Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go

by Dale E. Basye

  Suddenly the dense black smoke cleared in one great whoosh. A terrible, grating metal squeak sliced through the cavern as an ornate iron gate decorated with sugared spikes, candied skulls, and barbed licorice labored open roughly forty feet behind the stage. Beyond it were patches of fluorescent light, winking in nervous flickers through the haze from some vast plaza beyond. Even worse than the metal-on-metal screech was the deathly quiet that followed.

  A listless group of grubby children gathered inside the gates, gawking mutely at the new arrivals. They scattered in terror as a sharp clack of hooves broke the silence. A squat, puffy old creature strutted toward Milton and Marlo.

  The creature’s feet were shiny cloven hooves with gleaming, diamond-studded buckles. The legs atop these fancy hooves were like those of a fat, scabby goat. Above, mounds of scaly flesh were stuffed inside a filthy muumuu, cinched tight by a slithering snakeskin belt—with the snake still inside. Worst of all was its face—her face—a lumpy leather avalanche with a mouth rimmed in blood-red lipstick and fiendish scratches that served as eyes. She looked kind of like one of those bullfrogs that swells up, except this particular one had forgotten to swell down.

  She stopped just inside the gates, her gruesome face impossible to read. Between her hooves poked the nose—three, actually—of an overly groomed Pekingese with a little something extra in the head department. Three pink bows encircled its three necks. It sniffed the air and growled a malicious three-part harmony.

  Milton gulped hard. Even the impossible-to-faze Marlo fidgeted in her vintage granny boots. Marlo looked at her trembling brother. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  The female creature beckoned the children forward with a curl of her long, manicured claws. Marlo and Milton traded anxious glances, then marched beneath the arm of another red plastic devil. Above the devil was a sign that read YOU MUST BE THIS SHORT TO ENTER HECK.

  They stepped through the open gates and into a sprawling warehouse of sorts with a low, oppressive ceiling and dirty beige walls. The floor of the warehouse was covered with stained gray carpet that smelled like cat pee and instant soup mix. The carpet was striped with clear plastic runners, apparently to keep the floor from getting any dirtier, though Milton couldn’t see how that was possible. Scattered piles of broken toys, broken bottles, and sniveling children with broken spirits were strewn across the facility with no rhyme or reason. The whole place was like a drab, endless day-care center. It oozed tedium and cold despair.

  The woman/creature/whatever smiled sweetly, showing several rows of rotten yellow fangs. Behind her the gates began to squeal to a close.

  “I am Bea ‘Elsa’ Bubb. Welcome to Heck,” she hissed. “Population: Infinity…”

  Two bells tolled loudly as the gate clanged shut.

  “…plus two.”

  3 · IN BEA’S HIVE

  MARLO AND MILTON sat on a crinkly floral-patterned couch covered with plastic. Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s office and its owner both exuded a distinctive odor: part mothballs, part rose water, part disinfectant, part sour milk, part menthol rub, with a sharp undercurrent somewhere between vomit and neglected cat box.

  On the wall were three posters. The first was of a mangy, one-eared cat hanging from a cactus, perched over a roaring fire. The caption read “Why hang in there?” The next showed a mother scorpion scuttling for safety beneath a desert stone. Slimy white larval babies nestled on her back: “Go crawl under a rock.” The last was a watercolor cartoon of a man being fit for a noose atop a rickety gallows: “Today is the last day of the rest of your life.”

  Across from Marlo and Milton was a massive mahogany desk, ornately carved with demons and smiling clowns with large, moist eyes. Atop the desk was a marble, tombstone-shaped nameplate with BEA “ELSA” BUBB, PRINCIPAL OF DARKNESS etched in Gothic letters.

  The pudgy demoness sat behind her desk, her dog in her lap. She stroked one of its heads. Another head cleaned a paw while the remaining one growled suspiciously.

  “Now, now, Cerberus,” she cooed. “They always smell like that at first.”

  Milton nervously cleared his throat. “So is this…you know…he—?”

  Principal Bubb shook her swollen claw at Milton. “There will be none of that potty mouth down here. Of course this isn’t…that place. You’re in Heck.”

