Limbo's Child (17 page)

Chapter Ten
The Scriptorium

Even though he was already late, Nephys had to make a stop by home to pick up his pen case and this just made him later. The pen case was a long, flat, narrow board made of black cedar. It had an indentation for two reed pens and two, small, circular depressions that served as palettes for ink – one red and one black. Other than his stone basin and the tomb, it was his one true possession and his favorite.

He hurried his way down to the heart of the city, the echo of his footsteps dying as he passed down the narrow streets. Where it broadened out, he could see the long, low halls that were the scriptorium of Limbo. Usually, Nephys queued behind a thousand other scribes from a thousand other lands, and spent the time waiting seemingly endlessly for all of the scribes and workers to file in. It was an orderly, but long and tedious affair…one step, stop, one step, stop, and so on. It was an almost cadence-like ritual that drilled monotony into your head and set the rhythm for the workday to come. Today though, he was the very last to arrive and didn’t have to wait at all. If he hadn’t been late, he would have almost enjoyed it. As it was, no one was ever late to work, after all, what else did they have to do?

When Nephys got to the entrance, whatever slim, buoyant spirit he had managed to find that morning evaporated when he saw who was there. It was the scriptorium master…Falco. Falco was an eight-year-old boy who had died at the height of Rome. His hair was cropped closely to his head, and he wore a miniature toga and a large, gold bauble hung from a leather cord around his neck. It was a
bulla
, and it was supposed to protect young Roman boys from harm, but it hadn’t saved Falco from the plague. There wasn’t much opportunity for promotion in the afterlife, but Falco’s father had held every position a Roman patrician could hold from quaestor to consul, and he had entered the Senate
suo anno
, the first year he was eligible, so Falco wasn’t about to settle for anything less than his best. He had a masterful hand for Latin, and as fate would have it, because of the spread of Christianity, Latin became the
lingua franca
for the next millennium. Within a short time, he rose to become the master of all scribes. Falco was all ambition and had fared no worse in death than his father had in life and his eyes showed it. Within months of coming here, his eyes had clouded, and now, they were pitiless white orbs flecked with blue veins without a trace of iris, pupil or cornea. He was irreversibly, totally and completely blind. Falco turned those sightless eyes on the hapless Nephys now.

“Even in a land of timelessness, punctuality is demanded,” Falco uttered tonelessly.

“Apologies, Master, I’ve never been late before.” Nephys bowed quickly at the small boy and crossed the threshold into the scriptorium. The sounds of thousands of pens scritching across pages could be heard above the awful, omnipresent stillness of Limbo. Falco let him pass, but didn’t turn around to see him go.

“Which is why the exceptional must not be excepted.”

Nephys stopped. Falco possessed the one attribute critical to a successful career in the afterlife: a complete and total absence of empathy.

“I would remove you from scribe duty altogether, but that itself would be an exception.”

Nephys swallowed hard.

“What shall we do to prevent further…
exceptional
…circumstances?” Falco said in a completely monotone voice.

Nephys turned to face Falco, but Falco hadn’t even turned around. He didn’t need to. His crystalline sight was so good now he could see straight through the back of his own head as if it were a window.

“Apologies again, Master,” Nephys said, and then in a lower voice to himself, “Perhaps I should buy a sundial.”

Thousands of scribbling pens came to a sudden halt. Nephys clamped his mouth shut so hard his teeth made a loud “CLACK!”

“Where did that come from?!” wondered Nephys to himself. Why had he just told…what was it…a
joke
? To the scriptorium master?! The most humorless figure in all of Limbo?! No one told jokes here! What was he thinking? That morning with Maggie and Hiero must have affected him more than he realized.

Falco didn’t react. He didn’t even turn around.

“A sundial for a sunless place. What an…
exceptional
…humorous anecdote. You should record it for the Great Master. One would hate to lose such wit.”

Nephys stood there utterly devastated. He was normally so in control – this morning he had utterly fallen apart. When nothing but silence continued for a long time, Nephys began to turn to go when Falco asked a surprising question.

“What is wrong with your throat?” he spoke as if making a statement and not asking a question at all.

“My throat?” Nephys put his hand to the wound across his neck.

“Your gash looks…
different
,” Falco continued. And for a minute, Nephys thought he heard a slight inflection to his voice on the word “different,” but it was hard to tell.

“Surely not, Master…that would be impossible.”

“Of course it is, but then when have I ever been wrong?”

Nephys hated questions where there was no right answer, so he said nothing.

After another long pause, Falco spoke again.

