Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  “Game Over: The Atheist Game,” Wyatt said quickly. “It’s the hardest game in Arcadia.”

  “Why?”

  “If you lose even once, that’s it: The screen goes, like, the pitchest black ever, and you’re locked out. Forever.”

  Milton noticed a group of Indian boys playing a game called Hindu or Die. “What’s that game all about?”

  “It’s EPIC,” Wyatt interjected. “The colors are the awesomest with all sorts of cool realms, like Kali-Fornia and Shiva Las Vegas. Best of all, if you die, you just come back as something else. One game I came back as a dung beetle because of the morally questionable things I did in my previous game as a human.”

  Ahead was a quad of games unique in that all of the four gaming consoles had, instead of chairs, little prayer rugs, and they all faced the same direction.

  “Mega Mecca Mania,” Hazelle announced.

  “How come—” Milton began before Wyatt, lacking the patience to allow a question to be fully posed, chimed in.

  “Muslim game. EPIC. All the consoles face the Muslim holy city of Mecca, for flawless gaming unity.”

  “Can you just play, you know, any game you want?” Howler Monkey asked.

  “Yes—” Wyatt replied before Hazelle interjected.

  “And no. Only the games Provost Marshal Tesla authorizes will accrue points.”

  “And what’s the point of playing a game without points?” Wyatt laughed.

  Four jittery boys puzzled over a quad of games labeled Mormonster Attack!

  “Mormon game,” Hazelle said out of the side of her mouth as she led the tour crisply down the aisle, on some secret schedule dictated by her hyperefficient metabolism. “Don’t ask me what it’s about. You find a book, and if you lose, you’re forgiven, sometimes, and if you win, you get your own planet or universe or one of three heavenly kingdoms or something. No one can quite figure it out, but the players are really, really polite.”

  Next along the catwalk that wound inside the dome-shaped building was a quad of games crowded with celebrity avatars.

  “ScientoloG-Force,” Hazelle said. “Another hard game to explain, much less play. It’s sort of a sci-fi strategy game with ‘point-and-clique’ elements. Lots of aliens, volcanoes, and celebrities. The key is to know the right people … which should be second nature for you newbies.”

  Milton rolled his eyes at Hazelle’s innuendo that he and his friends were the recipients of some sort of favoritism. Milton didn’t care about scores or status or pleasing Provost Marshal Tesla. He was just happy—almost giddy—to be out of Snivel.

  He turned away from the fray and looked off past the steel railing down into the dimly lit Donkey Koncourse.

  Three levels were tiered below, with splotches of brilliant light radiating like a captive aurora borealis. Dramatic swells of pulse-pounding music and flocks of synthesized bleeps and blasts spilled out into the arena. Milton looked above. The building was capped with a black metal ceiling. He traced the path of the stairs upward, ending abruptly at a hatch embedded in the roof.

  But this is only Level Four, Milton thought. The note I found in Lake Rymose said there were five levels of Arcadia. Where is the rest of the arcade?

  Hazelle appeared at Milton’s side. “No deviating from the tour,” she scolded.

  “Where is Level Five?” Milton asked. Hazelle glared over her shoulder with eyes the color of the sky just before it becomes space. Milton sighed and raised his hand.

  “Where is Level Five?”

  Hazelle glanced up at the ceiling with a near-religious reverence.

  “Up there,” she replied, pointing across the expanse with her nose to the hatch. “The highest status level of them all. The top of the accumulated-score-and-social-position pyramid.”

  “But what’s it like?” Milton asked with a curiosity that burned so hot inside his chest that he broke out in a sweat.

  “SPOILER ALERT,” Provost Marshal Tesla said from behind them, his voice like a fresh peal of thunder. Hazelle, Wyatt, and the other Arcadians stood at attention, giving their leader a fist-bump-with-wiggling-thumb salute.

  “Let us just say it is zhe Valhalla of gaming,” Tesla continued. Tasha—arms crossed, face as unreadable as homework after it goes through the wash—appeared by his side. “A game so intense zhat, once played, you may never play another.”

  Tesla’s mustache fell to one side like an unevenly stacked bookshelf. His expression seemed to flow with alternating currents, one charismatic and forthcoming and the other darkly guarded. Tesla rubbed his spindle-fingered hands together.

