Limbo's Child (51 page)

“Are you sure?” she asked.

Hiero spat up a black piece of phlegm and stared venomously back at him.

“Definitely,” Nephys said firmly. Then he looked back at Maggie. She had resumed her usual pose, hands in back pockets. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. After all the urgency of the last few minutes, now that it came to leaving, Nephys found it hard to go.

“Well, you best get a move on!” she said at last, sending a half-hearted kick his direction, but her eyes held back more tears. Nephys stepped back, smiled, and left without saying goodbye one last time. He was out of the garden and halfway down the street before he turned to look back. Maggie was there at the gate watching him go. Hiero was stomping mad at her feet. She leaned over to say something to him. Nephys could just barely make it out.

“It’s ok, I know about the cats, I can handle myself. Go!” she told him.

The imp looked from her to Nephys before it trundled off after Nephys like a demented puppy. The little monster had nearly reached him before Nephys responded.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Nephys took a few steps forward and waved the imp back. “NO, HIERO! Not this time! You have to stay and take care of Maggie!” he ordered the little bagpipes back. Hiero stopped, whined and deflated, nearly dropping his massive butcher knife. “For ONCE, please listen to me,” Nephys demanded. All of the pipes on his back laid flat and he let out a sad, little droning honk. He looked forlornly back at Maggie and then back to Nephys, but he didn’t move. Satisfied that the imp would stay, Nephys turned back down the street and ran for the causeway.

“I told you to go back! Now for the last time GO!”

“Garbaanbatanflabit,” the small imp grumbled.

“I heard that!”

Hiero had dogged Nephys all the way to the edges of Limbo. Nephys’ pace had slowed recently, but he had run most of the way. Still the little monster had kept pace, always careful to drag himself no closer than thirty paces behind Nephys, like a dejected pet. Whenever Nephys turned around to see if he was still there, he caught the vile thing acting as if it just happened to be in the same vicinity by chance.

Nephys ignored him for a while and pressed on, hoping to out pace the little monster. Twenty minutes of fast walking later, Nephys hadn’t heard Heiro’s idiosyncratic drone for quite some time so he stopped and peeked over his shoulder. Sure enough, Hiero was still there, thirty paces behind as always.

“Ugh,” Nephys grumbled. This had to stop. He marched back to where the little imp was waiting.

“Enough! You have to go home! You can’t come with me to the land of the living – it’s just not right. More importantly, Maggie’s all alone, and she has no one to watch over her. You have to go back and take care of her!”

“Flubbit,” it muttered despondently, stabbing the ground absent-mindedly with the butcher knife. It looked up at him with eyes like a child that had been told he couldn’t go to the amusement park, but Nephys decided to be firm.

“I mean it! Now go!”

Slowly, the imp turned himself around and began stabbing the ground, dragging himself in the opposite direction, at a lugubrious pace, back towards the city and Nephys’ tomb. A few steps on it looked back over its shoulder at him.

“Go!” Nephys said adamantly pointing back towards the city. “I’m not going anywhere until you go home!”

Hiero let out a long, droning whine, but ultimately relented and started walking away. It was interminable, but finally the creature dragged itself far enough away it was a tiny spot on the edge of the city. Nephys didn’t move but watched it until it had nearly disappeared. Satisfied that he had finally gotten through to the demonic bagpipes, he turned around in a huff and picked up the pace considerably. A few minutes on, he looked back over his shoulder, almost certain that Hiero would be thirty paces behind him again, but the imp was nowhere in sight.

“Finally!” thought Nephys, but in truth it made him a little nervous now to be on his own. A short while later, he left the city and entered a rocky, debris-strewn plain that led to the causeway that crossed the black river that separated the land of the living from the world of the dead.

