“I found a door!” Virgil shouted from beneath the DURBR sign, his hand on the tarnished knob of a dull charcoal door.
So the three not-quite children, not-quite teenagers stepped through the door into a place that seemed not-quite home, not-quite Heck.
25 · WAIT WATCHERS
THEY ENTERED A sprawling gray building. It was a huge square room lined with counters, most of which had little signs that read CLOSED. TRY NEXT TELLER. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. Lines of people with drooped shoulders, shifting their weight restlessly from foot to foot, stood vigilantly in front of the few tellers actually at their post.
The air had that same dead quality that Milton noticed in chemistry class mixed with the odor of old carpet, mildew, dust, and despair. The whole place just smelled gray.
Rows of morose adults slumped in folding metal chairs, gazing dismally at the ticket stubs in their hands.
The only feeble splash of atmospheric color in this place came in the form of cheery music squawking through speakers embedded in the crumbling asbestos ceiling.
Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…
A huge, run-down metal sign displaying a long row of numbers clicked loudly. A new number dropped slowly into place like a glob of cold ketchup creeping out of an upended bottle.
NOW SERVING: 5,769,343,782,312.
One disheveled man in a trench coat held up his ticket in disbelief. “5,769,343,782,312? That’s me!”
The man shuffled across the carpet to a lumpy woman behind a counter. She was chewing gum. Gobs of it. Her jaws chomped in listless rhythm and caused her three chins to sway back and forth. She resembled a cow with gray hair and beige stirrup pants. The man knocked on her window just as she flipped her sign to CLOSED. She waved her painted, dagger-like nails toward the counter next to her, where several hundred people fidgeted in line.
The sign clicked again: NOW SERVING: 5,769,343,782,313.
The second clerk shrugged her padded shoulders. “Sorry, sir. You missed your turn. You’ll have to wait.”
The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon…
The man plodded back to his chair in defeat as Milton knocked on the cow lady’s window. She ignored him in that “pretending not to notice you” kind of way. Marlo stepped forward.
“Hey! Lady!”
The woman looked up reluctantly. She squinted at Marlo through cat’s-eye glasses. A glimmer of recognition flashed in her dull eyes.
“You three look…” She thrummed her stiletto fingernails on the counter. “I’ll get my supervisor to help you. Wait here…Ha, like you could do anything else.”
She pushed three long sheets of paper across the counter. “In the meantime, please fill out these Capture forms…Be sure to sign the back, people always forget to do that.”
She shut her window and waddled toward a bank of offices behind her.
Marlo noticed an engraved wooden sign above the windows of the counter: DEPARTMENT OF UNENDURABLE REDUNDANCY, BUREAUCRACY, AND REDUNDANCY. She swallowed hard.
Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon…
“We’re done here, boys,” Marlo said with a quaver, pushing the forms back across the counter.
Milton, Marlo, and Virgil pushed through the lines of people to a revolving door at the back of the room. Through the door was a winding white corridor, like a hospital hallway, with a rainbow of colored bands on the gray linoleum floor that branched out in a dozen directions.
“Well,” Marlo said, beginning to run, “I’ve always been partial to purple.”
They dashed along the plum-colored line, which veered sharply to the right. Milton looked over his shoulder. Three withered demon guards with matching shocks of gray hair struggled through the revolving doors behind them. Once free, they bounded toward the three children with surprising speed.
If you’ll hold my hand, we’ll chase your dream across the sky, for we can fly…
“I don’t know what’s worse,” Marlo said, panting as she galloped down the hallway, “being chased by demons or that awful music…it’s everywhere.”
Virgil wheezed. “I…kind of…like it…sort of… It’s very…relaxing…”
Marlo clutched her soiled towel.
“Figures,” she puffed. “It’s like a musical lobotomy.”
Up, up and away, my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…
The purple line ended at a like-colored double door. Hanging on the twin doorknobs was a cardboard sign on a string, reading DO NOT DISTURB: TIME-OUT.
