Limbo's Child (Book One of The Dead Things Series)

by Jonah Hewitt

  Persons who fell so far from the Gates of Erebus were rarely recovered. Their numbers were so small that the bureaucrats of Death could hardly be bothered with them. Anyone lost out here would usually become a lost soul, a shade, a mere memory of their former selves, with nothing but hunger to guide them.

  Nephys wasn’t sure why Hiero kept dragging him out here to find these hard-luck cases. Perhaps he had become a connoisseur and the vulgar flavors of torture, rage and obscenity of the Pits of Punishment no longer appealed to him. Now he liked the salty wine of sadness and despair. He was an imp after all; it was in his guts – even if he didn’t have any. But none of that explained why he dragged Nephys along on these rescue missions. Nephys went all the same, but mostly out of boredom. Still, of all the scribes and courtiers of Limbo, why choose him to share these adventures? Nephys would have thought to ask him if he wasn’t certain that Hiero would respond with a string of flat, minor key raspberries.

  The woman kept sobbing. Nephys felt the slightest trace of wind, and inside it was the touch of frost. The air of Limbo was normally as stagnant as the fetid pond water. The movement of air could mean only one thing. The shades had noticed them, and they were approaching. This was getting serious. Nephys was frozen in thought and deliberation, not knowing what to do – that is until Hiero snorted out a “BAARNT” and stabbed him in the back of his calf with the point of his butcher knife.

  “YEAARRRGH!!!” Nephys screamed. He reached down and grabbed the calf in a moment of agony and looked as the gash Hiero had made quickly disappeared. Nephys glared at Hiero, who only blithely rolled his glassy eyes in indifference. The afterlife was full of bitter and cruel ironies. You could hardly feel light or warmth or cold, you couldn’t taste or smell anything but flatness or stagnation, you couldn’t feel your breath, or a heartbeat, and you lost your eyes a little day by day, but a deranged imp with a rusty butcher knife could still stab you and hurt you as real as anything. Then the wound would instantly fade, disappear entirely, so of course, the cursed imp felt no compunction against doing it again. Meanwhile, the wounds you acquired in life remained indelibly, permanent. Hiero had stabbed Nephys a dozen or more times, usually just to get his attention, and not a single wound remained a second afterward, but the large black gash across Nephys’ throat was always there.

  However much Nephys disliked Hiero’s tactic, it had worked. The woman had noticed, and stirred herself from her despair. She stopped sobbing and stood up gingerly and spoke weakly. “Is…is someone there? Oh, please…anyone?! Can you hear me?!!”

  Nephys stepped a little closer and said, “Yes, yes…we can hear you. I’m here.”

  “Where?! Where?!! I can’t see you.” She said, even though she was standing less than two feet from Nephys and looking right at him.

  “I’m right here. Are you alright?” Nephys tried to sound reassuring.

  She gazed directly at him, her brow furrowing, she was having a hard time seeing him, but then she blinked a time or two and a look of surprise passed over her face as she finally recognized Nephys.

  “Oh! Oh, thank God.” She lurched forward at Nephys and grabbed him by the shoulders. Nephys stood awkwardly not knowing what to do. “I’m so glad you’re here…I need help…we were driving…it was night. Some kid ran out into the street and …I don’t know what happened, but we went off the road into the trees. I must have been thrown from the car….” She continued on, disjointedly, occasionally sobbing between breaths, trying to collect her thoughts while Nephys nodded complacently.

  This was not good. She may have seen Nephys, thanks to Hiero’s executive decision, but she was still not seeing him. She was still trapped in the delusion that this was the land of the living and that she was still alive. To her, Nephys was just some passerby who had come upon the accident. The newly dead saw what they wanted to see. This was a harder case than either he or Hiero had ever stumbled upon. Once, they had met a man who was convinced the swamp was the Florida everglades, and he wouldn’t leave until he had pulled in that big fish. He said this all the while not noticing the alligator bite-sized piece missing from his middle. When Hiero had stuck his knife through the empty space, the man came right to. Nephys had no idea what else to do in this situation but to play along and try to get her to listen. The hard part was finding a way to enter the woman’s one-sided conversation.

