Echoes of the Afterlife

The musty smell pulled Jethro out of his nap. A thin sheen of condensation coated his skin, residue of the muggy air that dampened his clothes and made his skin sticky. Sounds of dripping water echoed off of cavernous walls, turning small plips into cacophonous clangs. His old joints complained about the rigid, weathered wooden bench he was seated on, and he adjusted himself out of discomfort. He tried moving, only to feel himself rock with the motion in a way he hadn’t expected. He heard the swish of a paddle pushing through water, and he realized he was on a boat, floating down a river.

In his eighty-six years of being alive, Jethro had plenty of strange experiences, but taking a nap and waking up on a wooden boat inside a cave was not one of them. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t really remember falling asleep, and waking up hadn’t really felt the same way waking up normally did. It felt more like coming out of a trance, like his consciousness was materializing after disappearing for a while.

Across from him, he heard shuffling and murmuring from two people. After a few seconds of adjustment, one of them spoke up. “Where the hell are we?” He said. His voice was high pitched for a man, but he seemed to compensate for this by speaking more aggressively, over-enunciating every word. He directed that obnoxious voice ahead of them, demanding, “Who are you? What’s going on here?”

There was another gentle swishing noise, this time on Jethro’s side of the boat, as whoever was guiding it pushed their paddle through the water. In an ethereal voice, somehow sounding like it emanated from the walls of the cavern as much as the man himself, he said, “Do you not remember your last moments?”

“My…” the little man spluttered. “My what?”

The ethereal voice became clearer as the ferryman turned to face them. “Your last moments on earth,” he replied, a condescending timbre to his words. “Before you died.”

The woman screamed. The man tumbled off the bench and scrambled backwards. “What the fuck?” he spluttered. He turned to Jethro. “Are you seeing this shit?” he asked, in apparent disbelief.

Jethro turned his head towards the ferryman, then back to the man. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

“The fucking skeleton in a cloak standing three feet away from you?”

Jethro tilted his head in thought. “Oh yes, quite spooky,” he said, “Although I suppose that’s to be expected after you die.” He turned back towards the ferryman. “Excuse me, Mr Skeleton. You wouldn’t happen to be the ferryman of the river Styx, would you?”

“Indeed I am,” Charon replied, turning back and pushing the paddle through the water again. “I thank you for being polite.”

“Yes, well,” said Jethro, chuckling lightly, “I imagine in your line of work people aren’t always very happy to see you.”

“One of the hazards of shepherding the dead, I’m afraid.”

The woman spoke for the first time since they woke, with a thick, nasally midwestern accent. “This can’t be the end,” she whimpered. “My kids, they won’t have a mother anymore.”

“Very optimistic of you to assume they survived that car crash,” Charon replied, sounding bored with the exchange already.

“Wouldn’t you know whether they died?” the woman said, her earlier whimpering tone transmuting into a more entitled whine. “You’re the Grim Reaper, aren’t you?”

“I’m not,” he replied. “And if I did know, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

In a voice that sounded like she was about to demand to speak to the manager, the woman said, “Why not?”

“It would cause more trouble than it’s worth.”

She huffed, apparently at a loss for words. Instead, the man spoke up again. “I have unfinished business too, you know,” he said, matching her irritated tone. “I’m twenty-nine. I had a future to live for, I wasn’t ready to die yet.” He turned briefly to Jethro, then back to Charon. “Not like this guy, anyway.”

Jethro frowned. Who was this kid to decide when another person should die, anyway? “With foul manners like that,” Jethro replied, intentionally condescending him, “the world is probably better off without you.”

“Shut up, old timer,” the little man barked. “There has to be a way out, right?” he said to Charon. “A way I can go back?”

“The chances of surviving that kind of overdose are one in a million,” Charon replied.

“That’s not a no.”

Charon sighed, with undertones of annoyance faintly audible beneath it. He pushed and pulled the paddle more vigorously, until the boat landed on the river bank, sand crunching beneath its wooden hull. “Over there is a tunnel that leads back out to the world,” Charon said, his voice directed towards the cavern’s smooth walls. “If you can make it through there without touching the walls or the floor, you’ll be returned to life.”

“How am I supposed to walk without touching the ground?” the man said, bordering on outrage.

“You know what I meant,” Charon replied, still nonplussed. “Can’t put your hands on anything.”

“It’s pitch black in there,” the man complained. “How am I supposed to guide myself out without using my hands?”

“Have faith,” Charon replied, sounding like he was only half joking.

The man snorted. “Easy,” he said. “I’m a Catholic priest. I eat faith for breakfast.”

“And you believe God is the right person to put your faith into?” Charon asked, with a hint of a chuckle in his voice.

A short silence passed, the contempt between the two as palpable as the humidity in the cave. “I don’t believe it, I know it,” the priest replied.

Charon chuckled again. “Good luck.”

The priest marched out of the boat so ferociously that it nearly rocked itself away from the bank. Jethro listened as his steps squelched through wet sand, then scraped through gravel, until eventually simmering into light taps treading on stone. The echoes of his footsteps changed their shape and tone as the priest ascended into the tunnel, then grew quieter as he traveled further down. Hardly a minute later, the sound of sliding and scraping echoed back out into the cavern, followed by a muffled curse, then the much louder sound of rocks collapsing and causing the ground to rumble. The priest began to shout, but it was cut off by the crunch of his own bones as the rockslide crushed him.

