The children, bug-eyed with terror, stared at the Grin Reaper for some kind of explanation.
“Owl ghost,” he replied casually as he knelt down in the corner in front of what looked like a shabby doll. He tugged on the porcelain toy’s arm.
“Mama,” the doll bleated, its blank black eyes rolling back in its head as the floor fell, lightning fast, sending Marlo and the other children down, down, down, screaming.
Marlo shook her dizzy head, which was hanging limp below her shoulders as her knuckles and knees pressed hard against the concrete floor. The shack had plummeted so fast that it felt as if she had left her internal organs behind like lost baggage.
The sour-faced girl writhed beside her. Marlo struggled to her feet, then held out her hand.
“Here, um …,” Marlo offered.
“Petula,” the girl grunted as she took Marlo’s hand. “Petula Crabbe. But everyone calls me—”
“Let me guess,” Marlo replied, eyeing the large, lead door with its polarized glass window in front of them. “Crabby.”
The Grin Reaper swished past them, flicked open another keypad with his long, bony finger, and punched in six numbers—again too quick for Marlo to track.
The lead door slid open with a pneumatic whoosh. Glaring ultraviolet light spilled into the chamber. It’s like an atomic tanning bed, Marlo thought as the Grin Reaper urged them forward with a snakelike curl of his finger.
“Come,” he gurgled. “Before elevator shoot back up. Maybe it smoosh you on ceiling. Maybe it not.”
The children followed the hooded creature into the chamber. The door behind them sealed shut with a hiss of expelled air. Marlo’s eyes adjusted to the light.
Twining up the middle of the humongous cube-shaped room like a shoot of metallic ivy was a long contraption coiling to the ceiling. Sprouting from its dull stalk of braided cables were dozens of tripronged satellite dishes clicking and twitching restlessly as they trained brilliant golden light on …
Marlo gasped.
Children.
Ten kids, Marlo now saw, were trapped inside small, rectangular tanks stacked on three levels of shelving, each level connected by a rickety staircase. Stuck like flies in amber, they struggled softly in the tanks, their shadows cast against white panels mounted behind them on the walls. With a lump in her throat, Marlo noticed that there were three empty tanks perched atop the highest shelf.
“Bonswa! Welcome to the Shadow Box, petites,” a slender figure in a white top hat and tuxedo purred as it approached Marlo, Ferd, Petula, and the Grin Reaper. The man had a weird Caribbean French accent that felt like hot buttered rum poured into Marlo’s ear. “This be the ’eadquarters for the Decease Corps,” he added with a rumbling cackle.
“The what corpse?” Petula asked, folding her arms defiantly.
Marlo noticed that the girl’s thick, freckled arms were shivering.
The man—his face an ebony canvas painted chalky white like a skull—had a mouthful of dazzling teeth and cotton plugs stuffed into his wide nostrils.
“The Decease Corps is a volunteer program for petites … children … eef you be stretchin’ the definition of ‘volunteer’ to include ‘shanghaied and recruited by force’!” the man boomed in reply. “You will be ambassadors for the underworld, sent abroad on an ill-will mission.”
“Why us?” Marlo asked. “And who are you? You’re like something someone would hang on their door for Halloween.”
The man’s head pitched back, his gaping mouth issuing a resonant bray of a laugh.
“N’ap boule! Why you, indeed!” he managed after regaining composure. “You were han’picked by your vice principal.”
The man’s wide, red-rimmed eyes darted to a silhouette lurking at the back of the Shadow Box before quickly returning to bore into Marlo.
“Troublemakers,” he continued in a hush. “Grating, defensive children better elsewhere.”
“Who are you calling defensive?” Marlo replied. “You’re defensive.”
“Rete!” the man shouted, holding his palm up to Marlo’s face. He straightened, now as tall as a college basketball player.
“I am Baron Samedi,” he said with a quick tip of his top hat. “In-specter general on loan from Dead Letter Office. Now, prese prese! Wastrel Projectors are now online and I must train new operator.…”
His bulging eyes settled on the Grin Reaper, who fidgeted from foot to foot, with either sudden excitement, discomfort, or incontinence, Marlo couldn’t be sure.
