Limbo's Child (3 page)

His left arm was a tiny, piglet arm, fleshy pink, hoofed and entirely useless. The right one was long, thin and spidery, with three sharp fingers stained shiny black to the elbow. In this hand he carried a large, ragged butcher knife nearly as big as the whole imp himself. It was so heavy, the imp struggled to lift it at all, but his grip must have been strong because those three spindly, black fingers never let go of it. The right leg was also a short and stubby piglet leg, but that was the only part on the monster that matched another. The left foot was a webbed goose foot – a stiff and arthritic one at that. These two feet were worse than worthless, so much so that Hiero had to use the tip of the butcher knife as a kind of gruesome crutch and walking staff, which probably explained why he gripped it so tightly. With these three limbs he would half shuffle, half pull his body along. He’d stab the knife down and drag the rest of his misshapen carcass forward while his stunted, mismatched legs waddled desperately to keep up. Stab-drag, stab-drag he made his way everywhere he went.

But this was not the most disturbing thing about Hiero. No, the most disturbing thing about Hiero was his body, which wasn’t a body at all. Nephys had seen some revolting amalgamations in his time. He had seen a fish-headed cat with bricks for feet and a parrot-bodied imp with porcupine quills with anteater tongues where its eyes should have been. He had even seen a salamander-bodied imp with the head of a cabbage. But Hiero took the biscuit. His body was a set of bagpipes. The bulbous air bag made up his body. It was made from a sheep’s stomach, all veiny and sickly white. It expanded and deflated with every labored, hooting, honking breath, and if a bright light shone behind Hiero you could see that he was literally gutless. Inside he was all air. What need did an imp in the afterlife have for guts or eating anyway?

The neck, canter and blowpipe of the bagpipes made up his head and shoulders. On his head he wore a black cowl, like a medieval monk. Out of the back of his head, and the long pointed tail of the hood, came the blowpipe complete with a mouthpiece. This functioned something like a blowhole on a beached whale. Disgusting phlegm and spittle wheezed out of the pipe with every struggling, bleating breath. Up front, underneath the dark hood you could see two glassy, fish-like eyes and between them, like the long bill of some bizarre crane, was the flute-like canter, complete with finger holes. Out of the trumpet end of this beak, there flicked a tiny, bloody, red tongue covered in sharp barbs. Hiero had no teeth, lips or jaws to speak of, so it was a good thing he had no stomach. He couldn’t talk or speak either, except in shrill, discordant hoots and honks, but he never seemed to have any trouble making himself understood.

Jutting out of his back, like the bones of a bat wing that had been stripped of their membrane, were the other pipes and drones, blackened and skeletal. They rose and fell with each difficult breath, guttering out discordant tones and shrieks more unsettling than a pack of howling wolves. And when he got angry they stood upright, like the spines on a spiky fish, hollering like a demonic steam organ. The pipes on his back were also tangled up in black, stringy cords, like spider webs or ripped sinews, and from these hung an odd assortment of ghastly flotsam. There was a broken inkpot and an old, bloody whetstone, bits of parchment covered in vile glyphs only known or spoken in the deeper hells and small dead rodents, hairless and eyeless from a lifetime in the depths. And hanging from the largest pipe dangling from the far end on a scarlet silken cord was a severed human foot. Whether these were Hiero’s treasured possessions, or just junk that had gotten stuck there, Nephys didn’t know, and even if he asked, Hiero couldn’t exactly tell him.

Whether Hiero was a damned soul who hated bagpipes so much that he had somehow fused with the instrument of his torture, or whether he was a set of bagpipes whose tone was so awful it had sprung to life as an imp, no one could say. Imps were neither created nor born. Instead, the monstrosities just seemed to pop up from their vulgar surroundings whenever a damned soul arrived. They were all pain, frustration, shame and humiliation personified. Unlike the residents of Limbo, who drifted about in endless stoic repose and resignation, Hiero was always in a foul mood, and frequently flew into psychotic rages. Nephys liked that. It broke the monotony.

