Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  Weird, Marlo thought as the coolness of the shade wrapped around her, as snug and comfortable as your favorite coat. I feel more … me here in the shadow. More together. But … why? Is it because, like Baron Samedi said, I’m some kind of freaky spiritual shade and I’m, I don’t know, more comfortable hanging with my own kind?

  A man in a brown business suit walked by, talking on his cell phone.

  “Excuse me,” Marlo said, her voice strangely hollow in her own ears. “Hey … business guy!”

  The man stopped a few feet away from Marlo, by the mailbox, scowling quizzically at his phone.

  “Hello? Mr. Bourret? Are you still—” The man sighed.

  “Guess I lost that deal,” he grumbled as he stormed down the street, working out his frustration by playing a game on his phone.

  A mother and her son walked out of the coffee shop.

  “Hey, lady,” Marlo called out. Her voice seemed to die just as it left her lips.

  “Yum!” the pudgy boy cooed as he lapped the abundant, structurally unsound pile of whipped cream teetering precariously atop his drink. “I love skinny, extra-whipped loco-mocha-luscious frappa—”

  The boy’s drink fell and exploded like a caffeine-and-sugar grenade on the sidewalk. His mother, clutching a handful of letters as she leaned over the mailbox, turned to console him and accidentally deposited her wallet in the slot.

  “It’s okay, dear. Mommy will just buy you … Uh-oh.”

  A teenage girl strutted by in a plaid minidress, purple ankle socks, and white oxfords, rocking out to her iPod. Marlo stepped in front of the girl and waved her arms.

  “Hey!”

  “Oh come back, baby, my heart you fed,” the girl warbled tunelessly. “But now I’m starving, boy, I feel like I’m—”

  Startled, she looked down at her iPod, her eyes bugged out with alarm as she stopped in Marlo.

  “Dead?” the girl gasped. “All of my songs … like … totally wiped! And I spent forever illegally downloading those!”

  The teenage girl sulked away, leaving Marlo alone beneath the coffee shop awning.

  She passed right through me, Marlo thought with a shiver. Am I a ghost? Should I start charging a toll? She turned and got a glimpse of herself in the window’s reflection. Rather, she got a glimpse of where she should have been but wasn’t. Not exactly. I’m not here. Then how … Wait.

  At the fringe of the awning’s shadow, Marlo noticed a vague smudge of shade, almost like something stuck in your eye. It was a silhouette of her head.

  I’m a shadow. A real shade. But I’m not even really here to cast myself. I’m down in Snivel in that Shadow Box …

  A homeless woman drove a shopping cart through Marlo, temporarily derailing her train of thought.

  That machine, the Wastrel Projector. I’m down in Snivel and that machine’s freaky, powerful light is casting my shadow all the way up here, to Generica. But I’m not just a shadow. I’m me. Sort of. But no one can see or hear me. I might as well be a substitute teacher. So why am I—

  A plump, middle-aged woman in a jogging suit that obviously had never been worn for jogging stepped out of the coffee shop and onto the sidewalk.

  “What a beautiful day!” she chirped, sipping her iced double-Dutch chocolate fudge mocha with bacon bits and low-fat whip. As the woman brushed past Marlo’s shadow, her bright smile disappeared, as if it had been Etch A Sketched across her face, then shaken away. “But it will probably rain,” the woman grumbled as she dragged herself across the street, heedless of the cars honking at her. “It always does.…”

  I’m here to funk people out! Marlo realized. No one knows I’m here, but they can feel my shady presence—my absence—and it gets them seriously bummed! That must be why—

  Marlo remembered the letters and envelopes Baron Samedi gave to her, Ferd, and Petula before they were shoved into their tanks. She pulled out one of the crumpled letters. Marlo recognized her brother’s writing, though there was some creepy scrawl at the top.

  WHISPER TO SURVIVING KIN …

  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.…

  Marlo wadded the letter back into her pocket and pulled out the envelope. Of course, it was only a shadow—like the letter, sort of like burnt paper—but she could still handle it, feeling it faintly in her fingers. She ripped it open. Inside was Marlo’s itinerary for her six days, six hours, and six minutes up on the Surface.

  1. 33 Paradiso Crescent

  That’s my address, Marlo thought as she held the smudgy-dark paper shadow in her hands. Or at least it was, back in the day.

