The turnip-shaped lunch lady trundled out from behind the serving counter and, after killing the lights with two swift claps, walked over to an ancient film projector at the back of the Mess Hall.
The Fausters walked across the room and joined the other new recruits, having achieved a sense of solidarity due to their shared SighTram trauma. The Emo boy scowled at his food, pushed it away, and then pretended to check his cell phone, which he had drawn on his palm with a pen.
The lunch lady flipped the switch on the projector and the machine rattled to life. On a filthy white sheet hung on the far wall flickered an insignia of two leaky canoes crossed like swords, dissolving to GOOD GRIEF! THE NO-FUNDAMENTALS OF CAMP SNIVEL written in wood-carved letters.
A scratchy image of a girl sleeping in her bed filled the screen. She started up with a cry, spat out her mouth guard, and saw a boy hovering in her window. He was a twitchy, nervous-looking creature, clad in protective green padding and a safety helmet.
“I’m Whingey,” the girl shouted. “Who are you?!”
“My name is P-Peter P-Panic Disorder,” the boy replied between chattering teeth. “I’m one of the Lost Cause Boys.”
“Who are they?”
“They’re sickly, grumbling children who have just given up. They’re sent far away to Never-Ever Land … to Camp Snivel.”
“Oooh!” Whingey cried out as she wrapped her arms around her nightgown. “Do we fly there?”
“Nah … you sort of slide down the wind’s back until it shrugs you off.…”
“This is lame,” Marlo moaned.
“Not to mention copyright infringement,” Milton added.
“So, any ideas, Brainiac?” Marlo asked as she nibbled a woe-is-meatball. She grimaced and spat it back out onto her plate.
“What do you mean?”
“E-S-C-A-P-E,” Marlo replied, as if her eternal darnation were some kind of spelling bee.
“But where?” the long-faced girl sitting across from them whined.
“And how?” Milton added. “The SighTram is the only way out, and that thing almost got us killed—again.”
“Well, what’s your plan?” Marlo said, disgusted by both her meal and her tablemates. “To study real hard until they give us straight As and send us to Heaven or wherever? Get real, Honor Roll.”
“Well, who knows? Maybe that’s how it works here.”
Marlo snorted.
“Right,” she chuckled mirthlessly. That’s never gonna—”
A butterfly net swished over Marlo’s blue-haired head. The Fausters turned to see the Grin Reaper gently cradling something caught in the net’s pale-green mesh. He coaxed the invisible creature into his sputtering electric jar.
“Sarcastic laugh,” the Grin Reaper wheezed sadly as he stared through the indigo energy field at the shriveled mothlike creature within. “Not worth keep,” he muttered as he sulked away.
Marlo pulled out the crumpled HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyer.
“Well, this kid—and a whole bunch of others—escaped,” she said. “So it must be possible.”
“Something terrible probably happened to them,” the pouty girl offered, crossing her arms defiantly.
“Didn’t you say you saw something in the forest?” Milton asked.
Marlo bit her lower lip nervously, catching it with her fang. “I think so. Something dark, woolly, and creepy-fast … out of the corner of my eye.”
“Here we are,” Peter Panic Disorder murmured on the screen as he and the girl alighted on a cartoon campground alive with sparkling waterfalls and ponies tossing back rainbow-hued manes. “Camp Snivel. The supercool Never-Ever Land for kids like us. Here you can learn vital outdoor skills like stick-rubbing, tying and untying knots, and keeping to yourself, or you can engage in serene leisure activities such as a fun kayuck jaunt out on beautiful Lake Rymose.”
A pair of apple-cheeked children in a long yellow canoe sliced happily through the vivid blue waters of the animated lake.
“But be careful of the Dukkha Wheel …”
“Told you,” Sam said to Marlo before falling back asleep against his sister’s cheek.
“It’s what gives Snivel its … um, awesome upside-downiness,” Peter Panic Disorder relayed nervously, eyeing the sky above warily while biting his fingernails.
A pair of redheaded twins in pigtails pointed at each other’s eyes.
