Limbo 56 - Mike Morris (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📗

saw Arthur and the she-devil. This time he was alone, his prospect safely signed up. “What the Hell are you doing harassing me in London,” he said. “Get away from my pitch, or I’ll have the Council on your neck.”

“Jimmy, I just want to ask a favour,” Arthur said, and Jimmy’s eyes widened.

“If you think I’d ever do you a favour,” he snapped, “You must have gone crazy.” He noticed the rapidly healing hole in Arthur’s head. “Ah, I see you’ve damaged your brain. That explains a lot.”

Pauline leant towards Jimmy, horns prominent. Small blue flames issued from her mouth. “You can see me, right, you undead piece of meat. Do you know what I am?” Jimmy looked uncertainly from her to Arthur. “I’m a Devil, first class,” she continued. “I tear out livers and eat them for breakfast. I suck brains through a straw, and I crack bones for exercise. I’m also a friend of Arthur, and we have a request to make of you.”

“You are a friend of Arthur?” This, apparently was the most difficult part of the situation for Jimmy to take in. “Arthur?” he repeated, Governor of that scrubby little limbo that I foisted on him years ago?”

“Look, you piece of slime,” she hissed. “Some time or other you will have to visit a Limbo, and I’ll be waiting for you. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I shall have years, eons of pleasure with your suffering tortured soul.” Her tail lashed angrily beneath her skirt. “You know you’ll never be safe from me, short of entering He… that place. I’ll melt your lungs, I’ll strangle you with your intestines, I’ll…” she was working herself into a frenzy.

“Fine,” Jimmy said suddenly. “I’ll do whatever you want. “Just leave me alone afterwards.” The look he gave Arthur was unreadable for a moment, and then Arthur realized that it signified horror mixed with compassion. ‘He’s convinced I’ve sold my soul to her,’ Arthur thought, and then. ‘Have I?’

“Let’s go to the nearest Limbo,” Pauline said, “Where I can get back into some skin.”

The Limbo was suburban Surrey, neat row houses, pocket lawns, clean air, with impossibly bored undead, weeding, gardening, cutting privet hedges with blunt shears. No one here needed to be chastised. Boredom did it all. The place justified itself by producing endless religious tracts for the angels, pornography and patently false advertising for the Devils. The three plotters worked out the plan in a small cafeteria that sold stale cardboard buns, and weak vinegar lemonade.


Chapter 11 – Bobby Boy
Bobby was bored. The boredom problem had haunted him since his birth in a prosperous suburb in the Midlands of England. He had been bored with the endless supply of bright shiny toys that his parents showered on him. He would throw them against the wall and stamp on them, and complain that they were inoperable and cheap. He was bored with his dog, and let it wander off and get lost. The parrot palled after a couple of days, and he carelessly let it fly out of the window. The cat, he flat out didn’t like, so he set it on fire, and it shot out of the house, howling. It came back, one-eyed and frazzled, and attacked him. His terror of cats lasted to the end of his life and beyond. When he got older, he indulged himself with women. He was rich, handsome, with a certain rough charm, so a steady stream of them came and went. As he got older and coarser, so did his women. He drank copiously gambled, was involved in some illegal and ultimately unprofitable ventures, after which, he married for money, and drove his wife to drink. On his fiftieth birthday, he bought one of the first of the new-fangled automobiles that were beginning to belch fumes into the already dirty air of his local city. At the age of fifty years and one day, he was rolling down a steep hill that ended in a sharp curve and a gasometer. He had not fully grasped the principle of the hand brake that stuck out from the side of his car, and he went crashing through a fence, to be engulfed in a great gout of flame as his vehicle slammed into the old worn walls of the ugly edifice.

He ended up in Limbo56, and accepted the Governorship from Jimmy Wheeler as his right. The job was harder than he thought at first, but by dint of an innate cunning, ruthlessness, and callous unconcern for the welfare of anyone else, he was soon enjoying broad dictatorial powers and a reasonably comfortable death. As usual, he got too greedy, and a common foundry foreman named Shadrach Jones managed to get word to the council. Before he even had time to get bored with his new life, he found himself in the Limbo gaol, awaiting deportation to hell, constrained like a common criminal, with a new, hastily recruited Governor in charge. He managed to make himself comfortable again, under the misguided Governorship of the idiot Arthur Mossop, but he was constantly looking for escape, and took full advantage of the situation when the She-Devil Pauline wandered into his particular Limbo.

She was, like him, bored, looking for a change of scenery, and because he was a completely self-centered being, he was able to lie to her without qualms or fears, and he happily took advantage of her gorgeous and freely offered body. He boasted of how he had wrested the Governorship from Jimmy Wheeler, and told her that he now allowed Arthur Mossop to do the hard work of governing while he lived in luxury. When she unshackled him from the bounds of Limbo, he ditched her and fled without any consideration of the fact that she was a Demon, first class, and had risen to that position in quite a short time. A more imaginative man might have pondered on her powers and felt a certain amount of fear. He was lucky in that Pauline was impotent in the real world. He felt that he had nothing to fear from ordinary mortals.

