The PODs pushed their carts into the tent in a single-file line.
Milton looked nervously over his shoulder. From the mist, he saw a bristly, reddish brown creature bound into the air with a swift jerk and land by one of the outlying trailers. In its front legs, it clutched the body of a bewilderbeast that it appeared to be … sucking the life out of with its long, tubelike mouth. It was some kind of gargantuan, leaping … flea or … tick.
The creature was quickly joined by another. And then another. The mottled creatures quivered and scanned the confusement park with their dull red eyes.
Moondog grabbed Milton by the shoulders and heaved him into the tent.
“Incoming,” he croaked as he closed the tent flap behind the last phantom. “And they’re hopping mad!”
5 • STARK, RAViNG MADAME
“SHE W-WILL S-SEE you n-n-now,” said Farzana Daffney, a willowy, impeccably dressed girl.
Standing next to her, thirteen-year-old Marlo Fauster felt like Farzana’s photo negative. Farzana’s hair was red and effortlessly sleek while Marlo’s blue mop had taken an hour to become perfectly unkempt. Farzana was dressed in a creamy designer outfit so crisp and form-fitting that it was hard to distinguish whether Farzana was wearing it or it was wearing her. Marlo, on the other hand, was going on day three of her fave black velvet vintage top and bulky, knee-length tulle skirt.
Even the two girls’ manners were in stark contrast. Farzana seemed so rushed and on edge, like she was strapped to a perpetually teetering chair in a room covered with explosive eggshells. Marlo, however, was the poster girl for calm: a kleptomaniac presently content to take nothing but her own sweet time.
Marlo traced the scrupulously crisscrossed stitching of the black leather door with the tip of her finger. Both Farzana and Marlo eyed the imposing door in silence, only Farzana did so with hyperventilating fear while Marlo viewed it as the portal leading to a whole new afterlife: a backstage pass to privilege and power ripe for abuse.
After preventing the Grabbit—Rapacia’s greedier-than-all-get-out vice principal—from sucking the entire underworld into a black hole using two priceless diamonds and an atom smasher, Marlo had been rewarded with an Infernship, serving the Big Guy Downstairs in this place wedged between Heck and h-e-double-hockey-sticks. It was a reward that was both welcome and a little bit unsettling: like drinking from the water fountain after gym, only to have the water pressure change when someone flushes the toilet.
“M-Marlo,” Farzana pressed. “Madame Pompadour d-doesn’t like to b-be kept waiting.” The girl rubbed the goose pimples on her slender forearms. “B-believe me … I kn-know.”
Marlo glanced down at her scuffed shoes. She quickly rubbed them together, partly to look more presentable for her new teacher or boss or whatever, but also as a subconscious shout-out to fellow Kansan Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Only, after clicking her own heels together, Marlo was still here, outside the hide-upholstered door of Madame Pompadour, the woman who ran Heck’s Girl Friday the Thirteenth program.
“Okay, fine, I’m ready,” Marlo said.
Farzana rapped her bony knuckles on the leather door, hard enough to strike wood beneath the plush padding.
A voice—slow and deadly—hissed like a gas leak in an orphanage from inside the office.
“Yessssss? I don’t recall asking to be disturbed.”
“Um … right, m-madame,” Farzana replied. “But y-you said you w-wanted to meet the n-new—”
“Eternity is too short to spend it waiting for you to f-f-finish a sentence, Miss Daffney,” Madame Pompadour replied. “Have you had your Beauty Cream today?”
Farzana cowered as she pressed open the door. “Y-yes, m-madame. I mean, no.”
“Please have a glass at once. Your stuttering is most unladylike. It makes you sound like a scuffed CD.”
Marlo stood mutely in the doorway. Farzana attempted to nudge her inside the office with sweeps of her wide, uneasy brown eyes, but Marlo was having none of that. She’d go in when she was good and ready, on her own terms.
Farzana shoved Marlo inside, then closed the door behind her. The leather squished inside the door frame as it shut, making Marlo feel as if she was being sealed inside someone else’s tomb.
