YOU ARE UTTERLY ALONE
Each young spirit experiences “the change” in a unique and individual way. Sure, it can bring feelings of fear, sadness, confusion, doubt, and a sense of loss. While these feelings are perfectly normal, they are still nothing to be proud of.
C’mon…snap out of it, Gloomy McSad! The passage from the land of the living to the land of the dead is an exciting one! With a positive outlook you might actually enjoy this new phase of your nonexistence.
Now, being dead isn’t so bad after all, is it?™
* * *
“Next!” the blue-haired demoness behind the counter hissed. Startled, Milton dropped his pamphlet on the floor and shuffled to the counter.
“Um, y-yes,” he stammered. “Fauster…I’m here to be, uh, disorientated.”
The creature snorted and leafed through a stack of files, plucking out a slender folder. She stamped it with a loud thwack and pushed it across the counter.
“There you go…Next!”
Milton stared helplessly at his folder. “Is that it?”
The demoness glared at him, her yellow eyes flaring like coals. “What do you want? A parade? Fireworks? A big party? You’re not the first kid here and you’re definitely not the last.”
“But what do I do?”
The impatient creature sighed. “I’ll talk slowly so you can understand. This is your class schedule and registration packet. Your first class starts…started… five minutes ago. Tsk, tsk…looks like you really are the late Milton Fauster.” She giggled like a hyena laughing at its struggling prey.
“How can I be late if there isn’t any time here?” Milton asked.
The crusty blue-haired clerk scowled. “Be that as it may, it doesn’t stop you from being tardy,” she croaked impatiently. “Better hurry. Don’t want to start off on the wrong hoof.”
Milton clomped out of the room and into the hallway in his painful wooden clogs. The hall was flooded with wavering, headache-inducing fluorescent lights. Flaming torches also jutted from the walls, filling the halls with a sooty smoke that made Milton’s eyes burn. All of Heck’s passages, it seemed, were filled with an incessant and unsettling howling, apparently for no other reason than to be unnerving.
He knelt down and carefully removed Lucky from his knapsack. The ferret winced at the harsh light.
“Lucky,” Milton whispered while scratching his wriggling pet’s neck, “I need you to do something. Remember that bad lady’s office? The one with the stinky, three-headed dog?”
The ferret looked into Milton’s eyes, hissed, and shivered from his wet little nose to the tip of his tail.
“Good,” Milton continued. “I need you to get my contract. It’s in the file cabinet by her desk. It should be easy enough for you to find, because it will be the only one that smells like this…”
Milton bit his finger until it bled, then wiped it under Lucky’s nose. The ferret’s nostrils flared and a wild look came over him. He obsessively licked Milton’s wound until the bleeding stopped.
“Okay, boy,” Milton said sadly. “Time to go.”
He gave Lucky one last squeeze, then sent him rippling down the hall like a fuzzy white wave.
Milton wiped away a tear, then opened his registration folder.
“Ethics, Room 1972,” he muttered. “Teacher: Mr. R. Nixon.” He stared down the hall. “No way, it couldn’t be.”
11 · CLASS CUTUP
MARLO SLICED CAREFULLY through the demon’s tough skin—dark, crinkled rawhide mottled with red splotches—until she had made a deep, Y-shaped incision from shoulder to shoulder.
“Bonny good, Miss Fauster,” said Ms. Mallon, the stout demon teacher of Marlo’s demon biology class. “Yer a natural, ya are.”
Marlo seemed to be the only student remotely interested in today’s topic. In fact, the other girls—who were all wearing drab burlap muumuus, stirrup pants, and Birkenstocks with white socks—grimaced with disgust. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the demon body Marlo was currently dissecting belonged to her still-conscious teacher.
“Ooooh,” Ms. Mallon shivered. “Watch it, luv. Those instruments are colder than a Brit’s Christmas in Belfast, they are! Ouch…a little deep, dearie.”
“Sorry, Ms. Mallon,” Marlo said while folding back a flap of cold, black skin from her teacher’s chest. The whole experience was like peeling a really, really ripe banana that talked.
“Please, dear, call me Mary…Typhoid Mary,” the plain, thick-featured teacher said in her coarse yet lilting brogue.
