Yojuanna jerked in fits and starts. Her face was a scrolling menu of expressions—joy, determination, sultriness, despair, and mania. She also had a disturbing tendency to burst into static when she clapped her hands together.
One of the demons tapped a microphone with his finger. “Testing, testing,” he repeated dully.
Yojuanna waved her hands in the air as if she just didn’t care. She pumped her fists in front of her, sparring with an imaginary foe. Then, the pop screen saver began to lose herself entirely.
“Ugh,” the demon said to his partner with a shrug of his bony shoulders. “Before, at least she had a good beat and was easy to dance to. Now she just creeps me out with all that hopping and depressing gibberish.”
The digital diva continued to degrade as she lapsed into a blur of tiny jagged squares. Then, suddenly, the collection of blurry boxes that was Yojuanna just winked out of existence, leaving behind a small, hot-white throb of light that dimmed nearly imperceptibly. The demon sighed as he knelt for a rope by the microphone stand.
“Good riddance … help me with this, will you?”
The other demon worker scrambled up onto the rostrum. The two yanked ropes through pulleys mounted on the ceiling until a bright green banner rose above the stage: WELCOME TO MALLVANA DAY: EVERYTHING MUST GO!
“They must be having one heck of a sale,” Marlo murmured. “Everything must go …”
She glanced down at an antique great-great-grandfather clock in the corner. Its face read half past VII, which Marlo assumed meant seven.
“Everything must go … including me!”
She hopped down from the crates and saw a huge painting in another corner covered by a billowing gray drop cloth. The exposed corner revealed a brilliant green … rabbit’s foot.
Curious, Marlo tugged the cloth free. She gasped. Before her was a nearly life-sized portrait of the Grabbit, ancient by the looks of it—cracked paint, chipped varnish, and canvas peeling out of its intricately carved silver-leaf frame. Marlo’s exhaustion-rimmed eyes narrowed.
“Perfect,” she purred.
She knelt beneath the towering portrait and worried the peeling flaps of the canvas with her fingers until she had freed the entire painting.
“I might just pull a rabbit out of a hat after all,” she snickered as she rolled the canvas up tightly, bundled it in her arms, and hurried down the deserted hallway.
33 · POETiC iNJUSTiCE
MILTON COULD BARELY breathe inside the scratchy burlap sack the demon guard had pulled over his head. Through a slight tear in the fabric, he could make out the walls of a tunnel, which were the color of bruises and contusions. Sporadic flashes of electricity made the tunnel seem somehow alive, creating a horrible confusion of trembling shadows.
“Owwwrrmphh!” Milton protested through the gag in his mouth as the guard shoved him into a gleaming black stagecoach with the two other boys.
“What’s wrong with him?” the stagecoach driver asked the demon guard. “Speech impediment?”
“No, Byron. Just mouthy.”
“It’s Lord Byron!” the driver snapped. “And if being mouthy were a crime, half the employees here would have scarves in their gobs!”
Lord Byron peeled Milton’s chin free of the sack and untied his kerchief. Milton stretched his aching jaws. His mouth felt like a lint trap after drying a dozen wool sweaters.
“Thanks,” Milton managed through cracked, dried lips.
“I assure you,” Lord Byron replied, “it has nothing to do with kindness. It’s just that, as a lover of words, I cannot tolerate them being muffled. Language must be allowed to run free, like a stallion.”
Lord Byron cracked a whip over his skittish horse’s albino head. “Get a move on, Leucous!” the veiny red demon shouted.
The stagecoach lurched forward. The three captive passengers were slammed to the back of the carriage.
“Ouch!” one boy yelped from beneath his burlap hood.
I need to figure a way out of this, Milton thought desperately. A kid like me wouldn’t last a second in Sadia. It’s full of bullies … big, bad bullies … bullies like …
Milton gulped.
Damian. Of course. He’s dead, which means he’s here, which means that—being the baron of barbarity—he has to be in Sadia. They’ve-probably already-put his face on all their money. I’m doomed. Milton tried to shake his mind clear of anxiety. He had to think of something…
Milton leaned forward. “Lord Byron?” he asked.
