“You may approach the bench,” Judge Judas said, winking at the camera. “But do so without your feet touching the floor!”
The decomposing demon hordes crowding the stands hooted and hollered. Algernon eyed them with dismay.
I had no idea my imagination was so vivid, he mused, sighing. If I want to find my way out of this awful dream, I better play along.
He hopped onto his hands and, with the acrobatic ease that only comes when you are doing something you don’t think you can do but are doing anyway, Algernon crossed the bar and wobbled his way to the judge’s bench. His progress was accompanied by jaunty music and comedic recorded sound effects.
“If I may, Your Honor,” he panted after flipping back to his feet.
Judge Judas slammed his jumbo-sized gavel on his raised desk, sending the shot put to TOTALLY OUT OF ORDER with a piercing clang.
“Your Dishonor,” Algernon said with a dramatic bow of contrition. “Here is my list of proposed witnesses.”
Judge Judas stared down his coiled nose at the cocktail napkin.
“Are you serious?” the man said, glaring up at Algernon. “Well, looks like we’re all in for one heck of a ride. Bailiff, bring in the first witness.”
Judge Judas passed the napkin to a festering, pinched-face demon with a crew cut and a badge. The creature squinted at the shred of paper, gave a shrug, then lumbered down the aisle toward the courtroom doors.
“The court would like to call the first witness,” Algernon Cole said, leaning in to the microphone on his desk. “Louie Cipher … um, Lucifer, take the stand. You’re the next contestant on Holding Court with Judge Judas!”
Abbot Costello and two other wretched monks tugged Milton and Sam/Sara up to the Moanastery balcony jutting over the Dumps. The refugees from Snivel and Arcadia crowded around them. Their doughy faces flushed with exertion, Abbot Costello and the monks gave one last forceful heave, and Milton came up onto the balcony’s lip, pulling himself over in a state of panic. Marlo rushed over to him, shocked to see her brother spattered with blood.
“Milton! Are you—”
Milton grabbed the cable and peered down into the chasm.
“Sara’s hurt!” he yelped frantically. “She—they—were hit by Poe’s pendulum!”
Abbot Costello gripped the balcony floor with his sandaled feet as he gave one final pull.
“Yes,” the sullen man wheezed. “We saw. It was awful.”
“I can see them,” Milton said. “I’ve got their arms.”
Milton tugged the mangled twins up to the balcony, their bodies streaking the marble floor with blood.
The abbot gasped with horror.
“They are severed,” he whispered as he knelt beside them in his steel-wool robe. “Fetch Friar Bungay,” the abbot instructed a fellow monk before returning his rheumy gaze to Milton. “He is our order’s physician. If anyone can help them, it is he.”
Sam and Sara, Milton could see despite the thick, gurgling pool of blood coating them, were connected by just a few gnarled strands of flesh and muscle. The connection they once shared was now just a raw, open wound.
A thin, pasty man with long ears fringed by his bowl haircut flapped his sandals onto the balcony. He held his frail hand to his mouth, gaping at the twins with round eyes.
“Will they survive, Friar Bungay?” Abbot Costello asked as he flagellated himself with his leather lash.
Friar Bungay examined the oozing gash between the twins.
“I don’t know,” he said in a reedy voice. “It’s a clean cut, though. Poe must sharpen his pendulum regularly. For conjoined twins, their connection seems mostly superficial. No vital organs shared. If I can control the blood loss, they may have a chance. Help me with them, my brothers. To my chambers.”
The three monks carefully lifted Sam and Sara from the floor and back into the crumbling, dimly lit abbey. Milton followed, yet Abbot Costello blocked his way.
“It would be best, son, if you let Friar Bungay tend to them in private.”
The balcony was suddenly bathed in brilliant, uncompromising light.
“Look!” Petula shouted. “There’s a tiny sun on top of Snivel!”
The monks manning their giant bugles—filling the crater with peals of moans and sighs—stopped their bellowing to join the children on the balcony.
For the first time, Milton could see Arcadia from afar: connected to Snivel like the top bulb of a massive hourglass, a timepiece whose time was running out. Tesla’s tower showered Arcadia with raging bolts of blue-white lightning before toppling into the Pac-Man building.
