Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  “So silence you—and we all—shall have,” Tesla said. He gave a quick turn, showing off his new weapon with a smile of lunatic pride.

  “Do you like them? They’re my latest creation, my Hip-Hip-Array: a weapon zhat harnesses and amplifies static electricity. It’s powered by sudden body movement and, of course, deadly intent.”

  “Your plan, it’s going down in flames,” Milton said, slowly backing away from Tesla to Marlo’s tank. “And with Poe out of the picture, you’re through.”

  Tesla passed Poe, giving his unconscious form a kick with his wet boot.

  “Ironically, with this machine zhat Poe helped to create, he has made himself obsolete,” Tesla said breathlessly. “When First Fire is stoked with souls, it will have enough energy to project me to zhe Surface—not as a weak shadow but as a fully functional energetic clone—and to also simultaneously project my essence here, in zhe underworld. I can continue Poe’s work to fill zhe Surface with debilitating depression, leading children to seek zhe stimulatory relief of zhe Sense-o-Rama! Zhe last word in multitasking! This outbreak of melancholy will create more fixed points of grief for this machine, zhe Wastrel Projector, so I can send most anyone back to zhe Surface.”

  Tesla cackled maniacally.

  “And there are plenty of bad, bad people here at zhe bottom of zhe afterlife who’d love to make a killing back up on zhe Surface!”

  THE LIGHTS FLICKERED off and on. In the brief moment of darkness, Milton moved to rush Tesla. The mad inventor sent a savage bolt of electricity into Milton’s leg.

  “Don’t trifle with me, boy,” Tesla growled. “I once melted zhe hand of an assistant with X-rays just for fun. Not very scientific, but still pretty cool, huh?”

  The pain was both excruciating and lingering. The electricity coiled around Milton’s nerve endings.

  “Your First Fire … something is wrong … right?” Milton murmured as he backed away from Tesla.

  “Yes,” Tesla replied as he examined the tanks, each housing a child imprisoned in bad memory foam. “We seem to have Highly Disruptive Infinite Feedback Loop Disorder, or HDIFLD. Something, or someone, got sucked into zhe Sense-o-Rama and is being sent back out to zhe Surface, where zhe whole troublesome cycle starts anew. I’m here to unclog zhe ghost from zhe machine.”

  Marlo Fauster has entered the game, Milton thought, his nervous glance over his shoulder betraying his thoughts.

  A lipless grin split Tesla’s frenetic face. “Your sister! Of course … zhat’s why you’re here! Sorry to cut reunion short, but I must unplug your sister: forever.”

  The lights went out again. Milton had to think quick.

  “Too bad with all your genius, you can’t even keep the lights on,” Milton taunted in the dark. “What we could really use is a good, dependable lightbulb.”

  Tesla roared as he charged forward in the darkness. Milton backed into Marlo’s tank, felt around for the latch, and released the door.

  A livid flare of light surged up the Wastrel Projector. Tesla, blinded by his science, clutched his eyes while Marlo’s tank tilted upward. Its glass door flung open, sending Provost Marshal Tesla flying up and over the railing and into the torrent of reckless energy blazing through the Shadow Box. Instantly, the diabolical, off-his-rocker super-giga-genius was vaporized into dust with an angry crackle.

  The Grin Reaper peered down from the rail.

  “Someone who worked that hard was bound to burn out sooner or later,” he said, cracking himself up, then gazing in wonder at his own laughter.

  Milton gaped at Marlo, squirming in her prison of goo.

  “Is she okay?” Sara asked.

  Milton shook his head. “I don’t know. I have a feeling if I just stop the machine, her soul won’t make it back to her body. I’d be pulling the plug, just like Tesla said.”

  The shadows of Marlo and the Litsowo darted out from beneath the Shadow Box door.

  “I’ve got to get it just right,” Milton said as the shadows flew up the stairs toward the tank, “before I—”

  Marlo’s energetic shadow spilled into her body, with the bird spirit close behind.

  “Turn it off!” he yelped, shutting down the machine, the bad memory foam melting out onto the floor. Marlo fell to her knees, coughing. The Litsowo, missing Marlo’s shadow as it reintegrated with her body, swooped inadvertently into the machine. The Shadow Box trembled violently as chaotic snarls of First Fire roared up the Wastrel Projector and into the chamber.