The room was thick with the smell of leather and an intoxicating musk. Faint light leaked from above through ten red, recessed lights that formed the shape of a pentagram. Pressed against the far wall of the office was an imposing desk built from mahogany coffin lids, by the looks of it. A sleek figure was bent over a calendar on the desk. On the wall behind her was a large octagonal mirror and next to it a velvet scratching post.
“If people are going to barge into my office simply to stare, I should charge admission,” Madame Pompadour said in a clipped voice with just a whiff of snooty French.
The woman suddenly looked up. She had large cat eyes that glowed red for just a split second before cooling to a brilliant green. She wore a gorgeous purple snakeskin bodysuit with a little cowl that fit over her head and came to a point in a shiny widow’s peak on her forehead.
Marlo’s eyes traveled away from the woman, whose affectations reminded Marlo of some freakish Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup dreamed up in a mad doctor’s lab: “Hey, you’ve got a cat in my snake!” “Hey, you’ve got a snake in my cat!” “Mmmm … tastes like the snobby, psychopathic headmistress of an underworld charm school!”—to the octagonal mirror behind her.
“Do you possess the ability to speak?” Madame Pompadour spat through a small, pursed mouth. “Why is it that all my girls lately arrive with some kind of crippling speech disorder?”
Marlo smirked. If this supremely stuck-up woman wanted a battle of wits, Marlo thought as she wiggled her tongue for a prebout stretch, then the swords were drawn.
“Of course I can talk,” Marlo replied. “I was simply waiting for you to tell me what I’m supposed to be doing here—”
“I don’t recall granting you permission to speak,” the woman said dismissively. “I simply wanted to know if you could speak.”
Madame Pompadour made a few quick notes in her red leather Vilofax.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Marlo replied with a shrug. “But I was always taught to respect my elders, ma’am.” She stretched the last word as if she were pulling back the loaded pocket of a slingshot.
Madame Pompadour rose—reared, actually: her back arched, her arms pressed onto the desk, and her head jutted out in front of her.
“Madame,” she said slowly, with a great deal of restraint. “You will address me as madame. Always. Never ma’am. Ma’am is for …”
She twitched.
“… more mature women.”
Madame Pompadour sat down like a Jill-in-the-box recoiling back inside its tin cube of a home.
She scrutinized Marlo up and down, as if she were removing each of her organs in a mental game of Operation.
“‘Pretty’ isn’t the most apt description of you, is it?” she asked in a way that wasn’t anywhere near being a question.
Marlo, much to her exasperation, flushed red, completely ruining her hard-earned china-doll complexion and undermining her position as “plucky challenger” in this war of words.
“Well, madame,” Marlo replied, squeezing out a delicate glob of sarcasm, “pretty is boring. Saying that someone is ‘pretty’ is like saying that something is ‘fine.’ It’s not really saying anything. I’d take ‘interesting’ over ‘pretty’ any day.”
Madame Pompadour’s lips curled into a slight smile, a curved dish full of sour milk.
“I suppose you are somewhat interesting,” she replied coolly while propping her chin up with a pawlike hand. “Like a peculiar bug smashed on the windshield of one’s Maserati. That’s a type of car, by the way.”
Madame Pompadour slid a manila envelope marked MARLO FAUSTER from across the desk and brought it near her chest. She pulled out a letter opener from her top drawer, a dagger with a bejeweled hilt glittering with emeralds.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” she said as she sliced open the envelope. “You’ve been entered into a very prestigious program—Heck’s Infernship program, to be precise. To be even more precise, the Girl Friday the Thirteenth Finishing School, where today’s young ladies become tomorrow’s deceptionists, heckutaries, and badministrative assistants.”
Marlo swayed as her mind caught up to her present situation. When Chairman Mammon of the Netherworld Soul Exchange had offered Marlo an opportunity to make a difference from inside the system—rather than from her usual vantage point way outside—she thought it could be just the ticket, if not out of Heck, at least out of the kiddie pool and into the VIP Jacuzzi with all the other “playahs.”
If her first five minutes in Madame Pompadour’s finishing school were any indication, Marlo was in the same old game only with a new name: like how soccer is considered “football” to the rest of the world.
“And let me clarify for you, since I can tell from your bone structure, your dull expression, and your overall lack of refinement that you are not the smartest outfit on the rack,” Madame Pompadour relayed, “this is by no means a guarantee of you becoming an Infern for the Big Guy Downstairs. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal Light,” Marlo replied.