She turned to the golden, almost tragically beautiful light cascading up the coiling spindle piercing the center of the Shadow Box.
“Is that a Wastrel Projector?” Marlo asked as she eyed the ripples of resplendent light pulsing up the fiber-optic coils of the metallic vine. It flowed almost like luminous honey more than light. “What does it do?”
The silhouette across the room coughed. Baron Samedi gave a slight nod before grabbing Marlo and Petula roughly by the shoulders.
“No more labba labba,” Baron Samedi said as he shoved the children toward the stairs leading to the top shelf. “It time to mek haste and see the light … to be the light …”
Marlo, transfixed, followed the brilliant gleam as it streamed up the stalk and through the first satellite dish. Light gushed out like a supernova in a blinding, radiant discharge, bathing a boy trapped in one of the rectangular tanks in its shimmering brilliance. The boy’s shadow, cast on the white panel behind his tank, jerked and swayed like a puppet. Marlo watched as the shadow seemed to drip down, like wet black ink, into a dark purple duct. The pulsating, veinlike pipe sucked the shadow down the side of the wall, joining a network of other throbbing pipes, ultimately coiling and disappearing at the base of what Marlo assumed was the Wastrel Projector.
Baron Samedi shoved Marlo to the first step of the stairwell.… The Grin Reaper’s joyless buzzer vibrated at the base of Marlo’s back, filling her head and heart with dull, debilitating sludge. She longed to struggle, to break free, to run somewhere—anywhere—but her inner fire was scarcely stronger than a damp aromatherapy candle at this point.
“They transmit child’s weak energetic shadow up to Surface,” the Grin Reaper whispered into Marlo’s ear as he urged her up the second flight of stairs.
“The Surface?!” Marlo yelped with muffled excitement. Baron Samedi stopped short and glared at the Grin Reaper. The hooded creature gazed back with its twinkling, steel-gray eyes.
Baron Samedi glanced furtively down the coiling stalk of the Wastrel Projector at the man lurking in the shadows below.
“Through Wastrel Projection, your ‘absence’ is transmitted up to Surface, mon,” Baron Samedi whispered between his thick, white-painted lips, his voice still deep and reverberating despite the hush. “As long as there are three people with strong, sad memories of the deceased. This is how machine can triangulate the projection.”
Marlo glanced at the satellite dish nearest her as it blasted light at a little girl with pigtails, trapped, squirming, in her tank. The dish had three prongs, each sending shimmering threads of light that fed the main beam flowing from the center. All of the satellite dishes twitched nervously, like the eyeballs of someone asleep, dreaming.
“On edge of this high-powered absence and tragic recollection, this mizé.” Baron Samedi continued, the inside of his mouth as red and wet as the inside of a pomegranate, “The dead petite—you—can weakly manipulate the real world as a shade.”
“F-for how long?” stammered Ferd.
“Six day, six hour, and six minute,” the lanky in-specter general replied as he fingered his bone necklace. “If flow of light is unbroken, if you perform your tasks, and if nothing … interferes.”
“Interferes?!” Marlo replied. “What do you—”
“What tasks?” Petula interrupted with a scowl, her indignation at being asked to do something blundering past all concern for her well-being.
Baron Samedi scratched underneath his top hat.
“Spre
ading the malaise—”
“Spreading mayonnaise?” Ferd interrupted.
“Malaise … discontent. The incurable sadness. You must keep three people—as you petites say—supremely bummed out so projection stay strong. Then herd as many children as you can to seek out false happiness.”
Baron Samedi shot the Grin Reaper a quick, meaningful look. The Grin Reaper nodded his hooded head and squeezed his rubber chicken until it vomited out wads of letters through its gaping latex mouth. One of the letters floated lazily down to the floor. It landed near a large shaft at the base of the Wastrel Projector. Through the flares of pulsing light, Marlo could see a mirror set inside the shaft at the tube’s elbow where it turned away sharply, reflecting the light like a periscope.
Where is that weird light coming from? Marlo pondered as the Grin Reaper handed the letters to Baron Samedi.