By the growing number of ghosts and souls wandering around aimlessly in their new surroundings, Nephys could tell he was approaching the causeway to the Gates of Erebus. The vast plain surrounding the city of Limbo was less soggy on this side. The foundations had been shored up long ago by toppling eons of rubble into the swamp. Instead of sand or marshy soil underfoot, there was dry broken marble, gravel and brick. This was the causeway. It was a great, raised thoroughfare, a road of smashed tombs and gravestones leading from the Gates of Erebus to the edge of the city. There was nothing graceful or planned about the causeway at all. Unlike the elegant, crumbling temples and tombs, the causeway was a haphazard and ad hoc affair, piled up in great haste.

During the first taste of the Black Death, the souls had piled up so thick and heavy on the far side of the river Styx that the ferryman, Chiron, simply couldn’t keep up. First he had to abandon the skiff for a larger boat, and then later he had replaced the bark with a broad barge. He reduced the usual fee of a gold coin to a copper groat, and then eventually, because there were so many, he waived the fee altogether and just shoved them on by the dozens no questions asked. The barge listed and nearly sunk under the weight, and still he carried on, but things only got worse. By the end of the plague he was beating them off the giant barge with a large oar like cattle before returning to the opposite shore to fill up the barge once again.

Eventually, he gave up and left altogether, for where, no one knows. Not that anyone could blame him. There were just too many. The souls crowded on the far shore, helpless, unable to wade across and unable to go back, and always new souls arriving, pressing on them, driving them forward. The newly arrived pushed at the great mass of souls ahead of them, but the crowds of newly departed had nowhere to go. They were shoved into the flood of the great river of death, where they were washed away, down into the marshes of lost souls or beyond, lost forever.

Finally, the last remaining residents of the acropolis in Elysium came to their aid. They knocked over the temples, tombs and gatehouses, broke the stones down and tossed the rubble haphazardly into the river. More and more they tore down, destroying nearly a third of the city in the process. Once the gates of the city had been glorious with many great and beautiful statues, but now only a large field of rubble greeted the newly deceased to Limbo.

Desperate, they kept on, throwing all the broken pieces into the river at a furious pace. Eventually, they had constructed a broad, earthen dam of debris, thrown across the wide Acheron with little forethought. As he trod on the broad path, Nephys could read the names of departed kings and gods in the broken inscriptions and epitaphs beneath his sandals: Gilgamesh, Agamemnon, Thutmoses, Qin. None had been spared the indignity.

The brackish waters behind the earthen dam had backed up and flooded around the city, increasing the marshes in all directions, but the earthen causeway had held, and it had worked. Now hundreds could walk across freely from the Gates of Erebus unabated to the realm of Limbo without the aid of a ferryman or approval of any sentinel. It was all very democratic now and far less impressive.

Nephys was just approaching the close side of the causeway where it crossed the river and emptied out into a broad plaza of debris. The crowd was already immense and growing. Hundreds of souls wandered about in confusion, some not even aware that they were dead, most were muttering to themselves. Nephys caught faint snatches of dazed and disoriented conversation, pleas or prayers in many languages.

“Is this the land of my fathers?”

“Where is my husband?”

“Oh, Great God, protect me…”

“Where am I?”

Many had horrific wounds and one young man was wandering around carrying the wheel from one of those deathcarts. He kept looking around as if he was searching for the rest of the wretched device. All were awakening to their new life – some were adapting better than others. Some met it stony-faced, others with wailing and tears. Many of the more morose ones probably turned to shades right there and were lost to the swamps immediately. Everywhere there were dashed expectations and misery.

Amongst them, nimble of foot and ever polite was an army of young, blind children carrying wax tablets or notepads, asking for names and birthdates, cataloguing the who and how and when of each new arrival. What was done with this information was a mystery, but the names were tallied and recorded and handed over to representatives from the Halls of Death all the same. The young record keepers were often met with angry and ardent questioning.

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“I have to be getting back to the convention floor. They are expecting me to give the keynote any moment now!!”

“Will my luggage be checked through Denver? I have to make the connecting flight.”

