ALSO BY DALE E. BASYE
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO MY SON, OGGI,
AND MY WIFE, DIANA,
WHO MAKE ME FEEL THAT I CAN ACHIEVE ANYTHING
WHILE LEAVING ME WANTING NOTHING
FOREWORD
1. BLIND AS A BRAT
2. THE TAKING TREE
3. BUTTER OFF DEAD
4. DEAD GIRL’S BLUFF
5. THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER
6. SOUL SURVIVOR
7. MALL OR NOTHING
8. GOING TO CRACKPOT
9. STEALING THE SHOW
10. LOOK WHO’S STALKING
11. NERVES OF STEAL
12. SPREE DE CORPSE
13. CAUGHT SHORT
14. ENERGY CRISIS
15. HOPELESSLY DEVOTED
16. FERRET OUT
17. A SIDE OF COLE’S LAW
18. WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM
19. A SAVING GRACE
MIDDLEWORD
20. UP AND ATOM
21. HARE-BRAINED SCHEME
22. HUNG UP AND ON THE LINE
23. UP THE RIVER
24. IN MARM’S WAY
25. CROSSING JORDAN
26. SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE
27. BRIDGE IN TROUBLED WATER
28. FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES
29. POPPING OFF
30. MAKING UP IS HARD TO DO
31. A STROKE OF LUCKY
32. WARREN PEACE
33. POETIC INJUSTICE
34. UNDERNEATH IT MALL
35. FUNNY BUNNY
36. FALLING AFOUL
37. ROCKING THE BOAT
38. THE BUCKTOOTH STOPS HERE
39. A HOLE LOT OF NOTHING
40. A DIAMOND IN THE BLUFF
41. THE GIFT OF GRAB
42. CHICKEN FREED
43. PLAYING THE FOOLS
BACKWARD
FOREWORD
As many believe, there is a place above and a place below. But there are also places in between. Some not quite awfully perfect and others not quite perfectly awful.
One of these places is so shiny with glittering desire and itchy can’t-live-without-it-ness (which is amusing considering the life-challenged state of its inhabitants) that you can’t help but see yourself in its dazzling reflection. Only this reflection is as warped as a fun-house mirror.
Thousands of years ago up on the Stage, there was a king named Midas who had the power to turn everything he touched into gold. He had a lot of fun at first, but then—after turning his wife and children into golden statues—the king viewed his gift as a curse. His story comes with a valuable lesson: Never touch your wife and children if you turn things into gold. I mean, duh. How tacky.
In this place, self-gratification rarely results in self-satisfaction, even though they sort of rhyme. See, where there’s rhyme, there isn’t necessarily reason.
The mysterious Powers That Be (and any of its associated or subsidiary enterprises, including—but not limited to—the Powers That Be Evil) have stitched this and countless other subjective realities together into a sprawling quilt of space and time.
Some of the patches on this quantum quilt may not even seem like places. But they are all around you and go by many names. Some feel like eternity. And some of them actually are eternity—at least for a little while…
1 · BLiND AS A BRAT
“OWW … YOU FLIPPIN’ maniac!” Marlo Fauster shrieked. The demon driver, after untying Marlo’s hands, had jabbed his pitchspork in a place just south of cordial. Marlo fell to her knees outside the stagecoach and fumbled to remove her blindfold.
The driver, his shape smudged and cloaked in the murky darkness, stood atop the stagecoach and struck a match across his fangs. The bright flare of light felt like an explosion in Marlo’s eye sockets.
The driver’s nightmarish features burned themselves into the back of Marlo’s retinas. Like most of the demons she had met in Heck, he was a creature turned inside out. But this one was even more inside out somehow: a lanky, walking pizza with everything on it held together by a network of pulsating veins and arteries.
“On second thought”—Marlo gulped—“maybe the blindfold wasn’t so bad.”
A pale horse with shiny pink eyes clomped nervously in place in front of the stagecoach. The demon driver pompously puffed out his disgusting chest.
“Snatched away in beauty’s bloom, on thee shall press no ponderous tomb,” he recited in a wet, snooty tone, like a butler with a bronchial infection.
