Exactly how Emmeline made it to the top of the valley wall, she didn't know. She only heard the moment the top-heavy arachnid lost purchase on the cliff face and with a hissing howl, tumbled over upon his shining black belly again and again toward the valley floor.
For an almost comical moment, the beast struggled to untangle his eight legs from his collection of heads, but he soon found the will to stand, and shake off the trauma of his fall before flicking his whitetail angrily and mooching back toward the gate he guarded.
Emmeline wondered for a moment if a heart could burst from exertion, or perhaps a lung collapse? Maybe both lungs.
At least the rain had stopped.
She dropped her head to the ground, and finally passed out.
*
"C'mon kid, get the hell up."
Waking dirty and sweaty is one of the worst sensations. Point blank.
Maybe worse than waking up and remembering you are exhausted because a fucking eight-legged, three-headed monstrosity of a spider had chased you up a sheer cliff-face.
Actually maybe it was all just worse, and bad, and terrible.
But then, like a golden light shattering through it all, "You stink. You stink like a thousand rats on a thousand underground station platforms."
Emmeline grunted, and wiped sweat off her face, out of her sunken eye-sockets. Then, unimaginably, she smiled, with her eyes still closed, because she was afraid that once she opened them, the dream would stop.
"Hey kid." Her grandfather barked at her between two hearty coughs.
Her eyes fluttered open. There was light streaming in the window. Everything was still, peaceful. The only piece of existence in that moment that wasn't peaceful, was Emmeline's heart.
"Why did you go?" Emmeline asked him immediately. Their fondness had always been unspoken, so she didn't feel bad jumping to the heart of the problem. 'Hey kid' was as affectionate as he would get.
He grunted, much in a similar fashion as she had, suggesting it was a habit she had learned. If she was calmer, she may have noticed and been annoyed by it, but she wasn't calm.
He let out one harsh laugh upon taking a closer look at her facial expression, and unleashed a smile on her that encompassed all of her existence until that point.
Finally she felt peace.
"You knew I had to go, Emmeline," he reached a hand to her cheek and chucked it with his knuckles, in the same way he would have stolen her nose when she was young enough to believe it.
"But you are here now," she argued.
He nodded slowly. "But I'm waiting just like you are,"
"Waiting for what?"
"For the Ferryman to come open that bloody gate, what else?!" Geras snorted.
"But where is he?" Emmeline felt herself tearing up like a baby again, "He was supposed to be here with me."
Geras shrugged his ancient shoulders, "That's your mess, not mine."
Emmeline frowned, "Well, sometimes you just have to do it by yourself."
"Get through the gate?"
"Yeah,"
Geras shook his head, "Hhhhmmm, I don't know that you can. Not without him. Why'd you think we're all stuck out here?"
"All? I assumed you were some kind of projection of my imagination."
"Figment."
"Yes," Emmeline agreed with his correction, dourly, "a figment of my imagination."
"I'm not sure I am," Geras replied, having cajoled Emmeline onto saying so, "I mean this my house."
"But this is not London."
"Isn't it?" He seemed surprised, he stood up from her bed to walk toward the window.
"No!" Emmeline shouted.
"No?"
"Don't look out the window," she practically shouted at him, throwing off the dirty, dusty covers that had been over her and dancing on tip toe across the smashed glass on the floor to reach the window before he did. He pursed his lips and just watched her, leaning on his cane.
Emmeline gave him an apologetic smile before she looked out through the cracked glass.
Figmantary, fake-grandfather or not, Emmeline had no desire for the view out the window to upset the peaceful little balance she had suddenly found. The view outside was more or less as she had expected it to be.
Looking around her room now, for the first time, properly seeing it, she realised that it was most certainly not what she had expected to see.
"What happened here then?" She asked.
Geras looked around the room slowly, and shrugged.
"It wasn't like this when I left it."
He nodded, "I felt much the same. But this isn't the place you remember,"
"You're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy," Emmeline smirked.
He looked her up and down, "And why is that?"
Emmeline shrugged this time.
"I certainly expected to end up somewhere, but here, with you, is a surprise."
"But you knew who I was, this whole time," Emmeline felt herself losing a grip on the tangled threads of her composure. "You let me exist my entire life without knowing the danger I was in, or who I was." She took a deep breath, and felt the depth of self-pity in what she'd said, before adding, "And, let's not forget the danger an entire two worlds were in if my father had gotten away with his designs for me."
"Would you rather we'd killed you?" Geras asked suddenly, after he'd given her a moment to fall silent.
"No," she relied quickly, and then added, "I don't know. If I actually was altruistic, then, maybe. Yes."
"Well, we didn't, we took pity on you, and loved you."
"But why?" She wanted to throw her hands up in the air, but it was too cliche. Like shouting 'why' at the sky.
"Well, I can't speak for Erebus except to say that he damn well loved your mother."
Emmeline was ready to ask how stupid a god was for falling in love with a human, except that Erebus wasn't a god, and Emmeline felt the embarrassment creep into her cheeks with a hot flush as her brain caught up with her and considered that she had done something similar, as a human, fall for a god.
