Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (35 page)

She had removed her hand from the water and was clutching it
to her chest, a look of shock on her face. "There are things in the river,"
she whispered. "Things that hate us quite ferociously. And they mean us
harm."

"Holy shit. Take a look at that." Danny pointed
out across the water.

A whirlpool had formed in the Styx, a swirling maelstrom
that was inexorably drawing them closer.

"Charybdis," Ceridwen said, and Conan Doyle saw
that her hand was immersed in the water again. "The whirlpool is alive. I
don’t understand how, but it’s a living thing. It’s called Charybdis."

Danny couldn’t take his eyes from the spiraling vortex. "Why
does it hate us? What the hell did we do this time? Oh man I hate this shit!"

Gull
, Conan Doyle thought. Somehow, his old adversary
was responsible.

"It believes we’ve come to do it harm . . . ,"
Ceridwen began, her eyes wide and her expression dreamlike as she extracted the
information from the turgid water. "It has been told that we’ve come to
separate it from its mate."

"Who told it that?" Danny asked. He had picked up
his oar and was attempting to paddle the raft away from the whirlpool, but to
no avail. "Was it Gull?" His voice was on the brink of hysteria. "It
was that ugly fuck, wasn’t it?"

They drew toward the dark, sucking center of the maelstrom.
The raft began to rock and Conan Doyle and Danny were driven to their knees. Water
surged up over them, soaking their clothes.

"Is there any way you can ask the river currents to
pull us from the whirlpool’s grasp?" Conan Doyle shouted at Ceridwen over
the roaring water, trying to clear his vision to have the comfort of the sight
of her.

She looked up at him with eyes barely focused. "I’m
trying," she croaked, shaking her head in the negative. "But
Charybdis is too strong."

It tore at him to see her so helpless but there was nothing
he could do. If they were to survive, all of their power and guile would have
to be brought into play. He reached within himself, drawing upon the magick
that resided there. Conan Doyle expected excruciating pain, but found only the
slightest discomfort. Just as the nature of this place was adjusting to
Ceridwen, the laws of magick were growing accustomed to him. He didn’t like
that at all, but at the moment he was more concerned with Charybdis.

Conan Doyle raised a hand above his head and sketched at the
air. A sphere of dark blue energy coalesced around his fingers and then a lance
of magick thrust across the river, causing a wall of water to erupt beneath it
as it passed. It was a powerful enchantment meant to disrupt magick, to
short-circuit the supernatural. Again and again he summoned that spell, and
cast it out across the river to strike at the heart of the swirling water. The
river began to froth and steam and a strange sound, the cries of some ethereal
beast in pain, rose up from the water to fill the air.

The raft rocked upon the choppy water as the vortex started
to falter, and from the corner of his eye Conan Doyle saw Ceridwen pitch to one
side, coming dangerously close to falling from the raft. He scrambled to her,
pulling the sorceress closer to him.

"I have you," he told her as a wave of exhaustion
passed over him.

"I think we beat it," he heard Danny say
excitedly, and he looked to see that the boy was standing at the raft’s edge,
peering into the slowly calming waters. The raft was again at the mercy of the
river’s natural flow.

Ceridwen was shaking off her stupor, trying to talk, but her
voice was so soft that he could not hear. He bent his ear down close,
attempting to decipher her whispering words.

"Charybdis," she began. "Charybdis is no . .
."

"Charybdis is gone," he said, pulling her close in
an attempt to comfort.

Her violet eyes flashed angrily as she pushed herself out of
his arms, shaking her head from side to side.

"No," she said, her voice stronger. "Charybdis
is not . . .alone."

He recalled her words from before; that they had come to
separate Charybdis from its mate.

Its mate.

The water in front of them began to bubble and churn, and
again their raft was tossed about.

"What now?" Danny shrieked, losing his balance and
collapsing.

Something exploded up from the depths, its skin catching the
strange light of the hellish place, glistening with all the colors of the
rainbow. Conan Doyle was reminded of a rainbow trout, but this was no mere
fish.

