THE SELF-CONSCIOUSLY TALL demon bailiff stooped over into the microphone, stiff and uncertain, though he had been fulfilling this role for centuries. He reread the name on the slip of paper, shook his head, and trudged down the aisle to the courtroom doors.
“The court would like to call the next witness,” Algernon Cole said, swallowing hard into the microphone. “The Big Guy Upstairs. You’re the next contestant on Holding Court with Judge Judas.”
The hundreds of rotting demons, condemned malefactors, and crooked magistrates eyed the double doors with understandable unease.
Just as the festering demon bailiff reached the back of the courtroom, the gleaming oak doors were pushed open. In swept the seven archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Rafael, Uriel, Zadkiel, Raguel, and Sariel.
Gliding into the courtroom with the effortless grace of professional dancers, the seven divine messengers were simply breathtaking. Clad in immaculate white vestments, their movements were perfectly synchronized and, puzzlingly, rendered in a sort of fluid slow motion, like classical Greek statues come to life, performing a water ballet on dry land. The middle angel, Michael, was—unaccountably—cradling a teddy bear in his luminous, alabaster arms.
“Greetings and felicitations,” Michael said, greeting the judge. “Long timeth no decree.”
Judge Judas fidgeted in his seat like a talk show host upstaged by his guest.
“You’re in my court now,” the judge fumed through the feigned warmth of his tense smile.
Michael’s clear blue eyes spread the interior of the courtroom with a thin coat of condescension.
“So I am,” he muttered between his permanently pursed lips.
Judge Judas craned his neck over his bench.
“Aren’t we a little old for teddy bears?” the judge said, winking at the camera, igniting an audio explosion of prerecorded hoots and hollers.
Michael’s majestic wings stiffened. “You might not wanteth to be so glib around the Big Guy Upstairs.”
The judge’s dark, treacherous eyes widened in shock. “This is the creator of the universe and source of all moral authority?”
“No, thiseth be a Teddy Ruxpin doll,” Michael clarified in his marbleized tone of perpetual patronization. “He couldn’t be here today.”
“I thought He was everywhere?”
“Well, not today,” Michael said. “Not in the ‘actively intervening’ sense. He’s like cell phone coverage: mostly everywhere, but some places geteth better reception than others.”
The arrogant archangel set the teddy bear on the judge’s bench.
“So, as divine messengers, we are here to delivereth His divine message … or He is, actually.”
Michael slipped an audiocassette into the toy’s back. The Teddy Ruxpin doll came to creepy, animatronic life.
“I am honored to testify on behalf of my troubled fallen star—a rogue by any other name, but to me an angel who will always be Lucifer—yet I sadly cannot disrupt the proceedings with my Presence,” the bear said, its merry eyes rolling around in its head like cartwheeling beetles, its voice soothing, cheerful, and hollow. “But I will leave with this anecdote from the last time I saw Lucifer, when he was the gleaming son of Dawn, so full of promise, always ready to pierce me with a well-aimed grin plucked from his arsenal of mercurial smiles.”
The robotic bear continued with a grand gesture of its faux-furred arms. “When I created him and his angelic brethren, I commanded them to pay worship to no one but me,” Teddy Ruxpin relayed with a languid blink of its eyes. “But then, after creating mankind, I told them to bow in reverence to my most noble of works. Lucifer—to put it kindly—refused. I had always attributed this to pride. But as the years stretch to eons, I’ve grown to think that perhaps he refused to do so because of his intense adoration for me, and he could not bring himself to bow before anyone else.”
Satan quickly wiped away a tear of blood.
“We all make mistakes … well, you all do,” the robotic bear continued, his mechanized head rotating to survey the courtroom. “And Lucifer is no exception. In fact, he has spent his time … down there … perfecting the art of error.”
Satan crossed his haunches and sighed. “Damned once all those years ago, now damned again by faint praise.”
“So, despite Lucifer’s purported actions, show him the love and mercy that I show all of you: the inexplicable glue of serendipity that will always hold you close to me,” Teddy Ruxpin declared in his singsong voice.
