LAST WEEK: River discovers that Thanatos is a god of the dead and that he is draining blood from coma patients. He also learns that Pam is a vampire.
Read last week’s installment here. See all installments here.
Chapter 96
Thanatos
Greece — the Time before Time
Thanatos’ Tale
Vampires are even more susceptible to AIDS than humans. After all, humans need food, clothing, and shelter. The only necessities for vampires are blood and darkness. Deny or pollute either and the results are immediate. The virus dissolves their canines and robs them of the will to hunt. And a vampire without the desire to hunt or the ability to drink will perish.
It’s strange, but being immortal makes them more finite. They have no soul to travel to the land of eternity, so they return to dust. Perhaps that is why Thanatos, ferryman to forever, feels the need to prolong their existence.
Thanatos has always been a ferryman to the dead. He waits for souls on the banks of the River Styx. If they have a coin for payment, he’ll row them across. If not, they’re forced to wander the shore for one hundred years. But the dead are in no hurry. They have no shortage of time. A hundred years isn’t even a blip in the sea of eternity.
***
Thanatos is a son of Nyx (Night) and Erebos (Darkness). He has a twin brother, Hypnos (Sleep), but they are not close. Hypnos has always been their parents’ favorite. And who can blame them? Thanatos was born old and bearded. Hypnos has always been young and beautiful. Wings encircle his golden curls. He was never any trouble, preferring slumber to action. He moved away from home at birth, taking up residence in a cave where the sun’s questing fingers could not reach. Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, flows through his subterranean palace, murmuring lullabies. Poppies redder than sunset and chamomile delicate as dreams carpet the entrance to his home. He has no door or gate so he can never be disturbed by creaking hinges.
Thanatos, on the other hand, never closes his eyes to reality. He’s often portrayed as grim death, but he’s no killer. He’s a guide of souls, a psychopomp, midwife to death, delivering new souls to eternity. He’s a referee between unconscious and conscious; a bridge, coupling instinct and thought, life and death. His role is not to judge, but to provide safe passage.
Hypnos, that nightly foreshadower of death, is viewed as sweet release. But Thanatos, deliverer of eternal rest, is dreaded. It’s curious and unfair, as Thanatos presides only over peaceful deaths.
His stepsisters, the Keres, are the violent ones. They hover over battlefields smelling out the weak and the wounded. Gnashing pointy teeth, grim-eyed, fierce, and strong as time, they fight over the dark blood of the dying. Wrapping dripping talons tightly around expiring souls, they carry them straight to Hades.
Thanatos never kills. He’s just the messenger.
Thanatos’ other sisters, the Moirai, who weave, measure, and cut the cloth of life, often get an unfair rap, too. Although they enjoy the power of measuring out existence with a ruler, of weaving life stories on a loom, and ending tales with a snip, they don’t control the fabric. They do the best they can with the thread and pattern provided.
Thanatos sighs. They’ve never been a close family. He can’t even remember the last time they all got together, and Thanatos has a long memory. All gods do.
His sisters all have the travel bug. The Keres follow war and the scent of blood. The Moirai love to set up shop in odd locales, then vanish in a flash, leaving no forwarding address. Not Thanatos. He likes a home; a home, and a regular schedule.
He’d been happy, or at least as happy as a boatman to the dead can be, ferrying back ‘n forth between the banks of the river Styx and Hades.
Thanatos remembers a time when the banks overflowed with shades waiting patiently, coins clenched between teeth. He and his better-known brother, Charon, could barely keep up with the stream of dead, even when both of them worked 24-7, polling back ‘n forth across the river.
Later, much, much later in human time, although hardly a blink of an eye, or rather socket, for Thanatos, people began putting coins over the eyes of the dead.
Thanatos hated the change. Not that he minded the extra money, but these new shades were more boisterous and less fearful. Perhaps, he thought, because it’s easier to ignore what you cannot see. If you close your eyes to reality, you do not dread it. Also, it’s harder to talk with a mouthful of coin.
In the Victorian era, 1837 to1901, coins were placed over the eyes of the dead to prevent them from looking upon the living and taking them to the other side. All the doors in the house were unlocked because a locked door might trap the soul and the ghost would haunt the locksmith forever. All mirrors were so that the living would not see death reflected. For if you saw death, you would soon go to him. The corpse was carried out of the house feet first, so that they could not come back.
All through that time, the banks were jam-packed with loud, blind corpses.