  Marlo leaned forward, her brow knit. “Heck? What the…”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb glowered. Her eyes—inky black pupils adrift in a pus-yellow sea—glowed like fanned embers.

  “…heck,” Marlo faltered, “is Heck?”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb smiled coldly and clasped her claws together.

  “Rather like an h-e-double-hockey-sticks for children,” she said. “Heck is where the souls of the darned toil for all eternity—or until they turn eighteen, whichever comes first.”

  Marlo and Milton absentmindedly locked hands. They noticed that they were actually (eww) touching and instantly let go.

  Milton swallowed. “Um, how do we turn eighteen if we’re, you know, dead?”

  Principal Bubb rolled her eyes, the vertical gashes of her pupils settling on a stain on the ceiling that resembled dried puke.

  “Have you ever heard of the term ‘old soul,’ dearie?” she asked rhetorically. “Just because we leave the disgusting meat of our former selves up on the Stage…”

  Milton and Marlo furrowed their eyebrows.

  “The Surface,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb repeated slowly, as if she were talking to a banana slug with a learning disability. “We cast those gauche earthly vehicles aside and our souls move on…like a snake shedding its skin. The soul inside us continues to age. And, like you awful children, young souls aren’t fully accountable for what they have done—yet. Though if I had my way…”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb seemed lost in dark, secret thoughts. “Anyway,” she said, shaking her head. An earwig tumbled out of one of her pointed ears. “The bleeding hearts upstairs have created this cozy little place for despicable little brats such as yourselves to be rehabilitated and punished—mostly punished—so that when your souls reach maturity, they can be judged and sentenced to the full extent of the law. Your ultimate fate is not decided yet, though if you start out here, your everlasting prospects are grim.”

  Cerberus sniffed the air. His heads growled. Principal Bubb stroked his back.

  “What is it, Cerberus sweetie? Did the rat pâté disagree with you?”

  The principal inhaled deeply. “Is someone making s’mores?”

  Marlo hungrily eyed a glob of burnt marshmallow glued to her bangs, pulled it off, and popped it into her mouth.

  “What hap-happens after that?” Milton stammered, aghast.

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb sighed like an ancient bellows. She reached for her top drawer and pulled out two bright purple gelatinous candies.

  “Here,” the principal said, dolling out the candies to the children. “Have some Gummo Badgers.”

  The children eyed the candies. With razor-sharp teeth and claws meticulously sculpted from corn syrup, the candies resembled their vicious, beady-eyed namesakes but looked far more delectable. Ignoring all cautions about taking candy from strangers—and Bea “Elsa” Bubb was about as strange as they came—the two ravenous children snatched the treats and popped them into their mouths.

  Not bad, Milton thought. Kind of like marmalade, with just the slightest soaplike aftertaste, but Milton was so hungry he couldn’t afford to be picky. After the first few chomps another unwanted effect became evident: Milton’s—and Marlo’s—mouths were soon cemented shut.

  The ancient demoness leaned close and smirked. “That’s better,” she hissed with breath reeking of old coffee and rotten cavities. “Now sit back, shut up, and I’ll give you the official spiel. Maybe I’ll even be able to catch my favorite show.”

  She scratched her back against her chair.

  “Anyway,” she said, grimacing, “just like up there, you’ll be going to school, except the stakes are a little higher…or mo
re likely lower in your case. Each soul year you’ll be given your SATs—Soul Aptitude Tests. Based on these rigorous, highly standardized exams, your eternal fate will be decided. On graduation day you’ll be given your dysploma, thus dissolving our unfortunate relationship. Isn’t that nice?”

  Milton and Marlo struggled to answer, but all they managed were a few muffled grunts.

  Principal Bubb straightened a stack of tattered yellowed papers on her desk, shoved them aside, and set a mummified monkey’s paw on top of the pile as a paperweight.

  “You’re in Limbo now,” she said tartly, “the first of the Nine Circles of Heck. The others are Rapacia, Blimpo, Fibble, Snivel, Precocia, Lipptor, Sadia, and Dupli-City. Limbo is smack dab in the middle of the No Time Zone, meaning that timewise, there is no meaning, if you take my meaning. Think of it as detention, where you’ve got all the time under the world to mull over your new situation, to really think about why you’re here—”

  Why are we here? Milton tried to interject, but it came out more like “Wmm ahhh whu heh?”

