The arcade was clogged with dazed kids shuffling around in a stupor outside of the Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go game. They gazed expectantly at the large, peculiar booth.
“Best … game … ever,” muttered an Asian kid with a blend of reverence and dull hunger.
Screepy, Marlo thought as she skittered along spots of track lighting. Has to be some weird coincidence. Though I guess the whole idea of an h-e-double-hockey-sticks for children is so obvious it was only a matter of time before someone up here landed on it.
Marlo skipped along the shadows of kids waiting in line to play Heck, looking for her pseudo-date.
There, toward the back, hovering over a Scarface-themed Al Pachinko pinball machine like a question mark on fire, was Hans.
Hey, Hot Stuff. Didya miss me? Marlo thought-texted to Hans’s InfoSwank belt buckle. Of course you did. I’m dead and that’s really, really sad.
She hoped she wasn’t laying it on too thick, but Marlo was desperate.
Hans wiped a tear away from his blue-green eye.
Awesome, Marlo thought and—unfortunately—texted.
The boy cocked his rust-colored eyebrow.
Awesome that we are … together. Despite our differences. You know, you being a nerd, me being a Goth … oh, and the whole living-and-dead thing, too. The long-distance thing will be hard, but I’m sure we can make it work.
Hans smiled and started jerking around to the techno music blaring out of a nearby Cattlezone game, where virtual vegans traversed a roving herd of delicious char-broiled cows.
Is that supposed to be dancing? Marlo thought-texted.
Hans stopped self-consciously.
“I was just … making shapes to the music,” he muttered, straightening his misbuttoned button-down shirt.
Thanks for helping me out with my mom and dad. I think they might stick it out—despite me messing up everything by getting myself killed. To think, I’d still be here—really here—if I had just left that vintage dress of mine behind. The one stuck to the marshmallow bear. Though it was one of a kind.
Just then, Aubrey walked through the doors of Fragopolis, wearing the same black vintage Victorian mourning dress Marlo had been wearing at the moment of her untimely passing.
Make that two of a kind, Marlo thought-texted.
“Yeah, yeah … Lenore,” Aubrey called out over her shoulder. “Out here in an hour. Just in time for one of your yummy, macro-moronic meals …”
The girl looked cautiously around her before leaning closer to the car.
“Thanks.”
Hans’s pale face blanched. His freckles came out like dark stars at reverse-night.
“I’m … I’m going to break up with her,” he mumbled to his belt.
Good. Being me is weird enough when I’m being it.
“No one could be you,” Hans said as Aubrey approached.
Marlo noted tiny burnt marshmallow stains on the sleeves of her dress.
Ugh, really? Secondhand is one thing, but wearing your dead friend’s thrift-store finds is another.
The spitting image of Marlo blew her blue hair from her face.
“Hey, Hot Stuff. Didya miss me?” she asked, cornering Hans. The redheaded boy was shaking harder than a Chihuahua in Alaska.
“Um, hi, Aubrey,” Hans managed. “You look … nice.”
Marlo hated to admit it, but Aubrey did. Look nice. And not just because she looked like Marlo, though that helped. How could it not? Underneath all the white pancake makeup and eyeliner, Aubrey was really quite pretty, with a spooky sort of “peaches-and-scream” complexion. And she could tell by the twinkle in her eyes—a constellation of unabashed affection—that she really, truly liked Hans.
“Of course I do,” Aubrey said with feigned bravado. “And I just got my license.”
“You, um, did?”
“Yeah—to drive you crazy!” she replied with a charming snort.
Marlo glanced down at the carpet. With Hans’s poor posture and Aubrey leaning in to him, their shadows looked sort of like a heart, with Marlo’s shadow awkward and fuzzy next to them.
It was then that Marlo realized what she had to do. As the old saying goes, if you pretend to love something, then you’ve got to pretend to set it free.
“Right,” Hans replied nervously. “Look, I don’t think we should—”
I can’t go through with this, Marlo thought-texted.
Hans looked down at the upside-down readout of his belt buckle.
