Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  She shrugged.

  “But it’s no biggie. At least we’ve got each other. That might seem weird, but having a sibling is … well, complicated.”

  Milton looked over at Marlo, the instrument of his own demise—his first one, when he was dispatched via exploding marshmallow sculpture, not popped to death in a carton of popcorn in a mortuary furnace.

  “Believe me,” he muttered. “I can relate.”

  The Grin Reaper appeared at Milton’s side, looking down upon him with his weird, wet eyes.

  “Is time leave,” he hissed sadly, like a punctured, inflatable coffin. “But first, must write letter to loved ones.”

  The Grin Reaper pulled a wad of papers from the rubber chicken strapped to his belt and handed them out to the children. Marlo puzzled over the form letter: kind of like Mad Libs for the clinically depressed, trading verbs and adjectives for gripes and tragedy.

  “Um … why should we even do this?” she asked, trying her best to look intimidating in overalls-shorts.

  “Vice Principal has way of sending letter,” the Grin Reaper gurgled. “Only chance for you make contact with dear ones.”

  Milton, intrigued yet skeptical, took the pencil the creature offered and filled out his letter.

  Dear ___________________________

  How are you?

  [Space for intensely brief personal message]

  I’d like to tell you that Marlo and I are in a better place now, but that would be lying. And after our experiences in Fibble (the Circle of Heck for kids who fib) and the barely thwarted plot to sell the Earth, the last thing I want to do is fill the world with any more lies. At least Marlo and I are together. That should count for something …

  We just arrived at Camp Snivel. It’s ____________________________

  Well, I’ve got to be going. No rest for the wicked—of which I am an official member, judging from my eternally-darned-or-until-I-turn-eighteen-whichever-comes-first status. Though Camp Snivel is fraught with peril, the Grin Reaper—our awesome guide—says that most of the kids make it. Most of them.

  Signed,

  Your ___________________________

  The Grin Reaper collected the children’s letters, stuffed them into the gaping beak of his rubber chicken, and crossed the cramped labyrinth of rickety dressing screens and piles of dirty clothes. The children followed, leaving the tin dressing shed and trotting across the compound through the stinging, soaking upside-down rain, arriving at a circular yurt-style tent. Despite the rain, the children were assailed by swarms of mosquitoes. The Unhappy Campers huddled together, drenched, at the door of the yurt. The Grin Reaper spread open the tent’s beaded curtain.

  “First-class service. Get it? Your first … never mind.” The creature sighed, noting the children’s stone-faced mirthlessness. “I go now. Must meet with Vice Principal.”

  Milton and Marlo entered the spacious yurt. Inside was a circle of a half-dozen children stationed at easels, each directly behind the other as if in a conga line. Joining them was a lanky, twitchy man with a scraggly red beard and gauze wrapped tightly around the side of his head. It was peculiar, Milton thought as he drew near. He wasn’t sure if it was the dim light in the room—provided by suspended lanterns radiating soft blossoms of weak illumination—or his broken, borrowed glasses, but it looked to Milton as if the man—the teacher, he assumed—was a little gauzy himself, as if he were rendered with strokes of hastily daubed paint.

  “No … explore your own personal style by emulating mine,” the man shrieked with a faint Dutch accent as he nibbled on his paintbrush. “Paint me painting you as I would paint myself painting you painting me!”

  On the teacher’s canvas was a painting of what the boy in front of him was painting, which was a painting of what the girl in front of the boy was painting: a portrait of the next child’s painting. It made Milton a little dizzy, this loop of smeary infinity captured in thick, goopy brushstrokes. He looked away, glancing at the chalkboard.

  Arts and Crafts Therapy: Mr. van Gogh the chalkboard read, the letters spattered on in streaks of gold and blue paint.

  Mr. van Gogh turned suddenly.

  “Oh,” he said, scratching his bandage. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  Right, Milton thought. Vincent van Gogh—perhaps the textbook example of “temperamental artist” (accent on “mental”)—had once cut off his ear and given it to a lady he was smitten with. Milton could only imagine what anniversaries would have been like had they married: “Honey, it’s lovely, but I already have two—ears, that is. How about some long-stemmed roses next time?”

