Limbo 56 by Mike Morris (suggested reading .TXT) 📕

– False Start
Somehow Harry had wandered into an unfamiliar part of town. He knew most of his town inside and out, and this was strangely familiar, but it was also very different, the people, the smell. He sniffed, and recalled wandering into the poor area down the hill, when he was a child. “Coal fires,” he muttered. “Smoke from coal fires.” He looked up at the old houses with soot-blackened chimneys, some of them puffing smoke. “Coal fires,” he said satisfied, “But this place was torn down years ago.” And then a thin, tall man stepped in front of him.

“How did you get here?” the man demanded. “We don’t get many live ones.”

“Live what,” Harry queried, nettled by the Man’s tone.

“Live people,” the man answered testily. “As opposed to dead ones. You’ll have to go back.”

Harry was quite willing to go along with the joke. It was the swinging sixties, a time of rebellion. He had been at a party, and drugs and alcohol go along with some bizarre situations. “Are you telling me,” he said, “that this is Hell.” He paused. “I know what this is.” He studied the thin man. “You’re part of a bad trip. That crazy Joe and his cousin slipped something into my drink.” He peered at the thin man beginning to feel angry. “You look a bit like Joe yourself.”

“Joe,” the thin man said primly, will not be passing through this part of town. “Joe and his cousin will go directly to Hell.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Harry nodded. “The trip was not all bad. Joe must have gotten hold of some half-way decent stuff. Harry was probably sitting smiling in some corner of the party, much to Joe’s chagrin. “So this must be Limbo,” he said, playing along.

“One of them,” the thin man answered. “And one of the better ones, if I say so myself.” He waved at the dirty old houses. You have a roof over your head, Half day Saturday, and all day Sunday off.

“Off from where,” Harry asked.

“Off from the foundry.”

“Foundry?”

“Almost everyone works in the foundry,” the thin man said. “We all have to do our bit, keeping Heaven and Hell supplied.”

“So how come I’m here,” Harry asked cunningly. “I wouldn’t be seen dead working in a foundry.”

“Don’t be funny,” the man snapped. “In our foundry you have to be dead. Which reminds me…”

So, it was to be a short trip. “Soon as I come down,” Harry muttered, “I’m going to wring Joe’s neck.”

“Go, go,” the thin man said angrily.

“Go where?”

“Back down the street, where you came from.”

Harry found himself walking back, past the old houses. He was beginning to get very angry with crazy Joe and his cousin, and on top of that, as he neared the corner he began to feel sick, jittery, strung out. He turned the corner and saw his truck waiting patiently outside the apartment building. The party was still going on at the fourth floor, but when he rang the bell, no one answered. Harry shook his fist at the unreachable festivities. “I’ll get you Joe, you bastard,” he yelled. He staggered to his truck and clambered in. The vehicle roared to life, and, still cursing Joe, he jammed his foot on the accelerator.

And was back amongst the old, sooty houses. “Damn,” he said to the thin man.

“Follow me,” the thin man told him. “I’ll take you to the foundry.”

“I thought,” Harry told him nastily, “that live people weren’t allowed in this particular foundry.”

“Don’t worry,” the thin man told him. “You’re dead now.”


Chapter 16 – NTBW

“You know,” Betty, he says to the barmaid of ‘The Limbo Arms’. “I’ve probably never told you this before,” (he ignores her incredulous cry of ‘the Hell you haven’t’). “Betty, I should not, truly should not be here in Limbo. I know that this sounds Rather like an old movie, where the prisoner keeps telling everyone that he’s innocent, and no-one believes him, except his girl-friend the barmaid – ha ha – and right up to five minutes to midnight he’s walking down the corridor and the chair is waiting, and at the last moment the real villain confesses on his deathbed. I know this sounds unbelievable.” The small, scholarly man who, even in filthy foundry denims looks like a clerical worker pauses and takes a sip of the tasteless beer. “Thanks for listening, Betty,” he says gratefully, even though she has moved to the other end of the bar and is talking to a bunch of drunken customers yards away. “Well,” he says, standing in a little bubble of isolation, “this time the call never came, this time the lights went zzzzt, and I was sent here – to Limbo56, which is a lot like the awful, wasteful place where I was born. Betty, I am the most caring person on the planet.” He pauses, takes another sip, and continues talking into his beer, back in North Carolina apple country.

“I set my clock for 5:00 am exactly. Used to be 5:30, and before that 6:00, but there is so much to do. The coffee pot let out a piercing whistle, and I leapt out of bed, heart pounding. Still, that whistling pot was one of my better ideas. Now I woke to a scalding jolt of caffeine instead of wasting precious time lighting the stove, boiling the water, etc. Of course, even a very low flame takes some energy, but my cold shower saved more.

