Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 9

  “That’s true. I can’t say it’s something I disapprove of, not when it’s someone like you. I found out a lot about you.”

  “How do you even know who I am?”

  “We have our ways here. I know you are adding nothing to society, and I think if you do not add, you should be taken away.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “I do,” Cranston said.

  “Where is here? Is this a Limbus headquarters?”

  “Limbus finds us employees. We have what might be called a complex and sometimes complicated relationship with them. We are independent of them, and dependent on them. But this is OUR headquarters. One of them.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “Lots of things. Let me tell you something, Richard

  Jordan—”

  “How do you know my real name?”

  “That part was easy,” he said. “Don’t let it worry you. You have a chance at a better life. Here’s what I know. You started out good, smart with possibilities, that kind of kid, but your father committed suicide. Or tried to, failed, and then was killed accidentally. Comical, actually.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Tried to hang himself from a light fixture. The fixture broke. He fell, banged his chin on the desk, broke his jaw, received a concussion, died in the hospital a week later having never regained consciousness. You went to the university. Two years if memory serves me, and it most likely does. You went through one job after another. Failed relationships—”

  “How can you know all this?’

  “Not your concern. But there’s no use in me continuing. Pretty much your life is a wreck, and you were just on the verge of that shipwreck washing up on a rocky shore. All that’s left was for the seagulls to peck out your eyes and devour your body.”

  “Enough with the metaphorical bullshit,” I said.

  “We can offer you a job. We can give you a new back story. A new life. We can also wipe your brain, give you new memories and send you out in the cold, cold world to survive. To be honest, over time, the ones we send back with that alteration, they tend to lose the back story. The depth of it anyway. They cease to believe it, but they know nothing else. Psychosis often results. And frequently they go back to their old ways. Now and again we have someone who succeeds as a new individual, but it’s not really all that successful in the long run.”

  “So you’re trying to convince me to take the job.”

  “Just stating the facts. You get to choose.”

  “I get to choose between two choices you’ve given me. One sounds bad, and the other one might be. I don’t even know what the job is.”

  “True. But I can promise you this. It is unique. There is nothing like it. You will be part of a small crew. It is adventurous. We will prepare you for it, as much as someone can be prepared, and we pay extraordinarily well.”

  “How well?”

  “One job and you’re fixed for life.”

  “Are you with the government?”

  “No. Unlike the government, we are efficient. We are not with or associated with any known government. You might say we are mostly unknown and a government unto itself.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

  “Crime bears bitter fruit, Richard, but unlike the government, at least it bears fruit.”

  “So it’s a criminal enterprise?”

  “Only in the sense that it’s off the books, not answerable to any government, so yes, it’s a criminal activity with all manner of jobs, some of them sketchy by the standards of many citizens. That is neither here nor there. Here’s how it will be. You agree to go to work for us, we get you in shape for it first. Some solid meals, exercise, a bit of preparation. You were once a top javelin thrower.”

  “You do your homework. I was being groomed for the Olympics. Things went wrong.”

  “That no longer matters. Do you accept the job?”

  “May I ask why it’s important to know I was once training for the Olympics with the javelin?”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “But it might be?” I said.

  “It might be, but probably isn‘t. Still, the muscles for the javelin may indeed need to be aroused and rejuvenated to help with what we may consider you to do.”

  “You have something in mind already?”

  “Yes, but it all depends. Mr. Jordan, are you in or out?”

  I thought for a moment. What did I have to go back to? A bridge over my head. Cold winters, hot summers, stealing to survive. That was the world I knew, and I didn’t find any of that enticing. Here I was warm and fed and being offered payment for a job. If I didn’t like the job I figured I could find a way out later. They might not think I could, but I felt like it was a better shot than having my brain wiped—if they could actually do that—and being sent back out into the world.

  “You’re thinking you can say yes and maybe escape later, aren’t you?” Cranston said.

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “You can’t. You’re in, you’re in. Let me put this simply. There are nine, sometimes twelve members of our board, and frankly, they run a lot of the world’s affairs. Any one of them is smarter than you, and together they are considerably smarter.”

  “Perhaps they could do a better job running the world,” I said. “Case you haven’t noticed, it sucks like a vacuum cleaner out there.”

  “They fail from time to time. They are unique and wise, but they are also human. There are other factors, of course. Fate, humans, climate. Our group control more of that than what might be expected, but they can’t control it all.”

  “The climate?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They work on a theory of balance. Sometimes bad things aren’t all that bad, good things sometimes aren’t all that good. They have to be balanced.”

  “You lost me at bad things aren’t always that bad.”

  “You needn’t know any more. Are you in?”

