Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (34 page)

“Your pet has, like, blown the Stage, dig?” Jack explained.

Milton had known, in his heart, that this was true. Lucky was dead. But actually
hearing
it made the whole thing feel cruelly real. Sadness churned inside Milton until it became a thick, salty sorrow that gushed out of his eyes. He cried until he felt hollow, numb, and—ultimately—somewhat less than completely awful inside.

Milton gazed up at Jack and Moondog, as if they had suddenly just materialized out of thin air, which to him, in a way, they had.

“What are you two doing here?” he asked as he wiped his red-rimmed eyes. “I mean, I’m glad to see you, but I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.”

Jack reached instinctively for the pendant in Milton’s pocket. He patted it reverently, as if it held a baby’s first smile.

“We lost people had gotten even
loster
, like,” Jack explained in his cryptic way. “So Divining Rod was doing his divine thing to help us get back in the groove. And, when his crazy dowsing stick wobbled beyond Blimpo, we knew you must have either escaped or been kicked out.”

“So we hotfooted it back to Blimpo and found you
two here,” Moondog interjected, “in between there and …” He casually leveled his long, yellowed finger at the cave beyond.

“There.”

A stale wind, like the belch of a thousand-year-old giant after downing a water tower full of rancid Clamato juice, rustled through Milton’s hair.

“Is that the entrance to … you know?” Milton asked.

Jack nodded.

“One of many,” he replied with a nervous edge to his voice.

Moondog frowned, an expression only readable through the downward slopes of snowy white beard.

“Annubis told us about your plan to rescue your sister from …
there
. While that’s a noble cause and all, I’m not sure if you know what you’re getting yourself into. That place makes Heck seem like an ice-cream social in Candyland.”

Milton stood up, straightened his glasses, and squinted at the cave. It was still, slumbering, yet thick with potential danger, as if it were filled with hibernating bears.

“I made a promise,” he said. “And I’ve lost everything—my sister, my pet … my life. So that promise is all that I have. The only thing that seems real to me after all this.”

Annubis sniffed the air. The fur on the back of his neck rose into stiff prickles.

“Whatever we do, we should do it now, and on the move. Even a creature as graceless and crude as Principal Bubb will find her way out of the Gorge and onto our trail, snapping at our heels with her dentures.”

Milton furrowed his brow.

“Those are dentures?”

“Yes … perhaps the first.”

“We should make tracks, like a jazz combo in the recording studio,” Jack said with a nod, his cowlick shaking like an upside-down question mark.

Milton, the two phantoms, and Annubis plodded across the Wastelands to its abrupt edge at the mouth of the tunnel. Hot, humid wind coiled and hissed out of the burrow’s mouth.

The passageway was shaped like a seemingly never-ending row of dismal, concrete croquet hoops. The floor was slick and sticky, like a second-run movie theater after a matinee—only instead of smelling like stale popcorn and dried soda, the place reeked of stale Limburger cheese and dried skunk puke. The ceaseless, hypnotizing burble of crowd noise lapped against the walls.

“What’s on the other side?” Milton quavered.

“Many things,” Annubis commented as he stepped across the threshold of volcanic rock and concrete. Harsh white lights embedded in the ceiling flickered on, casting streaks of horseshoe-shaped light on the rough-hewn walls. “None of which will allow a boy to pass through.”

Milton hurried behind him, ironically, like a small dog keeping up with its master’s long, steady stride.

“Then how—?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Moondog said as he wheeled his cart across the uneven stone floor. The travelers stopped.

“First,” Moondog continued as he rummaged through his shopping cart, “I saved a couple of these weird jars.”

He pulled out one of the Make-Believe Play-fellows jars. The soul was nothing more than a dull, swirling clot of beige fog. Milton glanced up from the jar to Moondog.

“That’s
an imaginary friend?”

The wizened phantom shrugged.

“Not all imaginary friends are so …
imaginative,”
he surmised. “But you don’t want to be coming out of this tunnel with a rainbow unicorn mane and fairy wings.”

