In Limbo

by Christopher Evans

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

In a time of trouble, in a state of confusion, in a maze of mystery, in the Britain of the 1980s... It could happen to anyone. And it has happened to Carpenter. Now his only chance is to escape. Because Carpenter has woken up in Limbo where everything is familiar, everything is different - and everything is to be discovered.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 288

Sample

Most mornings the alarm outside Carpenter’s door startled him from sleep, but this particular morning he woke early to the
whiteness of his cell with the feeling that he had had an important dream during the night. Usually his dreams were pleasant,
aimless affairs in which he would wander through summery meadows or lie on a beach at sunset or sit snug beside a fire watching
the rain fall through a window. He was always alone. The dreams were pleasant because they were dominated by a comfortable
lack of urgency, by a feeling that this might go on for ever. They were an idyllic reflection of his waking life.


The alarm went off, startling Carpenter even though he had been steeling himself for it, sensing that it was almost eight
o’clock despite the absence of clocks and sunlight. He remembered the dream: he had been exploring a labyrinthine library,
filled with leather-bound books; a vast library containing all the knowledge in the world, like something out of a story by
Borges. He was searching for – he didn’t know what. At first he had been strolling leisurely through room after book-lined
room; but then a sense of urgency had slowly overtaken him until finally he was running through wood-panelled passageways,
feeling something approaching panic.


The dream had ended at that point. He pondered its significance and drew a blank. The alarm cut off, and presently he heard
footsteps in the corridor outside before the bolt was drawn back on his door. He closed his eyes, pretending sleep.


Snider entered, carrying a pair of white gym shorts, a towel and a battery razor. He wore slate-blue coveralls and cropped
blond hair; there was a name-tag on his breast. A lean but muscular man, Snider affected a smart appearance and an uncompromising
attitude towards matters of discipline. Carpenter often thought of him as a throwback to the Gestapo, even his surname sounding
suitably Germanic. His coveralls were always clean and uncrumpled; each morning he seemed to have been recreated anew, brought forth fresh from a mould.


Snider put the towel and razor on the ledge above the washbasin and tossed the shorts on the bed.

‘Five minutes, Carpenter,’ he said, then went out.

The bolt thunked shut behind him. Through the wall Carpenter could hear Sinnott in the cell next door getting out of bed as
his door was opened.


Carpenter still felt tired. He would have dearly loved to roll over and go straight back to sleep, but he knew that Snider
would only haul him out of bed and frogmarch him off to the gym where Blythe would be waiting, ready to take them through
another twenty minutes of physical torment. Bend at the hip. Stretch those arms. Lift those legs. Something ought to be done about people like Blythe.


He threw back the bedclothes and put his feet down on the concrete floor. He wore striped pyjamas, and there were canvas slippers
beside the bed. His cell was a twelve by nine foot chamber, painted entirely white. It was unornamented and the blankness
of the walls was relieved only by the washbasin to the left of the door and a circular light at the centre of the ceiling.
The washbasin had three taps, delivering hot water, liquid soap and cold water respectively. A toothbrush, comb and a tube
of SR stood in a clear plastic beaker, and a small rectangular mirror was set into the wall above. Under his bed was a plastic
chamber-pot which he had never used. The central light was a hemisphere of opaque glass with a metal nipple at its centre
which made it look like an artificial breast; it was dimmed at night but never extinguished. There were similar lights throughout
Limbo and each contained a hidden spy camera so that the inmates were under surveillance practically everywhere they went.
White walls and bare concrete floors predominated in the corridors and rooms, with functional modern furniture and a minimum
of decoration. Most of the rooms were less spartan than the cells; but none had windows.


Carpenter crossed to the washbasin and examined his face in the mirror for signs of decay. He would be thirty this coming
October and his health worried him greatly; he had never had a serious illness in his life and felt that it was only a matter
of time before he came down with something complicated and incurable. In the meantime Blythe was doing his best to kill him off through sheer
over-exertion. During his first month in Limbo he had developed aches in muscles he hadn’t known existed, and he still refused
to believe that Blythe had his well-being at heart. Most fitness freaks had masochistic tendencies, and to become a PT instructor
you had to be a sadist as well.