The spectators packing the courtroom stifled the pitiable wails that ached to be released from their wretched, trembling throats.
“That is all,” Teddy Ruxpin said, his tiny metal muzzle opening and closing. “This divine message will self-destruct in ten seconds.”
The crowd gasped.
“Just kidding,” the robotic bear continued. “Or am I?”
The bear smoldered on Judge Judas’s bench before breaking apart in a soft shower of sparks and flame.
The judge cleared away the smoke with his gavel.
“Thank you so much, archangels,” he said, coughing. “For whatever that was. Bailiff, if you please …”
Bea “Elsa” Bubb unscrewed the cap from her thermos.
“That should put the fur of God into us all,” she muttered.
The bailiff snatched a piece of paper from one of Johnny Cockroach’s feelers and walked down the aisle.
“The court would like to call the next witnesses,” Johnny Cockroach said, leaning toward his microphone. “Milton and Marlo Fauster, take the stand. You’re the next contestants on Holding Court with Judge Judas!”
Principal Bubb spat out her scalding HostiliTea on the back of Charles the Bald’s dome of a head.
“What?!” she screamed as every head turned toward the door.
“WE’RE MAD AT Heck and we won’t play it anymore!! We’re mad at Heck and we won’t play it anymore!!”
The AGHAST protesters chanted outside of Dale E. Basye’s mansion, pacing in pious circles in the cul-de-sac like holier-than-thou water swirling around a drain.
“He made a game that makes kids spacey,
Let’s pull the plug on Dale E. Basye!”
The crowd was a mixture of priggish adults, dazed children forced into suits and formal dresses, local officials feigning importance, and various sponsors huddled around the snack carts. KBET: The Only Sure “Bet” in Las Vegas was on the scene with anchorwoman Biddy Malone shoving her microphone in every sour face like it was a Dirt Devil sucking up the same prepared statement served up in slightly different ways. KBET was an affiliate station, so their coverage was sure to be picked up nationally.
“Sacrilegious, sick, and crass
Heck is wrong, so says AGHAST!”
That isn’t even a proper rhyme, thought Dale Basye, miserably, from his bedroom window in the south turret. A squeal of feedback, like that from a frightened, radioactive pig, tore through the strictly enforced placidity of the United Estates of Nevada.
“Good day, good people of Nevada,” Agnes Derleth proclaimed in her prissy, toothless-old-woman-gumming-oatmeal voice. “And it will indeed be a good day—for the righteous, not so much for the wicked.” She smirked, her beady eyes tossing daggers at Dale’s window. “Thanks to the tireless efforts of AGHAST!”
“From righteousness our group is cast,
We’re virtue’s watchdogs, so bark AGHAST!”
The crowd barked, howled, and—in one peculiar instance—meowed.
“This protest wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of the local, easily outraged community of devouts, including Pastor Prime and her flock at WorshipMart, Nevada’s largest megachurch and piety supply store.”
The dried-up old woman gave a self-satisfied nod to the side of the grandstand.
“But most of all, we’d like to thank the over-the-top financial and administrative support from the Better Foundation: A Better Foundation … Get It? Because of the Name.”
“Phelps Better,”
Dale grumbled between gritted teeth. His little stunt is going to cost me everything.
Dale rubbed his weary eyes, then put on his pants just like everyone else did: two legs at a time in one frantic jump. He walked over to his elevator and jabbed the button.
“Everybody,” Agnes said, freeing her pearl choker from the deep grooves of her neck. “I’d like for you to meet my new special friend.”
Necia led Damian, face bumpy with acne and slick with Derminator pore-minimizer and concealer, to the grandstand.
“Damian Ruffino,” Agnes said as she wrapped her age-spotted arms—which complemented her cheetah-skin cap—around Damian’s slumped shoulders.
The crowd cheered as Necia wiped Damian’s lips and pressed him to the microphone.
“Thank you, Mrs. Derleth,” Damian said thickly, as if his tongue were a slab of corned beef. “I, like many children my age with access to quarters, have played the game Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go. And I’m here to tell you, I am not the same happy, conscientious boy who entered the arcade.”