As if things weren’t bad enough, Marlo reflected, now I have to hear his poetry.
Her eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw she was in some kind of subterranean tunnel. She stood up, brushing gravel off her baggy, sequined #1 GRANDMA sweatshirt and sagging turquoise stirrup pants.
After her brother Milton’s unprecedented escape at the Gates of Heck, Marlo had been forced at spork-point into this ugly Rapacia uniform, blindfolded, and shoved into the stagecoach of some poetic cadaver.
The next thing Marlo knew, she was here—wherever “here” was. “You are so not getting a tip,” she said.
The demon folded his arms together smugly. The mesh of winding red and blue capillaries made him appear as if he were a living, throbbing road map. Watching the creature’s pulse made Marlo’s own pulse quicken.
“My, aren’t we a brave little girl?” the demon mocked before suddenly leaping to the ground.
Startled, Marlo jumped back, hitting something with a clang. “Dang!” she cursed, rubbing the back of her skull. The demon laughed.
She turned to glare at what had connected with her head so painfully.
UNWELCOME TO RAPACIA, read a sign atop an ornate metal gate. Twin wrought-iron fleurs-de-lis were welded against a gleaming brass serpent, double curved into a shiny letter “s.” At the side of the gate, attached to a crisscross of iron bars, was a large metal box, with a message etched across it: PLEASE LEAVE ALL VALUABLES AND EXPENSIVE PERSONAL EFFECTS HERE SO THAT THEY CAN BE, UM, STORED AND GIVEN BACK TO YOU AT THE END OF ETERNITY.
Marlo peered down the tunnel past the open gate. The passage grew darker in progressively blacker rings that formed a big, black, fathomless eye. She shivered.
“You’d better pick up the pace,” the demon jeered. “The Grabbit doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Marlo turned back toward the exploded, over-microwaved Hot-Pocket-of-a-man.
“The Grabbit?” she asked. “What’s a Grabbit?”
The demon laughed. “The Grabbit is your new vice principal. It’s what makes Rapacia such an … interesting place of torment for greedy, grasping little moppets such as yourself.”
The demon turned toward his stagecoach. The creepy white horse “nayed” with a deranged titter.
A wave of panic washed over Marlo.
“What am I supposed to do, you … you … freaky carcass thing?” Marlo shouted into the dark, her chest tight with fear.
The demon sneered over his sinewy shoulder.
“The name is Byron … Lord Byron,” he replied haughtily, his inside-outside body flushed with indignation. “I once wore my heart on my sleeve and now must wear it draped outside my chest, a palpitating medallion for all to see.”
The demon chuckled.
“But at least I’m not a naughty little girl—alone—in the dark.”
Marlo could practically hear Lord Byron’s uncaring shrug as the demon stalked back to the stagecoach, muttering another depressing poem.
After a few long seconds of complete silence, Marlo’s ears were suddenly assaulted with the sounds of hooves clacking, wheels squeaking, and monstrous snorts. Slowly, the noises f
lattened into fading echoes, leaving behind nothing but Marlo’s frantic panting. The darkness and silence seemed to grip her around the midsection, squeezing out every ounce of her usual bravado.
“This sucks!” Marlo shouted to herself, kicking the wall.
“This sucks!” Her words echoed back at her, whiny and afraid. Marlo tried in vain to hold back the twin gushes of hot, salty tears streaking down her cheeks.
At least there was no one around to see what a total chicken nugget she was, Marlo thought—down here, submerged in darkness, alone, en route from one terrible place to another.
She sighed and tugged straight her sweatshirt—an acrylic travesty the color of old dentures—and hiked up her stirrup pants.
Might as well get this over with, Marlo reasoned as she felt along the tunnel with her hands, reading the walls like braille.
After Marlo’s brother, Milton, had escaped from Limbo—using the buoyant power of freed souls to lift him up, up, and away back to the Surface, the Stage, the land of the living, whatever you wanted to call it—things had gotten a little tense down in the Netherworld.
Bea “Elsa” Bubb, Heck’s hideous Principal of Darkness, had gone ballistic. She had been so angry that she couldn’t so much as look at Marlo due to her sheer Fausterness—those hereditary bits of Milton the principal saw mocking her in Marlo’s face.
