“I have ruled, Principal Bubb. Do you think I liked having to play Freaky Friday with the Prince of Darkness and an archangel? Do you have any idea how messed up things are going to be?”
“Well, I can imagine that—” Milton began.
“It was a rhetorical question, Nosy Parker. But, while I rule the Provincial Court of Res Judicata, I am ruled by ratings. And this was the only knee-jerk, half-baked decision that made sense—and, more importantly, made a sensation. And while you two bite-sized buttinskies may have guaranteed me boffo share, you need to be punished. And since you legally can’t be tried as adults, you can try out being an adult, which”—the man rubbed his throbbing temples as he set down his gavel—“isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Case dismissed … though I’ve dismissed you all long ago.”
Principal Bubb motioned for her demon sentries.
“Guards, seize them,” she ordered. “Roughly.”
The goat-bats reared up on their haunches and grabbed the Fausters by their wrists, jostling them down the aisle. Principal Bubb turned to leave, stopping short to review the empty room with wistful resignation.
“Oh well, que sera, sera,” she sighed. “I’ve been neglecting Heck for all of this business. It’s gone flabby around the middle. And I’m back to cinch the belt. Tight. Sometimes getting exactly what you want is the biggest punishment of all—a punishment I may never know but the Fausters will soon learn firsthand …”
The bug-shaped earring dangling from the principal’s ear vibrated.
“This Extraordinary Anticipatory Recorded Wearable Incitement Gadget (EARWIG)—another groundbreaking innovation from Nikola Tesla—will now self-destruct so as to conceal zhe identity of its ingenious creator.”
Milton and Marlo were shoved down a staggered stairway and into the intimidating marble-floored lobby walled with greenish glass and steel. A small explosion erupted behind them from the courtroom, followed by Principal Bubb’s anguished howl of pain. Slumped over by a sulfur water fountain was Algernon Cole.
“I want to see my lawyer!” Milton shouted as the demon guard gripped him by his wrists.
“Go ahead,” the goat-bat hissed. “See him. See? He’s right over there.”
“You know what I mean,” Milton grumbled. “Mr. Cole! Mr. Cole!”
Algernon, his face wet with sulfur water and tears, walked sluggishly alongside Milton.
“I’m not waking up, am I?” he posed, his red-rimmed eyes strangely hollow, like Siberian snow globes. “This is all real, isn’t it? I thought that, after I won the case, the dream would stop. But it hasn’t.”
Milton nodded with a sympathetic half-smile.
“Sorry, Mr. Cole. But if it’s any consolation, even though you’re dead, you totally killed out there in the courtroom!”
“Thank you,” the lawyer said with a wobble of his graying ponytail. “It felt good. Probably because I didn’t think any of it was really happening. It’s interesting, this place. With my research, it seems that everything here is governed with rules, more so than in the land of the living. It’s like they actually, physically hold it all together. Which reminded me of your case, and a little loophole I believe I found that could—”
A team of security demons grabbed Algernon Cole by the shoulders as he neared the exit.
“Oh no, you don’t,” the head demon roared. “You have to be debriefed.”
“But I’m not wearing briefs,” Algernon joked as he was dragged away.
“Yeah, we get it,” the security demon rumbled. “And so will you. Big-time.”
The Fausters were shoved through the double doors, greeted by a thousand popped flashbulbs.
A loophole, Milton thought with a grin as he stumbled down the marble stairs. Maybe justice—real justice—can actually be served down here after all.
“What are you grinning like an idiot about?” Principal Bubb said, clacking beside them as they headed toward her stagecoach.
“You want to know what?” Milton replied.
“Yes, what?”
“Chicken butt,” he said before dissolving into exhausted laughter.
Just before he was thrown into the carriage, Milton saw Gabriel outside the courthouse, standing next to a shaft of light.
Gray-blue eyes wide and unnerved, mouth hanging slightly open in incomprehension, and downy white wings spread unevenly, cautiously, out to his sides, the archangel Gabriel stepped back from the beam of uncompromising, almost brazenly pure light. He turned his face away briefly, as if from the crude ambiguity of the future to the comfort of the past, but forced himself back into the light. A tear sliced down his cheek like a tiny jeweled dagger. The debonair angel’s face twitched with internal struggle, as if he held the power to avert a cataclysm but was bound by fealty not to. A sharp, castigating gust of wind blew across the marble steps of the courthouse with a roar that overpowered even the incessant flurries of the six Belief Blowers. The wind caught Gabriel’s wings with such sudden violence that he could no longer close them.
It was as if a storm were blowing all the way from Paradise, Milton thought as he was led away by a squad of demon guards. Little did Milton know that he was the myopic eye of this unstoppable tempest, an unbidden storm that no creature—divine or demonic—saw coming, and even if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway.
