“Let go, Creepshow!” Marlo shrieked from behind her brother, yanking him free of the incapacitating grasp. Milton, suddenly able to move again, collapsed to the ground, the taste of blood forming in his mouth.
A WILLOWY FIGURE stepped into the weak gray light. The creature was just under seven feet tall, wearing a charcoal hoodie cinched tight around its neck with a half-frowny, half-smiley face screen-printed in olive drab on the front. As the sense of tingling dread relaxed its grip on the inside of Milton’s chest, he noticed a flash of metal from something strapped to the creature’s palm.
“A joy buzzer?” Milton mumbled from the balcony floor, rubbing his aching hand.
“Joyless buzzer,” the creature replied in a way that made Milton unsure if he was actually hearing him or just thinking him. “I forgot I had on when greeting you.”
The figure offered its hand to Milton in the half-darkness.
Fool me once, shame on you, Milton thought as he struggled to his feet. Fool me twice … seriously … cut it out, not funny.
The skeletal creature, Milton noticed, had what appeared to be a rubber chicken strapped to its side and a gag arrow piercing its hooded head. Marlo glowered at the figure with a fixed from-under stare that brought to mind a Goth bull about to charge.
“What are you?” she spat. “A party clown who’s here because some kid’s birthday wish was that you’d drop dead?”
The creature stared at Milton and Marlo with its doleful eyes, like two dull marbles filled with rainwater.
“I’m Grin Reaper,” the creature croaked.
“Reaper?” Milton replied, stepping back. “As in—”
“Knock knock,” the Grin Reaper interrupted, staring expectantly at Milton.
“Um, who’s there?” Milton replied, unable to leave a knock-knock joke unanswered.
“Is doorbell repairman.”
“The doorbell repairman who?”
“Ding-dong … all done!”
“What?”
“Is joke,” the Grin Reaper explained in his halting hiss. “Make laugh.”
Milton, struck by the absurdity of the situation, let out an explosive snort.
The Grin Reaper swiftly yanked a green net with a wooden handle from the pouch on his back. He studied the air around Milton’s head with his gray wet eyes, as if something were fluttering before him. Suddenly, the cadaverous creature deftly swished his net, nearly swatting Milton across the mouth.
“What are you—?!” Milton gasped, pushing his new pair of broken glasses—two different lenses taped together at the bridge with duct tape—up his nose.
“Shhh … you scare,” the Grin Reaper whispered as something unseen struggled softly inside the pale-green netting. He carefully reached behind his back and snatched up two tarnished metal rings, one perched atop the other on his bony palm. With a twist of the wrist, he pulled the rings apart, activating a humming electric jar. The Grin Reaper tipped the jar’s rim toward the net. Inside flitted what looked like a butterfly.
It was about five inches across, striated with pink and blue, with iridescent splotches on its hind wings that shimmered with a spectrum of rainbow colors, like an oily film on deep-blue water.
Watching the insect flutter filled Milton with a peculiar bittersweet feeling, as if something he loved very much were very far away … a feeling not uncommon in the afterlife but particularly keen now.
“Is boy’s laugh,” the Grin Reaper said as he dropped a saturated cotton ball to the bottom of the jar. “Chuckle, actually. Is different. One of five types.” Milton’s winged “chuckle” fluttered about for a few moments before sinking to the bottom of the jar and expiring. Milton felt like a jack-o’-lantern whose candle was abruptly snuffed out: hollow and chilly with the memory of lost warmth.
“You’re joking,” Marlo said with a sneer as she watched the Grin Reaper seal the lid on Milton’s last laugh. “I mean … you collect laughter?”
“I never joke about laughter,” the Grin Reaper rasped. “I collect, yes. Keep in barrel. I cannot laugh. So I snatch from rich chaos of human nature. Temporarily brighten my luster-lack world.”
The Grin Reaper pitched the jar back over his shoulder and into his pouch. The creature turned toward Snivel, his rainwater eyes glittering with unfathomable sadness.
A tunnel stretched out beyond the gates, with a moving sidewalk that gradually corkscrewed until, at the tunnel’s end, the walkway was on the ceiling.