“By wheespering letters from the dead to the living,” Baron Samedi said as he shoved the crumpled letters into the hands of the children, “you fuel inconsolable grief.” He pulled out three envelopes from the inside pocket of his tuxedo coat.
Marlo studied the small white envelope that, creepily, had her name written on it in ornate cursive lettering.
“Who is making you do this?” she asked.
Baron Samedi laughed as he shoved each child successively up to the top shelf, where the three empty tanks awaited.
“Bourik swe pou chwal dekore ak dentel,” he grunted.
“What?” Marlo replied nervously as the towering man neared.
“The donkey sweats so the horse can be decorated with lace—old Haitian proverb,” the baron said as he reached Marlo.
The tanks were tilted slightly back, their glass doors open in sinister invitation.
“Now do the Decease Corps proud and spread the bad word upstairs,” the baron said as he shoved Marlo, hard, into the tank. “You no wanna romp wit me.”
He slammed the glass door shut—the tank burping like Tupperware—then stalked toward Ferd.
“Um …,” the boy said, quailing, as he backed away from the imposing tuxedoed man. “Are we there yet?”
Marlo rolled onto her side, feeling like a bug under a microscope. Suddenly, her tank began filling with translucent, jellylike foam.
“What’s going on?!” she screamed as the foam shot through nozzles from all four sides of the thin, cramped tank.
“Is bad memory foam,” the Grin Reaper said before walking to the wooden railing of the shelf. “To help you interact with world of living. Like shadow puppet.”
Marlo tried to block the foam spraying out of the nozzles, but the pressure was too strong. The bad memory foam was now up to her neck. She could feel it congealing like unflavored Jell-O around her legs … her waist … her stomach. Across the Shadow Box, through glass fogged by her gasping breath, Marlo could see another tank set on a middle shelf flicker, then go dark.
“Baron Samedi,” the silhouette shouted from below. “We seem to have lost yet another to the merciless talons of the Litsowo.” A flash of light from the Wastrel Projector briefly illuminated the man’s face. It was Vice Principal Poe.
“I stop machine,” the Grin Reaper said as he descended the staircase. “Maybe can retrieve boy.”
“Do so and you shall render our agreement null and void,” the vice principal replied, his delicate white hands at his hips. “And your ribs will never tickle with the rich, boundless laughter I have promised you.”
The bad memory foam choked Marlo’s tank and was now congealing on her face, becoming dense and stiff—like the egg-white-and-Pepsi facial masks Marlo used to make back home on sleepovers with her friend Aubrey Fitzmallow. Before the foam hardened into thick rubber in her ears, Marlo heard Poe’s voice one last time.
“The boundaries that divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague,” the vice principal proposed. “Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins? I leave these matters to spiritual crossing guards such as the baron. Now I can focus on how the other, less-willful children can best fulfill my wishes … my destiny.”
Suddenly, an explosion of blazing honey light filled Marlo’s chamber. She tried to scream, but the instant she did, the memory foam seeped into her mouth and stifled the howl before it even left her throat. Marlo could feel the light coursing through her, streaming in between every molecule, every atom, every thought, radiating outward until Marlo’s consciousness bubbled over like a shaken can of warm soda.
The Wastrel Projector’s light throbbed relentlessly. Marlo felt like a piece of chewed gum, pulled apart into a long, glistening strand that threatened to break at the slightest provocation. Everything went white.
Dizzy, her brain hot with fever, Marlo opened her eyes. There before her, in shimmering waves of visual heat, was the corner of Wooster Way and Arbuckle Avenue.
Generica, Kansas.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, her voice a flat, hollow vibration, like when your ears are plugged up from a cold. “I must be here because of my parents … my shade held here by their sad memories. But that’s only two. Baron Samedi said it took the anguished memories of three people who couldn’t let me go. Who else would love me enough to keep me here with their pain?”
THE SNAIL DEMON, with its waggling eyestalk, gestured toward a drab tent at the edge of camp.
“Vice Principal Poe’s tent,” the creature said in its irritating scrape of a voice. “His door is always open.…”
Milton nodded as he screwed his cap tight to his head and began trudging toward the tent.
