Limbo's Child

by Jonah Hewitt

  Those words made her shudder – with fear or hope she couldn’t quite tell.

  She looked deep into the mirror. Was it true? Did she really have a choice to live? Was it as simple as that? But how?

  “He spoke two words, do you remember them?”

  “I…I don’t remember.”

  “Try.”

  Amanda closed her eyes. Nothing was coming to her. Then she remembered drinking something, and falling back against the bed. Everything was dark and peaceful for a long while, and then, she remembered, he did speak. Two words. Two words only. She thought of the doctors and the years of treatment and how desperately she wanted it to end, and as she did, she could almost hear the words again.

  “Amarantha, come?” she spoke them uncertainly, but as she did, her whole body felt warm like she was being immersed in hot bath water. She opened her eyes. Her face was there just as before, but it was different. It was her face, but less puffy and pallid. Had the words done that?

  “Yes! Again! Say the words again!” came the voice.

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, more deeply than she had done in six years. She thought of her worthless, betraying husband and the therapist he ran off with, of the disappointment and hurt of the miscarriages.

  “Amarantha, come,” she said it more forcefully this time and when she opened her eyes she gasped in shock. All over her head was black stubble. Her eyebrows were back too. She nearly fell backwards, but caught herself before she stumbled. Then she stood and didn’t waver. She lifted her arms, the soreness was gone, their strength returning. She ran her hands over the miraculous new hair. It wasn’t mousy brown and thin like her hair, it was nearly black and lustrous and thick. She laughed a little. What was happening?! Was she still dreaming? She was suddenly very afraid. She felt like she should go back to bed and lie down.

  “No!! Don’t stop!! Say the words again, one more time!!”

  That definitely didn’t come from her. There was someone else here, but where?

  “Who are you?” she said aloud. She looked around nervously, but no one was there.

  “I am your one, true friend, Amanda. I will never abandon you. I am your savior. You will live, Amanda, and through you, all others will live and no one will fear death again.” “How?” Amanda gasped.

  “A drop of blood is all it takes. But it is your choice, Amanda, I will never force you to do anything you do not want to do, but it must be your choice. A drop of blood and then say the words again.”

  Amanda stared at the face in the mirror; it was her face, but different. It was pretty, but sharper somehow. She didn’t know what to think. She was very scared and afraid she was losing her mind, but she knew she didn’t want to stay here and wait to die. Amanda made her choice.

  Amanda Tipping ripped the monitors from her body. They made a high-pitched tone in protest. She kicked the cart forcefully away from her. It crashed against the wall so hard its bleating instantly stopped. She yanked the IV from her arm. A single drop of blood emerged from where the needle had come out. She caught the crimson drop on the tip of her finger and held it up to her face to examine it. All the while the voice was uttering encouragement. “Yes!! Say the words!! Say the words again!! I will never leave you. We will be together forever.”

  She stood up straight and felt the warmth pouring through her. She looked into the mirror; the hair had grown at least half an inch in the last few minutes. Gone were the dark circles and lines. Gone was any trace of the ravages of the cancer. She felt the disease ebbing, no, fleeing from her body. The drop of blood hung pendulously from the tip of her finger, full of promise.

  “Together, we will right the wrongs. We will make the crooked pathways straight. We will restore all that was lost to us and everyone.”

  She looked regal and beautiful. She closed her eyes and shook her head. She thought of her worthless mother and her unfaithful husband her wasted youth and her dead father. All the while the voice continued.

  “We will drag the old monster from his citadel and break his many limbs to splinters!! We will live forever. We will conquer DEATH, Amanda!! Together! You and I!! And we will give life to every deserving soul and none shall fear Death again!!” The drop of blood shook and then fell from her fingertip. Amanda took a sharp inhale of breath and watched it fall, fearful it would be lost.

  “SAY THE WORDS!!”

  Amanda closed her eyes and screamed, “AMARANTHA, COME!!”

  The drop never reached the sink but disappeared in the air mid-fall.

  The room shook with Amanda’s voice. Amanda slowly opened her eyes. They were no longer warm, brown or clouded. Now they were cold, grey and crystal clear and Amanda knew she would never be alone, or pushed around by anyone else ever again, even as the strangest words came out of her mouth.