Now, here she was, told to scurry in the darkness to meet her new vice principal.
After groping her way along for several minutes, Marlo felt a prickly wave of electricity creep under her skin. She stopped. There was a shimmer of … something … in the distance. A glint of garish green. A flash of cruel metal. A beguiling glimmer that drew Marlo closer like a moth to a lightbulb. She drifted toward the beckoning twinkle.
Marlo moved forward, the burrow narrowing steadily until, after a few hundred yards, it constricted into a dark, open portal. She sniffed the air. It smelled like ozone, like dust and electricity, like the smell just before lightning strikes.
Closing her eyes, Marlo breathed deeply to calm her frazzled nerves and then crossed the threshold into a humming chamber. Deep rumbling waves rattled her bones. Although she still couldn’t see, Marlo sensed the presence of something even darker than the darkness, a shadow in a nest of shadows waiting patiently for her to come one fatal step too close. Her heart galloped like a rabid, three-legged racehorse.
Dim neon bathed a shape that towered before her at the core of the chamber. A gorgeous spectrum of faraway light leaked faintly from a grate in the ceiling beyond the shadow, daring Marlo to come closer. Its color danced along the edges of the dark shape, making the shadow seem even more sinister in contrast.
“What the bloody heck is this place?” a voice boomed in the blackness.
Marlo jumped with shock.
“This is like that lame haunted house in the mall,” a familiar voice whined like a slow helium leak, “where they hire bums to dress up as monsters and pass out samples—”
“Pause it, Bordeaux,” another familiar voice snapped. “Let the dumb demon do its ‘oogie oogie’ thing so it can get its costume back to the shop before—”
Suddenly, harsh light and screams flooded the chamber. Marlo gasped.
At the center of the great, rounded burrow was a colossal, full-metal … rabbit. It was Frankenstein as imagined by Beatrix Potter, a carnival of grinning steel, painted in aggressively cheery pastels. At least nine feet tall, the freakish mountain of leering metal was perched atop a nest of barbed-wire grass. The creature, sculpture, object … whatever … shimmered softly, vibrating so fast that its edges blurred.
Marlo gulped. She fought to free her eyes from the rabbit’s blank, smiling eyes and the cold smirk that wrapped around its humming head. Once she tore her gaze away, she noticed five more tunnels branching out from the chamber and five terrified girls clad in awful sweatshirts and stirrup tights.
To Marlo’s left were skinny, bleach-blond Lyon Sheraton and her skinny, bleach-blond fashion-accessory-in-crime, Bordeaux Radisson. Figured that Lyon would be shipped off to Rapacia to make Marlo’s stay as excruciating as possible, Marlo thought. Lyon had been the bane of her nonexistence in Limbo and was primed to grow even … banier here in Rapacia. Lyon leveled a withering, fierce blue gaze at Marlo while Bordeaux, a few dippy seconds later, followed her lead.
Marlo and the other girls checked each other out with quick, darting glances. To her right was an African-English girl with cornrows peeking out from beneath her scarlet head scarf; a lumpy girl whose hair looked as if it had been cut with a food processor; and a Japanese girl with shocking pink bangs framing a chalk-white face.
Marlo scratched her arms. Her flesh felt like it was crawling with frozen fire.
The African-English girl shook her head and turned to leave. “This is barmy,” she said with a sneer of crooked white teeth. “I’m clearing off. Cheers.”
At that instant, golden gates shot down like gilded guillotines from the entrances of the six tunnels. The girl looked down at her orthopedic shoes, which were only an inch away from being open-toed sandals: hold the toes.
A voice erupted from the metal monstrosity:
“Welcome, all you greedy girls,
now don’t be so naive.
You’re my latest batch of grubby pearls,
I’d never let you leave.
So much for you to long for;
the rub is you can’t have it.
Feeling empty ’cuz you want more?
That’s my job, for I’m the Grabbit.”
The creature’s maddening smile somehow promised exhilaration and contentment. But it also creeped Marlo out.