“Typhoid?” said Lyon Sheraton, a thin blonde with bulging blue eyes. “Isn’t that, like, some old hippie band that does that song about money?”
“You mean Pink Floyd,” said a sullen, freckled girl in the back of the class. “My mom worked in a hospital. She said that typhoid was a form of salmonella or something.”
Lyon stared blankly at the girl.
“What happens if I connect the dots on your face? Does it spell loser?” she spat out like a verbal slap. Lyon smirked to her friend, Bordeaux Radisson, who—with her gleaming blond hair, vacant blue eyes, and frightening lack of body fat—seemed almost like a fashion accessory of Lyon’s that she kept close to both accentuate and confirm her own hollow beauty.
“Salmonella,” Marlo said. “Sounds like a fairy tale about a fish.”
Lyon and Bordeaux shot Marlo a frosty stare, before Lyon broke it off with a dismissive eye roll.
“Quiet, lasses, before I have ya all quarantined,” Ms. Mallon said. She sat up suddenly, causing some of the more squeamish girls to squeal, and brushed back her matted auburn hair.
“Thank ya, Miss Fauster. That’ll be quite sufficient.”
Marlo stepped away from the breached demoness as she carefully tugged apart the flaps of spotty skin, exposing her dry, lifeless internal organs. Lyon gasped.
“That is, like, so gross! If my stomach wasn’t stapled, I’d barf all over the place!”
Ms. Mallon glared at her with dark, glassy slits. “Remind me to judge yer insides when they’re hangin’ out of you… which might not be too long with your attitude.”
Lyon rolled her eyes and scowled.
“Scoot yer desks closer, you miserable young maidens,” Ms. Mallon commanded. “And, Miss Sheraton, please refrain from vomitin’ inside of me chest cavity.”
The teacher straightened up and pushed her gaping chest out.
“Now, lasses, do any of ya know how a demon becomes a demon?”
The girls looked at one another blankly. Marlo shrugged her shoulders as she stood beside her cleft teacher. A pudgy, cruel-looking girl with hairy knuckles answered. “Doing something really, really bad?”
“Well, that’s a given,” Ms. Mallon replied. “Here, let me show you something.”
Ms. Mallon carefully spread the opening in her chest wider, producing a few pops and tears. She reached her claws deep into her chest cavity, pried apart her withered lungs, shifted her prunelike heart, and revealed something so startling that even Marlo stifled a squeal. Inside Ms. Mallon was…a miniature Ms. Mallon. Not a wrinkled, demon shell…but a plain, plump human, with reddish-brown hair, ruddy cheeks, and a thin-lipped smirk. The miniature Ms. Mallon was like an extra internal organ, living just behind the withered heart, mostly just a head with a wasted, freakishly small body. All Marlo could do was chuckle. Her teacher was a huge, terrible candy bar with a living, nougatty center.
“That is, like, so wrong,” commented Bordeaux.
“I assure you, broomstick, ’sno more wrong than havin’ liposuction on yer twelfth birthday,” the demon teacher replied. “What happens is, once yer down here long enough, yer body ‘forgets.’ Its mem’ry, which is all it really is at this point, fades away, slowly like, becomin’ less distinct, as if it were lost in a Londonderry fog. And so it begins to lose its struggle.”
“What do you mean by ‘struggle’?” Marlo asked.
“The struggle between our inner and outer identities, l
uv,” Ms. Mallon replied. “The tension between who we are inside, and who we are on the outside. A demon isn’t some random, bloomin’ monster dreamed up by the Big Guy Downstairs. We’re simply people—granted, wicked diabhals sent to ifreann—turned inside out.”
Lyon’s collagen-fattened lips gaped like a bigmouth bass out of water. “You’re telling me that, like…you were a person?”
Ms. Mallon—both outwardly and inwardly—sneered. “Yes, wretched child. I was not unlike you, so very long ago.”
Bordeaux snorted. “I so don’t think so.”
“Well, I may ’a been a touch more…full-bodied than you—yer thinner than a French fry in a potato famine—but I had quite an infectious personality.”
Bordeaux absentmindedly scratched several small red blotches that had just appeared on her lower neck.
“You can only conceal what’s in ya fer so long before all that was in is hangin’ out,” Ms. Mallon said.