Except that she wasn't human.
And Charon, like his father, was not exactly a god.
Charon was the Ferryman, and his eyes held the gate way that allowed monsters and men to cross between worlds. And while this world certainly felt like hell, or the underworld, Emmeline knew it wasn't. This world was real, and she wasn't dead yet.
Emmeline had almost forgotten that her grandfather was standing there. He brought her back down to earth with a snap of his fingers. It wasn't rude, he'd used the method to capture her undivided attention since she was a kid, and she also had habit to use it on him.
"Also, kid, I'm captain of my own ship. If I care about a creature, its my own choice. I had visions of a screaming brat being dumped on my doorstep all those years ago, but when you arrived, comatose and shell shocked with that thousand-yards stare and harsh little grey peepers of yours, it was hard not to have compassion, or pity perhaps. But you ain't the creature to be pitied, are you? Erebus taught you well, and perhaps we could say that is the reason I fell in love with you."
Emmeline blinked, it was what she had wanted to hear, of course, what she had always wanted to hear from the lips of the man she called grandfather for all of her remembered life, except for the distant, fluttering, butterfly memories of her mother and father, most of which she couldn't even capture and call real.
"But if you love something, you gotta let it go, don't you?" He sighed.
"Don't go," Emmeline was stricken.
"You know I died, right?"
She reached out and clutched his shoulder, which she could tangibly do. "But this is the underworld."
"Now that's a big fat lie." He laughed out loud, "Don't keep telling yourself that. That's the kind of fairytales that will entrap you."
"Fairytales." Emmeline gave him a hard stare. Then rolled her eyes.
"So where is the lad?"
"What?" Emmeline knew he couldn't know about Charon.
"Don't play the fool with me."
Emmeline stared back. Playing the fool was one thing, but she wasn't going to put words or thoughts in the mouth of the dead.
"You came into this world with someone. As powerful as I can imagine you have become, my dearest delight, I know how it works - I've done it myself, remember? Erebus ferried me, eons ago, before your world knew the meaning of age, and now he is many years dead, we must assume that it was his son who ferried you?"
Well that was simple deduction. Emmeline flushed a bright red.
Geras' eyes narrowed. Emmeline felt the chill of it, and her blush died away instantly.
"He's too old for you." He grandfather snapped.
Emmeline blushed again.
Geras took a step back from her and scratched his head, running his gnarled fingers haphazardly through his peppery grey and white hair, "I never had that conversation with you," he said. His tone was somewhat guilty, and embarrassed.
Emmeline tilted her head to the side and raised one eyebrow.
Then, she clicked.
"Oh, eyew no. No. No. No."
Geras didn't drop his searching gaze, and Emmeline felt the embarrassment of a parental figure's concern for their child for the very first time in her life.
"No. No, we are never having that talk."
She could still see Geras thinking. Pausing, drawing on the wealth of knowledge that his eons of existence had given him.
"No." She said again, "I'm twenty one for crying out loud. Wait, you know I've had boyfriends before, right?" She searched his eyes, "You remember Stan right? Alejandro?" Geras frowned, "Come on! What about Peter?"
"You were eleven! That's far too young to see boys romantically."
"I was fourteen!"
"Really?"
"Ugh. How can you not know this? How were you that unaware?" Emmeline did throw her hands up in frustration this time.
There was a moment of silence between them, as Geras pondered, and Emmeline felt like a specimen under a microscope. After which, he said, "Fourteen is still too young."
"Well, you were too absorbed in whatever else to notice, so it's a little bit too late to have a conversation about it now," she felt like a sulky teenager, but she also felt a stupid joy that she was able to have a normal conversation with him.
His head snapped back up at her, "Maybe I was busy keeping you alive?"
Emmeline looked away, abashed. Put in her place. She'd had no awareness at all of the danger she had grown up on the doorstep of. Not the smallest inkling that there was a greater and more terrible reason for her birth and for the death of her parents when she was so young. She hadn't even been able to truly appreciate how blessed she was to have been shipped off to London to live with Geras after her parent's had been killed.
"I am thankful," she said, softly.
Geras nodded. "Be careful. Be so so so careful. Of all my long years living in your world, I never fully understood or loved humanity until you were dropped on my doorstep. You were the delight of my existence, to have seen you grow and become the woman you are was my utmost pleasure. So please, please don't throw it all away, and please, please be careful."
"Of course I will."
"But, Charon," he let the name linger.
"I know he was trying to deliver me to Melekh," Emmeline cut in.
Geras widened his eyes and nodded, but there was something in his look that became guarded. Emmeline barely registered it before he continued, "I can't change your path now Emmeline, you are on it, and you yourself cannot change it. But you've put your life in someone's hands whom you barely know. For your sake, I wish only that the sacrifices we all made to keep you safe have not been worth nothing. And I hope for all of our sake, that you find him."
Emmeline turned away from him and looked out of the window once more. She looked down at the sill and picked at the flaking paint, "But you forget, in making those choices to protect me, you ALL left me."
Geras ignored her, "You should head east. Here in the west, everything is dying."
By the time she turned around, he was gone.