  “Look, we are here to help you…” Nephys began awkwardly.

  “I was driving when…out of nowhere!...was this boy…what on earth was a boy doing on the highway in the middle of the night?!!” She was rambling.

  “I know this will be hard, but you need to listen to me,” Nephys tried to implore the lady, but she just continued her ranting; she was in shock.

  “I must have been thrown from the car, but I can’t find her anywhere, so she must be up there still.”

  “Look, I know this is hard, but…wait…her?” Nephys asked carefully.

  “Yes, HER! My daughter. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!!” the woman screamed frantically, and just then a chill wind blew through Nephys. Shades were coming.

  “I’ve looked all around, but I can’t find her! She must still be in the car!”

  No wonder the woman was still in a state of denial; she was searching for her daughter and was still attached to the thought that she might be alive.

  “Fhween,” Hiero hooted impatiently. Nephys glanced either way and then closed his eyes. In his Death Sight he could see dozens of shades slowly approaching, though still a few hundred yards off. He looked up to the strange vehicle, which was now like glass to his sight, but no soul flame was in the metal wreck. He opened his eyes again. Even from this short use they were dimmer.

  “Your daughter isn’t in the…the thing up there…Now I know this must be hard, but we can’t wait, we must go…”

  “What? What do you mean? Have you seen her?”

  “Well no…” Nephys began, but the woman wouldn’t let him finish.

  “Then how can you be certain she isn’t in the car?!” she said angrily gesturing at the metal thing in the tree.

  Nephys had no easy answer for her. Trying to explain the Death Sight to her in her condition would be worse than useless.

  “Look,” Nephys said exasperated, “if I can prove that your daughter isn’t in that…car…then will you go with us?”

  She looked at him oddly, but was silent. Her eyes seemed to alight on the gash on his neck, but she closed her eyes and shook off whatever recognition had touched her.

  “Yes,” she said tentatively, “I’ll go…but please hurry.”

  Nephys nodded once at her and then turned to Hiero and raised his eyebrows at him while he tilted his head towards the tree.

  “Fwhooont,” Hiero completely deflated, the pipes on his back laid down nearly flat.

  “Don’t give me that!! I’m not the one that dragged us out here!! I can’t get up that tree and we need to get out of here and…”

  “FHWEEM!” Hiero cut him off and was already thrashing ahead to the tree. Using the butcher knife like a pick, he clawed up to the wreck with remarkable speed. The woman moved aside as he passed and stared at him as if he had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. As Hiero stabbed at the glass and metal, she narrowed her eyes at him uncertain of what she was looking at. Whether she thought he was a trained monkey, or a rescue dog, or a hunchback dwarf, Nephys couldn’t tell, but she was so desperate to find her daughter she didn’t care.

  Hiero began wrenching doors and parts off the wreck, raining them down below with little regard to who was underneath them. Nephys reached forward and pulled the woman out of the way. With great dispatch, Hiero passed through the whole vehicle, finally emerging from the gaping hole where the door had been and gave a short, flat hoot.

  “Nothing there,” Nephys said, turning to face the woman, “Now we really need to be going.”

  Nephys had turned to go and Hiero had already dropped to the damp ground beside him with a splash when the woman spoke.<
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  “No,” she said in a whisper.

  Nephys turned around. Hiero just wheezed impatiently.

  “What?” Nephys said, “but you just said…”

  “I DON’T CARE…what I said,” she replied resolutely. She had suddenly become far less hysterical and seemed almost calm. “I’m…I’m not leaving here without my daughter. She has to be around here somewhere. I’ll look over here while you look…”

  Just then a cold breeze made Nephys shudder. They were running out of time. This had to stop. Nephys strode over to her and grabbed her by the shoulders, took a breath and blurted it out.

  “Look, I know this is hard to understand, but I have some very tough news for you.”