  “Did I miss anything?” Marlo gasped. She stared at her brother’s Arcadia uniform and smirked.

  “Nice shorts,” she said as Milton helped her off the floor and, in a rare public display of affection, hugged his sister tight.

  Marlo beamed her crooked grin. “Please, you’ll make me blush … and you know how much I hate what that does to my complexion.”

  “We must get out of here,” the Grin Reaper said, looking down at the smoldering Wastrel Projector and adding with a giggle, “especially now that we just added fool to the fire! Get it?”

  Marlo scanned the quaking insides of the Shadow Box and the tanks filled with trapped children.

  “We’ve got to save the others,” she said, stumbling to Ferd the Emo boy’s tank next to hers, her legs still shaky.

  “There isn’t time,” Sam said. “You can die again if you want, but I’m out of here.” He struggled with his sister for control of their legs.

  “I’ll save them,” Vice Principal Poe said, rising to his feet.

  The children swung around, startled.

  “Sound and fury was Tesla’s game,” Poe said as he gazed down upon the inventor’s ashes. “Sheer contempt for any portrait, just merciless dedication to the frame. Now I see the value of a conscience, despite the pain it brings. It’s our soul’s critic, fanning the poet’s fire, teaching the soul—with reason—to admire.”

  The Sunshine Sneezer glanced over at Milton, twirling his finger by the side of his head.

  “The author of ‘The Raven’ goes cuckoo,” he muttered.

  Poe jogged down the stairs to the base of the Wastrel Projector’s fiber-optic vines. He flicked two switches in tandem, and the doors of the thirteen tanks sprang open. Children fell onto the floor, two of whom—a girl in pigtails and Ferd—were lifeless and inert.

  Marlo knelt next to the Emo boy.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she asked, her dark eyes wide. “He isn’t moving. Is he …?”

  Vice Principal Poe climbed the stairs, a look of sadness etched deep in his face.

  “Two could not be saved. They have … moved on.”

  “Moved on?!” Marlo spat back. “Where?!”

  The Shadow Box shuddered in savage spasms. Sparks showered from the Wastrel Projector’s surging vines. Milton put his arm around Marlo.

  “We’ve got to go, Mar,” Milton said, hoping his sister’s intense dislike of the name “Mar” would snap her out of her shock. “We’ve done all that we can here. Snivel is falling and we have to help get everybody out of here, or else we’ll all be down in the Dumps. Permanently.”

  Marlo brushed Ferd’s hair from his face, the same hair she had made merciless fun of only a few days ago.

  “Well, Ferd … AWTY … I guess you made it,” she whispered, her soft voice catching in her throat. “You’re finally ‘there’—hopefully they’re playing that awful, whiny music you like so much.”

  She got back to her feet and joined the other children spilling down the stairs.

  As the Grin Reaper led the group away, Vice Principal Poe walked tentatively up to Marlo’s tank, twisted a small knob on the side, and stepped inside. The door closed, sealing with a burp, and bad memory foam began to gush inside.

  Milton turned as he and the children entered the elevator.

  “Where does that box go to?” he asked.

  Tears wore tracks through the bad memory foam caked to her face.

  “Home … sort of.”

  “Who would Edgar Allan Poe know in Gen
erica, Kansas?”

  As the vice principal’s shadow was cast upon the screen behind him, a brief flicker of a smile danced upon his face.

  “Lenore,” he murmured happily, heartfelt and complete, as a devastating surge of First Fire filled the Shadow Box for the last time.

  Milton, Marlo, the Grin Reaper, and an assortment of Terawatts and Unhappy Campers ran to the edge of the platform outside the broken, tear-rusted Gates of Snivel.

  Mr. Orpheus stepped onto the SighTram and slammed the door.

  “Wait for us!” screamed Caterwaul.

  The music teacher shut the door behind him and the SighTram chugged away fitfully on its one strained, bowed cable. The tram was packed tight with students and faculty.

  “Thorry!” Friar Miles, behind the controls, yelled out to those left behind. “I can’t hold any more, and we’ll be lucky to thurvive the Thea of Thighs as it is.… If I can come back I …!”

  The friar’s voice was lost against the roar of wind.

