Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  “This…is…incredible,” said Keppler. She sounded like she was about to hyperventilate.

  “You think that’s something?” Priest said, teasing them. “Then take a look at this.” He unclipped a multi-tool from his belt and stepped up to the arch, flicked open a flat-bladed screwdriver and gouged a long line across a metal panel. The gray paint curled away to reveal a different color, one that burned a fierce yellow.

  “Oh my god…” breathed Rink. “You were telling me the truth. I…I thought you were just exaggerating so I’d sleep with you. But this is all true.”

  The others bent close and stared at the exposed yellow metal, then they stepped back and let their gaze travel over the entire massive structure.

  “No way,” said Hiro.

  Boris said, “No fucking way.”

  “Yes,” said Priest. “Every last ounce of it. Seventy-three tons of gold. Six tons of platinum, eight point nine tons of silver. All of it absolutely pure except for the nonconductive gray paint.”

  “And all of it radioactive,” said Keppler. “How can we—?”

  “Whoa, whoa, guys,” said Hiro, cutting her off. “Jesus Christ, look at this!”

  He raised his flashlight and aimed at the center of the metal panel inside the arch.

  “What are we supposed to be looking at?” growled Boris, nervous and angry.

  “I don’t—” began Keppler, then she gasped. “Wait—what?”

  Rink was equally shocked. She reached up and took hold of Hiro’s wrist and moved it so that the beam traveled across the surface of the panel.

  It took Boris a moment longer, and then he saw it, too. “Oy blyad!” he gasped.

  The flashlight beam was visible in the dusty air. It was a stark white line between the lens and the wall, but there was something wrong with how it struck that flat gray metal. Because it did not. It simply did not illuminate the surface, nor did it bounce and scatter the light. The flashlight’s beam simply vanished into it, like a straw stuck into mud. The light passed through the flat gray and was simply…gone.

  “That’s impossible,” whispered Keppler.

  Impossible or not, it was happening and they all stared blankly at it.

  “My god, indeed,” murmured Priest, his heart beginning to hammer in his chest. “It’s still operational…”

  Keppler turned sharply to him. “What do you mean ‘operational’? What is this thing? How could it absorb light like that? It’s impossible. What the hell have we found?”

  Priest began to answer but then he saw something else and it froze his body but tore a cry from his throat.

  “God in heaven!”

  They all whirled and once more Boris brought up his gun.

  Forty feet away, half shrouded in darkness, stood a pedestal. Priest raised his flashlight and played the beam over it, revealing that the pedestal was carved from some dark wood and fashioned into the shape of a hideous monster with a squat and lumpish body, stubby batlike wings, arms and legs that were vaguely humanoid, and a hideous head whose mouth was formed by dozens of writhing tentacles. It crouched there, arms outstretched to form a cradle upon which a book had been placed.

  Rink cringed back from the horrific carving, raising a hand to shield her eyes from even looking at it. “No…” she whispered, and then began reciting an old Catholic prayer from her childhood.

  Keppler and Hiro exchanged a look and then turned to Priest. Boris still pointed his gun at the thing as if the wooden monstrosity would somehow spring to life and attack with claws and tentacles.

  “It’s really here,” murmured Priest and he felt a little faint. Even though he had spent many years as a younger man working with a group dedicated to locating, destroying, or hiding away books such as this one, he had never before been in the actual presence of one. He’d seen pages, photographs, and held vials of ashes from some that had been destroyed. But this one was intact, and it looked pristine. The edges of the pages glinting with gold paint, the ink dark and legible despite its incredible age. “Livre d’Eibon,” he said. “The Book of Eibon. God above.” He looked over his shoulder at the others for a moment. “You can’t imagine what this book contains. The fools who worked here tried to steal the code to make the God Machine function properly, but they probably disregarded the rest as the ramblings of a madman.” He turned once more to face the book and took a few tentative steps closer to it. “This is the only surviving translation of the original text written by the great sorcerer Eibon, chief priest of the god Zhothaqquah. In those pages is the whole story of his life. Every secret he uncovered, every celestial being he encountered on his journeys to Cykranosh, through the Vale of Pnath, the planet Shaggai, and elsewhere. All of the veneration rites of Zhothaqquah are here, all of the formulae for potions and spells. So much…so much…” An erotic shiver rippled through him. “Scholars—those who believe in this book’s existence at all—think that only a fragment of it remains, but here is the entire book.”