  “Where do we sit?” Milton asked.

  “What?!” the teacher roared as he outstretched his open palm. “Talk to the hand!”

  Attached to Mr. van Gogh’s palm was an ear. Milton and Marlo gulped as one.

  “Um … WHERE DO WE SIT?” Milton repeated, leaning into the teacher’s hand as if he were ordering at a drive-through.

  The teacher nodded and pointed to the far end of the tent.

  “Grab a canvas and join the circle,” he replied, carefully picking wax out of his palm with the tip of his brush.

  The children grabbed easels from a pile and dragged them across the wooden floor. Water seeped through the moldy canvas of the tent, dripping up along the walls. Milton set his easel next to Sam and Sara. Marlo smirked at her brother, making a kissy face before setting her easel on the other side.

  Mr. van Gogh fetched a number of rusty pails from the floor, each loaded with a random collection of art supplies.

  “We’ll return to my self-portrait later,” Mr. van Gogh said as he kicked the buckets across the floor to each student. “But now, a little art therapy: the fast lane to self-expression.”

  Milton sifted through his bucket, which contained a tangle of stiff, paint-encrusted brushes, bits of macaroni, yarn, glue, torn HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyers, pots of glitter, and—

  Milton touched something both stiff and squishy.

  “A finger!” he yelped. “A severed finger!”

  Mr. van Gogh scratched his beard as he watched something flit about in the stale air inside the tent. “For finger painting, you silly boy,” he replied.

  Marlo scowled as she emptied her bucket onto the floor.

  “How are we supposed to express ourselves with this junk?” she complained. “I mean, there isn’t even any paint.”

  The deranged Dutchman staggered toward Marlo with a sly, lopsided smudge of a grin, like someone had rubbed away the lower part of his face to reveal a secret painting of a smile beneath.

  “Knock, knock,” he said, standing in front of Marlo.

  She sighed. “Isn’t there enough misery in this place without another lame joke?”

  “Knock knock.”

  Marlo rolled her eyes. Sometimes a joke was like an invasive medical procedure. You just had to grit your teeth and let it happen.

  “Who’s there?”

  “That was totally uncalled for.”

  “That was totally uncalled for—”

  Mr. van Gogh slapped Marlo across the face.

  Marlo’s hand rushed up to her stinging cheek. “What was that all about, you psychotic one-eared freak?!” she shouted.

  The teacher looked down at his ear-hand and shoved it underneath Marlo’s nose. Smeared across his palm was a multicolored splotch with a dead mosquito in the middle of it.

  The teacher separated the rainbow-hued sludge in his hand until he had a small palette of primary colors.

  “The monochrosquitos,” he continued, his breath reeking of turpentine. “They swarm about Snivel, sucking the color from every living thing: trees, grass, demons … and little dead girls. That’s why everything is so gray, including your face.”

  Milton noticed a gray patch, about the size of a half-dollar, on Marlo’s cheek, where the mosquito—or monochrosquito, rather—had bitten her.

  “But they also make exceptional paint,” Mr. van Gogh continued as he walked over to a coll
ection of small copper pots by his easel. “The colors are so … lifelike.”

  After wiping the colorful muck from his palm and distributing it among the pots, Mr. van Gogh handed each student a small bowl.

  “With art therapy, the focus is on your inner experience: your feelings, perceptions, and imagination. It’s about turning what’s inside out—exposing your secret world—so that it can be harshly criticized, which is much better than being totally ignored, as my art was while I was alive,” the teacher seethed.

  Milton mushed up his bowl of bloody paint, separated the colors, held his freaky severed finger in his hands, and stared hopelessly at his canvas. He felt so many things that he didn’t know what he felt.

  He sighed, feeling suddenly unmotivated, hardly able to muster enough enthusiasm to hold up his severed finger. Milton had left Fibble with a fire in his belly for shutting Heck down for good, yet the mercilessly miserable atmosphere of Snivel had rained on his crusade. At least, he thought with a flicker of a smile, Marlo and I are together. Milton rummaged through the copper pot and pulled out a red HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyer, featuring a girl with fire-orange hair. He glued it to his canvas.

