Collector of Souls - Part 2
Missed the first chapter of Hades’s canine catastrophe? Don’t miss part 1. Start the adventure from the beginning!
A God’s Best Friend?
Plans of letting Cereberus off the leash on a future walk and hustling away filled my head. Now, people could look at my behavior in that instance and say, “That guy is clearly Slytherin.” Which was entirely untrue. I was good; I had Hufflepuff in my heart—the salt of the Earth. It’s just that this little terrorist had solidified his status as part of my family, and I was powerless to change that.
Between you and me, I’ve always wanted to not give two fucks, but years ago, ever since I had captured Persephone gathering radiant flowers over a soft meadow, things had changed. She’d lamented at being seized, of course, but it wasn’t as if I held her in the dungeons. In fact, she soon became the captor of my heart. And it was she who could spank and flog me with one mere look on her face. Ever since, I have found that I have become somewhat of a helpless vehicle for making sure the Queen of the Dead is in good spirits.
Thus, plans of abandoning Cerberus in the deeper caverns of the Underworld remained just that—plans.
I will admit that dog ownership wasn’t entirely distressing. Even though Cerberus peed on every possible inch of our home, I often used him as an excuse to get out of social events, which was great since I generally hated people. Well, some personality assessments that I took a long time ago stated that I scored high on attention to detail and was geared toward individual work, but same difference. A wedding on Mt. Olympus? Sorry, I can’t attend because I have this dog I can’t leave. If I do, he will not eat, not drink, but he will use his growing bear strength to cleave through our beautiful palace floors due to separation anxiety. What’s that? Just bring him along, you say? Oh, you try pushing a several-thousand-pound dog off people because he thinks they love it when he jumps at them and pokes them in the face with his paw-talons. That just won’t be a fun situation for anybody.
Circling back to the numbered, almost imperceptible redeeming qualities enfolded within a sea of dreadful ones, it was nice to have another presence in the house. Especially when it was only me haunting the halls.
My marriage with Persephone is rewarding in that we always have each other to lie with in bed at night and talk about how crazy the rest of the world is. However, because of a binding arrangement my brother Zeus made long ago to split custody of my wife between Demeter (read: my needy mother-in-law) and me, Persephone spends every summer away with her mom. Above ground.
“Is it that time again?” I asked Persephone before another one of her yearly adventures upward. She was sequestered in the closet, surrounded by her suitcases.
“Yes, ‘tis,” she said as she packed her precious jewels and matching chitons.
Cerberus shadowed her around the room. I could tell he knew she was leaving because he became convinced that he was going to die at any moment: looking after her with eyes filled with suffering and pain as if she had summoned the suitcases for the sole purpose of his imminent demise. When Cerberus used to stay in the house, he spent his entire life fearing that one of us would leave the premises, watching for the slightest cues. Eventually, he did catch a clue because inevitably, at some point, one of us did leave.
“You want to come with me this time?” Persephone asked. “Mom would love to see you.”
“Are you talking to the dog or to me?”
“Both of you.”
“Yeah, right,” I replied. “My tolerance for interaction with other gods maxes out at about the hour and a half mark. We like it down here, don’t we, CeeCee?” I stooped to ruffle Cerberus’s ears, and I swear I could feel him lean away from me so he wouldn’t be hindered from staring at Persephone. “We like being underworldlings. Besides, your mother hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you.”
I looked at her. A long, straight look. If you’ve been married for a long time, you know the expression.
Facts can be horrid things, you know. That’s all I’ll say about that.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” she allowed.
If I had my way, my wife and I would both hibernate for the summer, but alas, some things are out of my control. To this day, I still revolt in what ways I can, e.g., protesting the warmer months by not wearing shorts since antiquity.
As much as I made fun of Cerberus’s bevy of weird behaviors when it was just me here (crouched over, stiff as a board, staring at me from his corner of the room…constantly), I never took having him around for granted. Maybe because even though I could mock him, I myself morphed into this stinky demon with holes in my shirt and dried Parmesan encrusted into my hair—just sort of loafing about in my own mental filth and old marijuana crumbs.