  A group of sopping wet Arcadians, led by Hazelle, joined Milton at the edge of the marble platform.

  “Wait!” Hazelle yelled. “Come back!”

  The SighTram disappeared in a murk of upturned trash dancing murderously on the wind. Hazelle, normally so composed, dissolved in a torrent of tears. Milton clutched her by the shoulder.

  “I don’t understand,” she sobbed against Milton’s chest. “I lived my life by the rules—even my afterlife by the rules. And all this happens! It’s not fair!! It wasn’t supposed to be like this!”

  The girl’s long, dark hair broke free of its restraining bun and fell down over her face in sodden strands. It was like even her hair had given up.

  “Their rules only serve them,” Milton said, looking back through the dismal Gates of Snivel at the coiling sidewalk, the sounds of the camp’s destruction echoing down the corridor. “We have to make up our own rules as we go along.”

  Lucky poked his head out of Milton’s kerchief, tucked into his Arcadia belt. He held van Gogh’s ear in his jaws.

  The Grin Reaper guffawed, a hearty belly laugh, like a giddy genie being released from a bottle of nitrous oxide.

  “What’s so funny?” Hazelle yelled before shedding fresh tears.

  The Grin Reaper pulled out his humming electric jar and scrunched it up with his eye as if it were a monocle.

  “Nothing. Everything,” he murmured.

  Milton stared at the Grin Reaper, who was gazing in wonder at the butterflies of mirth fluttering around him.

  “I have an idea,” he said, standing on the tips of his toes and whispering into the Grin Reaper’s ear.

  The gangly creature nodded and unraveled a stray thread from his hoodie. He tied the end into a little loop, then—carefully following the invisible-to-everyone-else laughter flitting above him—lassoed his guffaw and held it by the string. He tied it to Hazelle’s wrist and went about lassoing another.

  “What are you doing?” Hazelle sniffed as the Grin Reaper tied a second laugh to her other wrist.

  “Nothing lifts spirit like laughter,” he said, roping two more fluttering chuckles. “There,” the Grin Reaper said as he tied them to Hazelle’s ankles. “Might be enough to make you laugh away. Far away.”

  Hazelle, her gray-blue eyes staring at her limbs in disbelief, floated gradually off the platform. A smile, streaming pure and unabashed like the sun peeking through the clouds after the rain, stretched across her pale, oval face.

  “I’m flying!” she shrieked with delight as she spread her arms out to her sides like a bird. “I’m free! Whoo-hoo! A kite without a string!”

  The Grin Reaper gave Hazelle a delicate shove. Milton grinned as she took flight across the Sea of Sighs, like Wendy off to Neverland.

  “Knock knock,” the Grin Reaper said.

  “Who’s there?” Wyatt, his senses fully returned, replied.

  “Interrupting starfish.”

  “Interrupting star—”

  The Grin Reaper grabbed Wyatt’s face, wiggling his fingers like tiny tentacles.

  “That’s so dumb,” Petula said, crossing her arms like a sulky Transformer before she and the rescued Arcadians laughed. The Grin Reaper rounded up all of their hilarity like comedic cattle in a rib-tickling rodeo. The children took to the air, flapping their arms as they shared their infectious Peter Pandemic of buoyant, incurable joy.

  The Grin Reaper had now completely unraveled his hoodie, revealing his face. With his wide, twinkling eyes, mischievous smile, and gray-cast complexion, the Grin Reaper resembled a thousand-year-old boy. After a few more jokes, it was clear that the remaining Terawatts had lost their senses of humor back in the Sense-o-Rama.

  “You go,” Milton told the Grin Reaper. “We’ll get out on our own. We’ll use the weapons we brought with us from Arcadia.”

  “I’ll go grab ’em,” the Sunshine Sneezer said, bounding away.

  The Grin Reaper nodded. “I will crack myself up then. And, since I have lots of laugh bottled up inside, I can take passenger.”

  He turned to Caterwaul. “You know what meanest animal alive is?”

  “Um … no,” she replied.

  “Is Hippogator. Animal with alligator head on one end and hippopotamus head on other. You know how it go to bathroom?”

  “Yuck, no.”

  “It doesn’t. That why so mean.”

  The Grin Reaper burst out in uproarious howls, struggling to yank threads from his threadbare hoodie and harvest every chuckle, chortle, and titter.