“You may go.”

Nephys bowed to the back of Falco’s head and walked to his usual spot. The scratching of pens commenced again and Nephys felt the eyes of the crowd drift away from him. As he walked, his hand went to his neck. It did feel different, but why? He would have to take another look at it once he got home.

The room was vast and filled with thousands of rows of scribes from many lands arranged in tidy rows in between a forest of columns. Each scribe had a stack of printed material next to them they were transcribing into permanent records, but no two scribes possessed the same tools. To the left of Nephys was a girl with long, braided hair and uncomfortable-looking shoes that buttoned up past her ankles. She was using a dip pen from a century not too long ago. Her letters were large, simple, but elegantly rounded.

To his right was a boy much his same age, but he was making records in an entirely different way. He wore a folded gray paper cap and heavy gray pants. He had on a heavy apron with ink splattered all over it. He sat for hours arranging tiny metal blocks to form the letters on a tray; the tray was then inserted into a vast, oily machine of gears and wheels the boy was manning, where it would print up a full sheet of the transposed text. In all, it took the boy far more time to print one sheet that way than a talented scribe could transcribe by hand.

The machine was supposed to be evidence of the progress of man in the last century, but it made no sense at all to Nephys. The Great Master only required one copy of each work for his library, and this machine was ill-suited to making a single careful copy of many things, but instead was only good for making several copies of one thing, and even then, rather badly. The paper was thin and gray and awful the pages smudgy and the text inelegant. It varied too much in size and shape with large text up top that was glaring followed by miniscule cramped text in narrow columns that was far too difficult to read. When the boy in the apron and paper hat finished transcribing the work, the “scribe” or as he liked to call himself, “print monkey,” would stack it up like a pile of wastepaper and tie it off with string like a common parcel.

“What a waste,” thought Nephys.

From the other side, it certainly seemed things had gotten worse up there. There were certainly more books now, but what came was less and less interesting. In the beginning, there had been lots of texts, scrolls on papyri and parchment, poems and legal documents and what not and then arrived books, real codices with pages to turn. Nephys had never seen a book during his short life, but once one showed up for him to copy in the afterlife, he was enthralled by its genius. Scrolls were so difficult to wind and unroll to read, but binding the pages together on one side? Brilliant! And so easy. Why had his people never figured this out? Nephys loved papyrus, but it was tricky; its crosshatch pattern could obscure writing and flummox an unpracticed scribe, but it couldn’t compare to the flat, creamy, smooth, translucent qualities of parchment. Parchment held ink better and longer, and what’s more, the stronger animal skins and flat pages made something possible that only happened rarely before in texts,
pictures
!

When you rolled up a scroll, the paint would flake off, so paint was reserved for only the most important scrolls, and then they were usually only rolled up once and interred with the dead, never to be seen again. But a book? A book could hold dozens of images. Since the image laid flat on tough sheep skin, there was no limit to what you could paint, and the images could last for thousands of years, if not forever.

For several blessed centuries, there was a small but steady stream of such books: rich books with illustrations stuck in between the words, or sometimes within a single gigantic letter that was stretched out to hold a tiny picture. And the scripts! From the West were letters that looked like twisting vegetation, or spiky fences, uncial and black letter and from the East, letters that looked like tongues of fire and dangling ribbons – Nastaliq and Diwani. And everywhere pictures. Persian kings and heroes fought monsters in landscapes of fire. Saints and prophets posed in front of diamond-patterned checkerboards of red, blue and gold. Dragons and jongleurs gamboled in the margins. And Gold too!! Several were filled with scenes entirely painted on gold. Its luster was far dimmer here in Limbo, but its reflection was as close to warm as Nephys had ever felt in the underworld.

But it had all passed as Elysium had passed. The books coming to Nephys now were far diminished from those of the past. More and more books than ever came, of course, a torrent, but quantity had replaced quality. The books that were appearing now were all garish or monotonous with very few pictures. The durable parchment was replaced by yellow, crumbling paper that smelled of decay.

Likewise, the boy across from him was also diminished, missing his right arm. Nephys secretly suspected that the machine had taken it in its terrible maw, and that it was probably still there in the recesses and guts of the horrible device. The machine had probably killed the boy who had tended it, and the boy had dragged the machine into this world much like Maggie had dragged her car. Though it was no imp and lacked bat-wing ears, it certainly seemed to torment him. The machines of the modern age extracted a horrible price, apparently, worse than any god of old.