Carpenter washed his face before switching on the razor. Monday, he thought vaguely. It was a Monday.

*

‘Now try it with one hand,’ Blythe directed Sinnott, ignoring the fact that Sinnott could barely manage the requisite twenty-five
press-ups with two tremulous hands splayed on the parquet floor. Sinnott’s thin, post-adolescent body was frail enough, but
his arms were even spindlier. Ever eager to please, he lifted his left hand and promptly collapsed, his head banging against
the floor.


He’s knocked himself out, Carpenter thought as he hastily completed his own quota. Then Sinnott groaned and rolled over, pushing
back his long hair from his face. He looked more downcast than hurt.


Carpenter took the weight off his arms and rested his cheek against the herringbone wood. His innards felt as if they had
been stretched on a rack. He decided that if ever he became Dictator of the World he’d have all PT instructors shot and outlaw
press-ups by decree. They were a very British form of torture, just like cold showers and boarding-schools.


Blythe had turned his attention to Riley. Riley’s portly, middle-aged body was ill-suited to any kind of contortion, but he always entered into the spirit of the gym sessions with gusto. As usual he was panting and groaning with effort, his head bobbing up and down in opposition to his behind while his arms remained motionless. It was the classic schoolboy simulation of a press-up.

‘Bend those arms,’ Blythe told him, putting a foot to his ample backside and forcing his body down. Riley’s pot-belly flattened
against the floor, his elbows jutting upwards. He made no attempt to rise.


‘Come on,’ Blythe urged him. ‘You’ve got at least fifteen more to do.’

Riley let his arms go limp and lay there, panting. He looked like a stranded turtle. The soles of his feet were grey with
dust from the floor.


‘You’re not finished,’ Blythe insisted.

‘My heart’s given out. Leave me in peace to die.’

Off to the right, Treadwell was continuing with his routine, blind to everything around him. Carpenter watched with a mixture
of envy and irritation as he jerked his body up and down with supreme ease. He had the physique of a lightweight boxer, muscular
but trim, and the only sound he made was the hiss of air through his nostrils as his chest brushed the floor before his arms
straightened without a quiver to raise his rigid torso once more.


In theory Carpenter would have loved to emulate Treadwell’s effortless athleticism, but Treadwell added insult to injury by
always doing double the number of required exercises. His relish for such strenuous and sweaty activities was a mystery to
Carpenter, but he tried not to let it bother him too much, oppressed as he was by much thornier problems.


‘Everybody hup!’ Blythe shouted.

He took a stopwatch from the hip pocket of his grey flannel tracksuit. The session was almost at an end, and they now only
had to complete five minutes of running on the spot before they would be released.


The gym was the only room in Limbo with a wooden floor. Apart from that, it was like all the others: bare and white-painted.
There was a storeroom next to the entrance from which Blythe would occasionally produce medicine balls for them to hurl at
one another or weights to strain their muscles with. On one occasion he had even dragged out a trampoline and a vaulting box
and had been flattened when Riley had come sailing over the latter like a human cannonball and hit him in the small of the
back. That was the last they had seen of the trampoline. Carpenter had never dared peer into the storeroom, his secret fear
being that it also contained a set of collapsible wall-bars which Blythe would erect one morning before commanding them to
mount the bars and hang there until he counted to one million. ‘Back-hanging from the top wall-bar’ was an order which echoed down the years from Carpenter’s schooldays, and he never recalled it without wincing.


In the doorway Snider was watching over the lanky figure of Wright, who was still in his pyjamas. Wright was the only one
of the inmates who refused to participate in the gym sessions; he forfeited breakfast as a result. Snider stood at his shoulder,
his arms folded across his chest, his austere face as impassive as ever. Although Snider never revealed any emotion or bias
towards his charges, Carpenter suspected that he actively disliked Wright and would not hesitate to bend his body into unusual
postures should he step out of line.


