Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  “Not the FBI!” exclaimed the Guiding Knight with alarm.

  The middle-aged woman folded her arms and glared at the man suspiciously.

  “Um … no. You should lay off the cop shows, Mr. Nervous.”

  A man with thinning ponytailed hair popped his head in through the curtains.

  “Excuse me, but I only had fifty cents for the parking meter, so I really got to get this party started….”

  Damian rose.

  “Fellow KOOKs, I’d like you to meet my lawyer, Algernon Cole.”

  The man swished past Mrs. Smilovitz, straightening his Hawaiian hula-girl tie.

  “Mr. Ruffino,” Algernon Cole said with a toothy grin, “always a pleasure to see you … especially when you’re alive!”

  Damian galumphed past the confused Guiding Knight and off the altar, crunching discarded sunflower seed husks underneath his boots.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Smilovitz,” Damian said as he shook his lawyer’s hand. “You can go now.”

  The woman scowled as she turned to leave.

  “That big shmendrick makes me want to plotz!” she groused as she left the room.

  “What is the meaning of this?” the Guiding Knight asked with a tinge of outrage. “We don’t need a lawyer—there is only one true law we adhere to … apart from those necessary to maintain our nonprofit status.”

  Algernon Cole studied the small flock of peculiar parishioners.

  “Is this a social club for those excluded from other social clubs?” he remarked. “I kid. Nice place. Understated.”

  Damian turned and faced his followers.

  “Mr. Cole here is in the process of getting me a righteous settlement—”

  “Two, actually,” Algernon Cole interjected. “One from Generica General Hospital for fatal negligence when you died after being in that coma from the exploding marshmallow bear incident, and the other from the Barry M. Deepe Funeral Parlor for egregious incompetence with intent to inter; that is, lay to rest someone who was—obviously because I am talking to him!—still restless. So we’re getting ’em at both ends, so to speak: one for letting you die and the other for trying to kill you! Most lawyers—and I’m a real one now, thirteenth time’s the charm as far as BAR exams go—have to start off with boring cases. Not me! Though I’ve always been cursed with an interesting life!”

  The Guiding Knight stepped off the altar and glided toward Damian and Algernon Cole.

  “I still don’t understand why he’s here! I run a lean operation, I mean, congregation, with things kept on the down low.”

  “And look where that’s got you,” Damian sneered, his beady black eyes shiny with malevolent glee. “In the back of some crappy store in a lame-o mall.”

  The Guiding Knight stiffened.

  “We were fine in our basement church at the funeral home, until things got … complicated.”

  Damian shook his blocky, freckled head.

  “You’re thinking about this all the wrong way,” he said smugly. “My settlement is going to buy us a proper home someplace. Really big with lots of free parking. And publicity. Maybe even infomercials. If you want people to believe that you’re the one who knows the ‘answer,’ then you’ve got to shout it the loudest.”

  The Guiding Knight rubbed his sharp chin, mulling over Damian’s words like an old computer chewing on new code.

  “Well … we could use some more room—”

  “And new robes,” Algernon Cole said with a grimace. “Polyester, by the smell of it. You need a natural fabric that can breathe. Organic cotton really uncorks your chakras.”

  The Guiding Knight smiled. “Perhaps good things really do come to those who wait,” he said with a look as self-serving as an open vending machine. “Looks like the all-seeing, all-powerful keeper of the Omniverse was really looking after us when he took Milton Fauster away without a proper sacrificial ceremony and gave us you.”

  Algernon Cole cocked his eyebrow.

  “Did you say Milton Fauster?” he asked.

  Damian bobbed his head at the mention of Milton’s name. “What about him?” he clucked.

  Algernon Cole shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing, really. Just a case of the ‘small worlds.’ Synchronicity and all. I had a meeting with the poor boy, in between his first and last deaths.”

  The man snickered.

  “It’s like you two are joined at the spiritual hip or something….”

  Damian’s eyes narrowed. His feathered hair seemed to stand on end.

  “Anyway,” Algernon Cole continued. “We met at the Paranor Mall—a place that makes your KOOK church here seem as exotic as an unfinished furniture shop!”

  “What did you two talk about?” Damian asked.

