The Gatekeeper's House (6 page)

***

Dusk was settling across the valley
when Jen noticed a set of headlights turn up the gravel drive
toward the Melner Cabin. Pete jumped up from his rocking
chair.

“
That him?” he
asked.

“
I guess.” She got up,
too.

It wasn’t too dark to see it was Hip.
He parked, grabbed the keys, and hopped from the car with the grace
of a jackrabbit. Then he sauntered up the deck stairs as though he
were aware of his audience. Whatever had made him leave in such a
hurry must be behind him now.

“
Hello,” he said as he
topped the steps.

“
Everything alright?” Pete
asked. “You left pretty quick.”

“
Family emergency,” Hip
said, crossing the wooden deck to lean on one of the rails
overlooking the valley. “My dad was out of town, but now he’s got
everything under control.”

“
What happened?” Jen
asked.

Hip continued to gaze out at the
reservoir and the mountains on the other side. “I won’t bore you
with the gory details.”

“
We’re worried about
Therese,” Pete said. “Can you get us in touch with your
brother?”

Hip spun around to look at Pete.
“Worried? Why?”

Pete pulled off his cowboy hat and
played with it, like he often did when he was nervous. He averted
his eyes. Jen wondered if he’d tell Hip the truth. “I got a bad
feeling.”

Hip took a few steps closer to Jen and
her brother and studied Pete with narrowed eyes. Although her
brother was tall and well-built, the new handler was at least an
inch taller and thicker all around. “What kind of bad
feeling?”

“
A really bad feeling,” Pete
said. “Like something’s happened to her. Like she could
be…dead.”

“
We want you to call your
brother,” Jen said. “We aren’t leaving here until you do.” She held
up her chin to let him know she wasn’t backing down.

The new handler had the gall to smirk.
Jen wanted to slap the expression right off his face.

“
Is that a threat or a
promise?” he said with a wink.

She felt the blood rush to her cheeks,
but she refused to look away. “You can take it however you
want.”

To her relief, he slipped a cell phone
from his back pocket. “Before I call my brother, I have a question
for Pete.”

Pete looked up at him.
“Shoot.”

“
Are you a seer?”

“
A what?” Pete
asked.

“
A seer.”

“
What’s a seer?” Jen
asked.

“
A person who can see
ghosts,” Hip replied. “A seer can use ghosts to find out about the
future.”

Pete looked at Jen, but Jen didn’t know
what to tell her brother. She sure as heck wasn’t going to say
anything. If Pete saw ghosts, he was the one who’d have to decide
if he was going to share it with others.

“
Are
you
?” Pete asked Hip.

Hip chuckled. “I’m not exactly a seer,
but I do see them.”

Jen’s mouth dropped open and Pete
started talking a mile a minute.

“
They’re everywhere. Mostly
Indians. But I saw Therese,” Pete said. “Does that mean
she’s…”

“
No,” Hip said. “No, Therese
is fine.”

Jen was surprised by Hip’s change in
demeanor from arrogant jerk to someone kind and…comforting. “Are
you sure? How do you know?” she asked.

“
I just spoke with Than,
when I was checking on my family emergency. Therese is fine. I’ll
tell her to call you. I think she and Than are tied up this
evening.”

Jen put her hands on her hips and
squared herself to the new handler. “I thought you said the wedding
was off. Why doesn’t she come back home?”

“
I’ll let her explain that
to you,” Hip replied. Then he turned to Pete. “You okay,
man?”

Pete nodded. “Just glad Therese is
okay.”

Hip slapped Pete on the shoulder in a
friendly gesture, saying, “Good,” and Jen felt a ripple of jealousy
crawl down her back. She wanted Hip to pat her on the shoulder,
too.

“
See you in the morning?”
Pete asked.

“
I’ll be there,” Hip said,
and gave Jen another wink.

She rolled her eyes as she
made her way down the steps, but secretly felt elated.
You can wink at me all you like, mister,
she thought.

***

As Hip watched the girl
walking away from him, admiring her curves and chuckling over the
prayer she’d unwittingly sent to him—
You
can wink at me all you like, mister
—he was
distracted by a sound he at first mistook for the howling of
wolves. But soon the ghosts wandering around the Melner cabin took
up the same terrifying call, and a light went off inside his
brain.

Melinoe.

Melinoe the Malevolent, she’d come to
be called by Hip and his family. Even Persephone, the last one to
hold out on believing in the existence of a redemptive quality in
her daughter, had finally found Melinoe repugnant. It was
impossible to love something so vile and cruel.

Some
thing
, not some
one
. Hip hardly considered her a
person anymore. She was a wicked, evil thing who wreaked havoc on
earth by tormenting lost souls and driving mortals
insane.

Had she been behind the attack on the
Underworld? It certainly provided her with an opportunity to
harness more ghosts for her nightmarish antics, but Hip doubted she
could pull off such a formidable attack on her own. If she were
involved and not merely benefiting from it, she must have combined
forces with another.

As Hip watched Pete and Jen pull away
in Pete’s pick up, he heard Jen’s prayers to him change from
flirtatious to frightened.

What is that howling, Hip?
I have a feeling you know more than you’re letting on.

He hoped he’d have a chance to visit
her again tonight in her dreams, as he had nearly every night in
the course of a year, but Melinoe’s command of the ghosts in this
area had him worried. He sent a prayer out to Than.

Do you hear that,
bro?
Hip prayed.

Melinoe is near,
Than replied.
I need your
help before I lose Therese forever.