‘I want you to lift those legs high,’ Blythe said. ‘And run as fast as you can, clear?’

He studied his stopwatch and began to give the countdown for the exercise. He was a beefy, florid man in his late forties
who always looked at once superbly fit and on the verge of a fatal coronary. Carpenter stared hard at him, thinking dark thoughts.
On Saturday he had read an article in the Reader’s Digest which had suggested that positive and negative emotional waves could be transmitted from the brain across free space and
exert a palpable effect on other people. Carpenter was entertaining a vision of Blythe turning purple and crumpling to the
ground in the hope of inducing a real seizure which would free them from the ritual torment of the gym sessions.


But Blythe completed the countdown as hale as ever. ‘Go!’ he shouted, and the four of them began running on the spot, Riley
lifting his legs so high that he resembled a demented grape-treader. Carpenter squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated even
harder on thinking Blythe to death.


*

Released from the gym, they assembled outside the bathroom for a shower. Hemmings, the slovenly guard who assisted Snider
on the eight till four shift, was standing outside with the bathtowels.


‘Morning,’ he said brightly to no one in particular.

They were admitted one by one to the bathroom and allowed a maximum of five minutes per shower: Hemmings kept track on his
wrist-watch. Riley was at the head of the queue, scratching his curly hair and yawning. Next to him was Treadwell, who stood
erect and looked remarkably unruffled after the gym; he always awaited his turn with infinite patience. Sinnott, by contrast
always looked edgy, as if he wished he was somewhere else; he seemed to be giving the blank stretch of wall before his eyes
particular scrutiny.


Carpenter went to the end of the queue, standing behind Wright, who was now completely naked. He always insisted on stripping
off as soon as the gym session was over, and he wore his nakedness proudly, as a sign of his defiance. No one paid much attention
to him in this state, though Carpenter always noticed how much better endowed he was than himself.


The rest of them were allowed to retain their shorts until they entered the shower. Afterwards, wrapped in bathtowels, they
departed to their individual cells, where a white cotton shirt and a pair of navy-blue serge trousers would be draped across
the bed. This was their uniform in Limbo, with grey worsted socks, plain black shoes and a pair of white Y-fronts. The shirts
and underwear were changed every other day, and every fortnight there was a clean pair of trousers. They had just completed
their third month in Limbo, and there was no indication of when, if ever, they would be released.


*

The traditional English breakfast was one of the best things about Limbo, and the only thing that made Carpenter endure the
gym sessions. Fruit juice and cereal would be followed by permutations of eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, black pudding,
baked beans and fried bread, with plenty of toast, marmalade and tea or coffee. It sometimes seemed to Carpenter that Limbo’s
catering department – whoever they were – worked in direct opposition to Blythe, being intent on clotting the inmates’ veins
and arteries with cholesterol as soon as Blythe had finished removing the previous day’s deposits in the gym. But Carpenter
always tried not to think of his health when eating; food was one of the few pleasures remaining to him.


They gathered in the small room which was set aside for meals and locked at other times. Hemmings doled out their breakfast from portable metal bins of the kind used in hospitals. He also
gave Carpenter a fresh packet of Silk Cut and the blue disposable lighter which Carpenter had been using ever since he’d been
in Limbo. He was allowed one packet of cigarettes per day, and these were taken from him before bedtime and a fresh packet
provided every morning. Since he seldom smoked a full packet in a day he often wondered if Peacock, the evening shift guard
who always collected his cigarettes and apparently didn’t smoke himself, sold off those that were left to other guards or
people in the outside world. Every prison traditionally had a racket.


Wright sat at the head of the table, disdaining the solitary glass of water which had been provided for him. He rested his
elbows on the blue formica table-top and leaned forward, his eyes taking in everyone.


‘I don’t understand why you continue to submit yourselves to the indignity of the gym every day,’ he said. ‘I look upon it
as a form of corporal punishment.’


