Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

“I know Marlo isn’t exactly Miss Congeniality,” Milton said with a sad smirk. “But it was nice to have her here. It made me feel like I was back home somehow.…”

  “She was a mouthy punk,” Sam said, his voice slurred with sleep, “but she had spunk.”

  “Has spunk,” Milton corrected, uneasy with referring to his sister in the past tense.

  Sara put her hand on Milton’s shoulder. “I’m sure she’ll be fine—she seemed like the kind of girl who can look after herself.”

  After a moment of shared silence, the weepy girl spoke.

  “If there’s one thing I know about camp,” she whined, “it’s that they’re going to give us nicknames. Terrible nicknames. Unless we come up with our own.”

  “Yeah,” the blond, elfish boy said with a sniff. “We could, like, give them to each other first.”

  Milton nodded. “That’s a great idea. It’s like a preemptive strike against humiliation.”

  “Well, like I told Milton here,” Sara said, “my brother and I are used to being called all sorts of terrible things, so most anything would be an improvement.”

  “How about something cool like ‘Gemini’?” the long-faced girl offered. “You know, the twins in astrology?”

  “Yeah!” the boy with the runny nose exclaimed. “Way über!”

  “I like it,” Sara replied. “But it’s like … hard being conjoined … with everyone thinking you’re one person, not two. You know?”

  Milton nodded. “That makes sense. How about just ‘Sam/Sara’? It’s quick but still acknowledges your individuality.”

  Sara smiled brightly as her brother began to grumble.

  “Samsara is the Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth,” she said with her hand clapped over her brother’s mouth. “It’s perfect! And, who knows, maybe one day we’ll be reborn!”

  Milton turned to the boy with the perpetually open mouth.

  “What about you?”

  “My name is Mortimer Franzenburg,” the slack-jawed boy said. “But everyone back home called me Mouth-breather, because—”

  “I think we know why,” the red-eared boy with the runny nose interjected. “How about something fierce, like … I don’t know … Howler Monkey? You know … turning your mouth thing into a—achoo!—sort of calling card.”

  Mortimer wiped the drool from his lower lip and smiled. “Yeah … sounds like a supervillain name!” he said. “What about you?”

  “Tyler Skaggs,” the elfin boy said. “My dad used to call me the Sunshine Sneezer. That’s actually how I got here. I fell asleep in a tanning bed to help clear up my eczema, and the machine went crazy. I woke up and it was flashing so bright that I sneezed harder than I ever had … than I ever would again.”

  “Actually, I kind of like the Sunshine Sneezer as a name,” Milton replied. “Reminds me of the Sundance Kid: Butch Cassidy’s sidekick. Plus it’s a way for you to be close to your dad.”

  Tyler wiped his eye. “Yeah … that’s cool,” he said with a sniff. “It’s a keeper, then.”

  The children turned to the weepy, horsey-looking girl.

  “Jaslin Chunder,” the girl offered. “The kids at my school weren’t particularly creative in the abusive nickname department. They just called me Crybaby.”

  “What about Waterworks?” Sam replied with a sneer. “Like, ‘Hey, turn off the waterworks, Crybaby.’ ”

  “That’s not much better,” Milton said. “How about something cool like Caterwaul?”

  “Caterwaul?” Jaslin asked.

  “It means to wail or howl,” Sara said. “But in kind of an intense way.”

  Jaslin smirked. “Caterwaul,” she said with a nod, trying the name on for size in her mind. “I like it. A nickname with claws.”

  Sam turned to Milton. “What about you?” he asked, glowering at Milton with his coal-black eyes.

  Milton stroked his nonexistent chin hair.

  “Well, there was ‘Dweeb,’ ‘Brainiac,’ ‘Short Bus,’ and dozens of other names my sister seems to come up with so effortlessly. There was another one,” Milton added, swallowing. “ ‘Milquetoast.’ ”

  Sam snickered. Sara nudged herself in the side.

  “The biggest, baddest bully ever used to call me that,” Milton continued. “I hated that name. Almost as much as I hated him.”

  After a moment’s consideration, the Sunshine Sneezer chirped, “How about the ‘Dork Knight’?” The boy snickered. “Because you’re kind of a leader but nerdy.”

  “I don’t know,” Milton murmured.