Marlo pulled off the sign and threw open the doors.
Milton, Marlo, and Virgil burst into a vast windowless space lined with shiny gray linoleum. Hundreds of agitated young children with cones on their heads twitched in folding metal chairs that faced the walls.
An old woman who looked like a puckered praying mantis paced the room, smacking a yardstick in her palm.
“Now stop all that blubbering!” she scolded. “You only have to stay here until the cows come home, or the place downstairs freezes, whichever comes last!”
Milton, Marlo, and Virgil closed the door behind them as quietly as possible. Unfortunately, they stuck out like three giant, soiled thumbs.
The withered insect lady glared at the three filthy preteens.
“You’re a little old for this place, aren’t you?”
Marlo stepped forward and cinched her towel tightly beneath her underarms.
“We have overactive thyroids,” Marlo declared. Then, with her usual grace and subtlety, she added, “Tell us where we are.”
“Take a seat,” the teacher spat. “You’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.”
Milton walked toward a group of vacant chairs in the middle of the wall opposite them.
“I’m starting to think we might not be home,” whispered Virgil next to him.
I sort of figured that once I saw the battalion of decomposing demons after us, Milton thought.
He studied the room. There were no other doors, no other way out. The room was still except for the occasional whimper or squirming limb. From down the hall Milton could hear grumbling and doors opening and shutting.
Virgil stared at the double doors.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said. “They’re going to find us. We’ve got to find another way out of here.”
“Shhhhh!!” the sour teacher hissed.
“There isn’t,” Milton said hopelessly.
Marlo scanned the room like a caged animal.
“Wait,” she yelped. “Up there!”
The ceiling was tiled in big, dingy white squares. One of the tiles was askew. A warm, faint light shone through the gap.
“I smell cookies,” Virgil said, sniffing up great gulps of air.
Marlo scooted a chair underneath it and hopped on top.
“I…can’t…quite…reach,” she said, teetering on her tiptoes.
“We’ll have to get on top of each other or something,” Milton commented beside her.
He looked over at Virgil and considered his bulk. “Due to our unique…body types, maybe you should be the bottom, while we climb on top.”
The shriveled teacher held a bony finger to her mouth. “Shhhhh!!!” she said with an explosive spray of spit. “Sit down this instant!!”
Marlo looked at Virgil.
“Only problem with that,” she said, “is that we’d have to, somehow, pull him up.”
Virgil shrugged his shoulders apologetically.
“Good point,” Milton said while rubbing his chin in contemplation. “Well, here goes…”
Milton scaled his sister, trying to touch her as little as possible.
“You could at least take off those stupid wooden shoes,” Marlo grumbled.
The teacher glowered at them, dumbfounded, with her withered arms on her hips. “What on earth do you wretched children think you’re doing!? Come down from there!”
Marlo groaned as Milton ascended her. “We’re not on earth,” she grunted. “That’s
the problem, bone bag.”
Securely on her shoulders, Milton managed to push the tile aside. “Close…Virgil, you’re up.”
The teacher was livid. You could see the anger pulsing along her network of bulging blue veins. She stormed at Milton, Marlo, and Virgil, waving her yardstick.
The Fausters moaned in agony as their full-bodied friend climbed to the top of their living totem pole. Finally, after much wheezing and mumbled curses, Virgil made it to the top.
He poked his head in. “Wow,” he murmured, “you’re not going to believe this.”
Marlo was sweating under the strain. “And you’re not going to believe my chiropractor bill if you don’t get off me!”
“Oh,” Virgil mumbled, “sorry.”
The double doors of the classroom rattled open. Several pairs of hard leather jackboots slapped the floor below. Virgil crawled into the ceiling and grabbed Milton’s arm.
“Whoa!” Virgil yelled as he suddenly fell into the ceiling, pulling both Milton and Marlo in as well.