He handed the jar, the soul inside jiggling listlessly, to Milton.

“Just drink it down. Pretend it’s like a health shake.”

Milton grimaced as he slogged down the Make-Believe Play-fellow soul, gagging all the way.

“It even
tastes
beige,” Milton choked out. “Like drinking a trip to a furniture store with your parents.”

Moondog uncovered his Polaroid camera from the bottom of his shopping cart.

“Beige is good,” he said as he felt around for his scissors, blank forms, glue stick, and other essential elements key to forging a convincing assumed identity. “Beige won’t get you noticed. Although … we don’t want it to look like you’re
trying
not to be noticed. Hmmm … I know. Here.”

Moondog doffed his horned Viking helmet and placed it atop Milton’s head as if casually re-creating some ancient Nordic ceremony. Milton’s eyes, which were now shifting from their greenish blue to a dull, nondescript brown, looked up at the savage, towering headgear that loomed above his crown.

“Great. I’m sure I’ll just blend in like a booger under a kindergartner’s desk.”

“Actually,” Jack said, “the horns might help, considering where you’re going.”

“Plus they add a few feet to you,” Moondog offered. “Heightwise, I mean. Just to be on the safe side, though, I think I’ll write you down as a midget—”

“Little person,” Milton interjected as his features became less distinct.

“Little person,”
Moondog continued. “Hopefully that will not only explain your youthful appearance, but also make customs a little uncomfortable so they’ll just hurry you on through. Little people have a way of doing that to nonlittle people.”

Jack slipped off his worn tweed jacket and gave it to
Milton, who now was of average build, with an average nose and average mouth arranged averagely at the front of his average-shaped head.

Annubis whined uneasily.

“We can dress Milton up as the devil himself, and he
still
won’t be able to find his way. He needs a guide.”

Moondog smirked until his snowy white beard tilted upward like a mischievous ski slope.

“He needs a guide
dog.”

Annubis cocked his head to the side.

“Guide dog? But I can’t just walk in and—”

“Sure you can,” Moondog interrupted as he pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses from the toolbox in his shopping cart. He took off Milton’s glasses and replaced them with the heavy black spectacles.

“I can’t see anything,” Milton commented.

“Join the club,” Moondog replied.

“So how does pretending I’m blind help me get to h-e-double-hockey-sticks?” Milton asked.

“It would help to explain the hat,” Jack offered.

“And it would also help to explain a guide dog,” Moondog continued, gesturing toward Annubis. “It would mean, of course, an entrance unbecoming a pseudo-god—on all fours—but a mission of dignity isn’t always dignified. Smile.”

Moondog snapped Milton’s picture. The yet-to-be-developed picture came spitting out of the camera. After waving the photo in the fetid air, Moondog gave it
a few artful slices with his scissors, pasted it to a document, stamped it with a rubber stamp, and handed it to Milton.

“Martin Foulest?” Milton said, squinting over the frames of his dark sunglasses.

“Cool, huh?” Moondog replied. “It’s an anagram of your name … Milton Fauster …”

“He, like, knows what his name is,” Jack chided.

“Exactly,” Moondog countered. “It sounds enough like your name so that you’ll answer to it. This is a major sticking point in acts of espionage. Not responding to your cover.”

Moondog pulled a red kerchief from his cart and tied it around Annubis’s slender neck.

“Your name is Dakota,” Moondog said as he cinched the knot. “That’s a good name for a dog.”

Annubis sniffed the air.

“We’re closer than I thought,” he said as he hunkered down on all fours beside Milton.

Milton slid the sunglasses down the bridge of his unremarkable nose.

“Down there,” Milton said. “It looks like the floor is moving.”

“Moving sidewalk,” Moondog said matter-of-factly. “What else would you expect just before entering an Errport?”

33 • A LOT OF HOT ERR

“AN AIRPORT?” MILTON
asked as they reached the end of the conveyor belt that deposited them at the other end of the passageway.

