Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (21 page)

“What I’d like to know is how exactly you were able to contact the underworld with this … this—”

“Psychomanthium,” Damian answered. “I don’t know, exactly. It’s weird. The weird hippie dude outside put on some music; then Algernon here said something and—”

The lawyer mumbled from beneath Damian’s hand.

“Oh, right,” Damian said, taking his hand away and wiping it off on his jeans.

Algernon Cole stood up and brushed smooth his slacks.

“This joke isn’t funny anymore,” he said. “Besides, your time is up.”

Damian pulled the lawyer down by the leg. Algernon Cole landed with a muffled thud in the beanbag chair.

“I’ll pay you overtime,” Damian said, his offer sounding more like a threat. “Just tell the principal what Milton said—you know, the freaky hocus-pocus stuff.”

Algernon Cole sighed and gulped, staring at the six
nightmarish Bubbs surrounding him. Heavy metal music shook the chamber.

Algernon Cole clapped his hands over his ears.

“Fine, anything to get out of here,” he whined. “Milton said something about the guardians of the spirit realm hearing his cry and summoning those spirits from the other side …”

The mirrors trembled and shivered.

The principal’s image stretched, shimmered, and blurred before swirling away into an optical whirlpool. A patch of red slowly formed, gradually gaining clarity and definition.

A dapper, red-skinned figure, with a neatly trimmed goatee and massive steel-tipped horns that coiled
elegantly, their ends nearly touching over the creature’s head, appeared in the mirrors. Algernon Cole fainted dead away. Damian’s mouth dropped open like a hungry, hungry hippo at the sight of the ultimate marble. The creature in the mirror arched his thin, black eyebrows and expelled a cloud of cigar smoke as a clangorous guitar chord shook the Psychomanthium.

“Satan!”

20 • H
i
J
i
NKS
i
N LOW PLACES

MILTON AND VIRGIL
crept carefully down the gently rolling floors of Blimpo’s main hallway, each pushing a large metal barrel. They had stolen out of their bunks in the dead of night and hijacked two of Dr. Kellogg’s overflowing Q-tip receptacles.

“Careful,” Milton whispered as he cautiously trod on the billowing floor, “we’re starting to get out of sync.”

For added insurance, Virgil had left puddles of gooey lentil casserole outside the demon den. The casserole, as Virgil had unfortunately discovered before Milton’s arrival, possessed a peculiar adhesive power and could potentially slow down the guards if Milton and Virgil were found out.

Milton and Virgil rolled the barrels down a slow bend in the hallway until they reached the inside of the
drawbridge. Milton eyed the empty hook by the sealed tongue and the Turnkey-leg-shaped lock beneath it.

“Well, it would have been too easy that way,” Milton said as he rotated his barrel beneath one of the observatory windows bracketing the bridge. “Just unlocking the door and tripping off the tongue.”

He reached inside the barrel and unraveled the ladder he and Virgil had spent the first part of the night constructing. Stolen burlap leotards were knotted together to form two parallel ropes, while rough, woolen gym socks were tied as crosspieces every foot or so.

Next, Milton unfolded a cage constructed of hundreds of used swabs joined together with sticky—nearly cementlike—globs of rainbow navel wax mixed with lentil casserole.

“Do you think the ladder will hold you?” Virgil asked, concerned.

Milton unrolled the ladder out of the round, glassless window, wrapping one end around the heavy barrel and then securing it with several hitch knots.

“Well, not in this thing,” Milton replied, taking off his Blimpo uniform. “Can you help, um …
unzip
me?”

Virgil grimaced with disgust as he looked nervously down the hall, not sure which would be worse: to be discovered by a demon guard or by a fellow student.

“You look like … like … a big shaved Muppet covered in cat sick,” Virgil said. He sighed and pried apart the seam running down Milton’s back. The Pang skin
clenched Milton tightly, fighting Virgil’s attempts to remove it.

“Your skin is …
. fighting me,”
he panted.

Finally, after a particularly spirited tug, Milton fell out of the skin and onto the floor, slick with Pang juice and gasping for air. The skin writhed next to him.

Virgil grinned and helped Milton to his feet. “Nice to
really
see you,” Virgil said. “What does it feel like?”

Milton took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sopping wet POD clothes.

“It’s like being the center of a living Twinkie,” he answered sluggishly, winded and dazed from having been “birthed.”

Milton shivered, feeling strangely naked even though fully dressed, and looked out the window at the Gorge. Hundreds of Pangs writhed below—fat pink zombies swarming with hunger. Milton could see Jack Kerouac’s upturned shopping cart almost directly beneath.

“It’s time,” Milton said as he slipped the Q-tip cage over and around him so that it formed a protective barrier, like a shark cage composed of abandoned hygiene products.

“I hope that’s strong enough to keep them out, or you in,” Virgil said as he nervously bit his lower lip.

Milton examined his gross, white-with-vaguely-multicolored-joints cage.

“I doubt it,” he replied softly. “But I’m just hoping they’re so dumb they’ll
think
they can’t get in.”

Milton’s Pang skin twitched on the floor.

“No offense,” he said as he climbed onto the windowsill.

Virgil nodded and pulled out several containers of Hambone Hank’s Soul Food—mostly leftover hush puppies, black-eyed peas (with
real
shiners), and a whole lot of sauce—as well as several plastic desserts filched from the Lose-Your-Lunchroom. He slathered sauce all over everything until it became a nondescript yet tantalizing mound, then positioned himself at the opposite window.