In all the houses of the dead, Hiero was the closest thing that Nephys had to a friend. There wasn’t much to like about Hiero. He was a vile abomination: a shrieking, stumbling, near-homicidal bagpipe – but a honking, hollering imp can never sneak up on you, and Hiero seemed to prefer Nephys’ company to any of the other souls here. Maybe he just liked to torment Nephys. Maybe he found Nephys a challenge and secretly wished for nothing more than his pain and degradation, but strangely, in this grey and twilight place where any motivation, even a sinister one, was rare, that was enough.

Nephys turned to face Hiero. The second Nephys made eye contact, Hiero’s impatient hooting ceased, replaced with a low droning breath. Hiero turned and began stabbing and dragging itself away. Nephys knew right away that Hiero wanted him to follow. Out of all the listless occupants of Limbo, there was an interest that only the two of them seemed to share – a morbid fascination with new arrivals that had entered the realm abruptly.

Hiero had obviously just found one.

Chapter Three
Lucy

“She’s over there, doctor, they brought her up from the ICU a few hours ago.”

“She’s stable – no problems?”

“Yeah, bumps and bruises mostly. They were afraid she had a concussion, but the CAT scan was clean. Miracle really, considering the accident. She’s resting comfortably. Here’s the chart.”

Lucia Claire Miller was actually wide awake, lying on her side with her back turned to the two female voices hovering in the door of her hospital room. She was definitely
not
resting comfortably. She kept very still as if she were standing on a precipice and was afraid any movement would threaten to throw her off balance and tip her over the edge. She was focusing intently on a water stain on the far wall, pouring all her concentration into it. She was trying very hard to clear her head and keep still, but the voices coming from just beyond her doorway were distracting her.

“Poor kid, did you hear about her mother?” the doctor said casually. Lucy could hear her shuffling over papers in her chart.

“No, what?” the nurse replied.

A few hours ago, her mother and she had gotten into a terrible fight. They were up late restoring the old mish-mash farmhouse they had inherited from her grandmother who had died a little over six years ago. It was located on a country farm several miles outside of Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Lucy had knocked over a ladder and spilled a gallon of dark purple paint all over the original oak floor. The purple paint was Lucy’s choice to replace the brown-velvet wallpaper that was peeling on the walls of the upstairs room. It was her room. It was a terrible mess to clean up. Her mother had been upset already by something and yelled at her. Lucy got mad and screamed back.

Fights are like wildfires – it ultimately doesn’t matter where they start or how. They just burn wherever there is dry tinder and enough wind to carry them. The fight soon leapt from the spilled paint to this lousy dump of a house and the recent move. From there, it quickly ranged from the friends she had left behind in Texas to how everyone had hated her in the new school, and how the present solution of home-schooling was even worse because she was trapped all day in this miserable house. The sparks flew in the direction of her mother and how she never understood her. When the fire reached why her dad had killed himself it finally burned itself out, though her mom had nearly slapped her by then.

Lucy had stormed outside and sulked on the dilapidated porch for over an hour. Mom came out and sat silently beside her and said nothing for a long time. Then they talked about the stars they couldn’t see anymore, and about the endless stretches of green trees in Pennsylvania compared to the open spaces of Texas, and all the flowers her mom had planted in their new garden. Eventually, the conversation came back to the fight. A few new ground-rules about fights were established and some terse apologies were exchanged, followed by some tears and some earnest “I love you’s” and a lot of hugging. When that broke up, they got in the car, and headed for some much-needed comfort food; an all-night diner at a truck stop nearby that served shakes and breakfast 24 hours a day. They had never gotten there.

The voices outside the door continued.

“They airlifted her mom to Philly, right?” the nurse asked.

“Yeah, but I just got the call from the attending physician in the ER. She didn’t make it…she was declared dead on the scene.”

“Oh my…that’s just awful!”