They fell onto the floor of a child’s bedroom. The hole in the ceiling of the room below—or at least it seemed as if it were below—had led to a hole behind a black velvet snowman painting hanging on a wall in this room. It defied the laws of physics and gravity. But obviously whoever had made those laws had never spent time down here.
26 · ALWAYS WINTER, NEVER CHRISTMAS
A LITTLE BOY sat on a bed, clutching his knees. Across from him was another bed covered with pink stuffed unicorns, on which a little girl—wide awake—shook back and forth excitedly.
“Hello!” said the trembling little girl, who looked like she was about to wet her bed.
Marlo and Milton stared at each other.
“Where are we?” Milton asked.
“You’re in our bedroom, silly,” the little girl replied. “What do you think Santa is going to bring you?”
“Santa?” Virgil said, reaching instinctively for a half-eaten cupcake on the boy’s bedside table. “There isn’t any…”
Marlo nudged Virgil in the ribs with her elbow—no easy feat.
“What do you mean?” asked Milton.
“Christmas!” shrieked the little boy and girl. “It’s almost Christmas! Look!”
The little girl pointed at a snowman clock on the wall, framed by twinkling Christmas lights. The clock read “11:59.”
Milton was filled with a strange electricity. This cheery room made him feel happy and warm inside. But it wasn’t your standard-issue kind of joy. It was joy with an edge. Happiness with a hunger to it, an appetite that ached, that could never be filled. It crackled all around him, making him itchy and agitated. It was like when he waited in line to see The Lord of the Rings. It was exciting, yet it gave him an ulcer. If he felt any merrier, he would explode.
“Lucky” chose that moment to poke his white fuzzy head out of Milton’s backpack, sniff the air, and bound out of the bag.
“Oh boy!” yelped the little boy. “A weasel! Just what I always wanted!”
The counterfeit ferret crawled toward a glass of milk and a plate of cookies on the girl’s nightstand.
“He’s not a weasel,” said Milton defensively. “He’s a ferret. And he’s mine.”
“Hey!” the little girl shouted. “That milk is for Santa!”
The creature looked up from the milk and hissed.
Milton looked at the clock on the wall: 11:59.
Virgil wiped frosting from his lower lip and whispered to Milton. “It’s been 11:59 for a while now.”
“Maybe the clock is broken,” said Marlo.
“No,” Virgil replied. “The second hand keeps moving around; it just never gets to midnight.”
“Always winter, never Christmas,” murmured Milton.
“Huh?” asked Marlo.
“It’s from a book,” he replied. “Never mind.”
“It’s like we traded one Limbo for another,” Virgil muttered weakly.
“And another, and another…,” added Marlo.
“Hey!” the little boy screamed. “Stop!”
The not-so-Lucky, with a frosted reindeer cookie in his mouth (Rudolph with a cinnamon Red Hot for a nose), leapt off the table and scurried out of the room.
“Lucky! Wait!” Milton screeched as he ran after him.
“You can’t go down yet,” wailed the little girl. “IT’S NOT TIME!”
Cerberus, in his ferret suit, rippled down the stairs like a fuzzy white Slinky, the glazed Rudolph still clutched in his jaws.
Milton rushed after him. Marlo started to follow, but, as she passed the clock on the wall, she began to twitch. It was what happened when she saw something she was about to steal. An itch she had to scratch. As she, with her near-legendary light touch, plucked the clock from the wall, the word “evidence” popped into her head. Her thoughts were tugged back to Ms. Mallon’s class. With any crime, you needed to collect evidence to support your case. If anything was a crime, it was this place, and she felt sure her brother would think of something. He always did.
So she tucked the clock beneath her arm and descended the stairs into a living room decked out in magical Christmas finery. It looked like an explosion at a tinsel factory. Twinkling lights in a rainbow of colors, candy-cane candles flickering, battery-operated snowmen waving…and in the middle of it all, a massive pine tree—twenty feet tall at least—surrounded by heaps of presents lavishly wrapped with green and red bows.
