Limbo's Child

by Jonah Hewitt

  Tim caught the sideward glance and said, “Dude…don’t bother. Graber is faster than he looks, and the other one has eyes in the back of his head, plus he can turn into a snake made of smoke and chase you down if he wants.” Schuyler raised an eyebrow at this as if he didn’t really believe it, but said nothing and continued his somber, casual saunter across the street.

  Hokharty stepped into the lead, somehow confident his charges would not try to flee. He walked across the street to the car on the passenger side and motioned for Tim to follow. Tim fumbled in his pocket for the keys and went to the driver’s seat. Graber held the door open and practically shoved Miles into the back, but he waited for Schuyler. From inside the car, Miles could see Schuyler hesitating. All at once Schuyler’s shoulders slumped. The lollipop practically fell from his mouth. On his face was a look of utter disgust and resignation, as if he had finally been delivered the ultimate insult.

  “An Impala? Seriously?”

  Chapter Ten

  The Scriptorium

  Even though he was already late, Nephys had to make a stop by home to pick up his pen case and this just made him later. The pen case was a long, flat, narrow board made of black cedar. It had an indentation for two reed pens and two, small, circular depressions that served as palettes for ink – one red and one black. Other than his stone basin and the tomb, it was his one true possession and his favorite.

  He hurried his way down to the heart of the city, the echo of his footsteps dying as he passed down the narrow streets. Where it broadened out, he could see the long, low halls that were the scriptorium of Limbo. Usually, Nephys queued behind a thousand other scribes from a thousand other lands, and spent the time waiting seemingly endlessly for all of the scribes and workers to file in. It was an orderly, but long and tedious affair…one step, stop, one step, stop, and so on. It was an almost cadence-like ritual that drilled monotony into your head and set the rhythm for the workday to come. Today though, he was the very last to arrive and didn’t have to wait at all. If he hadn’t been late, he would have almost enjoyed it. As it was, no one was ever late to work, after all, what else did they have to do?

  When Nephys got to the entrance, whatever slim, buoyant spirit he had managed to find that morning evaporated when he saw who was there. It was the scriptorium master…Falco. Falco was an eight-year-old boy who had died at the height of Rome. His hair was cropped closely to his head, and he wore a miniature toga and a large, gold bauble hung from a leather cord around his neck. It was a bulla, and it was supposed to protect young Roman boys from harm, but it hadn’t saved Falco from the plague. There wasn’t much opportunity for promotion in the afterlife, but Falco’s father had held every position a Roman patrician could hold from quaestor to consul, and he had entered the Senate suo anno, the first year he was eligible, so Falco wasn’t about to settle for anything less than his best. He had a masterful hand for Latin, and as fate would have it, because of the spread of Christianity, Latin became the lingua franca for the next millennium. Within a short time, he rose to become the master of all scribes. Falco was all ambition and had fared no worse in death than his father had in life and his eyes showed it. Within months of coming here, his eyes had clouded, and now, they were pitiless white orbs flecked with blue veins without a trace of iris, pupil or cornea. He was irreversibly, totally and completely blind. Falco turned those sightless eyes on the hapless Nephys now.

  “Even in a land of timelessness, punctuality is demanded,” Falco uttered tonelessly.

  “Apologies, Master, I’ve never been late before.” Nephys bowed quickly at the small boy and crossed the threshold into the scriptorium. The sounds of thousands of pens scritching across pages could be heard above the awful, omnipresent stillness of Limbo. Falco let him pass, but didn’t turn around to see him go.

  “Which is why the exceptional must not be excepted.”

  Nephys stopped. Falco possessed the one attribute critical to a successful career in the afterlife: a complete and total absence of empathy.

  “I would remove you from scribe duty altogether, but that itself would be an exception.”

  Nephys swallowed hard.

  “What shall we do to prevent further…exceptional…circumstances?” Falco said in a completely monotone voice.