  Algernon Cole smoothed out the lapel of his secondhand suit.

  “Well, I really shouldn’t divulge the contents of a meeting between client and counsel. But considering the client has passed on and I wasn’t licensed at the time, I’m sure it’s no big whoop. He wanted to talk about a book idea of his—”

  “A book?” Damian interrupted.

  “Yes,” Algernon Cole continued. “Called Heck.”

  Damian began to vibrate like a big living pager.

  “You don’t say,” he said with fascination.

  “I do say … and I did,” Algernon Cole laughed. “Ridiculous, I know. Not like my book, Chicken Pants, about a boy—”

  “So, about this Heck book,” Damian interrupted again. “What more did he say about it?”

  “Milton seemed quite interested in certain contractual loopholes … ways of rendering a contract with—who did he say?—oh yeah: the Principal of Darkness, null and void. Isn’t that rich? Apparently this principal is a woman.”

  Damian shook his head and snickered.

  “Barely,” he said under his foul breath.

  “It was the queerest thing,” Algernon Cole went on, replaying the event in the second-run theater of his mind. “He insisted on meeting in this weird mirrored booth. It must have been some kind of television, because inside—after we started talking—it was filled with the most horrific images. Demons, mostly.”

  Damian’s jaw dropped open. Several spit-slick sunflower seed husks fell from his gums to the floor.

  “You need to take me there,” he declared.

  Algernon Cole gave Damian a crooked grin. “That’s funny … not as in ha-ha but as in strange. Milton, I recall, wanted to come with me to see you after you had been, um, unplugged by that mysterious Get Butter Soon messenger.”

  Necia fidgeted in the back of the room.

  “Damian,” she called out meekly. “There’s something you need to know….”

  “Not now!” he spat. Damian placed his hand on Algernon Cole’s shoulder, not in a warm sense of fraternity, but tightly, as if he were trying to manipulate the man’s will by toggling the joint connecting his arm and trunk.

  “I need to go … there!” Damian stated forcefully, coiling the words slowly, then giving them a verbal tug as if tightening a leash.

  Fear flashed in Algernon Cole’s eyes.

  “Sure,” he said weakly. “Perhaps tomorrow after—”

  Damian squeezed the man’s shoulder.

  “Now.”

  Algernon Cole swallowed and carefully—as if dealing with a vicious, predatory animal that he had stumbled upon while hiking—moved Damian’s hand away.

  “Of course,” he muttered calmly. “I’m still on the clock. We can just take our meeting to go. But … why is it so important?”

  Damian stared off into space, rubbing his cheek. His finger picked at a small white whisker growing out of his jawline. He plucked it out and examined it. It was a tiny feather. Damian blew it away with a puff of breath.

  “It’s time to let the feathers fly, like at a juvie pillow fight,” he murmured spookily. He locked his birdlike eyes upon Algernon Cole. “Let’s just say I want to look up an old fiend.”

  14 • SCOFF AND RUNNiNG

  THE DREADMILL WAS a
dark, silent crypt that smelled of sour sweat and the sharp tang of fear. Inside, Milton was instantly seized by suffocating claustrophobia, like when his sister, Marlo, had sent him on a special scientific mission to see if the refrigerator light really went out when the door closed.

  Suddenly, the machine hummed to life. The wheel began to turn, gradually at first. Milton trotted tentatively to keep up.

  This isn’t so bad, thought Milton as the wheel rotated. Just a little jog. I don’t know what Virgil was talking—

  Milton’s thoughts were shattered as, all around him, the DREADmill filled with light and noise. A computer-generated trainer appeared before him: a tanned, shirtless, heavily muscled man with a blond military crew cut, twelve-pack abs, and a whistle hanging from his brawny stump of a neck.

  “Attention, maggot!” the pseudoman barked. “Major Bummer here, to get your pathetic self in shape—”

  Major Bummer scrutinized Milton.

  “—and that shape is currently oval! You’re a disgrace! Look at yourself!”

  Milton couldn’t, currently, look at himself, but he knew that the shrieking, computer-generated madman wanted him to feel intense shame.

  “A man’s body is supposed to be a temple,” Major Bummer hollered. “Yours is a community rec center after a drunken paintball party!”

