The stairway ended just below the black ceiling.
“Don’t we get to pimp our avatars before we go in?” the Sunshine Sneezer asked, stalling, as the Terawatts huddled anxiously beneath the hatch. Provost Marshal Tesla’s face shifted, his expression recalculating like a facial abacus with a twitch of his mustache.
“There is no need with zhe Sense-o-Rama to—as you say—‘pimp’ your avatars,” he replied with a crackle of light sputtering behind his dark eyes. “I have conquered zhe Uncanny Valley Problem—where zhe more lifelike zhe nonliving are, zhe more unsettling they appear to zhe player—with a solution so obvious it has eluded game developers. A way to both be yourself while losing yourself. To actually be zhe game.”
“But what about the other—” Sara interrupted before her question was waved away like a bad odor by Tesla’s long, slender hand.
“Enough!”
He swiped his card key through the slot to the side of the hatch’s iron wheel, then gave the wheel a twist. The heavy metal door fell open, slowly, on pneumatic hinges. The provost marshal urged the Terawatts through the portal. His electrified hands felt like cattle prods on Milton’s back. The children were swallowed up by a vast dungeonlike rotunda, dark save for the sizzle of torches—hundreds of them—inset along the rounded chamber’s damp stone walls. Faint glimmers of light danced on the floor. Milton looked up.
He gaped at the expansive domed ceiling. Hundreds of unblinking eyes twitched above, fixed in the domed ceiling like stars, the faces of their owners masked by an impenetrable darkness.
“The Surface,” Milton mumbled in a semi-audible hush.
Glittering red specks drifted across the ceiling and clustered into letters.
Milton turned the letters around in his mind, as if they were written in the steam on a shower door and he was trying to decipher them in the bathroom mirror.
HECK: WHERE THE BAD KIDS GO
“Players like playing as people who resemble themselves,” Tesla added as he backed out of the Sense-o-Rama. “And zhat is exactly how you will play. As yourselves. For as long as you possibly can. As if your afterlives depended on it.”
The team of Terawatts had graduated to Level Five and gained entry into the hallowed gaming halls of the Sense-o-Rama. Yet, as Provost Marshal Tesla shoved the hatch closed, the honor, to Milton, seemed more like an after-death sentence.
The hatch sealed behind them with a hiss. In that moment, Milton knew with nauseating certainty that he and his friends would never pass through that hatch again.
There are a number of quaint terms humans use to rationalize the irritating things they do and feel. Take the inappropriate display of aggravation with “venting one’s spleen.” To vent one’s spleen means to “unburden oneself.” This is different from “spilling your guts,” which means either “to divulge a secret” or “Help, get me to the doctor!”
The spleen is a nasty, purple, fist-sized organ located in the low-rent portion of the torso, just east of the stomach. In medieval times, the spleen was thought to produce a saddening black bile, one of four bodily “humors” (and medieval doctors had a real sense of humors). Later, eighteenth-century writers spent their time waiting for the invention of the typewriter by worrying of the spleen’s supposed connection to dangerously high levels of imagination (sadly, the “overabundance of imagination” proved a condition all too easily cured through such modern marvels as reality television, blogs, and DVD extras).
Truth be told, most people would rather spend their lives venting spleen than risking the fickle, sloppy uncertainty of happiness.
Complaining is, in essence, how the overly sensitive protect themselves from life. They wrap themselves tight with an insulation of indignation, a buffer of bellyaching. And while sensitivity—a person’s very soul coated with twitching cats’ whiskers—can open up one’s heart to the full spectrum of beauty around one, an overly sensitive soul can soon become a most burdensome possession (not to mention pure torment for anyone in the immediate vicinity).
When our skin is too thin, we capture every nagging nuance around us while exposing our vulnerable selves to the world. It’s where sensitivity becomes enslavement: to our emotions, to others, to most everything but ourselves. Yet, while acute sensitivity can be a most malignant condition, it can also be our greatest gift. Hope—a substance that, while undetectable to the naked eye, is stronger than any tank and louder than any bomb—resides in the most sensitive part of the soul (right around your soul’s scritchy spot) and only appears when most everything seems lost. But if you find yourself so foul-tempered that you can’t even acknowledge hope when it avails itself—like some vampire groundhog that casts no shadow—then you may find yourself with some serious ex-spleening to do.…
BE THE FIRST TO PLAY HECK: WHERE THE BAD KIDS GO. WE DARE YOU! read a banner hung over the converted Psychomanthiums in Fragopolis. BEFORE YOUR LAME PARENTS SHUT IT DOWN!™
The dazed kids flitted about the booths like drowsy flies around drugged poop.
