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

other end of the alley."

He looked at me nervously and I shoved him into the dark shadows between the bar and the side of a grimy abandoned factory. Rain dived between the buildings, funneled by the narrow corridor, and he stared at me in fright as droplets oozed through his sparse hair and down his pale face.

"You're in trouble, you old bastard," I told him. "You're not entitled to that money." I shoved him and he sprawled in the mud, coughing and groaning, scattering old beer bottles. "Give it to me," I yelled. "All of it, now, or I'll kick your damn ribs in."

He started to blubber like a baby. "It's mine, I earned it. I'm getting a room of my own, ah!” He stopped making sense when I hit him in the face.

"Give it to me," I screamed, “or I'll really hurt you."

For a moment, the young man surfaced, pain on his face. “I beat up that poor old man,” he said to Gladys, and went on with the story.

‘The old man coughed and spluttered and pulled out a wet envelope from somewhere. "Take it," he hiccoughed.

Something was wrong. The envelope was too small, too thin. I tore it open and stared incredulously at the single bill. I started to shake, and then I started to shake him. "I want the money, you bastard, not some lousy fifty quid. Where is it?" I shrieked. "The drug money, I want the drug money."

He was stuttering with fear, rain and blood streaking his face, and I hauled him halfway up and howled. "The money. You said you had a lot of money. I want the drug money you've been collecting. I want it, it's mine.”

"No, no”, he moaned. "That's it. That's my money, it's mine.” He was choking and gasping. "The vicar gives it to me to visit the old people who are dying in County Hospital. Most of them don't even know who they are. I just talk to them and make them happy, and the vicar gives me fifty quid and food money.” He moaned and tried to sag to the ground.

"You old liar!" I screamed at him. “Give me the money, I want it all." Through the red mist of my rage I hit him over and over, and his head snapped from side to side, wobbling on his scrawny neck and the blood mingled with the rain on his filthy clothes. "Liar!” I kept shouting as he bubbled and moaned.

I heard a thin scream and saw the fat broad from the bar, staring at us from the car park. Her eyes were focused now, as she held her mouth, stuffing the scream back into her throat. Suddenly she turned and ran, and I flung the old man down and started to go after her. The old man was crumpled at a weird angle and the damp envelope started to move sluggishly in the wet bluster. I turned back.

"Where's the rest of it," I yelled. I kicked him, but he didn't move. I picked him up and shook him. His head wobbled, and he seemed to grin maliciously at me. I dropped him and started to pull off his heavy old coat. He must have hidden the money in the lining somewhere, the lying old bastard. I tore at the overcoat with clumsy fingers, pulling out the soaking lining. I tore at the sleeves and ripped off the pockets. The money wasn't there. I pulled out my knife and slashed at the lining, tearing apart wads of sodden flock. Nothing.

"I'll find it," I screamed at him, but he didn't move. I wrenched his shoes and socks off; there was no money. Savagely, I pulled off his jacket, slashing at the fabric. He was wearing a couple of greasy sweaters, and I clawed at them, slashing and hacking.

He was down to his long johns when the rage began to clear. His neck and his arms were twisted, and he didn't move. I felt sick, and my arms ached. "I want my money," I sobbed at him. "Get up, I want my money."

A long way away, I heard the wail of a police siren. "Why did you lie to me," I moaned at him. "Why didn't you tell me it was only fifty pounds?” He didn't answer, and I began to realize that, for an old man with nothing, fifty pounds was an enormous fortune, a ticket to a room and a new life with friends and a bit of warmth.

The siren was louder now. The lights of the police car washed across the car park and peeped into the alley where I knelt in the mud with the dead old man.’

The young man shifted and looked at Gladys. “Now you know,” he said, strangely relieved. “I’m a very bad man. Not a very bad man who says ‘to hell with the world’ and looms larger than life, and fascinates women; who shakes his fist at God. I’m just a small, weak man who pretends to be tough. I never fooled anyone.” He half-smiled. “Just a few minutes ago, I fantasized about getting you drunk, and feeling you up. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” she said. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t fantasize about me. Every man I meet fantasizes about me, at least I hope so.” She got up.

“I won’t bother you again” he told her. “There are other pubs.”

“Now don’t spoil things by feeling sorry for yourself,” she said. “Look at me; I’m better-looking than the other barmaids in this Limbo, which isn’t saying much. In real life, I was a not-too bright marriage-destroying slut, out for my own pleasure, and even after I died I was a bit of a bitch.”

He started to say something, but she stopped him. “I’ve gotten a little easier with myself, over the centuries, and you need to do the same. You’re quite capable of punishing yourself for any bad things you’ve done.”

