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

by Jonah Hewitt

  Tim didn’t hesitate but went on, “And then they talk in some language I don’t know, Ukrainian maybe, and the crone on the left is finishing the sentences of the one on the right and vice versa, like they had one mind between them, with Hokharty asking questions, kneeling right beside the bed, like they’re his distant, sainted, dying aunts or something. Anywho, after some niceties, Hokharty gets up and says something, I don’t know what, and the room goes dark, it’s day out and the whole room goes dark, like crazy dark, and then these two women start talking in unison, but in this big, gigantic, booming male voice, like a subwoofer from hell. It was crazy. It was shaking the paint off the walls, and all the rest of us too, all crowded in this tiny room. When they stopped speaking, the light came back into the room and they fell down on the bed exhausted and Hokharty got this pleased look on his face.” Miles looked to Schuyler. He had peeled himself away from the window and was trying to hide the fact that he was listening intently.

  Tim went on. “So after that was done, all the other old hags in the room line up in two rows, one on each side, and they all go up and kiss the hand of these two ancient, I mean scary old ladies, and then, each one of these ladies leans over in turn and lets one of these two in the bed take a bite out of their neck.”

  “Were they vampires?” Schuyler got the question out before Miles did, but he was thinking the same thing.

  “I don’t know for sure, but after these two had drunk a little blood from every old crone in the room, they were refreshed, so maybe so.”

  “They couldn’t be…” Schuyler muttered, more to himself, “Wallach would have known…”

  “Wallach didn’t know about them, did he?” Tim said that with a touch of smug satisfaction.

  “Big deal,” Schuyler replied, “So Wallach missed a couple of ancient vampires being kept alive by a cult of knitting-club rejects, no biggie.”

  “No biggie?! Dude, that was just the start.”

  “Really?” Miles piped up.

  “Oh yeah, after that we went to South Philly near the Italian market. There we found this scary butcher shop, with all kinds of meat hanging down. Well Hokharty goes up to the butcher, and the guy is blind as a bat, but here he is wailing away on some piece of meat with a HUGE cleaver. Well, Hokharty goes up to him just like he was ordering at a deli, and then the guy goes and grabs a bunch of pieces of dead animals hanging from hooks in the back of his shop: a leg of a cow, head of a pig, back of a goat, whatever, this and that, all the pieces that Hokharty asks for; only he doesn’t wrap them up to go, he STITCHES THEM TOGETHER!” Schuyler’s eyes widened.

  Tim kept going, “Then Hokharty says a few words I couldn’t understand…and the thing comes to life!!” At that even Schuyler’s steely indifference evaporated. “I swear on my mother’s life that this thing was hopping and stumbling around like some demented, new-born deer.” Miles swallowed. Tim swallowed himself and went on, “Well, Hokharty negotiates something with the guy and tells him to make a bunch more, that he’ll come back later, and we are out the door.”

  Schuyler and Miles just stared at each other. Animated meat?! They’d heard of dark rites, rituals and powers of transformation, but not once in their combined years as vampires had they heard of anything like bringing a butcher’s special back to life.

  “And that’s not the worst of it,” Tim went on.

  “There’s sometin’ worse?!” Miles was actually unsettled by this point.

  “Heck yeah, way worse. We made lots more stops.” Tim listed off the stops on their macabre excursion, and they were not a few. “Society Hill, Kingssessing, University Museum, Oh! We checked out the mummies in the vault there, they were very respectful, practically reverential to Hokharty. I guess that makes sense, he being Egyptian and all, and then we went to the Mutter.”

  “The museum of medical oddities?” Schuyler cautiously asked sounding almost genuinely dismayed.

  “OH, Yeah.” Tim stared straight ahead and gripped the wheel with one hand, while wiping the sweat off the other on his pants. Then he switched hands and repeated the ritual on the other.

  “What did ya do there?” Miles was almost afraid to ask.

  Tim took a few short breaths as if to brace himself. “Well Hokharty goes up and has me buy a couple of tickets just like we were regular tourists. We go in and after a few minutes he ditches the tour group and starts wandering on his own. He finally finds what he’s looking for, a huge set of shelves, filled with jars full of pickled mutant baby fetuses. I swear to goodness. Pickled. Mutant. Baby. Fetuses!! Fetuses with two heads, or three arms, or two noses or six ears, all different kinds.”