Lucy didn’t react or flinch in the slightest. She just kept on staring at the water stain, which was beginning to resemble
something
. Even though this was the first real time she had heard the news, it was no surprise to her at all. She had known her mother was dead. She had known it in the emergency room, she had known it in the ambulance ride over, she had known it while lying in the grass looking up at the twisted wreck of the car caught sideways between two vertical tree trunks. She wasn’t sure how she had known – she had just known. Like those people on television who could hear a song on the radio they’ve never heard before and then play it exactly right on a piano the first time, or the way some people could shoot a basketball perfectly without trying, she just knew it. Her mother was gone, and she was never going to see her ever again with her own eyes.

Even now, though, she could still see her mother in her mind’s eye. Her mom was tall, slender with short, chin-length, dark-brown hair, chocolate-brown eyes and olive skin. Some laugh lines around the eyes and a stray lock of gray hair in her bangs were the only signs that showed her full forty-two years. Her mother was somewhat gangly and clumsy and a bit of a tomboy, always mucking around in the dirt of the garden, or repairing something around the house. She looked classy and gorgeous in a dress and heels, but she could usually be found in blue jeans, often topped by a baggy sweater, sweatshirt or plaid flannel shirt, a smudge of dirt on her cheek, and a smirk on her face.

Maggie Miller never put on any pretension that she was pretty, but Lucy had always thought her mother was very beautiful – lithe, slender and lovely – and she wished that she looked more like her. Instead of dark-brown hair, warm, brown eyes and olive skin, Lucy had sandy-brown hair, green eyes, pale skin and freckles. Instead of a tall and slim figure with a svelte waist, she was short and somewhat stocky – nearly the same width from her shoulders to her hips. “Pony-built” her mom had called it.

She always hated the way she looked, but her mom had always tried to make her feel better about her figure.

“Well at least you’ll have breasts! Look at me – I’m flat as a surfboard!” her mom had said once.

“
MOM!
” was Lucy’s mortified reply.

She had been horrified and embarrassed when her mother said stuff like that, but she had to admit, it
did
make her feel better.

She could remember lots of things about her mom, but the one thing she remembered most was something from just after the accident. It was a final image of her mother in shades of gray and blue standing in a marsh on the edge of a distant, ruined city. She was yelling something, but she couldn’t tell what. She seemed so far away. There was more to it than that, but it was slipping away, like a dream.

Of course it had never happened. It was something her mind had just invented immediately after the accident. A subconscious mental image that told her what her brain already knew – that her mother was dead. She had had flashes of visions and nightmares like that her whole life. Night terrors too. Mostly images of zombies and vampires and other dead things – the usual childhood fears. Her mother was always interested to hear about them but insisted they meant nothing, they were just manifestations of subconscious anxieties. Mom had studied a lot of childhood psychology in college. Somehow her mom could always make her feel better and banish the scary dreams away. Soon she had learned to ignore the nightmares entirely as idle chatter from her unruly subconscious.

Yet, she had seen a lot of strange things from her subconscious immediately after the accident. And not just monsters from late-night B movies. Strange visions and people she had never seen before, and somehow they were far more vivid than ever. They were all delusions too, she told herself, crafted from her own memories and fears – that’s all. She even saw a childhood memory where she had been attacked by a duck at a pond, but the duck had been turned into some bizarre monstrosity complete with back spines and a butcher knife.

Lucy shook her head and tried to think of something else. Even now the water stain was looking more like something, but she couldn’t tell what. The brain did funny things when under stress, and that’s all that was she told herself. Mom had been practical and always wanted her to be practical too, so that’s the way she was going to be. She wasn’t going to believe in nightmares or dead things. Now more than ever.

The voices just outside her door kept talking.

“And there’s no next of kin? She’s all alone?”

“We’re not certain, but it sure looks that way. She apparently had a grandmother that died a while back, but there are no known living relations other than the mother and now she’s gone.”