  She gazed at him and her momentary resolve began to slip. She looked down at him with moist eyes as if she were about to cry again. “You mean…” her voice trembled, “she didn’t make it?”

  Nephys sighed. There was no easy way to say this.

  “No,” Nephys said, “she did make it. You didn’t.”

  A brief happy moment of relief that passed over her face was replaced by confusion.

  “Look at me, and tell me what you see,” Nephys said forcefully.

  She looked at Nephys and shook her head, looked away, but then cautiously looked back. Her eyes looked over his face – his strange eyes, his odd robes and some recognition flickered across her face. Then her eyes saw the black gash on his throat and the look turned to disgust. She closed her eyes quickly, shrugged off Nephys’ grip and stepped backward.

  “No…” she spoke it softly, then louder, “NO!”

  She was close now. She had, at least for a moment, acknowledged the possibility, but forced it away. She had seen something. Now Hiero stepped forward to seal the deal. He slowly stab-dragged his way to her feet, looked up at her and blew out a single, horrid, cacophonous note. Her eyes followed over his body with growing disgust and horror. At last, her mind could not find any last minute rationalization (Monkey? Pig? Mutant duck?) that could explain the hideous imp in front of her. The final realization hit her…she was dead…and then she screamed…for nearly twenty minutes.

  Chapter Six

  Amarantha

  Lazlo Moríro was roaming the halls of the hospital in a moment of rare indecision. He knew that Hokharty and Graber would serve him well at their appointed errands, but there were places they could not go. To accomplish this next task, he needed a servant who could travel amongst the living and the dead. But there were grave dangers, and this servant could not be summoned to just any corpse. In fact, this one would not be summoned to a corpse at all. He needed a vessel who was not dead, or at least, not dead yet, which is why he had found his way to the oncology center.

  Moríro walked down the hall casually brushing his fingers across the doorframes of the patients’ rooms. He had covered his olive-green overcoat with a lab coat he had lifted from a closet. He had been rash and emotional earlier, and he wanted to avoid the scene he had inadvertently caused in the morgue. He had no difficulty in aping the officious demeanor of a physician since he had played that role successfully for the last three centuries. As a young man, he had attended the finest universities of Europe: Bologna, Salamanca, Oxford. His godmother had insisted. Being a doctor was an excellent cover for a necromancer. Any unusual death would be credited to the disease and any remarkable recovery would be credited to the skill of the physician. But Moríro had aspired for more than just a cover and had studied hard and learned to rely not just on his innate power, but on his medical knowledge as well – much to his godmother’s chagrin. In this way, he had plied his skills as a physician and only used his powers as Necromancer when he absolutely had to. Because of this, he had remained alive longer than any previous Necromancer, but this too had caused its own problems, which he now had to address.

  With the lab coat, Moríro’s assumed mantle of authority and grey hair was all he needed to pass unnoticed. As he walked past the rooms, he averted his dark eyes, partly out of respect for the occupants’ privacy, but mostly because his fingertips could tell him all he needed to know. Male, age 79, esophageal cancer, lifetime user of chewing tobacco. Wrong gender, and the subject needed to be able to talk anyway. A woman, mid-60s, brain tumor, inoperable, not ideal, but workable, very near death. However, she was surrounded by loved ones who wouldn’t take kindly to strangers intruding on their last moments.

  This was going to be difficult. He needed more time to find a suitable vessel, but he had little left. It wouldn’t be long before the three bodies missing from the morgue would be detected. Even if no one suspected that they had gotten up and walked away, their absence would be noticed and quickly attached to the stranger who had come looking for a dead relation. He had to act quickly and find a vessel soon.