  “I don’t get it,” Caterwaul replied.

  The Grin Reaper lifted instantly off the ground. He grabbed Caterwaul and held her in his long, spindly arms.

  “But I got you! Get it?”

  They soared into the sky, buoyed by gales of liberated laughter.

  The Sunshine Sneezer trotted back through the creaking Gates of Snivel, bungee cords slung to his back.

  “I assumed that you—achoo!—meant these so that we could all—”

  “Yep,” Milton replied as he took a handful of bungees and handed them to his friends. “Zip-line our way down.”

  Marlo held the bungee in her hands and examined the trembling SighTram cable with a disbelieving smirk.

  “You never struck me as a daredevil, little bother,” she said to Milton as she slung her bungee over the quivering cable. “Not even one of the lesser dare demons. But you’re different now. I kind of like it.”

  Her bungee looped around the cable, Marlo approached the lip of the platform.

  “But don’t worry,” she said, blowing blue hair out of her face. “I’ll find something new to pick at. After all, you can’t outgrow a big sister.”

  Marlo leapt off the ledge and zoomed down the line across the chasm.

  “See you on the other side!” she shrieked against the wind.

  One by one, they jumped off the platform and sped down the cable, leaving just Milton and Sam/Sara behind.

  “You go,” Sara said with a nervous smile. “I’m traveling for two.” She tilted her head down to her sleeping brother. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

  Milton blushed briefly before blushing again after realizing he blushed. His embarrassment at being alone with Sara made it easier for him to loop his bungee around the cable and—eyes scrunched closed—leap off the edge of the platform, leaving both his stomach and his awkwardness behind.

  The sour wind combed through Milton’s matted hair as he careened through swirls of foam packing peanuts, candy wrappers, and medical waste. It was freeing. It was thrilling. It was …

  Milton felt the bolt mooring the cable to Snivel give way.

  … too good to be true.

  He looked back over his shoulder at Sam/Sara, speeding a dozen yards behind him.

  “The cable is going to snap!!” Milton bellowed against the howl of wind. “Hold on!”

  Ahead of him, Milton saw the SighTram dock at the Moanastery, the passengers swarming out in a panic. The other Arcadians—little blurry d
ots amidst the tempest of trash—were just behind.

  Only a hundred feet or so away, Milton thought as the humid, sickening wind slapped his face. If it’ll just hold for a bit—

  Just then, Milton could feel the wire cord give way. He gripped the cable tightly. The friction seared the palms of his hands as he squeezed himself to a stop.

  Like a preteen Tarzan swinging on a metal vine, Milton curved through the air, his feet sticking out in front to brace himself as he rushed toward the cliff beneath the Moanastery.

  He screamed before slamming against the rock face, knocking the wind out of him. Seconds later, he felt Sam/Sara crash into the cliff below him. He looked down at the conjoined twins, hanging below by a coiled metal thread.

  “Just take your time!” he shouted. “The worst is over—”

  Suddenly, a great explosion rent the air. Snivel, dropping from the clouds like a gigantic glass tear, shattered. The Dukkha Wheel spun wildly out of the camp’s fractured hull and into the Dumps below. Spinning behind it was something else: a long blade.

  Poe’s pendulum, Milton thought as he swallowed the pit of dread in his throat. And it’s heading this way.

  The pendulum twisted in deadly arcs, ever closer, until …

  “Sara!” Milton screamed as the savage pendulum struck the twins gripping the cable below him.

  All Milton could see was blood. Everywhere. Up and down his arms, spattered on his face.

  “Sara!” he screamed again as Snivel and Arcadia, like a pair of conjoined twins themselves, fell, relentless and unstoppable, from the thick cloak of clouds overhead.

  ALGERNON COLE-CLAD in khaki shorts, Birkenstocks, and a macramé tie cinched around his neck—shuffled through a sheaf of papers on the counsel’s table. He pulled out a scribbled memo written on a HOLY SPIRITS cocktail napkin.

  “Request permission to approach the bench,” Algernon croaked as every eye in the courtroom fixed upon him. He coughed. “Sorry, my throat is still swollen from those crazy stinging jelly beans I had, back before I fell asleep and started dreaming this crazy—”