Limbo's Child

by Jonah Hewitt

  “And, of course, you so desperately needed to talk to Margarita. To ask her about her daughter, ask her if she’s ever shown any precocious capacity for necromancy, if she ever brought dead beetles or songbirds back to life, or even a precious pet, a cat or a goldfish perhaps?”

  This was not idle chatter. Did she know something that Moríro did not?

  “You were so desperate to know if the child could be the new heir that you were willing to call on someone you would only call on in your most extreme need.” The mocking tone of her voice let Moríro know that he had been a fool. “And that brought you here, to this broken body in this dreary room. To this near-dead shell of a human being to call on me, in the hopes that I could give you some small measure of comfort by providing the answers you seek, because only I, of all Necromancers, could inhabit the body of the living and travel like a ghost to the realm of the dead and ask those questions of Margarita in person.”

  She hugged her new knees and smiled at Moríro as he stood fuming silently.

  “How did you know?” Moríro spoke plainly, trying to conceal his rage.

  “I didn’t know, not really, not until just now, when you confirmed it, but I had heard rumors.”

  “Rumors? From whom?” Moríro pressed.

  “Oh, Godson, please, there’s nothing to do in Hell but gossip.” She stroked her shins like a little girl and smiled at him in faux innocence and continued, “And besides, the girl has more than one dead parent in Hell already.”

  Moríro blanched.

  Amarantha just laughed, “And she may not be the only heir after all.” She smiled a cold smile as Moríro just gaped. “You tried so hard. All of you, to keep the birth lines inside the order, but all those ages, I knew it must have been impossible for the order to prevent all the young ones from straying. People will find a way after all, and the gift has been spread to other bloodlines – less noble perhaps, but no less powerful.”

  Moríro froze. Could it be true? Had the gifts of the Necromancers been passed on to others? “What do you want with them?”

  She laughed, “You really have no grasp of the obvious, Moríro. With a boy and a girl, the possibilities, Moríro! An entire new house of Necromancers could be founded!! Necromancers who knew what to do with the gift.” She shot him a contemptuous glance. “But on a more personal note, I do have other reasons.” The faux innocence was replaced by pure, cold fire. “Everyone wants a second chance, Godson. I chose poorly the first time, but now I get to start over, with a new protégé, one who has no knowledge of her power, or the rules, or the Great Master, or you.” With each statement her contempt and fire rose, ‘til it crashed like a crescendo of bile on the word ‘you’.

  Moríro’s eyes widened. Somehow, she had known all along that he would call her forth. She had been laying in wait for centuries, like a spider, for this moment. She may have even figured out how to trick Moríro into calling her. How exactly, he couldn’t fathom yet, but he could see the confirmation in her eyes. He had been a fool. She must be sent back at once.

  As soon as this thought crossed his mind, however, she saw it his eyes. Instantly, she dove forward and crashed against him, nearly toppling him over the monitors and other electrical equipment. He struggled to hold onto the cart, to keep it from falling outside of the circle, and lost sight of her, but the flying tackle was just a distraction. Instead of pushing forward, she dived headlong over the opposite edge of the bed to her real objective. Moríro recovered and dove on top of her. She was flailing wildly, desperately trying to reach something on the floor beneath the bed. Moríro struggled to restrain her as he saw her intended target: a tiny, dead moth on the floor. He grabbed her arm just inches before her fingers touched the deceased insect. A dead moth was utterly harmless in a normal context, but to a master Necromancer it could be a deadly weapon. She might animate it into some demonic, undead, pestilential moth that would gouge his eyes out, or worse yet, she might pour her own soul inside it and fly off and escape.