  2. Fragopolis, 646 Spawn Boulevard

  Some lame arcade where socially awkward, pasty-faced, monosyllabic, joystick jockeys swarm like flies on …

  A girl got out of a red Hyundai across the street. She was pale and full figured, with pink cotton-candy hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

  Aubrey? Marlo mumbled to herself. Aubrey Fitzmallow?

  The girl leaned into the open passenger window.

  “I’ll be done in about two hours, Lenore,” she said with a sneer. “You can pick me up right here after your weird Jamaican yoga thing.”

  A thin, salt-and-pepper-haired woman with large dark eyes, hoop earrings, and a peculiar air of haunted beauty stretched her long neck from the driver’s seat.

  “Look, Aubrey, I’m not asking you to call me ‘Mom’ or anything, but the least you could do is not say my name like it’s some sort of embarrassing disease. And it’s not Jamaican yoga. It’s Pilates of the Caribbean. And since when does it take two hours to cut hair?”

  Aubrey rolled her muddy green eyes.

  “And a dye job … not that you’d know anything about that.”

  The woman tossed back her black-and-gray mane as she put the car in drive.

  “I like my hair. It’s natural. In a witchy way. So see you here in two,” Lenore said, shooting Aubrey one last confirming look before driving away.

  “Aubrey!” Marlo screamed, though her voice didn’t have enough force to even make it past her mouth.

  Aubrey had been Marlo’s best friend since second grade. They had hit it off instantly, trading Bubblicious back and forth as if it were currency. She was a fellow Goth, though she took it in that theatrical “cabaret” direction, whereas Marlo’s style was more “classic” Goth.

  Aubrey and her sketch pad were inseparable: She could almost always be found under a tree sketching her weird comic books (sorry, graphic novels, as she called them) about lost little girls encountering trickster spirits. Basically seeing how many ways she could reinvent the movie Labyrinth. She’d even tried to get Marlo interested in tarot cards, but Marlo had never liked the notion of her future all laid out in spades. Or pentacles. Whatever.

  Aubrey, decked out in a dingy white thrift-store wedding dress and black lace arm warmers, was headed down the street toward the Curl Up & Dye salon. Marlo stepped out of the shadows to follow her, but the intense light made it almost impossible for her to move. It was as if her whole body were numb and asleep, like how her mouth felt at the dentist’s. She struggled across the street, fluttering laboriously like a lead butterfly.

  Fluttering will get me nowhere, Marlo thought as she eyed the noonday sun overhead. Noon. The sun is at its highest, meaning hardly any shadows. A bus turned the corner. The T-Dious line, heading out to Dious Avenue and Paradiso Crescent. Marlo was sucked into the bus’s slender shadow as it whizzed by. Her insides felt cool and smooth, sort of tickly as the street combed through Marlo’s shadow body. The bus stopped at the corner, outside of the salon. Marlo crawled out of the bus’s shadow and onto the sidewalk, using the dappled shadows of a red maple tree like monkey bars to “swing” her way to the Curl Up & Dye
window.

  Inside, she saw Aubrey sitting in the swivel chair, showing the trendy hairdresser a picture.

  “That’s me!” Marlo yelped silently as the hairdresser took Marlo’s obituary photograph—her last yearbook picture—and set it on her workstation, right by a bottle of Blue Your Mind hair dye.

  Aubrey crossed her thick, stripy-stockinged legs and stared at herself in the mirror. A devious smile spread across her face—like a cat stretching in the sun before pouncing on an unsuspecting mouse—as the hairdresser clipped off the ends of Aubrey’s hair until it was exactly the same length as Marlo’s.

  What is Aubrey doing? Marlo asked herself. The sun broke through the canopy of leaves overhead, making Marlo’s mind go hot and fuzzy. The bus closed its doors as it prepared to leave the curb. Marlo panicked. There were only a couple of shadow clusters on the sidewalk now that the sun blazed full force above.

  What’ll happen to me if I’m caught here without any shade? I’m just a shadow in the harsh light of day. Will I just scatter like, like … ashes?

  Not wanting to find out the hard way, Marlo leapt from shadow patch to shadow patch until she reached the curb, then hurled her energetic absence to the slim band of shadow skirting the bus, clinging tight as it drove away.