  “I like it,” Sara replied with a smile that instantly changed Milton’s mind. “You are a leader—”

  “Thanks.”

  “But not in the conventional ‘handsome and heroic’ way,” Caterwaul added.

  “Thanks.”

  Lucky squirmed inside Milton’s backpack. Milton unhooked the straps, set it on the ground, and scooped out his restless pet.

  “When Lucky’s awake—which is seldom—he is AWAKE. In all-caps.”

  Howler Monkey smiled, leaning down to pet the ferret as it stretched and shook. Lucky assessed the boy’s hand and, grudgingly, deemed it worthy of touching him.

  The campfire sing-along stopped abruptly.

  “We’d better get back,” Sara said.

  Milton nodded.

  “You guys go. I’ll be there in a sec. I’ve got to let Lucky run around for a bit or else he’ll wriggle, dook, and whine, and get found out.”

  “Dook?” Sara asked with a crook of her thin black eyebrow.

  “It’s kind of like a clucking noise. Like an irritated chicken.”

  “Cute.” Sara smiled.

  “Yeah,” Milton replied, staring back at Sara’s sparkling black eyes. “Cute.”

  The Unhappy Campers turned toward the campsite.

  “We’ll cover for you … Dork Knight,” the Sunshine Sneezer called out with a grin as the group left Milton and Lucky alone at the edge of the forest. Lucky shivered, coiled around a dead shrub poking out of the sodden ground, pooped, then frisked around for a bit. Suddenly, the ferret stopped and stood stock-still, sniffing the air. Lucky hissed, his bristly white back arching into a harrowed hoop.

  “Lucky?” Milton said as he came closer. “What’s—”

  Lucky bolted across the slick mud, parting the rain-fog that clung to the ground in wispy patches, and shot straight into the heart of the forest.

  “Lucky!” Milton called out as he ran after the ferret, now nothing but a fuzzy, flickering streak at the back of Milton’s retinas.

  I lost Marlo today, Milton thought as he ran blindly into the clammy gloom. I’m not going to lose Lucky, too.

  Milton leaned against a weeping willow, winded and lost. The dark wood was a chaotic, monotonous tangle, with the only light coming from the faint twinkle of metallic garbage fixed like shabby stars up above—or down below—Snivel’s glass dome in the Dumps.

  A branch snapped, followed by a scraping rustle. Milton spun around, but the arrangement of trees made the sounds impossible to locate with certainty. They seemed to come from all around, as close as a whisper.

  “Lucky?” Milton gasped. The only reply was his own breath panting back at him. Yet as Milton quieted his breathing, he could still hear something puffing like a bellows. A dark, disheveled shape, blacker than the blackness of the forest, darted past in the corner of Milton’s eye. He turned, spinning on the ball of his foot, as another shape dashed between the trees, again only noticeable out of the corner of his eye.

  Something crinkled beneath Milton’s foot. A damp, smeary picture of an Indian boy, with the words HAVE YOU SEEN ME? scrawled atop his miserable face, lay in the mud. Is this what happened to Marlo? Milton thought.

  The chill of despondency seized him by the midsection. It was as if these mysterious, nearly imperceptible creatures—like shaggy wolves with heads hung low—radiated cold and despair as they stalked the forest in silence.

  A splintering noise sounded, rousing Milton from his mela
ncholy with a jolt of fear. Milton ran through the forest, eyes blind with tears, conscious only of his helplessness. He dodged trees and patches of slick mud as icy breaths beat down his back. Banking away from a clutch of withered pine trees, Milton tripped on a knotted clump of roots. He sprawled forward, stumbled, and fell down the raised mound separating the forest from Lake Rymose.

  Milton landed with a thump against a saltwater-rotted beam jutting out from one of the lake’s six docks. He heard a splash. A figure—someone or something—jogged away from the far shore of the lake back toward the camp. His stomach sick with motion and adrenaline, Milton rolled onto his side and stared out across the lake’s murky waters. Something small, like a bottle, sped toward the Dukkha Wheel, disappearing in the foam.

  That sinking heaviness returned, having briefly disappeared when Milton was freaking out in the forest. The water rippled and flickered faintly, glowing a sickly dark green, as if reflecting light. But, aside from the drab twinkle of garbage above, Snivel was as dark as a raven’s wing.