  “You want us to believe that this is—what?—a book of magic spells and shit? Dude, you’re out of your mind.”

  Priest ignored him.

  “What’s that?” asked Keppler, pointing to the pedestal. “Is that supposed to be the god he worshipped?”

  Priest shook his head. “No. Zhothaqquah is the offspring of the god Yeb, and in sacred artwork is represented as a short, squat, furry toad. Don’t laugh,” he warned sharply. “You mock the elder gods at your peril, yes?”

  Keppler turned away, probably to hide a smile.

  “No,” said Priest, as he nodded toward the pedestal, “that is something else entirely. This is the son of Yeb’s twin, Nug.” He moved to stand within a few feet of the pedestal and spread his arms wide. “And isn’t he magnificent?”

  “It’s ugly,” whispered Rink. “It’s evil.”

  Priest walked a few steps closer, then stopped. “Evil?” he mused, tasting the word. “No, my dear, it’s older than that.”

  “How can it be older than evil?” demanded Boris.

  “Because evil is a concept developed by man,” said Priest, touching the wooden tentacles, “and this one here…well, he is much older than us.”

  “‘He’?” asked Hiro. “Who? That monster? Who are you talking about?”

  Priest turned and looked at his companions. He smiled at them and he could feel that the smile on his face was strange. Wrong, somehow, though he could not see it. The others recoiled from him. Rink crossed herself. Then Priest turned back to the book and the magnificent pedestal on which it rested. He dropped very slowly to his knees and spread his arms wide.

  And he said, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Iä! Iä!“

  -7-

  Sam Hunter

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  She gave me a lot of it. Probably not as much as she knew, but enough to make my head spin, and that had nothing to do with the Jack Daniels in my coffee.

  “Okay, so this is some Indiana Jones bullshit,” I told her. “Not sure I see any doorway for me to walk through. I mean, I’m flattered that you called and all—”

  “No you’re not,” said Acantha.

  “No I’m not,” I agreed. “But I don’t operate out of the country. Hell, I don’t like going much outside of the tri-state area.”

  “Ah,” she said, “my mistake. The problem is definitely coming your way.”

  “How so?”

  “Some events are aligning in an unfortunate way. Or, an opportune way if we can act swiftly and correctly.”

  “You have a weird definition of ‘swiftly’,” I said. “We’ve been on the phone for an hour.”

  She laughed. “The clock hasn’t started ticking quite yet. But when it does, then you’ll have to move fast.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “The team put together by Mr. Priest has acquired an alarming number of those books. And a competing team has also taken possession of some of them.”

  “Wait…what competing team? Are you ta
lking about the Brotherhood of the Lock?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m talking about Closers.”

  “Closers? Never heard of them. Who are they?”

  “Oh, they are a very dangerous group, Mr. Hunter,” she said. “They are very highly trained special operators working for secret groups so deeply hidden inside the U.S. government that even the president is unaware of them. They are well-trained and well-funded by black budget dollars.”

  “Oh, that’s just swell.”

  “They also have access to technology in the form of weapons, equipment, and body armor that is far beyond anything you’ve seen. The source of that technology is something that has caused serious problems for a friend of yours.”

  “I don’t have a lot of friends.”

  “An ally, then. Someone whose work has many times overlapped with projects being undertaken by Limbus.”

  “Who are we talking about?”

  “Captain Joe Ledger of the Department of Military Sciences.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Him.”

