“You’ve been working for Limbus,” he said. “I know who the next name on their list for you is. I’m here to ask you to stop.”
I stared at him.
The lawyer’s name was Stuart; he had been working for my father since almost the day I was born, handling the company’s interaction with other large concerns. I didn’t know exactly what that meant; it seemed to be a way of saying that he provided plausible deniability for everyone else. Let Stuart be the one to shake hands with the monsters. Everyone else would be clean, if it came to that; everyone else would be able to legitimately say that they had no idea, even if they were the ones who sent him into the monsters’ den in the first place.
“You were the one who left me the business card,” I said finally. “I always thought it was one of the policemen. They didn’t work for my father.”
“No, which means they didn’t know you the way I do,” he said. “I always thought that what was done to you was wrong, Beatrice. Please, even if you don’t want to believe anything else about me, believe that much. Turning a child into a weapon…it wasn’t fair. Limbus offered a way out. At least with them, you’ll be compensated for the things that you destroy.”
I nodded a little, keeping my face schooled as neutrally as possible. I didn’t want him to know that I had no idea what I was destroying. I killed the targets Ms. Ng set for me, and I didn’t ask questions. I was smart enough to know that there was always a chance I wouldn’t like the answers, and the comfort and security of having a place to belong was more important to me than having all the information.
“You were already a weapon when I put you in their hands,” he said, sounding more like he was trying to convince himself than like he was trying to convince me. “I didn’t turn you into anything you weren’t already designed to be. I am so, so sorry for what was done to you, but Beatrice, none of this was ever my fault. If anything, I’ve helped you. You see that, don’t you? That I’ve helped you?”
I frowned. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with you being here.”
“I’m your next target, Beatrice.”
Everything stopped. Even the air seemed to crystalize, becoming thick and difficult to see through. My frown deepened, digging into the sides of my face. Finally, harshly, I managed to ask, “What?”
“I said, I’m your next target.” He straightened, forcing me to meet his eyes. “They’re going to ask you to kill me. Maybe I deserve it. Probably I deserve it, after the things I’ve done, the things I’ve signed off on and stood back to allow. But I have children. Three of them. The eldest is only twelve. No matter what I do or do not deserve, they don’t deserve to pay for my actions. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t let them make you kill me.”
“Why do we always say that children don’t deserve to suffer for the actions of their parents, and never that they don’t deserve to benefit from the actions of their parents?” My lips felt numb, like my own toxins had finally figured out the trick of working on my flesh. “When rich parents buy ponies for their kids, we act like it’s totally normal and the way things should work, but when those same parents go to jail for tax evasion, all we want to say is ‘think of the children,’ over and over, like it changes something.”
“Beatrice—”
“I don’t know your children. They’re not even faces to me. Why should I care if killing you hurts them? Letting you live hurts me.”
He looked at me. “Because I’m asking you as nicely as I can. And because none of your other targets have known that you were coming. When you put your hand against my skin, I’ll know it’s you, and I’ll go to my death knowing who killed me. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to take the step from natural disaster into murderer?”
I shivered. The air was warm, but that didn’t matter, because his words were cold. “You don’t know for sure that I’m going to be coming for you. None of my other targets have known.”
“Trust me, I know,” he said. “Please, just…think about it.”
Then he turned, and let himself out. I don’t know how he avoided touching the poisoned doorknob, whether he used a handkerchief or just took his chances. I didn’t want to know. I stood there, alone in my kitchen, and stared at the space where he wasn’t anymore.
*
The next morning at Limbus, a red folder in Ms. Ng’s hands: a familiar face looking up at me from the inside cover when I flipped it open. He was younger than I’d always assumed, aged by responsibility and the burdens of leadership.
The names of his three children were listed as well, almost as an afterthought. People I might encounter in the vicinity of the target. Margaret; Peter; Elaine. Three innocents who knew nothing of their father’s work, whose only contact with my world would be in the scars it could leave behind by touching them. This was supposed to be an “accidental encounter” killing: I would wind up next to him at the grocery store, touch his wrist, and walk away. No fuss, no muss, no need for extended contact.