  Moríro wasn’t certain he had made the circle secure enough to contain a possessed, demonic moth. It was small enough it might exploit a tiny flaw. Her hand grasped in frustration just a fraction of an inch away, but he pulled it back. She attempted a scream, but he forced his other hand over her mouth to prevent her from drawing the attention of the nurses and orderlies who were certainly not far. Amarantha had granted the frail body of Amanda Tipping unnatural strength, but the ravages of cancer were hard to overcome, and despite his age, he was strong enough to restrain her. Moríro dragged her back to the bed and forced her down on it, his hand on her throat.

  “DEPART, AMARANTHA!!” he bellowed. Shuddering waves of convulsions rippled Amanda’s body. Amarantha’s hold was weakening, but she was not ready to give up the body of Amanda Tipping just yet.

  “I WILL HAVE HER, MORÍRO!!”

  “Depart, Amarantha!!” he commanded again. Amarantha was going, Amanda’s frail voice was returning. The features softened, but not before one last utterance.

  “I will break the bounds, Moríro. I will free the prisoners…You will see. Death himself will die and be no more…you will see…you will see.”

  “Depart,” he said it calmly this time, summoning all his powers. Amanda Tipping’s eyes rolled back into her head for a moment, her whole body shook briefly, and then lay calm. The grey eyes and sharp features were gone, and the puffy, cancer-ravaged face of Amanda Tipping, age thirty-seven, returned.

  Lost in thought, Moríro didn’t realize his hand was still on the throat of Amanda Tipping. He released his grip instantly and awkwardly stepped away. She was breathing easier now. There were no bruises from the struggle. Despite the ordeal, she seemed the better for it. The amaranth elixir was a powerful restorative.

  He straightened her body and the covers and tried to make her comfortable, nervously glancing at the door, afraid someone might have heard. He took out a ragged, lace handkerchief and wiped up the salt and chalk and pushed the bed and equipment back into place. It took some time and gave him space to think. He had hoped to talk to Margarita, but he had learned much besides anyway. Margarita’s daughter almost certainly had the gift, or why would Amarantha know about her? But the situation was worse than he had feared. There were others who had the gift as well, and they were being hunted, and somehow, Amarantha had known. But how? Had she been summoned by someone else recently? Or worse, had she found a new ally in hell? His first obligation was to the girl, but Hokharty and Graber would do the job. He would go to Ephrata and see what he could find.

  He thought as he cleaned up, and with the last pile of natrun salt swept into the trash and the remaining chalk drawings now gone, he paused and picked up his overcoat, the leather satchel, his tools and the white lab coat. The room was much as he had first seen it, except it felt colder somehow. He paused to look once more at Amanda. There was a look of peace on her face. He tried to convince himself that if all this futile gesture had accomplished was to give this poor woman a few days of peace, perhaps it had been worth it. In a way, he envied her, but then death might come soon enough for them all. He swung the coat over his shoulders and was gone.

  Amanda Tipping blinked once or twice and stared at the flickering fluorescent lights on the ceiling. A fly was buzzing somewhere near her ear. She had had the most bizarre dream. There had been a strange doctor with a Spanish accent standing next to her, and there was a woman, but she couldn’t tell where she was standing. It was very odd, but it was also somewhat pleasant. It had been a long time since she had dreamed anything. Usually the drugs Dr. Harris gave her just plunged her into darkness. Dreamless sleep was never as restful. As she lay there, she noticed that many things were different now. She was breathing easier now, and the foggy-headed feeling of the sedatives was gone. She was tired, but not utterly exhausted, which had been normal for the last eighteen months.

  “Poor thing,” she thought to herself. “You’ve hardly moved in all this time. Haven’t you?” Amanda stiffened a little. That th
ought was odd. “You?” she thought again. She didn’t often think to herself in the second person. It was like another person’s voice in her head, but she decided to forget it and shrug it off. Then she actually shrugged!! She was instantly shocked that she could move her shoulders at all. She hadn’t had the strength to move so much as a finger in weeks.

  Her shoulders ached too, but not in the restless, burning way they had for so long. Instead, it was a dull ache, almost a good ache, like after a good workout, the kind she used to enjoy. She rolled her shoulders and gave them a good stretch and was surprised how much movement she had.