Charon sighed. “Every time.”

“I’m going to try,” the woman blurted.

The boat rocked as she stood from her seat. Charon paused in the middle of picking up his paddle, then turned to face her. “You think you’ll succeed where he failed?”

“I have to,” the woman huffed. “My children need me.”

“You still think they’re alive?” Charon replied, sounding amused.

“If they died in that accident too, they would be here with me,” the woman said.

“You’re assuming they died at the same time you did,” Charon replied, a smile tinting his voice. “You’re assuming quite a lot, in fact.”

“Or perhaps it’s faith,” the woman retorted. “Maybe I just have faith that my children are waiting for me.”

“Putting your faith in other people rarely ends well,” Charon said. “But if you want to risk it, I won’t stop you.”

The woman stomped out of the boat, almost as if she was trying to crack the ground beneath her. To her credit, it sounded like she made it a little further than the priest did. But—in almost the exact same fashion—she slipped, she fell, and she got halfway through screaming before the rockslide flattened her lungs.

Jethro sighed, adjusted his suspenders, and grabbed his cane. “Well,” he said, “let’s give this a shot. Looks like a fun challenge.”

“Why?” Charon said, something approaching bewilderment rising in his voice. “You’re old. Even if you succeed, you’ll die again soon after.”

“Then I have nothing to lose,” Jethro replied.

“Hm.” Charon tapped the end of his paddle on the base of the boat. “I suppose I can’t argue with that.”

Jethro smiled, then pushed himself to his feet, ready to exit the boat. As he stepped up to the edge, he was stopped by a bony hand grabbing his shoulder.

"Not so fast," Charon said. "Let me have that cane."

A chill traveled up the back of Jethro's neck at the ferryman's spidery touch. He turned, letting Charon's hand slide off his shoulder and gripping his cane. "Why?"

"Your cane is an extension of your arm, making the end of it essentially your hand," Charon explained. "If you use it to guide you, you'll fail the challenge."

Jethro gave Charon a wry smile. "You would take an old man’s walking stick away from him?"

Charon chuckled. "We both know you don’t use it to walk."

It wasn’t that Jethro couldn’t see without his cane—he had other tricks up his sleeve. It was the principle of the thing. Charon was right. His cane was an extension of himself, it had been for eighty years of his life. Whether Charon was trying to help him or handicap him, Jethro couldn’t say. But if it was the latter, Jethro was more than happy to prove him wrong.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll have faith in myself.” He handed Charon the cane, then stepped out of the boat and began his march towards the tunnel.

As it had with the previous two folks, his first footsteps here accompanied by the crunching of sand beneath his feet, the friction between grains loosened by the water soaking into it. The gravel—which was really just a louder and more unpleasant version of sand—was next, but it didn’t last long. When he reached stone, he instantly had a better idea of where he was.

He faced the tunnel ahead of him, and clicked his tongue. The soundwaves went out, bouncing off of the limestone walls, then radiated back to Jethro. One was all it took, and the cavern told him everything he needed to know. The opening of the tunnel was small and winding, with jagged walls and plenty of stalagmites to trip over. Treacherous, certainly, but not impossible.

As he ascended through the tunnel, clicking his tongue occasionally to regain his bearings, his mind began to wander. He wondered where the other two had met their end, and he clicked his tongue once more to see if he could find them. A yard or two ahead of him, he detected a softer texture, absorbing more sound than the limestone. Skin, he reckoned. He walked towards it, kicked it with his foot. The ball of his foot hit the pastor squarely in the nose—he reckoned it was the pastor anyway, unless the woman from earlier had a thick mustache. Of the six or seven stalactites that fell on him, the echoes indicated two of them standing up crookedly. It occurred to Jethro that they probably impaled the guy, and he decided to keep walking, having no desire to accidentally step in blood.

The cave became smaller as he continued on, and he found himself having to click his tongue more often to make it out. As his stops became more frequent, he started to wonder if impatience was what caused most people to fail. It had certainly been the cause of the mother’s end—Jethro learned that pretty quickly after accidentally treading on her hair. The further he went, the more debris got in his way—everything from crumbled limestone to dry bones, snapping and crumbling beneath his feet. But unlike everyone else who had failed before him, Jethro had eighty years of experience taking his time while navigating. He knew what to do, and he did it well, all the way up to the end of the tunnel.

As he stepped out onto the grass, breathing in the fresh air, he felt himself lifted up into the air. The sensation of being taken off of the ground was unpleasant, like a plant being pulled out of its roots. But it didn’t last long, and soon his eyelids fluttered open. He felt bedsheets around him—the scratchy felt ones that they always gave you in hospitals. He realized his daughter would be visiting later, and it cheered him up to know he’d been able to hang on long enough to hear her voice again. There was one more thing he had to check, and he reached to the side of his bed, feeling past the segments on the railing.

When he found it, he breathed a sigh of relief. His cane lay where it always was, leaning up against the right side of his bed.