“Huh?”
This whole thing. It was just an elaborate joke.
Hans swallowed, but the lump wouldn’t quite travel down his skinny neck.
“But …”
Gotcha!
Marlo could feel a tear slicing down her cheek. Being casually cruel used to be so much easier, back when she was sentimentally challenged. Now she felt like she was releasing some animal back into the forest, and it kept coming back so she had to shout at it.
Um … wait until the other kids at school find out!
Hans sniffed back a tear. His chest caved in like a jack-o’-lantern on the day after Halloween. Aubrey grabbed his hand.
“Are you okay?”
Marlo grew suddenly faint.
I can’t compete with that. Nothing can distract a boy like the touch of a living girl’s hand. I’ve got many things, but a pulse ain’t one of them.
Hans looked up at Aubrey as if he were noticing her for the first time.
Well, I guess if I can’t be me, at least Aubrey can.
Hans quickly glanced down at his belt buckle.
Shoot, Marlo thought as she slid her vague shadow away from Hans. I thought-texted all of that. Gotta seal the deal here …
Ask her if she’s an interior decorator, she thought-texted, flinging what was left of her shadow at the boy.
“What?” Hans mumbled.
Ask her if she’s an interior decorator.
“Um, are you an interior decorator?”
“Uh … no,” Aubrey replied. “Why?”
When I saw you here, the whole place became beautiful.
“When I saw you here, the whole place became beautiful.”
Aubrey blushed around the edges of her white pancake makeup and smiled. Not Marlo’s crooked smirk, but her own, genuine dimpled grin.
If you were the new burger at McDonald’s, you would be the McGorgeous.
“If you were the new burger at McDonald’s, you would be the McGorgeous.”
Aubrey busted up.
“That is so dumb,” she said, coiling her white arm around his. “I don’t even eat meat. There’s so much about me you have to learn.”
Dizzy and unmoored by Hans’s sudden surge of happiness, Marlo’s weak energetic shadow bounced around Fragopolis like a flat, smudgy pinball.
There goes the third point in my cry-angle.
Just then, a sharp, bird-shaped silhouette darted beneath the arcade entrance.
“Oh no,” Marlo muttered blearily. It senses helpless prey. Me.
A haggard, near-comatose boy summoned the force of will to nudge open the door of a Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go booth.
“Dude,” he croaked through the crack. “You’ve been in there … forever … We’re all … waiting …”
Marlo’s vaporous soul projection was tugged across the carpet.
What’s going—?
She was pulled into the dark, humming game chamber, with the door pneumatically shutting behind her.
In?
The booth had six walls, each with a sort of mirror, only the mirrors seemed to look out—into another world. The stench of sulfur inside was overwhelming. Ugh, it’s like eating an egg salad sandwich with your nose, Marlo thought.
The boy inside the gaming booth had a sort of metal starfish clamped to his face and a weird, chain-mail smock draped over his twitching torso. His eyes, as blank as a blackboard during summer break, bulged out around the arms of the face mask clutching his head. A tube coiled from the mask, just between
the boy’s eyes, leading to a glowing yellow box beneath his seat. She felt strangely drawn, physically, to the mask—like that eerie, self-destructive urge to jump when standing on the edge of a cliff. Marlo clung to the shadows on the wall to resist its pull.
She unfocused her eyes, like you do with those weird posters that suddenly turn 3-D if you look at them the right way, and gazed at the vivid images cast all around her.
Graackk! Scree!
A gigantic dark purple tongue the size of a killer whale thrashed about on some kind of massive stone teeter-totter in a cavernous dungeon. The creature was going berserk, roaring and slamming its glistening bulk into the walls. It was as if Marlo were clinging to the dungeon’s ceiling, watching the tongue lash at her from below.
It’s like an episode of When Disgusting Monster Slugs Attack! Marlo thought, an odd, angry, pepperish taste forming in her mouth. It’s like I’m inside the game, only it doesn’t seem like a game at all!
The tongue oozed toward the center of the unbalanced floor.
