Back From Limbo

Limbo After Pentwater

somewhere in Europe…

Abram Van Heatsink, vampire slayer and supernatural adventurer, was a hard taskmaster.
Pervasive and persuasive, he prodded me along with stick and very sharp carrots, keeping up my gruelling physical training regime with its running and swimming, torso oiling and wrestling… and the body buttering and wooden-bladed strigiling until I was not just buff, I was positively shiny.
The strict workouts and body conditioning kept me lean, mean and incredibly clean. It also kept me too busy to think. Thinking was a luxury that hadn’t occurred to me.
The adventuring that Abram and I embarked on together was fulfilling. My fill was so fulled, so to speak, that it gave me little time to take stock and consider where I might be going. I don’t mean geographically – I remained completely unaware of my whereabouts – it was more a lack of understanding of my direction in my inner journey.
Slaying vampires and binding demons was exciting, and seemed to be putting me in touch with what I accepted might be my destiny, my true purpose for existing, but at the back of my mind it seemed that there was something missing.
Most of it was obviously my past, which was conspicuously absent. It simply didn’t exist and it gradually occurred to me that there was, indeed, a void rather than something I could grasp. Until I specifically noticed it not being there, the absence hadn’t bothered me.
Now, I’d noticed that there was something missing, it had started to irritate me and it reminded me of that poem,
“Yesterday upon the stair,
I saw a man who wasn’t there…”
My previous life wasn’t there, either in fact or in my memories. Instead there was nothing but a misty wall somewhere behind my awareness of the present. The wall seemed to have come down like a foggy shutter just before the time I first met Abram Van Heatsink and he had saved my life.
The furthest back I could remember was that party, when I was on the point of being happily sucked to death by Camille von Drykull, the garlic-hating countess who had lured me to her castle to wait on her guests at a soiree she was hosting. Actually it wasn’t that intimate, it was a vast extravaganza, a decadent and glittery masque in a ballroom one could have played a test match inside.
It was only after I arrived that I discovered that my being paid depended entirely on my performing my duties bottomless, wearing nothing but a tailcoat and riding boots. I had no choice; I was penniless and miles from anywhere and I think I’d been promised an awful lot of money if I accepted the gig, which I was dimly aware of being persuaded into accepting by my agent, back in…. Damn! I couldn’t remember.
Stranded, I did what I’d been hired to do, circulating with a drinks tray among sniggering, vacuous guests from some social class someway between aristocracy and demonic, all cascades of pearls and monocles and laughter like braying donkeys.
I couldn’t begin to describe how utterly embarrassing and demeaning the experience was, but my hostess kept whispering to me how she’d make it up to me later, and I, young, gormless and unaware of her penchant for bodily fluids and erotic ensnarement, had somehow accepted this.
The fabulously extravagant masque was eventually over; the orchestra had been dismissed, the jugglers and acrobats had departed, Camille von Drykull’s guests had gone and I was alone with my voluptuous host-employer.

The countess had offered me a glass of the most wonderfully heady, blood-red… she called it wine, but it was more like ambrosia. Nothing had ever tasted this good.
She topped up my glass and I was lost, plunging down some fire-painted rabbit hole toward delirium. The delicious creature had drugged me.
I didn’t care, particularly when she’d seated herself down on the edge of her bed and had drawn me, stumbling and dizzy, close to her.
Events progressed much as any man might hope they would when presented with an unearthly beautiful face looking up with imploring eyes and softly parted lips.
Oh, such beautiful lips, ruby red, soft and sweet as ripe strawberries, yielding as down, warm as melting honey, lips that invited me irresistibly into perfect promised paradise… Oh, such beautiful lips. Oh Camille, sweet mistress of the night….
Soft lips surrounded me, engulfed me, beckoning my soul into Paradise’s warm embrace.
The world spun.
My head was warm porridge.
My second brain, the captain of my ship, was a swollen column of adamantine, steering me into beckoning siren-filled waters. There was nowhere else I ever wanted to be.
This was delicious, foggy bliss. The end of the race was only moments away, a final spurt to the winning line and Heaven’s promised pearl would be mine.
Oh Camille, Oh yes, Oh God…. Oh ecstasy!
I untangled my hands from the countess’s hair and gave myself up to her control; I couldn’t improve anything by interfering. Camille knew what I wanted better than I did.
I lifted my arms to my head and arched back like a bow, letting her measure the pace which she, reading my reactions, was controlling to perfection. I was drunk with desire, lost in need and close to… my back tightened and my hips thrust as if trey were part of her nervous system, totally under her control.
The sensations, however, were mine.
Ten final seconds before reaching the point of happy release that wild horses couldn’t have dragged me back from…
Eight seconds – hard and fast with gritted teeth and straining thighs and knotted calves…
Six seconds – earth trembling, boiling magma about to force its way to the surface…
Three measly, tiny seconds – and then, before that final second, a tall, rather thin figure leaped out of the wardrobe and struck a heroic pose, standing still for just long enough for me to see he was wearing a very battered, scruffy and wide-brimmed hat. It might once have been beige but was now more of a universal floor colour.
I was still trying to take this surprising sight in when hat-man sprang forward again and his very large sword separated the countess’s very pretty head from her very marvellous body.
Camille von Drykull’s head bounced across the floor, her surprised lips still sucking at nothing while her body smouldered into nothingness – well, into a damp, steaming stain – on the eiderdown and my primed and fully-cocked weapon failed to discharge.
My passion fizzed like a damp squib and went out. Phut.
I was so angry with frustration that I punched the hat wearing interloper unconscious, not realizing that Camille’s poisoned lipstick was already working its evil magic on me.
Seconds later, I too passed out.