  “Shhhh,” the principal hissed dismissively, before continuing with a speech she seemed to know by heart—if she’d had a heart, that is. “Hours, minutes, seconds…millenniums… fail to pass. Not even souls age here, which is why I don’t look a century past 2,900.”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb absentmindedly preened at her grotesque reflection in a burnished-bronze skull cup on her desk. Marlo gagged softly. There was something deeply nauseating about this creature, which resembled a swollen sack of tarantulas, thinking that by smoothing down a row of sprouted wart hairs she was somehow “prettying up.”

  “You’ll still attend classes, of course, but they’re more to familiarize yourself with how things work here than anything else,” the demoness continued. “For the time being, you are in Limbo, where time has no meaning, and where all newbies go until we sort out exactly which circle of Heck they’ll ultimately be assigned to. Every case has to go through our Department of Unendurable Redundancy, Bureaucracy, and Redundancy and they are notoriously, shall we say, thorough, so expect a bit of a wait.”

  Milton stood up, trembling with indignation. He forced his lips free from their Gummo Badger prison. “I don’t understand!” he shouted. “I can see why my sister’s here…”

  Marlo shot her brother a dirty look as bright purple drool trickled from the corner of her mouth.

  “But I’m a straight-A student!” Milton yelped. “A Boy Scout! Chess Club legend! I take piano lessons! I brush my teeth after every—”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb rose and leaned into Milton’s face. “You’re a thief,” she hissed with a flick of her forked tongue. “And use your inside voice, please.”

  “A thief!?” Milton was outraged. “But I never…” He looked at Marlo, who was smirking on the couch.

  Milton’s eyes bugged. “So I’m facing eternal…darnation… for a tube of kiwi-cantaloupe lip gloss?”

  Marlo managed a chuckle through her candy-sealed mouth.

  “She tricked me!” Milton yelped. “I didn’t know I was stealing! This is unfair!”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb clapped her claws together with a dry, leathery slap.

  Instantly she, her desk, and the children were hurled backward through a long, stone tunnel.

  4 · LAIR OF THE LIAR

  MILTON, MARLO, AND Bea “Elsa” Bubb plunged into a dark, high-tech lair of security screens, blinking computers, and a long electronic Netherworld Soul Exchange (NSE) ticker scrolling gibberish and numbers.

  Principal Bubb rose from her chair and clacked toward an immense filing cabinet adorned with padlocks. She extended a long rigid nail cut into intricate notches and fit it inside one of the locks. With a twist she opened the lock and pulled out two files from the drawer.

  The two files were not created equal. In fact, if both were placed on the scales of justice, one would have catapulted the other straight up to the Galactic Order Department headquarters.

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb tossed the files on her desk, plopped back down into her seat, and opened the first, which was crammed with papers.

  “Marlo Fauster,” she said, flipping through the countless infractions. “An open-and-shut case.”

  Marlo grinned with pride.

  Principal Bubb opened the other file. It was empty save for a Post-it note.

  “And Milton Fauster.” She chuckled. “This is pathetic.”

  Written on the Post-it were the following words:

  one act of petty larceny

  just before departure.

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s snicker trailed away. This was the sorriest excuse for a sin she had ever seen. It struck her as some kind of a mistake, except that making a mistake here was a mistake never made. Heck had run as a faultlessly foul machine for longer than anyone could remember…before memory, even. Principal Bubb wasn’t about to let some ghastly goody-goody undo all she had worked so hard to uphold down here.

  Milton was quivering with righteous anger. “I didn’t do it! My sister’s the evil one! Just ask anybody!”

  Cerberus, coiled beneath Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s hooves like a furry, three-headed cobra, looked up at Milton’s outburst. The ancient demoness put Operation Cover-up into motion.