“What are those?” they whined in unison. Their eyelids were crisscrossed with so many veins that it looked as if they had tiny purple volleyball nets suspended from their eyebrows.
“Those?” Peter Panic Disorder panted, riding a wave of anxiety. “A, uh, side effect of camping upside down in Snivel …”
“Look, I know that Heck is probably some elaborate, horrible game rigged so that all of us kids lose,” Milton whispered to his sister over the film. “But we have to learn the rules before we can break them.”
“I say we break first, learn later,” Marlo interjected as she vainly tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear.
“And look where that’s got you.”
“Well, Mr. No-Duh Prize Winner, apparently that’s gotten me exactly a foot away from you,” Marlo replied with a sneer. “It’s like we’re joined together with invisible handcuffs for all eternity. So neither of us is really acing this whole ‘beat the system’ thing.”
Milton had to admit that his sister had a point: a typically blunt point, but a point nonetheless. Neither of them had made much progress in the Escape from Eternal Darnation Department. Milton had managed to break out of Limbo—using the buoyant power of stolen Lost Souls—and make his way to the Surface, but in a barely functional “energetically challenged” state that had his body and soul maddeningly out of phase with one another. And what did Milton get for his trouble? A second death: poppin’ the bucket in a crate of popcorn kernels shoved in a funeral home furnace.
Something nagged at Milton, though. And it wasn’t just the fresh memory of having switched souls with Marlo just before Milton became Satan’s production assistant and Marlo was sent to Fibble by Principal Bubb—an experience so thoroughly awkward that it hung in the air, heavy and unspoken, between the two Fausters. It was something that bothered him even more than the humiliation of literally walking in his big sister’s shoes. Milton felt like he and Marlo were at the center of something big. His escape from Limbo, for instance, was apparently unprecedented in the near-infinite history of Heck. Then Marlo and Milton had unwittingly thwarted the rhyming, mechanical bunny that oversaw Rapacia—the Grabbit—and its plot to destroy the underworld by creating a black hole. Next, Milton had helped his best friend Virgil destabilize the power-hungry kingdom of Blimpo before reuniting with his sister to catch Fibble in an apocalyptic doozy of a lie that would have sent all of humanity halfway across the universe.
But, still, here he and his sister were, side by side, in another dismal destination—perhaps the most dismal—no closer to waking from this unliving nightmare than they had been when they had first passed through the grim Gates of Heck.
A greenish brown speck of light darted across the screen. The children in the film grimaced and waved the air in front of their noses.
“Ugh … what’s that horrible reek?!” they choked in unison.
Peter Panic Disorder laughed tremulously.
“It’s Stinkerbell, and she’s here to read the rules of Camp Snivel: and these rules rule!” he said unconvincingly as the grubby fairy, leaving a malodorous vapor trail behind her, unfurled a roll of toilet paper with words printed on the sheets.
“Rule one,” Stinkerbell squeaked. “No pranks will be perpetrated upon your fellow campers unless they have been officially sanctioned by a Camp Snivel staff member … or are particularly cruel and unusual in nature. Rule two …”
Marlo pushed away from the table in disgust. She walked over to the window and peered out through the blur of raindrops to Lake Rymose. Marlo watched several children hanging off the edge of a pier, crying over a chute of
spilling milk.
Milton joined his sister.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“I don’t think,” she replied, biting the tip of her thumb and definitely not sucking it. “I am. It’s weird, but I just don’t see myself here. Long-term. It’s like when our files got mixed up at that weird gifted summer school back in Kansas. That math concentration camp.”
“Calculation camp.”
“Whatever. The point is that I knew instantly that I didn’t belong there. And that I wouldn’t be there for very long.”
Outside the window, Marlo saw, out of the corner of her eye, a dark blob dart from behind one weeping willow to another. She craned her neck to see it head-on, but by then it was gone. Again. She sighed, fogging up the window with her breath.
“And I have the same feeling here,” Marlo said as she drew a stick figure of herself on the cloudy pane. “Like I won’t be an Unhappy Camper for very long.”
She slashed a line across her drawing before it slowly evaporated into nothing.