I floated back into consciousness, gradually becoming aware that I was sprawled across the bench seat of a bouncing carriage.
I groaned, too weak to move, smelling the leather of the seats and the oiled wood of the window frame only inches from my face. The smell was comforting and confirmed I was still alive, though not very awake. I was a child, being taken home after a night out, dozy and cozy and smiling inwardly at the soothing rocking motion…
It took me several more seconds to come to the present and to lift my head to see that we seemed to be speeding away from the castle that was occasionally visible through the carriage window.
I recognized its outline, though not the flames which were blazing and extending its shape into the night sky. It was Von Drykull’s castle and it was burning fiercely.
I twisted my head, painfully. The thin, grinning face hovering above me under its wide brimmed hat looked like a caricature of Peter Cushing. I slumped again.
The hovering face licked its lips, and introduced itself:
“Professor Abram Van Heatsink at your service; Doctor Physician, Doctor of Metaphysics, Fellow of the Ingoldstadt Institute of Surgery, Slayer of Vampires, Master of Chiropody, Fellow of the Academy of Anthropology of Arkham, Associate of the Imperial School of Plumbing and Heating Engineers…”
The list went on and on. I began to yawn, and Van Heatsink reached, “Holder of the Loyalty Card of The Esoteric Society of Contemporary Occultists.” He stopped his catalogue when he saw my blank expression.
“The order s little known outside the circle of its own initiates,“ he smiled thinly, “and bearers of its loyalty card are privileged in many ways.”
I tried to think; I couldn’t, Even his proud claim to be holder of the TESCO loyalty card failed to put my mind in gear.
Slayer of Vampires?
I’d either just seen proof of that or I was still in some drug-induced dream. I tried very hard to work out which would be more likely, but reality was slipping away again.
Van Heatsink began fussing with a cushion behind me as if I were an invalid. I did, in fact, feel very weak. The jouncing and swaying carriage and his soporific voice was making me drift off into a cozy, comfortable sleep again, back in childhood, but he put paid to that by imparting information I wasn’t quite ready for.
The countess had poisoned me with toxic lipstick, he told me, lipstick which had encircled…
I gulped. So that was how it was done.
Van Heatsink looked a little too smug, too comfortable with the idea as he explained exactly how he had saved my life.
He assured me that he’d sucked the poison out while I was unconscious and indeed, the burning pressure of unquenched desire seemed to have been released. The full meaning of his explanation hit me like an icy shower, and I felt my undercarriage retract, fold away and pull the doors closed behind itself as psychological anaesthetic doused the entire area into insensibility.
I can’t even contemplate the how and where of his final intervention without my toes curling up in horror, and I still have to mentally cover my ears and sing, “La-La-La-La!” until the image sinks below the surface again. As a passion-killer, it beats the image of my great-grandmother sitting toothless on a potty and dribbling. Not that I could remember my great-grandmother, of course, but I had this generic, universal image of utter grossness, normally glimpsed naked and cackling, driving a traction engine and passing wind through flapping buttocks whikle demanding to be worn like a face mask…
Van Heatsink’s alternative was more upsetting because it was far more real, and not just some ridiculously hyperbolic, metaphorical invention. I felt my stomach heave, and hummed, “La… La… La!” until the image crumbled.