Florpadda-florpadda.
Something shot out of its body, up toward Marlo.
Floom! Thomph!
Please have that not be a stomach, she thought as the disgorged digestive organ snapped at her face, revealing rows of bright pink bristles.
“Watch out, Dork Knight!” a boy to Marlo’s right yelled. “The Nyarlathorp is trying to pick us off the ceiling!”
Health: 0
“Do you think?!” another boy shouted with high-volume sarcasm.
“That stuff in our canteens has it in a frenzy!” a girl shrieked. “A full-on Cujo!”
The XXL-sized tongue lapped and lashed at everything around it.
Whooowl!
The creature howled, an unnerving shriek that sounded like a murderous blend of flutes and military drums. Marlo clapped her ears.
“Caterwaul!” a familiar voice yelled as a long-faced girl fell from the ceiling.
It’s that crybaby from Snivel.
Another kid, wearing some kind of shredded armor, fell from the ceiling. Wait … two kids.
And the twins!
Sara, writhing on the ground, attached to her sleeping brother, looked up at Marlo as the monster tongue slammed itself against the wall like a spit-soaked battering ram.
“Milton!” she cried. “Do something!”
Oh no, Marlo thought as she was pulled closer and closer to the twitching boy in the gaming chamber. Either I’m my brother—again—or that zombie boy playing the game is.
Milton tumbled from the ceiling. He sprang toward Caterwaul, who was nearest the roaring Nyarlathorp, and dragged her from a sticky trail of rainbow slime.
As Marlo watched the horrific scene in mute shock, she was slowly tugged up a ladder of crisscrossing shadows, traveling across the boy’s electrified, chain-mail poncho.
“Throw your canteens at that far wall!” Milton yelled, pitching his flask over the Nyarlathorp’s quivering, taste-bud-studded back. Six canteens clanged against the dank stone wall.
Whooowl!
The creature stiffened the front of its body into a quivering point, swiping its appendage over the heads of the terrified Terawatts.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
“What’s it doing?!” Caterwaul yelled.
“I think it’s tasting the air!” Howler Monkey replied, edging back from the creature.
Back in Fragopolis, the bird shadow forced its way underneath the Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go game door. Getting closer and closer to the starfish-shaped mask clutching the boy’s head, Marlo entered another plane of reality, ferried by a sort of full-sensory trance. The Litsowo pecked at the dark spots on the floor before settling on Marlo’s silhouette cast across the boy’s face. The bird spirit darted across the gaming chamber just as Marlo was pulled headfirst through the mirror and into the game, the hungry spirit on her projected soul’s heels. The game’s announcer bellowed into the Sense-o-Round arena:
“Marlo Fauster has now entered the game.”
“MARLO FAUSTER HAS what?!” Milton yelled over the roar of the deranged Nyarlathorp. Whoooowl! Slosh!
“It’s working!” Sara exclaimed as the monster tongue lapped itself against the far wall like an ocean of pink-red muscle. “It wants more Hypool-Active Overstimu Lake water!”
The arena rumbled. Bits of stone rained down upon the Terawatts.
Glorm! Scree! Crashathud!
Milton shut his eyes as Gustator: Sense-o-Round Five crumbled around him.
Florpadda-florpadda … bumbada-bumbada …
After a moment of silence, Milton opened his eyes.
Howler Monkey was on his hands and knees several feet away, giving the ground a quick lick.
“I think I, like, taste victory,” he said as he and the other children stirred from the cold, slanted stone floor. “Kind of gingery with mint flourishes.”
“Did anyone else hear my sister’s name?” Milton asked.
“I didn’t hear anything but that big tongue doing laps all over everything,” Howler Monkey replied.
Words written in digital fire burned above.
+ 100 EXPERIENCE POINTS
CONTINUE?
“Continue?” the Sunshine Sneezer said as he rose from the ground. “Continue where?”
“Maybe out that massive hole in the wall,” Sam replied sarcastically.