  The wheel began turning faster.

  “But since you’re a new recruit, I’m going to go a little easy on you,” the trainer said with a shark’s grin. “Fear Level One!”

  Milton was now in a dark forest. Towering, imposing pine trees swayed with a wicked wind, causing Milton to release a wicked wind himself. A savage, beastly roar filled the DREADmill, exploding from behind. Milton instinctively burst into a run.

  “Fear Level Two!” Major Bummer barked, floating ahead of him like an antagonizing specter.

  Now Milton found himself in a lush, prehistoric landscape, full of monstrous, darting dragonflies and a herd of apatosaurus munching foliage in a lazy, bovine rhythm.

  A pterodactyl swooped down, squawking at a stegosaurus trampling flat low-lying vegetation some hundred meters ahead.

  Apatosaurus, pterodactyls, and stegosaurus, Milton mused. Must be the Jurassic or Cretaceous period. The only thing missing is—

  A deep, rumbling roar rent the air around him. The DREADmill trembled with violent footfalls.

  “A Tyrannosaurus rex!” Milton screamed as he galloped faster, the wheel becoming a shimmering blur in front of him.

  This is ridiculous, Milton thought feverishly, his mind whirring as fast as the treadmill he was trapped upon. This is just some kind of motion simulator, like at the Puny-versal Studios Kiddy Freak ’n’ Fun Park in Florida. But why does this seem so much more … real?

  Major Bummer, his nostrils flaring like a winded gorilla, reappeared.

  “Well, well,” he said, looking Milton up and down with his ice-blue eyes. “Looks like we’ll have to come up with something less … run-of-the-mill. Get it? Sometimes I slay myself … though I’d much rather slay you, maggot. Fear Level Three!”

  Milton was now, for all appearances, in the north hallway back at Generica Middle School, the one that led from the locker room out past Threat Row—where all the bullies hung out—to the buses. The DREADmill urged Milton onward as a yellow and black school bus pulled up at the back of the school. Milton’s heart pounded with a familiar anxiety, and his limbs went numb with fear.

  “If it isn’t Milquetoast Fauster,” a cruelly familiar voice taunted from behind. Milton’s insides turned to marmalade. “Damian!” he gasped. The principal architect of Milton’s panic disorder—the sadistic, pathological thug who had brought Milton to Heck in the first place (granted, Milton had accidentally returned the favor, but that was beside the point).

  “I’ll even give you a head start, just to make things interesting,” Damian purred like a preteen panther. “Of course, it will end the same way—terrible for you and terribly fun for me….”

  This is impossible, Milton thought as he trotted to the DREADmill’s nefarious rhythm. Damian’s not here … I’m not there. But, somehow, the machine is drawing the fear out of me … which means—

  Milton gulped.

  The machine can read my thoughts. Or at least my feelings. Which means—if I let it—it can see who I really am! Which means I have to pretend to be afraid of things I’m not really afraid of, like …

  Milton’s mind skipped back in time to his eighth birthday when Marlo had given him The Big Pop-up Book of Totally Scary Phobias that You Never Knew You Had but Really Do. One page in particular came to mind: a big pop-up peanut-butter sandwich that sprang to life, accompanying a brief description of arachibutyrophobia, otherwise known as the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

  “C’mon, this is as challenging as slow-motion Pong,” Damian said as he tenderized his meaty palm with his fist. “The least you could do is to r-r-…”

  Suddenly, Damian began smacking his lips.

  “Rumphghgrllmyack!”

  Thick gooey strands held Damian’s mouth tight. As he gaped, goggled, and gasped, Milton could see a lattice of sticky, pale brown muck in his mouth, as if a spider had woven a web of peanut butter (which would undoubtedly breed, Milton thought, a case of arachno-arachibutyrophobia). Now all that was left was for Milton to react as if terrified.

  Milton ran as fast as a boy encased in a suffocating clown suit of living meat could. The wheel hummed like the blades of a helicopter. Soon, the school hallway dissolved into the cavernous mouth of a giant, with Damian morphing into the creature’s uvula—that little punching bag in the back of your, and everyone’s, throat. Globs of peanut butter clung to the roof of the creature’s mouth, with ropes of ooze hanging down like stalactites.