  The late-afternoon sun stretched the shadows long across the driveway of a black-and-white two-story house, with THE FAUSTERS looped in wrought-iron cursive outside the cracked stucco fence.

  Marlo swung from shadow to shadow, finally nestling in a dark pool cast by a ceramic gargoyle her mom had made after quitting smoking for the third time.

  The garage door was open. Marlo smirked. The bottom of it was still scuffed from when Marlo had taken her father’s station wagon out for a late-night spin and miscalculated the delicate garage-door-opening-to-car-speed ratio.

  Inside was a labyrinth of old cardboard boxes, each overflowing with a jumbled collection of clothes, books, records, and assorted memorabilia. Beside a totem of boxes was Marlo’s father, Blake Fauster. The middle-aged man took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as he stared into a seemingly bottomless box of personal effects.

  “Dad?!” Marlo shrieked as she traveled along a long shadow cast from a chimney across the street into the garage, walking it carefully, her arms held out at her sides as if it were a plank poised above shark-infested waters. “It’s me! Marlo!”

  Blake Fauster shivered, despite the heat of the afternoon sun, and scratched his graying goatee.

  “Haunted,” he mumbled as he stared at a picture of Marlo perched at the top of a mound of photographs, the only surviving photograph of her in her Brownie uniform, “by the ghosts of memory. Eating away at me from the inside …”

  “Dad … it’s me,” Marlo wept as she strained to touch the sleeve of his tweed jacket. “Marlo. I’m here … sort of.”

  Tears streaked down Blake Fauster’s face, their salty trails banding along his cheeks like prison bars.

  “What’s the use of love when it turns to pain?” the broken man murmured as he set the picture down and closed the flaps of the box, securing them with duct tape. “Leaving behind pictures I can’t bear to look at and names I can’t bear to say out loud.”

  The door to the house creaked opened. Marlo’s mom, Rosemary Fauster, poked her head out into the garage, her normally smiling eyes dull and red-rimmed.

  “Oh, I … didn’t know you were still here,” she lied. “Do … do you need any help?”

  Blake Fauster smiled, but it was a smile without warmth or authenticity.

  “I do need help … I do,” he replied. “It feels so odd to say those words—I do—considering the circumstances.”

  “Blake, don’t,” Marlo’s mother said, crying without tears, her tear ducts spent and dry. “Don’t make this worse than it already is.”

  Marlo watched the scene, helpless, somehow sharing this awkwardly painful moment while simultaneously aware of her motionless, disembodied self trapped in memory foam back in her Shadow Box Chamber.

  “Mom,” Marlo whimpered, unsettled by her once obnoxiously cheerful mother’s cold look of despair. “What’s going—”

  “I don’t see how I could,” Blake Fauster replied as he hefted a box to the nearly stuffed trunk of his white Rambler station wagon. He slammed the door shut. “Make this worse than it already is. But I suppose, once you hit bottom, you can always dig deeper.”

  Rosemary Fauster clapped her hands over her ears, grabbing her dark brown, gray-streaked hair with her fists.

  “That sounds like something … she’d say,” the woman wailed. “I can’t do this, Blake. It’s just too … I can’t.”

  Marlo’s mom slammed the door as her father, shoulders slumped, head barely held up, walked alongside his battered car—a car that actually looked like him—and slid behind the wheel.

  “You can trash the rest!” he shouted as the station wagon lurched into the street.

  The sun sank below the roof of a neighboring house. Marlo felt as if she were a bucket of black ink poured into a black lagoon. Her thoughts seemed to spread and spill over each other.

  My parents are breaking up. Getting a divorce. Because of me. Because of my memory … and Milton’s. They’ve been through so much. Too much. I can’t let it happen … I can’t, Marlo thought, before losing the ability to think altogether.

  MILTON AWOKE TO a sight that he had never seen before and hoped to never see again: a severed ear dangling in front of his nose.

  “Euuugh!!” Milton yelped as Lucky held Mr. van Gogh’s ear tight in his little ferret jaws, his hot sardine breath panting in Milton’s face with a mixture of pride and excitement. Milton squirmed out of his serpent restraints and out of the lower bunk.