Nephys far preferred his method. He sat on the floor, cross-legged on a woven mat. He held the reed pen confidently being sure to float his hand over the work, never halting or smudging the graceful lettering. His father had taught him the priestly hand and the common hand and even the full picture writing of the ancients. In addition, he had taught him Latin and Greek even before death, as they were commonly spoken in his country as well. Since then, he had added many languages and scripts to his repertoire.

He unrolled a scroll of empty papyrus. It was crosshatched from the pressed reeds and translucent but it wasn’t warm and brown like in life, but grey and cold. A bit stiff but not a problem for a talented scribe. He set out his long, narrow pen case with its palettes of red and black ink. Red was one of the few colors he could still remember, outside of blue and grey, because he used it every day. In life, he had only used red for the names of deities or rulers, or special words that invoked power. There were no such rules in death, so he was free to express himself, and he sometimes chose red ink just because he liked the way the word sounded. “Befuddled, ignominious, caoutchouc, dweeb,”
these
were red words. He also used red on the names of authors, Chaucer and Khaldun, Sagan and Camus. He wondered what he would use it on today.

Another boy came by with a small cart filled with books of all sorts. He dumped a pile of soggy books in front of Nephys and pushed on. The books had obviously landed in the swamp before being recovered. The large pile stood in a gathering puddle of water as black as ink. The pages were stuck together and difficult to separate. Nephys carefully opened the cover of the first.

“Chester County Plumbing Code Violations, 1967.”

He set it aside and picked up the next one.

“Germantown County Phone Directory, 1983.”

Ugh. He moved on to the third.

“Municipal Tax Code of Ephrata, 1979.”

Falco was punishing him. Oh well, nothing to do but forge ahead anyway. He decided to start with the “Phone Directory” whatever
that
meant. He put the end of one of his reed pens into his mouth as he had to use both hands to separate the first few sticky, wet pages. As he did so he wondered, “Was ‘AAACO Auto Repair’ a red-letter title or not?”

Chapter Eleven
Maggie Miller

Maggie Miller stuck her hands in her pockets and tried to take stock of her situation. She lazily skidded her favorite, simple flats along the gray, sandy path and was grateful she at least hadn’t worn the heels that day. Of course, the flats weren’t really on her feet when she thought about it, in fact her feet weren’t there at all, not her
real
feet anyway. This was all some sort of psychic projection of herself from the moment of her death. The real flats and the real feet they were on were up in the world of the living on her rapidly cooling corpse. She shuddered. She didn’t like to think about it, but there it was, even if it didn’t make sense to her. She certainly felt real, felt like herself, had all her parts – fingers, toes, etc. She was just glad she hadn’t died in the shower. Imagine going through eternity naked!! Despite everything that had happened to her, it was hard to believe that she was really dead, that she was just a ghost. It was surprising how normal everything felt.

“FHWONK!”

Well, aside from the odd, demonic musical instrument.

Hiero had started the trip to Neppy’s house at an alarming pace – galumphing off so fast she was terrified she would be lost in the dim streets of Limbo forever. Hiero kept running and eventually disappeared around a dark corner far ahead. She nearly worked herself into a panic trying to keep up, until she realized that was exactly what the little toad was trying to do, panic her. Then she remembered what Nep had told her, how emotions are real here. She swallowed hard and instead of panicking, calmed herself and walked slowly and purposefully. When she turned the corner several agonizing minutes later, Hiero was there, wheezing like a worn-out vacuum cleaner. She smiled. Ol’ Nep was right.

You had to stay calm or things like this little imp here would get the best of you. She felt rather embarrassed about the way she had behaved earlier and felt the need to make up for it. Besides, Hiero seemed to delight in any frustration so she decided not to let it goad her. In fact, she started walking even slower than before, just to annoy it. Let the little monster get a taste of his own medicine. After all, time was one of the few luxuries Limbo offered. Hiero was now dejectedly shuffling along beside her like a whipped dog. That was better, she thought. It gave her time to observe and think and look around.

Limbo certainly was a flat, colorless place. The tomb-like houses were all gray or blue or off-white – all of them in varying states of decay with no sense of planning or organization. The streets were narrow in some places, while in others were they broad and empty. Odd juxtapositions abounded. Here was a Gothic tomb built on top of a Roman one. There was something that looked nearly modern butting up right against something Baroque. Most were abandoned. Quite a few were crumbling into dust. She looked different too. She could have sworn she had been wearing a red and black plaid flannel shirt over a long-sleeve pink t-shirt, but the plaid shirt was now blue and charcoal, and the pink shirt was now light grey. At least the faded blue jeans looked the same. She looked over her hands and legs and body and felt her neck back and face. She couldn’t detect any obvious wound, but she was desperate for a mirror. Neppy’s gash had been horrifying – once she was able to see it – and she didn’t relish the thought of going through the eternities looking like a sideshow freak.