  Miles actually saw Schuyler cringe when Tim said this.

  “What did he want those for?!” Miles wasn’t sure he wanted an answer to this question.

  “He goes up, and he taps on one of the jars, just like you would tap on an aquarium, and this mutant fetus, it just opens one eye, like it’s been asleep waiting to be woken up all this time. I swear, I nearly lost it right there.”

  Miles and Schuyler exchanged looks of horror and revulsion.

  “So then he starts talking to it in cooing sounds, y’know, like you’d do to a baby or a kitten? Pretty soon he’s a got dozen or so up and rattling around inside their jars, and they’re all jumping up and down, happy to see him. So he opens the jar lids on a half a dozen or so and they all splash out and are slopping around his feet and pant legs excitedly for a while, like a pack of excited puppies. Then he says something to them in that cooing voice, and they have time for a few yelps of joy before they run off and slide down the air vents and squeeze down the drains.” Tim gripped the steering wheel extra hard for a moment and then tried to suppress a shudder that traveled down his spine. Then he went on, “So next, Hokharty spends a few minutes calming the ones still in the jars back down, because they are all disappointed to be left behind. Eventually, after a while, they fall back asleep and we’re out the door like nothing ever happened.”

  Miles looked at Schuyler. Schuyler looked back at him. Miles had seen a lot of weird things in his hundred years being a vampire, but nothing, absolutely nothing had prepared him for the thought of pickled – mutant – baby – fetuses running around the sewers and ventilations shafts of Philly.

  “You’re putting us on!” Schuyler interjected suddenly.

  Tim didn’t speak at first, but then he drew a breath, and spoke. “I was at the end of a twelve hour shift when Hokharty and Graber just got up from their metal drawers in the morgue.” He didn’t look at either of them but just stared off through the windshield at the dark road ahead. “I haven’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. But after I saw those freaky mutant baby…things…I think I could go a lifetime and never sleep again.”

  Schuyler and Miles said nothing. After that, there was no doubting Tim’s conviction. After a long pause, Tim just blurted something that couldn’t be held in any longer.

  “Oh! And you don’t even want to know what’s under the cemetery at Laurel Hill!”

  “What’s under Laurel Hill?” Miles asked innocently.

  “You DON’T want to know,” Tim said emphatically.

  “Yeah, we do,” Schuyler pressed.

  “No. You. Don’t.” Tim stared at Schuyler with one twitching eye, and Schuyler decided to let it drop. Miles suddenly wished they could go back to arguing about the music again, but everyone was eerily silent.

  After a long while Schuyler ventured a question.

  “Where are we now?”

  “Oh good,” thought Miles, “the argument over the route again.” At least that would distract him from thinking about mutant baby fetuses for a while.

  “We’re passing through Ephrata now,” Tim sighed.

  Any chance of reigniting the argument ended when Schuyler just sighed once through his nose, utterly resigned to his situation.

  Miles watched the small city of Ephrata, Pennsylvania pass by. It was a typical Pennsylvania small town, a mix of Colonial and Victorian archi
tecture: a red brick church here, a gothic revival one there, the grand turn of the century architecture, the belle epoque banks, war memorials and a city hall, topped off by a postwar main street, with its neon signs and large plate glass store fronts, all finally peppered with a few modern buildings and strip malls. It was far from its heyday but not yet forlorn like the neighborhoods around Rivenden. Old storefronts that had once been department and hardware stores were now antique shops and coffee houses. All in all, a lot of Pennsylvanian towns in Lancaster County had weathered the years well; changing from colonial farmer’s villages, to industrial centers and then eventually to gentrified tourist traps. They were comfortable, lived-in and utterly non-threatening.

