The Limpet Syndrome

by Tony Moyle

  The snow crunched under foot as he set off up the slight incline. Although the distance was short, the air was thin, and pulling Byron’s obese body across it would be a challenge. John was about halfway to his destination when he caught sight of two dark green figures hurrying away from the cabin in his direction. Pulling heavily laden sledges and travelling at twice the speed, they were clearly fitter and better prepared than John was. With fear as well as snow in their eyes, they did not stop when they reached him.

  “Arrêtez-vous, Monsieur. Un oiseau démoniaque dans la cabine. Repart tout suite,” they muttered, gliding across the snow as quickly as the water ran off their waxy waterproofs.

  John attempted to translate the words that he heard. He understood the words ‘cabine’ and ‘démoniaque’. He knew the word ‘arrête’ meant stop. Stop, the cabin’s possessed? Deciding that made no sense, he racked his memory in search of the missing words in the sentence.

  “I remember ‘oiseau’,” he said to himself, “but what was it? Peach stone? No, what would ‘The cabin has been possessed by a peach stone’ mean?”

  He kept plodding slowly through the two-foot snow.

  “It sounded a bit like wagon. What the hell is a demonic wagon? It can’t be that. Oiseau,” he repeated several times over, before it finally hit him. “It’s bird, of course it is. A demonic bird. Sandy!”

  Undeterred by the build-up of lactic acid that drowned Byron’s body, his legs worked at an unfeasibly quick pace. Ten minutes of frenetic walking later he’d reached the cabin, almost braking its fragile hinges as he burst through the door.

  “Sandy!” he shouted. “Are you in here?”

  On the first floor of the cabin the answer to his question was thawing off in front of the dwindling embers of the fire. Sandy sat snivelling and spluttering in the relative warmth, having almost returned to his distinctive original colours.

  “John, next time you have a good idea,” Sandy chattered, “keep it to yourself.”

  “At least you haven’t spent the morning swinging by a thread,” John replied. Empty packets of biscuits were strewn around the floor. “Looks like you’ve had it pretty good.”

  “If you want to keep your eyeballs, I’d stop if I were you. You didn’t have to deal with the hairy twins and their total hysteria. Now that you’ve put us here, I hope you know what to do next?”

  “Yes. It’s around here somewhere, we just have to find it.”

  “Find what?”

  “The entrance to Limbo. I saw a blue light coming out of the mountain. I’m convinced it was a soul cast from Limbo. Let’s spread out and look for it. I’ll look around the slopes, I need you to fly up to the summit and see what you can find. I’ll meet you back here at the end of the day.”

  Over the next few hours they explored every possible nook and cranny on the mountainside. From high peak to shallow contour they searched for the entrance, neither knowing whether an entrance existed or not. The mountain bullied and harassed their efforts, shedding massive rocks from its giant shoulders, unwilling to allow any clues to its secrets. The weather was as equally uncooperative, unleashing a fierce horde of sharpened ice crystals in their path. When the sun had moved out of sight and the conditions became impossible, they retreated to the sanctuary of the cabin. Exhausted, they collapsed in front of the fire to defrost frozen limbs and exchange scant information.

  “Nothing,” said John both as a question and a summary of his day.

  “I watched the peak for hours and nothing came from it, blue or otherwise,” replied Sandy, his chest panting frantically for air.

  *****

  Daylight broke for the twenty-first time of the sixth month and both Sandy and John hid from it under borrowed sleeping bags. John’s stomach woke with an enormous sense of foreboding that soon spread to the rest of his body like a cancer. This day had been engraved on his conscience. He’d always believed, always hoped, to avoid its consequences when the day eventually arrived. How wrong he’d been. The human race had been saved from the emptiness of Emorfed. But his own emptiness, his own impending solitude, was more and more certain. In order to save humanity for the second time in a week, and sacrifice himself in the process, it was time to initiate plan B.

  He nudged the lump in the adjacent sleeping bag where Sandy had presumably been lost during the night. After much flapping and cursing, Sandy’s head appeared at the end of his sluglike chamber.

  “Ten more minutes,” he croaked, head retracting back under like a gopher.

  “No time,” replied John. “We’re all out of it.”

  Sandy reappeared to see that John was pointing Victor’s gun at him, “What are you doing?”

  “We can’t find the entrance, Sandy. I can’t help you as I promised. But I can’t risk the consequences of the solstice. I’m sorry.”

  Sandy’s face flooded with the fear of his own reckoning as the shiny barrel of the gun shook uncontrollably in John’s hand. Accustomed to a more confident master, the metal felt alien in his palm. As Victor had done before it, the weapon cast doubt on his courage to fire. Two parts of John’s will wrestled with each other, stricken by stalemate. There was an anger desperate to pull the trigger and a logic stopping him doing so. How could he weigh up the importance of one life above another? Would he save billions or take one life needlessly?

  “You can’t do it, can you?” said Sandy, after several minutes. “You’re no killer, John, you just haven’t got it in you.”

  “I thought, given the gravity of the situation and the choice that I had to make, it might become easier. At the end of the day you’re only here because you wanted to do good. It’s not your fault things ended like this. I won’t be an accomplice for someone else’s mistake.”