Chapter Five: Melinoe the
Malevolent

As soon as Than heard the howling of
the lost souls, he knew his estranged sister was near, working her
evil. He’d abandoned Canada and brought the siphon to Therese’s old
room, and though he could not multiply the device, he disintegrated
into twenty so that he might herd the spirits toward it. He hoped
to save as many souls in the area as possible from the clutches of
Melinoe the Malevolent.

Therese and her parents were among
them, but Therese was resisting his attempt to rescue her. Unable
to break free from Melinoe’s call, she continued to howl along with
the other ghosts, but unlike them, she recognized him and saw what
he was doing.

“
Don’t run from me,” he
cried as he followed her and her parents from her room into the
woods, which were dark with nightfall. “Come with me before it’s
too late!”

“
Noooo!” she howled. “I
don’t want tooooooo! They know-ow-ow-ow meeeee!”

“
You don’t understand,” he
said, pointing his siphon toward them only to be evaded again.
“They’re in danger. So are you!”

He took as many souls as he was able
while trying to persuade Therese to cooperate, but she and her
parents continued to flee up the mountain as they howled. Than
followed a few more feet and then stopped in his tracks. Several
yards away, past the evergreens and Cypresses, in a clearing
directly above him, stood Melinoe with her asymmetrical eyes, one
white and the other black, fixed on his.

In each hand, one white and the other
black, she held multiple whips, and on the ends of each whip were
five to ten souls trapped in the leather straps like the victims of
a group of octopi. Altogether, she had acquired at least fifty new
ghosts to add to her menagerie.

And Therese and her parents were
running straight for her.

With a roar louder than the howls of
all the souls combined, Than disintegrated into a massive army and
attacked his monstrous sister, unfurling her fists until the whips
were dropped. Hip arrived in time to see Than whisk the Malevolent
away from the woods and across the evening sky—all the way across
the earth into the darkness of Greece. On the southernmost tip of
Greece at Cape Matapan were the ruins of Poseidon’s old temple
beside an abandoned lighthouse. Beneath the lighthouse was a cave
that once served as an entrance into the Underworld. When Hades
banished Melinoe to the cave, he had sealed off the gates. The army
of Thans now returned Melinoe to her cave where Hades awaited
them.

“
Hello,
Father
,” she hissed with an ironic
emphasis on “Father.”

Half of her face was smooth and black,
and the other was white and misshapen. On the white side of her
face was the black eye, and on the black side, the white. Her black
arm was also smooth, like a slender eel, but the skin of the white
arm hung loose in places and was spotted with hairy moles. The hair
on her head was parted down the middle and each side of the part
matched the side of the face it framed, so that whenever you saw
her profile, depending on which way she was turned, she looked
either all black or all white. It wasn’t until you faced her square
on that you saw her duality.

“
You stopped being my
daughter long ago,” Hades said.

“
And even way before that!”
she growled. “Back and back and back and back and back!”

“
Silence!” Hades roared.
“Tell me who was in league with you against my kingdom and
why.”

Melinoe laughed. Then, along with her
laughter, she repeated her mantra of, “Back and back and back and
back and back!”

***

The screeching in Therese’s phantom
ears, which had caused her to wail, finally stopped. She backed
away from Than toward her parents’ souls, assessing the situation.
She wasn’t sure what had just happened, but she was certain Than
wanted to return her parents to the Underworld.

“
They remember me!” she said
to him in the woods outside her home. “If you take them back,
they’ll forget me all over again!”

Than lowered the strange gun in his
hands and took a step back. Was he leaving her?

“
Don’t go,” she
said.

“
I’m not going anywhere,” he
said.

She could tell he was still hurt from
earlier that day, when she’d announced for the third time that she
was moving in with Hecate. She hadn’t meant to hurt him, and her
phantom heart tightened in her chest.

“
You don’t understand,” he
said. He was kind but aloof. “Unbound souls are in danger of
becoming enslaved. If we leave your parents to roam the earth,
Melinoe will capture them and…”

“
Why didn’t you ever tell me
you had another sister?” Therese demanded. She couldn’t stop
herself.

“
Therese, what’s going on?”
her father asked.

“
This is Thanatos,” Therese
explained. “He’s the god of the dead.”

The souls of her parents looked at one
another, then at Than, and then back to Therese.

“
I thought you were in love
with him,” her mother said.

If Therese would have had blood in her
cheeks, she would have blushed. “Mom, the point is that he wants to
return you to the Underworld, where you’ve been all this
time.”

Her father narrowed his transparent
eyes and asked, “And that’s bad because?”

“
Because you’ll forget
everything about your mortal life,” Therese huffed. “You’ll forget
me.”

“
But what was this business
about becoming enslaved?” Therese’s mother asked.

Than stepped forward. “It’s not safe
for souls to wander the Upperworld. They’re unprotected. Melinoe is
just one of many deities who’ve been known to enslave mortal souls
and use them to drive humans insane.”

“
Why would she do such a
thing?” Therese asked.

Than shrugged. “No one understands her.
Something happened to her while my mother was pregnant with her. My
mother never speaks of it.”

“
But that’s not Melinoe’s
fault,” Therese objected.

Than shook his head. “Look, don’t you
think we tried for centuries to help her? Don’t you think we tried
everything possible?”

Therese opened her mouth to say
something, but instead, it hung open. Finally she said, “I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean to suggest…”

“
What’s important right now
is that I get all of you back to safety,” Than said.

Therese felt a panic welling inside of
her. “Wait! Just hold on!” She looked at her parents on either side
of her and then pleaded with Than. “Let me have a few days more
with them. I beg of you!”