  “Lucky … why?” Milton whispered. “Now Vice Principal Poe and the staff will be on our case, and we can’t just return it because then, you know, they’ll find your little teeth marks on it and—”

  Lucky gazed back at Milton. His pink eyes shone with incomprehension. All Lucky wanted was the unhinged joy of sinking his needle teeth into his latest acquisition. Milton sighed.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Milton said softly as he scritched Lucky underneath his jaw, the ferret leaning into Milton’s touch. “You can’t help who you are,” he added, quickly snatching the ear from Lucky’s unsuspecting jaws before shoving his angry, wriggling ferret into his backpack.

  “Is that our art teacher’s ear?” Sara said groggily from her bunk.

  Milton nodded, staring at the detached auditory organ in his palm.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Lucky must’ve ferreted it out somehow. He sure can smell.”

  “You’re telling me,” Sam said with a bleary sneer.

  “I mean his sense of smell,” Milton clarified, despite the fact that Sam had already fallen back asleep. “It’s like his nose has a mind of its own.”

  Sara giggled while the Sunshine Sneezer blew his nose in the bunk above her.

  Milton picked out a strange brass disk from the canal of van Gogh’s ear and stuck it into his own ear.

  “Maybe it’s a hearing aid or—”

  Footsteps pounded on the soggy stoop outside. Without thinking, Milton plopped the ear into his mouth. Instantly, he could hear a disgusting, smacking assortment of wet noises and gurgles: the sounds inside his own mouth. Mr. van Gogh and two demon sloth guards filled the doorway.

  “Have you seen my ear?!” Mr. van Gogh shrieked.

  “No, but, like, have you heard my eyes?” Howler Monkey said as he rubbed his eyes so vigorously they squeaked.

  The flying-off-the-handle Dutchman examined the Totally Bunks with dubious sweeps, the teacher’s bulging eyes settling on Milton.

  “And what do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Fauster?”

  Outside, the Town Cryer’s bell tolled.

  “It’s six fifty-nine and time to face another pointless day,” the voice wailed pitiably.

  Mr. van Gogh sighed.

  “Fine. O
ff to class with the lot of you … and haast je!” he said, adding a wave of his paint-smeared finger. “But don’t think you’ve heard the last of my ear!”

  Just as the teacher and guards turned to leave, Milton rolled away and spat the ear into his hand.

  “Yuck,” he mumbled as the Unhappy Campers hopped to the cold, wet floor. “I don’t think Mr. van Gogh has ever swabbed this thing. Lucky’s fish spit doesn’t help.”

  Sara sat beside Milton and patted him on the back. Milton dug the brass disk out of his ear canal and stuck it back inside van Gogh’s spit-soaked ear.

  “Well, no matter how many disgusting, dignity-robbing things they put us through down here, one thing is for certain.”

  “What’s that?” Milton asked, staring back into her kind, sparkling eyes.

  “We’ll always have class,” she giggled. “C’mon.”

  Milton fluttered his eyelids. It looked like he was behind bars in some deep-purple prison. The blood vessels on his eyelids were darker and more pronounced than they had been just yesterday.

  After a quick inventory of his fellow classmates, Milton realized he wasn’t the only one. It made him feel trapped. Hopeless. He knew that if he were to escape to Arcadia at all, it would have to be soon, while he and the other Unhappy Campers still had some fight left in them.

  Question 1 — Are you Milton Fauster?

  That was the first, last, and only question on Milton’s Arcadia Club Entry Exam—at least as far as he had been able to tell before the exam’s weird, disappearing ink faded. How did they know about him? And who, exactly, were they? And why did Vice Principal Poe seem both intent on prohibiting and simultaneously pushing him there? All Milton knew for sure was that the answer lay coiled somewhere within Lake Rymose, like a mysterious Loch Ness monster just begging to be un-Loched.

  “Where’s the—achoo!—teacher?” the Sunshine Sneezer said as he and the other children sat in a circle in the round leaky tent. Through the curtain of beads sulked a pale, dark-haired man wearing laurels in his hair and, unfortunately, little else, save for a diaphanous white tunic draped across his hips. The man seemed both young and impossibly old, like an ancient statue of a young man brought to life. The girls in class—including Sara, to Milton’s strange, sudden displeasure—seemed to perk up slightly at the mopey man’s entrance. He listlessly picked up a piece of chalk, sighed deeply, then scratched across the chalkboard “Mr. Orpheus, Music Depreciation.”