  “I just knew Lazlo wouldn’t notice a lazy fly on the IV cart. He always missed the small things. Like I would enter any dead thing, especially a dead moth.”

  She spun away from the mirror and folded her arms elegantly across her chest. As the room filled with stunned nurses and orderlies, Amanda spoke softly. “Now, where has that senile old Necromancer gone off to?”

  Chapter Seven

  Hunting Hunters

  Tim Riggle, the orderly, drove down Highway 95 in his cherry, 1974 limited-edition Spirit of America cream-colored Impala with three corpses in the car. One was in the trunk; two were freshly animated and sitting in the car. Graber, the big one, was snoring in the back seat, sucking in wheezing breaths through his nose and gurgling them out through the large, open head wound above his right eye like a blow-hole, sputtering out little flecks of clotted blood on the custom vinyl interior. The thin corpse, Hokharty, was in the front with Tim looking at a road map of Delaware upside down. The other corpse in the trunk was a woman with dark hair. She was, mercifully, not doing anything unusual for a dead person.

  “If this girl is in Harrisburg, why exactly are we heading south again?” Tim asked the seemingly perplexed but unflappable Hokharty.

  “The girl is west, but the hunters are south. We need help.” Hokharty didn’t look at Tim. “Only hunters can find what we are looking for.”

  “And what exactly are we looking for if it isn’t the girl?” Tim asked.

  Hokharty just smiled his subtle toothsome smile again. Tim was certain he saw a fang this time.

  Tim sighed in frustration and gripped the steering wheel tighter. This wasn’t going to be easy – not that getting out of the hospital was a piece of cake. It was hard to tell exactly what had happened from inside the morgue drawer, but apparently Hokharty had done his “turn into the smoke monster” trick and gone down the hall to the custodial closet. There, he found something to suit him and cover up the stab wound in his chest, but Graber wasn’t so simple. Graber was too big for any of the scrubs there and the wound on his head wasn’t exactly easy to cover up. So, they improvised. Graber was placed on a gurney, covered in a sheet, and Tim and Hokharty pushed him down the corridors. Hokharty had insisted on taking the body of the woman and made Tim wrap it carefully in a sheet and place it on the lower rack of the gurney. Hokharty recited some unknown words over the body while faint wisps of red smoke emanated from his mouth. Tim was afraid she was about rise up too, but thankfully nothing happened, so Tim agreed to push the cart while Hokharty followed. It wasn’t easy. Even without the second body, Graber weighed a ton and it was pretty hard going. Graber seemed to exude a pervasive field of inertia, resisting all forward movement.

  Along the way, Hokharty made Tim use one of the “devices,” Hokharty had called it, to find out the information about the deceased Margaret Holveda Miller’s daughter. Lucia Claire Miller was located in an ICU ward in Harrisburg, stable and expected to recover completely. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t authorized to do this, but he knew several nurses’ pass codes because they had asked him to retrieve something for them while they were busy. The whole time Hokharty’s icy hand never left the back of Tim’s neck. Worse than the g
rip were the things he said.

  He queried Tim on everything: his age, his family, his education, his hopes and aspirations. When he told Hokharty his goal was to one day be a Physician’s Assistant, Hokharty remarked, “Why not be the Physician? Why not the greatest Physician who ever lived? Greater than Hippocrates or Galen or Asclepius himself?” More unnerving was the way he said it, as if he could actually make it happen. And then there was the whole “How would you like to live forever?” thing. Tim was glad he hadn’t brought that up again.

  Once they had gotten the information about Lucy Miller off the computer, Hokharty made him push Graber down to the staff locker rooms. Tim scoped it out to make sure they were empty then wheeled Graber in. When Graber got up on his own accord, it spooked Tim all over again, even though he had seen him rise the first time. Tim got changed into his regular clothes. Graber’s hand could open the lockers like a can opener. Eventually, they found clothes for all of them, including some large jeans and a huge sweatshirt for Graber and a leather jacket for Hokharty. Hokharty kept the green scrubs on underneath, however. Neither had any familiarity with zippers, though. Tim had to show Graber how to use it – that had been embarrassing. Once Graber had figured out his pants zipper he kept pulling it up…zip! And down...zip! And up…zip! And down…zip! Over and over again in child-like wonder until Hokharty had told him to knock it off.