  The light must be coming from the bottom of the lake, Milton thought as he got onto his scraped knees, wincing with pain. But how?

  The Dukkha Wheel shuddered as it turned, threatening to shake itself loose from its axis. Beneath the roar of the wheel was a wash of muffled beeps, chirps, and twitters. Milton crawled to the edge of the dock to try to make sense of the sounds. There, below the rim of the lake, was something else bobbing in the water. Milton leaned over the dock, straining to reach it, and finally snatched it up by the neck. It was an old, green-tinted glass bottle with a brass plug on top. Milton rolled the bottle in his hands, examining it by the weak light drifting from the lake. He unstoppered the bottle and found, coiled up inside, a note.

  Dedicated. Focused.

  Shrewd. Nimble. Tenacious. Twitchy.

  Do you have what it takes to become a member of the one and only OFFICIAL Arcadia Gr8 G4m3rz Club?

  If selected, would you vow to:

  • Adhere to the rules and bylaws of the Arcadia Gr8 G4m3rz Club?

  • Remain vigilant in the Sense-o-Rama, no matter how realistic your virtual opponents seem?

  • Compete mercilessly against your peers?

  • Abduct new recruits so that they can have awesome fun, too?

  • Disclose the secret location of the Sense-o-Rama, like, never?

  • Ingeniously master all five levels?

  • Acquire valuable badges to advance in the Arcadia Gr8 G4m3rz Club ranks?

  If so, then you MAY have what it takes to be one of our Gr8 G4m3rz!* Sit tight and await further instructions as to how YOU can join! Not just anyone is allowed into Arcadia: only the best!

  * In fact, we’re almost certain.

  Milton rubbed his thumb pads against the paper. It was strangely smooth and … tingly.

  “A video-game club?” Milton wondered aloud. “It can’t be here in Snivel. The kids here seem too depressed even for Super Marlo. Arcadia? Maybe this is one of the Grin Reaper’s lame jokes—”

  Something scraped behind Milton on the dock: something with claws. Milton turned slowly. There, shivering in the dim light, was a small, fuzzy creature.

  “Lucky!” Milton gasped as he rose to scoop up his ferret. Lucky backed away, spooked.

  “What’s the matter, little guy?” Milton whispered gently. “What did you see that made you like this?” Lucky’s white fur was raised all over in quill-like bristles, and one of his pink eyes bulged bigger and wider than the other.

  A piercing whistle rent the gloom.

  Milton grabbed Lucky and tucked him and the note into his backpack.

  “Ferret-frisking time is officially over,” Milton mumbled as he trotted off the dock and toward the camp compound. “Hopefully we can make it back before lights-out … though the lights don’t ever really come on in this sucky place.”

  Milton pushed open the door to the Totally Bunks. His fellow Unhappy Campers were already snoring away—especially Howler Monkey—in the leaky, moldy cabin. They twitched in their sleep as small, slender serpents coiled around their wrists and ankles, securing them to their beds.

  “Guys?” Milton whispered as he tread across the squeaky floorboards, down the aisle of broken bunk beds.

  Sam/Sara stirred in his/her bunk.

  “Milton?” Sara murmured, her voice craggy with sleep. “Good … you made it back. We tried to stay awake … but this place … It makes us all so sleepy. And heavy. Our bedtime story—a dramatic reading of the Boring, Oregon, phone book—didn’t help.”

  Sam grunted in his sleep, his face a scowling mask of “don’t bother me.”

  Milton pulled the note from his backpack.

  “I was chased by some creatures I couldn’t see. And then I found this.…”

  He unfurled the note and showed it to Sara, who rose to her elbows as best she could considering the serpent restraints. She squinted at the paper, then at Milton, confused.

  “A piece of paper?”

  “What do you mean?” Milton asked as he looked at the scroll.

  It was blank.

  “It was an invitation to this cool video-game club,” he murmured, feeling baffled and somehow betrayed. “To a place called Arcadia.”

  Sam gnashed his teeth together with a grimace as he tried to turn himself and his sister over onto his side to face the damp, mildewy wall.

  “I’d better go back to sleep,” Sara whispered as she slowly lost the tug-of-war with her own body. “Sam gets grumpy if he doesn’t get his twenty hours of rest.”

  Sam/Sara turned away, leaving Milton to ponder the clean sheet of stiff, tingly paper in his hands.

