Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  Most of him was flesh.

  Some of him was still metal.

  Whatever process of transformation was necessary for him to come from whatever hell he lived into the world of flesh and blood, it was not completed. Maybe there hadn’t been enough of the guards’ blood. Or maybe adult male blood was not enough. Maybe Moloch really needed the blood of a child sacrifice to gain his full power. Maybe that’s why he reached for her, to feed his need, to create the bridge between his world and ours.

  Maybe.

  Maybe.

  But who gives a fuck?

  Bambi was still alive. And I was never more alive than I was in that moment. Fully the wolf. Without hesitation or resistance on my part. A monster, and reveling in that.

  On the walls all around me were framed posters of women who had died. I could feel their eyes watching me. I looked at their faces. Recorded every image with the clarity of mind that is a gift of the wolf. Every face, every line, every curve, every scar and blemish. Sixteen beautiful girls, each of whom had been torn apart and had their blood and flesh fed to a monster.

  An actual monster.

  My ancestors, the Benandanti, fought evil. They fought monsters and demons. Until now I thought evil was a human thing. Entirely human. I thought the whole ‘fighting monsters’ thing was some kind of metaphor, a grandiose way of describing struggles with human corruption.

  Moloch, by his fact, by his presence, by his reality, changed all of that. It made the unreal real.

  It also made the stuff of nightmares real.

  Demon-gods.

  Fallen angels.

  Blood sacrifices to conjure something impossible.

  Gold made flesh.

  Maybe being flesh was the only way Moloch could exist in this world. I don’t know, I’m not a mystic, I don’t do metaphysical questions. All I know is that if Moloch was flesh—or even partly flesh—then it meant that he belonged to this world. And this world has rules.

  One of which is that all flesh is vulnerable.

  With a howl as loud as the roar of the demon-god, I threw myself at Moloch, slashing at him with my claws.

  The golden flesh was tough.

  Damn tough.

  But flesh is flesh.

  I had claws as sharp as razors. I had all of the muscle given to me by whatever power or gene or curse created my family’s bloodline.

  I had the rage of a werewolf. A Benandanti.

  A hound of God.

  And I laid into that evil son of a bitch with everything I had.

  Golden flesh opened as I raked him back and forth.

  Red-gold blood splashed out, striking Bambi, who screamed and screamed. Hitting me in the face, in the mouth. I snarled and drank the blood down as I slashed.

  Moloch roared in sudden pain and his surprise was awesome to see.

  Maybe in all of his thousands of years of existence he’d never felt pain. Maybe he thought that pain was beyond him, that he was immune to it.

  But he chose to be flesh. That’s what he wanted from his worshippers. They killed so many girls to give him that gift.

  And I used it against him.

  I tore at him. I bit into his stomach and pulled out organs and meat. I covered the floor and the walls with the blood of a fallen angel.

  It burned my mouth and throat.

  I drank it anyway.

  When the guards knocked down the door they found shattered pieces of a statue standing in a lake of molten gold. Bambi crouched on a table that had once been covered with knives. She hunkered down, arms wrapped around her head, unwilling and unable to witness this.

  I stood in the center, in the hollow of what had been the chest of the bull-god, a golden lump of heart-shaped meat in my hands, muzzle buried in it, feasting.

  The guards saw this. They pointed guns at me.

  I raised my head and growled at them.

  They dropped their guns and fled.

  *

  Later…

  I’m not sure how much later.

  I dropped Bambi at the E.R. of the closest hospital. I walked her in. She was catatonic. She had some minor burns from drops of molten gold. She couldn’t speak, and the drugs were still in her system. I left her with nurses who tried to get me to tell them who she was, who I was, what had happened.

  I walked away and found my car and drove back to my office.

  That was six hours ago.

  I showered in the tiny bathroom, then took the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s 23-Year-Old bourbon back to my desk, poured a big glass, and drank it slowly. When it was gone I refilled it. And refilled it again.

  Around midnight I fished for the card I’d found on my floor and laid it on my desk blotter.

  Limbus, Inc.

  Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

  Call us. We employ. 1-800-555-0606

  How lucky do you feel?

  How lucky did I feel?

  Hard to say.

  Hard to really know what to think.

  I’d fought something that shouldn’t exist. On the other hand, to most people I was something that shouldn’t exist. Hang both of those on the wall and look at them.

  Moloch.

  Jesus.

  But with all of that, there was something that hung burning in my mind.