Lyon shook her carefully maintained mop of blond hair. “You sound like a bad fortune cookie. Look, I’m sorry you’re, like, a big, dried-up piece of rotten meat or whatever with a lady stuck inside, but whatever happened to you isn’t going to happen to me.” She sucked in her cheeks and put her bony hands on her nonexistent hips. “Besides, my daddy will get me out of here. He’s, like, so rich. He probably owns this place.”
The teacher laughed, which made her useless internal organs jiggle disturbingly, then sat up stiffly.
“Miss Fauster, would ya do me the honor of stitchin’ me back up? This is most uncomfortable, and yer the only one present I would trust with such a procedure.”
Marlo looked around uncomfortably. “Um…sure.”
As Marlo stepped up and took the needle from Ms. Mallon, she heard Lyon whisper to the rest of the girls. “Ooh, looks like Elvira is teacher’s gross new pet.”
There’s something about a girl’s whisper that manages to slice through the air like a knife, arriving louder and sharper than a scream. Marlo had never, ever been considered anything remotely petlike in relation to teachers. Not even a tolerated stray. It was a new feeling, and she didn’t like it. She felt like taffy pulled in two directions.
On the one hand, she wanted to fit in with the other bad girls. She could never really fit in anywhere, but she was much more comfortable in the role of class pit bull than lapdog. On the other hand, Ms. Mallon was kind of cool, or as cool as a fat, contagious demon could be. The class was actually kind of interesting. Still, even an outcast as, um, outcasty as Marlo was not immune to the slings and arrows of peer pressure. She needed to regain her balance in the scheme of things, or perish yet again.
“So,” Marlo said while suturing her teacher closed, “can you explain that ‘tension’ thing you were talking about?”
Bordeaux and Lyon leaned into each other, snickering.
“Good question,” Ms. Mallon answered. “It’s the tension of identity. The eternal war between appearance and substance. Sooner or later, our true selves prevail.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Marlo mumbled as she snuck her skilled, pickpocket’s fingers into her teacher’s abdomen. She clutched on to something in the middle of her teacher’s chest. Deftly, she plucked what was surely Ms. Mallon’s heart from its supposedly final resting place. It was like yanking a large, overripe grape from a vine. Marlo slyly displayed the stolen organ at her side, blocked from her teacher’s sight by a steel tray, so that the other girls could see how gifted she was. But instead of a chorus of giggling appreciation for her “inside job,” all she heard was a muffled squeal ratting her out.
“Our heart!” a shrill voice exclaimed from her teacher’s chest cavity. “The little nasty stole our heart!”
Ms. Mallon snapped out of her philosophical musing at the shouting from within her chest. Marlo’s pale face reddened while the girls finally giggled, but at Marlo’s expense.
“Miss Fauster,” the teacher said softly, “though it has grown cold and hard, I would appreciate it immensely if you would return my heart to its rightful place. It may not be much, but it has great sentimental value.”
Humiliated, Marlo reopened Ms. Mallon’s incision and resecured her heart to the network of dried branches in her chest. The pinched face inside stuck its tongue out at Marlo.
“Thanks a lot, you little snitch,” Marlo replied under her breath.
“Now, dear,” Ms. Mallon scolded. “We all have a wee voice inside that’s hard to silence, don’t we?”
It was weird, thought Marlo as she stitched Ms. Mallon up yet again. She had once had a voice inside, when she was a little girl, but after years of ignoring it, it had finally grown quiet. She had thought she heard it whisper when she had taken her teacher’s heart, but its warning had seemed as faint as a soft, cautioning breeze. She didn’t like it. Things were bad enough without a nagging little voice making trouble inside, too.
Just as she was nearly finished sewing up her teacher, her needle hit something hard. A bone. She slipped her thumb and index finger subtly inside the wound. It felt like a rib. It must have been dislodged during her failed attempt at stealing her teacher’s heart. The word “failed” blinked like lurid neon in Marlo’s mind. Swiftly, she pulled the rib through the slit and up into her sleeve. Perfect, Marlo thought. No witnesses.
A faint voice bubbled up from inside Ms. Mallon.
“Ya thievin’ magpie!”