“But that’s impossible,” Milton muttered as the Grin Reaper brushed past him and onto the sidewalk.
Marlo shrugged and stepped onto the sidewalk behind him. Milton sighed, forcing himself to participate in something that openly mocked the laws of physics. He looked behind him to see the landing platform tilted subtly to the side, or so it seemed, as he was moved along onto the tunnel’s wall, feet still firmly planted to the walkway.
“Artificial gravity,” Sara offered with a smile. “Either centrifugal or superconductive diamagnetism. It has to be something like that.”
Nearly upside down, Milton couldn’t tell if his head-over-heels feeling was burbling infatuation or simply the play of gravity. Still, something tickled the inside of his chest and made him feel a little bit nauseous—but in a strangely good way.
“Yeah … some simulated gravity machine, probably,” Milton replied, his face hot and his fingers tingling with nervous electricity. “Milton, by the way.”
“M.I.L.T.O.N.?” the girl pondered with a crinkle of her sparkling dark eyes. “Is that an acronym for some theoretical microgravity device?”
“Um, no,” he said, looking past her shoulder as the landing platform clicked near the twelve o’clock position. “My name. Milton. Milton Fauster.”
“Oh … right,” she replied with her easy smile. “I’m Sara Bardo. And this is Sam,” she added with a tip of her head toward her snoring brother. “Most people just call us … well, a lot of terrible things, usually.”
The corkscrewing sidewalk was now on the ceiling, which was now the floor. The Grin Reaper stepped off the moving walkway and toward a gently swaying wall of grimy vinyl plastic strips.
“We’re here,” he wheezed, parting the dingy gray curtain and holding it out wide with his long, bony arms. “Camp Snivel,” he continued as a carpet of dark fog spilled onto the platform. “Your last resort …”
Behind Milton, the red-eared boy sneezed.
“Ugh.” The boy sniffled. “Airborne mold spores. Looks like you can take it with you … at least in terms of allergies.”
Marlo swept past the Grin Reaper and entered the Circle of Heck for the inconsolably sad, sulky, and sensitive.
“Ugh … this is even worse than I thought,” she muttered as she scanned the relentlessly grim surroundings. “It really is like summer camp!”
“A bummer camp,” the Grin Reaper clarified.
How bad can a bad camp be? Milton thought.
Milton joined his sister, hitting his head on a low-hanging wooden sign that Marlo had dodged. He could tell by the faded letters that it had once read:
WELCOME TO CAMP SNIVEL: YOUR LUCKY WHOLESOME FUN CENTER!
But now, thanks to an eternity of weather damage, it read:
W—O-E TO A—L—L WHO-ENTER
Milton also noticed, as he rubbed his throbbing noggin, that, somehow, his legs were cold and wet.
He looked down at his soggy sneakers. The blanket of stormy fog clung to the ground like sodden moss. Drops of rain splattered the underside of Milton’s chin, rolling up his neck and into his ears. He couldn’t believe it. It was actually raining up.
“But how?” Milton asked as a thuggish gang of storm mist clustered below, spitting up cold, slushy rain so that he was thoroughly soaked from toe to head.
The Grin Reaper walked toward a group of devastated weeping willows, stooped by the weight of some secret sorrow.
“Special bioengineered rain fog,” he explained. “Made from He2O: two helium atoms for every oxygen atom. Make rain
up. Dampens even highest spirit,” the Grin Reaper continued as he looked up through the broken boughs. “But there is something worse.…”
Above was a sight that took Milton’s breath away. The sky was filled with … garbage.
“The Dumps,” muttered Sara as her brother Sam snorted himself awake, the raindrops tickling his nose. “It’s our sky now. It’s … terrible,” she wept, hiding her face in her brother’s neck.
“Rain? In the underworld?” Sam complained, caught between the undertow of sleep and the cold drizzle stinging his face from below.
A hot gush of tears mingled with the helium water dripping up Milton’s face.
The sky had always represented a sense of hope for Milton. And now it was a bottomless, festering heap of medical waste, plastic bottles, paint cans, rotting food, soiled clothing, and milk cartons.