  Ledger was a kind of super Boy Scout with a strong dash of absolute fucking psychopath. Like me, he was a former cop, but unlike me he now ran with one of those “we’re-so-secret-if-we-told-you-we’d-have-to-kill-you” groups. Very James Bond. Very Mission Impossible. When I did the Limbus gig in Pine Deep, Pennsylvania with the North Korean werewolf super-soldiers, he was working the same case from another angle.

  And, let’s pause for a moment to discuss how absolutely fucking surreal my life is. I just said that I worked with a super spy to take down North Korean mad scientists who were creating werewolf super soldiers…and I’m not exaggerating. And you wonder why I drink?

  “Are you still there?” asked Acantha.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but wishing I wasn’t. Am I going to have to work with Ledger again?”

  “Would you have a problem with that?”

  “Yeah. He’s a dick who’s basically a standup comic with a gun. I’m not captain of his fan club.”

  “He’s a good man,” she said.

  “So is Will Ferrell, but I don’t want to go hunting bad guys with him, either.”

  “Point taken. And it’s not an issue, I assure you. Captain Ledger is currently in the hospital in San Diego.”

  “Oh. Why? What happened? He crack a joke at the wrong time and somebody knocked his pearly white teeth out?”

  “He’s dying,” she said, and left it at that.

  That hit me pretty hard. A lot harder than I expected. Ledger was a bit of a dick, but he was on the side of the angels.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “The matter before us,” she said after a moment, “is coming to a head in your own backyard. A group of Closers is arriving in Philadelphia tonight to obtain a book in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania’s folklore department. The book is The Cloister Manifesto, and it is arguably the rarest and most dangerous of the Unlearnable Truths. Dr. Holland, the professor who is studying it, does not know what it is because the text is written in a unique form of coded Aramaic. That’s also why the book went missing for so long; it’s been in various private collections under a number of names that don’t hint at what it is. A rare book collector in Budapest had it among a collection of indecipherable curios for the last forty-six years, and he referred to it merely as the ‘Latin book’. After that it was in an estate auction catalog as ‘lot 561-F’. It was purchased in bulk with other items deemed curious but of little apparent value.” She laughed again. “It’s a bit like people passing around and bidding on a nuclear bomb and thinking it’s a doorstop or paperweight.”

  “And Dr. Holland got it?”

  “From a friend of a friend of a colleague. Given to him as a Christmas present because it appeared to be Latin and Holland is a noted scholar of ancient Latin folkloric texts.”

  “Jesus.”

  “In point of fact,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The Cloister Manifesto is very much connected with Jesus of Nazareth. It is why the Brotherhood of the Lock have sought it more aggressively than any of the other Unlearnable books. It is why the Closers will stop at nothing to get it. And it is why we need you to obtain that book at all costs.”

  “What do you mean? Why’s that book so goddamned important?”

  “For two reasons,” said Acantha. “The first is that it contains a series of complex rituals for invoking a being of incalculable dark magic who would delight in consuming our entire world. A being hinted at in many religions but given a name in the Book of Revelation.”

  “Shit…please don’t tell me you’re talking about the antichrist.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, and once more I could hear the fear in her voice. “The Cloister Manifesto contains the rituals for bringing the antichrist into our world.”

  My throat went dry and my heart was hammering. I shouldn’t be listening to this shit let alone believing it, but each time I’d done something for Limbus the world got bigger, stranger, and more terrifying. I did not think Acantha was lying to me now.

  “You said there were two reasons…what’s the other?”

  There was a sound on the line. Did she catch her breath, or sob?

  “The Cloister Manifesto is written in the blood of the man crucified on Golgotha,” she said. “It is written in the blood of Jesus Christ.”

  -8-

  Hiro Tsukino

  Sicán Cave System

  Nazca Desert

  Southern Peru

  Four Years Ago

  Hiro hadn’t understood why Priest had required them all to wear such clumsy outfits. They were modified versions of the heavy rubber and canvas rigs worn by firefighters and included thick gloves, boots, and helmets with clear plastic visors. Emergency oxygen bottles were clipped to their backs, though Priest said they probably wouldn’t need them.

