Chapter Text
Charonosaurus: meaning "Charon's lizard," one of the largest hadrosaurs currently known
Charon: the ferryman of the underworld in Greek mythology. He ferries souls across the river that separates the worlds of the living and the dead.
Here they passed dozens of strange animals lying on the turf, either dead or asleep, Jill could not tell which. They were mostly of a dragonish or bat-like sort; Puddleglum did not know what any of them were.
"Do they grow here?" Scrubb asked the Warden. He seemed very surprised at being spoken to, but replied, "No. They are all beasts that have found their way down by chasms and caves, out of Overland into the Deep Realm. Many come down, and few return to the sunlit lands. It is said that they will all wake at the end of the world."
- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
U N D E R
M E
After the heart-stopping fall and that first, shattering moment in the darkness when he thought he had lost Pole and Puddleglum both, Eustace began to breathe again. It didn't hurt as much as it ought. He had been pummeled and bashed about by rocks of all shapes and sizes — sharp ones, blunt ones, pebbles to sting his face and great big stones to bruise the rest of him — and Eustace suspected the only thing keeping him from feeling his injuries more keenly was the fact that he could not see them.
(If so, it was an interesting variation on the placebo effect... but all in all, not one he cared to study.)
Even so, he would rather have light and endure a little more pain.
No sooner had he thought this, than a ghostly gray light bloomed in the pit. Eustace looked to Pole, first — dirty and disheveled, her cheek streaked with blood, but she looked intact, thank the Lion. Wherever it came from, the light cast her features in an eerie hue of blue.
Puddleglum looked about the same as always, albeit dustier.
Reassured, Eustace finally turned to look for the source of the light.
His stomach promptly bottomed out, as if he had not finished falling after all.
An enormous woolly creature loomed over them. A giant horn sprouted from the middle of its face, like a rhinoceros, only much larger and hairier. Iron straps wrapped around the horn, supporting a short pole and strange pale lantern that swung before the beast's eyes with every ponderous step. The light was not so bright that it could blind, but it did not look very comfortable.
Behind the creature (woolly rhinoceros, a distant corner of Eustace's mind supplied), a silent rank of other shapes and shadows lurked. There were more horns, sharply curving antlers, darkly gleaming tusks... an endless file of beasts sprung from the pages of one of Eustace's treasured books.
Prehistoric.
Alive.
"Why have you come, creatures of the Overworld?"
Eustace swallowed his tongue.
Into the silence spoke Puddleglum.
"We fell down by accident."
The great shaggy head nodded somberly. "Many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands." It turned, and the swinging lantern cast devilish shadows across Puddleglum's homely, familiar face. "Come."
"Where are you taking us?" asked Pole.
"To the Queen of the Deep Realm."
Then came a long forced march ever downward. Eustace kept stumbling, not so much from the uneven footing, but because his attention was split between cataloguing the features of every beast he could see and a growing concern for Pole.
She looked even paler than the light could account for.
Eustace pretended to fall, halting the procession long enough to pull her close. "What's wrong?"
She bit her lip and looked away. "I can't stand close spaces," she confessed in a whisper.
After everything they'd been through together, did she truly think he was going to make fun?
"Like me on the cliffs," he said, trying to sound encouraging. "Steady on. It can't get too close, can it? I mean, look at the size of that Elasmotherium! Not to mention the antlers on that Megaloceros, he could hardly get through a tunnel less than three meters wide."
Pole hiccupped, halfway between a sob and a laugh. "I don't even know what that is, Scrubb."
"Megaloceros is that giant deer over there. Elasmotherium is the woolly rhinoceros, the fellow with the lantern."
Pole's hand sought his. "They look awfully glum, don't they?"
Eustace had been trying not to anthropomorphize, but she was right. And after all, they did talk, just like proper Narnian beasts, so perhaps it wasn't anthropomorphization after all.
Puddleglum seemed to be trying to arrange his face in an even deeper frown than it was built for.
"Whatever are you doing?" Pole asked.
"Learning from my betters," mumbled Puddleglum. "These chaps know how to be properly solemn, just like every good Wiggle ought to be."
"Silence!" boomed Elasmotherium.
Pole cast a nervous glance at the rock above them. Eustace opened his mouth to tell her it was as solid as — well, as a rock — but decided that didn't sound as reassuring as he meant it to be and settled for squeezing her hand instead.
After trudging for what seemed like days but must have been only hours, the rocks underfoot changed.
The beaten path turned to smooth, rounded stones that shifted and clacked against one another. Then they became smaller, and smaller still, until they were mere pebbles. And then a wave broke over Eustace's feet.
"An underground lake," whispered Pole.
Elasmotherium raised her head. Across the dark water, another pale light sparked in the distance.
"There will be sea monsters, I shouldn't wonder," said Puddleglum sagely.
Eustace had battled sea monsters before, of course, and had no great wish to do so again. Still... "Plesiosaurus," he murmured wistfully.
Puddleglum shook his head. "Knowing their names won't help much when they eat us."
"You're not helping much now," Eustace muttered.
Pole squeezed Eustace's hand. "I'm all right," she said. "Look, you can't even see the ceiling. It's almost like being out under the night sky when it's cloudy." She glanced upward doubtfully. "Almost."
Their silent host of guides — or guards — stopped when Eustace and Pole were knee-deep in the water.
A wave surged.
Beneath it, eyes gleamed.
Then a pair of sleek humped backs slowly rose to the surface. Eustace swallowed hard when he saw they were labored with chains. Dolphin-shaped heads poked above the water and grinned through sharp teeth.
"We can't possibly ride them!" protested Pole.
Eustace's heart raced at the thought.
"Into the boat," ordered Elasmotherium.