  He wasn’t entirely certain it was the right thing to do, to summon up her, but there was no one else to turn to now. There would be consequences of course, there always were, but he needed to talk to Margarita and Margarita was now beyond his reach. He had hoped that Margarita would replace him, but she had followed another reckless path. She was never a true Necromancer and could not be summoned, but he had someone in mind who might be able to find her. His fingers trailed along the walls of the hallway: leukemia, carcinoma, lymphoma, there were certainly a lot of dying people here, but none of them were quite right. Some were months away, others only days, but all that were even remotely close to passing were annoyingly attended by loved ones. It was long past visiting hours, but not even in this wretched, mediocre age were people heartless enough to deny a person their last moment. Some of those attending were holding the hands of the unconscious who were no longer aware that anyone was there. They held on tightly in hope that there would be one wakeful moment of recognition before the end.

  Other sentinels were in chairs, half-sleeping, awaiting the moment of passing, or the changing of the guard, as other relations took watch. Elsewhere, there were those who were dying but still conscious, using their last moments of strength not to fulfill their own desires, but to comfort those who had come to comfort them. Everywhere there were spoken promises and whispered hopes; circuitous, casual conversations that avoided the topic of death like the plague, yet somehow still acknowledged its omnipresent hand. There were confessions and prayers and tears and honored silence that screamed louder than the sharpest retort. It was cruel and noble and pitiful all at once.

  Moríro withdrew his trembling fingers from the walls and squeezed his eyes shut. It was nothing he hadn’t heard before, but it weighed on him more deeply than it had in a long time. As he opened his eyes, he saw something quick and fleeting and almost transparent dart down the corridor into a room at the end of the hall. It was small, like a child, but not really present, as if it were between this world and the next. As it passed, the linens of the gurneys and clothes of people walking in the hall flitted briefly as if moved by a faint wind. Moríro blinked his eyes several times. No one else in the hall reacted. It was not unusual for a Necromancer to see things that mere mortals could not. He had seen the souls of the dead passing into the next world, if only faintly, but this seemed different. If this was a spirit or a vision he couldn’t tell, but he had learned long ago not to ignore even the most simple of signs.

  He walked to the end of the hall and turned and looked into the room. A pervasive silence hung there, broken only by the horrid clicks and beeps of this age’s wretched machines. Beyond a thin curtain, he could see the end of a bed, the covered feet of the person dying here, and the shadow of a body breathing very shallowly. There was something profoundly different from this room than all the others however; the patient was alone.

  Moríro walked around the curtain and regarded the unconscious person. She was pale and ancient looking, but not yet forty. Her face was bloated and puffy but hid fine features. Her hair and eyebrows were gone, her skin paper thin and sallow. He had seen this many times. The medicine of this age was often effective, but it just as often ravaged the body and le
ft it an empty shell. This woman was at the end of a very long intervention, but it had ultimately failed, and the results were far from pretty.

  He reached for the chart that hung from the end of the bed, but as he touched it his senses told him far more than the chart and diagrams could ever tell him. Amanda Tipping, only thirty-seven, dying of advanced breast cancer. It had spread throughout her body, and the strongest of this age’s poisons could not kill her cancer before it killed her. Yet, for some reason, she had not given up; she had chosen every available option, clinging desperately to life. Even now the only thing that prevented her from demanding one more round of possible treatments was her near unconsciousness.

  And suddenly Moríro understood. She was alone. There was no one to hold her hand, no family, no loved ones, no one for her to tell to be courageous and strong for her sake. There was no one for her, and she only had herself, so she had fought to the bitter end, for there was nothing else left for her. Once she had fallen into silence, the doctors and nurses had gone and left the watching to the machines. Seeing her now, Moríro knew that he could count each remaining, labored breath and that there would not be more than a few hundred at most. She was very near the end. Moríro had found his vessel, if she were willing.

  All the colors of the room were beige or pale green, and all the angles were sharp or mechanical. There was nothing warm or comforting. A dying person deserved a comfortable bed and a thick blanket, but here the sheets and blankets were thin and the bed had railings more appropriate to a pig’s pen. The warm and dim candles of past ages could imbue even a room like this with some quiet dignity at the last moments of life, but the glaring, horrid lights of this age threw everything into pallid clarity. Looking at her nearly dead body, Moríro felt something he had not felt in a very long time. He felt pity.