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

Chapter 26 – Campaigning
Arthur thought that he should show himself to his electorate, shake a few grimy hands, and make a few unrealistic promises. He had never properly counted the inhabitants of Limbo56, but then, he never really had to. He knew pretty well how many of his people worked each of the three shifts at the foundry. He had hired fourteen unprepossessing barmaids plus Gladys, working the three shifts at five pubs. There were a few specialized craftsmen, some all-purpose maintenance men, a few permanent loafers and the usual ebb and flow, more of a trickle really of new arrivals, promotions and demotions, and of course, Jasper and himself, the titular heads of the place. The foundry was a huge, never still behemoth that churned out harps and tridents, haloes and horn-muffs and employed over fifteen hundred half-souls; the total number of inhabitants of his Limbo surely did not exceed two thousand in these straitened times.

And in a hundred years, Arthur thought, administering what amounted to only a small, extremely dingy village, he had never really explored the place. He decided to see the sights. Limbo always seemed much larger than it was, Arthur thought, miles and miles of sooty houses, with the square block of the foundry anchoring the middle. He had seen, briefly, just how far down that anchor went when Jasper delivered the new machinery up from a red flickering hole in the concrete floor that looked as if it reached all the way down to Hell.

He knew, of course the location of the three official gateways, where new recruits dribbled in occasionally, and at least one of the clandestine crossing points, the cellar of his local pub, where Jasper conducted his catches to the nether regions. In a hundred years he had worn a rut to the foundry and a rut to the pub where Gladys worked – was working a rainy Sunday morning when he started for the foundry, wrapped up warmly, kicking a pebble, bouncing it off the uneven cobblestones.

The machine minders who worked the Sunday shift were chatting desultorily, standing close to the furnace with spotless rags in their hands. They were all Jasper’s recruits, and while Arthur never saw them working, he had never known the machines to fail. He approached them and halted a few feet away. The heat from the open furnace was overwhelming, but they didn’t seem to care. One of them flicked an imaginary spec of dust off a mould and the others shuffled a little as if to give the appearance of purposeful work. “Hey, you,” Arthur called to one of them. “What are you men doing?”

The man, a stocky fellow with high cheekbones grunted. “Cleaning up,” he said at last, scratching a bump on his head. “Boss,” he added, as an afterthought.

Arthur sighed. If he fired them all, Jasper would miraculously produce a fresh batch within hours. “Any of you live that way, down Rotten Row,” he said, pointing through grimy windows to a gloomy street he hadn’t traveled in years.

“Joe does,” a pale, long-faced youth said pointing to the stocky man.

Joe glared at the youth and scratched his mustache. “Nothing down there,” he muttered. “Nothing any different from anywhere else.” And he waved his hands vaguely in all directions. “Don’t go down there,” he ordered, and Arthur decided to go all the way down Rotten Row if it took him the whole day.

He tramped out into the rain and peered through the gloom at Rotten Row. Even for his Limbo, it was a depressing place. He wandered into a ramshackle pub that stood at the corner of the Alley and looked at possibly the least attractive barmaid of the lot. Finally, he walked up to the bar. “Whaddya want?” the barmaid asked, scratching her crotch. Arthur realized that this was the same bar that he had woken up in, after being killed by the big Londoner. In fact, it was a replica of the bar where he was knifed with Joe and Gladys watching. It was old and gloomy then, but it had definitely gone downhill since. “Well,” the barmaid demanded. She tired of her crotch and started picking her teeth.

Arthur had been a regular at the bar where Gladys worked. She and Jasper had transformed the other barmaids there, and while Nellie and Gert were still ugly and rude, they had freshened up into ugly, rude and sexy, a situation that caused frequent bar-fights and added enough to the general mayhem in Limbo to maintain the general undesirability of the place. This barmaid, on the other hand, was ugly, rude, and available. Her blouse was missing a couple of buttons and her sagging breasts were ready to pop out into his drink. If, he realized, he had a drink. “Beer,” he said.

She sloshed some beer into a dirty glass and scratched her scalp as he fished out his scrip. A few flakes fell dangerously near to the beer, and he grabbed it hurriedly and sat at a table. A few minutes later, a couple of customers made a simultaneous grab for her breasts, which were conveniently close as she leaned forward. Sighing, he got up and dragged them out to the street. She looked at him speculatively when he returned. “I remember you, she said. “You’re the Governor here, aincha.” She smoothed her blouse and a grey nipple poked out. “Sorry,” she said coyly. “Ya wanna take me out tonight?”

“Look,” he told her. “You work here; you have to maintain certain standards; pretty low standards, but standards nevertheless.” She looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Wear a slip or something,” he said.

