Milton clutched his tightening Pang throat with panic.
Is it my imagination, Milton wondered with fearful curiosity, or is the Pang getting tighter and tighter, pushing me down, as if it’s slowly swallowing me?
“Gym dandy!” the teacher exclaimed with a clap of his immaculate white gloves. With that, the demon guards herded the boys into the DREADmills.
Milton was sealed inside the DREADmill’s suffocating blackness. The machine switched on and the wheel began to turn. After a few stumbles, the DREADmill was filled with the cruel, high-definition image of Major Bummer.
“Well, well!” he bellowed in his husky, shout-ravaged voice. “If it isn’t the boy so big he gives the school bus stretch marks!”
The wheel turned faster.
“Now, where were we?” the trainer said as he thrummed his fingers on his chiseled chin. “Oh, that’s right: Fear Level Four!”
Milton was now in Limbo. He paced the familiar halls, the ones that winded aimlessly but always seemed to lead straight to …
“Mr. Fauster,” a familiar voice hissed behind him.
… Principal Bubb.
His heart raced, with his body instinctually chasing after it.
“Where are you going in such a rush?” Bea “Elsa” Bubb mocked as the hallway echoed with her clacking hooves. “I thought we could have a little chat, just me and … what’s left of you!”
A trio of vicious snarls pricked Milton’s ears.
Cerberus, Milton gasped as he ran faster and faster, trying desperately to fill his mind with frightful things that didn’t scare him.
“Who do you think you are, Mr. Fauster? The Gingerbread Man?” the principal mocked, her wicked rasp of a voice sounding as if it were right beside Milton’s ear. “I assure you that, not only can I catch you, I intend to dunk you in milk and bite your head off!”
Cerberus began licking his three chops with his three tongues. Peanut butter clung to his fangs.
“Or, I’ve got a better idea,” Principal Bubb growled as she plopped crackers dripping with peanut butter into her mouth. They turned down a white hallway, ending at a great door ornately carved with gods rowing children down a river.
“Fear Level Five!” Major Bummer shouted, his tree trunk of a neck bulging with angry veins.
Milton was now in Limbo’s Assessment Chamber, a massive round room of gleaming white marble and gold. He was pulled down the nine descending rings leading to the stage of polished gold. Milton tried desperately to run backward, away from the elaborate scale on the platform. His Pang skin jiggled with exertion.
Principal Bubb’s voice taunted him from behind.
“Now, now, Mr. Fauster,” she heckled. “Don’t be like this. We just want to rip out your everlasting soul and weigh it, maybe take a few samples. Standard procedure. I’m sure we could get it back to you by, say … how does never sound?”
As the principal cackled, Milton moved his legs as fast as was physically possible. Thick, droolish Pang sweat coursed off him. His throat burned with each hungry gulp of air. Thoughts of clinging peanut butter were simply no match for the pure adrenaline of fear. Real fear.
The worst feeling Milton had ever experienced in this life or the last was the numb agony of having his soul removed, even just for a moment, upon his initial “appraisal” in Limbo’s Assessment Chamber. As Annubis, the slender dog god that had extracted Milton’s soul, had gently cradled it in his paws, Milton’s sense of self had completely drained away, leaving him with an unendurable emptiness.
As Milton literally jogged his memory, he saw at the corner of his sweat-stung eyes, rows and rows of jars, jars of …
“Lost souls!” Milton gasped, tripping over himself.
“So clumsy,” Principal Bubb mocked. “I’ve heard of having butter fingers, but butter legs? Oh dear …”
Milton quickly got up and began to sprint anew. The wheel wobbled with every pounding footfall.
Those jars! Milton thought, his mind racing as fast as his feet. Just like the ones in the kitchen and in Hambone Hank’s shack.
Major Bummer’s disembodied head pressed itself against Milton’s face.
“You may have won the battle of the bulge, but not the war of the waddle!” he shouted. “You make me sick! Get out of my sight!”
Major Bummer and the Assessment Chamber disappeared, replaced by a delectable paradise for the palate.
“We now join Lost on a Dessert Island, already in progress….”
