Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  “You’re up, Hiro,” he said, and the former leader of the Tengu nodded and approached the door.

  There are a lot of ways to approach a new site when doing urban exploration. Hiro was bold but he was also smart. Going over the schematics and floor plans of the old shoe factory was the smart way to go. Taking risks was part of the game; being stupid was not.

  “We need to be careful in there,” said Hiro. “There’s been years of rain and snow with no one to repair weather damage. The floors could be rotted out; the ceiling could be ready to collapse, if it hasn’t already. Don’t trust anything until I’ve checked it out first, okay?”

  The others nodded, except for Priest. He’d brought Hiro along mostly to field-test the man’s attitude, not because he thought this particular hunt was going to require his skills. After today, though, Priest would know whether Hiro could be trusted. Even so, he let the urban explorer have his moment of authority.

  The door was slightly ajar and yielded to a light touch.

  “Lock’s been forced,” observed Hiro.

  Boris bent to look and nodded, then sneered. “Probably one of those samosely pieces of shit. They’re worse than rats.”

  Despite the radiation, dozens of illegal ‘self-settlers’ had moved into Poliske and the other abandoned towns in the Exclusion Zone. They were mostly old, poor people who could not afford to live anywhere and had been drawn like flame-dazed moths to all those empty buildings. Sometimes their corpses were recovered and buried by workers of the State Agency of Ukraine on the Exclusion Zone Management; and sometimes they were left to rot.

  “How could they even live here?” asked Rink.

  Keppler shrugged. “The radiation isn’t as bad as all that. I mean, it will kill you, but not right away. Not for years. If you’re old…” She shrugged again, as if to say “who cares?”

  Priest and Rink exchanged a brief look. He knew that Keppler tended to underestimate the danger because she didn’t want to scare anyone off. Her bonus was contingent on completing this mission. On the other hand, she had insisted on the very best protective equipment including the decontamination units in the van that was parked at the outer edge of the thousand-square-mile zone. Keppler had also insisted on a timetable that would get them out of here well before the radiation eroded the integrity of their suits.

  “Let’s get a move on, yes?” suggested Priest. “Tick-tock. There are satellite fly-bys of this area and we have a three hour and fourteen minute window.”

  “We should think about getting out of here sooner than that,” advised Keppler.

  “That is the plan. But we leave when we’ve found what we came for.”

  Hiro nodded, unclipped his flashlight, and stepped cautiously into the warehouse. The others followed and they moved through a vast space of old machines, rows of industrial sewing machines, bins where rolls of material like the stuff outside was rotting away. Animal bones littered the floor and Priest thought that some of them looked very strange. Too many legs, deformed skulls, spines mottled with odd lumps of calcium. Evidence of the radiation’s mutagenic horrors even on creatures as stalwart as rats.

  “I hate this place,” whispered Rink.

  “We’re not shopping for a summer home, darling,” he told her. “Come on, Hiro, this is taking too long.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said as he entered one of the offices. “Come on, I think I found it.”

  They hurried in after him.

  “I don’t see nothing,” said Boris, looking around at a desk and chair that were badly warped by dripping water. There was a row of file cabinets along one wall and lots of framed pictures of men and women in old Soviet uniforms. They stood in front of the row of file cabinets. Diagrams and measurements flashed on the inside of his hood.

  Hiro used his flashlight to tap on the cabinets and on the wall behind them. “Yeah, this is definitely it.”

  Priest clapped him on the shoulder. “Perfect.”

  “What?” demanded Boris. “It’s old office furniture? So what?”

  Priest shook his head. “The floor plan I got from my contact in Moscow said that this whole block of buildings was erected over an old coalmine that had played out in the 1920s, right? But who would build a factory town over a coalmine? Just from the perspective of structural engineering it makes no sense. You’d have to either fill in the mine or otherwise reinforce it.”

  The others stared at him like studious school kids.

  “The specs on this place are nonsensical if you are trying to understand it from any direction except one in which the coalmine is still in use. Or, was in use before the reactor blew at Chernobyl. The orientation of the buildings, the power grid, the population numbers, even the location of railroad tracks and a landing strip.” Priest bent close to examine the cabinets. “I hired a forensic accountant to tear apart the billing records and manifests of building materials sent out here. For it to make sense there would have to be five times as many buildings, and they’d all be in better condition than what we’ve seen. There are records of premium-grade steel alloys, timber, and other stuff. Incredible amounts of expensive materials. Why would a shoe factory like this need six super computers? Why would almost two percent of the electrical power generated by Chernobyl come here? Two percent. Do you know how much power that is?”

  “Let me guess,” said Boris. “Two percent?”

  “Amusing, but no. It’s enough to light up twenty cities of this size.”

  Keppler nodded. “Maybe more.”

  Boris frowned. “Then what—?”