The assiduous young bureaucrats of the underworld, however, avoided making any concrete commitments or answers. They had none to give anyway – only a job to do. They placated all, took the names, and with blank stares, directed all the members of the loose throng towards the city. Several of the children of Limbo eyed Nephys suspiciously. No one ever walked against the flow of traffic here, but there was too much to do, so many new arrivals, they couldn’t be bothered to question him. So, Nephys elbowed his way past the crowd without being waylaid. Deeper and deeper he pushed into the mass of people, until there was barely enough room to pass. Once a woman met his glance and fell to her knees grabbing Nephys and shaking him.

“Where is my daughter?!! Where is she?!! Why have you taken her?!!”

She had a horrible gash across her forehead. Nephys just pushed her away. “Them!” he said, pointing to the young children of Limbo taking names. “Talk to them!” She let go and he quickly shoved past her. As he pushed on, he looked back, but she was already lost in the crowd. She had been someone like Maggie, he thought, but no one would help her and take a note back to
her
daughter.

Nephys approached the edge of the causeway where it met the river. The crowd was so thick and pressing, they hardly noticed him but just roughly brushed by. He craned his neck to look over the crowds. Far away, on the other side of the river, he could barely see a vast, black granite statue with half its face missing.

“Anubis,” he said faintly to himself. His grandmother always said Anubis would ferry his soul to the land of the dead. She instructed him that Anubis would present his heart to Osiris and weigh it against the feather of truth. If he passed this test it would be recorded by Thoth, the scribe of the gods. Horus, far sighted, falcon-headed and son of Osiris would then usher him into the rest of the blessed. If not, his heart would be fed to the devourer of souls, Ammit. Nephys lived in fear of that day, but Anubis never came. There were only the children of Limbo and they were utterly disinterested in truth or judgment. As he looked to the far end of the causeway towards the massive statue, he thought maybe this was his test, finally.

He paused and looked at the stone the Chamberlain had given him. There was no going back now. He was filled with equal parts dread and anticipation. Would the stone work? Would the statue of Anubis on the far side really help him? There was only one way to find out. He took an empty breath – the dead couldn’t breathe, but the habits of life were hard to break – and he plunged forward into the crowd and out into the causeway crossing the river.

By the time they crossed the causeway and reached the outskirts of the city, the dead had assimilated something like their earthly forms. Their spirit bodies bore the wounds of their passing, but they were human at least, and to the other dead felt and appeared solid, but further out into the causeway, in the middle of the great, black river, they began to lose form and shape. A never-ending stream of bluish and white ghosts poured through the gates and across the causeway, so many that it didn’t even resemble a crowd as much as a river of ghostly light. Nephys pressed first through the human crowd and then at some point, gradually crossed into the torrent of insubstantial souls. Soon, it didn’t feel like he was in a crowd of people at all, but rather like he was standing in a dense, whirling, freezing mist. He could still catch the whispers of regret and moans of grief of the dead blowing around him before their ghosts hurried off to the other side.

The black waters on either side of causeway revealed nothing deeper than an impenetrable, opaque surface like a sea of ink. The river was nearly still, languid and stagnant with hardly a trace of movement, but every once in a while, a ripple would indicate the presence of something darker underneath. Nephys had only ever seen the murky waters of the swamp close up. He had never seen the Stygian waters this close to the source. Nephys’ toe kicked a loose piece of rubble. Curious he picked it up and tossed it in. It vanished without a trace of a ripple, almost exactly how the herald had vanished through the doorways to the halls of Death.

At first it was easier to negotiate this stream of spirits than having to elbow your way past a crowd of angry ghosts, but it was cold, bitterly cold. However, he could feel the warmth of the green stone in his hand, and it seemed to warm him from within, making the trip passable, but with every step it got harder. He pulled his thin linen robe tightly over his shoulders and curled his toes under, but Egyptian clothing just wasn’t made for cold weather, let alone a current of dead souls. Each step grew wearier, and the cold stabbed deeper, until only the part of his body close to where he clutched the stone to his chest felt warm. The intensity of the deluge of departed souls became stronger. It roared in his ears like a storm and he had to walk against it like a stiff wind.