Limbo's Child Read online

  Limbo’s Child

  Book One of the Dead Things Series

  Text copyright © 2011 by Jonah Hewitt

  Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Travis Lee Clark

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book or its illustrations may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

  without written permission from the author or illustrator except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and critical reviews.

  This book is dedicated to my eldest daughter,

  Who inspired me to begin it,

  And to my wife,

  Who encouraged me to finish it.

  -Jonah Hewitt

  Limbo's Child

  Book One of the Dead Things Series

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Fred the Unkillable

  Chapter One

  The “Accident”

  Chapter Two

  Nephys

  Chapter Three

  Lucy

  Chapter Four

  The Necromancer

  Chapter Five

  The Marsh of Lost Souls

  Chapter Six

  Amarantha

  Chapter Seven

  Hunting Hunters

  Chapter Eight

  The Bark of Nephys

  Chapter Nine

  Miles and Schuyler

  Chapter Ten

  The Scriptorium

  Chapter Eleven

  Maggie Miller

  Chapter Twelve

  The Stone

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rivenden

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Gardener

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wallach

  Chapter Sixteen

  Yo-yo

  Chapter Seventeen

  Soup

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Long Drive

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Hospital

  Chapter Twenty

  The Herald

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Smoothie

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Halls of Death

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A Shirt

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Gift shop

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Chamberlain

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Plan

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Escape

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Gates of Erebus

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Boston

  Chapter Thirty

  The Diner

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Family Reunion

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Note

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Father of All Vampires

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Debates and Deliberations

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Opening The Gate

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Burial

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Dawn

  Epilogue

  Gifts

  Prologue

  Fred the Unkillable

  “MOMMY!!”

  Maggie Miller tore down the hallway. There were angry voices and pouty voices and upset voices, but she knew her six-year-old daughter, Lucy, well enough to recognize a “horrified” voice when she heard it.

  She came into her little girl’s room expecting to see a monstrous spider or something far, far worse. That was why it was such a surprise when she stopped at the doorway and all she saw was her daughter sitting on her bed holding a fishbowl in her lap, crying. Maggie looked at the fishbowl. The beautiful, purple and red tropical fish inside it was belly up.

  “Oh, honey…” Maggie said coming into the room.

  “Fred’s not moving,” Lucy whimpered.

  Maggie sat down on the bed beside her daughter, put her arms around her shoulders and gave them a little squeeze. Then she laid her head on top of her daughter’s. Maggie stroked her little girl’s sandy hair while she sobbed, but she didn’t say anything. Sometimes these things just needed to be cried out. After a long while, it was Lucy who started speaking.

  “It’s not fair,” Lucy suddenly said, angry, “I didn’t over feed him or let him get too hot or too cold or anything! I did everything right!”

  Maggie just sighed through her nose. This was going to be a hard one.

  “Honey…” Maggie paused, “Honey, fish don’t live forever.”

  Lucy began sobbing again. Maggie stroked her arm. Maggie hated this part of being a parent. She loved her daughter very much, but it was so hard being the grown-up, having to be tough all the time. So she just held her daughter and tried to punctuate the tears with the best parental advice she could muster. She never knew if this did any good or not. She wasn’t even certain if she believed it herself. So much of what people said about death was so trite as to be meaningless, but she just felt as if she had to say something, so she soldiered on.

  She started with, “Fred lived a good, long life for a fish, and it was just his time.”

  The sobbing petered out to some light whimpering. Maggie rubbed her girl’s back and decided to go on, “The best we can do is to remember the good times.”

  A few more snuffles. Lucy was nearly cried out now. Just a few more minutes and it would be over.

  “Bad things happen. We just have to be strong and move on.”

  After a few minutes more, Lucy had almost stopped crying completely and was just sniffing back tears and a runny nose now. Maggie hugged her daughter again, gave her an extra squeeze and then leaned back and looked into her daughter’s eyes. They were big and green and moist, but they weren’t tearing anymore. She was almost there. She decided to say one last thing to try to comfort her, “Sometimes these things happen and they just don’t make any sense and we just have to accept that.”

  Lucy looked back at her mom with wide eyes and spoke, “Like dad?”

  Maggie took in a breath but it never came back out. Her eyes darted nervously around the room at first and then between the fishbowl and her daughter’s equally glassy eyes. She remembered now the circumstances of when and why they had bought the fish. Her husband was dead. Her daughter was sad. She wanted a pet, but Maggie had insisted on a simple pet, a safe pet. Something she wouldn’t have to worry about Lucy ever touching. It was in the months, no…weeks! after her husband had taken his…after her husband had passed away. How long ago was it? A little over two years now? Two years and three months, but how many days? She didn’t know exactly. Not without counting it up in her head. How could she not know?! She had thought about his death every minute of every hour of every day the first year, but this year, the next year, it had gotten easier. Had she thought of him today? Yesterday? This week?! She didn’t know when she had thought about him last. It was a week at least. She felt guilty, ashamed, alone and hurt, and it all suddenly dawned on her. Here she was parroting back all the trite things her friends and coworkers at the library had said to her back then. No wonder her daughter was so upset. It wasn’t just the fish, it was her dad dying all over again, and here she was telling her it didn’t matter, suck it up, move on, grow up, get over it.