  I thought it over again. I still believed I had a chance to get out if it came to it. And then again, I might just like the work. Whatever it was.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  *

  I guess I was there about a month. I didn’t keep up with the time. Couldn’t even tell you what day of the week it was. I saw the bronze-skinned man and the dark-haired man from time to time. I saw them in the gym, wrestling, nude, like in the old Greek contests. Neither seemed to be trying to win out over the other. It was almost as if they were afraid of discovering who was the best. Instead they practiced moves and throws and did so with an eerie kind of grace. I even saw them walking alone through the halls, gently touching hands, entwining fingers. It was obvious they were lovers.

  I saw the nurse from time to time, but she never smiled at me again. She didn’t smile at that pair either, but she watched the dark-haired man in a way that made me think of a chained dog smelling meat from a butcher shop.

  My assignment of the moment was to eat right and exercise. My teacher was a long, lean black woman who looked like an African goddess. She put me through my tasks as if she were a drill sergeant. She sprang about with cat-like grace, taught me a few martial arts moves for muscle tone, had me kicking a heavy bag and running along the track outside. Where the outside was I couldn’t tell you, and to be literal, it really wasn‘t outside. Just seemed to be. There was a huge dome over the track, and though it was transparent in spots, it was mostly covered in camouflage. A birds-eye view from above, and it would look like forest, or jungle. The flooring of the track was the color of swamp water, so even views through the gaps would make it appear wet and uninviting. I wondered if it were possible to see us from above on the track, running. I found the idea of that amusing, an aerial view of us running on what appeared to be the surface of water.

  Again, I had no idea where I had been transported to, and still had no idea for what reason. But I decided in for a penny, in for a pound, and maybe a ton. I felt it was best to dedicate myself to the preparation of the t
ask ahead of me, whatever it might be. I never lost the idea that I still could escape if I found my job odious. It was hard to imagine it being a positive assignment, what with all the secrecy. I felt like a character in a comic book.

  I began to throw the javelin again in time. The goddess brought it to me and I was rusty at first, but I found my stride after a while. It didn’t feel all that familiar though, in spite of remembering how good I had been at it in the past. It built my arms up, throwing it again.

  I was also fed a very foul-tasting milkshake every day. I drank it without hesitation after the first week. I realized it was doing something to my body. I felt stronger, quicker. More than felt—I was stronger and quicker. Partly that was due to the training, the diet, but that milk shake had something in it besides the usual ingredients. I could feel it seep into my bones and innards. I didn’t measure myself, but I was reasonably certain that not only was I leaner and more muscular, but that I had grown an inch or more in height, which I would have thought impossible.

  They increased the size of the javelin over time, but I continued to be able to throw it with ease. In time the drinks were stopped, and when I inquired of the goddess as to why, she informed me it was no longer needed. Its effects by this time were permanent.

  It had other aspects that were beneficial as well. I was not tired at the end of a day, and on a fine dark night, after a workout, the goddess became quite human, and the two of us shared my bed. It was as if we were competing in a sexual Olympics. By morning, she was out on the track. I showered and ate lightly and met her there. It was as if nothing had happened between us. She looked at me with all the warmth of a cobra.

  One day the African goddess came to me and said, “Today, we take a day off from training.”

  Actually, I didn’t want a day off. I had begun to truly love the workouts. They made me feel good and powerful.

  “You have a meeting with Mr. Cranston,” she said.

  I went to meet Cranston with the goddess leading.

  It was a large office with a desk about the size of a landing field. There was a computer on the desk, a chair behind it, and a row of chairs in front of it, eight to be exact. It occurred to me that with eight in front and one behind the desk that could be the nine who ruled the world. It was a crazy thought, but there it was. Cranston had said as much, and though I hadn’t yet decided if he was crazy or not, no doubt the resources available to him seemed unlimited.

  The rest of the room was lined with shelves of books. The books climbed three stories, and there were stairs that led upwards to the other levels, and there were long rows with railed pathways where you could walk along and look at the books.

  The black goddess left me there and went away. I stood waiting. A short older man was on the far side of the room sweeping with a large push broom. He swept and then used a whisk broom to push the small, almost invisible dust pile into a hand-held whisk pan, and then dumped it into a trash can on wheels. He put the broom in the can so that the broom itself stuck up in the air. He pushed it past me, said, “Good luck to you,” and was gone.

  After a while I walked about, looking at the books on the floor where I had been left. There were what you might call classic literary titles. The entire collection of Twain, Kipling, Dickens, and so on. I pulled a few out for examination, saw they were first editions. I was even more impressed to find that many of them had been signed by their authors.

  I strolled along and found a section of books with titles I didn’t recognize. Like The Book of Doches, something called the Necronomicon, Those Who Rule the Earth, and Outsiders and Insiders. Volumes that were sometimes attributed to certain authors, others without author recognition.

  I had just pulled one of these books from the shelf, The Hounds of Tindalas, when Cranston, standing at my shoulder, said, “That one I wouldn’t look at. It will make you nauseous, not just due to content, but due to how words and images and numbers are placed on the page, the shapes of the letters are quite baffling.”

