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

for limbo, no more worries.” With a flourish, he withdrew a sheaf of papers from his rather old-fashioned coat, just as a pretty nurse entered at a run.

“We got your signal,” she said to the figure on the bed, ignoring Arthur, as all healthy humans did. “Two blinks, time for your pain-killer. Calm down,” she said as he struggled mightily to sit up, but with a gasp and a rattle he heaved upward, and then slumped down, dead. “Damn,” said the nurse, “I hope you put me in your will, you bastard, I let you feel me up enough times.” She pressed a button. “Number 10B is gone,” she said into the intercom. “I need that tame doctor of his to get up here right away to certify death so we can freeze him right away.”

Arthur stood by aghast as doctors and nurses dashed in and out, scribbling, injecting, and assembling a sort of tent on wheels. “Well, I sure fooled you,” the billionaire told him. “You cheered up the last few minutes of my life.” The fat ghost chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder. “You think I’d trust myself to a loser like you?” He shivered a little and lifted the flap of the tent. “Haven’t you ever heard of Cryogenics? I have my own limbo, until they can revive me. Talk to me again in a hundred years,” he said, settling comfortably into his quick-frozen corpse.

Arthur sat disconsolately on the edge of the bed. This was really too much. Despite what he had told the Billionaire, he’d had little success selling Limbo. There was the occasional used car salesman who had been snatched from the claws of the Devils, or, he thought, in a few cases, smuggled from beneath the wings of Angels. Most of his successes had turned out to be troublemakers or whiners, and his output of harps and tridents especially was alarmingly low. ‘It’s really too much,’ he thought. What was that new word, Cryogenics? Pretty soon, every living person would be carrying around his own little limbo. He stirred. No rest for the weary. His quarterly meeting with the stockholders was not too far away. The charter plane for the used car expo had crashed across town, conveniently next to a hospital, and some of the passengers were still clinging to life. He sighed, “I can do it! I can do it! He said fiercely, then “Cryogenics be damned,” and he disappeared with an audible ‘pop’.


Chapter 19 – A Blast from the Past

The thin man wandered down a rapidly deteriorating Main Street one rainy night, just after the Millennium was celebrated in the Real World. ‘All those zeroes,’ he thought. As a custodian, he enjoyed some privileges and the rain that followed him down towards Gatehouse corner was more of a light wet mist that he hardly noticed. He thought, with quiet melancholy, of the years piling up, a heavy load, becoming steadily heavier. This was not a walk that he enjoyed. Gatehouse corner was where the newly arrived undead came shambling into Limbo, astonished, annoyed, or scared stiff according to their individual temperaments. Nowadays very few lost souls came wandering round this particular corner, early nineteen-hundred industrial squalor being quite unfashionable among currently dying humans.

Now, Arthur reflected, even the half-sinners, not quite bad enough for Hell and not quite good enough for Heaven were getting increasingly choosy about their semi-permanent abode of semi-torment. His orientation class a few decades earlier opened his eyes to the changing moral horizons of the human race. In his time, a life of petty crime, the occasional unkind act and minor infidelities were guaranteed to send you to an equally petty non-existence in a drab, rainy, boring Limbo like the one he now ran and inhabited.

Nowadays, even the squeezed inhabitants of Limbos demanded daily street bombing, mugging and random acts of violence as the preferred form of punishment, rather than his boring drab, but relatively relaxed half-Hell. Arthur thought about this vanishingly low boredom threshold that he had observed in live humans as the decades rolled on. He trudged abstractedly towards the corner and the hidden gatehouse, thinking that, in many ways, live humans were shooting off to the lunatic fringes, away from the monotonous center he was used to.

This, he concluded, was a big factor in the depopulation of his Limbo. Humans tough enough to resist the myriad temptations of a world where luxuries abounded and practically everything could be had for the asking ended up in Heaven telling the poor old-fashioned Angels what to do. He had even heard of an ex-human who, dissatisfied with some small corner of heaven had constructed a virtuous, or was it virtual Heaven that was rapidly becoming more popular than the real thing. And Hell was faring no better. Newly arrived ex-humans down there were already terrorizing the old-time Devils with their biological and nuclear weapons and frighteningly efficient methods of inflicting pain and suffering. The dead were going to one extreme or the other and very few were finding their way to the rapidly declining halfway outposts.

He was most surprised, then when he heard the clattering of footsteps around the corner. It seemed as though a female was rapidly tapping her way towards him, the sound vaguely familiar. The tapping stopped, and a face from his past peered into Limbo.

“Arthur,” she said, flashing her gypsy smile. “They told me you were running this place. This godforsaken place,” she said, looking around.

“Gladys,” he gaped. “What are you doing here after all this time?” he said. “I never thought to see you again, not after that bastard from London stabbed me.”