  After I’d let the wolf out, I’d looked at the faces of the sixteen murdered women. Those images were indelibly recorded in my mind. Every single detail. They were all strangers, women I’d only ever seen as skinned meat.

  Except.

  There was one face, one woman. A little more beautiful than all the others.

  It was the kind of face that you read about. The kind of face that might have looked down at you from a movie screen if she’d been allowed to live, to grow up, to become what she’d wanted to be. Pale skin with pores so small it looked like she was carved out of marble; with good bones and full lips and only a single visible flaw. If you could call it a flaw. A small crescent-shaped scar on her cheek near the left corner of her mouth.

  I thought about that face. It had been on a poster, screaming down at me, dying.

  Maybe the cops would be able to match it against one of the sixteen bodies in morgues across the country. That scar, though, wouldn’t be there. It had been stolen with her skin.

  But I’d seen it.

  Yeah, I’d seen that scar.

  I reached out and touched the Limbus card. I traced each digit of the phone number.

  If I called it, I wondered who would answer.

  I wondered if anyone would answer.

  I sipped some more of my bourbon and wondered about a lot of things.

  My cell phone lay on the blotter next to the card. I looked at it.

  I poured myself another drink.

  And another.

  Epilogue

  It happened just as he had come to understand that it must. As Matthew turned the final page, as he left behind tales of sacrifices, of ancient gods, of unimaginable futures and beings that span time and space, it fell, fluttering almost, down to the table below, landing with the audible flop of thin, cream-colored card stock. Where had it hidden in the book he’d just read every page of? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was what it said on the front. There, printed in thick black letters that were illuminated by the day’s first rays of sunlight, was a name and a slogan that he didn’t have to read to know.

  Limbus, Inc.

  Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

  We employ.

  How lucky do you feel?

  And that was it. No phone number. No email. No address. Nothing. He didn’t need it. Matthew had only a moment to comprehend the words when the bell rang and the door to his shop opened.

  The man stood in the doorway, outlined by the dawning glow of a Boston morning. He stood there on the threshold. He did not move forward. And he did not speak. It took a moment for Matthew to realize he was waiting on an invitation.

  “Come in,” he said, stuttering.

&nb
sp; The man stepped out of the light, and somehow he was precisely what Matthew had expected. A proud face, marked by sharp features and an air of absolute authority. He wore a suit, nothing too fancy. Nothing that would stand out.

  “Mr. Sellers,” he said, “I am Recruiter Hawthorne. And I have a job for you.”

  As he crossed the short distance that separated the two men, Matthew shook his head.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Hawthorne smiled. “Ah, Mr. Sellers, let us not play games with one another. You know who I am, and you know for whom I work. I see you even have our business card.”

  Matthew glanced from the card to Hawthorne and shuddered.

  “One of our other employees visited you yesterday. He left you that book.” Hawthorne said, pointing down to the tattered manuscript that still sat on Matthew’s desk.

  “Templeton was an employee of yours?” Matthew said, truly not understanding. The frail man who had come into his store only a day before was terrified of something. Now Matthew knew what that something was.

  “Of a sort, yes. We are all workmen in this world, don’t you think? And if we do not always know exactly what the work entails—or even who pulls the strings behind the scenes—it is no great matter. I believe he presented you our offer, did he not?”

  “Your offer? You mean you want this book published?”

  Hawthorne reached down and rubbed his hand across the shabby cover of the manuscript. “It surprises you, does it? I suppose I can understand that. You think that we wish to hide our work from the world. Yes, it is true, I suppose—what we do, we tend to do in secret. But we do not wish to hide in the shadows. The whispers of our existence have grown too loud, and the curiosity of mankind is never satisfied. People will seek us out, and when they do there is no telling what trouble they may cause. No, Mr. Sellers, we hide best when we hide in the light. Make the story of Limbus one of fiction, one of myth, and one will no more look for us than they would the lands of Narnia or Middle-earth. But first, we need a publisher, Mr. Sellers. That is our offer of employment to you.”

  “And what makes you think I would agree to that?”

  Hawthorne looked around the shop, sweeping with his hand as if to include it all in one great gesture. “This is your dream, is it not? You built this with your own hands? And now you are in danger of losing it. I offer you a goldmine, sir. A book that will sell millions of copies. A story that will make you rich and perhaps even famous. The job is made for the man, Mr. Sellers. You are the only person who we believe is right for this employment.”

  “Are the stories true?” Matthew asked.