Conscientious my foot, Dale fumed to himself as he opened the first of his front doors.
“Even once-beloved activities such as visiting my grandmother and singing in my church youth choir, the Gang Glee Adolescents, have lost their luster,” Damian continued. “And hey, you kids out there, have you ever popped a few quarters in a video game? Chances are, you had fun. Maybe you got lucky that time. But what if you played a game that seemed to suck the life right out of you, full of un-Nintendoed side effects that left you forlorn and for-Sega-d? More than twenty kids will play Heck by the time I finish talking to you today.”
“That’s almost twenty-five!” Necia interjected.
“And sixty-two percent of those almost twenty-five kids,” Damian continued, “may be ten times more likely to have a sixteen percent chance of being at risk of complications such as brain damage, even death!”
Necia patted Damian on the back as he pretended to cry.
“There, there,” she said as she stealthily fed Damian another motivating fudge-dipped pork rind.
Dale took a deep breath and walked past his hedgerow to the grandstand.
“It’s him!” Agnes declared with a sneer.
“That awful man!” Necia gasped dramatically into the microphone.
Damian slowly leveled his gaze upon Dale as if it were a weapon. He smiled with smoldering hatred—his eyes a pair of burning match heads—accidentally popping a pimple near his mouth in the process.
Biddy Malone bounded across the cul-de-sac like a panther in a pencil skirt.
“Mr. Basye … what do you have to … say about what your … dangerous game has … done to this … poor boy?!” she panted as her cameraman rushed to keep up with her.
The crowd went from simmer to boil, just one misinterpreted gesture away from foaming over.
Dale backed into his overwrought-iron security gate, its cold metal touch providing him no security whatsoever.
This is it, he thought as he fought back the Mardi Gras of terror parading in his chest. Time to face the music.
Biddy Malone, navigating the sidewalk in her spiked heels, pressed her microphone into Dale’s face, like the leader of a firing squad offering its victim one last, huge cigarette.
“Mr. Basye, do you have anything to say about the deleterious effects of your awful game?”
Dale looked up at the sky with his bulging blue-green eyes.
I promise, whoever’s up there, if you get me out of this one, I’ll never steal book and video-game ideas from children that end up hurting children again.
A spout of glittering, honey-colored steam shot out from the hedgerowed horizon by the Las Vegas Strip.
The cameraman whipped his gear around and zoomed in close.
Phew, Dale thought with relief. At least I don’t have to keep that promise!
“It’s coming from that new Catholic video arcade: Our Lady of Perpetual Ammo,” the cameraman said as he squinted through the viewfinder.
The crowd gawked at Dale.
Right, like this could be my fault, too, he thought.
“Police chatter says that it’s some malfunction from one of the games,” the bearded cameraman relayed as voices squawked into his earpiece. “That Heck game.”
Agnes Derleth etched her permanent scowl deeper into her yesterday’s-prune-Danish of a face.
“So that immoral game has claimed more victims,” she said, the question posed as a statement.
The cameraman shook his head.
“No, no casualties. In fact,” he added with a confused furrow of his brow, “the police dispatcher says that the children are laughing and lively.”
“At a video arcade?” Agnes asked, suitably aghast.
“Yes,” the cameraman said with a nod. “Some of the teens are even talking face to face, making eye contact, too.”
The crowd gasped. A cloud of the golden, sparkling gas, like vaporized champagne, drifted overhead. Some of the children sniffed the air and smiled.
“It smells like flowers and Pop-Tarts,” said a dark-skinned boy with a wide grin. “I should text my friends about this.”
He looked down at his phone.
“It doesn’t work,” he muttered as an Asian girl in a pink dress sidled up next to him.
“Neither does mine,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t feel like staring at a little screen, anyway. It’s such a beautiful day. Hey, what’s your name?”
“I’m Mohajit, but my friends call me Mo,” the boy replied. “My status is that I’m at an AGHAST protest because my parents made me and— Hey, this is like In-Your-Facebook only real! Will you friend me?”