  As the Impala crawled through the evening traffic, on the left a park-like area came into view. In the center of it was a collection of odd buildings that seemed far older than anything else Miles had seen. The buildings were large, grey, blocky and monolithic, as though made of stone even though he could see the clapboard siding. The broad, flat walls and high, pitched, slate roofs were largely undistinguished except for a series of tiny, almost fortress-like windows. The whole complex turned inward, against the rest of the city and the landscape, like a citadel. It felt ancient and mysterious like Rivenden, and Miles felt as if he had seen it somewhere before.

  Miles turned and watched the strange buildings through the rear window until they disappeared out of sight. The city faded and gave way to tree-lined highways and mixed suburban and rural farmland and still no one spoke. After more than an hour of acrimony, the morbid silence of Schuyler and Tim was galling. So Miles decided to start something himself.

  “Sky?”

  “What?” Schuyler came back obviously annoyed.

  “Ya said ya were a vampire in the seventies, right mate?”

  “Yeah, what of it?” Schuyler said impassively, “Weren’t you?” Schuyler turned around, examined Miles critically and gave him an odd smirk, “Well just barely, I guess.” Schuyler turned back around, but even looking at the back of his head Miles could tell he was wearing his smug little smile.

  Miles decided to ignore the insult. “We didn’t hang out then, so I was just wonderin’....”

  Schuyler interrupted him, “We don’t hang out now, Miles.”

  Schuyler had a way of always making Miles feel inferior, but it was true. Miles and Schuyler hadn’t spent this much time together in the entire time they had known each other. Neither of them were top-flight performers in the Rivenden Clan, but they traveled in completely different circles. Miles trolled the streets and avoided Rivenden as much as he could, but Schuyler was always hanging around the court trying to ingratiate himself with Wallach, with limited success, it was true, but he at least tried. Aside from the times that Wallach had sent Schuyler to check up on him, they had hardly ever seen each other. Schuyler only spoke to him to tell him what a lousy vampire he was. Now here they were, stuck together, on a mission for the Father of All Vampires with a Renfield who was convinced it was the end of the world. It seemed like as good a time as any to get to know each other, but if Schuyler wasn’t interested then why bother.

  “Just forget it.” Miles had meant to say it with a bored voice, but it just sounded petulant and hurt. He wasn’t as good at faking his emotions as Schuyler was.

  Schuyler was silent for a while then he sighed and slapped the vinyl seat with both hands. “Fine! Whaddya want to know?” He didn’t turn around.

  Miles leaned forward and cautiously asked a question, “So…when were you…y’know…”

  “When was I turned? Is that what you want to know?” Schuyler seemed to read Miles’ mind. As always, Schuyler seemed far more intuitive than himself. Miles didn’t say anything but just waited for Schuyler to continue. Schuyler sighed and took a few moments to compose his thoughts.

  “Sixty-seven,” Schuyler eventually said.

  “Sixty-seven?” Miles started inquisitively, but Schuyler didn’t let him get any further.

  “Yeah, I was seventeen. Ran away from home and my dad.” Schuyler said the word “dad” with particular contempt. “I headed out to San Francisco to catch the scene, y’know, ‘Summer of Love’ and all? But I was a bit late and missed all that.”

  “So you were a hippie?” Tim said incredulously, deciding to join the conversation.

  “No…” Schuyler sounded annoyed, “Not…religiously anyway. Dude, it was a good time – lots of chicks, drugs, no rules and mostly it was away from my family.”

  Miles was hoping to hear more about Schuyler’s family, but he skipped over that and went on.

  “Well, things were pretty dead in San Francisco by that time so I hooked up with some kids who decided to catch the hippie scene on the East Coast. We hitched our way to Philly and I wound up on South Street. A few months later, I was a vampire…been there ever since, end of story.”

  “And that’s it?” Miles prompted.

  “That’s it.” Schuyler’s tone told Miles he was trying to end the conversation, but Miles wanted to dig a little deeper.

  “So, who turned ya?” Miles asked.

  Miles’ question was met with nothing but stony silence. Schuyler folded his arms across his chest and turned back to the window. Miles leaned back against the bench seat expecting the conversation was now over. A few minutes later Schuyler piped back up.

  “Oh…All right. I’ll tell you.” He took a breath. “It was Ulami.”

  “No way!” Tim exclaimed, “That scary blond chick Hokharty killed?!”