“Game over,” Milton whispered.
At the bottom of the tapered midsection connecting the upper and lower hemispheres was Lake Rymose, and at the top was the Hypool-Active Overstimu Lake. The conjoined realms dropped slowly from the grim mantel of clouds above. The frenzied blaze of First Fire pierced the billowing fog. The industrious ball of sputtering, sizzling flame sank gently into the lake. Suddenly, great blasts of evaporated water filled the insides of the glass-shelled dominions, with steam hissing from the hull’s fissures and fractures.
Mr. Orpheus joined Milton at the rough-hewn stone railing. He sniffed the air with his perfect nose.
“Evaporated sadness … dampened mania,” the man said in his distant, melancholy voice. “A precarious blend not unlike nepenthe: the potion purported in Homer’s Odyssey to bring a welcomed forgetfulness to a troubled person’s mind, an opiate of sorts, making one heady with hope.”
“Hopium,” Milton muttered as he gazed at the explosions of electrified vapor splitting the pendulous glass barrier. He turned to face Mr. Orpheus. “Thanks, by the way, for leaving us behind in Snivel,” he sneered, his face patchy with Sam/Sara’s dried blood.
“If there is one thing I’ve learned from my time in the underworld,” the smug man said with a dismissive shake of his lustrous curls, “it’s to never look back.”
“Snivel and Arcadia!” Caterwaul gasped. “They’re dying!”
The two realms collapsed in on themselves, from pole to pole, and plummeted into the Dumps. Due to the distance, it took a few seconds for the shock waves to hit the Moanastery. A sharp, crashing boom clopped Milton’s ears, followed shortly by a wet blast of tingling steam. Sight and sound disorientingly out of sync, Snivel—followed swiftly by Arcadia—shattered as it struck the mountains of garbage, displacing rubbish while upturning vile clouds of trash. The globe of First Fire flared one last time before snuffing itself out completely with a moist explosion of glittering vapor.
“Something’s happening to the Dumps,” Howler Monkey said as he gaped over the edge. “It’s, like, changing.”
The smoldering embers of First Fire mingled with a surging blanket of sparkling mist that tilled the millions of tons of rubbish below. The coiling tendrils sifted through the Dumps with an almost tender curiosity, cascading along rippling waves that transformed the dreary acres of reeking, noxious garbage into a verdant valley of luminous green moss. The mist dissipated into a haze of dancing motes that twinkled in a hypnotic way, like a happy, half-remembered memory. Bits of flaming wreckage rained down, first from Snivel—smoldering cabins and stone from Poe’s Conversation Pit that formed oddly playful structures—then from Arcadia. Twisted metal shrapnel from the broken video-game arenas were forged by the flaming death throes of First Fire into bizarre approximations of jungle gyms, slides, and teeter-totters. A lofty section of fuselage from Tesla’s tower pierced the heart of the emerald playground, with the charred Dukkha Wheel landing on top with a splintering crack, spinning and smoking like a postapocalyptic Ferris wheel.
“It’s almost beautiful,” Marlo said softly as she joined Milton by the railing, covering his shoulders with a rough blanket.
Suddenly, the sluglike Nyarlathorp, the tentacled Tactagon, and a wounded Oscithraud landed atop the pillowy carpets of moss, strewn about one of the grassy knolls.
Marlo grimaced. “Ugh … make that a monster-sized almost.”
A sudden shower of molten metal cast the heinous beasts as freakishly permanent art installations. The smoldering torso of the Donkey Koncourse dropped down at the center of the cast-iron zoo with a clangorous thud.
Wisps of fragrant “hopium,” smelling like gardenias and roses growing in a soil of ground-up Pop-Tarts and clove, spilled out the walls of the crater. The smell tickled Milton’s nose and, despite the blotches of dried blood on his face, he summoned a weary smile. He put his arm around Marlo.
“Maybe we got to Neverland after all,” he murmured.
Marlo shook off Milton’s embrace, folded her arms together, and scowled at the sprawling playground below with suspicion.
“Hmm … something tells me we’re not off the Captain Hook just yet.”
“IF I COULD play devil’s advocate here,” Algernon Cole said as he approached the witness stand. “You look fabulous.”
