Collector of Souls - Part 1
A God and His Three-Headed Pup
There are those kinds of souls who enjoy gossiping on patios, people-watching with a beverage in hand as a zephyr fills the air with the crackling tunes of ice cubes. You know the type. They’re the sort who take pleasure in the sunshine and sit on benches with their friends or go for long walks in meadows with bees buzzing around. People like my wife. Then there are people like me, wind-and-rain kind of guys. Dark skies, looming storms. I’m the guy who thinks there’s nothing more delicious than taking in the smell of fire and brimstone. My dream day consists of exploring the various pits and tunnels of the Underworld and roaming forgotten rooms.
Dead ends!
Back in the day, when the Underworld was truly a goddamn nightmare (the streets were brimming with souls, creatures and spirits alike wandered around unaccounted for, and, yes, everyone was trying to break into Elysium), there was no better way to get away from the woes of executive management than to get lost behind the many secret, ancient walls of my realm.
I’m sure some of my staff thought I was traipsing off to burn weird oils, mutter fucking chants, and join a subterranean orgy, but I was simply going on walks. My space away from the countless issues allowed me to gaze with unruffled curiosity at death as though it were a remote disturbance that did not involve me.
After some time, I felt strongly that I would enjoy my little recesses with a companion. Not with a person—my contact with others was usually from a distance—but with an animal.
At least, those had been my hopes back then when I was looking through BeastFinder, which allows you to search the divine world for any kind of creature you desire. You can even narrow down the search within a specified radius of your abode. All types of critters are available: Centaurs, Chimeras, Cyclopes, and those are just the C’s. Each adorable monster came with an accompanying biography and profile picture, making it a trying experience to settle on only one!
Cerberus was a mangy, three-headed puppy with an adorable little serpent tail. His profile stated his mother was Echidna, the mother of all monsters; ergo, I knew his genealogy was rock solid. He had some siblings, but something about him spoke to me.
“Let’s go see this one,” I said to my wife, Persephone.
“Are you sure you want a three-headed dog?” she asked, peering over my shoulder as I flipped through the latest compendium of monsters. “He looks like a little brute who hates everything.”
“Then we’ll get along famously.”
I had a theory that souls who hated everything did, in fact, love at least one thing: other souls who hated everything too. Besides, I needed a friend for all my perambulations. The Underworld has a lot of, well, underworld. I could picture us going on long spelunking adventures in the natural caves in the bedrock of the Earth itself, independent yet together as we explored and snuggled into periods of glorious silence.
“But don’t you want to check out a few more? You haven’t made it that far through the list.”
“Nah,” I said breezily, “this one is special. I can feel it.”
I felt pretty optimistic because, secretly, I believed myself to be a beast whisperer, and I could use my divine powers to mold Cerberus into the perfect hound.
So. I was wrong.
As it turned out, I was not some sort of beast whisperer. Furthermore, the three heads weren’t as rockstar as I thought they would be. The first clue to Cerberus’s neurotic nature, and the signal that things might not go well for me, was that he refused to eat for days after I brought him home to the Underworld.
All three heads refused to eat the nine dog food brands that I had conjured. I tried everything. Oh, how I tried. I even offered him filet mignon and rubies. I’ve since learned that he’s just nervous, and any change to the environment upsets him. Come to think of it, it was Persephone who had said something along the lines of, “Change, even good change, can initially be experienced as a loss.” Being that I had abducted my wife—a story for another time—I wondered if she was subtly hinting at more than the dog. Regardless, I realized that there may be something in that astute observation. Persephone generally knows.
I resisted, therefore. The urge to return Cerberus, that is, even though the clues that he wasn’t quite the dog I had imagined him to be were starting to pile up almost immediately. Those daydreams of long, quiet promenades in the Underworld…gone. From what I could tell, the rightmost dog (your right when the time comes for you to face him head-on) held a firm belief that silence should not exist. The fact that things were quiet in the land of the dead filled the right one with what I would call an uncontrollable, psychotic rage? It would probably be manageable if it was just one head, but of course, when the right one started barking, then the left one, alarmed by the right one, kicked into his own hysterical fit.
And with the chorus of the right and left wailing out in anguish, that duo would finally break the middle head. After the middle one joined the fray, the outer two heads barked even louder in surprise, only to further upset the middle one again. And so it went, the trio having crafted this positive (really, negative) feedback loop of shriek-barking.
The exquisite code of the dog lover within prevented me from clipping all three of them on the head. Still, I would have murdered something tiny and adorable to get them to stop making that racket. I simply wanted one oasis of peace in my life, and I had a suspicion that they could make this noise forever if they felt it necessary.
Also, it was embarrassing.
Other spirits wandering the Underworld would stop and look on at the spectacle in suppressed horror. Of course, I could still decipher what their looks meant. They would have glared if they could, but being who I was, they simply looked on in concern, confirming with themselves and conveying to me that I must be some grim breed of divinity to have such a dog. And if Cerberus was their dog, their hierarchy of the owner-dog relationship wouldn’t allow a canine such congress. Gods like me should be locked away in Tartarus for all eternity.
Back home, at the end of our walks, Cerberus always scuttled over to Persephone. After he gave me a reproachful glance, he snuggled next to my wife, effortlessly masking any of his aforementioned weirdness. In those days, I would watch the two of them canoodling as an absurd rage built inside. She didn’t even want me to get him! And he wasn’t the tiniest bit interested in all the affection I had to give. See what feelings the dog brought out in me? The jealous, vindictive streak that threatened to return him because I knew he was impossible.
“What? We can’t return him,” Persephone said.
“And why not?”
“You can’t just return things once you’ve grown tired of them. This is his home. Besides, he’s grown on me.”
Despite Persephone’s protests, a dangerous thought crept into my mind. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures, even in the Underworld…
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