Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (14 page)

“Someone got up on the wrong side of the cage,” she said.

Lucky—Milton’s beloved pet who had been left in
Necia’s twitchy hands ever since his master had been “popped” in a tub of popcorn in a funeral home furnace—sniffed the air groggily and trained his burgundy eyes on Damian. The hair on his back raised as stiff as a brush made of porcupine quills. Lucky hissed and spat.

“Junior Knight Necia,” the Guiding Knight commanded, “please do something about that disagreeable creature.”

Damian shuddered as he locked eyes with Lucky.

“I have a few suggestions,” he said with disgust. “Like maybe a charitable donation to an animal testing lab …”

Necia scooped up the animal in her dark, spindly arms and walked toward a cage in the back of the stockroom.

“He’s so sweet when he’s not awake,” she said. “Looks like my widdle fuzzy wuz needs more of his special sleepy snack.”

Necia stooped before the cage, opened its squeaky door, and forced Lucky—who, even when sedated, could still put up a formidable squirm—inside. She took a small eyedropper from a vile next to the cage and gave a few squirts into a bowl full of scrambled eggs and liver. Necia put the bowl in the cage, and Lucky, ravenous with hunger, went at the bowl like, well, a starving weasel-like animal presented with its favorite
food. After a few lusty bites, Lucky’s gobbling grew sluggish. He valiantly snapped up one last morsel of liver before passing out cold.

The Guiding Knight grew impatient.

“Damian—”

The brutish boy waggled his finger at the wooden, self-important man. The Guiding Knight sighed.

“O, most revered Bridge,” he corrected. “How do you propose adding to our flock? We’ve always preferred a low profile, for sanctity’s sake, not to mention tax reasons.”

“Well, all that’s about to change,” Damian said, looking at his watch. “I’m taking this second-rate cult to the top. We’re talking
Damiantology!
You know, fame, fortune, celebrities, lots of dues, hardly any
don’ts
, using negative energy for the public bad—”

“I believe you mean—” interrupted the Guiding Knight.

“I
am
mean—and I want everyone to be able to harness that awesome nastiness and take it straight to the top. Well, not actually
the
top, because that’s where I’ll be. But right below.”

Mrs. Smilovitz parted the curtains. The Guiding Knight shot the organist a look. The old woman nodded and began to play. The congregation joined in.

“Oh, Lord, Kum Bay Yah.”

Mrs. Smilovitz grinned and clapped. “Such beautiful
voices! Though I never could understand that
mishegas
song. So sorry to interrupt, but you have a visitor …”

“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 RUNN
i
NG

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.