I handed the folder back to her. “No.”
“I’m sorry?” Her pretty face contorted into a frown. “What do you mean, Miss Walden? This is your job.”
“You told me I could refuse a target at any time, and I’m refusing this one. I won’t do it. Find another way.”
“That was quite a few assignments ago; if you were going to start refusing, I would have expected you to have done so well before now.”
I said nothing.
Her face twisted further, becoming nothing but frown. “Don’t you think you owe me some sort of an explanation? This man needs to be removed. You’re the easiest method of removing him. Your refusal complicates business.”
“I know him. I don’t want to kill someone that I know.”
“He’s not your friend. He’s never done a single thing to help you.”
“He’s the one who gave me your card. Does that mean that Limbus isn’t helping me?”
Ms. Ng blinked before allowing her frown to fade, face smoothing into its customary neutral expression. “Limbus, Inc. is your employer. We’re happy to help you, inasmuch as helping you helps the company. The bottom line commands us all, Miss Walden. Even me. Even you.”
“You said that it was always going to be up to me whether or not I took an assignment. You told me, when I first came to work for you, that I would always have the option to say ‘no.’ I’m saying ‘no’ now. I don’t want to kill him. He works for my father’s company, he pointed me at Limbus, and I want him left alone.”
Ms. Ng looked at me levelly. “You don’t get to say that, Miss Walden. You can refuse the assignment, if you truly wish to do so. I can’t stop you. I won’t pretend that your choice doesn’t disappoint me, or that I don’t wish you would reconsider. I also won’t pretend that your choice saves this man. Don’t look so shocked. Did you truly think that, in a company this size, you would be our only killer?”
I stared at her. I had never really considered how big Limbus was, or was not. On a daily basis, I saw Jacob, the man at the reception desk, and Ms. Ng. Everyone else was a walk-on part, occasionally appearing, but no more vital to the work we did together than the pigeons that occasionally appeared on the windowsill. Limbus must have been large, to afford the sort of fees they paid to me, but how large wasn’t my concern. Or hadn’t been, until this moment.
“I thought…”
“You thought wrong,” she said, and thrust the folder at me again. “Take the assignment, Miss Walden. Kill him, and know that it was done peacefully and without suffering, or leave it here, go home, and know that I will personally guarantee that his life ends in excruciating agony. Anything I can do to make it worse, I will do. I’ll send the bloodiest butcher on our payroll to take him apart, and I’ll make certain that his children walk in on the mess he leaves behind.”
“You told me I could choose.”
“You are a tool.” She leaned closer, so close that I could have touched her, if I’d wanted to. If I’d been that prepared to be disobedient. “You are a u
seful, pretty, unique, valuable tool, and I took you because I didn’t want anyone else to have you, not because you had some right to control your own life. You never have and you never will. Do you understand me? Now take the folder and do your damn job, or I’ll make sure that you regret it to the end of your days.”
Tears rose in my eyes, hot and bitter and so toxic that they burned. I took the folder from her hand.
Ms. Ng smiled.
*
Killing him was such a small thing. There was no pretense this time, no flirtation. Jacob drove me to his house and stayed in the car while I walked up the walkway and rang the bell. I removed my gloves with the chimes still sounding through the house.
When the man from my father’s company opened the door, he didn’t look surprised to see me, and he didn’t try to run. I reached out, pressing my hands to the sides of his face, and pulled him forward, placing a kiss on his forehead. Then I let him go, and turned away.
His body sounded like a sack of potting soil when it hit the floor. I never looked back.
Jacob frowned at me as I got back into the car. “You okay?” he asked.
“No,” I said. The poison was singing in my hands. It prickled and stung, but it soothed me at the same time. He couldn’t touch me. No one could touch me. I was immune to all human acts.