The blond curly-haired boy and the willowy girl walked cautiously down a forest path. The girl fell to her knees and examined a huge moist Hershey’s Kiss.
“We’re close!” she chirped.
They ambled down the path, following a trail of gargantuan Kisses.
The boy stopped suddenly, holding his friend back with an outstretched arm.
“What?” the girl asked.
“Shhh … you’ll scare it,” the boy whispered.
“Jeepers,” the girl murmured as she saw, ahead of them in a clearing, a majestic chocolate moose.
Milton trotted on. While his Pang suit slavishly pursued the virtual Candyland before it, Milton’s mind was on more than his stomach.
Lost souls, he pondered. Owners unknown. Souls that, throughout eternity, had somehow lost their way. Captured and jarred up tight to be stored for perpetuity in the Assessment Chamber.
Milton snickered.
That is, unless you steal a bunch of them to make a soul balloon and escape back to the Surface.
The teenagers on the screen circled the hulking, dark chocolate elk. Tiny Tootsie moles snuffled around its sumptuous hooves. It began to nuzzle them playfully, almost begging them to nibble on its brittle toffee antlers.
But why would Hambone Hank have all those jars?
And then it hit Milton like a ton of Twix.
Soul Food with Real Soul.
18 • DiSEMBODY AND SOUL
“HAMBONE HANK’S SOUL Food is people! It’s people!” Milton exclaimed to the boys in the locker room, pacing with galumphing outrage.
“How can you … know that, Jonah?” Hugo puffed while attempting to shed his burlap leggings. “I heard that Hambone … keeps his recipe a closely guarded secret. Locked away in a vault down in … h-e-double-hockey-sticks, in the circle where all the telemarketers are.”
“Exactly!” Milton deduced. “That means he must be hiding something!”
Gene blanched.
“You don’t really mean … people, do you? As in human?”
Thaddeus shrugged. “Maybe Jonah means Hunan food,” he said as he pried off his black rubber tube top. “That really spicy Chinese stuff.”
Milton shook his Pang head so hard that it jiggled like a bulldog drying itself off in slow motion.
“I mean souls. Lost souls. Tell them, Virgil.”
Virgil held his round head in his hands, rolling it back and forth, as if he were hoping he could physically help his tormented brain to make the right decision.
“But it’s so good,” he mumbled.
Virgil sighed and propped his sad, puffy face between his hands.
“They do look a lot like those jars,” he said grudgingly. “Remember when you went into the Assessment Chamber?”
The boys shuddered.
“That was awful,” Gene recalled with quiet horror. “It was like being hungry … everywhere. Ugh.”
“But do you remember the jars?” Milton asked.
“Sort of … I guess.”
Milton swept his eyes across the four boys. A cobra tattoo gradually appeared, then disappeared along the side of Gene’s neck. Hugo’s button nose unbuttoned into a full-blown schnoz. Virgil’s hair receded and swelled like a tide of hair lapping a scalp shoreline. Thaddeus’s pouty boy boobs became a touch perkier.
“And, in case you guys haven’t noticed,” Milton observed, “you all have a strange habit of … shifting … like there’s a roulette wheel of people spinning inside of you.”
The boys
glanced at one another guiltily through the corners of their eyes, as if they were silently acknowledging a secret they all shared yet hadn’t dared utter.
“What about this: we aren’t losing any weight,” Milton continued. “Do you all want to be here for eternity if we don’t graduate?”
“Who cares?” Thaddeus declared abruptly as he cinched up his corduroy pants. “We’ll just burn it off in the DREADmills.”
Milton stood still, his massive arms akimbo, glaring at the boys with disgust.
“You’re eating human souls and you couldn’t care less!” he spat.
Hugo screwed his plaid beret upon his head.
“Well, it’s no worse than what that friend of Virgil’s did. What was his name? Melvin?”
“Milton,” Virgil mumbled, eyeing his disguised friend uneasily.
“Whatever,” Hugo continued. “Using those lost souls to free himself and leave you behind.”
“Yeah,” Thaddeus joined in. “I heard two demons transferred from Limbo talking about it, that those souls tried to reunite with their totally dead bodies. Some had even been cremated. How terrible is that?”
“Horrible,” Gene muttered.