  “She wasn’t so scary back then.” Schuyler’s response surprised Miles. It didn’t sound angry or offended, more sentimental than anything. “She didn’t get super scary until she became one of Wallach’s lieutenants, back in the 80’s…I think.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah, she was a real babe back then…long, blond braids…pony beads, leather-fringed mini skirt…go-go boots,” Schuyler always warmed up the more he talked about fashion. “Back then, she wasn’t so…” Schuyler hunted for the right word, “anorexic,” he finally chose. Miles smiled. Ulami wasn’t anorexic she was an emaciated corpse with a fright wig. Schuyler went on, “Ulami wasn’t her real name either. I don’t know what her real name was…but she was calling herself ‘Starlight’ back then.” Miles nearly laughed. The thought of the terrifying Ulami using the name ‘Starlight’ was just too barmy. Tim obviously felt the same way, because he blurted it out.

  “’Starlight!?’ No way!” Tim laughed. And then the oddest thing happened. Schuyler laughed. Not one of his snide smug laughs, but a genuine, unpretentious laugh like someone gives when remembering a past embarrassment that was scalding at the time, but is now just a nostalgic memory.

  “Yeah, she had this great gig going.” Schuyler was absentmindedly picking lint off his near-pristine, black jeans as he spoke now, “She would hang around the clubs and parties and find some dumb mark, a stray or runaway. She had a thing for young, blond boy toys.”

  Schuyler sounded distant, wistful even. It suddenly struck Miles that Schuyler wasn’t talking about just any blond boy toy – he was talking about himself! This was the first real insight Miles had ever had into Schuyler’s personality. Did Schuyler have feelings for Ulami…er…Starlight? Had she made him believe that she loved him? What promises and lies had she made to him? Is this why Schuyler was playing lost little rich girls at Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, because somewhere, decades ago, Ulami had played him the same way? Was this the secret to Schuyler’s personality? Was he really just a jilted, broken-hearted boy getting revenge for being used that way? Miles had never much liked Schuyler. He was pompous, vain and arrogant, but now he felt just a small twinge of pity for him. Miles wondered: if Ulami had changed so much, if she had transformed from a hippie in go-go boots to a monster in just a few decades, what was his and Schuyler’s future?

  “Well anyway…” Schuyler began again, “It turns out it was probably good the way it happened.” Schuyler turned to Tim and tapped his shoulder in a genu
inely friendly manner. “They say that if you are turned by a powerful vampire, the more powerful vampire you will become.” Schuyler was relaxed now, talking about his favorite subject, which was, after all, himself. He ran his fingers through his perfect, blond hair and examined his teeth in the side mirror. All of Miles’ pity evaporated.

  “Hmmph,” Miles muttered under his breath, “Well that’s not bloody true.”

  “What would you know?” Schuyler had commandeered the rear view mirror now too, and was checking his hair. Schuyler pulled a lurid-blue lollipop out of his pocket, another one of his plastic props, and started practicing poses with the thing halfway out of his mouth.

  “Never mind,” Miles muttered. He didn’t like the direction this conversation was going.

  “Never mind?!” Schuyler stopped primping and turned around to stare down Miles. “Oh, no…no, no, no, no, NO! You started this pajama party sleepover confessional and you’re gonna finish it, missy.” Schuyler jabbed the lollipop at Miles and then stuck it defiantly back in his mouth.

  Miles said nothing. Schuyler stared at him a good long time, then he removed the lollipop from his mouth and said in an almost earnest tone, “C’mon. ‘Fess up. Who turned you Miles?”

  Miles bit his lip. He didn’t really want to continue. He just knew that Schuyler would use this over him somehow, but after all that Schuyler had just offered, he didn’t feel like he could refuse.

  “Wallach,” Miles spat out quickly, barely speaking above a whisper.

  “No. Freaking. Way!” Tim turned around to look at Miles and nearly swerved off the road. He quickly turned back around and got control of the car.

  “You lie,” Schuyler eyed him suspiciously.

  Miles sighed and decided to get it over with.

  “Five days off the boat. He caught me in Brewer’s Alley near the waterfront. I was drunk.”