The sight of Pauline and Arthur lurking around his fortress house amused him for a while, and the ease with which he lured Arthur into his den convinced him that, in the real world, he was untouchable. He had looked forward to cutting Arthur into small pieces, and was annoyed when the police thwarted his scheme, and even more annoyed when Arthur disappeared. Despite his contempt for the Governor, he was forced to be a little more circumspect in his comings and goings and this irked him.

He bumped into Jimmy Wheeler in an expensive club that catered to rich patrons of dubious pedigree. He had dined on good food, imbibed expensive wine, and dallied with available women, but on this late night in autumn, he was bored. He was bored with the living, and a fellow undead was a welcome change. Jimmy was a little quiet at first, but after a few large whiskies, he became his old self. They swapped a few compliments, and Jimmy attested as to what a good job Bobby Boy had made of the Governorship and Bobby Boy agreed, and complimented Jimmy on his good sense in filling the position, and they both laughed over the present incumbent and finally Jimmy said, “When are you going back to the land of the undead.”

Bobby Boy frowned over this. “Why should I want to go back to that miserable Limbo,” he asked. “Nobody can touch me here.”

Jimmy looked thoughtful. “I know that Arthur Mossop isn’t a problem,” he said. “That idiot never was. Still, from what you just told me, the police were around your place a couple of days ago. You don’t want rumors circulating. You know how live people get about folks like us who are different.” He sniffed. “There are a whole lot of coppers in the Metropolitan police force. It’s not like when we were alive.” He looked seriously at Bobby. “The police started to harass me once. I lost a lot of business. I had to move from London to Birmingham just to survive.”

“I can’t go back to Limbo56,” Bobby protested.

“Of course not,” Jimmy said hastily. “You know, we could do some business, you and me. I can set you up in a nice little Limbo, not like the dump you were in. You can take it over from the inside, milk it dry.” He smiled. “For a percentage, I can take care of the Council.” Bobby frowned. “I’m not going to make it to Heaven the way things are running now,” Jimmy continued. “Think about it, but don’t take too long. Once the Coppers are on to you they never let go.”

They talked a little longer, and Bobby finally left with one of the women from the club in tow. Unfortunately, he fell asleep in the taxi, and when he awoke with a start, outside his house in the Terrace, the woman was no longer in the vehicle, and neither was his wallet. “It’s alright, mate, she paid me. Told me to take you to this address,” the taxi driver said. Bobby’s bodyguards hustled him into the house, and he settled into an armchair with a sigh.

“Anything happen while I was away,” he asked Reg., a solid man with the strength of a bear, and brain-power to match.

“No, Boss, just this big fella.” Reg. frowned. “I don’t think he was a Copper, maybe a plain-clothes detective. He was sort of flashy, but rough-looking.

“You think he was one of Arthur’s friends,” Bobby asked thoughtfully.

“No, Boss, he wasn’t like that at all. Didn’t look like a worker.”

“Well, what did he want,” Bobby demanded.

Reg. scratched his head. “Said he wanted to talk to you,” he mumbled. “I didn’t want to make no trouble after the Copper thing this afternoon.” Reg. hesitated. “’Sides, he didn’t look like he scared easily.” For a man the size of Reg. this was an amazing admission. He hesitated again, brow furrowed. “Boss, he kinda reminded me of you, like he wasn’t afraid of dying, if you know what I mean.”

“Guard the front entrance,” Bobby said. He pulled a silver cigarette case from his pocket and extracted a slip of paper with a phone number, printed in the old fashioned calligraphy that Jimmy Wheeler used. He picked up the gold and white telephone and dialed. Then he settled down with a cigar and waited.

“No, I have no idea who that man was,” Jimmy was saying. “It sounds as if he may be one of us. You say he had a London accent, but it was a little strange; he used some old-fashioned expressions?” Bobby shrugged. “Forget about it,” Jimmy told him. “Check out this nice little Limbo I have for you. Relax, take a break.”

So it was that Bobby Boy found himself in Surrey, where bored suburbanites mowed their lawns and trimmed their hedges. Neat row houses faded into the distance and a hundred small printing shops churned out religious tracts and pornography. Bobby looked around puzzled. “What kind of Limbo is this,” he said suspiciously. “I’m not going to like it here.”

“No, you’re not,” Pauline said sweetly. She grabbed his head in a vise-like grip, and planted a long hard kiss on his lips. When she released him a drop of blood trickled down his chin. Bobby felt for his gun, but she