She met hardly anyone on the way. She assumed that they were all off at work like Nep. A few ambled down dark alleyways, she called out to some, but they all turned and went the other way quickly or shuttered their windows when she passed by

“Friendly town,” she muttered sarcastically to herself.

Hiero honked a few short, dissonant notes in what she thought must have been its best attempt at ridiculing laughter.

Once, in a broken window, she saw a young girl, no more than four, with hair so blonde it was nearly white. She was staring blankly out into the street, expressionless. Maggie waved meekly at the girl and tried to get her attention but stopped suddenly when it became apparent the girl was blind and could not see her. She thought about calling out to her, but decided to just keep moving on. A short while down the street she thought how desperately she wanted to run to the girl and take her in her arms and tell her it would be alright, as if she were her own daughter.

Her
daughter!
She was amazed she hadn’t thought about her much since realizing she was dead. Nep was right. Somehow this place did make you forget. Lucy was alone up there with no one. Grandma Holveda had died years before, and all the other relations had passed on long ago, well
almost
all the relations had passed away. There was
one
, of course, but Maggie pushed that possibility far from her mind, until now. Where would Lucy go? Who would take care of her? She had tried so hard to keep Lucy away from all of that; she couldn’t imagine that all coming out now. No, she mustn’t second-guess herself. She had made that decision long ago, but of course, she wasn’t there to make decisions any more, and anything could happen.

Lucy was thirteen and not a child anymore. Lucy was strong and she knew her mother loved her.
That
had never gone unsaid. There was at least that. Lucy would find a way to get by; Maggie just knew it. Still, there was so much more that she needed to say, things she needed to know. And now she was gone and there was no way to tell her.

It didn’t help that Maggie’s last memory of life was the two of them tumbling violently in her car. She ran the accident over in her mind – the boy, where had he come from? And in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of the night? Still, he looked oddly familiar. Maggie had swerved but overcorrected, and the car had flipped, gone over the railing and then into the small stand of trees between the highway and the off-ramp. And then she was in the swamp, but then that swamp was
here
, wasn’t it? She wasn’t really sure when she had lost consciousness and only realized now she had no idea how Lucy had fared after the wreck.

“Where was Lucy now?!” she thought. How much time had passed really? It was so hard to tell! This morning in the swamp already seemed ages ago. Was she safe now or was she lying in agony in a ditch off the road still waiting for help? Or was she resting comfortably in a hospital? Or worse, was she weeping over her mother’s dead body? Maggie’s jaw clenched at the thought. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and pressed the heels of her palms to her face to keep from crying. She turned away and sniffed and pretended to wipe her nose on her sleeve as she pushed back the tears. She didn’t want that wretched blowfish to see her break up. In a weird way, she was grateful it was there. Its presence gave her an excuse to be tough. If she were alone, she just knew she would burst out sobbing again. She looked sternly at Hiero, but for once, other than its usual droning, it was mercifully silent. Lucy wasn’t here, she was still alive, she felt that much, and for the moment that was enough.

She thought about what Nep had said, that the dead don’t recognize each other. She desperately wanted to believe it wasn’t true, and that somehow, she could find her daughter when she came here to the underworld, but even now her memory was dimming and she knew Nep was telling the truth. She could feel it. She needed something resolute in her memory – something she wouldn’t forget about her daughter. She thought of all the things she could remember, her crooked smile, her sandy hair, her sarcastic voice, the way Lucy rolled her eyes at her whenever she didn’t want to do something she asked her to do…her
eyes
…that was it. Lucy had the most brilliant, green eyes. She could think of her daughter and remember her bright green eyes. She would always remember the eyes. And with that thought, Maggie Miller didn’t feel like crying so much anymore.

Maggie was so lost in thought that she had to stop and look around to figure out where she was. She was in an open square with tombs on all sides when she realized she was alone. She had outpaced Hiero by several steps. She turned around frantically looking for the little monster for a moment before she spied him. Hiero was panting at the sheltered corner of a crumbling tomb at the edge of the square where they had entered, crouching out of sight. To Maggie it almost looked…frightened. That made her snort in satisfaction but only for a while.