Scylla, the mate of Charybdis, surged up from the bubbling
black waters of the Styx, her voice raised in a scream of rage over what they
had wrought upon her consort.

Once she had been a beautiful sea nymph, loved by Zeus and
Poseidon in turn, until twisted by the jealousy of Circe into something
monstrous. If one looked closely enough, past the slick, greasy skin and thick
appendages that grew like tumors from her body, one could see that this had
once been a creature of beauty, but that had been so long ago that Conan Doyle
doubted even Scylla remembered.

The river beast surged toward them in a spray of water. Scylla
grabbed the front of the makeshift raft in large, webbed hands, tipping it
forward. Holding Ceridwen tightly in his arms, Conan Doyle dug his fingers into
the wood, halting his slide toward the enraged beast.

"Hold on!" he cried out to Danny, but the boy’s
clawing hands could not find purchase and he began to slide toward the monster.

Her tentacles darted at him with incredible speed, almost as
if they had a sentience all their own. Conan Doyle watched in horror as the
tapered ends of those appendages split open to reveal snarling faces,
needle-toothed jaws snapping in horror.

Is there no end to the nightmares of this place?
Conan Doyle thought as he plucked a spell from his memory. He thrust out his
hand and began to utter the incantation.

The blast that streamed from his fingertips struck Scylla
square in the chest and seared her flesh black. With an ear-piercing scream she
dove beneath the water to recover. Danny struggled to climb back up onto the
raft, and Conan Doyle was forced to leave Ceridwen’s side to assist him.

"Take my hand, boy," he cried, extending his arm.

"What the fuck is up with this place!" the boy
yelled, hauling himself out of the water with Conan Doyle’s help, and back up
onto the raft. "Does everything have to have multiple heads and a serious
mad on for us?"

"It does appear that way, doesn’t it?" Conan Doyle
sighed, taking a moment to catch his breath now that Danny was safe.

The waters of the Styx were becoming agitated again. He was
about to tell the boy to hold on, when he heard Ceridwen’s cry of warning, and
he turned just in time to see the elemental sorceress standing, her hands
crackling with unrestrained power as she prepared to defend them.

"That attack will come from beneath us!" she cried
out just as the raft was struck from below.

Then they were airborne, the raft propelled up and out of
the water by the savagery of the attack. The raft was destroyed, reduced to
wreckage floating upon the turbulent waters of the River Styx. Conan Doyle
broke the surface, spitting the foul tasting water from his mouth. Its taste
was like nothing he had ever experienced before, and it stirred memories of
times and events best left forgotten. Times of sorrow. The water wanted him to
surrender, to give himself over entirely to the flow and pull of the river.

But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would never surrender.

Shrugging off the influence of the river he began to search
for Ceridwen and Danny in the choppy waters. In the distance he saw something
upon the undulating surface and relief surged through him as he realized it was
Danny, clutching Ceridwen with one arm and with the other clinging to a section
of their decimated raft.

Swimming against the current, he went to them.

"I think she might have hit her head on something,"
Danny shouted over the rush of the river.

Conan Doyle helped him with Ceridwen. The sorceress had a
gash on her temple, and she moaned fitfully as she struggled to regain
consciousness.

"We have to get to shore," the demon boy said, his
eyes wild as he searched the waters for any sign of further attack. "I
can’t freakin’ stand this anymore."

Conan Doyle could offer nothing to allay the boy’s fears. They
were being carried by the current, not near enough the bank to swim, only the
wreckage of the raft keeping them above water. Conan Doyle racked his brain for
a way to the other side.

Then he saw Danny’s eyes go wide with fear.

"Something just touched my . . . " The demon boy
gasped, but never finished as he was yanked beneath the surface of the water.

"Danny!" Conan Doyle cried, illuminating one of
his hands and plunging it down into the river. But he could see nothing in the
darkness.

The boy was gone.

The water began to churn again and he readied himself for
the conflict. Ceridwen was barely conscious so he could not depend on her for
assistance. As he clung to a piece of raft, keeping his love from sliding
beneath the river’s cold embrace, Conan Doyle brought forth a spell of defense
and held it at the ready.

