Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go

by Dale E. Basye

  “All right, all right…I guess just one little bruise won’t spoil my next masterwork. But just one punch…”

  Damian leaned toward Milton and removed his glasses.

  “…and keep it clean.”

  One of the redheaded tormentors snickered and, without hesitation, gave Milton a quick jab to the eye.

  “Oww!” he yelped, clutching his burning eye.

  Damian delicately put Milton’s glasses back on, then grabbed the twin thugs by the scruffs of their thick necks and threw them toward the purple dinosaur.

  “Noooooooooooo!” they cried in unison as the overgrown lizard scooped up the twins into his smothering Jurassic arms.

  “I love you, you love me. Darned for all eternity…”

  The happy creature suffocated the two struggling delinquents with kisses and dragged them away.

  Damian straightened his thin black tie.

  “I’ll see beating you later…I mean, be seeing you later.”

  Damian strutted away, pushing several boys aside for no reason.

  Virgil wiped his brow. “Thanks, man.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Milton mumbled painfully. “Really, don’t. At least not until the swelling goes down.”

  He walked over to the Automat machines and searched for a particular slot. Milton stooped down, slid open the little glass door, and pulled out a sickening yet strangely comforting slab of liver. Beneath the glistening, soft pink gland, was a note. Milton looked around cautiously and snatched it up.

  Milton,

  As you can tell by the barely legible handwriting, it’s me, your sister. I had a hunch you’d be needing another piece of liver. It’s the girl’s lunch, dinner, whatever period and I needed to let you know something: I’m going to escape. Really soon. I’m not sure how exactly, but you’ll know when I try. Everyone will know probably. I know I haven’t been the best sister, but, deep down, I think you’re really not all that bad, for a little brother, anyway. If you need to get a hold of me before I bolt, let us correspond via liver since no one in their right mind would eat the stuff.

  Later,

  M

  Milton stood motionless for a moment before thrusting the note deep into his lederhosen. He walked back to Virgil in a daze, grappling with new thoughts and emotions. Marlo was planning another escape. If she was successful, he would be left here alone. If not, what would happen to her? Most disturbing of all, though, was the glimmer of fondness that peeked out of the note. This meant that she was scared, and she was never scared, which was scary, especially to someone who always was. Scared, that is.

  Virgil hovered closer. He must be a close talker, Milton thought. Milton’s personal space, however, was more like a city block.

  Then, as if he were about to burst from the pressure of a grand, wonderful, wriggling secret, Virgil said in a whisper, “I’m breaking out.”

  Milton removed his liver eye patch, put his glasses back on, and scrutinized Virgil’s face. He had a dark mass of freckles between his upturned nose and gentle eyes. “Maybe it’s your diet.”

  Virgil shook his head. “No, out of here. Tonight.”

  Milton leaned close to Virgil. “Really? How?”

  Virgil patted the pocket of his bulging lederhosen. “I got a map. We’d be home by morning. So,” he continued with an infectious twinkle in his eyes, “you with me?”

  This was an excellent example of synchronicity, Milton mused: a coincidence that really isn’t. But Milton had no idea how or when Marlo was planning to break out.

  “Wait a second,” said Milton, regaining his usual sense of caution. “How did you get a map?”

  “I saw a guard get chewed out by his supervisor this morning for smiling, so I limped by, flinching and crying, begging the guard not to beat me again, because I can’t help how loud I breathe. The guard got a promotion on the spot because I was so pathetic. Then, later, when I got out of the nurse’s office because of my hand, the guard snuck up to me and dropped a rolled-up piece of paper at my feet. By the time I picked it up, he was gone.”

  “And you trust a demon guard,” Milton said skeptically.

  “I’m a trusting person,” Virgil replied. “They can’t take that away from me.”

  “I don’t know,” Milton mumbled. “It just seems too easy.”

  Milton watched the singing purple dinosaur corral a herd of unsuspecting boys for a group hug. Their screams made him tremble.

  He sighed. What did escape even mean? Did he think it could be as simple as returning to his old life, already in progress, like waking up from a bad dream? Or would he be a ghost doomed to haunt some creepy mansion on the edge of town forever and ever, with only stray cats and kooks to keep him company?