I figured a long time ago that all natural food was less of a strain on the eco-system – pesticides – crop spraying by gas-guzzling crop-dusters and all that. Local-grown produce saves transportation costs, but not enough, not enough, so I started to grow all my own food, the natural way, but that took away a lot of my time, before and after work, and there’s recycling and garbage disposal. I read up on crop rotation and chicken rearing the natural way, because the latest scientific knowledge indicates that some meat is necessary, but the chickens were constantly tearing up my garden, and I couldn’t be so cruel as to coop them up. I had to build a fence, higher and higher round the garden, and down into the ground as the cats jumped over and burrowed under to get at the chickens.

Now I was using a cycle instead of a nasty, gas-guzzling SUV. I created much less pollution and did not contribute to global warming, but I read a while back that cow-farts contribute 80% of the methane discharged into the atmosphere – very bad – and I farted more now on my diet of natural vegetables and fiber, so was I really helping the environment as much as I could? Of course, cycling down the country roads, across Peggy Sue’s Apple Farm (all those farting cows) –took me hours. To get to work and back, was a two-hour commute each way, and I didn’t get much sleep and I missed my nice little apartment over my job, but I wouldn’t let my boss hook me up to the computers so I could work from home. Computers use up all kinds of resources.

I was tired all the time, and the articles that I wrote about saving the environment weren’t nearly as persuasive as they used to be when I lived in my little apartment. They weren’t as well-researched as they used to be when I was Googling the Internet, and my boss was getting ready to fire me, and my work was more time-consuming, and I had to write queries and articles and consign them to the mail system. But the little computers are very difficult to recycle, so I wrote everything longhand and in pencil.

Then I realized that my letters had to be carried to my editor, in a van, I suppose, by a man wearing a uniform, and these uniforms have to be manufactured and shipped, and armies of lobbyists and salesmen, all with huge SUVs have to go out and sell the uniforms. I thought, maybe I’m making things worse and polluting more and more and contributing to global warming while claiming to do just the opposite.

I was only sleeping 3 – 4 hours a night, so I was probably sucking in more oxygen and breathing out more carbon dioxide. I was wearing my clothes out faster, so that people all over the world had to spin more for longer hours and use more cloth. They had to build more machines to make the cloth, and tear up more earth to extract the iron and nickel and build more foundries to smelt the iron into steel. They had to mine and burn more coal to generate the electricity to build the factories and keep them running, and hire more men and women to run the factories and foundries, and all the new men and women need clothing and housing and stoves and refrigerators, which need more foundries and stores and salesmen, and the salesmen all need……………..”

He stops and looks up vaguely. Betty is still talking at the far end of the bar, and he fumbles in his denims, and drags out a filthy tattered scrap of newsprint. “It’s alright Betty,” he calls, dropping the newsprint on to the soaking bar. “I have plenty of copies.”

She waves him away, and says something inaudible amidst the noise.

“Thanks, Betty,” he tells her, relieved. “Thanks for listening. I knew you’d believe me.” The newsprint, rapidly soaking up beer, is barely legible. If any of the customers were interested, they might just have been able to make out the brief news story, rapidly disintegrating into the splintery wood.

Daily Record – dateline August 4th
An as yet unidentified man was apprehended today while driving an ultra-large stolen tractor at high speed down Interstate 77. The vehicle was stolen from Peggy Sue’s Apple Farm, where it had been laid up for several weeks pending a complete engine overhaul to bring it up to the new statewide clean-air standards. The thief was easily spotted and apprehended, due to the emission of dense black smoke from the tailpipe. The gas pump that he was dragging slowed his progress. He had apparently failed to extract the gasoline hose from the tank after speeding off without paying the station owner. Several hundreds of gallons of gasoline gushed into the air when a safety valve was breached, and the farmhouse, with several adjoining buildings was completely destroyed. Police are still searching the wreckage for bodies.

It is speculated that the driver may be a member of the pro global warming terrorist group, N.T.B.U. (Nuke the Blue Whales) which has been operating with increasing frequency in this area.

Chapter 17 – A Pact with the Devil
I’d never heard of anyone being promoted from Hell before, but this little Devil stood right in front of me, horns and all, steam coming out of his ears like he was brewing tea in that big round head of his. He turned the corner on Main Street and came wandering down just like a regular dead person, past the old houses and the rickety pub, which he looked at, licking his lips.

“Hey, you,” I said sternly. “What in Hell are you doing here?” I was a bit nervous, but you have to speak to them like that or they think you’re a wimp and breathe fire over you and do all sorts of unpleasant things. Anyway, I could see he was quite a young Devil, probably no more than a