  Maggie’s heart was suddenly in her throat. Her face went stiff and hot. She tried to turn away but couldn’t. A sob erupted from her mouth. It was more of a gulp of air really. She tried to hold the next one back but couldn’t. She slapped her hands over her mouth, but it didn’t matter. The sobs just kept coming. Soon the crying was racking her whole body with great heaving sobs.

  “Mommy!” Lucy buried her head into her mother’s chest and threw her arms around her mom to try to comfort her, but with both arms arou
nd her mother’s middle, she didn’t have a hand free to hold onto the fishbowl. It slipped off her lap.

  “L-Lucy!” Maggie yelled through sobs.

  The fishbowl crashed to the hard oak floor, shattering into dozens of sharp pieces, sending glass and water and colorful gravel everywhere.

  “Mom!” Lucy cried.

  “It’s ok, honey, it’s ok,” Maggie reassured her daughter, “We’ll just clean it up.” Maggie was instantly glad the fishbowl had shattered. Somehow the shock of the breaking glass had brought her back around. There was something to do now, something to clean up and something to distract both of them. Maggie pulled herself together and the two of them got down on their knees and started picking up the pieces.

  Not a minute into the cleanup, Lucy yelled out.

  “Ouch!”

  Maggie looked up. Her daughter was looking at her finger while a single trail of scarlet dripped from the fingertip. “Just great,” Maggie thought. Lucy had cut her finger on the glass. Already Lucy’s lip was trembling and in a moment the whole thing would start up again. Maggie couldn’t be certain she wasn’t about to start up again herself. Just when the waterworks were about to get going, Lucy looked down to the ground, stunned. The lip stopped trembling.

  “Mom, look!”

  Maggie looked down. Fred was twitching. A few seconds on, and the fish was practically flopping around in a small puddle of water caught in one of the larger fragments of the fishbowl. A drop of Lucy’s blood was slowly dissipating in the tiny puddle too. In an instant, her daughter went from despair to elation.

  “MOM!! FRED’S ALIVE!!”

  But Maggie went from distress to near abject horror. She went rigid.

  “Don’t touch it, Lucy.”

  Lucy just looked at her in disbelief. “But, MOM, we have to save him!”

  “DON’T TOUCH IT!!” Maggie screamed.

  Lucy looked back at her mom, scared. Why was she so angry?

  “But, mom…” Lucy went on.

  “Um…ok, honey, hold still. Don’t move! I don’t want you to get cut again.” Maggie had to shake herself to bring herself back to the moment. What to do?!

  “But, MOM!!”

  “HOLD ON, LUCY!! I’ll be right back!!”

  Maggie got up and ran to the kitchen. She found a large Mason jar, filled it with water and ran back to the room. She paused, looking disbelieving at the flopping fish.

  “Mom!” Lucy implored.

  “Right,” Maggie set about her task. She scooped up the fish and plopped it into the Mason jar. Fred swam around the smaller confines of the jar contentedly. Lucy began jumping up and down holding out both hands for her chance to hold her fish once again. Maggie reluctantly handed over the Mason jar.

  Lucy was beside herself with relief.

  “I can’t believe it!! FRED’S OK!!” She gazed into the Mason jar with wonder. Maggie stared too. Lucy hugged her mother around her middle, but Maggie Miller didn’t hug her daughter back. Instead she just stood there, hand on mouth, staring at the fish. After a while, Maggie gingerly pried the jar and miraculous fish from her daughter’s hands.

  “What?” Lucy protested.

  “Honey, Fred’s ok, and I still need to clean up all this glass. Ok? Now just go out into the kitchen and bring me the dustpan, broom and some rags. Ok?”

  “But…”

  “Honey, please don’t argue.”

  Lucy reluctantly went. After she came back with the cleaning supplies, Maggie sent her to the front room to wait. Lucy didn’t want to go, but Maggie insisted because Lucy didn’t have shoes on, and there was still a lot of glass. Lucy didn’t want to be parted from the resurrected pet so soon, but she was so happy to have Fred back, she didn’t complain too much.

  Maggie swept up the gravel and glass and mopped up all the water, but she never took her eyes off of Fred swimming in the jar on Lucy’s dresser. When she was all done, Maggie went over to the fish, narrowed her eyes at it and tapped on the glass once or twice. It looked just like a normal fish.

  Maggie leaned back and put her hands in her back pockets.

  “Well, at least we’ll save on fish food,” she muttered to herself before leaving and shutting the bedroom door, “Thank goodness you weren’t a kitten!”