  “The devil’s in the details,” she said coolly, opening her top drawer and pulling out a large remote control. It was a real beauty, with more blinking buttons than a blinking-button factory. She waved it at a wall of screens, and the cavern exploded with noise and light. Marlo and Milton covered their ears as grainy video footage streamed across the massive screens.

  Marlo, as seen from a department store security camera, examines several large bottles of perfume: Siren’s Song (“Drive Him to His Doom”), Aroma Borealis, and Scentless Tragedy. She scoots like a crab down the counter, fingering tubes of lipstick and mascara. Suddenly Marlo yells and points toward the other side of the store. The heavily made-up shop girl pivots her head in the same direction. In the blink of an eye Marlo grabs a fistful of expensive cosmetics and drops them off the edge of the screen into a makeup bag. The motion freezes while the camera zooms in on Milton’s blurry self, cradling the bag and staring obliviously off into space.

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb snapped off the TVs. Milton put his head in his hands and moaned. “I don’t get it,” he said. “One little crime puts me away with Miss Demeanor over here…”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb folded her arms together and glared at Milton.

  “The Big Guy Upstairs doesn’t grade on a curve,” she said. “While you may have frittered away the majority of your young life being a good little sheep up on the Stage, as you can plainly see now, it was all for naught.

  “Your last sin is typically your greatest,” Principal Bubb continued. “Your act of thievery—whether intentional or not—counted so heavily because it was your very last, with no chance to redeem yourself before your sticky end.”

  She shifted her weight from one buttock to another, and possibly a third. “Up there, it’s all about first impressions. Here, it’s all about your last.”

  The lumpy lizard-like demoness put her hooves up on her desk. “Do you have any idea how many souls are upstairs in the penthouse?”

  Marlo and Milton traded a glance.

  “Go on. Hazard a guess,” Principal Bubb dared.

  Marlo finally wrenched her mouth free of the sticky Gummo Badger candy.

  “A million?” Marlo ventured, her lips feeling like they had been injected with Novocain. “A billion?”

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s eyes crinkled with cold amusement. “Not even warm…and it’s always warm here. Try seventeen.”

  Marlo’s and Milton’s jaws practically dropped to the stone floor.

  “Yes,” she continued. “Of all the humans throughout history, only seventeen made the cut.”

  Marlo leaned forward with a look of utter disbelief. “George Washington?”

  “Ah, yes, who could never tell a lie,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb spat back. “But he seemed to have
no problem owning slaves and leading thousands to war.”

  “Joan of Arc?” Milton chimed in.

  “French,” she answered.

  “Mother Theresa?” Marlo asked.

  “She once had the gall to take a day off after contracting dysentery.”

  Milton shook his head. “Of all the things that don’t make sense here, that makes the least.”

  Principal Bubb sneered. “I don’t expect your just-dead brains to understand the nuances of our afterlife system. Your heads are still warm with how things were. But you’ll have plenty of time to understand how things work, believe me.

  “Suffice it to say that there is a just reward for all creatures, great and not so great. Mother Theresa is enjoying a perfectly acceptable hereafter. It’s just that the deluxe afterlife suite with all the divine trimmings is reserved for a select few. Her accommodations in Sixth Heaven are comfortable and near beatific, merely without the lavish frills and exclusive privileges, and with only limited access to the main grounds. But the buffet, I hear, is to die for.”

  She settled back into her plush velveteen rabbit–upholstered chair, scooted closer to her desk, and pulled out two long pieces of parchment paper from her top drawer.

  “As much as I’m enjoying our little chat,” Principal Bubb said coolly, “we must get back to business.”

  She placed two lengthy contracts before them. “I just need your grubby signatures here and here,” she said as her claws scraped the paper.

  Milton leaned over the contract, scrutinizing it through his one good lens.

  by and between Heck, a branch of the Galactic Order Department, itself an independent offshoot of the Cosmic Omnipotence and Regulation Entity, hereinafter, whether singular or plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, terrestrial, extraterrestrial, and/or interdimensional, designated as “Soul Holder,” which expression shall include Soul Holder’s executors, administrators, assigns, and successors in interest, and Milton Fauster, hereinafter, designated as “Soul Relinquisher,” witnesseth this legally binding covenant.