  Milton’s thoughts were dragged back to his impending detention with Damian.

  Not only had Damian somehow become more calculated and fluent with his cruelty, he had been given a blank check by the Powers That Be Evil to become as sadistic as he possibly could, for as long as he possibly wanted. And he was about to cash that check all over Milton. Who knows? Milton thought. Maybe Virgil’s map would lead them out of this nightmare.

  “Well, when you’ve lost your life, what else do you have to lose?” Milton said. Whatever escape meant, he decided, it couldn’t possibly be worse than eternal darnation with Damian.

  He sighed, wiped away a sooty smudge from his broken glasses, and grinned. “Let’s get the heck out of here!”

  MIDDLEWORD

  To live in Limbo is to live in a pit full of not-so-quicksand, waiting. Just…waiting. It’s suffering without the torment.

  What’s the point of Limbo, you may ask impatiently, hoping to jump to a hasty conclusion? Well, just hold your skittish ponies, now. Limbo isn’t just nothing. It’s the excruciating awareness of nothing.

  Think of Limbo as a big, slow spiritual laundry that is trying to cleanse you of impatience. Time doesn’t pass, but that doesn’t mean nothing happens: it just never happens fast enough. And in the waiting is the lesson.

  You know when you’re in the dentist’s office, flipping through those horrible, ancient magazines like Livestock Today, Macramé World, Slug Fancy, and Modern Tax Adviser, listening to music so boring that it’s barely music? And it’s not only deadly dull, but the whole time that you’re there doing nothing you hear the whine of the dentist’s drill, the sound of someone trying to talk but they can’t because they have a rubber glove in their mouth, and the thousand-year-old receptionist blathering on to her aunt Edna on the phone about the meat loaf she ate last night and how moist it was—ugh, the worst word in the English language, moist—and, to top it off, there’s some toddler with sniffles in the corner banging the back of his chair against the wall.

  This is Limbo. It’s frustrating, irritating, and nothing happens fast enough because nothing is happening. It’s like racing toward a horizon that you can never reach. It’s like trying to catch a rainbow. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a spatula.

  Limbo is a lot like growing up.

  19 · THICKER THAN WATER

  MARLO STAGGERED DOWN the hall, a look of almost animal desperation in her eyes. As she passed the sizzling torches on the beige concrete walls, she noticed a small glass box just outside of the girls’ bathroom. Inside was a lever with the words PULL IN CASE OF WATER painted on it in bright blue letters.

  Marlo bit her thumb and cased out the empty hallway. Convinced she was alone, she rubbed her huge silver skull ring, closed her eyes, then smashed it into the glass. Quickly, she thrust her hand into the box and pulled the lever. The instant she gave it a tug, the fluorescent lights shut off and flames belched from the ceilings.

  Miss Borden came rushing out of her classroom.

  “Water! Water!” the teacher screamed. “Everybody run! Water! This isn’t a drill!”

  Panicked, girls began to stream out of the classrooms and into the blazing hallway.

  Meanwhile, Milton and Virgil walked out of the cafeterium just as plumes o
f flame began to shoot from the ceiling.

  “What’s going on?” Milton gasped.

  “I don’t know,” Virgil replied, “but this could be our chance. Quick, let’s go to the little boys’ room. I have an idea.”

  Just then they heard a pair of hooves clatter down the hall. Virgil and Milton traded looks of sheer terror.

  “C’mon.” Virgil grabbed his friend by the sleeve. “We’ve got to skedaddle.” The two boys and one fake ferret dashed down the crowded hallway that had now become a fiery, frenetic free-for-all.

  Milton stared at the toilet. Actually, the word “toilet” was far too poetic a word for the dark hole that assaulted Milton’s senses. Try “horrid, reeking pit.” While the toilet in the boys’ bathroom would have made even a sewer rat wrinkle its nose, to Milton the sight was far more traumatic, causing a full-body paralysis of pure revulsion.

  Milton had acquired, during the course of his short life, the ability to hold his bodily fluids in check until safe in the clean sanctuary of his own bathroom. It had been years since he’d seen the inside of a school restroom.