  John lowered the gun and sank to the floor. Weakness was overcome by anger as he repeatedly punched the floor until his knuckles cracked and bled. A shriek of pain leapt from his mouth and in that moment the mountain roared back its disapproval. The cabin shock uncontrollably as if John’s roar had finally found the one weakness in its chaotically mangled structure.

  Anything that had been stationary was now mobile. Objects were flying from shelves as the furniture shifted around them unaided. The magnitude of the juddering increased as a full-scale, seismic event threw them from one rickety wall to another. As timbers ripped like sails in a hurricane, the unbearable noise of rock colliding with rock echoed down the valley. Dust filled the air around them and the darkness engulfed the cabin. Holding anything that resembled a solid object, the occupants and the remains of the building sank into the ground. They fell uncontrollably into a deep crevice that had opened up in the Earth beneath them.

  Unlike the fall from the airplane, which had been uncomfortable yet planned, this experience was terrifyingly brutal. Fingers became numb from the pressure of clinging on, as they dodged the rocks that had pulverised what remained of the roof and joined the cabin on its descent. Then as quickly as it had started, everything stopped. Sandy and John jerked upwards on impact with the ground. But the remains of the cabin didn’t stay at rest for long. After several hesitant seconds it slide across a smooth, convex surface, before coming to rest in a heap of fractured planks and battered tiles. A slither of distant sunlight crept in from the outside world thousands of feet above them into the newly carved-out crevasse.

  John opened his eyes, half-expecting to see Brimstone’s craggy face or the excruciating pain that came from being sucked through the Soul Catcher. He got neither. In fact he saw nothing at all. If he hadn’t known better he would have sworn that this was what death really felt like. How many times had he died so far? There was no way of predicting what it actually felt like, maybe one day he’d find out.

  Slabs of timber, rock and ice lay over his body, yet as he attempted to move he found to his surprise that none of his limbs had been shorn off or shattered. Unable to predict the obstacles, he crawled out of the rubble and walked into a soft metal wall, wet and cold. The part of his arm that he’d
placed forward to stop his fall was being sucked in by the liquid metal. He wisely pulled it back before he lost it forever.

  As he analysed the barrier like an architect studying a new structure, he found the metal was soft and malleable and deduced that its properties must have cushioned the falling cabin. The cold metal sloped away from his body above and below him. When he pushed forward it sprang back into its original position. It acted like a plastic but had a metallic feel in all other respects. He had only seen it once before and it filled his heart with hope.

  “Sandy!” shouted John.

  “I’m over here. Follow the light.”

  “What light?” replied John, following the sound of Sandy’s distant voice and finding to his surprise a gleam of light creeping from the metal sphere a few hundred feet away.

  Using his hands to gently follow the curvature of the wall, he followed the sound. When he reached the light it came from a small, circular opening that allowed entry into the sphere. Sandy stood inside taking in the interior. The illumination came from a long, white cone that hung from the ceiling.

  “Is this what you were looking for?” asked Sandy, his head fixed on the view.

  “It’s the place that I sought, but hoped that I would never have to.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. What is it?”

  “This is Limbo. It’s where they process the souls that have no charge. The neutrals of the world, neither good nor bad.”

  “Isn’t it about time you explained to me what your plan is?” demanded Sandy. “I’ve gone on faith so far.”

  “Soon,” said John. “Let’s get down there and I’ll show you.”

  John scanned the gloom, expecting to see figures going about their business. The lack of any people in the vicinity gave him a sense of unease. The cabin had come to rest at the top half of the massive sphere, so John and Sandy had to carefully and quietly stroll down the smooth metal steps to reach the bottom. When they arrived the things that John had seen on his last visit were still in place.

  The dock, where he had stood utterly confused as his counsel had unsuccessfully fought his case, and the raised, throne-like seat that Laslow had occupied, were all unchanged. All these items brought back painful yet insignificant memories. There in the centre of the room was the thing he was most interested in. The long, thin white cone that stretched hundreds of feet from the roof to about six feet from the shiny, polished floor.

  “OK, this is it. Sandy, this device ionises souls. It can be used to charge a neutral soul to either positive or negative,” he said, grabbing the lever on the floor and dragging it from its central position to where it was marked on the floor ‘positive’.

  “I don’t get it,” replied Sandy.

  “You are a negative soul, Sandy. But I can’t send you where those souls go. You and I deserve better. So we are going to determine our destiny, rather than wait for judgement to be given. Stand here please,” John indicated a spot directly underneath the ioniser.

  Instinctively he found the switch. A jet of white light illuminated the feathery figure below it. Sandy wasn’t altogether happy with the plan unfolding in front of him, but the alternative wasn’t worth thinking about. John raised the gun and once more aimed it at Sandy, hoping this time he would have the bottle to pull the trigger.

  “I can do this,” John said to himself. “I’m sending him to a better place, I’m not killing him.”

  “I don’t think you want to do that, John,” echoed a cold, callous voice high above him in the void of the sphere.

  - CHAPTER THIRTY -

  THE VIVISECTION OF MANKIND

  “Who made you God, John?” demanded an ancient figure moving down the levels of the sphere with the agility and speed of a man a tenth of his age.