  Instead of answering, Priest nodded to Hiro, who began pulling out the cabinet drawers. Most of them were crammed with old papers, and for a moment Priest’s heart began hammering in his chest as doubt flared. Then the top left drawer rolled out differently than the others. It came too far out, as if the cabinet was far deeper than the wall against which it was set. He reached inside and fiddled with something the others couldn’t see. There was an audible click and one half of the row of cabinets seemed to lean out toward them.

  “Help me with this,” said Hiro. Priest and Boris took hold of the handles and pulled. It was immediately clear that the cabinet was a dummy set on hidden casters, but rust made it improbably heavy. “Might have opened electrically. God, it weighs a ton.”

  Boris gritted his teeth, made a sound like an angry bear and pulled. The rusted wheels made pig-squealing noises as the cabinet moved. The whole row moved outward with dogged reluctance and then stopped, revealing a darkened cleft two feet wide.

  “Light, light,” called Priest, snapping his fingers impatiently, but Hiro was right there. He aimed the beam inside and they could see that there was a short hallway beyond the cabinets, beyond which a flight of stairs dropped into utter darkness.

  “What the fuck?” asked Boris. “How’d you know about this?”

  “A little birdie told me,” said Priest. “What does it matter? The only thing I care about is what’s down there.”

  “What is down there?” asked Keppler. “Is it something to do with what happened at Chernobyl?”

  Priest laughed. “Oh, no,” he said as he squeezed inside, “this is a lot more dangerous than that. And a lot more beautiful.”

  -3-

  Sam Hunter

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  The woman told me her name was Acantha. Greek in origin, I think, though her accent was generic American. No last name given, even when I asked really nicely.

  When she got around to telling me about the job it was pretty clear why she was willing to dig deep to hire me. Understand something, she wasn’t just looking for a P.I. who isn’t afraid to bend the rules a tad, but specifically Samuel Theiss Hunter. Limbus, whoever the Christ they were, knew who and what I was. The jobs they brought me before were not something one of the bigger and better run investigations agencies would have taken or could have handled. I’m not saying I’m better, because…hey, let’s be real, but I am different. Limbus hires me for oddball
jobs because of certain qualities I bring to the mix. Not talking about my snarky wit or roguish charm.

  No, I’m talking about the whole fangs and claws and fur thing.

  As for Limbus…I haven’t been able to discover much about them except for a few things. First, they have the most enigmatic and annoying fucking business cards I’ve ever seen. Nice paper, embossed printing, quality work, but this is what their cards say:

  LIMBUS, Inc.

  Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

  Call us. We employ. 1-800-555-0606

  How lucky do you feel?

  Sounds like a recruiting ad for a hooker, or maybe a thug to guard a brothel, and not in the good part of town.

  The first job I took for them involved the hunt for some rich assholes who were skinning innocent young women alive. Why? Aside from the fact that they thought their money and family connections gave them license to piss on anyone lower on the social ladder, these particular privileged dickheads were trying to appease a demon.

  Yeah. Be with that for a minute. Their game plan boiled down to conjuring a demon, appeasing the demon, enslaving the demon in order to get it to grant them a lot of wishes including even more money and maybe bigger dicks.

  Whatever.

  Bottom line is that we had words. Me and them, and me and the demon. Actual demon. Scared the piss out of me when I realized that these ass-clowns had conjured a real demon. No, check that…it scared me to know that demons were real and not something from bad horror movies. My life’s been pretty weird but I thought there were limits, you know? There were already enough things going bump in the night. But, I don’t get to make that kind of an existential call. So, yeah…demon. Fuck me.

  But, fuck him too. Turns out, he could bleed. That was a bit of a game changer because up to then I figured I was totally screwed. I mean, demon, am I right? That’s usually the point at which you figure it’s game over.

  But if something can bleed, then it can die. That, as it turned out, is something of a cosmic verity. When the universe turns out to be both bigger and badder than you think, it’s nice to know that there are rules.

  My second Limbus job was last year, and it involved a team of North Korean wacko scientists trying to create lycanthropic super soldiers. No, I am not making this up and I am not drunk. Okay, well, maybe I’ve had a couple-three beers today, but everything else is straight. Werewolf super soldiers.

  So, my life is complicated. To which you might say, no shit, Sherlock. Fair enough. But I’m telling you all of this because it’ll help you frame your mind for what Acantha told me about the job.

  I took the phone with me through the door that connected my crappy apartment to my crappy office. It was small, cramped, untidy, unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and probably unhealthy. I’d prepped the coffeemaker before I went to bed so that all I had to do was hit a button. If I could have gotten a coffeemaker with an IV drip to start the caffeination process that much quicker I’d own one. I knew that Acantha was still waiting on the line through all this even though she hadn’t said anything. She called me, so fuck it. Coffee first.

  When the magical process of coffee making was in full swing, I plopped down on the creaky leather chair behind my desk. I flipped open my laptop and logged in.

  “Okay,” I said, “hit me with some details.”

  She started off by asking me a question. “Mr. Hunter, have you ever heard of the Unlearnable Truths?” When I was a little slow in responding she said, “Stop Googling them.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can hear you typing,” she said. “Don’t bother, they’re not on the Internet.”