  He looked over at Sara, who was squinting at the hovering lanterns overhead.

  “What are you doing?” Milton asked.

  She smiled softly.

  “I’m making the lights all blurry so I can see the halos around them,” she replied. “So I can paint them like how van Gogh paints them—all those swirls and spirals. I thought that way I’d get a good grade. Shameless but—”

  “Totally smart,” Milton said with a grin.

  “Hey,” Sam snarled. “Give me the finger.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Sara said between gritted teeth.

  Sam bit his sister on the ear.

  “Oww!”

  “What’s going on?!” shouted Mr. van Gogh from behind them. Sam’s dark eyes rolled into his head as he lurched forward, startled into a narcoleptic sleep, and knocked over his painting. Pop went the easel as it collapsed to the ground.

  The teacher examined the toppled painting.

  “Nicely done,” he said, nodding, while giving his beard a contemplative stroke. “Especially how you captured the lanterns.”

  Sara winked at Milton, which immediately sent Milton’s complexion from “nerd white” to “flaming crimson.”

  Mr. van Gogh stalked behind Milton, glaring at his canvas.

  “This one wouldn’t be too bad if you kept the color inside the lines, you picked a new perspective, and asked someone with talent to paint it for you,” the teacher said with a violent twitch.

  Mr. van Gogh strutted over to Marlo’s easel with his hands clasped behind his back. Marlo was staring blankly at her blank canvas, as inspiration was coming to her as slow as a constipated tortoise.

  “I don’t even know what we’re supposed to be doing,” Marlo complained as she scowled at her unpainted painting.

  “You’re supposed to paint what you feel,” Mr. van Gogh replied.

  Marlo’s look of frustration turned into a triumphant smile.

  “There!” she chirped as she folded her arms.

  “There what?”

  “I didn’t feel like painting!”

  Mr. van Gogh clenched his fists so hard his ear rang.

  As the teacher reached out to strangle Marlo, the beaded curtains parted, sending in a blast of rain. In sulked the Grin Reaper.

  “I’ve come for Mr. Nurlington …”

  The Emo boy chewed the chipped black nail polish from his fingers.

  “Miss Thomas …”

  The pouty girl crossed her arms. “Figures,” she fumed.

  “And Miss Fauster,” the Grin Reaper concluded as he glided toward the children, skeletal arms extended as if in flight.

  He scooped up Mr. Nurlington and Miss Thomas.

  “Why us?” the Emo boy whined, his urge to resist suddenly sapped at the Grin Reaper’s joyless-buzzered touch.

  “It nothing personal,” the creature wheezed as his gray marble eyes settled on Marlo. “Just mandatory extra-credit Feel Trip for special campers.”

  The Grin Reaper took Marlo’s hand, his joyless buzzer bumbling like a woebegone bee in her palm.

  “Marlo?!” Milton called out helplessly as the Grin Reaper dragged the three children toward the door.

  Marlo, fighting the surge of dread spreading outward from her hand like a slow, debilitating poison swimming through her veins, gave her brother a weak smile.

  “Don’t worry, bro … you’ll get worry warts,” she replied softly. “I told you I wouldn’t be here long.… Anyway, they can’t hurt us—we Fausters are like superheroes.”

  With that, the Grin Reaper, Marlo, and the two other children were swallowed up by the thick, gray drizzle outside.

  “Yeah, just like superheroes,” Milton murmured. “Only our superpower is the ability to get into serious trouble.”

  He stared at the HAVE YOU SEEN ME? flyer glued to his canvas, wondering if he would ever see his sister again.

  THE SLOTH DEMON shoved a lantern beneath its hideous, decomposing face. Its tatty fur was matted with dried mud and slobber, its sunken, bloodshot eyes were rimmed with sores, and sharp yellow teeth grew out of its speckled gums like candy corn scattered across a slab of spoiled meat. It leaned into the fire.

  “Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice were camping at the edge of the dark wood,” the demon guard hissed. “The night was chilly and dark, with a barometric reading of 30.28 inches, indicating—”

  A snailish demon sitting by the fire slugged the sloth in the shoulder with its distended eyestalk.