Not landfill … but skyfill. The boundless vista of trash pressing down from above made Milton feel small and powerless, as if all hope had been left on the curb, waiting to be disposed of forever.
“Helps keep child’s outlook always down,” the Grin Reaper added as a fresh bank of storm mist colluded underfoot, birthing another torrent of lancing rain. “Is one reason Camp Snivel wrong-side up.”
“It’s eleven-fifteen and we all might as well give up,” a voice sobbed in the distance to the clang of a bell. “I mean … really. What’s the point?”
The Grin Reaper motioned the children through the trees.
“Town Cryer,” he mumbled. “Major downer but punctual. Come.”
Marlo stomped through the murky pea-soup mist, her shoulder brushing against a flyer tacked to the trunk of a weeping willow.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
The flyer had a picture of a round-faced Latin American boy with wet brown eyes and snot running down from his nose. Next to the flyer was another one, stuck fast to the tree with milky sap. This one featured a girl with dirty-blond hair sloppily cinched into pigtails with mismatched ties. Marlo counted twelve such flyers in this cluster of trees alone. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shaggy dark blob streak through the gnarled underbrush.
Marlo swung around, startled.
“Who’s there?!” she called out, but the only thing she heard was her own breathing. She quickly tore down one of the flyers and rejoined the group as they neared the edge of Camp Snivel’s tree-lined border. With each step, Marlo felt as if she were getting heavier and heavier.
“Hey, Lesser Fauster,” Marlo said to her younger brother. “Get this: a whole bunch of missing kids … and I thought I saw something back …”
The group cleared the fringe of trees. Before them was an enormous, deep green-gray lake—like the color of spoiled luncheon meat—with a humongous, screeching, forty-foot-tall stone wheel churning at the center. The wheel shook and tottered uneasily on its axis as, with its eight stone ladles, it whipped the center of the lake into a misty, agitated froth.
“Are we there—?” the Emo boy started before he was silenced by a slug in the shoulder from the pouting, puffer-fish-faced girl.
Surrounding the lake were three broken pairs of rotting docks, strewn about like the aftermath of a giant toddler’s tantrum. Dozens of children sat along the edges of the broken piers, crying over pools of milky water.
“Lake Rymose,” the Grin Reaper rasped, skeletal arms akimbo as he stood on the uneven ridge of raised, knuckle-shaped mounds overlooking the lugubrious lagoon. “Filled with tears of every Unhappy Camper sent to Snivel.”
Milton felt drawn to the wobbly wheel—literally, as he found himself having to tilt backward somewhat to counteract its effects.
“Dukkha,” Sara murmured softly. “Of course. That’s what gives this place its dreadful gravity.”
“Dookie?” Marlo interjected. “Like poo?”
“A Dukkha Wheel, you troll-haired hockey puck,” Sam spat. “You know … Buddhism?”
Marlo drew in her breath, as if Sam were a birthday candle that she was about to blow out. “Would you like to meditate on this, Two-for-One?” she hissed, brandishing her fist.
Milton wedged himself between them.
“Enlighten us,” Milton said. “What’s a Dukkha Wheel?”
After giving her brother a sharp, nervous glance, Sara stepped to the edge of a bleak outlook facing Lake Rymose.
“The cycle of misery, unhappiness, and pain,” she replied. “It turns like a squeaky, broken wheel about to fall off its axle, causing suffering and unrest … and, in Snivel’s case, gravity.”
“So that’s why I feel so heavy here,” Marlo replied. “I knew it couldn’t be the headcheese Stroganoff we scarfed before we came here. I lost most of it out the side of the SighTram, anyway, if you know what I—”
“It’s a peculiar kind of gravity, too,” Milton added. “I feel kind of drained and lethargic, in addition to really heavy.”
Milton noticed the flyer crumpled in Marlo’s hand.
“What’s that?”
“Oh yeah,” Marlo said as she flattened the flyer out on the back of Sam/Sara’s shared shoulder. “A mess of kids gone missing. Plus I saw something back there in the trees.”
“What did you see?”
“I don’t know … I didn’t see it,” Marlo replied as she looked intently around her, swatting at a mosquito nibbling her neck. “But I spy with my kleptomaniac’s eye something else.”
