stand in the doorway for a moment and let his brain catch up.
Penny climbs down from his back. The absence of her weight hits Sidney all at once and his ribs make themselves known with a vengeance that nearly puts him on the floor. He braces a hand against the wall. Breathes. The pain peaks and plateaus and settles into the familiar, grinding ache that he’s been carrying for days.
Penny takes his hand and pulls.
The tour is not optional. She leads him down the hallway, chattering with the sudden, manic energy of a child who has been terrified for the past hour and is now in her safe place and is burning through the residual adrenaline by talking. She shows him the bathroom, which has a bathtub that’s bigger than his entire bathroom at home. She shows him a closet that contains nothing but coats, all of them black, all of them the same, which answers the question of whether the lord of the underworld has a varied wardrobe. He does not.
Her room is at the end of the hall. She pushes the door open and pulls him through and it’s shockingly, almost aggressivelynormal. A daybed with a canopy made of some gauzy fabric that catches the light from the fairy lights strung along the ceiling. A rug with sunflowers on it. Bookshelves crammed with picture books, their spines creased and faded from use. A collection of stuffed animals that could populate a small, very eclectic zoo.
Sidney tries to imagine the god of death shopping for fairy lights. He tries to imagine those hands, the ones that had wrapped his ribs and cupped his jaw and pressed against a kitchen counter on either side of his hips, selecting a sunflower rug from a display. He tries to imagine Erath standing in a toy store evaluating stuffed animals and he can’t do it, and the inability lodges somewhere soft and undefended.
Penny introduces him to every stuffed animal. All of them are her favorites. She shows him her books, most of which feature a caterpillar that apparently eats an unreasonable amount. She shows him the drawings on the wall, which are done in crayon and marker and depict, as far as Sidney can tell, a family: a tall dark figure, a small dark figure, and, in the most recent one, tacked to the wall with a piece of tape, a yellow figure with a smile that takes up most of its face.
Sidney looks at the yellow figure. He looks at it for a long time.
“That’s you,” Penny says, helpfully.
“I gathered.”
She’s flagging. The energy is draining out of her, the adrenaline metabolized and spent, and her movements are slowing and her eyes are getting heavy and her voice is softening into the register of a child who is fighting sleep and losing.
“Can you tuck me in?”
He’s never tucked a child into bed. He doesn’t know the protocol. He suspects it’s more of an art than a science, and he’s not great at either, but Penny is looking up at him with dark eyes and messy braids and a one-eared rabbit clutched to her chest and he would do anything for this child. He knows this. He’sknown it since the night she walked into his bar, and it’s only gotten worse.
“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”
He does his best. He pulls back the covers and she climbs in and he pulls them up and tucks the edges around her feet because that seems like a thing you do. He smooths the blanket down. He asks if she wants a story. She shakes her head. She’s already going, eyes closing, opening, closing again, and the rabbit is pressed against her chin.
“Sid?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t leave while I’m asleep.”
“Okay, I won’t leave.”
“Promise?”
He looks at her. She’s half gone already, the words coming from somewhere between awake and asleep, and the weight of them is enormous. This child, who has been uprooted and frightened and chased across a city and down into the dark, is asking him to stay. Not her father. Him. The bartender. The human.
“Pinky promise,” he says.
She’s asleep before the words finish landing. Her breathing evens out. Her grip on the rabbit loosens, slightly, and one of her braids falls across her face and Sidney reaches down and tucks it behind her ear. He watches her breathe for a moment. Then he backs out of the room, leaving the door cracked, a sliver of light from the hallway cutting across the floor.