  “Skip a bit,” the demon said in its grinding voice, like two dull knives scraping against each other.

  The sloth demon nodded as the children surrounding the fire roasted their rotten eggplant and Brussels sprout skewers.

  “Just trying to create an atmosphere. Anyway, as night fell, the girls started a roaring campfire. But the area outside the fire’s rosy glow was pitch-black. Just like it is … out there.”

  The sloth demon pointed out to the rim of the forest with one of its long, curved claws. Milton and the other children shivered as they cast wary glances out at the darkened woods surrounding Camp Snivel. Milton was still freaked out by his sister’s sudden “extra-credit” abduction, making him especially susceptible to ghost stories. His gaze lingered on the sinister silhouettes of weeping willows and pines.

  “It was from this blackness that the sounds of snapping twigs and the rustling of leaves came. For a long moment, there was nothing but the crackling of the fire.…”

  For a long moment, there was nothing but the crackling of the fire. The sloth demon handed the lantern to its demonic comrade-in-arms, who—not having arms—hung the lantern off one of its tentacle eyes.

  “Suddenly, a ghastly, bloodcurdling sound erupted from the deepest part of the forest,” the snail demon rasped. “Terrified, the girls darted away, tripping through the underbrush. Unfortunately, their blind panic sent them running right into the gaping jaws of the …”

  Both demons scanned the bulging eyes of the children expectantly.

  “… fuzzy kitten,” the demons oozed together, cradling the words dangerously on their tongues as if they were verbal grenades.

  Milton and the other Unhappy Campers traded dumbfounded glances.

  “Meow!” added the sloth demon, claws raised like a frisky cat, thinking that the confounded children simply hadn’t fully grasped the story’s horrific ending.

  “Was there something—achoo!—really scary behind the fuzzy kitten?” the allergy-prone red-eared boy asked.

  “Was it dismembered?” Sara interjected.

  “Or strangled by yarn?” posed the slack-jawed boy.

  The sloth and snail demons eyed each other with dismay.

  “This was an exceptionally fuzzy kitten, I assure you,” the snail demon rasped through its tiny gash of a mouth.

  The sloth demon scratched its
throat. “I’d tell you a frightening tale about a prancing pony, but I’m afraid I’m a little hoarse,” the mangy creature coughed.

  “So let’s have a little sing-along instead,” the snail demon interjected, prompting a chorus of groans, mainly from the children who had been at Snivel before Milton and the other new Unhappy Campers had arrived. “Participation isn’t mandatory, though all those not singing will enjoy some quality time with Vice Principal Poe.”

  The children went suddenly pale and silent.

  “Bummertime is here again,” the snail demon sang, “and you know what that means …”

  “It’s time for rashes, colds, and flu: no access to vaccines,” the children sang in shaky unison.

  “Cry our eyes out by the lake until our faces are so long

  that horses whinny while we whine the lyrics to this song.

  Spirits sunk so low now that it’s like we’ve got the bends.

  Oh, Camp Snivel, how we loathe you: this bummer never ends!”

  Milton, Sam/Sara, and the other newbies arched their eyebrows at one another.

  “I should get some more firewood,” Milton said, standing.

  “I’ll help,” Sara said as her brother grumbled, half-asleep.

  “Us too,” the three other new Unhappy Campers said, rising.

  The demon guards glared at them suspiciously.

  “We wouldn’t want the fire to go out,” Milton said as Lucky wriggled in his backpack. “You know … kittens.”

  The demon guards swallowed.

  “Don’t be long,” the sloth demon said with a shudder.

  The children marched along the edge of the forest, the sky beyond Snivel’s glass dome a dim canopy of garbage. From the raised mound overlooking Lake Rymose, the Unhappy Campers could see the wobbling Dukkha Wheel churning the grim lagoon.

  “Sorry about your sister,” Sara said, giving Milton a faint smile.

  “Yeah,” the slack-jawed boy added. “She seemed really nice.”

  The six children stared at each other, before bursting out laughing.