  Disappearing ink? he thought as he found an empty bunk beneath an especially prodigious leak in the rusty tin roof. Or did I just imagine it?

  He crawled into the lower bunk as Caterwaul whimpered in her sleep above.

  Milton sighed as he laid his head on the lumpy, burlap sack of a pillow, staring up at a patch of black mold that resembled a grinning skull.

  “It’s ten forty-five and all is, if not lost, then forever misplaced,” the Town Cryer wailed outside with a clang of his bell.

  Maybe it’s my mind playing tricks on me since Marlo isn’t here to do that, Milton thought as he succumbed to the sluggish pull of Snivel. I’ll figure things out … maybe confront Vice Principal Poe. In the meantime … I’ll just try to … Serpents slithered from the sides of his bunk, coiling together into knots, binding Milton tightly to the bed.

  Relax.

  MARLO AND THE two other Unhappy Campers were heaved out into the thick, drenching downpour. Marlo struggled against the devitalizing effects of the Grin Reaper’s joyless buzzer, pressed firmly into the small of her back. Night was falling, sharp and sudden like a guillotine, and it was hard to make out anything through the grim sheets of rain pelting the children from below.

  The weeping willows beside Marlo suddenly trembled, as if something large had brushed against them. She turned and, just like before, could only see something vague, black, and shaggy at the edge of sight before it vanished completely.

  “And I told him he could stuff it,” the mangy sloth demon told its fellow guard, a walking snailish creature that left a trail of glittering slime behind him. “But the taxidermist said that Twinkles had been dead for too long—”

  “Are we there yet?” the gangly Emo boy grumbled behind his long, side-swept bangs as he pretended to listen to the music not-playing on his hand.

  Marlo shot the boy a double-barreled glare and vented in one, breathless gush: “First, your iPod’s on the Surface—get over it—and, anyway, it’s loaded with music that wasn’t really cool even when it was cool. It’s like listening to someone barf up their feelings all over your shoes. Secondly, no, we aren’t ‘there’ yet, and ‘there’ is obviously someplace even worse than this blowsome pit of lameishness, so what’s your hurry, Tickle Me Emo?”

  The boy, his angular face mottled with gray monochrosquito bites, swayed like a sail
after a sudden squall.

  “It’s Ferd,” the boy mumbled after a beat. “Ferd Nurlington. But the kids used to call me AWTY. You know, for ‘Are We There Yet?’ ” He gave Marlo a shaky, smitten smile.

  Marlo sighed. She was all too familiar with that dweeby grin. “I absolutely forbid you from having a crush on me,” she replied. “I’m putting a restraining order surrounding all thoughts of me. Got it, AWTY?”

  The boy nodded meekly and pretended to shove his imaginary earbuds deeper into his ears.

  The freckled, put-upon girl stopped short in a puddle of mud.

  “Ugh!” she complained as her left foot emerged from the oozing muck sans shoe. “Figures. Stupid extra-sticky mud!”

  “Where we go, you no need the shoe,” the Grin Reaper rasped as he urged the girl onward.

  “Where we go?” Marlo asked, swatting away a swarm of monochrosquitos feasting on her pigment.

  “There we go,” he said, nodding to what looked like an out-of-order outhouse up ahead at the crest of a hillock. They slogged through the mud and stormy sheets of rain-fog to the small shack nestled in stinging nettle.

  “I take them in,” the Grin Reaper said to the demon guards. “Area restricted. Go lead other children in optional-yet-obligatory campfire sing-along.”

  The demon creatures nodded as they slunk away, swallowed up by the rain and fog. The Grin Reaper slid open a keypad panel to the side of the shack’s door. His skeletal fingers punched out the sequence so fast Marlo couldn’t make out the code. The door unbolted from inside with three mechanical pops. The Grin Reaper pressed the children through the cramped portal before entering the shack. The door whooshed shut behind them.

  Marlo scanned the bleak, dilapidated shack, illuminated by a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling.

  It’s like something out of a horror movie, she thought with a shiver. Right before the stuck-up cheerleader takes a shower. Damp seeped up the claw-scratched walls from the stained concrete floor. Suddenly, a white, feathery shape swooped through the shack.

  “Boo who … boo who,” the creature screeched before flying through the wall.