Well. Maybe not to bullets. But these weren’t people who used bullets. Guns were messy, imprecise, laborer’s weapons, intended to be used by those who had no better options. My hands were so much more elegant than a bullet could ever hope to be. I looked at them, and wondered how much I could destroy.
“I’ll take you home.”
“No,” I said again. I turned to look at him, perfectly calm. “Take me back to the office.”
Jacob met my eyes, and for one terrible moment, I was afraid that he was going to refuse me. Then he nodded, small and tight, and the engine turned over, and we were moving, into the night, into the future, away from the dead thing I had made.
The lobby was empty when we got to Limbus. Jacob stayed there, standing in the elevator bay and watching me go. I think he knew what I was doing. I think he knew I had to go alone. I rode to the eleventh floor in silence, and my reflection in the elevator doors was pale and drawn, with pink and yellow patches beginning to blossom on the front of my suit jacket.
The elevator stopped. The door opened. I stepped out into the antechamber that had gone, one inch at a time, one brutally harvested row after another, from sanctuary to prison. I walked, silently, to the waiting door.
Ms. Ng was at her desk. Ms. Ng was always at her desk. She looked up at the sound of my footsteps, and frowned.
“Is it done?” she asked.
“It is,” I said, and closed the distance between us, and put my hands to either side of her face. My palms were damp with sweat and sticky with sap; she only had time for a single syllable, a soft and sighing “oh” before her eyes rolled up in her head and her body went limp against mine. I did not let her fall. I eased her gently to the floor, but I did not let her fall.
Her chair was a bit too high for me. I adjusted it as I sat, and pressed the button for her intercom. “Hello?” I said.
“Hello, Miss Walden,” said the pleasant female voice I’d spoken to on the day when I first chose to call, a lifetime and almost a dozen lives ago. “May I assume there has been a change of leadership?”
I looked around the silent office. I looked at Ms. Ng’s body. I nodded, if only to myself. “You may,” I said. “Please send someone to remove the body. And…bring me some orange blossoms.”
“Yes, Miss Walden,” said the voice, and the intercom clicked off, and I was alone, the poisonous girl, in the garden of my own design.
First Interlude: Whispers in the City of the Dead
After they pulled him out of the hole, the shift captain on duty told Malone to go straight home and get some rest. Instead he went straight to work, delivering the sheaf of papers to the lab boys to see if they could find any prints or DNA. While he waited for them to bring it back, he did a quick search on the Internet. What he found would have been amusing, in a different circumstance. Limbus, Inc. was a book, a collection of stories apparently. Pulp horror, it seemed. Whatever sick fucks had killed that girl, they were playing with him. Or maybe they were copycats, inspired by what they’d read. Either way, it seemed like a dead end.
Next he took a picture of his sketch and did a reverse image search. To his surprise, a Wikipedia entry popped right up. “Thank God for Google,” he whispered to himself. The entry was sparse. Seemed nobody could figure out exactly what it was, or what it meant. Some thought it was an Egyptian symbol. Others thought it more ancient. A professor of folklore at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts had dubbed it the Eye of Thotep, though Malone wasn’t sure what that meant, either. So he Googled it, and found nothing but dusty academic tomes that he didn’t have time to read. If something on the Internet could even be dusty. That’s when the boys had returned the papers to him. To no one’s surprise, they contained no useful physical evidence. But that made them no less intriguing.
It was a story, that much was clear. He read it, and an hour had passed by the time he flipped the last page, but he’d barely noticed. He picked up the phone and dialed the medical examiner.
“Pierson,” the man said as he answered, and Malone could hear what he imagined was a bone saw whirring down to a stop in the background.
“Pierson, this is Malone. You looked at that girl yet?”
“Just about to cut her open. Why?”
“Do me a favor. With a presentation like this, you wouldn’t normally look for poisons, right?”
Pierson snorted. “Somehow I don’t this is a case out of Arsenic and Old Lace.”