“What’s that?”
“A whole lot of nothing, at least in terms of demon guards.”
Milton looked out past the sludgy gray-green waters of Lake Rymose and to a sad compound of waterlogged cabins: sagging structures that seemed to be commiserating with one another as the rain pelted up beneath them. Milton could only make out a handful of listless demon sloths sulking about the barracks, their knuckles dragging along behind them in the mud, and what looked like a gigantic leather snail crawling outside a tent. Both Limbo and Blimpo had been teeming with a malevolent menagerie of pitchspork-wielding demon guards, Milton recalled. And, according to Marlo, Rapacia and Fibble had no shortage of sadistic lawless-keepers patrolling their hallways.
“You’re right,” Milton replied. “There are hardly any guards. And the guards they do have don’t seem particularly threatening.”
“We need no sentries in this place,” an eerily calm, hypnotic voice declared from behind them. “Camp Snivel guards itself. From the inside …”
The children turned.
There stood a cadaverous man—short of stature, thick and compactly set—whose head looked like it had been carved from a tombstone.
“The inside of you,” the man concluded. “Debilitating sentinels stationed within the bosom of each and every Unhappy Camper.”
The Grin Reaper drifted with haunting ninja stealth to the man’s side. “Children, meet Mr. Poe,” the hooded creature wheezed. “Your new vice principal.”
Milton swallowed, gripped by sudden dread.
“It’s eleven-thirty and things keep getting worse and worse,” the Town Cryer wailed, followed by a mournful clang of his bell.
EDGAR ALLAN POE, Milton mused with a full-body shiver. The author’s bleak, unnerving classics, such as “The Raven,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” had given Milton countless nightmares. And here he was, in the pale flesh, poised to give Milton daymares as well.
Milton and the other children were led through blinding sheets of rain so merciless that 90 percent of Milton’s body had officially gone from “damp and clammy” to “wicked pruney.”
The children approached a cabin with cracked, mismatched windows on either side of a red door that hung off its hinges. To Milton, the structure’s facade resembled the face of a maniac.
I wonder what twisted act of depravity he has in store for us, Milton thought as he stepped onto the stoop with a creepy creak.
The vice principal, after brushing back his dark, weblike hair, pushed open the door of the cabin. “I presumed you children would enjoy some light sustenance
in the Mess Hall whilst enduring a brief Disorientation. Good day.”
The man curled his thin, liver-colored lips into a smile, then—with a swivel that made his pleated cape flap like a raven’s wings—disappeared, swallowed up by the deluge.
The Grin Reaper urged the children inside, where they stood, drip-drying, in the doorway. They were in some kind of dining hall—filled with rows of ill-assorted tables. There was a serving counter at the far end. The scent of mass-produced food filled the hall.
“When I get depressed, I get hungry,” Marlo said. She walked across the hall, parting the sea of sluggish children like a drenched Goth Moses, and stepped up to the serving counter, grabbing a tray.
A squat, turnip-shaped demon wearing a full-body hairnet held court over a tub of unappetizing muck, holding her filthy spatula as if it were a scepter.
“What are the not-so-specials?” Marlo asked.
“Woe-is-meatballs,” the she-demon replied. “And leftover blubber casserole. It’s where all of the week’s scraps reunite for one final encore … though sometimes there is a repeat performance in the Unrest Rooms.”
Marlo grimaced as she eyed a patch of mold coating the surface of the casserole, which was so old that the mold itself was starting to grow mold.
“Woe-is-meatballs, por no-favor,” she sighed, blowing wet strands of blue hair from her face.
Milton joined her at the counter, grabbing a pitcher of water. Depression had the opposite effect on Milton. It made him nauseous. But, while soaked to the bone, he was somehow thirsty inside. He poured himself some water, but the glass would only fill halfway. He took a sip and spat it back out.
“Yuck … salty!” he choked. “Like tears.”
A grubby girl in denim overalls-shorts shambled by, weeping. Milton noticed she had rags and sponges lashed to her shoes.
Marlo, cradling her tray of terrible food, nudged Milton with her elbow. “She must be moping the floors,” she said with a wink. “Get it?”
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 2
