Abandon - Meg Cabot [76]
I felt myself blushing for some reason.
“When I died…what happened…it was…” I shook my head. It was amazing. Now that I’d finally found someone who’d actually believe me, the words wouldn’t come. I could never tell this nice old man what it was really like in the Underworld, or what I’d been through there. “It wasn’t like in books,” I said finally. “I had to run. I had to.”
Mr. Smith raised his eyebrows. “I see,” he said. “But first, he gave you that?” He pointed to the necklace in my hands. “And somehow it came back with you?”
I was still too ashamed about what I had done back then to look him in the eye. I stared down at the stone. It seemed to wink back, white as Mr. Smith’s shirt.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d met him before, here, on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, when I was seven. He was…nice, that day. Then I died when I was fifteen, and I saw him again. That day, he wasn’t so nice. At least at first. I’ve only seen him a couple of times since then. Once was last night.” Suddenly, I realized I’d ruined my back-to-school manicure by peeling off most of the polish as I’d talked to him. It was lying in flakes all over the wood floor beneath my chair. Great. “John…he scares me,” I heard myself admit. “He can act a little bit…wild. I didn’t know why before, but now, thanks to you, I think I have a better idea. I want to help him, but he won’t let me —”
Mr. Smith made a slight hooting noise. “Oh, no. I would imagine your help is the last thing he wants.”
I lifted my hands in a helpless gesture. “Then I don’t know what to do. Doesn’t he scare you?”
“Well…maybe a little, at the beginning. One hazard of working in a cemetery, I guess, is that you see scary things all the time. But —” Richard Smith shrugged. “You know why they call this place Island of Bones, don’t you? You can’t have a place that’s routinely littered with the dead and not have it be an entrance to the Underworld —”
I looked up at him, my heart seeming to shrivel inside my chest. “Is that what Isla Huesos is?”
“Well, of course, Miss Oliviera,” he said, grinning a little. “What did you think? And with that, of course, you have to have a keeper of the dead. And someone with a job like that is bound to be a bit scary.”
“And is that who he is?” I asked, thinking of the name written above the door of the crypt beside which I’d met him twice now. I didn’t want to ask it. But now that I knew about the necklace, I had to. “Is he…Hades?”
Outside, the first few drops of rain began to fall, pelting the tin roof. Slow at first. But hard. They sounded like bullets.
“Of course not.” The old man looked surprised. “Hades was a god, and John Hayden’s not that. He was born a man, and lived like a man, and died like one, and only then came to be what you and I know him as now…ruler of the Underworld.”
“So, he took Hades’ place when he…retired?” I asked, still not understanding.
Mr. Smith shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “As close as I’ve been able to figure out — and please understand, you’re the only person I’ve ever met besides John who’s actually been there — John’s isn’t the Underworld. I personally don’t believe there can be a single Underworld. That would be quite an honor for our little island, but there’s been a bit of a population explosion since the days of Homer, don’t you think?”
I stared at him. “I didn’t understand a single thing you just said.” Except that John wasn’t Hades. Which was a relief, I supposed. But I still didn’t get what he was, exactly. “Who’s Homer?”
He sighed as if wondering how he’d been cursed with such an inept pupil, then turned back to his book about death deities, showing me a section of brightly colored illustrations, each depicting a different representation of what looked, to me, like hell. But I supposed to someone like him, they looked like super-fun playgrounds.
“Look,” Richard Smith said, obviously trying to be patient with me. “It’s quite simple, really. Every culture, every religion