This was not news to Lucy either. Grandma Holveda had died six years ago. Lucy had only met her a few times anyway. Most kids had loving grandmothers that spoiled them. Nana Holveda was stern, dark-eyed, mysterious and distant. Her grandmother had never even hugged her once, so when she passed away when Lucy was seven, it was no loss. Her father had passed away three years before that. She was only four when he had died. He was shorter than her mother, stocky and sandy haired like Lucy. He was very fun, gave her helicopter rides, and always made her mother laugh, but he was often moody and distant himself. There had been no suicide note, no indication it was anything but an accident, but everyone in town gossiped about it. She had always thought he had been happy, but looking back now it was almost impossible to tell. She had been very young. She didn’t know what she thought was more tragic, that her dad’s death was a random accident, or that he had killed himself intentionally and no one knew the reason why. Her mom didn’t even let Lucy see her dad’s body, but had had him cremated almost immediately. Her mom was a bit weird like that. She never let Lucy get near any dead animals or even touch raw meat when they made dinner. She may not have believed in God, but she was practically phobic about dead things, even her husband’s body. So one day her dad was there, and then he was gone. Maybe her mom thought she was protecting Lucy somehow, but it always made Lucy sad that she never got to see him one last time. In a way, it was like he hadn’t died at all. It was more like he had left on a long trip and never come back.

Grandma Holveda had never approved of her mother’s choice to marry him and even after his death never quite accepted the marriage. Because she had thought her daughter’s choice was a mistake, Lucy guessed Grandma Holveda thought anything that came from that choice was also mistake. That meant that Lucy was a mistake too.

Lucy screwed up her concentration and stared at the water stain some more. It
did
look like something. Maybe a face, she thought. The voices kept talking.

“Social services will be here to interview her in the morning. We’re hoping that she can tell us something; maybe there’s some distant relative we don’t know.”

“The social worker is going to be disappointed then,” thought Lucy. Both her father and mother had been only children, just like her, and all the grandparents were dead. She didn’t even have a cousin, let alone a sibling or an aunt or an uncle.

“And the mother left no will? No instructions about who would be the guardian?”

“The state police went into the home but didn’t find anything.”

“What happens if they can’t find a relation or a legal guardian?”

“Then she becomes a ward of the state. She’ll stay here for the next couple of days for observation, but then she’ll be released to Child Welfare Services.”

“Child Welfare Services.” The term was as cold as a dead fish to Lucy. This was no surprise to her either. She had known kids from foster homes. Some had great, loving foster parents, some, to put it bluntly, did not. It was a crapshoot, and there was no way to know which way it was going to turn out, like life itself. It was all so random. Some had grandmothers that were all smiles and high-pitched voices of delight, who bought them Happy Meals and cute, patterned dresses; others had grandmothers with stern and disapproving cold looks and ugly old houses. Some had fathers to give them helicopter rides until they were six or even seven, and some had their helicopter rides cut short. And some had mothers…fun, loving, pretty mothers that looked good in jeans and liked pancakes at eleven at night and now…she just didn’t anymore. That was all there was to it she told herself. It was unfair and cruel and capricious, but that was just the way it was and you couldn’t think about it too much because if you did it would drive you crazy. You just had to suck it up and take it the way it was and try not to be a mess for the rest of your life – however long it lasted before death came for you and finally ended it. That was what her mother had always said at least.

“Because she’s a teenager they’ll start her at a halfway home most likely and then, if she’s lucky, they’ll find a good foster family for her…”

She pulled the pillow on her hospital bed tighter around her ears and wished these women would just
go away
. They were driving her
crazy
and they never said anything she didn’t already know. She stared a little harder at the water stain on the wall.

“…but that’s not the worst of it,” the doctor continued.

Lucy’s eyes quavered and her concentration on the water stain broke for a moment. The two women’s voices went on.

“Not the worst of it? What do you mean?”

The doctor gave a long sigh and paused before continuing, “Her mother’s body is missing.”

The nurse gave a sharp intake of breath. So did Lucy. This was the first thing they had said that she didn’t already instinctively know.

“Missing?!”

“Stolen,0020 actually.”

“Stolen! You’re kidding!”

“I wish I was.”

Lucy’s resolve wavered. She bit her lip and tried to stop her eyes from welling up, but it wasn’t working. She tried staring at the water stain harder. A wildfire had started somewhere inside of her. She thought about truck stops and pancakes and chocolate shakes late at night.