“Game … awesome,” a boy with headgear mumbled. “Must play. Again.”
“Was … intense … then stopped,” a boy with a clip-on eyebrow piercing gurgled. “But said … back up soon. Not soon … enough.”
Their unblinking eyes were as glazed as honey-baked hams. Like one-way streets leading to abandoned ghost towns.
Why a game? Marlo thought from a shard of bright light spilled across the Fragopolis carpet, framed by a curtain of shadow. Isn’t it bad enough that the souls of the darned must toil in Heck for all eternity, or until they turn eighteen—whichever comes first? Now kids up on the Surface have to endure Heck, too, feeding it attention like some leisure-time-eating virus? And the million-dollar-and-some-change question: What the heck am I doing here? Why do they need me to bum kids out when they have this dumb game here that can do it for them?
The kids traded monosyllabic grunts like verbal Pokémon cards. They stared with hunger at the gaming booths, shaking with withdrawal, wanting more than anything to play again.
A pair of geeky boys walked through Marlo toward a Wii the People game, where kids could virtually manipulate the quills of America’s founding fathers to help sign the Constitution before the colonies were besieged by British “rust-coat” robots armed with boiled-beef bazookas.
One of the boys—a pimple-studded pixie-stick of a boy in a striped ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO YOU sweatshirt—stopped short by Marlo’s spot on the terminally ’80s carpet.
“I don’t know, Hans,” he said, shoulders slumped. “I suddenly don’t feel like playing that game … any of the games. They all seem so lame … except—”
Hans? Marlo thought.
“But, hey, what’s that one?” the boy said, pointing toward a Psychomanthium. “For some reason, I want to play it more than anything!”
Man, even his finger has pimples on it, Marlo thought. The other boy … Hans. He seems super familiar. He’s got to be one of Milton’s friends. Like fate sprayed him with loser cologne. There’s some weird thing that’s like … drawing me to him.
Hans scratched his woolly red hair.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” the boy replied with a resigned squeak of his preadolescent voice box. “I haven’t felt this bummed out since … well … she … you know … but that game does seem really—”
Marlo noticed the boy had a school binder clutched beneath his arm. Plastered across it were pictures of … her. Marlo. Dozens of them. The few gaps between the pictures were decorated with dozens of little black hearts.
That’s it! Marlo thought. Hans Jovonovic. Milton’s friend with the bushy hair so fiery red that you could practically talk to God through it. The geeky matchstick boy always mooning around me—borderline stalking by the looks of it. Guess he had an Orange Crush on me. Who could blame him? He must be why I’m here! The third point in my triangle, sticking me to the Surface to bum people out! Maybe that’s why I feel so weirdly … focused around him.
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“We might as well check out that new game,” Hans said with a shrug. “There are a bunch of kids hanging around it, so maybe it’s not as sucktastic as all the others.”
The boys slunk away toward the Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go game among the clamor of frenzied bleeps, static explosions, and cheesy music loops. Just then, a girl blocked Hans’s way.
“Holy cats!” Marlo yelped, her voice ringing in her ears. “It’s me!”
A girl with stylishly scraggly blue hair and layers of meticulously mismatched Victorian mourning dresses stood defiantly in front of Hans. Had there been any color in the boy’s face, it surely would have drained away. The girl was spooning a jar of baby food into her mouth with a Twizzler: Marlo’s trademark negative-attention-getting snack. It added another dimension to her freakdom. But who was this wannabe wolf in black sheep’s clothing? It couldn’t possibly be—
“Hey, Hans,” the girl said coyly. “Smokey the Bear asked me to come and put out your hair.”
Aubrey! Trick-or-taunting as me!
Hans stood there, stupefied, clutching his binder so tight that it made his white knuckles almost translucent. The boy’s beanpole-of-a-friend stepped up.