Her heart pounded with longing. She wanted to get closer to the Grabbit, to embrace it, to please it, to become part of it. Yet her stomach was filled with molten dread. Marlo’s extremities tingled with terror and excitement. Even her ankles stung and throbbed, as if they were covered with tiny cuts…
Marlo looked down and realized that she was now, inexplicably, standing in barbed-wire grass, inches away from the Grabbit, her ankles scratched and bleeding. How long have I been standing here? she wondered in a haze. How did I get here? Marlo backed away and looked around her.
The chamber was a gaudy green-and-gold lair, overstuffed with opulent furnishings jumbled in incomprehensible heaps. It was like the estate sale of an old movie starlet who hadn’t left her Hollywood mansion for decades.
Lyon stepped alongside Marlo, not out of any kind of sisterhood or solidarity but to send a message to the other girls that she was the alpha deb around here, not the creepy little Goth girl.
“And what exactly is a Grabbit?” Lyon asked, her eyes narrowing into cold, twinkling sapphires. The eerie, ancient voice again thundered through the chamber:
“Pleased to meet you, one and all.
You’ll make fine inventory.
Now that you are in my thrall,
I’ll share a little story…”
2 · THE TAKiNG TREE
“ONCE THERE WAS an oleander bush that loved a little boy. Every day on his way to school, the boy would pass by the poisonous shrub, trembling with fear. The bush would sway its pointy, spear-shaped leaves coquettishly, and the boy would blanch, clutching his inhaler.
“One day, the boy hobbled past the bush. The bush waved its branches, stretching its blooms, which, if ingested, cause vomiting and fierce abdominal pain. The boy, shambling with terror, tripped on one of the bush’s lower branches and fell. He lay on the ground, crying. The oleander bush drank in the boy’s tears through its roots. The bush was happy. But it wanted more. Much more.”
Rapacia, the circle of Heck reserved for greedy kids, wasn’t exactly what Marlo had expected, she thought as she and the girls sat at the Grabbit’s cast-iron feet. Marlo had prepared herself for some kind of a haunted nunnery, a deathly dull place devoid of anything worth wanting.
But, instead, she found herself trapped in a dazzling treasure trove, like that cave in Ali Baba and the Fort
y Thieves—not that Marlo had actually read the book, per se, but she had skimmed the report she’d tricked Milton into writing for her.
“The boy grew older. One day, he shuffled quietly past the bush, praying it was dormant, when it shook itself awake.
“‘Give me some money,’ the oleander hissed.
“‘But I have no money,’ the boy croaked in reply. ‘Just allergies.’
“‘Get me some money or I will rub you with my jagged, prickly branches.’
“So the boy fetched the bush some money. And the bush was happy. But it wanted more. Much more.”
During the course of the Grabbit’s horrible fable, Marlo stared at a sparkling crystal chandelier above her that grew fainter and fainter with each passing moment. In fact, all the long-eared vice principal’s prized possessions were steadily evaporating into nothing.
Several burnished brass chutes supplied fresh valuables for the creature to covet, but as soon as they appeared, they began their slow fade into nothingness. It was as if the whole warren were caught in a state of pointless, perpetual vanishment.
“And time went by and the boy came back, now an old sagging sack of withered flesh draped casually over a skeleton of brittle bones. The oleander bush perked up as it smelled the boy approach.
“‘I want—’
“‘I have nothing left to give,’ wheezed the ninety-year-old boy.
“‘Then I have a gift for you,’ the oleander bush replied coolly.
“‘What?’ the boy whispered, clutching his tightening chest.
“‘Release.’
“The boy smiled a weary smile and stooped down, grabbing a fistful of leathery leaves in his arthritic hands.
“‘Come, boy,’ the bush said. ‘Sit down and rest … forever.’
“And the bush was happy.”
The Grabbit stopped, its maliciously merry expression expressing nothing. The silence made Marlo uneasy. Awkward. Anxious. She traded looks with the other girls, seated cross-legged just beyond the Grabbit’s metal feet.
“So, I take it that you’re the nasty bush and humanity or something is the little boy” Marlo hypothesized aloud. “Always feeding something that will never be full until someone else is all used up. Right?”
Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck Page 1