At the end of the partially demolished arena was a hole the size of a small garage door. The edges were worn smooth, like those of an old, unfinished lollipop.
“I’m … so … sleepy,” Caterwaul complained from the floor.
Milton pulled her up off the ground. “We can’t fall asleep,” he said as he walked her down the sloping floor of the arena. “That’s what happened to the Zetawatts. They gave up and the Sense-o-Rama sucked the will right out of them until they were practically senseless.”
The children stepped through the hole in the stone wall and into a narrow yet startlingly tall passageway crowded with sputtering electronics equipment, fiber-optic cables, and malfunctioning mechanical boxes. A large, glowing yellow button on the wall just outside the arena blinked SAVE. Milton slapped it with his hand.
“So any kids playing on the Surface will go straight to the end of the game,” he explained as he walked into the passageway.
The corridor widened into a large, round chamber so tall that it seemed to have no visible ceiling. In the center of the room was a towering spindle, a throbbing vine of light and mirrors, sending thick globs of honey-orange radiance cascading downward. A coiling helix of glass wrapped around the spindle, a smooth translucent ramp that glimmered as fantastically and improbably as Cinderella’s slipper. Blankets of shimmering steam hissed from tangled knots of piping girdling the walls, clouding Milton’s vision. The whole thing was like a surreal game of Mouse Trap.
“The light,” Milton said as his faltering eyes tried to make sense of the chamber. “It must be First Fire. And it’s reflecting down toward Snivel. This is the way out.”
A riot of raw sound clopped Milton’s tender ears: growls, screams, gasps, gurgles, panting. It reminded him of gym class.
“Watch out!” Sara yelled as she shoved Milton and Caterwaul out of the way of something the others couldn’t see.
“Yuck,” Howler Monkey complained with a sour face. “It tastes like … danger.”
Lucky hissed from inside his kerchief pouch, some objectionable odor offending the ferret’s phenomenal nose.
“I think we’ve unlocked a sixth level,” Milton said. “Unfortunately. Full of unheard, unseen, untasted, unsmelled, and unfelt sensations.”
“A sixth level?” whined Caterwaul.
“Yeah … the level leading back to Snivel.”
The key, as with all of the Sense-o-Rama levels they had survived, was to work as one. But how? Milton thought.
Working as one.
Milton had an idea.
“Help me collect the hover-boards and sticky bungees,” he asked his friends.
&n
bsp; “What?” Howler Monkey asked.
“Help me collect the hover-boards and sticky bungees,” he repeated, louder, for his comrades’ faulty ears. “Together, we’re going to knock some sense into this place. Five senses.”
Within minutes, the Terawatts had bundled the hover-boards together with bungee cords to create a large, levitating raft. They placed the fallen Zetawatts—Tasha, Joey, Libby, Wyatt, and Ariel—in a writhing, muttering heap at the center. Sam/Sara stood up in front of the heap, acting as the vessel’s eyes. Sara cradled Lucky in her arms—a small miracle, as the ferret was very particular as to who, if anyone, cradled him—where he acted as the group’s nose. Howler Monkey lay on his stomach up front, jaw slack, serving as the vessel’s sense of taste, with Caterwaul alongside him, flailing hands outstretched, as the craft’s sense of touch. Lastly, Milton and the Sunshine Sneezer stood on either side of Sam/Sara as ears. They kicked off and traveled, slowly, up the eerie glass ramp amidst a chaotic vortex of sensations: swooping hordes of shocking sights, sinister smells, spine-chilling sounds, frightening feelings, and terrible tastes peppered with assault.
Damian Ruffino stood, blocky and blotchy, staring down the camera with a dark, slitted glare. He tried his best to widen his eyes into something approaching innocence but made a wrong turn somewhere along the way, arriving just outside Intensely Unnerving. Necia, dressed in her red-and-white candy-striper jumper and nurse’s hat, stood next to him, fussing with Damian’s baggy suit that, while making him look like a pallbearer at a hobo’s funeral, was perfectly tailored for his nefarious purposes.
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 23