“Hi, Aubrey,” the boy said with a confident smirk belied by his quivering lower lip. “Um … you are, like, so sweet that I … um … get cavities just looking at you!”
Aubrey gave the boy a stare as spicy cold as frozen gazpacho.
“Humberto,” Aubrey replied, slurping her Twizzler spoon. “If you want to talk to me directly, you’re going to have to fill out a U-R-A: DWEEB form and fax it to the home office in You Wishistan. Expect to be completely ignored within six to eight weeks.”
Humberto’s whole body crumpled. With his striped sweatshirt, he resembled a forlorn candy cane.
“I’ll be in line for the new game,” he mumbled to Hans as he joined the growing crowd of glassy-eyed kids milling about the Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go booth.
Hans swallowed.
“Hi, uh … Aubrey,” he managed. “Sorry, it’s just that you … well … you look so much like … you know …”
Aubrey smiled and smeared the last bit of her baby food with her finger.
“It’s okay,” she replied carefully, twisting her baby-girl voice into something lower and huskier. “You can say her name. Marlo.”
Hans winced at the mention of Marlo’s name, as if its mere utterance were an invisible dagger twisting in his heart.
“She’s gone, Hans. Sometimes life is like a game of poker and you just have to deal,” Aubrey said, punctuating the word “poker” by poking him.
Aubrey glanced down at the boy’s Marlo-covered binder, her black-lipsticked lip curling at the sight of it, as if it were a rival.
“But I’m here … alive,” she said, her eyes sweeping across Fragopolis with disdain. “And seriously bored. Buy me something. Or, better yet, steal me something.”
Hans cast a nervous, desperate glance toward Humberto across the bustling arcade, as if his friend were a life preserver floating just out of reach in a stormy crazy-girl sea.
“Well, I was going to play that new game.…”
Aubrey rolled her heavily eyelinered eyes.
“C’mon … there’s trouble to make—with a capital ‘T’ that rhymes with ‘me.’ ”
What is Aubrey’s damage? Marlo thought, following the unlikely couple—Aubrey practically dragging Hans out of the arcade by his sweaty hand—using the broken shards of light streaming down onto the carpet from the arcade’s track lighting as a sort of pathway. It’s like she’s got split ends all the way down to her brain. What is this Marlosquerade all about, anyway? And what’s so hot about Hans, other than his raging-campfire haircut?
A twinge of lovesickness spasmed in Marlo’s chest like a dove wounded by rose thorns.
Zane, she thought wistfully as her mind and heart filled with images of the sullen-sweet British boy she had first crushed on in Rapacia and who then later—in Fibble—she had gotten to really know and fall for … so hard she had practically skinned her knees. But in Fibble, she had been in her brother Milton’s body, so their relationship hadn’t really had a chance to even be a relationship. She sighed as she watched Hans’s and Aubrey’s silhouettes hanging in the doorway of Fragopolis.
Marlo studied Aubrey, creeping closer in a band of sunlight-sharpened shadow just outside the arcade to get a better look.
Her nose is bigger than mine. Her eyes are smaller, spaced a bit farther apart and almost blue. And she’s got calves so large they’re practically cows. But still, with the makeup and outfit—she’s really rocking that mourning dress—she is, if not me, an amazing simulation.
“Hey, let’s go to the park and play ball!” a little boy called out to his friend just before passing through Marlo’s shadow. The boy stopped, the winds of outdoor frolic taken out of his sails.
“But we’d probably just get hurt and sunburned,” he mumbled, turning toward Fragopolis. “Not like if we spent the day playing video games,” he said with a dispirited shrug as he pushed open the door with his shoulder. “That’s, like, fun designed by professionals. Way better than what we kids could come up with on our own—like that new game about dead kids.”
“Whoa,” Marlo exclaimed. That’s why I’m supposed to be here, hanging around the arcade. I’m like somebody dressed as a hot-dog monster outside of a Franks ’n’ Steins, luring them in with bite-sized chili puppies. Only instead of food samples, I’m doling out the doldrums. Free funk. Get it while it’s not. Making people depressed so they seek out the consolation of a gaming console.