“Yeah, what a creep,” Hugo said, walking toward the sulfur water fountain with huge sweeps of corduroyed thighs.
Milton sat down as the wind was metaphorically taken out of his sails.
“But it’s morally wrong,” he sputtered weakly. “It’s like … spiritual cannibalism.”
Gene and Thaddeus rose to join Hugo by the door.
“But, it’s not really … that,” Gene replied nervously, “if you don’t know it is, that is.”
Hugo pressed the door open with his meaty palm.
“First, you’re wrong,” he said. “Second, if you aren’t, there isn’t anything better to eat. Nothing even comes close. And … and …”
“Third,” Thaddeus offered.
“And third, I just don’t care. One guy’s morally wrong is another guy’s unquestionably delicious. So keep your crackpot theories to your big ugly self.”
The boys left the locker room, leaving Milton and Virgil to share an uncomfortable silence.
“I felt so supported in all that,” Milton grumbled.
Virgil sighed and faced his friend. “I tried …”
“Do or do not. There is no try,” Milton mumbled to himself.
“Look, we really don’t know for certain,” Virgil continued. “And it’s clear that none of the boys care about the ingredients. They’re just thinking with their stomachs….”
Milton glared at Virgil. “And what do you think?”
Virgil picked at his beret’s orange pom-pom.
“What I think is … is that you’re probably right. But … you come here like … like a cowboy, ready to take something on when you don’t even know for sure, you know, what’s really happening.”
Milton sighed wearily.
Maybe Virgil is right, he thought. Who do I think I am, anyway? I abandon my friend and my sister, making things worse for them, then come charging back in trying to make things right, not for them, but for myself.
“Maybe if we registered a complaint, or a concern, anyway,” Virgil suggested as he walked over to the swab dispenser on the wall. “There’s a box right outside, goes straight to the vice principals….”
“Fat lot of good that would do,” Milton groused.
Virgil took a cotton swab from the dispenser by the warped Seems-Only-Fitting mirror.
“Ugh,” he said as he worked out a sizable iridescent glob from his belly button. “For the past few days, the boys have all been making belly button wax like nobody’s business. Ever since Hambone Hank—”
Virgil tossed the swab into an overflowing swab receptacle. “Anyway, I just mean that registering a complaint couldn’t hurt, though I suppose that most everything could hurt here. I don’t know what else we could do, really, short of messing with Hambone Hank’s recipe, switching the souls with something else….”
A small grin formed between Milton’s gelatinous Pang chin and misshapen nub of a nose. Though Milton was currently four-hundred-something pounds and counting, he suddenly felt as light as nonfat, lo-cal, no-carb air.
Milton rose, beaming, ambling toward Virgil with his clumsy borrowed body. Virgil gulped.
“What? You’re scaring me.”
Milton wrapped his massive arms around his friend, enveloping him. The Pang skin reflexively tightened around Virgil, thinking it was suddenly gripping warm, struggling prey.
“Oww,” Virgil squealed. “Too … tight.”
“Sorry,” Milton offered. “Still trying to get a handle on these arms.”
Milton stepped away from Virgil, his bespectacled eyes glittering with perilous notions beneath his Pang sockets.
“I’m worried about you,” Virgil said.
“You gave me a great idea!” Milton exclaimed through numb, oversized lips.
Virgil swallowed.
“Now I’m worried about both of us,” he whimpered.
* * *
“Okay, we’ll try it your way,” Milton whispered as they walked down the hall. “We’ll register a concern,” he said, emphasizing the last word with sarcastic finger quotes.
They arrived at a speaker box in the middle of the hallway connecting the Lose-Your-Lunchroom to the boys’ bunks. It was a smiling clown whose grin was stretched so wide it became a mocking leer.
“Hello and welcome to Blimpo’s suggestion box,” said the recorded voice, cracking in adolescent squeaks. “Your feedback is important to us. Please state your name and the quality of service you received. And don’t worry: special orders don’t upset us! Thank you for being sentenced to Blimpo.”
The clown beeped.
Virgil looked nervously at Milton.
“Um, yes …,” Virgil mumbled.
“Please speak clearly into my jolly mouth,” the voice added.