But now the river Styx is forgotten. The way lost. Souls rarely arrive on the shore. Those who do usually lack the fare. So, Thanatos branched out and went where he was needed.
He’s not alone. Like snowbirds fleeing winter, many of the Greek Gods, having lost their followers, packed their bags, and moved to more receptive climes. The Bay Area was a popular destination, with its forgiving mists, spiritual uncertainty, and divergent dress. At first, some of the older, harsher gods had favored stricter locales —Alabama or Arabia, Texas, or Tehran. But Texas and Tehran had not favored them. And it’s the height of ignominy for a God to be driven from town by an angry mob who disapprove of their hair length or fashion sense.
Thanatos had moved directly to San Francisco. He felt at home there. He updated his resume and went into business, expanding from ferryman for the dead, to merchant and minister for the undead.
Thanatos can smell those who can neither live nor die. When he found The Quiet Dignity Coma Care Center and Residential Facility and breathed in the tang of all that blood just going to waste, he set up his delivery business.
It’s a common misapprehension that gods feel no pity. Humans are made from partials of stardust and eternity. Gods are created out of fear, from darkness, pain, hope, desire and very, very occasionally, pity. When a God is in power, the belief of his followers flows through his veins thicker than blood. And no one knows the terror of darkness more completely than a God who has lost believers. No one comprehends the fear of non-existence more thoroughly than an immortal. Perhaps this is why children fear death so intensely. When at our zenith, loss of being is the most terrible to contemplate.
Thanatos understands fear and craves purpose. He knows that new ailments call for new treatments. Pamela and Mike are only two of his customers. AIDS has decimated the vampire community. If Thanatos does not find them, the diseased are doomed to waste away in cellars and caves. They are echoes in the night. The unseen something that whispers in the dark.
It’s a good thing that Thanatos is a God and so can travel quickly and with ease. Many of his customers have fled the city.
They live in caves on Mount Diablo and Mount Tamalpais. Mount Diablo and Mount Tamalpais are the Medicine Mountains of the Bay area, twin holy eyes. Thirty-seven miles apart, they soar 3,864 feet up into soft heavens, holding the city between rocky arms.
Rare manzanita trees grow both on Mount Diablo and Mount Tamalpais, their red bark peeling off like dried ribbons of tattered flesh, revealing the baby smooth green limbs of dryads.
Manzanitas molt to slough off parasites, molds, and bad memories. Often from the gray wood of dead trees, new trees spring, death and life, intertwining. It’s here that many of the undead make their home, surrounded by ghosts and memories.
Once Mount Diablo was surrounded by water. The Miwok say that from the bones of Mount Diablo, Coyote the creator and his assistant Eagle-man, formed all of earth and the first people, the Miwoks.
Mount Diablo is where, under the crescent moon, the departed gather for purification before entering the land of the dead.
Here in red, sandstone caves, spirits dance. Large snakes with rainbow scales are glimpsed, but never caught. Phantom black panthers prowl the slopes, leaving no prints in the soft, red dust of creation. Frogs have been found living within solid slabs of limestone.
In 1805, a band of Miwoks, fleeing the Spanish soldiers who wanted to teach them the ways of Christ and convert them to laborers, hid in a willow thicket on the Mount. Though the Spaniards camped there overnight and scoured the area the next day, the Miwoks were never captured. The Spaniards came to the only possible conclusion. The Miwok had been aided by the devil.
Monte del Diablo actually means thicket of the devil. But as is usual in this and all tales, Monte was misinterpreted by English speakers to mean mountain.
A year later, in 1806, a flock of phantoms flew out of the mountain caves, cutting off General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, thwarting his pursuit of a second group of Miwoks.
In 2005, Arthur Mijares petitioned the federal government to change the name of Mount Diablo.
Firstly, it offended his Christian beliefs.
Secondly, he said, the federal law bans naming geographical landmarks after living people. Since the Devil is obviously alive, the name was illegal.
He proposed rechristening Mount Diablo to Mount Reagan. But the change never came to pass.
One night, under a crescent moon, Mijares took his poodles, Ronnie and Nancy, out for a stroll. He never returned. Ronnie and Nancy were found some days later, dirty and full of burs in the shadow of Diablo. They refused to come when called, running into the thickets of the Mount, snarling and biting, like wild beasts.
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK: Sarah is proud of her ancestry: not of the famous white man buried in her genes, but of her mother and grandmothers who’d kept the gifts of literature and knowledge alive within her. She scorns any man who would cage what he loves, no matter the motive or the enclosure.
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.