“Why,” she demanded, “What’s wrong with me?” And she grasped her breasts as if she was about to juggle with them. “Jasper don’t mind,” she said angrily. “Jasper says the more I get them to fight over me, the more points I score.” She smirked. “I got a great trick. Here, wanna arm wrestle?” She leant over the bar and stuck her arm up, blouse gaping.

A slab of a man shoved in front of him. “I do,” he said, glaring at Arthur.

The fight was longer and fiercer than Arthur expected. At most now, he worked only part-time in the foundry, and even these coddled twenty-first century Intermediates were quite tough. After being beaten, though, the broad man disappeared into the ground with a pop and a wail. Obviously, Arthur still counted for something here. He limped back into the bar and the barmaid leered at him. “Oohh, you big strong man,” she said.

Arthur sighed. “What’s this about points?” he asked her.

“I get enough points and he’s going to take me down the cellar,” she crooned. “You know, he’s not even, never…” she paused, undecided on how explicit she could be with the Governor. “We haven’t done it yet,” she finished lamely.

“Sew some buttons on your blouse,” Arthur said firmly and moved to a dim table to think. He sipped his tasteless beer and collected his thoughts. His regular bar, ‘The Two Puddings’ had definitely improved, under the influence of Gladys and Jasper. True, there were more broken bones and loud arguments to offset better quality barmaids, but an occasional manic gaiety suffused the place, and the food and drink sometimes tasted almost real. At the Two Puddings he knew that whatever scales weighed the balance of good and evil were not entirely out of kilter. A place he was in ‘The Pig’, was, on the other hand definitely tilting downward. He had heard during training sessions, of Limbos where things got out of kilter, and where whole areas went sliding down to Hell, or more rarely, soaring to Heaven.

He began to feel uneasy. His task was to maintain the status quo, and deviation was failure and failure was, for him, the long slide down to the nether regions. Even if his entire Limbo soared, a most unlikely occurrence he thought looking round, he would descend. He knew now why the Limbo recruiter, all those years ago, had been so happy. For a Governor, there were only two options, Limbo or Hell. Two more men were fighting, and he got up stiffly, but the story of the slab man had spread, and they broke apart sullenly.

“Does Jasper go down the cellar at all, Olga, or whatever your name is?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “all the time. He has some gambling going on down there, or something.”

“Do the customers come back up?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” she said, “when the other barmaids are here. There’s no way out.”

“I think there is,” he muttered. Uneasiness turned to something like panic. He needed to confront Jasper immediately. Then something told him that he needed to walk the length of the crumbling alley outside. “What’s down Rotten Row,” he asked, and the barmaid’s face turned wary.

“Nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing but crumbling old houses. You don’t want to go down there,” she said, echoing the mustachioed technician.

Walking stiffly down Rotten Row, full of flat beer and sore from the fight, he saw that the houses became more ramshackle. Cobbles were missing from the road, and potholes appeared and turned into craters. He observed that the steam lines under the craters, periodically belched, hissing as if the cauldrons of hell were beneath the street, which, Arthur thought, they might well be. Grimy faces peered from dirty windows, men and women he did not recognize, which meant, he thought, that his initial estimate of the population was probably low.

Considerably low, he thought when he came upon the sprawling building, five stories high and three blocks long, made of some white stones which he realized from his occasional forays to the real Earth were called cinder-blocks. Only the fact that the floors were stunted, dwellings for thin pygmies, and the building was hidden by the great bulk of the foundry had kept him from noticing it before.

A couple of drunks were sprawled on the steps outside and he stepped gingerly over them into the gloom. He wandered down the narrow vomit-green corridors and peered through some of the open doorways. Cots were stacked against the walls, and bedding lay untidily on the floor. Stairs sprouted up and away at odd angles from odd points in the corridors, and he climbed up, encountering identical warrens of square crowded rooms.

In one corridor a couple were attempting clumsily and half-heartedly to have sex. The woman could have been Olga’s sister and the man could have just emerged from a pile of refuse. Arthur hastily turned a corner and stumbled up a narrow stairway. He soon realized that he was lost. There were no windows, so he must be in the middle of the building. He tried walking in one direction to reach the outside walls, but the corridors kept winding, and all the stairways pointed up. He began to feel that he was in a three-dimensional game of snakes and ladders. He supposed that he should keep going up.

He sensed rather than saw that he was on the top floor. Maybe it was an increased dampness he felt; limbic rain seeping through the cinder blocks. He climbed the final flight of stairs and stopped behind a mass of damp humanity jamming the corridor. He realized that he knew none of these people. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” he asked a wizened little man who turned bloodshot eyes on him.

The man cringed. “Who are you?” he countered. “You’re not with us.”

Arthur saw that this was an extremely long line