Heist Hades

“You do not seem exactly dead,” Charon observed of his passenger, as they pushed off from the livings’ shore.

“I’m just frozen, technically,” Niesha said, not looking back at the towering figure, but instead staring blankly at the small black notebook in her hands.

“Hm.” The ferryman mused, “Does that not usually kill humans?”

“Technically.” She offered.

“You know,” He sighed, without breath, ”Very few interesting things happen down here. And it does take twenty minutes to cross the river.”

“Twenty minutes!? Can't you go faster?” Niesha pled, finally turning around.

“No.”

The shock of this news made her at least feel more present. She had never been dead before, after all, and something about this place crept into her mind like a sedative.

And so she explained how she came to the shores of the River Styx.

I was working my shift at The Hungry Owl, a cramped dumpy place that’s close enough to campus for their inconsistent carding habits to matter more than their cleanliness.

I was bussing a table when some guy shouted, “You there, dark skinned tavern wench.” I whirled, thinking of all the things I would scream at this jerk, knowing I really wouldn’t, but when I looked, I found the most beautiful people I’d ever seen.

It was like these three were what humans were supposed to be, and everyone else was just some crooked photocopy, run off on a cheap scanner, with dirty glass.

“Yes, yes, you. Come here.” One of them commanded impatiently, “We need you to settle a bet.”

I was pretty sure neither they, nor the alcove where they sat, actually existed, but I went over anyway.

Insanely, they claimed to be Hygieia - Goddess of Health, Boreas - Bringer of Winter, and Hephaestus - who had just crafted a book for Hades, which was at the center of their debate.

Hephaestus insisted he had only made three such books, for the three Judges of the Underworld, and they were designed to hold an eternity worth of Judgments, but Hades refused to tell him what this new book was for.

Hephaestus was betting there was no way to find out.

Boreas believed Hades just needed a replacement for one of the Judges. However, he bet he had a plan for sending a mortal to retrieve the book so they could settle this debate.

Hygieia bet Boreas’s plan would work, but she heard from Persephone, at the Winter Solstice, that Hades had recently been greeting new souls near the gates of his realm.

She bet he was using the book to Judge souls himself.

“Probably looking for evidence that the Judges are inefficient and lazy.” She added with an elegant smirk.

“So, I agreed to go and grabbed my jacket. Hephaestus gave me a perfect replica of the book to swap, and Hygieia promised the Favor of the Gods if I was successful. Boreas froze me, technically killing me, and Hygieia will revive me in exactly 2 hours.” Niesha finished.

“You know,” the ferryman said gravely, “if your body is revived while you are on Hades’ side of the river, your soul will not return.”

“They said you could give me a ride back,” Niesha added.

“Sorry. No return trips.”

“Even if I pay you?”

“Ha!” his laugh was sharp and dry, “Mortal money has become worthless. Common metals, inked paper, even plastic cards. I refused to take your kind across the river for decades because of it, but the souls piled up… It caused… problems. I’ve been doing my task without payment for half a century.”

“I wondered why there was no fee, but Hephaestus gave me these too.” She turned and offered a pure gold drachma, with one shaky hand, while holding an identical coin pinned to her book. “One now and one for the ride back?”

“Hm.” He contemplated as the boat scrapped onto the deads' shore. “You had better hurry, then.”

She shouted her thanks, already jogging, checking her watch, hoping it was still as accurate as Hephaestus had promised it would be.

As she approached the gate, she thought she was seeing a heaving black boulder, but now closer, she knew it to be a massive three-headed monster of a dog, dozing, just beyond the entrance. “Cerebus.” She whispered, remembering some old cartoon she watched as a child. But as she crept by, one head only gave her a lazy sniff before returning to its nap.

And so Niesha crossed through the gates, entering the Realm of the Dead.

There was no apparent source of light, nothing seemed to cast any shadows, but everything seemed to have some otherworldly blueish glow. This made the place massive with no obvious sense of direction. Shades wandered, some alone, some conversing, and she clung near the walls to avoid them all as she made her way deeper into the caverns.

Increasingly nervous as each minute ticked by.

She had been cautioned not to go beyond the caverns near the gates, and to simply return if she could not find the book in time. So after 50 minutes without luck, she was considering doing that, until she came upon several dead people, just standing in a queue.

She wove her way forward through the waiting souls and discovered a great hall of a cavern, filled with ornate pillars holding up a beautifully supported dome ceiling and polished walls. She presumed Hades, God of the Underworld, was the imposing figure presiding from the thronelike chair at the top of a staircase, which seemed to have been grown out of the solid rock beneath rather than carved.

He was holding a small black book.

She also noted several souls, not in line, but moving about, apparently examining the ornate carvings. Imitating them, she and cautiously made her way to the back of the hall and up the stairs. After several more precious minutes of maneuvering, she positioned herself directly behind Hades, who had just placed the small black book on the ground next to him, after making some notes and was waiving his next patron forward.

