The Lightning Thief

them.”
    “There’s a court for dead people?”
    “Yeah. Three judges. They switch around who sits on the bench. King Minos, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare— people like that. Sometimes they look at a life and decide that person needs a special reward—the Fields of Elysium. Sometimes they decide on punishment. But most people, well, they just lived. Nothing special, good or bad. So they go to the Asphodel Fields.”
    “And do what?”
    Grover said, “Imagine standing in a wheat field in Kansas. Forever.”
    “Harsh,” I said.
    “Not as harsh as that,” Grover muttered. “Look.”
    A couple of black-robbed ghouls had pulled aside one spirit and were frisking him at the security desk. The face of the dead man looked vaguely familiar.
    “He’s that preacher who made the news, remember?” Grover asked.
    “Oh, yeah.” I did remember now. We’d seen him on TV a couple of times at the Yancy Academy dorm. He was this annoying televangelist from upstate New York who’d raised millions of dollars for orphanages and then got caught spending the money on stuff for his mansion, like gold-plated toilet seats, and an indoor putt-putt golf course. He’d died in a police chase when his “Lamborghini for the Lord” went off a cliff.
    I said, “What’re they doing to him?”
    “Special punishment from Hades,” Grover guessed. “The really bad people get his personal attention as soon as they arrive. The Fur—the Kindly Ones will set up an eternal torture for him.”
    The thought of the Furies made me shudder. I realized I was in their home territory now. Old Mrs. Dodds would be licking her lips with anticipation.
    “But if he’s a preacher,” I said, “and he believes in a different hell. . . .”
    Grover shrugged. “Who says he’s seeing this place the way we’re seeing it? Humans see what they want to see. You’re very stubborn—er, persistent, that way.”
    We got closer to the gates. The howling was so loud now it shook the ground at my feet, but I still couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
    Then, about fifty feet in front of us, the green mist shimmered. Standing just where the path split into three lanes was an enormous shadowy monster.
    I hadn’t seen it before because it was half transparent, like the dead. Until it moved, it blended with whatever was behind it. Only its eyes and teeth looked solid. And it was staring straight at me.
    My jaw hung open. All I could think to say was, “He’s a Rottweiler.”
    I’d always imagined Cerberus as a big black mastiff. But he was obviously a purebred Rottweiler, except of course that he was twice the size of a woolly mammoth, mostly invisible, and had three heads.
    The dead walked right up to him—no fear at all. The ATTENDANT ON DUTY lines parted on either side of him. The EZ DEATH spirits walked right between his front paws and under his belly, which they could do without even crouching.
    “I’m starting to see him better,” I muttered. “Why is that?”
    “I think . . .” Annabeth moistened her lips. “I’m afraid it’s because we’re getting closer to being dead.”
    The dog’s middle head craned toward us. It sniffed the air and growled.
    “It can smell the living,” I said.
    “But that’s okay,” Grover said, trembling next to me. “Because we have a plan.”
    “Right,” Annabeth said. I’d never heard her voice sound quite so small. “A plan.”
    We moved toward the monster.
    The middle head snarled at us, then barked so loud my eyeballs rattled.
    “Can you understand it?” I asked Grover.
    “Oh yeah,” he said. “I can understand it.”
    “What’s it saying?”
    “I don’t think humans have a four-letter word that translates, exactly.”
    I took the big stick out of my backpack—a bedpost I’d broken off Crusty’s Safari Deluxe floor model. I held it up, and tried to channel happy dog thoughts toward Cerberus—Alpo commercials, cute little puppies, fire hydrants. I tried to smile, like I wasn’t about to die.
    “Hey, Big Fella,” I called up. “I bet they don’t play with you much.”
    “GROWWWLLLL!”
    “Good boy,” I said weakly.
    I waved the stick. The dog’s middle head followed the movement. The other two heads trained their eyes on me, completely ignoring the spirits. I had Cerberus’s undivided attention. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
    “Fetch!” I threw the stick into the gloom, a good solid throw. I heard it go ker-sploosh in the River Styx.
    Cerberus glared at