Carpenter felt his spirits sag, and he kept his eyes fixed on his food; Wright was about to embark on his morning lecture.

Treadwell dabbed at his moustache with a paper napkin.

‘Exercise is good for you,’ he said. ‘It has to hurt a little to be of any benefit.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. The notion that things must hurt in order to do you any good is a fallacy which arises
from the Protestant Work Ethic.’


Treadwell stared at Wright with patent incomprehension.

‘The Protestant Work Ethic,’ Wright explained, ‘underlies most of Western civilization. It’s rooted in the Christian doctrine
that pleasure is, in itself, an unhealthy thing, that to enjoy something you must first suffer hardship and toil.’


‘What hardship?’ Treadwell looked puzzled. ‘It’s fun.’

‘It may be fun for someone like you who’s fit and naturally enjoys exercise. But what about someone like, say, Riley there,
who’s obviously in no condition to enjoy it? How do you think he feels?’


Riley stifled a burp.

‘I feel indigestion coming on,’ he said.

‘Exercise doesn’t have to hurt to do you good,’ Wright told Treadwell. ‘Essentially, all you have to do is raise your heart-rate
under exercise by gradual stages until you reach the level of fitness you desire. You don’t have to sweat blood.’


‘Who’s sweating blood?’ Treadwell said.

‘I was speaking metaphorically.’

Riley, munching toast, let out a longer, louder burp. Wright kept his attention on Treadwell. ‘Anyway you sidetracked me.
I wasn’t really making a point about the merits of exercise – I believe in it myself – but about the fact that there’s no
element of choice involved in whether we exercise or not.’


‘I’d do it anyway,’ Treadwell said. ‘I enjoy it.’

Wright sighed. ‘I know you would. But that’s not the issue. What I’m arguing is that the gym sessions should not be compulsory.
We should be free to participate if, and only if, we want to.’


‘But you don’t participate,’ Treadwell said.


‘I don’t get any breakfast because I refuse, do I? How many of the others do you think would be with you in the gym each morning
of their own free choice if it wasn’t for the fact that they’d forfeit breakfast if they didn’t?’


Carpenter could see that Treadwell was lost in the convolutions of this last sentence. He considered sticking a sausage in
Wright’s mouth to shut him up but rejected the idea since it was likely to have the opposite effect.


‘They’re treating us like criminals, don’t you see?’ A film of spittle had formed at both corners of his mouth. ‘They’re attempting
to dictate our behaviour with a system of rewards and punishments, to compel us to do things we may not want to do. That’s
the point. We’re not criminals. What gives them the right to treat us this way? What have we done to deserve it?’


‘Why are we here?’ Sinnott murmured.

That, thought Carpenter, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

*

After breakfast they retired to what was popularly known as the lounge, a spacious room holding black vinyl armchairs, melamine
coffee tables and a colour television set. On the walls hung cheerless abstract prints. Athena prints. There was something
about Athena prints which always made Carpenter think of colour supplements and long, boring Sundays. He’d disliked Sundays
ever since he’d been a young child and had had to go to Sunday School while most of his friends were out playing football
or teaching themselves to smoke. Even when religious disillusionment had finally overcome him and he’d stopped going, he’d
still found that Sundays remained boring or were prone to disruption by bad news. Maybe it was God’s way of getting His own
back.


The morning papers were sitting on the central coffee table and Carpenter selected a Daily Star, feeling a twinge of guilt as he did so. Wright would have no truck with any of the popular newspapers and was always chastising
Carpenter for not reading a ‘quality’ paper such as The Times or the Guardian. Carpenter agreed that these were indeed good newspapers and worthy of his attention, but he continued to avoid reading them
for the very reason that they contained a lot of important news and considered analysis of current affairs. The issues were
invariably so complex that he could never form any coherent opinions on them and always ended up wishing that he hadn’t bothered
to apprise himself of the facts in the first place. Since he’d been in Limbo he’d stuck resolutely to the tabloids with their
more comforting diet of sex, sport and showbusiness. If this meant that his mind was going to seed, so much the better.