“Yeah, well, do me a favor. Run the full tox screen anyway. Like, everything you can think of, and some stuff you can’t.”
Pierson was silent. “You’re serious?”
“Just do it Pierson.”
“Whatever. You’re the boss.”
The whirring fired up again, this time drowning out the line. Malone hung up, turning back to his computer. It was probably stupid of him to even ask Pierson to do something like that. If he had a career left to worry about, he might care. But the story had been found with the girl, and if there was any truth to it, maybe it was a clue of some sort.
And Limbus.
Limbus had been mentioned in the story, too. Had played a major role, in fact. And Limbus killed people. And if they killed people, maybe they killed the girl. God, it was crazy to even think such a stupid thing. But so was the case, everything about it.
Malone pulled himself up from his desk and walked down the hall to special prosecutions. Their offices were empty, but he didn’t need any of the investigators. Just their computer, the only one in the station equipped with a TOR browser, and thus the only one in the station that could access the Dark Net.
The Dark Net was the deep sea of the Internet, and there you could find anything—legal, illegal, and somewhere in between. The boys in special pros spent their days buying illegal weapons, accessing stolen credit card numbers, and pretending to be thirteen-year-old girls with an unusual attraction to nerdy men who lived with their parents. Malone had other ideas. The Dark Net was about more than contraband and black markets. There was information to be found there, as well. Among a thousand juvenile message boards, there was one that stood out—Iram of the Pillars. A dead city of the Net, filled with mysteries to be unraveled, and maybe clues to do the unraveling. Malone brought his own mysteries to the table.
He started with the image he’d found carved into the girl’s back, the Eye of Thotep. Only one thread came up after the search, and it consisted entirely of a conversation between two people. The first was a girl who—and this gave Malone chills—wanted to find someone who could tattoo the Eye onto her back.
RnnrGrl97: Looking for an artist in the L.A. area who’ll ink this on my lower back. Been to about a hundred shops with the a
rt, and they all turned me down. Weird, right? And they don’t even have a good excuse. I’ve got money, and I turned 18 two months ago. Anyway, I found it in a book in the library, and it’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen. They call it the Eye of Thotep. It’s Egyptian, or something. And straight awesome.
4of3: Damn, you a dumb bitch.
RnnrGrl89: Excuse me?!?!?!?!
4of3: Nobody’s going to mess with that shit. The Three-Lobed Burning Eye of Nyarlathotep? Are you nuts or something?
RnnrGrl89: The Eye of THOTEP, dick.
4of3: Man, what an idiot. Just because you read it in a book don’t make it right. This is fucking Iram of the Pillars. We know more than some dick prof. Look, bitch, I’ll give you a free piece of advice. Stay away from that shit if you want to keep your mind straight. But you want to be a whore of the black god? You go right ahead.
The conversation was locked at that point, which was strange for Iram. Usually the threads flowed free and fast and vulgar and nobody bothered to moderate anything.
Then he typed in Limbus to the search box and hit enter. A microsecond later, dozens of threads filled his screen. He clicked one, and through the profanity and the unintelligible memes, he got the impression that these people thought Limbus was real. That it was more than just a book of pulp stories. That in fact, the book was just a cover. A way to make people miss the truth.
“Conspiracies,” Malone muttered to himself. He should have known. He was about to click off when a DING sounded from the speakers so loud that it made him jump; someone had sent him a private message. He clicked it, expecting to find an invitation to view some online porn, probably underage, or maybe an ad for drugs, guaranteed delivery. But that’s not what he found. Not at all.
Hello Thomas.
Malone actually spun around in his chair, and he fully expected to find someone standing behind him, TOR-enabled smart phone in one hand and maybe a gun in the other. The point of TOR and the entire Dark Net was that it’s anonymous. No one can track you. No one knows who you are. You can be anyone or anything in the deep. But there was no one. Just an empty room. He turned back to the monitor.
Limbus, Inc., Book III Page 8