Limbo's Child (27 page)

“No joke,” Schuyler had resumed his more sarcastic reply.

“Look, it’s the only thing that makes sense,” Tim continued, “Hokharty is uniting all the dark, or dead, or whatever they are…forces for some final, epic battle or something.”

“You’re full of it.” Schuyler sounded like he was trying to convince himself, but Miles knew exactly what Schuyler was thinking. The back and forth between Wallach and Hokharty before Hokharty had kicked Wallach’s rear up one side and down the other was hardly the usual vampire banter. Then he destroyed Ulami and Forzgrim – the scariest vampires Miles had ever known – like they were an afterthought and had Graber drag Wallach into the early dawn and turn him into charcoal. Then there was all that talk about how Hokharty was going to restore vampires to their “true purpose.” It wasn’t just high-sounding prose and boasting like Wallach used to spin. Miles hadn’t known the Father of All Vampires more than a day, but it didn’t seem like Hokharty was given to empty melodrama. Tim was right; something
was
up.

“Fine,” Tim said indignantly, “If you don’t want to know,
fine
, just don’t come whining to me when the whole universe starts falling apart.” At this, Schuyler just gave a dismissive “hmmph” and turned to look out the window, but Miles knew Tim had hit a nerve. After a while Miles leaned forward over the seat and started again.

“Tim, what exactly were ya and Hokharty
doin’
today?”

“Yes, please regale us, Oh GREAT
Renfield
.” Schuyler’s back was still turned to them.

“Look, if you don’t want to hear about it…” Tim began.

“No, no, no!” Miles prompted, “Go on mate, we want to hear about it. Right, Sky?” Miles raised his eyebrows at Schuyler.

Schuyler just said, “Whatever,” and turned back towards the window.

Tim began nervously but eagerly. He obviously wanted to get this out of his system.

“Ok, guys. So first, after we, me and Hokharty, left Rivenden, we headed up to Fishtown, some Eastern European community, I don’t know which, maybe Ukranian or something. Anyway, we go up to this common row home adjacent to a funeral parlor. At first I thought there was a funeral going on or something because everyone was in black and out front, dozens of ‘em, but no, it turns out they were waiting for
us
! Like they knew we, well Hokharty at least, was coming.”

Schuyler and Miles exchanged looks. Tim went on.

“So they take us upstairs, all these old ladies in black, and they take us to this cramped bedroom. And there lying in this old-fashioned, wrought-iron bed, in an ancient room with peeling, red velvet wallpaper are these two really old, I mean
ancient
, crones, identical twins they looked like, holding hands the whole time, right there in bed together. Majorly weird. So Hokharty goes right up and
bows
to them.” From the look on his face, Miles could tell this piece of information really surprised Schuyler.

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 architecture: 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.