VICE PRINCIPAL POE sat slumped on a Victorian fainting couch in his cold, darkened office with a pad of paper and a quill on his lap.
“Well, Principal Bubb, that just about does it,” he said, his voice both heavy and nebulous like fog clinging to a graveyard as he cradled the old-fashioned phone between his head and shoulder. “I appreciate your time in this matter. There are only two more names I’d like to sort out for my extracurricular … activity.”
“And what is this ‘activity’ again?” Bea “Elsa” Bubb distractedly replied from her Not-So-Secret Lair in Limbo. Her bulk cinched tight in a Komodo dragon–skin kimono, the principal sat behind her mahogany desk, doodling on the back of an old Bland’s End catalog the same picture over and over: herself seated upon a grand throne surrounded by lapping flames and cowering demons.
“A simulation, my good principal,” Mr. Poe replied. “Er … just principal. I take the most sensitive of our overly sensitive student body and lead them through an exercise meant to re-create what and who they left behind on the Surface. An experimental therapy, of sorts … though I’m afraid some of the more delicate children may find the experience next to unbearable.”
“Fine, fine … sounds in line with Heck’s traditional kid-detested-mother-removed curriculum.”
The principal’s pus-yellow goat eyes settled on her clock radioactive: 13:13 blinked the blaring green readout.
“But let’s wrap this up. It’s getting late. Or early. Actually, exactly the same considering it’s Limbo. All I know is that I’m in desperate need of my beauty unrest.”
“Indeed you are,” the vice principal replied. “We’re almost through, so you can go to bed before it gets any more exactly the same. Now we’re left with … Milton Fauster and his sister.”
A bitter coppery taste formed in the back of Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s cavernous throat, like an old penny dredged from a decommissioned wishing well.
“Mr. Fauster seems like an excellent candidate: anxious, introverted, prone to uncertainty … though not a textbook Unhappy Camper—he doesn’t so much snivel as stew. His delicate constitution would seem a good match for potentially dangerous therapy.”
“Yes,” the principal replied with a grin, “he’d be perfect—”
A thought darted across the dark alley of the principal’s mind.
“—ly wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Yes, wrong.”
Recent unbelievable events had clouded Principal Bubb’s thinking like a squirt of squid ink in the ocean.
First and foremost, Satan had been removed from his post pending an investigation by Infernal Affairs as to his involvement in the most ambitious surreal estate scam ever conceived: selling Earth to an extraterrestrial race, evicting all humanity from its temperate blue marble of a planet to some dreadful beige rock halfway across the galaxy in the Sirius Lelayme system. And to think the principal herself unwittingly prevented the unauthorized sale of Earth, thanks to a bit of real estate law she had picked up from a Psychomanthium conversation with a once-living-yet-now-not-so-much lawyer named Algernon Cole. This legal loophole—deeming mankind as sovereign “squatters”—allowed humanity to wriggle out of the contract.
Secondly—assuming that the Baron of Brimstone would most likely be found guilty—that meant that someone, or something, would need to take over his position: a fact that the archangel Gabriel had brought up himself when Fibble, the Circle of Heck once reserved for lying little brats, became deluged with, of all things, pure liquid truth.
And, lastly, during Fibble’s moment of brutal truth, the principal—after apprehending Milton and Marlo Fauster—had Annubis the dog god switch their unruly souls for added awkwardness and confusion. So now, in the principal’s cesspit of a mind, Milton was Marlo. And vice versa. Little did she know, she had actually ordered Annubis to switch them back.
“Principal?” Mr. Poe inquired from the other end of the phone.
“It’s just that, due to my unfortunate experience with these children, I’ve learned that Marlo Fauster’s felonious bluster masks a fragile, insecure mess of a girl,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb lied. “She’d be a much better candidate for your hopefully—I mean possibly—hurtful extra-credit experiment. Her brother, Milton, is actually the shrewder of the two.”
“Really?” Mr. Poe said with a curl of his liver-colored lips. “Fascinating. He might be useful for another extracurricular … activity I have planned.”
Mr. Poe rose abruptly from the sofa.
“Thank you for your time, Principal,” he said hurriedly. “And might I congratulate you on your impending promotion.”