  Graber finally found a large, knit cap big enough to pull over his wound. He pulled it down so far it practically covered his eyes, but it didn’t seem to hinder him at all. In fact, neither of them seemed to use their eyes at all. Hokharty had an intense, fixed glare that never wavered, and he seemed to be able to see straight through the back of his own head. The one or two times Tim was close to the door when Hokharty had his back to him, Hokharty would calmly advise him against thinking about fleeing without even turning around. Thankfully, Graber picked up the body of the woman and carried it out. Tim thought about warning them about the surveillance cameras, but then they had enough trouble with the zippers, so he decided to let it pass.

  When they got out to the parking lot, Tim thought he could just hand off the keys and be done with them, but of course, neither knew how to drive. So here he was, going…somewhere…on I-95…near Chester…looking for something called a “hunter”…with two dead guys.

  “Hurgghl-KKHUTT,” Graber woke up with a start and hocked up a blood clot through his wound that landed on the dash. Tim tried desperately not to shudder. Hokharty turned around and said something in some guttural language that Tim couldn’t understand to Graber. Graber just nodded and said nothing, as usual, and pulled the knit cap low over his face again.

  “What? What is it?” Tim could see that Hokharty was looking out the windshield into the distance.

  “We’re getting close,” Hokharty said barely above a whisper, “I can sense them.”

  “Close? To what?!” Hokharty didn’t answer.

  “There. We need to go there.” Hokharty pointed towards a cross street.

  Tim couldn’t see an exit. “Fine, but I can’t get off here, I’ll have to go to the next exit and turn around.”

  Hokharty furrowed his brow in displeasure but didn’t say anything.

  Tim got off on the next exit and started to wind his way through the surface streets according to Hokharty’s directions. Hokharty hardly gave him any notice before abruptly pointing “here!” or “there!” Tim had to wrench the steering wheel a few times, and the tires squealed in protest, but he didn’t slow down. He didn’t want to spend any more time with these corpses than he absolutely had to.

  Finally, Hokharty said, “Stop!” and Tim slammed on the brakes at the street corner. Hokharty fixed his impassive stare at a small alleyway and smiled that now-familiar half smile that disappeared in an instant. Tim was certain he had seen fangs that time.

  “Sooo…now what?” Tim said anxiously.

  “We wait. They will come to us.”

  “Really?” Tim wasn’t so sure he wanted them to come to him. He had already seen two animated cadavers tonight. He wasn’t sure what kind of things “hunters” were, but he had seen enough for one evening.

  “Yes, of course,” Hokharty said as if it were obvious, “It’s getting near dawn, and they will be looking for shelter…but not yet.”

  “Why not?” Tim asked, curiosity overcoming fear.

  “Because they haven’t caught anything all night.” And then Hokharty turned slowly to face Tim. “They are still hungry.” And with that, Graber began snorting a low laugh in the back seat, but at least the knit cap, already crusted with gore, caught most of the bloody spatter this time.

  Tim leaned over the steering wheel to get a better view through the windshield. He looked at the alleyway but saw nothing. As he sat on an abandoned street corner in a ‘74 Impala with two dead guys who couldn’t even manage zippers, let alone cars, he knew just one thing for certain…all his horror comic books, all of his first-person shooter video games, his DVD collection of zombie movies…they had all totally lied to him.

  Chapter Eight

  The Bark of Nephys

  After all that screaming, the trip back to the necropolis in the skiff seemed eerily silent. The air was still and stagnant, and even the movement of the boat could not seem to stir it. Nephys was in the back, tired, and poling the boat forward. The woman sat dejectedly in the middle, her palms in her lap, her eyes vacant, near catatonic. Her head hung limply to one side, without focus. She had passed from panic, to despair, to outright horror in the space of half an hour. Now she was just numb. Nephys felt it too. Only Hiero seemed to be happy, bouncing lightly on his mismatched feet in the prow. It had been a veritable smorgasbord of negative emotions. Nephys figured Hiero had been well fed on the outburst. It had been a lot of screaming.