Despite his strong opinions on the press, Wright did not in fact read any newspapers in Limbo or watch any television. He
had explained that since Limbo was an enclosed environment, since they knew nothing about what was happening in the outside
world except what they read in the newspapers or saw on television, it was possible that all their incoming information was
doctored – censored or even fabricated – to suit the mysterious purposes of those who were keeping them in captivity.


Wright had evolved the provisional theory that their enforced incarceration in Limbo was some form of unprecedented sociological
experiment whose purpose was simply to study the reactions of five randomly chosen men to such an unexplained and unjust imprisonment.
In comparison to Riley’s notion that they had been press-ganged and were aboard a spaceship en route to another planet, this seemed to Carpenter quite a reasonable idea: after
all, sociologists and psychologists were renowned for doing arcane studies in which the layman could see no practical relevance
whatsoever. But he didn’t believe that they were receiving faked or censored news. He could think of no earthly reason for
such a subterfuge, and there were practical difficulties, too. Imagine having to invent a special set of newspapers each day,
in addition to persuading all the television newsreaders to do extra broadcasts of made-up news just for their benefit – it
simply wasn’t on. Wright, however, remained unmoved by these arguments, contending that anything was possible under the bizarre
circumstances in which they found themselves and that it was prudent to trust nothing.


Carpenter stared at the front-page story in the Telegraph Treadwell was reading – a report of an earthquake in Ecuador. Even assuming that their news input was faked, the point seemed pretty academic to him. The world outside was doubtless in as much confusion as it had been before
they’d been spirited away to Limbo, and did it really matter if it was an earthquake in Ecuador or a plague in Pakistan that
was presently causing misery for thousands or millions of people? Well, yes, strictly speaking it did; to the Ecuadorians
and the Pakistanis at least, it probably mattered a hell of a lot. But what about the typical Britisher, shielded from such
gross catastrophes by the luck of geography and history? What did it really matter to him who was dying and where? Tragedies
tended to blur into one another when viewed through the cosy medium of print or screen; and anyway, you could only absorb
so much bad news before your brain clicked into neutral. Take Northern Ireland, for example: there was a perfect case of so
much horror building up that eventually you became inured to it.


Carpenter immediately stopped himself from thinking about Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland was one of those thorny problems
which seemed so impervious to rational contemplation that he tried to relegate it to a dark corner of his mind with all the
other questions to which he could find no answers. He turned to the back page, looking for some news of Manchester United.
Sometimes it seemed strange that he should be so concerned about the fortunes of a football team when there were many larger
issues which ought to be occupying his mind. Wright, for example, disapproved of all team sports, claiming that they promoted regimentation and
the mob ethos. He had been expostulating on that very subject the Saturday afternoon of the Wales-England rugby international
when Riley had poured a cup of coffee in his lap.


As if on cue, Wright emerged from his cell, where, Carpenter knew, he had been exercising. Wright was almost as keen on physical
fitness as Treadwell, and would surely have enjoyed the gym sessions had he not been ordered to participate. The question
of whether Wright’s behaviour was symptomatic of an absolute integrity or an ineluctable stupidity was one which continued
to haunt Carpenter. Wright, a rangy six-footer with a pointed nose and a shock of mousy hair which hung over his widow’s peak
like a wave about to break on the shore of his forehead, did at least possess the firmness of mind which Carpenter knew he
lacked himself. Wright believed in things; he had strong opinions on a wide range of subjects; he was committed. This naturally
made him hell to live with.


Carpenter lit his first Silk Cut of the day. This is the one, he thought as he drew on it, which will trigger one of my cells
into a riot of replication. Within a year or two I’ll be dead, consumed by a cancerous hunger. Why am I doing this to myself?