The book was identical to the one she held.

The new man insisted he was to go to Elysium, but under the unrelenting glare from the Death God, the man suggested that he should at least be worthy of the Asphodel Meadow.

Moving sharply, Niesha kicked the black book, sending it sliding down the stairs in front of the deity.

“ENOUGH!” Roared Hades, as he stood, patience evaporated, “There will be order in my presence! You-”, the God terrifyingly turned on Niesha, who had already slipped Hades’ book up the back of her jacket, while he was distracted by the faux one sliding down the stairs, “-get to the back of the line.”

While Hades walked down the several stairs to retrieve the duplicate book, Niesha hurried towards the exit with his, pushing her way through the now hectic crowd of wanders. She had already been dead for 92 minutes, not leaving much time to navigate back through the tunnels and still make the 20-minute ferry ride home.

Nearly at the main gate, running at a full sprint, paralysis froze her in midstep as all three heads of Cerberus snapped menacingly in her direction.

Though horrified, she took step after measured, shaky step forward. About ten feet from a paw so large that she could not see the top of it, one of the dog heads lowered for an exceptional inhalation that measured the scent of her soul, trying to determine the source of its confusion. Yes, Cerebus knew he was supposed to keep the dead from leaving once they had entered, but this one did not quite smell dead and it had an object that smelled strongly of his master.

Then, more confusion struck the dog as a mountain-shattering roar rose from somewhere deep in the catacombs.

“Who has my book!?” screamed the God of Death, thunderous footfalls now reverberating with increasing intensity. Niesha, benefiting from this brief distraction, sprinted through the gates.

The ferryman was waiting, somehow seeming pleased to see her, though his face conveyed no emotion. She dove into the boat, which did not rock even slightly as she slammed into its unforgiving wooden bottom. Hades burst onto the shore, no longer a reasonable size but now a giant, forced to stoop to maneuver in the otherwise generous cavern.

“Give me back my book, human!” He roared with a guttural wind that swept over the boat like forced exhalations from the grave.

“You have no jurisdiction beyond your shores.”, the ferryman interjected, unperturbed, pointing to show the boat was no longer touching the soil. Hades let out an infuriated scream as the boat began moving away.

“It’s too late.” Came Niesha’s hectic sobbing voice, “They’re going to revive my body in 11 minutes. What will happen to me then?”

“You will go home.” Charon said, “The trip can be made in nine. I just enjoy the conversation.”

And so they did. Niesha was scrambling up the riverbank where her journey began, once again yelling thanks over her shoulder when her soul suddenly blinked back to her body. Charon held the two gold coins in his hands, testing their malleability with immense satisfaction, before beckoning his next passenger join him across the River Styx.

“You made it!” Hygieia beamed.

Boreas, already reading the book, “Hades really is keeping a separate account of Judgments. Has he come to distrust the Judges’?”

“Probably just trying to increase efficiency or something, you know how he is,” Hephaestus said with a shrug.

“I win!” Hygieia shimmered happily, having been right about the book's contents and the successful means of retrieval.

“What did you win?” Niesha asked, dimly aware that she was now speaking casually among Gods.

Hygieia was about to explain that they hadn’t decided that yet, but Niesha stumbled while getting down from the table where she had been frozen for nearly two hours, though no one in the bar seemed to have noticed. They were all distracted by the sound of two gold coins falling melodiously to the floor.

“You still have two coins?” Hephaestus asked, “We only gave you four to bribe the ferryman, did we not?”

“Yeah, but before you guys froze me, when I went to get my jacket, I weighed the coins on the meat scale and checked the price of gold. They’re worth $10,000 each! I only agreed to go because I hoped I could keep any I didn't use if I got your book. He was pretty happy with just two.”

“A truly brave hero.” Hygieia purred as she leaned over and pressed her lips against Niesha’s.

The sensation of the Goddesses’ skin on hers was the most wonderfully electric thing she’d ever experienced. At least, that is, until her lungs began filling with a glowing heat that brought the pulmonary organ to near bursting with pleasure, which then spread to every cell in her body as blood vessels disseminated whatever Godly infusion she had just received.

The young waitresses’ face was that of a comically swooning schoolgirl as the Goddess pulled away.

“You now have the Favor of the Gods and will enjoy a long and healthy life.” Hygieia declared.

Niesha, who had been about to make a joke about not keeping the coins out of bravery, just her hatred of waitressing, was now struggling to swim back towards full consciousness through the angelic vibrations that currently hummed through her entire body.

When she finally did, she was staring at a solid wall, less than a foot from her face.

Crouching, she picked up her two gold coins and turned to find all attention in the bar was fixed on her. Each slack-jawed face held some degree of confused wonderment towards this odd person, who commanded far too much presence for a grimy little bar on a Friday night. Agreeing with this apparent sentiment, Niesha exited elegantly into the night.