Marlo watched as Aubrey convinced Hans to leave his Fortress of Geekitude for some misdemeanor pseudo-date. Marlo sighed with the envy of the dead.
“You’re a mess,” Aubrey said, licking her palm to pat down a rogue tuft of Hans’s unruly orange hair. “But you could be a Euro mess with a little help.”
Hans blushed and, suddenly, Marlo’s shadow winked out and she saw the Shadow Box—all gauzy and faint like a half-remembered dream—from inside her chamber. To her side, as if through a veil of steam, she could see Baron Samedi fretting in front of the chamber belonging to Ferd, aka AWTY—the irritating Emo boy back in Snivel.
“I theenk we lost thees shade to the Litsowo,” rumbled the dark man with the grinning skull painted across his face. “Trouble no set like rain.” He shrugged, bunching up his tuxedo coat with his shoulders. “That bird wraith has big wanga-gut for stray, wanderin’ souls, stretched thin and pyaa-pyaa by the Wastrel Projector …”
Marlo’s consciousness winked on and off, returning to the outside of Fragopolis. Hans took Aubrey’s hand away from his flaming red hair. Marlo’s shadow gradually sharpened in a stain of sunlight.
My grip on the Surface, Marlo pondered, her thoughts as worn and fuzzy as an animal at a cheap petting zoo, it’s dependent on three people’s grief. Sort of a triangle of torment. And one of those points is—of all people—Hans Jovonovic. But if Aubrey sinks her mitts into him, this Gothlet is gone. A shade no more. I’ll be replaced by a psychotic tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Marlo!
A large, birdlike smudge streaked across the bank facing the arcade. But just as Marlo caught a glimpse of it, it was gone. She swallowed, praying that she wasn’t the prey of some weird bird wraith, or whatever Baron Samedi was labba labbaing about back in the Shadow Box.
And I have to hang around long enough to bring Mom and Dad back together. Which means getting Aubrey and Hans untogether. And somehow getting Hans to help me. But how?
A businessman texting a client stumbled through Marlo’s shadow. He stopped abruptly and puzzled over his handheld.
“Which means getting Aubrey and Hans untogether? And somehow getting Hans to help me? But how?” the man mumbled before shaking his head. “Wacko client … must’ve forwarded me a text from his kid or something …”
The businessman crossed the street, leaving Marlo puzzling on the sidewalk.
That’s it—
I think, therefore IM! I not only mess up cell phone signals, but I can, somehow, manipulate text messages. Sweet!
Aubrey coyly tapped her china flats against the sidewalk.
“Don’t you like me?” she asked with a practiced pout, looking like a preteen cemetery angel. Hans, flustered, stared down at his shiny black belt buckle.
“No … I mean, yes. I do like you. It’s … it’s just that I’m not sure if … you know …”
Marlo noticed that Hans had one of those InfoSwank Wi-Fi touch-screen belt buckles. She crawled across a braided checkerboard of light and dark, stopping at Hans’s smudged white Converse sneaks before scaling a streetlight shadow slashed across his corduroys.
Marlo concentrated. This had been challenging enough for her in her three-dimensional form, but doubly so as a weak, Marlo-shaped energetic absence.
Hans. Meet me at the dump. Marlo “The True Blue” Fauster
“If I’m ready to …,” Hans said before making that startled face everyone makes when their phone is set to vibrate, like they’re about to fart fireflies. He craned his neck low to scan the upside-down readout of his belt buckle:
Hans. Meet me at the dump. Marlo “The True Blue” Fauster
Hans gave a shiver so fierce that he nearly shook off his freckles.
“Hans?” Aubrey said, her spooky self twitching beneath her cool facade. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
The ghostess with the mostest, you cheap knockoff!
Hans’s InfoSwank belt buckle went off again, Marlo having accidentally texted her wrath. Hans swallowed and gave a nervous look up and down the street.
“Well?” Aubrey asked, her face growing red at the edges around her corpse-white foundation. “Who’s calling you, Red? Your mommy?”
“Aubrey?!” a slender, middle-aged woman with flowing black-and-gray hair called out from across the street. “Is that you?”
Aubrey cringed. Marlo could sense a supremely irritated tremble, as if life itself were rolling its eyes. Aubrey took her time turning to address the woman.
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 15