The boat was little more than a plank of driftwood and rough iron bolts to anchor the harness chain. Eustace wondered who built it and tried to remember when opposable thumbs first evolved.
They were splashed quite a lot on the journey to the opposite shore but the water was fresh, not salt, and it washed away a good bit of the grime that had covered them since their fall.
Eustace spent the whole trip studying what he could see if their steeds. They couldn't really be Ichthyosaurs, could they? Prehistoric mammals were easier to accept, somehow. Before he could make up his mind whether to believe in them or not, the possibly-Ichthyosaurs banked hard, spilling Eustace, Pole and Puddleglum into the surf.
Eustace yelled and got a mouthful of sweet water for his trouble. Pole wrung water from her braids. Puddleglum stood and dripped.
"Who will be our guide now?" Pole wondered. There had been no boat big enough for Elasmotherium, after all. "I can't imagine this Queen would allow us to roam her Underworld without a guide."
Eustace turned to look... and froze.
Through the roaring in his ears, he heard Pole talking about the classical Underworld, something about sticks and ferrymen and not looking back.
Eustace had no interest in looking back. The only temptation was the one right before his eyes.
Fossils.
Living fossils.
Teeth grinned at him. Skulls stared. An empty socket winked.
Pole's litany faltered. She stammered something about pillars of salt and pomegranates.
Eustace stretched out a trembling hand.
The skeleton — Protoceratops andrewsi — crouched to nudge Eustace's hand with its bill.
Lion's mane. It was warm.
Pole's hand trembled in his. The dinosaur trembled too, its bones clacking. Eustace's vision sparked. Had he forgotten to breathe?
"It is said that they will all be reborn at the end of the world," proclaimed a voice.
The Protoceratops fled.
Jill despaired at the longing in Scrubb's eyes. Reborn dinosaurs sounded like a very bad thing indeed. Not to mention the end of the world. But at the moment, she supposed, they had bigger problems.
"The end of the world, as in the very bowels of it?" asked Puddleglum. "For I do believe we are there, good sir. Or the end of the world, as in, the end of all things? For we might be there as well, like as not."
A sad-faced furry creature scratched its long nose with a giant curved claw.
"At the end of the world," it repeated.
"Megatherium," whispered Scrubb. "Giant ground sloth."
Jill hoped that meant it didn't eat people.
"How do you know my name?" asked the sloth, which looked nothing like the sloths Jill had seen in the zoo. It stood on two feet and reminded Jill more of a bear, only its face was too long — and not just in the metaphorical sense.
"From a book," answered Scrubb.
Megatherium blinked slowly. "What is a book?"
Scrubb boggled. Puddleglum shook his head mournfully.
"A magic tome of knowledge," said Jill. "Your Queen must know, perhaps she can explain it to you."
Megatherium raised its paws as if to ward off her words. "You must be brought before the Queen of the Deep Realm. Come."
And the march began again.
There were fossils underfoot, whorled shells and jointed vertebrae and bug-like creatures ("Trilobites!" exclaimed Scrubb as if greeting an old friend), but they were the least of it. It was like walking through an elephant's graveyard. Massive ribs curved up out of the ground, reaching for where the sky should have been. Enormous frilled skulls, ridged with horns... rows of diamond-shaped plates emerging from a hillside... the unmistakeable skull of a predator, with its giant eyes and sickle-teeth. Most of them were still, although Jill hesitated to call them dead, for all they were nothing but bone. Sleeping, perhaps. A few stirred as they passed, but none so lively as the one that Scrubb had reverently touched before Megatherium's arrival.
Scrubb tried to stop at every new skeleton. Jill and Puddleglum had to keep pulling him along in their wake. For a sloth, Megatherium moved quickly. Jill wanted to make a face at his broad furry back, but didn't quite dare.
“Come on,” she hissed. “This is no time to take field notes!” She didn’t think Scrubb had a notebook with him in Narnia, let alone a pencil, but he might not have outgrown all his sneakiness.
He didn’t answer. All his attention was now focused behind them, where something large and hulking paced in the shadows. Jill felt its footsteps in her own bones.
"Another one of your friends come to eat us, I shouldn't wonder," said Puddleglum.
Jill didn't think Scrubb even heard him. She gripped his hand tighter. This time, less for comfort than for safety's sake, to keep him from wandering away and falling yet deeper into the bowels of the world, as Puddleglum had called it.
So intent was she on monitoring Scrubb, she didn't even see the slumbering giant until they were almost right on top of him.
"Who is that?" Scrub blurted, shaken out of his reverie.
"Father Time," replied Megatherium. "It is said he will wake at the end of the world."
"Then we had better pass quietly," said Puddleglum. "With our luck, the old fellow could be a light sleeper."
Father Time snored gently. Wind whistled through the cavern.
Jill shivered at Puddleglum's words. Despite the cavern's unexpected warmth, she had never felt so cold.
Puddleglum did not voice even half the gloomy thoughts that crossed his mind. No use scaring the children, after all. Well, no further than necessary to keep them on their toes.
It was decisions like this, he knew, that made his mother despair and made his sisters call him names when they were little Wiggles. Bubbleglum, Puddlesun and — worst of all — Happy-Go-Lucky... the names didn't sting anymore, which he supposed proved their point, but he had bigger problems now.
Such as the end of the world.
This is what comes from being such a flibbertigibbet, he told himself.
Puddleglum straightened his shoulders and his pack.
"Well," he said, gaze trained firmly ahead and not on the sleeping giant looming next to them, "onward and downward."
It was, perhaps, not his most inspiring speech, but the children followed obligingly enough. Was it overly optimistic, he wondered, to save his best oratory for some future crisis?
No doubt he would find out soon enough.