  And Virgil wanted him to climb inside the stinking hole before him.

  “It’s the only way, man,” Virgil explained. “Do you think I want to dive down into that either?”

  Milton stared into the darkness, somehow transported thousands of miles away by his thoughts.

  “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” soothed Virgil as he put his pudgy hand on Milton’s trembling shoulder. “No guts, no glory. It’s time to poop or get off the pot.”

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” Milton mumbled, “that toilet or your clichés.”

  Virgil smirked. “I’ll be right back. I know where I can score us a couple of teeny flashlights. I saw some this morning in the nurse’s office when she/it/whatever fixed my hand.”

  Virgil left Milton to stew in his thoughts. He closed his eyes. His therapist had told him to go to his “happy place” whenever Milton was faced with an anxious situation, which was almost hourly. Milton’s happy place was a musty library full of books. All he needed to do was pretend that the powerful stench that prickled his nose was the intoxicating perfume of paper, dust, and old wooden desks. This was simply a case of mind over fecal matter. And the only thing Milton had to fear was fear itself (Oh no, Milton thought, Virgil’s got me doing it now… ). Wasn’t the remote possibility of freedom—not to mention the rightful possession of his eternal soul—worth tromping through a little poop? He had to, at the very least, give it a try. After all, how bad could it really be?

  20 · TUNNEL OF DUNG

  IT WAS BAD. Worse than bad. Terrible.

  Filthy drops dripped. Filthy drips dropped. Terrible plops and splashes echoed through the dark, cramped pipeline. The smell was like a mixture of vinegar, socks, rotten milk, and every imaginable shade of poo. The smell was so thick, it was like a putrid blanket wrapped over…everything. And that was the opinion of just one of Milton’s senses. The other four weren’t wild about their present situation, either.

  Two weak flashlight beams slashed through the hot, stinky blackness. Milton and Virgil crawled on all fours with the flashlights duct-taped to their heads. Milton panted, his nose curling, feeling as if his lousy liver lunch were trying to make a break for it.

  “It stinks in here,” he said in a colossal display of understatement.

  “It’s the…River Styx that…stinks,” wheezed Virgil. “It’s the sewage.”

  “So this is where it all goes?”

  “Comes,” Virgil replied while wiping grime off his face. “Remember what Dr. Pemberton said: all the sewage in the world comes through here, down to…the other place.”

  Milton gagged as blobs of toxic crud slithered down the great pipe.

  “It’s like a disease buffet down here. What I wouldn’t give for an industrial-sized drum of antibacterial soap.”

  Milton pulled up his shirt so it covered his mouth and nose. He looked like a germ-phobic bandit.

  “So what’s the plan?” he said, his voice muffled through his shirt.

  Virgil pulled an ancient scroll from his knapsack and unrolled it. One side of the yellowing map featured a complex network of lines, curving and coiling like a convention of Krazy Straws.

  “It says that if we follow this pipe here,” Virgil said, highlighting a tract of plumbing with a smudgy finger swipe, “it should lead us to…the Secret Toilet, just outside the gates.”

  Milton’s eyes peered out from above the collar of the shirt cinched tightly over his nose. “The Secret Toilet,” Milton repeated with disbelief.

  “Yeah,” Virgil replied with a hopeful twinkle in his eye. “Just outside the—”

  “I heard you,” Milton interrupted. “It’s just so…ridiculous. Why on earth would—”

  “We’re not on earth, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Virgil said, interrupting Milton’s interruption. “A secret toilet isn’t any more bizarre than the other things we’ve seen down here.”

  Milton sighed. “I suppose,” he conceded. “Can I see that map of yours?”

  Virgil shrugged and handed his friend the map. Milton flipped it over and pressed his broken glasses up the bridge of his nose. The other side of the ancient map featured nine concentric circles: the Nine Circles of Heck. Virgil knelt next to Milton and jabbed his swollen finger at the center of the map.

  “Here’s Limbo. That’s where we were.”

  He slid his finger down to a thick green ring on the map.

  “Next is Rapacia, for greedy kids,” Virgil said.