  “You can do more than that, I bet.” There was that odd thought again, followed by more buzzing. The fly was somewhere near her ear, bothering her with its incessant buzzing.

  Suddenly, her hand popped up. For weeks her arms had felt like they were pinned to the mattress, like they were made of lead. It took all her willpower to lift them just a few days ago, but now it seemed as natural as before, if a bit tired and sore. She stared at her hand and moved the fingers back and forth just to make sure she wasn’t still dreaming. She gazed first at the palm and then the back of her hand and then let it drop slowly back to the mattress.

  “You can get up if you like,” she thought to herself in that odd way, as if speaking to another person. The fly kept buzzing in her ear.

  She wasn’t certain if she could, but then she sat up suddenly; it hurt, but she could do it. She pulled the covers up and looked at her toes and wiggled them and laughed a little. She slapped her hands over her mouth and then slowly lowered them. She hadn’t laughed in ages. When the shock of that wore off a little, she grabbed her shoulders with both hands and massaged some of the soreness out of them. She paused and looked around the room. It was the same as always, but something was different.

  Was she still dreaming? She was suddenly gripped by a terrible urgency to get up. Aside from the times the nurses and orderlies rolled her over like a side of beef to change the sheets, she hadn’t moved from this bed in months, and dream or not, she wasn’t going to let a chance to get out of it pass her by. She carefully pulled the sheets back to look at her thin legs. Her feet looked white and dead, but the color was slowly coming back. She moved them over slowly until they hung limply from edge of the bed. She looked at the small nightstand next to her bed.

  “With a good push you could make it,” came a thought. Yes, she agreed, she could. She pushed off and grabbed the edge of the small table. Her legs nearly collapsed under her, but they held, and then slowly, slowly, she raised herself up. She was standing! She laughed out loud. She put her hand to her mouth and nearly cried. She found her balance and leaned on the equipment by her bedside. There was the IV stand and a rolling cart of monitors hooked up to her by a number of wires. On the IV stand was the fly, buzzing weakly, barely alive. She shooed it away with the back of her hand. The second she touched it, she felt a small static spark and it fell dead onto the cart. She wondered at it for a moment then tried to take a step, but the monitors dragged her back.

  “Vicious machines. You will soon be free of them,” the voice inside her head was stronger now, and it sounded more like her own thoughts. She hated the machines and dreaded being hooked up to them. She pulled herself up and took a step forward and didn’t fall. She was nearly in a state of shock and didn’t know what to do.

  “What would you like to do?” came the voice inside her head again. She had had this thought many times before. What would she do if she could stand on her own? The mirror. She wanted to see herself, to look into her own eyes. And then maybe after that, perhaps she could manage the small dignity of even going to the bathroom by herself. A few months back she never would have imagined how much she would miss that.

  “Go,” came the thought into her head, “Go to the mirror.”

  Amanda gathered up her nerve. She leaned on the IV stand and dragged the cart of equipment behind her. It would have been so much easier if she could just tear them off, but she knew that would just call the nurses, who would almost certainly just put her back in bed and sedate her again, but she was not going to have any of that. She was going to the bathroom, darn it, and no one was going to stop her.

  “Excellent. Go!” came a thought out of nowhere. It wasn’t exactly excellent though. She struggled the whole way. And although it was just a few feet, it was agonizing. Her feet were still numb like they were asleep. She couldn’t get them to lay flat, properly on their soles, but she carried on, walking on the sides of her feet instead. It was painful and awkward, and she nearly fell down a dozen times, but she made it. The roughest part was when she had to negotiate the cart and IV stand through the doorframe of the bathroom, but soon she was leaning on the sink, gripping it tightly with both hands and gazing into the mirror. It hurt a lot, but it felt like a real accomplishment. How was this possible? Had she really seen a strange doctor after all? He had promised that she would feel better and she did. Had it all been real? And what about the strange woman?