We (and by “we,” I mean you) often view happiness as the ultimate goal of life (though, physically, the ultimate goal of life would be death, with the bulk of our death spent being gravely disappointed that we realized the first goal). But is happiness a fixed destination, or is it an unattainable yet vexingly visible point perpetually on our psychological horizon?
Much of our existence, it could be said, is a teeter-totter ride between happiness and sadness. If we’re too light, we can get stuck up in the air, legs dangling, the soles of our feet soon craving stable ground. If we’re too heavy, we just sit there like a leaden lump, adhering faithfully and forlornly to the law of gravity. What makes the experience any fun at all is the promise of movement: the motion of emotion.
Happiness and sadness need each other. They’re like an old bickering couple at the diner that you see holding hands, slyly, under the table. If we were always happy, we would never truly be happy. It would be like living in Disneyland, the self-appointed Happiest Place on Earth. After a few days, we’d have third-degree sunburns and be completely sick of all the rides. Even six out of seven dwarves aren’t Happy living there. But if we just stop trying to be happy, we’re doomed to reside in Disneyland’s polar opposite—Dismayland—a place where Mickey is caught squealing in a trap, Donald is served à l’orange, and Goofy is … well, pretty much the same.
The truth is that happiness is found in its pursuit, not its possession.
There is a virulently infectious song for children with the maddening refrain, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.” This is not only reckless advice—especially if one finds oneself unexpectedly “happy” while driving a truck carrying flammable chemicals in an avalanche zone—but it is also misleading. True happiness is something impossible to identify, much less celebrate with the unwarranted striking of one’s palms. “Clap on” the glaring light of awareness and you can pretty much “clap off” any shot at happiness.
As any rare insect knows, once something is caught and labeled, it’s usually only a matter of time before it gets a pin through its thorax. So can you really blame happiness for being so fleeting?
Likewise, even in the upper reaches of the afterlife, happiness is playing one heck of a game of hide-and-seek. And the rules have changed: so much so that no one—from the demonic to the divine—is even quite sure what game is being played. The only thing that anyone knows with any certainty is that the stakes are higher (and lower) than anyone, alive or dead, ever thought possible.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE BOOK YOU are now holding—printed on the latest in teardrop-resistant paper, able to withstand a salinity of roughly 5.12 percent�
��was the result of tens of thousands of words painstakingly arranged in such a way that they formed a semicoherent story, in many ways, this semicoherent story.
I’d like to acknowledge the countless friends and colleagues who helped with the creation of this book, generously mulling over ideas and scrutinizing various drafts as the manuscript grew and gradually took form … but, in all honesty, I can’t. Sure, there are exceptions … my editor, Diane Landolf, springs to mind, as she so often does, pouncing like a bespectacled Ivy League tiger, savaging self-indulgent prose until it is worthy of public consumption.… But, in general, writing is a solitary pursuit, like rugby, only without all the other players, spectators, referees, and that weird oval ball. Plus I seldom write on a field that’s one hundred meters long and seventy meters wide with H-shaped goal posts on each goal line and crunch together in a scrum with fifteen other players in a brutal battle of might.
Hmm … perhaps writing isn’t as much like rugby as I had previously thought.
Anyway, I’d also like to acknowledge Heck’s rabid fan base and pray that they seek the medical attention they so desperately require. If it weren’t for the constant barrage of encouraging letters and emails … well, I’d probably get a lot more work done. But writing these books wouldn’t be nearly as rewarding. Seriously. Your freakish absurdity and devotion are my fuel. Keep it surreal, demon hordes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DALE E. BASYE is a writer of staggering humility—voted Most Modest Author five times running in This Isn’t a Real Magazine magazine. He has made a decent living for himself writing reviews, stories, advertising campaigns, and his parents for money.
Here’s what Dale E. Basye has to say about his fifth book:
“There is a time when most everything seems to rub you the wrong way. As if life itself, clad in white socks, had walked across a mile-long shag carpet to give you an annoying shock of static electricity, or to maliciously stroke you on the back with an irritating squeak. (I forgot to mention that you are a balloon.) During this time, you feel as sensitive as a freshly shaved Chihuahua at its first spring formal, and the only course of action is to complain bitterly until you are blue in the face and feeling twice as blue inside. Heck is like that. And, no matter what anyone tells you, Heck is real. This story is real. Or as real as anything like this can be.”
Dale E. Basye lives in Portland, Oregon, where he spends his days whittling large pieces of wood into slightly smaller pieces of wood and working alongside the world’s greatest scientific minds in hopes of developing the perfect pancake.
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 29