  Nephys turned to face Falco, but Falco hadn’t even turned around. He didn’t need to. His crystalline sight was so good now he could see straight through the back of his own head as if it were a window.

  “Apologies again, Master,” Nephys said, and then in a lower voice to himself, “Perhaps I should buy a sundial.”

  Thousands of scribbling pens came to a sudden halt. Nephys clamped his mouth shut so hard his teeth made a loud “CLACK!”

  “Where did that come from?!” wondered Nephys to himself. Why had he just told…what was it…a joke? To the scriptorium master?! The most humorless figure in all of Limbo?! No one told jokes here! What was he thinking? That morning with Maggie and Hiero must have affected him more than he realized.

  Falco didn’t react. He didn’t even turn around.

  “A sundial for a sunless place. What an…exceptional…humorous anecdote. You should record it for the Great Master. One would hate to lose such wit.”

  Nephys stood there utterly devastated. He was normally so in control – this morning he had utterly fallen apart. When nothing but silence continued for a long time, Nephys began to turn to go when Falco asked a surprising question.

  “What is wrong with your throat?” he spoke as if making a statement and not asking a question at all.

  “My throat?” Nephys put his hand to the wound across his neck.

  “Your gash looks…different,” Falco continued. And for a minute, Nephys thought he heard a slight inflection to his voice on the word “different,” but it was hard to tell.

  “Surely not, Master…that would be impossible.”

  “Of course it is, but then when have I ever been wrong?”

  Nephys hated questions where there was no right answer, so he said nothing.

  After another long pause, Falco spoke again.

  “You may go.”

  Nephys bowed to the back of Falco’s head and walked to his usual spot. The scratching of pens commenced again and Nephys felt the eyes of the crowd drift away from him. As he walked, his hand went to his neck. It did feel different, but why? He would have to take another look at it once he got home.

  The room was vast and filled with thousands of rows of scribes from many lands arranged in tidy rows in between a forest of columns. Each scribe had a stack of printed material next to them they were transcribing into permanent records, but no two scribes possessed the same tools. To the left of Nephys was a girl with long, braided hair and uncomfortable-looking shoes that buttoned up past her ankles. She was using a dip pen from a century not too long ago. Her letters were large, simple, but elegantly rounded.

  To his right was a boy much his same age, but he was making records in an entirely different way. He wore a folded gray paper cap and heavy gray pants. He had on a heavy apron with ink splattered all over it. He sat for hours arranging tiny metal blocks to form the letters on a tray; the tray was then inserted into a vast, oily machine of gears and wheels the boy was manning, where it would print up a full sheet of the transposed text. In all, it took the boy far more time to print one sheet that way than a talented scribe could transcribe by hand.

  The machine was supposed to be evidence of the progress of man in the last century, but it made no sense at all to Nephys. The Great Master only required one copy of each work for his library, and this machine was ill-suited to making a single careful copy of many things, but instead was only good for making several copies of one thing, and even then, rather badly. The paper was thin and gray and awful the pages smudgy and the text inelegant. It varied too much in size and shape with large text up top that was glaring followed by miniscule cramped text in narrow columns that was far too difficult to read. When the boy in the apron and paper h
at finished transcribing the work, the “scribe” or as he liked to call himself, “print monkey,” would stack it up like a pile of wastepaper and tie it off with string like a common parcel.

  “What a waste,” thought Nephys.

  From the other side, it certainly seemed things had gotten worse up there. There were certainly more books now, but what came was less and less interesting. In the beginning, there had been lots of texts, scrolls on papyri and parchment, poems and legal documents and what not and then arrived books, real codices with pages to turn. Nephys had never seen a book during his short life, but once one showed up for him to copy in the afterlife, he was enthralled by its genius. Scrolls were so difficult to wind and unroll to read, but binding the pages together on one side? Brilliant! And so easy. Why had his people never figured this out? Nephys loved papyrus, but it was tricky; its crosshatch pattern could obscure writing and flummox an unpracticed scribe, but it couldn’t compare to the flat, creamy, smooth, translucent qualities of parchment. Parchment held ink better and longer, and what’s more, the stronger animal skins and flat pages made something possible that only happened rarely before in texts, pictures!