“
Err
port,” Moondog corrected, drawing out the subtle difference of inflection. “Where those that have erred congregate before they are, um …
ported
.”

Milton stood tentatively at the mouth of the sticky, stinky tunnel that had seemed so bleak and despairing only a moment ago but now, considering the infamy of his final destination, felt as inviting as his cozy
Star Wars
comforter on a cold winter’s morning.

He surveyed the gray congested terminal where thousands of put-upon, unpleasant-looking individuals boarded a steep escalator headed straight down. From Milton’s vantage point, it seemed as if he were looking down upon the Niagara Falls of humanity.

Milton sighed.

“Do we have a plan B?” he asked.

Jack laughed. “If plan Bs were any good, they’d be plan As, right?” He hit Milton on the shoulder.

“We gotta run like a pair of cheap nylons and leave you to your destiny,” Jack said. Milton stared as the lanky man walked the wrong way down the moving sidewalk, which made his exit far more gradual and far less dramatic.

“I’ll be fine,” Milton said sarcastically. “Don’t worry about me.”

Moondog patted Milton on the shoulder.

“Don’t mind him,” Moondog explained. “He isn’t much for goodbyes. After all, to him, this is just the end of one moment and the beginning of another. He’s either incredibly enlightened or is going senile. Until we meet again, Little Unborn.”

The old blind man in Viking clothes trotted down the conveyer belt to join Jack. Tears leaked from beneath Milton’s sunglasses.

“I hope you find the Margins … where those who don’t belong belong.”

Annubis nudged Milton’s leg with his snout.

“We must go,” the dog god said as he crawled toward the noisy human traffic jam outside the one-way escalators. “Maybe Heaven can wait, but the place we’re going can’t.”

Milton and Annubis reached the end of the escalator,
which—after about a half hour of continuous descent—seemed like an esca-
much
-later. Demons—and not the pitchspork-wielding flunkies in Heck but nightmarish monsters brandishing deadly pitchforks—corralled the people into one big line, only to split them up again into three separate, backtracking lines that coiled around and around until coming back together one foot ahead of where they had been to begin with.

“NEXT!”

A skeleton in a navy blue uniform wearing a light pink crocheted shawl around “her” shoulders (how anyone, much less a skeleton, could get “chilly” in this sweltering heat was beyond Milton) greeted the arrivals as they entered the swelling lines.

“Transgression?” the creature, named Helen, judging from her badge, asked with a peculiar hollow quality unique to talking skeletons.

“What are my options?” Milton asked as the woman impatiently waved the twenty-seven bones that made up her hand, presumably to see Milton’s freshly fabricated passport. He handed it to her.

“Don’t be funny,” Helen replied as she scanned Milton’s fake ID. “Funny takes time.” She glanced at Milton through hollow sockets rimmed with blue eye shadow.

“Though that hat is a riot,” she deadpanned. “Transgression?”

Annubis tugged Milton’s pant leg with his teeth.

“Say ‘greed,’” he whispered through a mouth of beige khakis. “It’s a safe, not-immediately-evident sin.”

Milton nodded, straightened up, and addressed Helen.

“Greed.”

“Greed?”

“Yes, I was … blinded by it.”

“It says here you’re nineteen,” Helen said, glaring at Milton suspiciously “You look younger.”

“I … um,” he stammered.
“Thank you
. I’ll take your word for it since, you know, I can’t see myself or anything. Just a late bloomer, I guess.”

“It’s a pity,” Helen intoned through lipstick-stained teeth. “If you only died younger, you’d be going to Heck instead. That place is an ice-cream social in Candyland compared to where you’re headed.”

“I’ve, um, heard that … in line.”

Helen looked down at Annubis.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a dog,” she chattered. “Loyalty, and all. Except for pit bulls. Those rap stars take them everywhere. Does he—”

“Dakota.”

“Dakota
do any tricks?”

Milton smirked. “Sure, he can—”