Virgil cleared his throat.
“Yes, I … this is Virgil Farrow and …”
Milton shook his head fiercely from side to side, his Pang jowls slapping his freakishly small ears.
“… just me. I wanted to register a concern. About Hambone Hank’s Heart Attack Shack. The food is awesome! And the service is really first-rate, efficient without a lot of meaningless chitchat—”
Milton smacked Virgil on the shoulder, gesticulating for him to hurry up.
“The problem is, or might be, anyway … We—I mean I—can’t be sure.”
Virgil wiped the sweat pouring down his face like a windshield wiper on a rainy drive.
“But we—I—think he may be using … souls in his soul food. Lost souls. Stolen from—”
“Thank you for your comments,” the clown chirped from the cruel crescent of its mouth. “They help make Blimpo a bigger, better place to be punished. Have a blimptastic day!”
Virgil gazed expectantly at the pasty white clown face. Milton patted him on the back, restraining the Pang hand that wanted to clutch on to Virgil as if he were the ultimate entree.
“We did it your way,” he said cheerily. “Now we’ll do it mine.”
Virgil turned to Milton with alarm. “What do you mean? I thought—”
Milton folded his arms together until they looked like a huge, swollen pretzel.
“Complaining was a great idea,” he said earnestly. “That way, if the vice principals don’t do anything, then we know they’re in on it. Meanwhile, though, we have to take action. Just in case.”
Virgil sagged sadly, like an empty carton of chocolate milk.
“C’mon,” Milton said. “It’ll be like old times. You and me, messing with the system. At least, this time, I promise: no wading in sewers, hip-deep in poop.”
Milton’s smile faded, like an old picture of a smile.
“Though we may find ourselves wading in something far worse.”
19 • CALLiNG THE BiG SHOTS
“WHOA, PARLEZ-VOUS déjà vu?” Lester Lobe, a wild-eyed man
with gray hair spilling out from beneath a tattered red fez, quipped as Algernon Cole and Damian stepped into his metaphysical museum, the Paranor Mall. A pensive cloud crossed the otherwise sunny, manic sky of Lester Lobe’s face.
“I didn’t expect to see you again after Milton’s … accident.”
Lester Lobe gave Damian the once-over, then smirked at Algernon Cole, exposing a mouth full of nicotine-stained teeth.
“What are you, some kind of kinderlawyer now?” he said. “As if exploiting adults wasn’t bad enough. But,” he added, arms outstretched, spinning in a slow circle among his crowded cathedral of curiosities, “we all have our niches in life, don’t we?”
Algernon Cole extended his arm from his beige suit cuff. He glanced at his Mickey Mouse watch.
“I don’t have time to trip down memory lane with you right now, Mr. Lobe,” he replied. “My client has a very specific request that I, as his counsel, am bound to execute.”
Damian gazed, dumbfounded, at a life-size fiberglass alien statue. It grinned—glittering yet cold and aloof, like a faraway sun.
“This place is every shade of crazy,” he said, wiping his rough-hewn nose.
Lester Lobe smirked. His bloodshot eyes quivered from his morning liter of Pace Breaker soda with a triple shot of espresso.
“The Paranor Mall is just a mirror held up to society, to see if it’s still breathing,” he explained. “UFOs … ESP … MTV … all of life’s hard-to-explain phenomena have a place here, unlike in those snooty, big-city museums where they’re only interested in leading you to the gift shop, not a new conclusion. They curate boredom. I, on the other hand, cure boredom.”
Lester blew the tassel of his fez out of his eyes.
“Wow, you’re that other kid who came back from the dead,” he said with a spooky whisper that reeked of coffee and ashtrays. Lester looked over at Algernon Cole. “You really do run a specialized business: Central Kansas’s go-to lawyer for once-dead minors. Heavy. If you get another client, I might have to dedicate a new wing.”
Damian spat out a sunflower seed husk onto the floor.
“Just show us the way to the mirror booth, freak show,” he sneered. “The one that Milquetoast used.”
Lester puffed up with indignation. “His name was Milton,” he said, stepping closer to Damian. “And I don’t have to show you nothing.”
Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck Page 13