The turbulent waters exploded and the monstrous Scylla
reared up from beneath the Styx, shrieking like the damnable thing she was.

But there was something wrong. Scylla was not attacking. She
was fending off an attack.

Bobbing upon the roiling waters, Conan Doyle looked on in
astonishment as Daniel Ferrick clung to the body of the raging sea monster. The
lunatic savagery of his demonic birthright had overcome him, and there was
nothing human about him now. His yellow eyes gleamed as he tore away chunks of
the monster’s flesh with his claws and needle-teeth in a bloody frenzy of
violence.

The river churned as though attuned with Scylla’s pain. It
took everything Conan Doyle had to keep himself and Ceridwen above the raging
waters. Scylla dove repeatedly beneath the surface and exploded upward in an
attempt to loosen the hold of her attacker, but to no avail. Danny held fast,
rending her flesh with wanton abandon.

The last thing Conan Doyle saw before succumbing to the pull
of the Styx was the monster Scylla beckoning to the heavens as the demon boy
dug into her chest with his claws, hunting for her heart. Scylla screamed as if
pleading to the gods that had cursed her for mercy.

The shipyard stank of fish. Squire wrinkled his nose as he
ambled among the dry-docked fishing boats. Some of them were obviously being
repaired or repainted and one or two seemed to be in the midst of a patchwork
reconstruction using the remains of several others. The majority were rusting
or rotting hulks that had been abandoned long ago, their paint flaked off so
completely that they appeared ancient. From the awful odor, it seemed like one
of those old wrecks — or perhaps one of the boats under repair — still
had a hull filled with the catch of the day.

If the day was a week ago
, he thought.

The smell was ferocious and he breathed through his mouth. It
might have come from the boats themselves, from the sea seeping into the wood,
or maybe it was just that stench that sometimes came off the sea at low tide. But
something about it made Squire reasonably sure it was local. Either there was a
trawler-net full of rotting fish nearby, or something had crawled up out of the
ocean and died. Maybe a lot of somethings.

The night was humid and even the breeze off the
Mediterranean was hot. They were farther south now, Medusa’s trail having led
them to the coast and then southward, passing through several small villages
and at last to this place.
Marina
would be far too rich a word for it
and
dock
was not nearly descriptive enough. There was a dock where local
fisherman brought in their catch, but that didn’t account for the ships under
repair or the ones that had been abandoned. It was like some nautical junkyard
occupied by dedicated fishermen who wouldn’t give up on a boat until it was
beyond repair . . . but from the look of things, whoever these fishermen were,
they had paid little attention to the upkeep of their vessels until things went
horribly wrong.

Squire licked his lips, wishing he had a thick, sugary glass
of ouzo to relax him. What he liked best about the Greek liqueur was that it
was sort of like getting drunk on melted candy.

The evening sky was a blue-black and the darkness seemed to
nestle within the shipyard in graded hues, an evening shadow in one place and
an utter, inky black in others. It was almost as though the place had something
to hide and the night was its conspirator. Squire paid it no mind. Natural or
otherwise, he was intimately familiar with the dark. The shadows were
his
conspirators.

He whistled an old Frank Sinatra song, "Summer Wind,"
and turned seaward, passing through an opening between two skeletal boats, one
of which appeared to have once been put to military use. As he moved nearer the
Mediterranean there were fewer wrecks and more ships under repair, propped up
on scaffolding or hoisted off the ground with ropes and pulleys. A pulley
clanked against the side of a boat and Squire paused, frowning, but he did not
turn to see the source of the sound.

The wind was strong, but enough to sway the heavy apparatus?

He continued on until he emerged from among the ships. A
wide, rutted path separated the shipyard from the docks — wide enough for
a car or truck to pass through — and beyond that was the Mediterranean. Whitecaps
churned atop the waves, whipped by the wind and the night. Squire had always
thought the sea was a nocturnal animal, only truly coming to life after dark. Scientists
talked about the pull of the moon, but he felt it was more than that.