  John peered up at the approaching figure, his gun still fixed on Sandy. The voice alone was enough for John to know who he was up against. He’d never expected this to be easy, he expected someone might try to stop him. Now he knew who.

  “You did, Laslow.”

  “Really, I must have missed that,” said Laslow.

  “You remember. It was the moment you took control and made my choices for me. After that, I had to take things into my own hands.”

  “And you think shooting this poor creature will help?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “You won’t go through with it. You proved that up in the cabin, you just haven’t got it in you,” taunted Laslow. The black hood and cloak that Laslow had worn at their last meeting in Geneva were replaced by a pinstripe suit four sizes too big for him that did nothing to hide his weathered skin.

  “We’ll see,” replied John defiantly.

  “The trouble with people like you, John, is that they lack foresight. You’re more concerned with the mundane than the significant. You have become consumed by the trivial over these past months. What will happen to others? How people will feel? The impact on the ordinary individual? But most of all you lack the courage to pull that trigger. That’s why you’ll fail to do it.”

  “What do you want from me, Laslow? I have done everything asked of me,” replied John, refusing to be drawn into his meandering accusations.

  “LIAR,” Laslow boomed angrily. “You’ve done what you thought was important. Since your very first step, every one of them has been in the pursuit of your own selfish outcome. In doing so you have flaunted every gram of your human weakness. Every time it was predictable and, as it happens, necessary. No one told you to come here. No one told you to stop Emorfed. No one told you to hide Faith. These are not my commands, are they?”

  “How do you know all this?” said John, scratching his head with his free hand in order to massage his head into understanding. In response, a single laugh bounced around the metal sphere. The laugh had no way of escaping and simply resonated on like a never-ending echo.

  “I find it amusing that your tiny, human soul believes you have reached this far on your own. It’s frankly laughable. I have been with you at every step of the journey. It was me that made sure those steps reached this point, at this time. Like the plastic bodies that you’ve seen in this place, you are my vessol, John.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Why are humans so interested in questions, when they have no faculty for accepting the answers? You do as we tell you. Now put down the gun.”

  If this wasn’t a character assignation then the bruising insults certainly amounted to a damn good hiding. It wasn’t just accusations about him. They were about the whole of the human race. Fury bubbled through him. He’d done so much for others and yet he was being accused of selfishness. Of all the results he wanted, his own future was the one thing that still appeared at the bottom of his priority list.

  “Why shouldn’t Sandy go to a place where he can be at peace? He has done more to save humanity in the last few days than the world’s politicians pooled together. No one will write plaudits for him. What do you care anyway?”

  John pulled the safety catch off his weapon and found, not for the first time, someone pointing a gun back at him. Sandy was suddenly feeling a little exposed as the only individual in the room without a gun. But now he and John were both staring down the barrel of one.

  “I don’t care John,” came the ill-tempered response.

  “Then let us do what we please,” shouted John. “Let us be.”

  “Why should I do that? There are rules, you know. It’s not for you to decide the polarity of someone’s soul,” answered Laslow, his footsteps finally reaching the same level of the sphere as John.

  “Why not? I have suffered injustice. Isn’t it about time I inflicted some.”

  “Then do it, if you feel that way. This has never been about him, John,” replied Laslow with a grin to shock the most dedicated of dentists.

  “What?” John stuttered.

  “It’s not about him,” Laslow repeated, nodding towards Sandy.

  “What do you mean it’s not about him? I’ve spent months trackin
g him down. I’ve been through the most unbelievable and hideous of journeys to bring him here.”

  “It’s about you, John. It always has been,” croaked Laslow, revelling in John’s expression. A gaze of such utter confusion it resembled someone struggling with an unfathomable mathematics calculation or the age-old riddle of why women needed so many shoes?

  “What do you mean, me?”

  Laslow looked at John with an air of disappointment. He pitied John’s lack of foresight. It was incomprehensible to Laslow that someone could pursue a course of action for so long without any indication that it was a hoax.

  “You actually thought the Universe was going to collapse, didn’t you?” said Laslow.

  “Um,” replied John, with an expression that said, ‘yes’, ‘what?’ and ‘of course not’ all at the same time.

  “If the Universe was fragile enough to be split in half every time a soul went walkabout, it would have destroyed itself in the Neanderthal period. Look around you, John.”

  John took in the magnificent yet horrifying surroundings of Limbo. A place of chilling beauty created by the magnitude of some great unseen power. The metal in the walls oozed around him, a living, breathing structure made of a substance alien to planet Earth. In the middle of it all was this tiny speck of life, dwarfed by the sprawling behemoth that towered high above his head. Just one stitch in the infinite tapestry of existence.

  “They created structures like this and the places you have seen at the end of time. They don’t need you to save it. But they do need you to save them.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” said John, mouth still swung open so wide it was dramatically changing the external pressure in the room. Laslow went back to square one.

  “How did you get here, John?”

  “I went to Hell, twice. Spent three months possessing two notable personalities, fell through a massive crater in the very mantle of the Earth…”

  A raised finger stopped John in his tracks.