My life seemed to have started immediately before that night. Obviously it hadn’t; I simply couldn’t remember anything prior to meeting him.
When I regained fuller consciousness, maybe a day ot two later, I was taken to a wayside inn and ministered to by a charmingly strict, blonde braided Fraulein named Helga while van Heatsink went off shopping for a few days.
Helga looked like something out of a pantomime, all bosom and laced bodice in voluminous skirts, and she had a figure like a ship’s figurehead, old fashioned voluptuous rather than matronly. She was rather decorative, with big, surprised-looking blue eyes and rosy cheeks and, of course, bosoms like thinly-covered pumpkins made of marshmallow.
I longed to settle against the inviting softness, but she was having none of it. I felt I just needed to utter some lost magic word and she would have been mine, but I had no idea what this could be. It was, of course just a fantasy of my fading delirium.
Occasionally, though, she clutched me to her and rocked me into breathlessness, stroking my hair while crooning some unintelligible teutonic Wagnerian lullaby, but when I tried to climb out of the softness, using my hands to push me to safety, she always pulled away and tutted at me as if I had overstepped the mark.
She was totally impervious to my charms – but she wouldn’t leave my side until I was well.
I wished she spoke English, or I spoke German or whatever her language was, but our only communication was through facial expressions and gestures and my watching her wiggling around the room like an overdressed belly dancer.
As I began to recover, I found myself watching her, yearning for her but she simply found it amusing; in fact she teased me a little, not quite leading me on but somehow “accidentally” being encouraging.
I saw her naked a couple of times, when – I believed – she thought I was asleep. She wandered round the room as unconcerned as if she were completely alone and I watched her through half-open eyes not daring to breathe too loudly in case she realized she was being watched. My rosy-cheeked Helga was rosy-cheeked no matter how I looked at her. Perhaps she went bareback riding? I thought, or her father was a strict disciplinarian? My dreams were full of delightful speculation and my physical reaction made me realize I must be getting better.
Fully awake, Helga was indeed magnificent, if somewhat scarier than in my dreams.
When I had almost recovered, Van Heatsink paid Helga off and she kissed me goodbye in a way that made me wonder if I’d misinterpreted her lack of interest. As we left, she was sobbing. I didn’t really want to go, and I tried to… I don’t know what I tried to do, but Van Heatsink ushered me away, back to his carriage, and before I knew what was happening, we were speeding away again.