It was painfully beautiful. It was almost enough to make a jaded kid believe in Santa all over again. But there was something about the festive scene that made Milton uncomfortable. It was too perfect. Cruelly so.
The fake ferret rushed toward the largest gift under the tree, then suddenly stopped in his tracks. He dropped the cookie and sniffed the box with abandon, baring his needle-like teeth into something like a smile.
“What is it, little guy?” Marlo asked, stooping next to him.
Just then the oversized box shuddered.
Milton instinctively scooped up his pet. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
The fuzzy imposter squirmed and spat, wanting nothing more than to get back to the box.
“He’s really upset,” Milton said. “This is all probably too much for him.”
Milton stuffed the twitching animal deep into his knapsack, then strapped it shut. The sack quivered and quaked as “Lucky” desperately fought to get out.
Milton took a deep breath and approached the trembling package.
“Stop!” screamed the little girl from the top of the stairs. Both she and her brother acted as if there was an invisible force field preventing them from descending. They shook with both fear and excitement. Their hair stood on end.
“You can’t open a present before Christmas!” the little boy yelled desperately. “You’ll spoil everything!”
Virgil slogged past them down the stairs. The terrified children gawked, as if he had just jumped off a cliff.
“I don’t like this,” Marlo murmured as she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.
The box convulsed anew. Virgil pushed the Fauster children aside, stepping defiantly toward the present.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m Jewish. I’ll be fine.”
Virgil bent down. Up close, the green and red foil and silver silk bow looked somehow sinister. The quivering box was both wonderful and wicked, like a chocolate-covered jalapeño.
Virgil examined the tangle of ribbon as if defusing a bomb, cautiously gauging which wire to cut. He gave the bow a tug. Suddenly a long black claw stabbed through the “gift” from the inside.
Virgil jumped back and fell on his substantial backside.
The little boy and girl craned their necks to see.
“Is that Santa Claus?” the girl asked timidly.
Virgil, Milton, and Marlo stared bug-eyed as the gift began to unwrap itself.
“Whoever’s claws those are,” muttered Virgil, “they sure as heck ain’t Santa’s.”
His curiosity getting the best of him, Milton inched toward the gift.
With a great pop, the box’s lid shot off like a rocket, hitting the ceiling. The gift wrapping shred into a cloud of glittering confetti and the lofty, lavishly decorated pine tree toppled as Bea “Elsa” Bubb climbed out of the box.
Towering over the threesome, Bea “Elsa” Bubb pulled a large can of Not-So-Silly String from her purse.
“This is going to hurt you much, much more than it will me,” she said with a sneer.
She sprayed the trembling escapees, coating them thoroughly with yards and yards of gooey, multicolored ribbons. The candy-colored cocoon stiffened into a hard, unyielding shell, with Milton, Marlo, and Virgil sealed inside.
27 · TO HECK IN A HANDBASKET
THE ELEVATOR—MORE like an oversized wicker hamper—shook, clacked, and squealed its way down…or up…or across. It was hard to tell when you were wrapped up like a mummy.
In the darkness Milton bobbed in and out of consciousness. He could only imagine what kind of punishment Bea “Elsa” Bubb had in store for him. What could she possibly dish out that could be worse than simply going back to Heck—that is, if they had ever truly left?
The suffocating heat inside the Not-So-Silly String shell sent him back inside his feverish brain.
Milton was in his bed. He rose and stretched, comforted by his familiar surroundings. Something troubled him, however. He looked at the lump next to him beneath the sheet. He ripped off the sheet and lying beside him was Marlo, physically attached to him like a Siamese twin. They gaped at each other in horror and screamed.
Milton came to in the dark shell, screaming. Marlo was wedged into his left side (luckily not permanently), while Virgil woke up on his right.
Phew, Milton thought. Just a dream. No Siamese twin. Just me, encased in thick plastic strings, imprisoned by a demoness in the underworld.
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go Page 11