“Byron!” cackled one of the boys. “What a nerd name!”
“Weren’t you a poet?” Milton continued, hoping to establish some rapport with the driver. “Up on the Stage?”
“I was the poet!” Lord Byron shot back. “And still am!”
“I’m. a poet, too,” brayed the donkey boy. “Here I sit, brokenhearted …”
“I will have no lavatory doggerel in my carriage!” Lord Byron ordered.
The demon stagecoach driver turned to Milton and smiled: a jagged fence of exposed teeth with lips curled on the inside. “Would you like to hear one of my poems?”
Of all the questions in the universe, “Would you like to hear one of my poems?” is the hardest, as there is no good way of answering it.
Milton sighed. “Yeah, sure.”
“While it’s not yet fully refined,” the demon went on, “it is evidence that my Byronic mastery of the English language did not expire upon my death.”
He coughed, clearing a throat that Milton could plainly hear was clear to begin with.
“Bunnies will go to France, and they will look up teachers’ underpants, then do the latest bunny dance—”
Laughter exploded from beneath the burlap hoods of the two other boys.
“Underpants!” they chortled in unison.
Lord Byron stiffened. “It’s experimental,” he said defensively. “I obviously don’t literally mean underpants, per se, but instead the feelings that we all keep hidden away—”
“I think I know one of your poems,” Milton interrupted. “One of your old ones.”
Lord Byron puffed out his exposed chest until the ribs stuck out like a batting cage.
“How flattering,” he said in a sorry excuse for false modesty.
Milton dredged his mind for scraps of remembered poetry until a verse surfaced.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever …,” Milton said.
“KEATS!!” Lord Byron bellowed. “THAT WAS KEATS!!”
“Byron! Byron! Face like a moron!” the two hooded boys chanted.
“THAT ISN’T EVEN A PROPER RHYME!” the peeved poet screeched.
Lord Byron slowed his horse’s canter down to a trot and reached behind his seat.
“I’ll teach you shabby scapegraces that words are a privilege, not a right!”
He stopped his horse. Then he pulled out a handful of rags, jumped down from the driver’s box, and proceeded to gag the two hooded boys.
“It astes ike oogers and not,” one boy groused.
“You should be so lucky,” Lord Byron muttered as he stuffed Milton’s kerchief back into his mouth.
Lord Byron climbed back onto the driver’s box. He snapped the reins, bringing his draw-and-quarter horse to a full gallop.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for no one,” he grumbled. “It’s just nature showing off. Keats … that birdbrained, winged wannabe, he couldn’t tell a good poem from a cuttlebone … wait.”
Lord Byron looked down from the stagecoach at the mottled red and purple channel. The way was blocked by a series of bright orange cones.
“I need this like I need an X-ray,” the driver groaned.
A large, handmade sign hung on the wall, with an arrow pointing to a branch of the channel: SADISTIC CHANNEL REPAIR UNDER WAY. SHORTCUT TO SADIA.
The pulsating meat demon flicked the reins, and the stagecoach veered down the bypass. They soon arrived at a grand foyer, carpeted in blood-red shag and flanked by two huge Gothic columns. A paper banner hu
ng from the ceiling of the channel: UNWELCOME TO NORTH SADIA. A tall, black-robed figure emerged from the foyer and staggered shakily to meet the demon and his cargo.
“Whoa, Leucous!” Lord Byron called to his nervous horse. The stagecoach came to a squeaky halt.
Milton’s eyelashes brushed the lens of his glasses as he pressed his eye against the gash in the hood.
The demon grabbed a burgundy pouch next to him. The disgustingly visible veins of his arms bulged from the strain, though the pouch seemed no bigger than a change purse. Lord Byron hopped out onto the ground. Milton rubbed his burlap hood against the glass of the stagecoach window until the slit aligned perfectly with his right lens.
“So,” the teetering figure said in a higher-than-expected voice, “you have what we are waiting for?”
“What?” Lord Byron said. “Oh yes. Atrocious grammar.”
He patted the velvet pouch he held in his trembling hand. “I’d like to take it inside myself, if you don’t mind.”
The robed entity paused, swaying like a tree in a storm.