“Ready,” he replied.
“Ready to waste all this delicious sauce.”

Milton smiled as he mounted the dangling ladder of soiled gym clothes.

“It’s for a good cause,” he said sincerely. “Just be quick … I don’t know how long all this stuff will hold together.”

Virgil nodded and reluctantly hurled armloads of food and pseudo-food alike out into the Gorge below.

The Pangs were temporarily paralyzed at the sight of the plummeting feast. Then, suddenly, the creatures thrashed about in a frenzy, climbing over one another to get to the food. It was like a bizarre game of football, only, in this particular case, all the players in the huddle
were obese, naked pink blobs with taste buds all over their bodies.

As the Pangs surged en masse to sate their insatiable hunger, Milton clambered down the delicate ladder, like half a spider descending a web of rank, woven laundry. The abandoned shopping cart was just beyond the bottom of the swaying ladder. The squirming pile of Pangs, only ten or so yards away, were completely oblivious to his presence.

Milton took a deep breath and hopped off the ladder. He tried his best to tune out the horrible, slobbering grunts and growls that echoed through the cavernous Gorge and focused instead on the shopping cart. He waddled toward the cart in his oversized floor-length cage, knelt down beside the cart, and, as gently as possible, tipped it over. Beneath were dozens of jars wriggling with the odd, vaporous souls of Make-Believe Play-fellows. Some were broken and empty, yet there were at least twenty intact, filled with undulating, pseudo-spiritual goop that churned like Lava Lamps filled with tufts of cloud tinted with vague, muted colors. Milton scooped up several jars and felt his mind loosen, slipping backward into the hazy, comforting gauze of a daydream. He shook his head clear and quickly stuffed the jars into a stolen pair of XXXL always-tighty-not-so-whitie undies. Dangling from the barbed lip of the cart was Jack’s glittering pendant. The silver liquid encased within burbled as Milton’s eyes
fixed upon it. The fluid—like a melted mirror—reacted to Milton’s attention, becoming somehow alert, making the necklace tremble.

Suddenly, the background noise of gurgles and slurps abruptly ceased. Milton turned his head slowly, meeting the dull gaze of a hundred vacant eyes.

“Dinner’s over!” Virgil declared from above in a whispered shout. “And they want dessert!”

Milton grabbed the pendant and stuffed it in his shirt pocket, looped his arm through one of the leg holes of his underwear satchel, and heaved it over his shoulder. The Pangs spilled around him, snorting and gaping stupidly at his cage. Milton slowly backed away toward the ladder. Nine Pangs began licking the shopping cart and fighting over its contents—Jack’s blankets, notebooks, and old jazz albums, mostly—with slavering growls. Other Pangs, however, were not as easily distracted. They followed Milton as he reached his arms through the cage to mount the ladder and pressed their blank pink faces close, panting hot stale breath. Milton slowly climbed the ladder, stinky rung by stinky rung.

The Pangs moaned with anguish. Their humid breath melted the hardened clots of belly button wax and lentil casserole into soft, untrustworthy lumps. Two Pangs lunged up after him, but the mildewed-gym-clothes ladder shredded under their bulk. As they bellowed, Milton’s cage all but disintegrated. He looked down with terror as a mewling mound of Pangs roared
at him. He was now exposed, like a piece of unwrapped candy. Milton shinnied until he was halfway up the ladder.

“Grab your hand!” Virgil yelped from the window above.

“Grab
my
hand?” Milton mumbled, perplexed, as he looked up to see Virgil hanging out the window, holding Milton’s Pang skin by both wriggling feet. Milton clambered up a long, knotted tangle of leotards, his eyes watering from the fumes.

Don’t they ever wash these?
he thought. Just as his gym-sock foothold gave way, he seized the Pang suit by the hand. Milton shuddered as he felt the hand clutch back.

Virgil leaned backward and yanked Milton through the window. They both sprawled out on the floor.

“I hope … it was … worth it,” Virgil gasped.

Panting, Milton handed the tinkling underwear tote to Virgil as he scooped up his Pang skin.

“Wow,” Virgil murmured softly, transfixed as he gazed into the bag. “These are weird … not like the Lost Souls at all. More like steam and gas than thick globs and goop.”

Milton slipped the Pang skin over his head. The creature’s flesh seized him tightly, squeezing him with spasmodic contractions.

“This … suit … is … crushing me,” Milton said with gasping breaths. “Like it’s trying to swallow me.”

Finally, the spasms stopped. Milton shook his head clear and began to breathe normally.

“Phew,” he said with relief as he finished getting dressed. “It was like choking on a big vitamin, only
I
was the vitamin.”

Virgil swayed and hummed to himself as he stared at the jars. Milton gave him a soft kick.

“C’mon,” Milton said as he loaded his barrel with jars. “We’re only halfway there. The night is young and there’s mischief to be done.”

Virgil nodded, groggily wrapped up the jars in a wad of gym clothes, and put them in his barrel.

Maybe Marlo was right
, Milton reflected as they headed toward Hambone Hank’s Heart Attack Shack, Virgil humming “Roll Out the Barrel.”
Sometimes being a little bad does feel good
.

21 • OUT TO LUNCH AND OUT OF LUCK

MADAME POMPADOUR’S TOWN
coach turned into a bleak-looking shopping compound right off the highway to h-e-double-hockey-sticks, Route
666
. The strip mall reminded Marlo of those sad little clusters of outlet stores she’d find dotting otherwise barren landscapes on never-ending family trips.