“But children, once they pass through that door,” the demon guard rasped against the roar of stinging rain, “have a hard time finding their way out.”
Milton slogged through the mud toward the shabby tent. The door, strangely, was massive. It looked like it was made of iron. It was also ajar.
Milton heaved the door with his shoulder until he made a gap wide enough to pass through. The door’s weight caused a sharp grating sound as it moved upon its hinges.
“Hello?” Milton called out tremulously into the dim, mournful vault. “Vice Principal P-Poe?”
A single dim ray, like the thread of a spider, shot out from a bell jar across the small, dusty room. The gleam of light looked like an unblinking eye staring back at Milton. His heart tried to pound free of its rib-cage jail. In fact, Milton’s pulse throbbed so loudly that it nearly sounded as if it were booming back at him from the other side of the room.
From the outside, the large circular tent seemed scarcely different from the others dotting the solemn, sodden campgrounds of Snivel, Milton thought. Yet, as seen from the inside, Vice Principal Poe’s office, from its dark draperies to its marble lining, was indistinguishable from a mausoleum.
Maybe I shouldn’t have come here, Milton fretted, feeling as if he had trespassed upon someone’s tomb. But perhaps Poe knows something about Arcadia and whether that’s where Marlo and the other children are. And if he does know something but denies it, maybe I can find some clue here in his creepy lair.
Milton’s eyes soon grew accustomed to the dark. Books and furniture lay scattered about—all of them comfortless, antique, and tattered—at the rim of the round, reinforced tent. He breathed in the chamber’s dust and desolation, feeling the atmosphere of sorrow sit heavy in his lungs. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Be gone, be gone, be gone, Milton’s heart seemed to be telling him as it throbbed in his chest, though, again, its cautionary pulse sounded as if it were coming from across the room.
“Lenore?” a groggy voice exclaimed.
Vice Principal Poe arose from the sofa that he had, apparently, been lying on the whole time, as silent as a corpse.
“Who wanders weak and weary in my drawing room dreary?” he asked as he wiped the sleep from his eyes.
Milton’s throat swelled closed with fear, as if his lower body were trying to forcibly block all passage of distressing input from his head. His he
art banged like a drum in his ears.
“My name is M-Milton Fauster,” Milton faltered, his mouth as dry as a mummy’s bath towel, “and I was wandering—wondering—if I could have a word with you.”
Vice Principal Poe rested his darkly luminous gaze upon Milton, instantly chilling the marrow in his young bones.
“A word is a very dangerous thing, as it often leads to sentences,” the vice principal replied in his stumbling, unsettling manner. “Regardless, you have roused me from my reverie. What word is it, exactly, that you wish to have with me?”
“I was walking by Lake Rymose last night and found a message by the shore.”
The vice principal’s thin lips curled subtly, his mustache straightening into a sort of sly salute.
“A message?” he replied with thinly veiled amusement. “My, how intriguing. Whatever did this message say?”
Milton dug for the rolled-up paper in his pocket and held it out to the vice principal, yet stopped short just as the man moved to seize it.
“First, I need to know where my sister is … Marlo,” Milton said, his teeth gritted with determination. “Where have you taken her?”
Vice Principal Poe’s sour face curdled until it resembled a waxy lump of feta cheese.
“O! How brazen we are … such bluster!” he mocked.
“You’re not answering my question,” Milton said.
The vice principal tightened his crimson cravat. “Perhaps we should retire to a more … relaxing venue for discussion.”
The bell jar on the chamber’s far shelf quaked and quailed.
Be gone! Be gone! Be gone! the jar seemed to chant in a deep, resonant thrum. Milton caught sight of the hideous contents of the jar: a beating heart.
Vice Principal Poe strode across the tent, pulled a hand-knit cozy out of a writing desk, and thrust it snugly over the pounding jar. Stitched across the gray and pink woolen cover were the words HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS.
“Now, now, don’t have a you attack, my tattle-tell-taling friend,” the vice principal said as the muted heart palpitated beneath the cozy. “Save your bleeding heart tirades for someone who cares.”
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 6