“I’m always turning up, like a bad penny,” she grinned. “Yes, he was a real bastard, I soon found that out.”

“But where have you been for the last hundred years?” he asked her.

“Oh, here and there,” she said airily. “For a while I was on the run with that bastard from London, but things took an ugly turn. Oh,” she gasped suddenly, “You’ve still got his knife sticking out of your ribs. Why don’t you pull it out?”

“It’s part of my penance,” he told her gloomily, “I kept trying for a long while, but somehow it always wound up back in my ribs.”

“We’ll soon see about that,” she said firmly, grasping the knife in strong hands. “Ah,” she gasped, setting a shapely leg on his stomach. “Yes,” she exclaimed triumphantly as the rusty old knife popped out of his ribcage. “I could have done that a hundred years ago,” she told him. She looked at the knife and it crumbled to dust in her hands. “Looks like that’s the end of it,” she said.

“I don’t know what to say,” he told her. “Anyway, what about this ugly turn? Let’s go to the pub and you can tell me all about it.”

“You have a pub?” she asked surprised.

“There are a few of ‘em here.” He grimaced. “Bloody awful, they are, all of them.” They reached the dim old building and walked in. As always, he tripped on the ragged mat and banged his shins on a badly placed chair. “God damn to Hell,” he cried, and she giggled, negotiated the hole in the floorboards and sat down daintily at the rickety table.

He wandered over to the bar, where the enormous barmaid was glaring hatred at Gladys. He ordered a whiskey for himself and a double shot of brandy from the fanciest bottle on display. “Wash the glasses out before you pour, Nellie” he told her.

“Why?” she asked nastily. “All the drinks taste like vinegar.”

He sighed and hurried back to Gladys. “We used to have some real food and drink here, but we ran out. All the drinks taste like vinegar in Limbo,” he told her apologetically, just as she tipped up the glass and poured the contents down her throat. To his surprise, she didn’t scream or throw the glass at him. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes and gazed at him calmly.

“First drink in a hundred years,” she told him. “It ain’t too bad.”

He blinked and coughed. “What have you been doing for the last century?” he asked. “What was this ‘turn for the worse’ you mentioned?”

She handed the glass back to Arthur who demanded a refill from the gaping barmaid. “Well,” she said, after sipping daintily on the murky liquor, “Larry O’Grady, the bastard from London, ran out of there after you collapsed on the floor. We all tried to stop the bleeding and I told your friend Joe to leave the knife in your ribs – to keep you from bleeding to death. Wasn’t no good, though. Pretty soon everyone was tramping red footsteps across the carpet and you were an interesting shade of blue. Joe grabbed a bottle of whisky from me and kept trying to force it down you, but it just ran out of your mouth and added to the blood. Pretty soon, he was drinking most of it himself, and by the time the copper came you was dead and your friend was dead drunk.”

Gladys paused for breath and signaled for another drink. “Well, the bobby finally came and it was the big fat bloke who used to come in every so often for a free beer. Always thought he could have a free feel too, the sweaty bugger.” She noticed his look and hurried on. “He’s so stupid, that copper. Insisted on handcuffing your mate and kept asking for witnesses to the killing of ‘the deceased corpse’.” Gladys took a sip of brandy and grimaced slightly. “I suppose I’m getting used to it now,” she said. “It does taste a bit vinegary.”

Arthur shifted uneasily, thinking of his corpse soaking the carpet with blood, with Joe staggering round, pouring whiskey into his dead mouth and the bobby rubbing his hand across Gladys’s bottom. “We finally heard horses clattering over the cobblestones,” Gladys continued, “and these two men in dirty white coats came in and wrapped you in a sheet and hauled you off. Then the copper left and the customers drifted off, and I kicked Joe out after he got all weepy drunk and started calling you the best mate he ever had and slobbering on my shoulder.” She sniffed. “Then, of course, I had to clean up all the blood and tidy up and it almost dawn when I finished.”

“It must have been awful,” Arthur said to her. “I suppose you were glad it was all over.”

“All over,” she said. “It was just beginning.”

He stared at her. “Well, I finally got out of there, after having a good belt of brandy, a few good belts of brandy. “I knew,” she said, “that I wouldn’t be going back there to work.”

“Yes,” he said, touched, “it must have been hard on you.”

“Hard?” She told him. “Hard ain’t the word. I knew the landlord was going to sack me. He used to blame me for every fight in the place. Used to say the customers was always fighting over me.” Here she paused to primp her hair. “Of cause, the fight had nothing to do with you acting like a drunken idiot, practically asking Larry the Bastard to duff you up.”

“Just a minute,” he spluttered.

“Ah, sorry, love,” she said. “Get me another drink will you, before it starts to taste too bad. Thanks,” she said contritely when he sat down again. “Like I said, my troubles were just beginning. I staggered out of that place and it was pitch dark, raining, and the streets were