“Totally!” the girl laughed. “My name is Huong. It supposedly means ‘perfume’ or something. I’m here because …”
Dale, never one to turn up his nose at an opportunity (or turn a blind eye toward a cliché), carefully untangled himself from the distracted, suddenly carefree crowd.
“That’s gr-great!” Dale croaked as he crept toward one of the omnipresent golf carts. “See? Much ado about nothing! Sounds like the kids are having the time of their lives … their afterlives! Get it? Because, in the game, they’re all dead! Anyway, I’m doing a coffee run. Anyone want anything? No? Okay, I’ll be right back!”
Dale sped away, if you define “sped” at “under five miles an hour.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Damian mumbled as he leapt off the grandstand in pursuit, scarfing one last heaping handful of Choco-full of Oinkrageous Flavor-Brand Fudge-Dipped Pork Rinds.
Dale buzzed along the serpentine pathway bisecting the Avalawns golf course like a slow electric mosquito.
“Good morning, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” Dale chirped, as—even while evading a potential lynch mob—he still wanted to stay on the persnickety woman’s good side. Mrs. Fitzgerald and her golfing companions grimaced, teed off that their tee-off was interrupted.
“Mr. Basye,” Damian said, jogging alongside Dale’s golf cart. “Not the best getaway vehicle. Pull over. We need to talk.”
Dale looked over his shoulder for a way out, but the path was blocked by decorative boulders on one side and a chain restricting access to the maintenance shed. He sighed. He was trapped between a rock and a barred place.
“What do you want from me?” he said before studying Damian’s bumpy face. “And what is wrong with your face?”
“Hormones,” Damian spat back, scratching at the sides of his orange-smeared neck. “Man, it’s like I have a pulse everywhere. But if you think I look bad, just wait until the coroner gets a load of you—that is, unless you sign this.”
Damian handed the middle-aged man a sheaf of papers.
“What are these?” Dale asked.
“Contracts, Blindstein. Forget your contacts?”
Dale set the papers down on his lap.
“You want me to sign away ninety-nine percent of all Heck-related monies?”
“I’m nothing if not generous.”
“An
d leave you as my heir?”
“In case I find myself needing some extra mad money,” Damian said, scratching at his bumpy arms. “You’ll be my ATM. I’ll just drop by unannounced and make a permanent withdrawal.”
Dale gulped.
“Why all of this?” he said, nodding back at the grandstand. “Why didn’t you just come forward and unmask me as the shameless, talentless fraud I am?”
“To get your attention,” Damian said, wincing with pain as he scratched his pimply head. “And to amass support. Look, no one is going to believe a rotten kid like me. AGHAST was my way of gaining credibility, plus an insurance policy.”
“How do you mean?”
“If you didn’t want to play Let’s Make a Deal, then I could have got some serious buckage by hauling your butt to court—though, by the looks of it, I’d have to take two trips. Hitting the buffets hard, huh?”
Damian’s skin seemed to visibly crawl. His eyes scrunched in agony.
“Are you okay?”
“There they are!” Biddy Malone shouted from the thirteenth hole.
Damian fell to his knees, his body rippling like a cactus preparing to birth a cyclone of baby scorpions.
“I see … a black light,” he murmured. “Oh no … not again … not like this. If only I had watched more television and traveled less …”
With that, Damian—his chronic, fudge-dipped-pork-rind-aggravated acne looking for some way out of his skin, only to be blocked by Necia’s off-brand Taiwanese pore-minimizer and concealer—popped like an enormous, 250-pound zit.
Pus and assorted bully bits spurted everywhere, much of Damian spattering Mrs. Fitzgerald and her companions. Damian Ruffino had indeed died a second time and returned to Heck: for good, for bad, forever.
Dale felt like his sanity was a sinking ship, and the more he tried to plug the holes, the faster it sank.
“Did you get that?!” Biddy Malone shouted to her cameraman.
“I think so,” the man replied. “It seems to be working again. Must have been one of those electromagnetic pulse thingies that knock out all electronics within a certain radius.”
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 27