  “But, alas, zhe Sense-o-Rama—Level Five—is only for Zetawatts,” he said, his purple neon tie glowing with what Milton assumed was pride. “And is currently awaiting its first team for its inaugural game.”

  Tasha, Wyatt, Libby, and two other Zetawatts exchanged glances packed tight with trepidation and excitement.

  “But I have a feeling—right about zhe base of my spine—zhat you lot are next in line,” Provost Marshal Tesla added, nodding toward Milton and his friends. “Zhe next team of truly ‘great gamers,’ led by zhe only boy to ever escape from Heck …”

  Tesla sighed, a static-filled sound that made the hairs on the back of Milton’s neck rise.

  “Like a flash of lightning, an instant of truth, zhe technology to create zhe ultimate gaming environment was revealed to me. And, with similar rapidity, I set about its construction. Edison would have probably tested his creation while opportunity whizzed past like confetti in a windstorm. But why waste precious time testing when zhe players can find zhe bugs for you?”

  I should sneak back to Tesla’s penthouse to rescue Lucky, Milton thought as the tall, gaunt inventor—gesticulating wildly like a marionette beset with termites—went off on his tangential tirade.

  But maybe I could just play a few games first, Milton considered, biting his lower lip, his hands balled up into fists with tense, nervous energy. I’m sure Lucky’s just asleep, anyway. There’s plenty of time for me to get him back … plenty of time …

  “Sense-o-Rama?” Sara interjected when Provost Marshal Tesla had taken a rare breath.

  The man’s eyes glittered with secret knowledge. “Ahh … my bad, as you say. I don’t want to leak too much and affect your … experience. I will just say zhat gameplay is driven by sensation rather than story line. An all-consuming, nonverbal poem zhat you both experience and engender. Zhe Sense-o-Rama allows players to lose themselves to zhe game like never before.”

  As if a switch had gone off in his brain, Provost Marshal Tesla turned suddenly to leave.

  “But I have taken away enough of your game time,” he said from the stairs, giving the ceiling a fleeting, adoring look one might give someone they were deeply, shamelessly, in love with. “You will need all of your senses sharp if you are to survive the Sense-o-Rama.”

  He stopped short on the stairway.

  “Zhe game, I mean … of course.”

  Tesla turned to the five Zetawatts.

  “It’s time.”

  The Arcadians nodded with grave anticipation, following Provost Marshal Tesla up the stairs to the ceiling. With a swish of his card key, the hatch fell open. The children stepped inside. As soon as they passed through, Tesla sealed the hatch behind them.

  “Play well,” he murmured as he descended the staircase, walking past Level Four, lost in his thoughts. Hazelle followed, swept away in Tesla’s wake, leaving Milton and the Unhappy Campers to themselves.

  “I guess the tour’s over,” Caterwaul said with a shrug.

  Milton found that his fingers were, inexplicably, twitching. So were the restless digits of his friends.

  “We might as well, you know …,” the Sunshine Sneezer said, his eyes reflecting a nearby game called Tarnished Halo Storm. “Play.”

  “Yeah.” Milton nodded as he spied an open quad. “How about that one?”

  Milton, Sam/Sara, Caterwaul, and the Sunshine Sneezer sat down at the gaming quad.

>   “That’s okay.” Howler Monkey nodded, hovering over the Sunshine Sneezer’s shoulder. “I’ll watch and switch out with one of you later.”

  Milton wrapped his hands around the controls. They felt … right. Like they were made for him.

  Welcome, Milton Fauster, the screen blinked back at him. Would you like to play?

  Milton nodded reflexively. The game somehow acknowledged this by switching into play mode.

  The Unhappy Campers were a grubby group of heavily armored angels parting a valley of varicolored grass, many peculiar shades of which Milton had trouble assigning names to.

  The model fidelity and motion control were flawless. No “jankiness” at all. And the more Milton played, the more connected with the characters and the world they inhabited he became. The action was intense and fiercely competitive, with Milton fighting alongside his friends in Team Play mode. Together, they were unstoppable: their movements, their thoughts, their reflexes in total sync.