  “Vicious little imp,” thought Nephys. No wonder he went looking for these souls.

  And it was a bit of luck too. Horror was an entirely different feeling than despair. The sound of her screaming had cleared away the approaching shades like a foghorn. Then there was the wreck. Ten minutes into the screaming fit, the tree and wreck had sprung to life. It pulled up its roots, which turned into a giant chicken leg, grew batwing ears and hopped around on the single appendage, a grotesque, metal, tree monster clanging its hood and trunk like a mouth on either end. All that horror had given birth to a monstrous new imp. The sight of that had guaranteed another ten minutes of screaming alone. For a moment, it looked like it might turn on the three of them, but Hiero brandished his knife at it ferociously with honks that sounded suspiciously like “Mine! Mine!” It stormed off and was probably halfway to the wastes on the other side of the swamp by now.

  The silence after the screaming was so profound that when she finally spoke it surprised both Nephys and Hiero.

  “I had hoped someone would be waiting for me,” she said quietly.

  Hiero turned to look back at Nephys and then just snorted dismissively. Nephys grimaced at him, but said nothing.

  “It’s not like I was expecting a whole big family reunion or anything,” she said after a while longer.

  “Fhwerpan?” Hiero tooted querulously. She paid him no mind.

  “…or checkered tablecloths spread on the grass…and water fights…and grandparents, or noodle salad, but you would think there would be someone waiting for me.”

  She breathed in slowly and took a pause. She drew her knees up and hugged them to her chest, resting her chin on them.

  “Verroooont?” Hiero gave Nephys an odd look. Nephys just shrugged and pushed the skiff forward a little faster.

  “I guess I was really naïve.”

  There was another long pause. Nephys said nothing.

  “Is this…I mean…is this where…bad…people…go?”

  Nephys had been dreading this question. Sooner or later any spirit that made it this far asked that question. People in the living world were obsessed with judgment and validation. Nephys’ grandmother had told him that his heart would be
weighed against the feather of truth and that if his heart wasn’t lighter than the feather, it would be eaten by a monster. Nephys’ uncle had told him that was nonsense. He was a soldier and had survived many battles. He believed that Mithras, who had slain the Bull of Heaven, had protected him, and that he would not abandon him at the end, but there was no Mithras here.

  Whatever Nephys had believed in life, he couldn’t remember exactly, he just knew it wasn’t this. There was no judgment, no condemnation or sermons when souls passed through the gates of Erebus. Kings, paupers, saints and sinners; they were all the same. They were only catalogued and measured and passed on – they weren’t even told where to go. A few asked directions, which the Children of Limbo would be happy to give them, if they had any, but it didn’t matter anyway because all paths led to equally displeasing places. Once catalogued, the souls were not anyone’s concern. Some lingered, others wandered. Some went to the Pits of Punishment to the south, some disappeared into the wastes to the west and became shades or lost souls. Others just ceased to be at all. Most faded away or disappeared eventually, to where exactly, no one really knew. Nowhere, probably, Nephys guessed.

  Nephys realized he should say something to her.

  “No,” he began sympathetically, “this is where everyone goes.”

  “Everyone?” she said gingerly.

  “Everyone,” Nephys replied.

  Her face tightened as if suppressing a sob, but then she remained silent for a long while as Nephys directed the skiff across a rare section of open water. Black lotus blossoms floated beside the boat and the way became easier. They were getting closer to the edges of the city.

  After a long while she spoke again softly.

  “Is it all like this? I mean…isn’t there anywhere…with any warmth or light…it’s just that…after all the stories…” she trailed off.

  Nephys understood how she felt. Expectations for the afterlife were very high; it was hard not to be disappointed.

  “Well…” Nephys began trying to say something positive about his home, but couldn’t think of anything, “Yes, it’s mostly all like this,” Nephys gulped. It hadn’t seemed quite so bad yesterday, but after this morning, the weight felt heavier than it had in centuries. He started again…“Once there were nicer places. Not as nice as you imagine, but …nicer.”