“Of course,” it said finally. “As you wish. Only, I thought you might want to hurry to Rapacia and deliver poem for ceremony.”
“Poem?” Lord Byron said, smiling. “Really?”
“Yes,” the figure replied. “Grabbit wants poem for end of Mallvana ceremony. But if you want to deliver diamond personally, I am sure Keats can give poem.”
“Keats!” Lord Byron screeched. The veins and arteries laced across his skin pumped with fury. It was as if he were having a heart attack on the outside.
Milton leaned against the stagecoach door to give himself a better view.
“Yes.” The robed figure nodded. “He was just here. He is very excited about giving poem.”
Lord Byron flushed all over, darkening from red straight to purple, ignoring fuchsia in the process.
“I’ll pluck that preening parakeet with my poetic prowess!” the bright red demon alliterated as he turned on his exposed heel. The robed figure coughed for his attention. He swung around, his red-rimmed eyes quivering with impatience. The figure held out its tiny hand.
“Oh, right,” Lord Byron said vaguely. “Of course.”
He wrested a larger-than-normal diamond from the sack and dropped it into the figure’s hand. The weight of it made the robed figure wobble and lurch.
“Thank you,” the figure replied. “You do your job good.”
“Well,” corrected Lord Byron as he ran back to his black coach. He stopped suddenly by the carriage door. “I almost forgot …”
The wooden door swung open. Milton tumbled onto the ground. Through the slit, he could see Lord Byron grabbing the other two boys with his slimy meat hooks and flinging them out of the stagecoach.
The demon climbed onto the driver’s box. Leucous reared into the air, whinnying, his muzzle flecked with foam.
With a snap of a whip, Lord Byron and his unsettling draw-and-quarter horse charged into the swollen darkness of the tunnel of bruises.
The looming, listing figure stood silent. Its black robe billowed in the rippling gust of sour wind from down the channel. In the crook of its arms, it held the dense, despairing, and dazzling diamond. The figure shook off its hood, freeing its pink hair.
“All clear,” the Japanese girl said as she tousled her cotton-candy bob.
From behind a column emerged a squat girl with a haircut that was either really, really bad or the latest thing; Milton couldn’t be sure. The girl looked down the Sadistic Channel nervously.
“You think he’s really gone?” the girl asked.
A voice as thick and dark as a smoker’s chest X-ray gurgled from beneath the Japanese girl. “Norm, can you get Tokyo off of me?”
“It is Takara,” the Japanese girl replied as the girl with the hacked-up hair—named Norm, apparently—helped her off the shoulders of another person: a hulking, big-boned tank of a girl who had served as the robed figure’s sturdy trunk. The frail Japanese girl cupped the diamond in her trembling hands. Norm and the big, creepy girl peered down, mouths slack with awe, at the glittering jewel.
“It is so heavy!” Takara said. “But so small. It looks like tear.”
Behind them, a Gothic column flanking the grand foyer tilted, then slammed into the other. Both pillars smashed into shards of paper and dust as they tumbled to the blood-red-carpeted floor.
“Good thing veiny poet demon gone!” Takara said.
Norm looked over at the damage. “Yeah,” she replied. “No wonder the drama department was going to throw them out.”
The beefy girl—Where have I seen her before? Milton thought as he eyed the scene from the ground—blew her blond bangs out of her face. Her wide-set eyes twinkled with greed as she gazed down upon the diamond. “Let me see it.”
Norm looked up at the strange girl’s squared head and thick features with distrust. “You are seeing it, Amandi.”
“You know what I mean,” the hefty girl snapped.
Norm and Takara looked at one another. Takara shrugged and rolled the diamond into Amandi’s palm. Amandi—What a weird name, Milton thought—was the only human so far who didn’t struggle with the diamond’s surprising weight.
“It’s … -perfect,” she said as she licked beads of sweat from her fuzzy upper lip.
The girls looked at Amandi suspiciously.
“So what next?” Takara asked.
Norm smirked, shaking her head. “Well, I guess that’s up to Marlo,” she replied with a shrug. “Wherever she is.”
“Marlo!” Milton yelped with surprise, though to the diamond-distracted girls beyond him, it sounded more like a muffled, “Mlow!”