  It was the best game Milton had ever played. A little run-and-gun with clever stealth elements. As Milton moved through the game’s world—an apocalyptic wasteland hazy with expertly rendered smoke—a vibrating elation spread from his lungs to his extremities. The ceaseless chatter of his brain eased up.

  Milton, his pupils dilated, stole a quick glance at Sara after she delivered a swift, fatal judgment to a non-believer with her atomic bugle.

  “Nice,” Milton replied, feeling happier than he had ever felt before. Really happy. Uncomfortably happy.

  Almost … too happy.

  MARLO FELT LIKE a stranger in her own life. Only it wasn’t her life anymore. It wasn’t anyone’s life, by the looks of it. Her room was like a seriously underfunded museum. Or a mausoleum, only with band posters—Funeral Petz, Supernovocaine & Abel, and the You Wouldn’t Understand—tacked up on the walls. It was so freaky-strange to be here, haunting her old room, a Marlo-shaped shadow cast by a beam of sunlight streaming through the window. Mom finally won the Battle of the Tin-Foil-Reinforced Black Velvet Curtains, Marlo thought with a smirk.

  When night had fallen, Marlo’s shade-self had been absorbed by the darkness, like a piece of broken seashell on the shore reclaimed by the tide. Her consciousness had gone all liquidy, getting weaker and weaker until she couldn’t hold together a thought to save her afterlife. It was like sleeping, only … wider.

  Marlo could see circles of melted red candle wax stuck to her floor, chipped partially away by her mother’s fingernails, alongside her match-burned throw rug.

  From my last tarot card reading with Aubrey, Marlo thought. She never really bought the whole tarot thing—her relationship with it was more like windowshopping—but Aubrey was spooky into it. She was always saying that “she read tarot cards like scars” or something, but that sounded more like a regurgitated Incurable Necromantix lyric than an actual philosophy. All those wands, cups, and swords … there was something para-abnormal about it.

  Marlo saw a card poking out from beneath the rug: a card with a skeleton riding a horse across a grim field strewn with lifeless bodies.

  The Death card.

  Okay, Marlo thought as her shadow-throat swallowed a lump of cold darkness, maybe there is something to tarot cards. The occult is like everything else: all fun and games up until it’s not.

  Marlo’s patch of sunlight had shifted, now a brilliant shaft leading to the door. She drifted to the hallway past a series of family photographs hanging on the wall. Most of the pictures were various groupings of Mom, Dad, and Milton, as Marlo had adopted a strict “you take my picture, I take your life” policy early on. In fact, the only photograph of herself she saw hanging had been taken shortly after she was born.

  ROSEMARY’S BABY, Dad had written—judging from the tidy handwriting—at the bottom of the photograph, which showed Marlo as an infant swaddled in a pink blanket in her mother’s arms. Marlo’s mother had a peculiar expression on her face. She was so young, probably just twice Marlo’s age when she died, and her deep-brown eyes shone with a mixture of pride, elation, fear, and fatigue. Her smile was wide, but almost tacked on. Like she was putting on a brave face, even though inside she was a bowl of quivering jelly.

  Marlo’s cheek prickled with tears.

  I’m probably crying back in my Shadow Box Chamber. She sniffed. Crying like a baby over a baby picture. She wasn’t sure why it got to her so much. Maybe it was because her mother seemed terrified of her future as a mother, while Marlo—just a shadow cast across her own memory—was fresh out of future. She knew that the world had gone skipping along without her. But it was another thing entirely to have it rubbed in her face.

  Another patch of sunlight, thrown from the living room window, left a cool, straight shadow leading out to the garage. Marlo edged her way along the hall and underneath the door. Mom’s used Porsche—an anniversary gift that Dad couldn’t afford but somehow could—was gone, though the garage was still warm from it. Through the garage door’s three dingy windows, Marlo could see her dad’s leftover boxes were now at the curb.

  Mom must’ve dragged them there before she left for work, Marlo thought as she slid beneath the garage door.

  The driveway shaded from the morning sun, Marlo made her way to the curb. She stooped to peek at what her dad had left behind. Several notes—again, in her dad’s meticulous, slanted handwriting—had fallen out of a leftover box. The corner of one, written on nice stationery, was currently absorbing carburetor grease.