She took over from Sadie and started to chat to the customers, no longer looking at him. He watched her for a moment, swallowing the tasteless beer. After a while he walked slowly to the door. Turning, he called quite loudly. “See you tomorrow, Gladys.”

She looked up and waved as he walked into the rain.


Chapter 29 – Talent Search
Arthur was not normally an inquisitive man, but, of his three main companions, Charley was the most mysterious. Jasper talked constantly about himself, whether asked or not, and it was impossible to determine truth from fantasy in the constant avalanche of contradictory tales that battered their ears whenever he popped up.

Gladys, on the other hand, had to be asked, but whenever, in occasional fits of jealousy, he did venture to jog her memory, she was quite capable of producing lurid tales that he was only too sure were true.

Charley, on the other hand, seldom talked about himself. He had sprung from the bowels of Hell fully grown, so to speak, the final link in the conga line that snaked through the mist into Limbo, dragging Arthur through the minefield of potholes to hell. Charley was cheerful and quiet, and seemed genuinely pleased and humble to be friends of both the Governor and the gypsy Gladys who had apparently known him briefly in real life. Charley even maintained a guarded neutrality towards Jasper. Had he not once hinted quite casually that he was a mass murderer, he would have seemed totally out of place at the same table as the Devil, the Gypsy, and the hard man, and indeed Arthur increasingly came to believe that Charley was a harmless victim of circumstances, and that only a monumental stroke of bad luck had brought him down to Hell.

“So how did you two come to meet,” he ventured one evening in the bar, after he had ascertained to his satisfaction that they had never been lovers.

“It was nothing,” he said, looking at Gladys, “We only knew each other for a very short while.”

“Yes, but you don’t seem as if you moved in the same circles,” Arthur persisted. “Somehow I can’t see your paths ever crossing.”

“It was after you were killed,” Gladys told him, and before O’Grady killed me. In fact it was O’Grady who got me the interview.”

“Interview?” Arthur interrupted.

“I was looking for another line of work.”

“And I interviewed her,” Charlie said reminiscently, looking at her with friendly blue eyes.

“.”
.
Pale blue eyes, empty as space, bored into her.

“Killing requires a special talent.”

“Yes.”

“Don't hesitate.”

“No.”

“Don't question.”

Silence.

“Don't think about it afterwards.”

“ - “

“No regrets.”

“Right.”

“Any questions?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “Are you finished, Charley?”

“I'm done,” he told her.

Calmly, she shot him between the eyes.

“……….”

Arthur waited for whatever revelation his new friend could provide regarding the gypsy woman who fascinated him so.

“She was very good,” Charley said. “Fastest study I’ve ever had.”

Chapter 30 - The Halfway Housekeeper

Arthur Mossop, known to the people of Limbo56 as the thin man, settled himself in a dim corner of the almost deserted pub. Seated in the shadows, he was practically invisible to the undead, which was probably a good thing, since he insisted in dressing in the scratchy and shabby garments of the 1880s, and most of his ghosts were from the late 21st century.

A long time ago he had been appointed Governor of this Limbo by a very persuasive recruiter. For years he had thought himself a cut above the miserable citizens who lived here before moving up, or down as the case might be. For a short while he had been in awe of the Heavenly Powers, but soon he came to realize that his masters were just as blinkered, irrational, and illogical as members of any other large bureaucracy were. The only reason he never officially had gotten to work in the foundry, was that he had actually worked in one while alive. While managers and organizers who had experience running things were summarily dispatched to get their soft, clean hands dirty amidst the soot and flames of the great building, he, hard of hand strong of limb, skilled in iron molding, and short on organizational skills had been conned into running the place. Almost every inhabitant of Limbo worked in the foundry, apart from the service staff, and the only service around was the collection of dingy pubs around the Foundry. The bar workers were all female and all ugly.

Limbo though had changed with the times. The undead of the 1880s were unhappy working seven twelve-hour days in a gloomy smoke-blackened place, but they were hardly overwhelmed, and he suspected that some scarcely noticed the transition from their hopeless, miserable lives to the miserable Limbo where they found themselves.

The new breed of undead had grown up in an entirely different world. As conditions improved in the real world, Limbo was forced to keep up; lest the new occupants decided that they were already in Hell. In the land of the living, working hours were reduced, to six, five four days a week; even foundries were spruced up and made more pleasant. To the new, soft breed of inhabitants, forty-hour weeks, with constant work-breaks were still an awful contrast to their lives of leisure and pleasure in the new, high-tech world outside. They