  I stopped one-hand typing the words into Google. “Okay,” I said, “then what are they besides an obvious contradiction in terms?”

  “Are you familiar with the phrase ‘Librorum Prohibitorum’?” she asked, then quickly added, “Please don’t look it up. Just answer me.”

  “Um,” I said, “I don’t speak much Latin, but I can take a swing at it. Prohibited book? Something like that?”

  “Very good, Mr. Hunter.”

  “Do I get a cookie?”

  “We’ll see. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was authorized by Pope Paul IV in 1559. It contained a list of books deemed by the Catholic Church to be heretical, lascivious, or anti-clerical.”

  “Naughty books.”

  “Naughty books indeed,” agreed Acantha. “And, yes, you can find mention of it on the Net. Look under ‘Pauline Index’. However what you’ll find is the wrong list of books. You see, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum contained two separate lists. The Pauline Index was a list of books the general public were allowed to know about but not allowed to have. Books that were decried by the church and sought by the Inquisition.”

  “Okay. And the second—?”

  “Ah, that is a very special list,” she said. “We call them the Unlearnable Truths. And they are the most dangerous books ever written.”

  “Oh come on…”

  She ignored me. “Even the titles of those books were kept secret from everyone except for a special and very covert office of the church and their field agents, who were known collectively as the Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum.”

  “Order of something-something,” I said. “Who are they?”

  “The Brotherhood of the Lock. They are an ancient order of warrior priests,” she said, and there was a quality to her voice that I found both intriguing and alarming. She sounded genuinely scared. “They are the most intense and dangerous arm of the Inquisition.”

  “You keep talking in the present tense but we’re discussing something that happened a long time ago, right?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Hate to break it to you, sister, but I’m pretty darn sure the Inquisition is yesterday’s news.”

  She sighed. “There is so much that regular people don’t know about the world, Mr. Hunter. Even people like you. And, let’s face it, the general public don’t believe you could possibly be what you are. Or that you’re from an ancient family of lycanthropes who can trace their unique bloodlines back to Etruscan times.”

  “Okay, okay, fair enough,” I said. “Tell me the rest.”

  “The Ordo Fratrum Claustrorum—the Brotherhood—were created by a papal bull, but you won’t find that on the Net, either, or in any official church records. They were always kept secret. Only a few cardinals know of them, and most popes, including the current one, know nothing about them. Their mission is to search the world for the Unlearnable Truths.”

  “And do what with them? Burn ‘em?”

  “If possible.”

  “How could that not be possible?”

  “We’ll get to that,” said Acantha. “It was the mission of this brotherhood to seek out the Unlearnable Truths and to protect humanity from the secrets they contain. This they did by any means necessary. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that rivers of blood have been spilled. Many heretics were burned or butchered by the Brotherhood because, after all, sacrifices must sometimes be made to protect the flock.”

  “You sound like you’re in favor of the Brotherhood’s game plan.”

  “One can agree with the end result without agreeing with the motives or methods.”

  I didn’t comment on that but encouraged her to tell me more.

  “The creation of the Index,” she continued, “and the formation of the Brotherhood happened centuries ago. The Pauline Index has, for the most part, become a footnote in history. However the search for the Unlearnable Truths continues, as does the mission of the Brotherhood. They are real, they are dangerous, and they are relentless.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “I’m getting to that. Until the early twentieth century the names of the Unlearnable Truths were unknown to all except the most devoted occult scholars, and then something happened, something that brought the titles into the public consciousness.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We…don’t actu
ally know how or why it happened,” said Acantha, “but during the twenties and thirties several writers of pulp fiction—predominantly horror and science fiction writers—began mentioning the titles of those books in their stories. Luckily the contents of the books formed no part of the text of these stories, but it was devastating to discover that even the titles should be so casually mentioned.”

  “Mentioned how?” I asked. “I don’t follow.”

  “Have you ever heard of a writer named Howard Philips Lovecraft?”

  I sighed and it turned into a shiver. “H.P. Lovecraft. Sure. The name’s come up.”

  “Have you read his stories?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And—?”

  “And what?”

  “Do you think they are entirely fictional?” asked Acantha.

  I sat back in my chair and put my heels up on my desk, crossing them, trying to convince my body that everything was casual and cool. However I was sweating under my clothes. Last year—on a gig that didn’t involve Limbus—I’d had a run-in with a group who seemed to have stepped right out of a Lovecraft story. They were not products of some asshole writer’s lunatic imagination. I wish to Christ I could say they were, but I’m still having those nightmares.

  “I try to keep an open mind,” I said carefully.

  There was a sound that might have been a small, quiet laugh. “Have you read any of the writings of Lovecraft’s colleagues and those influenced by him, particularly the stories collectively known as the Cthulhu Mythos?”

  “Some of them.”

  “August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard…” She rattled off a dozen or so names. I knew most of them, though I hadn’t read all of them and told her as much. “In those stories the writers make mention of forbidden books. Do you recall any of the titles?”