Maggie turned. “What’s got you spooked, you drunken Scotsman’s nightmare?”

The fact that there was something here that could scare a creature like Hiero was a suddenly horrifying thought. She heard the sound of doors slamming, and windows being shuttered in the square. She hadn’t seen anyone before, but they were obviously there and didn’t want to be seen. What was going on? This place was so exasperating. She felt a faint, chill breeze blow through the square. Slowly, she began backing up towards Hiero’s position.

“What is it…more shades?” she whispered at the little imp.

She had to turn around to look at Hiero to see his response because he was so quiet. The imp just flicked its barbed tongue through its trumpet snout and said nothing. Even its constant droning was practically silent. Maggie narrowed her eyes and scanned the square. What was she missing? She thought of that morning and how at first she had thought Nephys was just a passerby or that Hiero was a…well she didn’t know what she thought Hiero was, a very ugly search dog maybe, but she certainly didn’t think he was a demonic bagpipe. She thought about everything that Nep had told her, how unreal things were real here and that people saw what they wanted to see. She suddenly realized that seeing here was not a matter of actual sight. After all, she wasn’t looking with her actual eyes – those were back in her real skull with her body, along with her real flats on her real dead feet. Seeing things here was something entirely different.

What was Hiero seeing that she couldn’t? She narrowed her eyes and then realized that squinting was pointless. She was
still
thinking like she was alive and looking through her real eyes. There was nothing to focus on anyway, so she tried doing the opposite. She attempted
unfocusing
her eyes instead. As she relaxed her eyes and panned across the sandy square, she saw it, if only for a fleeting moment: a tall, white, shrouded, female figure with black pits for eyes and what appeared to be long, black hair. It was wandering the edges of the square unseen looking for something, but as she saw it she gasped, and it turned its empty sockets on her suddenly. In that instant she knew two things, it had seen her, and it
knew
that Maggie had seen
it!

The specter raced across the square at frightening speed, it s black hair flying madly behind it.

“Guh-WOONK!!” Hiero was instantly there, bashing up against her urging her to move. She didn’t need to be told twice. She turned and fled. Hiero was tearing along at a terrific pace, hooting and shrieking in high tones as she was desperately trying to keep up. She knew instinctively that the thing, the black-pitted specter, or whatever it was, was right behind her and gaining. She was trying to think and run at the same time without much luck. What did this thing want? If shades eat misery and imps eat frustration, what does this thing eat? Fear?! If so, it was going to have a heckuva banquet because she couldn’t for the life of her stop panicking now. She was terrified. Their feet pummeled the soft sand sapping her strength as she ran down the rows and rows of tombs, away from the square and deeper into the tortuous paths of the city.

Hiero was turning and running side to side, searching for something. She kept tailing him hoping he would find what he was looking for, but she wasn’t certain his escape plan included her. Finally, Hiero gave out a loud honk and led her to a big tomb with two large, Egyptian-looking cat statues framing the entrance. She barely had any time to make the turn and had to grab one of the statues frantically to keep her feet from slipping out from under her. Once inside, she screeched to a sudden halt.

Cats! Thousands and thousands of cats! Calicos and Mau-Maus, blues and tabbies, but ghostly, pale and translucent, lounging about everywhere. They stopped whatever they were doing and instantly trained their eyes on her and raised their hackles. What on earth were they doing here? How was this going to help?! She had no time to think because Hiero was right behind her. Hiero plowed into her, knocked her down hard and stomped on her back to make sure she was down. Ouch! It wasn’t fair she could feel so little of everything else and yet pain was as livid as ever. At least he hadn’t used the butcher knife.

Instantly, the dark presence of the specter was over her. Hiero was standing right on her back jumping up and down and bleating up a horrible cacophony. She covered her head in her arms waiting for the inevitable touch or blow from the specter. She wasn’t quite certain what happened next, but if you can imagine a sound like a thousand hissing cats fighting in a metal barrel, that was close.

Thousands of cats poured over her, or more accurately,
through
her. The ghostly cats passed right through her and their tiny claws felt like they were made of ice and broken glass. Each one that passed through was like a sharp jab in her stomach followed by icy pricklings. The screeching sound of the cats just barely masked a rasping howl like a screaming woman and a sudden burst of icy wind. Only when it was silent did she dare to peek out from under her arms. Hiero was still on her back, hooting a little less triumphantly than usual, but still in his annoying tone.

“Get off!” she yelled. She brushed him off, pulled herself up out of the sand and glanced around. The tall spectral figure had vanished, and so had all the cats.