“Promotion?” Bea “Elsa” Bubb replied, cinching her kimono so tight that she nearly had a waist. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Well, it doesn’t take a genius to see who the Powers That Be would appoint to replace the Big Guy Downstairs,” the vice principal said as he passed his dreary drawing room. “It’s all the talk down here in the lesser realms. In any case, Principal, you can count on our support. In fact, I have a friend who may be able to help you seal the deal.”
The vice principal hung up the phone.
“A secret friend hidden right beneath your hideous snout,” he whispered to himself in the dark. “One who will help us—the miserable, tormented geniuses of the underworld—to unleash that misery and torment upon those above who squander their time in the light …”
SEVERAL EMOTIONS FOUGHT for control of Marlo’s face as she stared at herself in the It’s Only Fitting Room mirror: None of them were positive. She turned this way and that in her shabby denim overalls-shorts.
“Overalls-shorts? Don’t make me laugh,” she said to her reflection. “Seriously. It’ll just add to the Grin Reaper’s creepy collection. Maybe this T-shirt will help.”
Marlo pulled on a grubby gray T-shirt with UNHAPPY CAMPER spelled out in slimy yellow letters.
“And that would be a no,” she muttered as she buttoned the bib of her overalls. The “U” in “Unhappy” began to wriggle and ooze as Marlo cinched the straps.
“Please don’t tell me these letters are hot-glued banana slugs,” she said with a scowl of disgust.
Milton fastened the straps on his bib overalls-shorts and picked at the glistening yellow “y” stuck to his shirt.
“I think these letters are hot-glued banana—” Milton replied before Marlo leveled a coal-black gaze at him so withering that, had Milton been a flower, his petals would have instantly fluttered to the floor.
Marlo picked at her blotchy cheek.
“And what are these weird gray splotches on my face?”
The pouty, freckled girl next to Marlo in the leaking dressing room knelt down to tie the laces on her workboots.
“Ugh! These are, like, three million sizes too small,” the girl said, exaggerating by about 2,999,997 sizes.
Milton tugged the neck of his rough gray T-shirt. Inside was a tag:
ONE SIGH FITS A
LL
“And who knows who wore these before,” the pouty girl continued. “They were probably at a Goodwill.”
Marlo glared at the girl. “Don’t be dissing Goodwill,” she said. “It’s like my off-site closet.”
The blond, allergy-prone boy sneezed.
“Dusty,” he complained. He screwed a tweed flat cap onto his head and glanced about over the broken dressing screens. “Probably mites and animal dander, too. Hey,” he added, wiping his runny nose, “why are we all together here? Girls and boys, I mean? In Limbo, we were separated.”
“Same in Rapacia,” Marlo interjected as she knelt down to tie her boots.
“Apparently Snivel is a ‘co-dead’ facility,” the long-faced girl said. “At least that’s what one of the kids said back in the Mess Hall. It’s supposed to make us feel even more awkward and miserable.”
Milton looked over at Sam and Sara as they wrestled with a pair of extra-wide overalls-shorts. There was something about Sara that had left fingerprints all over Milton’s imagination (apart from the whole Siamese, er, conjoined twins thing). She was a girl, yes, but approachable: exotic and faraway yet familiar and close, like a fallen meteorite. Sara caught Milton looking at her in the mirror.
“Yes?” she asked as she buckled the strap over her shoulder.
“Um … I … was wondering,” Milton stammered, “well, why are you here?”
“How we died?”
“No, not that, really, but why you’re in Snivel. You seem so … I don’t know. Sunny.”
Sara smiled, proving Milton’s point.
“Sam was yelling at a waiter so hard—complaining about the hot-and-sour soup being too hot and sour—that he burst a blood vessel that we, unfortunately, shared.”
“I’m right here, you know,” Sam grumbled as he struggled to fit his head through the overtaxed neck of the Unhappy Camper shirt.
Sara rolled her eyes.
“So, I guess our souls must be conjoined, too, in some way. And since no one can grumble and moan like my brother here, that must have eclipsed my apparent sunniness.”
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 3