  That didn’t make a lick of sense to me, but I returned the book to its position on the shelf. I was shocked to discover Cranston had been able to sneak up on me so easily, so silent.

  I turned and watched him glide toward the desk and seat himself in the chair behind it. He motioned to me and I picked a chair directly in front of him and sat down.

  “I hope everything has been comfortable,” he said, “and to your satisfaction.”

  “It has, though I do feel a little kidnapped, baffled, and abused.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Just said so, didn‘t I?”

  He almost smiled. The corners of his mouth rose up as if they were hats being tipped, then settled back down.

  “Do you believe that beneath our world there is a hollow that contains another world?”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe in global warming?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And as for the earth being hollow, no.”

  “Okay, you believe in global warming, but you don’t believe the world is hollow.”

  “I know it isn’t,” I said. “I didn’t sleep through all of science class. I even found out about things like gravity and evolution, and believe them. I also believe the core of the world is molten. ”

  He nodded. “All right then. What if I told you that inside our world is another?”

  “I’d say you are nuttier than I first suspected.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Let me lay it out to you in a different way. The center of the earth is not hollow.”

  “Now you’re making me dizzy. Didn’t you just say—”

  “I said beneath our world—to be more specific, inside the earth—there is another world. But not at the core. There is a hollow band beneath our earth and it can be best entered through a gap at the South Pole, though there is, in fact, a North Pole entrance.”

  “The place where Santa lives,” I said.

  He ignored me. “I might also say that the hollow is not strictly hollow. There is a world within the hollow.”

  “Well, sounds like to me you may have had a bit too much coffee, so I’ll just go back to the track and you can call me when you’re ready for me to start to work.”

  “What I’m ready for you to do involves both global warming and the world within our world.”

  I could see that he was absolutely serious.

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me.”

  *

  Cranston leaned back in his chair, placed his hands together and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. He said, “At both poles there are entries into the earth. They are subtle openings. It’s like sliding down gently into a bowl. You don’t realize the depth of the bowl because its sides slope gradually. The bowl has large openings in the walls of what appears to be a cavern of ice. Through those gaps are more direct entrances, many of them large enough for an aircraft to enter, or even for a boat to sail through. We’ll come to that consideration shortly.”

  “Sailing to the center of the earth?”

  “No, it’s not the center of the earth, but those entries are how the stories were started. People who went there and came back claimed to have gone to the center of the earth, but they were within a rim world that circles the world completely around.”

  “It would be a dark world,” I said.

  “It is not completely explored, but has its own sun, or a substitute for it. The high roof of their world blazes with volcanic fire. This is something the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs knew, though he called it a sun. No one knows how he came by those stories, who told him about the inner light, but he knew. A large number of the things he wrote about were accurate, the bulk of it fabrication.”

  “If this is true, what has it to do with me? And I don’t know who Edgar Rice Burroughs is.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Let me backtrack. The job we had for you was uncertain. It might have been menial. Someone, for example, has to clean this library.”

  “You were considering me for
a custodial job? You went through all of this to possibly have me sweep up? You have someone for that. I saw him.”

  “It was truly a consideration, having you replace the old man. He’s been of service to us in so many ways, but right now, we feel he best serves us here, doing a menial, but important job. You could take his place.”

  “Again, I have a hard time believing you brought me here the way you did because you wanted me to sweep up and swab toilets.”

  “True, but the custodial job here comes with added chores you would never encounter elsewhere. It doesn’t matter, however. That’s not the job. You have been researched thoroughly. Your mother leaving you and your father, taking off for parts unknown. Your father’s death. But I’ve told you I know about all that.”

  “That has nothing to do with anything,” I said. “He was an unhappy man.”

  “Obviously,” Cranston said. “But genetics has a lot to do with inclination, and so do events in your life. The two make you a great candidate for us. As to why, it’s a long story and a study of psychiatry and genetics would be necessary to understand it.”

  “I’m not a total idiot,” I said. “How do you know all about me?”

  “For us, information comes easy. So does certain kinds of manipulation.”

  Cranston paused for dramatic effect. I said nothing. I waited him out.

  “You are of a good type, blood and bone and flesh and genetic makeup. We ran tests while you were, shall we say, asleep.”

  “As in drugged?”

  “More accurate, yes. I think the best way to short-story this is to say certain flaws in your DNA have been corrected, and strengths have been enhanced through the drinks and the diet we have been feeding you. We like a long employment, so all of these alterations will allow you to live a long, long time. You won’t be immortal, and you will still be subject to accident or attack, some rare diseases, but otherwise quite hale and hearty for years to come. As long as we attend to you. As for your employment, your job, sir, is to fish for and catch a plesiosaur, or at least a beast similar to it. An unknown cousin, to be accurate. Well, unknown to the rest of the world, but not to us.”

  “A dinosaur?”