  “Sounds like my sister,” replied Milton somberly. “Speaking of my sister—”

  “The Third Circle,” interrupted Virgil as he studied the map gravely, “is Blimpo for…plump kids. I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll end up.”

  Virgil pointed to a sketchy-looking ring that subtly seemed to shift every so often.

  “Then there’s Fibble for lying kids…”

  He slid his finger down to a wavy ring that, in some impossible-to-describe way, just seemed really annoying.

  “…Snivel, for whiny kids, Precocia, for kids who grow up too fast, Lipptor for kids who sass back, Sadia for really, really mean kids, and, lastly, Dupli-City for dirty, two-faced snitches.”

  Milton turned toward Virgil, the flashlight beam shining in his chubby face.

  “My sister,” Milton said with a gentle sadness. “Even though she’s the reason I ended up here, I can’t just leave her behind.”

  Milton’s eyes teared up. He took off his glasses and wiped a tear away, creating a smudgy streak across his filthy face.

  “Pull yourself together,” said Virgil with a reassuring pat that left a hand-shaped patch of brown sludge on Milton’s back. “There’s probably a way to get her once we’re back home, somehow,” he said unconvincingly.

  Milton rose, smacking his head on the top of the slimy tunnel. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he asked.

  Virgil shook his head. “Nope. My parents said that I was perfect, so why bother having another? Though the fact that I was sixteen pounds at birth might have had something to do with it.”

  “Well,” said Milton. “Having a sibling is…complicated. It’s like you’re two prisoners handcuffed together through life. Half the time you want to strangle each other, and the other half…Well, okay, maybe you want to strangle them almost all of the time, but still: they are a part of you, and even though you dream about being apart, you can’t really imagine it, know what I mean?”

  Again Virgil shook his head.

  Milton sighed. “Blood is thicker than logic, I guess. All I know is that I’m not leaving without her.”

  Virgil grumbled. “We just don’t have time. The second they notice we’re gone, they’ll drag us back here faster than you can say ‘The devil made me do it.’”

  Virgil turned the map back over to the intricate diagram of Limbo’s sewage pipes.

  “And Heck is bad enough,” he added. “I can on
ly imagine what their idea of ‘extra punishment’ is.”

  Virgil looked into Milton’s sad eyes and sighed.

  “Besides, how bad can Heck be for a girl, anyway?”

  21 · SUGAR, SPICE, AND EVERYTHING MEAN

  THE FIRST TEN seconds of freedom Marlo enjoyed after setting off the water alarm were thrilling. Amazing. Exhilarating. Unfortunately, they also happened to be her last ten seconds of freedom.

  “Guardettes!” Miss Borden bellowed from around the bend.

  Marlo had been alone when pulling the alarm. Almost immediately the hallway was full of frantic girls running for their afterlives. Unfortunately, Marlo always had a fascination for seeing how her acts of mischief played out, which often left her rooted to the scene of the crime. Similarly unfortunate for Lyon and Bordeaux, the two girls felt themselves too cool for running. They came sauntering into the hall well after the initial wave of commotion.

  Miss Borden stormed around the corner from home ec on her way to the teachers’ lounge. Almost immediately upon hearing Miss Borden’s shriek, decaying she-demons surrounded the three girls left in the hallway.

  “One of you must be guilty,” the teacher accused as she dug her squeaky leather heels into the floor, stopping dead in front of the girls. “Perhaps all of you, in some kind of conspiracy. But when did you find time to hatchet—um, hatch it?”

  The girls stared blankly at Miss Borden, which was particularly easy for Bordeaux as that was her usual way of staring. The trio suddenly began accusing each other at once.

  “It was Marlo—”

  “It was Lyon—”

  “It was—”

  “I don’t have time to split hairs!” the teacher barked, folding her arms against her chest. “Especially when there are parts I would much prefer to split. Guardettes, bring these girls to the showers!”

  The guardettes promptly herded the trio of sooty girls to their pre-punishment cleaning. Heck may not have graded on a curve, Marlo thought, but it certainly punished on one. Even though she was way guilty, the injustice of it all just bugged her—of course, not to the point of actually stepping forward and confessing.