34 · UNDERNEATH iT MALL
THE THREE GIRLS led Milton and the other boys from the stagecoach through a dark, dusty tunnel that smelled of mold and cobwebs. Barely able to make out any light sources through the small tear in his burlap sack, Milton was forced to rely on an endless stream of bickering and chattering to find his way.
“This place is creepy,” Norm commented as she crept cautiously in the dim light.
“And water is wet,” the larger girl, Amandi, answered, in a voice that seemed strangely familiar to Milton. “Thanks for the update.”
The girls tromped through the catacomb. Broken glass crunched beneath their shoes.
Amandi squinted back at Norm. “Nice hair, by the way,” she said. “Where did you get it done, Stupor Cuts?”
“Actually” Norm replied defensively, patting her fiercely uneven hair, “I was a compulsive hair chewer—before. I’d always chomp on the ends of my hair when I was nervous, which was a lot. And, one day in my after-school hairdressing class—”
“Hairdressing class,” Amandi repeated with disbelief. “That’s priceless! Couldn’t the school afford mirrors? And scissors? I’ve heard of bad hair days, but you’re having a bad hair eternity!”
“So tell me, Norm,” Takara, the Japanese girl, chirped, wedging herself between the two fuming girls, “how did you die?”
“Like I was saying,” Norm continued, “one day after class, I just fainted and was taken to the hospital. I kind of went in and out of consciousness, but I heard my doctor talking about how the stomach can’t digest hair and that mine was plugged up, like a big hair clog in a drain. The nurse said the clog looked like a dead rat.”
After a long pause, Takara added soothingly, “That is very interesting way to go, Norm.”
Amandi snorted. “Yeah, fascinating,” she said dryly. “In a ‘hair today, gone tomorrow’ kind of way.”
“Well, then, Amandi,” Norm replied in a huff, blowing away strands of nonexistent bangs from her eyes, “I bet I know what killed you.”
“What?”
“Your face … because it’s sure killing me.”
“Shhh,” Takara interrupted. “I hear something.”
Footsteps plodded nearby in the darkness ahead. Sharp voices, slapping against the stone and mortar walls, filled the stifling air around them.
“That was, like, so major cool! The way he just crashed right into the mirror! He must’ve been all, Oh snap!’”
“What did I tell yeh, Bordeaux, ’bout saying ‘snap’?!”
“Whatever. That demon with the pretty blue feathers, the one driving the stagecoach, reminded me of a blue parakeet I used to have, Papa Smurf”
“Papa Smurf?”
“Yeah, he used to peck at himself in the mirror all day.”
“Lyon, I thought yeh were jess a glaikit skinny dip. How did ye know that daft demon would crash inta the mirror like that?”
“Well, I did a little research, and I knew the driver was, like, super vain and would think his reflection was another demon trying to challenge him.”
“Research? But I thought you, like, totally got the idea from that weird note you found on your chair—?”
“Zip it, Bordeaux.”
In the dim light of the tunnel, just beyond a network of large dripping pipes, Milton could see three figures: two looked like skinny blond cheerleaders on their day off, while the other reminded Milton of a brooding storm cloud stuffed into an ugly sweat suit.
“Lyon!” Takara smiled as the three girls walked into view. “You made it!”
“Where’s Marlo?” Lyon said with a scowl. “Did she run away again?”
“Mowlo,” Milton inadvertently gurgled through his filthy spit-soaked kerchief. We must be close to Rapacia, he surmised.
“She’s going to meet us later to help get the diamonds to the Grabbit,” Norm explained.
“I don’t believe it,” Lyon said with disgust and dismay. “Actually I do believe it. We’re down here doing all the dirty work while she waits all safe and cozy up in Mallvana to take the credit.”
Bordeaux gestured to the three hooded boys. “Who are they?” she asked.
“Forget them,” Amandi said. “They were on the stagecoach.”
“Oh,” Bordeaux replied with a faraway look. “We just, like, left ours. Whoopsie … our bad! Were we supposed to take them? What’ll we do with them?”
“We’ll dump them off to Bubb when we’re through,” Amandi interrupted.
Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck Page 17