  A stitch in Milton’s side formed a seam of pain up and down his body. Major Bummer’s disappointed face appeared.

  “I didn’t think you had it in you,” he grumbled. “And you have a lot in you, by the looks of it. But you are running faster than your body mass index would dictate, so I guess I have to—sigh—give you a little flavor furlough.”

  With that, the computer-generated tyrant disappeared and was replaced by what looked like a TV show.

  “We now join Lost on a Dessert Island, already in progress….”

  A teenage boy with a mass of curly blond hair and a pretty, slender girl with wide, dark eyes climbed a massive hot-fudge sundae.

  “We’re almost at the summit,” the boy called to the girl as he, after scooping up a handful of mint-chocolate-chip-brownie-dough ice cream to make his next toehold, held his sticky hand out to her. “Can you make it?”

  She gave the boy a mischievous smile.

  “The question is,” she replied, popping a double-fudge-dipped peanut-butter cup in her mouth after using it as an ice-cream pick, “can you make it?”

  The two teenagers briskly ascended the frosty, delectable peak. Meanwhile, Milton’s Pang skin began to quake with hunger. It rippled in painful waves of want, becoming slick with full-body saliva. Its chubby legs sprinted toward the enticing yet unobtainable treats before it. Milton felt as if he were trapped inside a haunted tracksuit. He fought to keep up with the creature’s frenetic pace.

  It’s … not … fair, Milton chewed over in his mind, so exhausted that even his thoughts panted with exertion. I’m either running … away from something … out of fear … or running toward it … out of desire.

  The teenagers on the screen reached the summit. Giggling, they parted clumps of cotton candy to enter a luscious grotto of swaying taffydills. Milton could even smell the sweet breeze wafting from the scene, savoring it with the taste buds all over his borrowed body.

  A chocolate-milk waterfall cascaded into a foaming lake full of bobbing Oreo lily pads. Chocolate frogs croaked, trying to catch skittering Skittles with their long licorice tongues.

  Milton’s Pang suit convulsed with craving. Just as Milton felt as if his heart were a beat away from burst
ing, the screen surrounding him went dark, the wheel slowed, and the sides of the DREADmill opened in pneumatic wheezes until they rested on the Gymnauseum floor.

  Two decomposing lizard demons hoisted Milton out of the machine. His body was frothy with a thick mixture of sweat and drool. One of the demons threw Milton a large, stiff white towel and prodded him toward the other boys, who were gasping by an industrial-sized black iron scale.

  “Hmm … simply terrible, Hugo,” Dr. Kellogg pronounced, eyeing the two hands of the clocklike scale as they settled on 227 pounds, 3 ounces. “I don’t understand it—none of you have lost any weight in the last three days.”

  Hugo stepped off the scale, shaking his head. “I don’t know, Dr. Kellogg,” the boy said, scratching his crew cut. “I just haven’t felt like myself lately.”

  In a flash, Hugo’s chubby face … changed. More than just a sudden shift in expression, it was as if his face had turned into a puzzle, shifting and rearranging to become a quick succession of other people—an old African American man, a Chinese warrior, a young Swedish woman—until his features finally settled back to their original configuration. No one else had seemed to notice, and it had all happened so quickly that Milton was unsure if he had actually seen the split-second metamorphosis or if it had been the lingering effects of extreme physical exhaustion.

  “You,” the doctor said, gesturing toward Milton. “Jonah. Step on up.”

  Milton complied. The scale whirled around like a roulette wheel spun by an angry croupier. Dr. Kellogg caressed the scale with his gloved hand.

  “There, there, dear,” he murmured to his machine. “It will be over soon.”

  The hands finally settled on an astounding 416 pounds.

  “Incredible,” the doctor said, stroking his white goatee. “Well, I’m always up for a challenge.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Now, boys, let us retire to the promenade deck for the remainder of our class. I hope to feed your heads so that, before the lunch bell rings, you will feel sated and sanctified.”

  Dr. Kellogg walked energetically toward a pair of glass doors at the side of the Gymnauseum. He flung them open and motioned for the class to make themselves comfortable on the piles of foam mats within. The teacher kneeled upon a backless posture chair at the front of the small room.