  From that point on, Lucy and the fish were inseparable. In the years to come, the fish survived many more accidental hardships, including a couple more dropped fish bowls, being accidentally placed under a heat lamp and even an unexpected freeze when left outside. It didn’t help that Lucy insisted on taking the fish everywhere: show and tell, vacation, camp. It had survived so many mishaps that Lucy began calling it “Fred, the Unkillable.” When she got older, however, and she learned that fish simply don’t live for that long, she began to suspect that her mother was secretly replacing her original fish with identical fish all along. On a couple of occasions, she even found bags from the pet store lying around the house with receipts for new fish in them. Lucy hid the incriminating evidence when she found it and tried not to let on that she knew. Lucy never said anything about it to her mom even when she turned thirteen. She just figured it made her mom happy to keep up the pretense. It must have been a way for her mother to hold on to the innocence of her childhood just a little while longer.

  But those receipts were for fish Maggie Miller secretly gave away to neighbors, coworkers and the children of friends. Maggie gave away enough fish over the years people began to think she had an odd fascination for them, but Maggie Miller didn’t care for fish at all. She only needed the bags and the receipts. She left them around the house for her daughter to find every time Fred “miraculously” survived another calamity. The truth was, Fred really was “Fred the Unkillable,” and Maggie was prepared to do anything to keep her daughter from finding out the truth. She just wished her daughter wasn’t so accident-prone. Those fish were expensive.

  Chapter One

  The “Accident”

  Lucy couldn’t move. There was a ringing in her ears and, behind the ringing, faint voices. She could tell her eyes were open, but she couldn’t see. She couldn’t even blink. She felt as if she was floating for a moment and then she felt the weight of her body and the solidness of a long board being slid behind her back. Hands were running all over her gently trying to roll her onto the board. It made her extremely uncomfortable. She tried to fight, tried to tell them to stop, but couldn’t speak. Someone was strapping something thick and soft around her head and neck that muffled the sounds even more. Thoughts, images and voices without any apparent connection drifted through her mind.

  Her mother and her laughing while taking a drive to get some late snack at an all-night truck stop. The anticipation of pancakes and chocolate shakes. Mom liked to dip fries in hers. Yuck.

  “This one looks stable, help me with this one.”

  A boy with a yo-yo in the headlights. A sound of screeching tires, then red and blue flashing lights.

  “Blood pressure is dropping fast…”

  She could feel the cool night air on her skin now, a dull ache in her joints.

  A beautiful woman with long, black hair she’d never seen before, with cold…cold grey eyes.

  “I’ve lost the pulse, quick…not that…over here…”

  Something else…a dog, no a pig, no a duck…with a butcher knife? A sound like a cat being strangled underwater.

  “We’re losing her…”

  A man with a silver, beak-like visor instead of a face.

  “She looks ok. Take this one to Harrisburg…”

  A man with no face at all.

  “Careful, together on three and…1…2…3, LIFT!”

  Two teenage boys: A pale, handsome, shirtless young man who almost sparkled, with wild, blond hair and a carefree smirk. The other dark, red-haired, with brooding eyes.

  “One vehicle accident, northbound, overturned car stuck in a tree…”

  A young, olive-skinned boy with cropped hair and strange clothes…wearing eyeliner?

  “Tw
o passengers, both white females, one middle age, brown hair, the other 13 or 14, sandy haired…Pennsylvania registration…”

  A vast beast or animal with many arms and wings covered under dark drapes and shrouds lurking in a room full of candles. Two candles waver…one goes out, the other burns on…faintly.

  “We have the younger one heading to Harrisburg now…”

  A blue-grey city full of broken tombs and statues on the edge of a vast swamp surrounded by flames of ice. Monsters of horrible size and configuration gather around the city…children…blind children everywhere…running and screaming. The boy with the yo-yo is there, the woman with dark hair too.

  “15, maybe 20 minutes out…”

  A foreign, sunny land, a father kneeling over the body of a boy, the boy’s throat slit, the last of his blood spilling, his father’s groans of agony splitting the heavens. He is changing into…something.

  “I think she’ll make it, possible mild concussion, possible broken ribs…the other one, however…major internal bleeding…”

  A vision of her mother in blue monochrome. She speaks her name, “Lucy,” as if from very far away.

  “You still with me, honey?” says another, much closer voice she doesn’t recognize.

  Lucy struggled to wake up and called out weakly, “Mother?”

  “Your mother is in another ambulance…”

  “MOM? Are you there?” she called out again.

  “They are going to airlift her to Philadelphia…”

  “Mom?!”

  “Stay with me honey, it will be alright.”

  “MOMMY?!!!”

  Chapter Two

  Nephys

  Nephys shook himself awake. He had slipped away for a moment. It was dangerous to sleep in the land of the dead – not that anyone ever really slept here. Instead, people just tried to lie down and rest in a form of forced meditation. That was the closest anyone ever came to sleep in the underworld, here on the vast grey shoals of Limbo. But you had to keep focused. If you lost concentration for a moment, you could drift out of time or space for a day or even a century. That could be a blessed relief, for a moment, but it was risky. You never knew if you might not come back out of that emptiness. You could wind up a shade, a lost soul, less substantial than candle smoke, more adrift than a dry leaf on the wind, and then you could never come back.