“Of course I do,” the Lord of Darkness said, carefully smoothing his bright black-and-yellow poison-dart frog-skin suit and gleaming razor-blade tie. “I’m dressed to kill!”
In the stands, Bea “Elsa” Bubb noted the devil’s lustrous black locks.
“Is Satan wearing a rug?” she asked Ivan the Terrible seated next to her.
“It’s his Hell Toupee, ma’am,” the wild-eyed man with the unruly beard replied politely. “All the stress of causing distress has been murder on his hairline.”
Bea “Elsa” Bubb glared at Lilith Couture, sitting pretty across the courtroom in a black satin minidress and pearls. The elegantly emaciated woman even had an extra-flattering rose-tinted bulb placed directly above her. Lilith rippled her bony, manicured fingers in hello. Involuntarily, Principal Bubb waved her claw in kind, only to discover that Lilith had been waving to her running mate, Mary, Queen of Scots, behind the principal. Bea “Elsa” Bubb pretended to, instead, pat down her hair in order to save hideous face. She stole a look at herself in the reflected shine of Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Bald’s head, who was sitting in front of her.
Not bad, she thought. Despite the bluish hair and crooked smile of that awful Fauster girl, I look centuries younger!
“You’ll do great, Bea,” the principal’s earring whispered in her pointy ear. “Your testimony will be broadcast across zhe underworld. Just be sure to support previous administration—Satan—while not supporting zhe previous administration.”
Satan’s polished cloven hooves fidgeted, their leather tassels trembling, not so much from nerves as from self-contained restless energy. The Epitome of All Evil should be out undermining all that is good, bringing about ruin and corruption. Not sitting on his tail, cross-examined in some stuffy courtroom by bitter magistrates who didn’t bother to read the fine print in their contracts.
The bailiff demon lumbered to Satan’s side, brandishing a Bible.
“Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you the Big Guy Upstairs?”
Satan recoiled with disgust. Algernon Cole handed Satan an oven mitt. The devil sighed as he slipped it onto his claw.
“I promise to … do what you said,” Satan grumbled as he set his claw on the Bible, the Good Book smoldering under his touch despite the padded glove, “as much as the Father of Lies can, that is.”
The demon bailiff shuffled away as Algernon Cole peered down through his lenseless glasses at his hastily scribbled notes. With a flourish, he wadded up his notes and tossed them over his shoulder.
“Rather than give you the third degree, Mr. Satan,” he said slyly, “I’ll just have you tell your story in your words. Totally off-the-cuff, as we’ve been practicing.”
Satan scratched around the nub of his horns.
“Well, in the beginning …”
The courtroom sighed as one weary one.
“Fine, I’ll skip a bit. The thing is, for centuries, I’ve been treated as the Big Guy Upstairs’s nemesis. As an angry angel consumed by pride and cast out of Heaven to oversee his own dastardly domain. Which is”—the word wriggled fitfully on the devil’s forked tongue—“true. But lisping gangstas and I share one thing in common. A bad rap. I’m just doing my job: testing the virtue of all humanity and flunking out those who fail. That hardly makes me the de facto mastermind of all malevolence!”
The courtroom was packed with more snickers than a candy machine.
“Humanity has laid all accountability on me for what they’ve clearly caused themselves. You can blame it on denial, you can blame it on mass psychosis, you can even blame it on the bossa nova, but you can’t blame it all on me. I’m nothing but a scapegoat. I mean, look at the hooves.”
The assorted demons and decomposing historical figures in the court murmured their grudging assent. The prosecuting attorney, Johnny Cockroach, skittered up to the bench.
“If I may cross-examine, Your Dishonor,” the beetle-like lawyer said, flipping his long antennae back behind his sloping shoulders.
Judge Judas nodded.
“Mr. Satan,” Johnny Cockroach said, his four arms tucked thoughtfully behind his back as he paced in front of the witness stand. “Did you or did you not attempt to hasten the Apocalypse by broadcasting inflammatory religious-themed television shows up to the Surface?”
“Yes and no,” Satan answered after stroking his prominent chin. “But mostly yes. Brilliant, huh? There were some unauthorized rewrites, but I can’t deny those ratings! Simply boffo!”