  When you rolled up a scroll, the paint would flake off, so paint was reserved for only the most important scrolls, and then they were usually only rolled up once and interred with the dead, never to be seen again. But a book? A book could hold dozens of images. Since the image laid flat on tough sheep skin, there was no limit to what you could paint, and the images could last for thousands of years, if not forever.

  For several blessed centuries, there was a small but steady stream of such books: rich books with illustrations stuck in between the words, or sometimes within a single gigantic letter that was stretched out to hold a tiny picture. And the scripts! From the West were letters that looked like twisting vegetation, or spiky fences, uncial and black letter and from the East, letters that looked like tongues of fire and dangling ribbons – Nastaliq and Diwani. And everywhere pictures. Persian kings and heroes fought monsters in landscapes of fire. Saints and prophets posed in front of diamond-patterned checkerboards of red, blue and gold. Dragons and jongleurs gamboled in the margins. And Gold too!! Several were filled with scenes entirely painted on gold. Its luster was far dimmer here in Limbo, but its reflection was as close to warm as Nephys had ever felt in the underworld.

  But it had all passed as Elysium had passed. The books coming to Nephys now were far diminished from those of the past. More and more books than ever came, of course, a torrent, but quantity had replaced quality. The books that were appearing now were all garish or monotonous with very few pictures. The durable parchment was replaced by yellow, crumbling paper that smelled of decay.

  Likewise, the boy across from him was also diminished, missing his right arm. Nephys secretly suspected that the machine had taken it in its terrible maw, and that it was probably still there in the recesses and guts of the horrible device. The machine had probably killed the boy who had tended it, and the boy had dragged the machine into this world much like Maggie had dragged her car. Though it was no imp and lacked bat-wing ears, it certainly seemed to torment him. The machines of the modern age extracted a horrible price, apparently, worse than any god of old.

  Nephys far preferred his method. He sat on the floor, cross-legged on a woven mat. He held the reed pen confidently being sure to float his hand over the work, never halting or smudging the graceful lettering. His father had taught him the priestly hand and the common hand and even the full picture writing of the ancients. In addition, he had taught him Latin and Greek even before death, as they were commonly spoken in his country as well. Since then, he had added many languages and scripts to his repertoire.

  He unrolled a scroll of empty papyrus. It was crosshatched from the pressed reeds and translucent but it wasn’t warm and brown like in life, but grey and cold. A bit stiff but not a problem for a talented scribe. He set out his long, narrow pen case with its palettes of red and black ink. Red was one of the few colors he could still remember, outside of blue and grey, because he used it every day. In life, he had only used red for the names of deities or rulers, or special words that invoked power. There were no such rules in death, so he was free to express himself, and he sometimes chose red ink just because he liked the way the word sounded. “Befuddled, ignominious, caoutchouc, dweeb,” these were red words. He also used red on the names of authors, Chaucer and Khaldun, Sagan and Camus. He wondered what he would use it on today.

  Another boy came by with a small cart filled with books of all sorts. He dumped a pile of soggy books in front of Nephys and pushed on. The books had obviously landed in the swamp before being recovered. The large pile stood in a gathering puddle of water as black as ink. The pages were stuck together and difficult to separate. Nephys carefully opened the cover of the first.

  “Chester County Plumbing Code Violations, 1967.”

  He set it aside and picked up the next one.

  “Germantown County Phone Directory, 1983.”

  Ugh. He moved on to the third.

  “Municipal Tax Code of Ephrata, 1979.”