Quickly, Marlo stitched closed the incision.
“Thank you, Miss Fauster,” Ms. Mallon said while clutching her chest. “Ooh,” she winced. “Must be me heartburn actin’ up again. Anyway, class. What was Miss Fauster here exhibitin’ that is important to note?”
The girls all turned to Lyon, who had seemed to become their de facto leader. All the jockeying for power that boys did so loudly and obviously, girls could establish almost invisibly.
“A colossal lack of judgment…and style,” Lyon responded tartly.
The girls tittered maliciously. Marlo blushed, which is extra embarrassing for a Goth girl.
“Actually,” Ms. Mallon said while buttoning up her red leather blouse, “Miss Fauster was unwittingly carryin’ out one of the most essential aspects of biology, or how it’s practiced down here, anyway. That would be a…”
The teacher scanned her pupils’ faces for the smallest spark of understanding, but there wasn’t a glimmer. She sighed.
“…forensic examination: the revealin’ of circumstances and the securin’ of evidence. In the afterlife, we couldn’t give a right darn about how life is made. What concerns us is how it was unmade.
“Once the exact conditions of death are assessed, one can trace the path that the spirit will most probably follow. This information is of extreme interest to both the Powers That Be and the Powers That Be Evil, especially when settlin’ disputes. Without actual proof, an allegation is as worthless as a comb to a bald man. It’s just an assumption with airs.”
She walked up to Marlo. Despite herself, Marlo winced. Her teacher wrapped her thin, sinewy arm around Marlo’s shoulder.
“You have a light touch, luv,” Ms. Mallon added. “I can see yer really goin’ places. You just might have a brilliant career down here.”
Marlo cringed. Lyon and Bordeaux glared at her from across the room. If looks could kill, those twin blue-eyed stares would be on America’s Most Wanted.
She had accidentally made a bad situation worse, she thought as she stealthily tucked Ms. Mallon’s ill-gotten rib into her pocket. Marlo, too, had been turned inside out. Up above, she knew her place: in the back of the class, making trouble. Down here those same instincts made her teacher’s pet, the outcast of the outcasts. As Ms. Mallon tightened her claws around Marlo’s neck, sealing her fate in the eyes of the other girls, she did indeed feel every inch a teacher’s pet, with an exceptionally tight collar.
12 · FIRST-CLASS FRIGHT
MILTON CREAKED OPEN the door and walked into the sudden hush of a classroom, interrupted. Yep, there was no mistaking it. Standing in front of the
class was Richard Nixon, the deceased thirty-seventh president of the United States, who had resigned in disgrace in 1974 after a big scandal called Watergate where he had tried to cover up a secret government conspiracy. The stooped, drooping old man was lecturing about ethics, of all things.
“The term comes from the Greek word ethos, which in the plural means ‘character,’” Mr. Nixon said, his sagging jowls flapping as he spoke before the twenty or so terminally bored boys.
Milton crept toward the nearest empty desk, but it was near impossible to be stealthy in wooden clogs and bright yellow lederhosen.
“Ethical actions may be approved of in that they are good, desirable, or right,” the teacher continued, undeterred by a chorus of loud yawns, “or disapproved of because they are bad, undesirable, or wrong…like being late for class.”
Milton sat down at an unoccupied desk in the back of the class.
“As I was saying,” Mr. Nixon carried on, “ethics is the study of moral principles and philosophical quandaries. A traditional philosophic question is whether right and wrong are fundamental in the nature of things, making them absolute, or merely relative to present circumstances, fluctuating on the requirements of the moment.”
Mr. Nixon’s bloodshot eyes settled on the class list on his desk. “Mr. Fauster,” he said in a low, cutting rumble. “Since you know so much about ethics that you feel your attendance is optional, give us an example of the latter.”
Milton hated being singled out like this, not because he didn’t know the answers—he almost always did—but because he had to act like he didn’t know the answers in order not to seem like any more of a freak than he already was. But his teachers knew that he knew the answers and took great pains to drag them out of him. This made Milton seem like a know-it-all to his classmates, and a head case to his teachers. Either the teachers were completely oblivious to the nuances of Milton’s situation or—on some deep malicious level—cruelly aware.
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go Page 6