“And did you or did you not attempt to sell the Earth and transport humanity to a deadly dull planet across the galaxy in the”—Johnny Cockroach adjusted his reading glasses as he referred to his notes—“Sirius Lelayme system?”
“No!” Satan said emphatically, much to the relief of Algernon Cole, who was back at the defense table blotting his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. “But it is exactly the sort of thing I would have devised. Uncanny, actually. Whoever hatched that beauty was really wearing their thinking horns.”
Johnny Cockroach smirked.
“So, Mr. Satan, what you are saying is that you approve of the devious plot and admit to helping it along?”
“Well—”
“You don’t deny it?”
“Deny what?”
“Helping it along?”
“Of course not. I mean, I did … a bit.”
The prosecutor laughed. “Actually, it’s rather ridiculous to think that even you could have devised something so nearly perfect. It must have been the brainchild of a true mastermind—”
“I object, Your Dishonor!” Algernon Cole interjected.
“You object?” Judge Judas replied. “On what grounds?”
“Um … hallowed?”
“Overruled!”
Satan bolted up in the stand, sparks shooting out of his flared nostrils.
“I most certainly could have engineered the selling of the world and the simulated extinction of all humanity!” he shouted, turning an even deeper shade of crimson. “In fact, I … I very well might have!”
Johnny Cockroach straightened his feelers with smug satisfaction.
“I have no further questions,” he said as he scuttled back to his desk.
Judge Judas banged his gavel on his table, hitting the bell marked DISORDER IN THE COURT.
As the courtroom descended into chaos, the judge spoke to the camera.
“Well, I’ve heard of pride before the fall, but that was ridiculous!” the pointy-faced man said. “This fallen angel has fallen and he can’t get up! It would take a miracle for Satan to survive his testimony, and—as he knows all too well—miracles are in short supply down here. We’ll be back with our next witness after these messages.”
Satan, flustered and irate, was escorted from the stands by two burly guards.
“Barring any unpleasant surprises,” the recorded voice in Principal Bubb’s earring said, “your testimony could double as your acceptance speech!”
Principal Bubb sneered wickedly to herself as she absentmindedly fingered Marlo’s charm, fi
lled to the brimstone with self-confidence.
Looks like I have more than a snowball’s chance after all …
The monks of the Moanastery celebrated on the balcony, arms hooked, robes twirling as they danced merry jigs. The smiling children clapped in time, laughing as the fragrant, spicy wind of hopium drifted across the crater. The Sea of Sighs still and quiet, the monks could hear whoops and hollers from across the crater.
Abbot Costello leaned over the stone balustrade and peered across the emerald-green valley.
“Well, well,” the ruddy-faced man said. “It’s true.”
“What’s that?” Milton asked as Marlo wiped Sam/Sara’s blood from his face with a damp cloth.
“The Hystery,” Abbot Costello chuckled, nodding toward a garishly painted structure inset on the opposite side of the crater. “The mythic home of an order of manic monks. Evidently not so mythic after all. We could never see them, what with Snivel and—apparently—Arcadia blocking the way.”
The hammering clack of hooves marching across marble echoed throughout the Moanastery. A team of beastly demon guards—a herd of leathery, bat-faced goats—passed through a pair of fallen arches and onto the balcony. The leader reared up on his hind legs, standing at least eight feet tall.
“Milton and Marlo Fauster?” the guard bleated.
Milton shared a wary gaze with his sister.
“This party was just aching to be crashed,” Marlo muttered.
Milton sighed and stepped forward, hoping—like yanking off a Band-Aid—that getting whatever bad thing was about to happen over with would hurt less if it was done quickly.
“Y-yes?” He gulped.
The demon goat-bat clacked in front of Milton, looming over him as he whipped a rolled-up parchment from his holster. Milton took the paper and unfurled it. After skimming its contents, he looked up at the guard’s scrunched-up scowl.
“I don’t understand. What is this?”
“It’s a subpoena,” the creature said, his teeth laced with thick strands of saliva. “For you and your sister to testify at the Trial of the Millennium: the State vs. Satan … now.”
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 26