  Dearest Rosemary,

  I think of you so much—only of you—that it borders upon the too-much. It seems to me that no woman was ever to a man what you are to me. And it’s near tragic, that long wilderness I spent without my blossoming Rose, that unfilled capacity for happiness, like a gaping hole, before this electric surge. But now I bask in the wonder, as if standing in a dream, somehow unable to fully believe that I am awake, held absolutely—in your sweet sway.…

  Yours,

  Blake

  Marlo could feel her face grow bright red, even as a shadow cast from one world to another.

  Whoa … Dad’s old love letters to Mom. Good thing I’m not diabetic. The pure, treacly sweetness would send me into a coma. Jumpin’ Jeebus, Marlo thought as she spied another yellowed letter. There’s more. This one’s written on the back of a Ugandan Quinine Quencher label. Must’ve been when Dad was in the Harmony Helpers, that hippie group that went to dig wells in countries no one had ever heard of.

  My Rosie,

  Please only write to me once a week. I cannot endure daily reminders of your absence. Whenever I read one of your letters, I lie in my cot, paralyzed in sweltering agony, my heart pounding throughout my entire body. Sometimes I feel that I shall surely implode from chronic lack of you. Absence does not just make the heart grow fonder. It makes it melt. Absence makes the heart … fondue.

  Yours, as always,

  Blake

  Marlo cringed so hard that she feared she’d suffer internal injuries back in her bad-memory-foamed chamber. She had always known that her parents, you know, loved each other, but it never really struck her that they had ever been in love. Much less passionately so. These letters peeled away their protective layer of “parentness” until they were raw, tender, and something that Marlo had never fully considered before. Human. But, like most realizations, this one had arrived too late to do anything about it. Her parents were breaking up the act and going solo. And here Marlo was to rub salt in the wound. The last note, torn from Dad’s ever-present moleskin binder, was, though crumpled, obviously written recently.

  R,

  If I were to draw a picture of my heart as it is now, it would be exactly as you left it: tastefully decorated, hung with your photographs, yet now miserably empty save for three unoccupied chairs. We began as fast friends; then came the days of love and innocence; next an unerring respect deepened by parenthood and an affection only heightened by time. I cannot tell you what pleasure knowing you has given me. Because of this I will always be overwhelm
ingly in your debt. Time passes swiftly and—as we have been burdened to know—so does life, even young life. Yet, even amidst the tragedy, the treasure we have gathered together remains undiminished. I still love you. And always will. We will always be together even if you cannot bear us being together.

  B

  Marlo’s silhouette grew dark and focused in the patch of sunlight peeking out from behind the roof.

  “He still loves her!” Marlo exclaimed in that flat, dull voice that never seemed to pass her lips. And I’m sure Mom still loves him, too! She just needs reminding. These letters will fan the embers—I just know it. It’s not too late! All I’ve got to do is—

  A grating, metal-scraping-metal noise erupted from down the street. A truck stopped in front of the house, idling noisily like a garbage disposal full of forks and knives.

  The garbage! Marlo fretted as two men in filthy navy-blue overalls hopped from the truck. The men—one blond, spindly, and eating a banana, and the other burly and slouching—stomped out to the curb.

  I’ve got to stop them! Mom needs to see these letters! They’re the only way to keep them together!

  Marlo threw her shadow between the garbagemen and the boxes. The lanky man passed through Marlo. His banana went instantly black.

  “Figures,” he muttered with disgust as he tossed the banana into one of Blake Fauster’s boxes before tugging it to the back of the truck. The squat, sour-faced man scooped up the letters and threw them in the remaining box.

  “Looks like rain,” he complained as he heaved the box out into the driveway. Marlo hurled her shadow-self at the man, hoping to slow him down with a debilitating dose of depression. The drooping, dumpy man stopped to glare accusingly at the sky.

  “Yep, definitely rain,” he continued before hauling the box into the back of the dump truck. “It’d be a good day to just stay in and play some of those video games all the kids are playin’ these days.”

  The two men climbed into the shuddering vehicle. Marlo scrambled up a patch of dappled shadows into the cab of the truck and threw herself onto the seat between them.