  Falco was punishing him. Oh well, nothing to do but forge ahead anyway. He decided to start with the “Phone Directory” whatever that meant. He put the end of one of his reed pens into his mouth as he had to use both hands to separate the first few sticky, wet pages. As he did so he wondered, “Was ‘AAACO Auto Repair’ a red-letter title or not?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Maggie Miller

  Maggie Miller stuck her hands in her pockets and tried to take stock of her situation. She lazily skidded her favorite, simple flats along the gray, sandy path and was grateful she at least hadn’t worn the heels that day. Of course, the flats weren’t really on her feet when she thought about it, in fact her feet weren’t there at all, not her real feet anyway. This was all some sort of psychic projection of herself from the moment of her death. The real flats and the real feet they were on were up in the world of the living on her rapidly cooling corpse. She shuddered. She didn’t like to think about it, but there it was, even if it didn’t make sense to her. She certainly felt real, felt like herself, had all her parts – fingers, toes, etc. She was just glad she hadn’t died in the shower. Imagine going through eternity naked!! Despite everything that had happened to her, it was hard to believe that she was really dead, that she was just a ghost. It was surprising how normal everything felt.

  “FHWONK!”

  Well, aside from the odd, demonic musical instrument.

  Hiero had started the trip to Neppy’s house at an alarming pace – galumphing off so fast she was terrified she would be lost in the dim streets of Limbo forever. Hiero kept running and eventually disappeared around a dark corner far ahead. She nearly worked herself into a panic trying to keep up, until she realized that was exactly what the little toad was trying to do, panic her. Then she remembered what Nep had told her, how emotions are real here. She swallowed hard and instead of panicking, calmed herself and walked slowly and purposefully. When she turned the corner several agonizing minutes later, Hiero was there, wheezing like a worn-out vacuum cleaner. She smiled. Ol’ Nep was right.

  You had to stay calm or things like this little imp here would get the best of you. She felt rather embarrassed about the way she had behaved earlier and felt the need to make up for it. Besides, Hiero seemed to delight in any frustration so she decided not to let it goad her. In fact, she started walking even slower than before, just to annoy it. Let the little monster get a taste of his own medicine. After all, time was one of the few luxuries Limbo offered. Hiero was now dejectedly shuffling along beside her like a whipped dog. That was better, she thought. It gave her time to observe and think and look around.

  Limbo certainly was a flat, colorless place. The tomb-like houses were all gray or blue or off-white – all of them in varying states of decay with no sense of planning or organization. The streets were narrow in some places, while in others were they broad and empty. Odd juxt
apositions abounded. Here was a Gothic tomb built on top of a Roman one. There was something that looked nearly modern butting up right against something Baroque. Most were abandoned. Quite a few were crumbling into dust. She looked different too. She could have sworn she had been wearing a red and black plaid flannel shirt over a long-sleeve pink t-shirt, but the plaid shirt was now blue and charcoal, and the pink shirt was now light grey. At least the faded blue jeans looked the same. She looked over her hands and legs and body and felt her neck back and face. She couldn’t detect any obvious wound, but she was desperate for a mirror. Neppy’s gash had been horrifying – once she was able to see it – and she didn’t relish the thought of going through the eternities looking like a sideshow freak.

  She met hardly anyone on the way. She assumed that they were all off at work like Nep. A few ambled down dark alleyways, she called out to some, but they all turned and went the other way quickly or shuttered their windows when she passed by

  “Friendly town,” she muttered sarcastically to herself.

  Hiero honked a few short, dissonant notes in what she thought must have been its best attempt at ridiculing laughter.

  Once, in a broken window, she saw a young girl, no more than four, with hair so blonde it was nearly white. She was staring blankly out into the street, expressionless. Maggie waved meekly at the girl and tried to get her attention but stopped suddenly when it became apparent the girl was blind and could not see her. She thought about calling out to her, but decided to just keep moving on. A short while down the street she thought how desperately she wanted to run to the girl and take her in her arms and tell her it would be alright, as if she were her own daughter.