Clearly, we both missed Persephone when she was gone.
A couple of days after my wife left, I was approaching said train wreck territory. But things still needed to be done. Chthonic deities required annual performance reviews. The dog needed to be walked. Oh, and lording over billions of dead mortals in the Underworld was also still my job. To this day, it still is, albeit a smoother gig now. But in those days, it was just simple math that even with all my cutting-edge changes to the industrial death machine (For example, I set up Charon to ferry souls across the river, and I installed judges to decide where to send those souls afterward), some of the souls still floated about aimlessly—cogs caught in limbo. Eventually, those lost souls meandered to the Underworld’s farthest reaches, and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t be bothered with rounding them up; that is where I went to decompress.
I had discerned early on in my immortality that it was vital for me not to go and do something like eclipse my capacity for responsibility. Especially when my wife’s sabbatical made me descend into psychological chaos. Therefore, I largely ignored the passing souls. All I wanted was one quiet space. Of course, Cerberus didn’t empathize.
You have to understand that he wouldn’t.
Stop.
Barking.
My dog didn’t understand the words “come here” or “no.” Whenever I said them to him, I began to understand how a general probably felt when he ordered a battalion of troops to go forth into the fray only to be met with the rebuttal that they weren’t in the mood. Despite that, I let him off the leash during one of his fits of shriek-barking.
Just to have a moment’s peace.
Okay. Part of me hoped that he would go on a rampage, which: sad. Very sad, of course, for those caught up in the midst of his destruction. But, you know, an action that would hopefully result in Cerberus’s own tragic demise. In the past, I worried that he would be the longest-lived dog I had ever owned.
Why is it always the unstable creatures that seem to go on forever?
Anyway, I uncovered a major clue about what exactly was setting Cerberus’s three heads off that day I let him off the leash: He couldn’t tolerate those wayward spirits, so he had been doing everything in his power to make sure that nobody else could enjoy existing until this problem was rectified.
The happy tragedy I was constructing in my head was interrupted by the fact that Cerberus…did the right thing. He herded the lost soul over to the three judges: Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus. Whether the soul went on to Tartarus, if its deeds above ground were primarily evil, or it went on to Elysium, if its deeds were primarily blessed and pure, or even on to the Asphodel Meadows, if they broke even on the karmic scale, I didn’t know. Because I was so ecstatic to cling to this rare, beneficial attribute of Cerberus’s that I rushed him home to reward him with treats. With fewer souls haunting my safe space, I could just slip on tears of unadulterated glee.
That night, I even let him sleep at the foot of the bed, and I lay propped up against the pillows on the other end, reminiscing about how great it was that we saved that soul.
I know—it’s horrifying how great I can feel for things I have co-opted from others and haven’t actually done. It’s a handy piece of luggage within my emotional baggage set.
Just let me have this. Because for the first time, I got to feel what it was like to like my dog.
So. As I watched Cerberus snore peacefully, I mentally sketched out the grand gate I would build for him to guard, imagining him herding the souls between the riverbank and the judgment room. I also thanked him. For acting as the perfect mirror in my hand that I held up only to see my own anxious nature reflected. And how finding something else to focus on helps diffuse that energy.
A relatable plight
This whole escapade is a classic case of “be careful what you wish for.” Hades thought he’d get a loyal, silent companion for his underworld strolls. Instead, he gets a three-headed terror who refuses to eat, loves to bark, and has zero respect for the concept of peace and quiet. It’s like adopting a small, furry chaos machine.
Even though this story is inspired by the mythical characters of the Underworld, there’s no actual myth about Hades’s tumultuous relationship with his puppy. But it’s fun to imagine, right? My own experience with my last dog, Lexi—a rescue who was a handful for many years—makes Hades’s plight all too relatable. Just like Hades, I discovered that sometimes the pets we choose are the ones that teach us the most about patience, resilience, and unconditional love.
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