Marlo wanted to sit down. Having a bad attitude was draining. Her feet hurt. And everything in between wasn’t feeling so hot either. But there was no place to sit. Girls were forced to, Marlo assumed, simply stand before Madame Pompadour as she tore them apart from the inside while they slowly crumbled on the outside from physical exhaustion. But not this girl. Marlo was unbreakable. Impenetrable. Like an armadillo wearing Tuffskins. Like a steel-plated Twinkie. Like an algebra equation.
“I take only the truly exceptional,” the cold, composed woman explained. “But I am making an exception in your case, out of coercion—respect—for certain influential personages that have taken a shine to your dull little self. You are being forced upon me … but I like a challenge. Even if I don’t like you.”
Marlo’s thieving eyes were drawn to something dangling from Madame Pompadour’s slender wrist. It was a gorgeous charm bracelet laden with elegant vintage hearts. Each heart had a tiny face and name etched into it, too small for Marlo to read. They tinkled in the hush of the office.
“I begin my training with simple, repetitive tasks that help mold my girls into young ladies worthy of the opportunity that they have been given,” Madame Pompadour continued. “Otherwise, it’s like handing a monkey a razor and shaving cream, turning your back, and not expecting them to end up all … stubbly.”
Madame Pompadour’s perfect pink mouth curled into a sneer.
“Judging from your upper lip, it looks like you could benefit from ‘monkeying around’ with a razor.”
Marlo’s hand shot to her upper lip. It felt as if a woolly caterpillar had decided to take up residence just south of her nose.
“You’ll begin by answering phones, mostly. And running errands for … him. The Big Guy Downstairs. Actually, the Big Guy Just Down the Hall. He has an office here for when he needs to get the you-know-what out of you-know-where.”
Marlo stared past Madame Pompadour’s shoulder into the mirror. Nothing in it was distinct, just dark smudges and swirling blobs. Suddenly, the blobs clotted together to form Marlo’s reflection.
Marlo gasped at the drab, dumpy girl in the octagonal mirror. Her hair appeared to be a rat’s nest, and not in a cool-and-expertly-crafted-to-look-punky-yet-casual kind of way, but as if it actually harbored vermin. Marlo’s face looked hideously swollen, as if she had drunk an aquarium’s worth of salt water and slept upside down for a year. And what had happened to her chin? Had it been blown free of her immortal self in the marshmallow bear explosion that had taken her life? Madame Pompadour slapped closed her red leather Vilofax.
“Are you even listening to me?” the woman hissed through pointy white teeth. “Do I need to repeat myself and reenact my words in a closed-captioned puppet show so that you can follow along?”
“No, ma’am … madame,” she replied thickly, as if her head were stuffed full of overcooked oatmeal. “I’m … listening.”
Madame Pompadour sighed and took a dainty lap of catnip tea from a small porcelain cup. Meanwhile, Marlo fought the pull of the woman’s mirror. It was as if her eyes were fastened to it with Silly Putty, and the more she struggled to free her gaze, the more the putty stretched and contorted her reflection.
Farzana peeked into the room. The sound of the door opening—a slurping, backward belch—coaxed Marlo from her stupor.
“Excuse me, madame, but it’s time for your two o’clock with Sheila Shylock and Lady Lily Lassiter,” Farzana said in one fluid, perfectly enunciated breath. She wiped away her milk mustache with a quick sweep of her tongue. Madame Pompadour cocked her eyebrow.
“I thought my two o’clock was at four?”
“No, madame. At four you’re meeting with the lab about your latest line of lovely lemon liniment for learned ladies.”
Madame Pompadour nodded.
“Fine, then,” she said as she jotted down a note in her Vilofax. “And I believe that Miss Fauster here could use a glass of Beauty Cream.”
Marlo pried her eyes from her homely image. “No … madame,” she managed. “I’m lactose intolerant. Severely. It does things to my plumbing that I wouldn’t wish on, well … you, even. Once I went on an aerosol cheese binge and woke up the next day in the hospital.”
Madame Pompadour glared at Marlo.