Of all the grisly ends which Carpenter conceived for himself, the thought of cancer was the most terrible. In this he knew
he was representative of his time. Wright believed that the general fear of cancer arose from the fact that most people instinctively
understood and were appalled at the thought that they were dying through self-cannibalization, being eaten by themselves,
as it were. Like most of his ideas it suffered, Carpenter felt, from over-intellectualization. He doubted that most people
had sufficient knowledge of the exact nature of the disease to conceptualize their fears in such a fashion. As far as he was
concerned there was a much simpler and more plausible reason for the general horror of cancer: most people who got it eventually
died of it.


As soon as Wright saw Carpenter light up, he walked straight through the lounge and into the games room where Sinnott was
practising his snooker. Perhaps the only good reason Carpenter could give himself for continuing to smoke was that it would
ensure Wright’s abrupt departure from whatever room they happened to be in. Wright detested cigarettes, and espoused the theory that
they were substitute nipples; smoking, according to him, was as much an oral comfort harking back to breast-feeding as it
was a nicotine addiction. Carpenter was quite happy to subscribe to this theory: how much nicer it was to think of a cigarette
as the end of a tit than as a tube of potentially lethal tar.


He was thinking too much, he knew, and about all sorts of unpleasant and unfruitful subjects. That was the trouble with Limbo:
you had so much time on your hands you invariably spent a lot of it in thought.


‘Listen to this,’ Riley said, and read out an amusing story from the Daily Mirror about a man who had climbed a tree to rescue a cat only to have the animal leap upon his head and hang there, tearing out
half of his hair before he brought it to ground.


Riley showed him a photograph of the man, who looked like an alopecia victim. Treadwell peered over the top of his paper and
smiled in a way which suggested he had no idea why Riley was displaying the photograph.


‘If I was him,’ Riley said, ‘I’d claim damages from the cat. Demand a graft of its hair to cover the missing bits.’

Carpenter returned to his own paper, unhappily stirred by the story to thoughts of his own receding hairline. Baldness, he
had reluctantly decided, was aesthetically unappealing. One of his girlfriends had once told him that bald or partially bald
men were often very attractive to women, but to him this simply implied by a kind of negative emphasis that most, in fact,
were not. And anyway, to be losing your hair at twenty-nine was … well, it made you worry like hell and caused your hair to
fall out even faster. It was a vicious circle, a destructive self-perpetuating cycle, as most of his habits seemed to be.


Riley was peering at him.

‘You all right?’ he asked.

Carpenter pointed a forefinger to the side of his head and twirled it around. His brain was in overdrive today.

‘Darts?’ Riley suggested.

Carpenter decided that a game would be most welcome. Darts were always good for staving off thought.

They went into the games room. Sinnott was knocking balls around the snooker table, waiting for Treadwell to finish his newspaper;
Treadwell was the only one who could really compete with him on green felt. Wright was sitting in an armchair beside the dartboard,
reading a copy of The Listener.

Riley put a rag to the scoreboard. A cloud of chalkdust began to descend on Wright.

‘Do you mind?’ he said.

‘Do I mind what?’ Riley asked.

‘Do you mind not showering me with chalkdust.’

‘No,’ said Riley, ‘I don’t mind.’

Wright glared at him, then returned to his reading, smoothing out the page emphatically. ‘Don’t think I’m going to move just
because you’ve come in here to annoy me.’


Riley took the darts from the board and walked back to the eight foot mark.

‘Up for bull,’ he said, handing Carpenter a dart.

Carpenter aimed and threw. Riley followed. He was closer.

‘I’m warning you, Riley,’ said Wright as he plucked out the darts, ‘if you hit me I’ll bloody throttle you.’

‘What if I hit you in the head?’

‘If you so much as graze me, I’ll throttle you.’

‘Not if I hit you in the head. You’ll be dead.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Just pointing out the dangers. The brain is in the head, you know.’

‘I don’t need you to give me an anatomy lesson. I knew where the brain was when I was five years old.’

Riley looked impressed. He walked back to the mark.

‘When I was five years old,’ he said to Carpenter, ‘all I could do was dribble. I was a late developer.’

‘Late?’ said Wright. ‘You never got started.’ He gave a porcine snort.

‘I was eight before I learned to talk,’ Riley told him.

‘And you’ve