He looked to Kerry and gave a small nod. Kerry held the Limbo cup in her right hand and manipulated Danny’s head with her left, tilting it back until a thin, slow stream of murky pink liquid began to pour from the hole in the skull and fill the plastic tumbler.
“Today you’ll know what the child knows,” Peck said. “And you’ll feel what the child feels. You’ll know and feel these things without loss or distortion. Without the corruption of language. You’ll know the truth. And then you’ll have to decide if you want the truth to set you free.”
When the last of the fluid dripped from the boy’s skull, the tumbler was nearly full, and the liquid gave color to the skin of the freaks, whose bodies were outlined on the plastic. Kerry positioned Danny’s head back onto the surgical slab, crossed the room to Sweeney and extended the cup to him.
Sweeney stared up at her, unsure of what he should say or do. And in the absence of any plan, he lifted a tacky hand to his wife and they traded fetus for cup. Kerry smiled at him, brought the flesh in her hands to her chest, up high, near her neck. Sweeney wrapped both of his trembling hands around the cup, which was neither cool nor warm. He lifted it slightly, noticed what seemed to be tiny bubbles popping just above the rim. He brought his head down, fitting his mouth around the end of the straw as he closed his eyes and began to suck. The fluid wound its way through the looping track of the straw and flowed into the father’s mouth, over the tongue, down the throat and esophagus. It tasted like milk with a hint of molasses, and Sweeney drank until the straw made the slurping and sputtering that indicated the cup was empty.
He let the straw fall from his mouth, lowered the cup and opened his eyes to the phosphorescent display of a thousand Roman candles arcing across a deep blue sky. When the fireworks faded, he found himself staring at the back of his own head. And then the picture opened out, and his head was boxed in the rear window of the Honda. He was backing out of the driveway. He was headed down Oread Street on his way into work. He honked twice, his standard goodbye to his wife and his son.
He knew this moment, but not from this perspective. This was Danny’s viewpoint. This was the last time that Danny had seen him. This was the last glimpse of the father by the son. This, Sweeney knew, was what happened at home on the night of the accident.
While Sweeney was turning onto Williams, cranking up “Betcha by Golly Wow” and hoping that it would lull him out of a sour mood, Danny was watching the Honda disappear. Everything that Sweeney was about to witness, he realized, would be through the boy’s eyes. And what he saw was a dash back into the house, from a shaky and low-to-the-ground angle. Upon entering the kitchen, carpet changing into linoleum, the sprint transformed into a glide, as the Limbo slipper socks carried the boy almost across the length of the room, where Kerry was chopping produce for a salad.
Danny’s eyes came to rest on his mother and Sweeney saw Kerry smile.
“Did you say goodbye to Daddy?” she asked.
Danny nodded and the picture tilted forward and back.
“Can I have some Oreos?” the boy asked.
Kerry glanced at the wall clock.
“Dinner’s in a bit,” she said, but Danny was already at the low cabinet where they kept the cookies. “Just a few, okay?”
A nod, a tilt, and the boy pushed his fists into the bag that held the cookies and retrieved three, four, and one in his mouth made five. Kerry let it go and Danny departed the kitchen, climbed the stairs to the second floor, singing around the Oreo, “I Don’t Look Like a Hero,” the theme to the last Limbo movie.
When he got to his room, he stacked the cookies on the night table next to the bed, opened the drawer beneath the stack, and lifted out, gingerly, the issue of the comic that he and his dad had purchased earlier in the day. He hoisted himself up onto the bed. Kneeled and balanced and turned on the lamp. The bulb illuminated its Limbo shade. Threw shadows onto the far wall, across the Limbo poster and the Limbo wallpaper that stretched beyond the poster.
Danny sat back and then lay down. Not quite comfortable, he put the comic on the bed and stacked a second pillow atop the first. He grabbed two cookies off the top of the stack, put one on his stomach and took a bite of the second. Crumbs rained down on his chin. Now that he was ready, he lifted the little magazine, its cover overloaded with colors, the gloss glaring a little in the light.
He opened the issue, rolled the cover around to the back without creasing it, and began to read the first page of the final Limbo story.
26
The first page was one full panel, a portrait of the troupe on the little beach, at the foot of the boulders that stretched up to Dr. Fliess’s castle. The freaks fanned out behind the chicken boy like bowling pins, their heads tilted up in unison and the same look of caution and anticipation on each face. Above them, the black iron castle, the laboratory of the legendary renegade, Dr. Wilton Fliess, sat at the edge of the cliff, looking ominous and uninviting.
They have wandered so long
the narrative bar above their heads read
And suffered so much.
They have faced the good and the bad together
Bound by their deformities and their love
But today, they will learn what lies at the end
of their hard road
Deliverance or damnation.
Because today they have reached
and now came the title, floating down in the air above their heads like manna, in blood red ink
The End of Limbo!
Below their feet was a banner that read
Complete in this one issue, the last chapter of the Limbo epic
Written & illustrated
By Menlo
Danny made crunching sounds. Crumbs flew and settled. The noise of the page being turned was thunderous. A second cookie went into the mouth and then the hand came down and grabbed the Limbo blanket, a little throw that Kerry had picked up a few months before. Danny pulled it over his legs and began to read.
Dr. Fliess is hunched within the folds of his black cape, the red velvet interior just peeking into view. He is sitting cross-legged halfway up the cliff, in the notch where two boulders come together. His elbows are planted on his knees and his chin is cupped in his braced hands. It is clear he is locked in some sort of demonic trance.
He remains this way all night. His gargoylean homunculi burrow into crevices around him. All that can be seen of the servants are their red eyes, looking terrified. What has happened to the Master? they wonder.
But the Master is unaware of their terror. He is in the grip of his own destiny, waiting to see where a lifetime’s obsession will bear him. He is inside the densest mysteries of nature now. And no one can touch him. He watches the tide come in with its careless fury, battering the beach, flooding over the newly covered graves. Seawater sinking down into the hard sand. The tide builds, rises. The tide reaches up to Fliess, engulfs his pointy-booted feet before it begins to recede. The wind does its part, howling, banshee mad.