  The corner of Hawthorne’s mouth crept up into the hint of a smile. “To a measure. They are visions, you see. Visions of things that have been, things that are, and things that are yet to be. They are truth, to the extent that truth exists in this world.”

  Hawthorne removed a single sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the desk.

  “Our offer is simple, Mr. Sellers. We pay you a retainer fee to put you back on your feet. That is yours to keep, as are all the profits from sales of the work. We ask only for your discretion and a promise never to reveal from whom you received the book. Do we have an agreement?”

  With a flick of his wrist, Hawthorne produced a pen, placing it on the desk. Matthew stared hard into Hawthorne’s unflinching eyes. He glanced from the pen to the manuscript to that single sheet of paper. And then he made his choice.

  About the Authors

  Anne C. Petty is the author of three horror/dark-fantasy novels, a Florida Gothic suspense series co-written with P.V. LeForge, three books of literary criticism, and many essays on writing, mythology, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Recent short fiction includes her award-winning story “Blade,” and the novella “The Veritas Experience,” published in The Best Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2009. Anne is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, the International Thriller Writers, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. She is a founding member of the Tallahassee Writers Association and has been a presenter at writers’ conferences and pop-culture conventions such as Dragon-Con in Atlanta. In 2006, she founded Kitsune Books, a small press specializing in literary fiction and book-length poetry collections. She has a Ph.D. in English from Florida State University, specializing in Mythology & Folklore. www.annepetty.com/

  Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and freelancer for Marvel Comics. His novels include Assassin’s Code, Flesh & Bone, Ghost Road Blues, Dust & Decay, Patient Zero, The Wolfman, and many others. Nonfiction books include Ultimate Jujutsu, The Cryptopedia, Zombie CSU, Wanted Undead or Alive, and others. Jonathan’s award-winning teen novel, Rot & Ruin, is now in development for film. He’s the editor/co-author of V-Wars, a vampire-themed anthology; and was a featured expert on The History Channel special ZOMBIES: A LIVING HISTORY. Since 1978 he’s sold more than 1200 magazine feature articles, 3000 columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, and poetry. His comics include CAPTAIN AMERICA: HAIL HYDRA, DOOMWAR, MARVEL ZOMBIES RETURN and MARVEL UNIVERSE VS THE AVENGERS. He teaches the Experimental Writing for Teens class, is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse, and co-founder of The Liars Club. www.jonathanmaberry.com/.

  Benjamin Kane Ethridge is a Bram Stoker Award winner, author of the novel Black & Orange (Bad Moon Books 2010), Bottled Abyss (Redrum Horror 2012), and Dungeon Brain (Nightscape Press 2012). For his master’s thesis he wrote, “CAUSES OF UNEASE: The Rhetoric of Horror Fiction and Film.” Available in an ivory tower near you. Benjamin lives in Southern California with his wife and two creatures who possess stunning resemblances to human children. When he isn’t writing, reading, or videogaming, Benjamin’s defending California’s waterways and sewers from pollution.facebook.com/Benjamin.kane.ethridge, twitter:@bkethridge, email: ben@bkethridge.com

  Joseph Nassise is the author of more than twenty novels, including the internationally bestselling Templar Chronicles series, the Jeremiah Hunt trilogy, and the Great Undead War series. He has also written several books in the popular Rogue Angel action-adventure series. His work has been nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award and has been translated into half a dozen languages to date. He has written for both the comic and role-playing game industries and also served two terms as president of the Horror Writers Association, the world’s largest organization of professional horror and dark fantasy writers. For more information about Joe’s work, visit him on the web at www.josephnassise.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/joseph.nassise.

  Brett J. Talley is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of That Which Should Not Be and The Void, as well as numerous short stories and a haunted history of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A native of the South, Brett received a philosophy and history degree from the University of Alabama before moving to witch-haunted Massachusetts to attend Harvard Law School. He seeks out the mysterious and the unknown and believes that the light can always triumph over the darkness, no matter how black the night may be. You can find him at http://brettjtalley.com/.

  Check out these titles from JournalStone:

  That Which Should Not Be

  Brett J. Talley

  The Fall of Night

  Joseph Nassise

  Nightmare Ballad

  Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Forever Man

  Brian Matthews

  Twice Shy

  Patrick Freivald

  Fade to Black

  Jeffrey Wilson

  The Devil of Echo Lake

  Douglas Wynne

  The Burning Time

  JG Faherty

  The Cornerstone

  Anne C. Petty

  Available through your local and online bookseller or at www.journalstone.com/

 

 

  Archive.