By Meg O’Connor
When the ten-year-old boy in the baseball cap came to, he opened his eyes and stared up at a flaming sky. He blinked hard, but the clouds above still hissed and smoked, letting off curling ribbons of fire that danced around the night’s stars. Groggy—and fighting the world’s worst stomachache— the boy groaned. An hour before, he’d been playing with Georgie in their tree fort outside Reno. Now, the sky was on fire.
Still lying on his back, he noticed he was rocking and heard water lapping against wood near his head. As he gingerly turned his neck to the side, he realized he was lying in a large, open rowboat. A wave splashed up and over the side, and black water—black like his dad’s coffee—spilled over the edge and snaked its way towards his arm. He glanced towards his feet and realized the putrid water and the flaming sky were the least of his problems. A short sword protruded from his chest, lodged at an angle in his ribs.
He choked on his own saliva—at least what was left of it. His hands flew up to grab the ruby-studded hilt of the sword lodged in his chest, but he might as well have flailed around for black bats in the night. His hands went straight through handle. I’m hallucinating, thought the boy, as the flaming sky cast spider-web shadows across his cheeks.
He struggled to a sitting position, and pain like a branding iron seared his chest. He yelled and reached for the sword again, but once again, his hands passed through the specter of a hilt.
An old man with a gaunt face he hadn’t noticed before turned to look back at him. The man with a let go of the oars he’d been rowing with, but they remained suspended in mid-air and propelled themselves. The boat continued down the river by a force of its own. The man’s cheekbones were taut against his gray skin, skeletal—yet not a corpse—and lifelike—yet not human. The boy turned around to get his bearings and to look at anything other than that face.
His boat was the first in a long line of hundreds of others, spanning as far as he could see behind down an endless river. The people on the other boats held torches and lanterns and candlesticks that showed glimpses of their faces between fire flashes from the sky. They all had the same haggard appearance. No one had hair. The stagnant air smelled of rotting flesh.
The boy spun back around to face the old man, wincing. The rowboat hit a rapid and careened downward, and the boy pitched forward with it, catching himself on the bewitched oars. “Please tell me, where are we?” the boy asked.
“The River Styx. I’m your boat driver, Charon.” His bulging eyes scanned the boy’s body, and he pursed his lips. “Theseus will be wanting his sword back. You’d best get on that, Eli. We’ll be arriving soon.”
Eli was too dumbfounded to ask where they’d be arriving and why. All he could think to say was, “But the sword isn’t real!” As if in response, the muscles around his ribs seized, and he cried out in agony.
Charon raised his eyebrows. “Don’t let Theseus hear you say that. Go on, now. His ship is somewhere back there.” Charon glanced over Eli’s shoulder at the endless line of boats following behind them.
Eli trembled as he stepped to the edge of the boat. He swallowed hard as he glanced at his own reflection in the black water below, dancing with flames mirrored off the sky. In his reflection, Eli saw the gleam of the rubies in the hilt of the sword in his stomach. He shook his head. None of this is real.
He dove into the water and began to swim against the current, enveloped in thick liquid that burned his skin. He wasn’t strong enough to swim upriver through the ooze, but he managed to hold position. And as he treaded water feverishly, the parade of boats made their way past, one at a time. The gaunt, gray faces began to sing a song in raw, unpolished voices just barely in unison. It was an old gothic song his mother had sung sometimes to scare and tease him. Light and tinkly, like a merry-go-round tune. Don’t ever laugh as a Hearse goes by, for you may be the next to die.
Eli swam harder, wishing the boats would pass, wishing the singing would stop. When he opened his eyes, a grand ship towered over him, and a man peered down over the gunnel. “Oy, Eli,” he called. “I’ll be needing my sword for this upcoming minotaur situation.”
Eli’s brow wrinkled, but at this point, there was no sense in asking about the damn minotaur situation. He swam to the rope ladder running down the side of the boat and climbed up to the deck. He stood facing a man in velvet robes, an empty sheath at his hip.
Eli gestured helplessly at the sword in his stomach. “Sir, I’d like to return your sword. I really would. But how am I supposed to pull out a sword that isn’t real?”
The man let out a deep belly laugh. “Oh, Eli. Why do you think something has to be corporeal to be real?”
They stared at each other as the ship drifted down the River Styx. Slowly, knowingly, Eli reached for the sword one more time. And this time, his hands wrapped around cold metal.
He pulled. He screamed. He fell.
A moment later, Eli was aware of a soft bed beneath him. The stench of rotting flesh was replaced by the smell of antiseptic. There was a steady, rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor near his head.
He couldn’t move and he couldn’t speak, but he heard his mother’s voice gasp with sudden hope. “Steve—I think his eyelids just fluttered!”
* * *
Meg O’Connor is an emerging writer and professional scientist living outside New Orleans, Louisiana. She writes freelance travel articles for the popular travel blog “Travel Lemming.” In addition, her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Anastamos Journal, The Horror Tree, and is forthcoming in Penumbric Magazine.