I didn’t have any control over any part of my relationship with Van Heatsink, but I felt that I owed him a huge debt for saving my life, and he and I entered into a partnership that lasted for several years, with me as his apprentice and him as the bloke that got all the kudos — and all the gold.
Van Heatsink, who liked to be called “Indiana” for reasons I never understood and probably never will, managed to make me feel grateful and guilty for him taking me on as his lackey. I sometimes wondered if he had subjected me to some sort of Mesmerism and it occurred to me that he may actually have engineered my memory loss, and indeed, the whole scenario with the vampire countess, but I couldn’t hold onto that train of thought long enough to follow it through.
Thinking seemed to have become as impossible as flying. I wanted to know more about Helga but it never occurred to me to ask. I didn’t know where we were, but it was equally unimportant. I was an automaton, doing as I was told and very little else.
As months went by, jigsaw pieces of my lost past began to break through, but nothing personal revealed itself, just things I’d learned over the years.
I remembered things I must have been taught at school – facts, bits of science and folklore for example – but nothing of school itself. I could remember nothing of people I must have known before finding myself wherever I now was, in this uncharted limbo.
I remembered things I’d read, but not where — apart from in the library in Pentwater, which I remembered as clear as day; at least I remembered standing in one of the aisles, scrutinizing the shelves. There was a huge bank of knowledge of folklore and mythology that hadn’t been obscured, but I had no recollection of my family or friends.
Had I been romantically involved with anyone? I simply did not know.
I knew the incantations to converse with a Babylonian fire spirit, though, and the names of the seventy-two intelligences which helped Solomon build the Temple, and how to inscribe the vivifying Hebrew word onto the soft clay of a Golem that would make it come alive.
I remembered the difference between a pentacle and a pentacle, and the attributes of all twenty-two paths of the Otz-Chim, the glyph of the Tree of Life – but I couldn’t remember how I knew any of this or what the heck it was all meant to achieve. I didn’t actually believe any of this stuff. It was academic knowledge that was so completely esoteric that it had no useful purpose that I could see beyond being a rather arduous mental discipline.
I was being too dismissive though, as I discovered when I learned a great deal more in the company of my self-appointed guiding light.
Under Abram’s tutelage I added practical experience to the theoretical knowledge I’d already gained from years of reading the arcane books in the Pentwater Public Library’s “Occult” aisle. More of what I’d previously learned was coming back to me, knowledge gleaned in the gloomy “forbidden” section between books on reading tea-leaves and stuff like, “Mixing Cocktails To Go With Your Guests’ Star Sign.”
The “forbidden” shelves of Pentwater Public Library’s “Occult” aisle weren’t in the card index catalogue, and contained a selection of books that, whenever I returned one I’d borrowed, always contained at least three I’d never seen before.
This was invariably true, and remained true for every visit I made to the library throughout the many years I used it. I did recall that I’d even tried to catch it out, taking out an assortment of titles and returning the following day to find a previously unseen extra selection, and again the following day… It was always just as surprising.
The section shelves held maybe a hundred and fifty books, but I must have borrowed eight or nine hundred over the years, always from that same short run of shelves.
Maybe the library had been a false memory? It made as much sense as the infinitely inexhaustible catalogue of books I apparently remembered on a very finite run of shelving.
I certainly remembered that something – books or not – had taught me mythology and method, and ancient folklore about gingerbread cottages and brownies with big ears in the company of nodding pixies, but they didn’t cover real life problems like evicting the Smurfs that had infested the locker room at a Bavarian police station, or removing triffids from the botanical gardens in a Norwegian holiday resort. Van heatsink did.
The books certainly didn’t cover decapitating East European aristocrats or techniques for charming nesting harpies out of Aegean trees. Van Heatsink taught me how to deal with the fierce, flesh-ripping bird-women by setting up a trap with bird-seed – and a big hammer with “ACME” engraved on it. Malleus Aviicarum, he called it.
My books had taught me nothing about harpies. They taught me nothing about laying to rest undead Chinese zombies who moved around like contestants in a sack race and were expert in kung-fu.
I’ve never understood why Chines zombies get around by hopping, but they do, and I suppose it looks so silly that potential victims don’t realize they’re about to get their throats ripped out.
Van Heatsink taught me all this, and more, but it was very one-sided, and everything seemed to end in mayhem and death. There was very little about healing, or positive confidence in the human condition, and nothing at all of love.
Van Heatsink seemed to be an occult policeman – very procedural and inflexible, with a fixed idea of right and wrong. If he didn’t understand it, it was something to be destroyed, usually with a stake and mallet or a whirling sword, though there was that one time he managed to kill the half-man, half-insect monstrosity with a steam-powered drop hammer. Two thousand tons per square inch flattened its head and torso down to about three quarters of a millimetre, which saw the end of the incessant buzzing and the annoying, round and round and round orbiting of the gas mantle in the rector’s laboratory.
The accursed thing weighed about two hundred pounds and had a fly’s head. It had unscrewed the lids of all the jars of home-made jam in the rectory pantry and had sucked out all the contents with its spiral proboscis tongue before moving on to bags of sugar…
The festering pestilence was eventually lured between the plates of the massive press with a cup of marmalade and a very old pork pie, when an automatic switch brought the plates into unfeasibly intimate contact —
“Swat!”
Apart from introducing me to the world of practical monster slaying and applied exosorcery, Van Heatsink’s major contribution to my life was to get me physically fit, and I was subjected to an arduous programme of running, swordplay, unarmed combat and, unaccountably, the oiled-body wrestling which finished off most of my long training sessions.
I was always baffled by the inclusion of oiled-body wrestling but he insisted it was an essential part of my regime, as was the assisted bathing and oily massage which he assured me was necessary to relax me.
He was as good with a strigil as an ancient Roman bath-house slave, however, and could scrape the oil and muck off me with the same expertise as any barber could shave facial hair off a customer. Van heatsink seemed to enjoy this particularly, and silenced any protests with, “But I haf not deep cleansed the buttocks!” or, “All around the wrinkled skin is needing of stretching and oiling!”
I wasn’t ever comfortable with this, but what did I know? He was the expert.
He did not attempt to suck any more residual poison out, thankfully.

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The years I spent with Van Heatsink were very much lived in the present.
My past remained largely lost in murkiness. I knew there was something beyond my awareness which was probably very important to me, or would be if I could only see it, but it was as impenetrable as somebody else’s dream. I had no choice but to live in the here and now, or the present that I imagined might be real.
I was kept busy and had little time to think about anything outside the task in hand and so hadn’t really considered things that I really ought to have considered, like trying to recall my past, or consider my place in the universe. Most of the time, I didn’t even know where we were, as Van Heatsink took care of directions and locations but I did find out we’d been in Old Siam, and Afghanistan, and when I’d complained about being cold, he shrugged and dismissed my objections with, “What do you expect for Siberia?”
I’d had no idea we were in Siberia; it possibly explained why my feet ached. We’d long ago dispensed with the carriage and had been traveling on foot ever since, though we hitched a lift when we could. We’d covered, it seems, thousands of miles, and though it was largely on foot, I seemed to be a passenger as far as whereabouts were concerned.
This was thraldom, like being a private in an army of one. All my thinking was done for me. If I looked like I wasn’t fully engaged in the moment, I was ordered to do push-ups, or jog around the block or perform sit-ups until any inclination to thinking had passed me by. I had become a machine.
“Jog up that sand hill, carry the McGuffin. Chop wood.”
I got really good at chopping wood.
In this dream-like state, it never occurred to me to take stock and question my situation.

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