“That’s … unfortunate,” she grumbled while tinkling her bracelet with her fingers. “My Beauty Cream is a unique blend of ingredients designed to create a foundation of poise and refinement. I will have to think of other … means … of drawing out your charm.”
The haughty woman opened her top drawer and plucked out a small red velveteen pouch. She pushed it across her desk.
“It’s a welcoming gift,” Madame Pompadour explained. “It also doubles as a cell phone. So I can keep my girls close—no matter where they are.”
Marlo’s curiosity got the best of her (hopefully it would kill the cat that got her tongue), and she turned to receive her gift.
She picked up the pouch, loosened its drawstring, and pulled out a gorgeous, tortoiseshell compact case. Marlo marveled at its ornate, filigree embellishments. She flipped it open with her thumb. Tiny blue lights surrounding the mirror inside the compact’s lid strobed in a mesmerizing pulse. Marlo stared at her reflection, overly magnified so that her face looked like the surface of the moon.
“You’re welcome,” Madame Pompadour said wearily. “My, we have a lot of work to do, don’t we, Miss Fauster? But that is all for now. You may leave.”
Marlo cradled the compact in her palm. It radiated peculiar swells of electricity that throbbed in time to her own heartbeat. She couldn’t take her eyes off herself, though—horrified by what she saw—that’s exactly what she wanted to do, more than anything. She trembled as she scanned the ravaged, cratered surface of her face in the mirror.
“Marlo,” Farzana whispered with urgency, waving Marlo to her as if trying to coax a duck across a busy highway.
“It’s really quite simple,” Madame Pompadour explained with passive disgust. “You do exactly what you did to get into my office, only in reverse.”
Madame Pompadour returned to her Vilofax. To her, it was as if Marlo suddenly ceased to exist. The problem was, Marlo was beginning to feel the same way.
6 • iN THE FLiCK OF iT
INSIDE THE MASSIVE tent was—somehow—an even more massive carnival. It was crowded with lurid signs (BEHOLD: EL HOPPO THE MEXICAN FROG BOY! for instance), sideshow exhibits, and baffling rides. A carnival on the edge of time, Milton thought.
He looked above him at the swaying wooden sign, daubed in bright yellow and blue: STEP RIGHT UP …
And so Milton did, passing beneath the sign to the frozen, painted metal automaton standing between the hundred or so fearful p
hantoms and the midway. The figure wore a black top hat and a pin-striped vest, waistcoat, and pants. It held a varnished wooden cane with what looked like a mummified monkey head on top. As Milton scrutinized the figure, it twitched to mechanical life.
“From the instant you are born to the moment you expire, the clock is your executioner,” the automaton relayed in a deeper-than-expected voice. “There’s no escape from the great finale of life where each of you is destined to play your farewell performance.”
More PODs huddled together around the robotic curiosity.
“Or is there? Can one actually delay that final moment when the bony hand of death scrawls one’s name in his crowded diary?”
The automaton’s mouth squeezed and scraped into a smile.
“Of course there is, ladies and gentlemen, and that is why I am here….”
The figure waved its arm toward the midway in a grandiose gesture.
“I am Savage Bumble, and this is my Tragical Confusement Park!”
Suddenly, three very large somethings landed on the roof of the tent. The fabric puckered dangerously inward. The creatures’ legs scrabbled for purchase, tearing into the canvas.
Through the shredded canvas roof, one of the creatures dropped the lifeless body of a bewilderbeast onto Swami River’s Fortune-Telling Booth, smashing it to splinters.
The phantoms around Milton screamed and slammed their shopping carts into one another in desperation. He gaped, stunned, at the roof above his head as it was slowly yet purposefully scratched to ribbons. Jack pushed his cart to the head of the line and waved his arms for attention.
“Hey, cats, cool it,” Jack said calmly. “We’ve got to scatter. Take to these crazy tents and caravans and force those crazy bugs to hunt alone. Hurry. Like now!”
The edgy phantoms frantically broke off into clusters. Jack led a group of older, slower phantoms to a tent marked AMAZING CURATIVES AND SUPERNATURAL SALVES! just past an empty platform marked HUMONGOUS HEXED RABBOT. Milton felt like he often had back on the Surface during gym class after all the teams had been picked: shunned and awkwardly alone.
Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck Page 4