  The Peruvian sun was blistering hot despite the deep cold of the previous night. Deserts were like that, willing to torture and kill with extremes of temperature. The walk from where they’d parked their vehicle to this forgotten weed-choked gulley was filled with dangers, too, as if the landscape and the atmosphere were accomplices in premeditated murder. Without equipment, Hiro did not believe he could last more than a day out here. If the weather and terrain didn’t kill him, the scorpions, spiders, biting lizards, and poisonous plants would. How in hell the Sicán people ever thrived here for over six hundred years was a mystery. Bunch of masochists was the best Hiro could determine.

  Luckily Mr. Priest had left nothing to chance, though, and outfitted them—as always—in the most advanced gear. Over-preparing so that there was no risk of ever being caught off guard with a need and no solution. Hiro appreciated that even if he didn’t like having to test the boundaries of those preparations this often. Since joining Priest’s little team of oddballs the urban explorer had found himself in several extreme locations. And not extreme in a fun way. Not like snowboarding down a sheer mountain or base jumping off a skyscraper in Dubai. But no, Priest dragged the team to the ass-end of the world. Different ass-ends, mused Hiro, if the metaphor would stretch that far. This place was a classic. They couldn’t bring the truck closer than three miles. There was a road, but an earthquake thirty years ago had ripped it apart. And since it went from nowhere to nowhere, no one had seen fit to fix it. The team had to climb over boulders that had been thrust up by the seismic forces, and twice Hiro had to rig lines so that they could shimmy across deep chasms. It took hours to go those few miles.

  During one their many necessary breaks, Hiro took Keppler aside.

  “This is nuts,” he said quietly.

  The nuclear scientist took a moment before replying. “It’s no crazier than any of the last three jobs.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t mean that part…though I wish Priest had told us more than ‘we have to fetch a book’.”

  “That’s mostly what we’ve been doing,” she said. “Except for Poliske.”

  They sha
red a smile about that. Each of them had been allowed to pry some of the massive jewels out of the God Machine. Those jewels were being treated now to remove as much radiation as possible, using a technique developed by one of Keppler’s many uncles. The uncle was in for a hefty cut, of course, but there was plenty to go around. Sadly, the jewels could not be sold in their current form even though they would be worth much more that way. But the Soviets had laser-cut ID tags into them and once the cutters in Antwerp got the booty they’d have to cut those sections out. Currently Priest’s organization was overseeing that process and the stones—in whole or part—would not be formally released to the team members until the whole mission was done. It was a three-year commitment but the payday at the end had a mind-numbing number of zeroes at the end of it.

  “You know what’s bugging the crap out of me,” Hiro told Keppler, “is the geology of this place. Rink showed me the geophysical history of this region and I was surprised to see how many earthquakes they’ve had around here.”

  “So what? Earthquakes happen. What’s the problem? Are they predicting another one or something?”

  “No, that’s just it,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any earthquakes here at all. There are no fault lines running anywhere near here. Not in this part of Peru. I checked with a geologist chick I used to date, had her look into it. She said this whole area is kind of freaky.”

  “Freaky?”

  “Geologically speaking. She said that according to the structure and location of the tectonic plates this is supposed to be a stable region, and yet there’ve been over thirty quakes here in the last hundred years. Different universities have sent people to study it and they came up empty. They’ve used ground penetrating radar and all. No one understands it.”

  As he spoke it became clear to Hiro that Keppler either wasn’t really listening or didn’t really care about what he was saying. Lately she’d become more distant and cold; not that she’d been warm from the jump. But since the last couple of trips with Priest, Keppler had stopped acting like a scientist and tended to drift along in the boss man’s wake. Even Rink—who had become jumpier and more fearful each time they went out—had more evident life force, and was more present than Keppler. Hiro wondered if Keppler had reached a limit or crossed some kind of line, on one side of which was the rational—if greedy—scientist and on the other was a mind unable to accept the things they’d all seen.