  “Look at yourself, Amanda. What do you see?” came the voice again. She hardly recognized herself. Her hair had never been special, mousy brown, but it was hers; now it was all gone, her eyebrows too. She was completely bald. Her eyes were puffy and swollen, and her face too. It wasn’t as bad as she had thought, but it was still bad enough to make her start to cry.

  “I see nothing,” she said out loud.

  “No,” the voice said reassuringly. “Not nothing. Far from it. Foolish men,” the voice continued, “The physicians can see the flesh, see the disease, but they have never learned to read the heart have they?”

  Amanda didn’t normally speak to herself like this at all, but it somehow felt comforting, so she rubbed her nose and stopped crying. “No, they can’t,” she said aloud, her voice firmer than it had been in years.

  “They act as if they know everything, but they don’t, do they? They don’t know about your father.”

  “Her father?” Amanda had not thought of her father in a long time. Her father and mother had divorced when she was very young. She had loved her father and her father had loved her. He was kind and loving and caring, but the court had awarded custody to her mother instead. She had taken her away from him just out of spite, to deny her father any joy. Her mother moved often, and went through a string of worthless boyfriends always trying to keep her from her father. She used to dream of the day when she would be eighteen and she could get away and live with her dad. He had died of cancer just six months shy of her eighteenth birthday.

  “But it didn’t end there, did it, Amanda?” No, it certainly had not. She had left anyway, and never saw her mother again. There were odd jobs and delayed dreams, some community college. Then there was him.

  “Tell me about him, Amanda,” said the voice. She was getting more comfortable with this strange, new personality trait she had developed. He wasn’t all that charming. She had always wondered if her mother’s string of loser boyfriends had impacted her judgment; but he had seemed nice enough and appeared to like her and that was the first thing that had made her feel special since she was a little girl.

  “But you are special, Amanda.” This talking to herself wasn’t helping. “Special” was a word grandmothers used when they couldn’t say you were pretty. Not that she had ever had a grandmother.

  “Tell me more. Go on.”

  They had gotten married. She had put off her own schooling, got two jobs, put him through law school. Then there were the two miscarriages and the diagnosis. Somewhere between the first and second remissions he had run off with her physical therapist. It had never been a great marriage, but the betrayal stung worse than anything.

  “How long?”

  ‘Hmmph. Eleven years. Eleven years wasted with that loser.”

  “And how long since you were diagnosed?”

  “Six.” She said aloud to herself. Six years of chemo, and surgery, and physical therapy. Six years, the last three, alone. Utterly alone, waiting to die. No one wanted her t
o live anymore, not her doctors, not her ex-husband, not anyone. She craved death herself and yet somehow it never came. She doggedly clung to life, disappointing her doctors, and she was certain, her insurance agent as well.

  “But you’re not dead, are you?”

  “No,” she thought. She was most definitely not dead. Not yet.

  “And you will not die, not for a very long time.” She had had that thought before too, but that was just wishful thinking, that’s all.

  “No, listen to me!!”

  Amanda went rigid. That was so sudden and so sharp it didn’t feel like it came from her at all. She turned slowly and looked around the tiny bathroom. There was no one there. She turned and looked back in the mirror. She was different. She had regained some color and she wasn’t yet sure how, but something had changed. She thought about the strange doctor in her dream.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t a dream,” came the thought into her head from nowhere.

  Perhaps it wasn’t. What was going on?!

  “Do you remember what the strange doctor said?”

  “Yes, hadn’t the foreign doctor said something about her regaining clarity?” she thought. She certainly was less foggy-headed now.

  “There was something else too, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes,” she thought to herself, “He had said something about helping others, and about it needing to be my choice.”

  “It is your choice, Amanda.”

  “My choice?” she said aloud, “My choice to do what?”

  “To live.”