Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (5 page)

The principal stared at the high-strung flicks through the chicken wire. They considered her with their dull, red, hungry eyes.

“Oh, I don’t mind if the little simp is knocked around a bit,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb said as the vertical slits at the center of her curdled-yellow eyes tightened with purpose.

“Or a little pale from, shall we say,
an impromptu blood donation.”

4 • SCRAMBLED EX
i
LE

MILTON CLUTCHED HIS
threadbare coat as another salty gust of wind high-fived his face. The phantoms, just under a hundred of them, pushed onward through the gray, gritty realm.

Moondog had referred to this bleak tract of despair as the Wastelands. It was like the land that time—and
everything
—forgot.

“It’s a place where addled, abandoned memories, hopes, and wishes go,” said Moondog, responding to Milton’s thoughts in that eerie way of his, not so much reading his mind as flipping through it like a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room. “Ripped away from the people who originally had them, never to find their way back again, then ground into dust and wind.”

Another blast of briny, stale wind hit Milton in the face. It was like inhaling the steam from a pot of boiled
tears and old-lady perfume. He shuddered at the thought of being struck in the face by someone’s stray remembrance. Jack pushed his shopping cart alongside Milton and Moondog.

“‘These rootless souls lean forward into the confusion, prowling the dreaming darkness to find their rightful place,’” Jack said, the words flying out of his mouth like a saxophone solo. “‘Yet past the raggedy madness of the senseless nightmare road is a place on the edge of sight, where every sigh goes to die.’”

Milton wiped the salt—or abandoned memory—from his stinging eyes.

“Cheery, like a burned-down toy store,” Milton deadpanned. “Let me guess, another inspiring quote from
The Dead Beat Scrolls.”

Jack smiled his nervous, impish grin.

“Everything belongs somewhere, Popsicle,” he said. “We’ve all got our fit, dig? You just have to keep on trying on the clothes that fate gives you.”

The caster wheels of a hundred shopping carts sliced through the coarse gravel and dust.

“We didn’t belong up there, and we don’t seem to belong down here either,” Moondog said, his blind eyes coated with a white film that made it look like he had tiny onions in his sockets. “It’s like when you take apart a car engine and put it back together again. You always seem to have some stray parts. Society is the engine and we PODs are the leftover bits that no one can find a
place for. With our unique balance of faults and virtues, the Powers That Be and the Powers That Be Evil just couldn’t place us in their tidy little hereafter. So we roam.”

The front caster wheel of Milton’s cart became stuck in a glob of yolky sludge.

Here I am, in the middle of nowhere, stuck in someone’s gross, abandoned memory
, Milton groused to himself. He gave it a kick with his sneaker.

“Memories are just energy, Milton,” Moondog said after casually leafing through Milton’s thoughts. “See, everything has got to go somewhere, whether it’s a person, a memory…. It’s just a question of charge. When it’s all juiced up, it’s on the Surface, alive, making mischief. When it’s spent, it goes … well, down here.”

Jack stopped his cart and studied the horizon while playing nervously with his cowlick. He turned to his tribe of sullen phantoms.

“Divining Rod,” he called out over the crowd.

Rod, a steely-eyed man with a braided beard, stepped forward. He held a Y-shaped branch lightly in his palms.

“Lay some divine magic upon us,” Jack asked. “A righteous, so-help-me path. Like
solid.”

Rod pointed to Jack’s pendant. “That’ll throw off the reading,” he said in a voice like crumpled butcher’s paper.

Jack pulled the pendant over his head—something
Milton had never seen him do before—then tucked it in the back of his khaki pants.

Rod held the forked branch in his outstretched hands, sweeping the point slowly across the Wastelands.

“What’s he doing?” Milton whispered to Moondog. “Trying to find water?”

Moondog scratched at the unruly beard that coiled out of his face like the branches of a hardy white bush.

“Nope, even better: Liquid Silver,” Moondog replied as he set down his walking stick. “It always leads us to fortune, especially since the deposit for the stuff is so dern good.”

The point of Divining Rod’s branch began to wobble. His sweeps became tighter, more focused.

“Deposit, like with bottles and cans?” Milton replied. “So you’re telling me that there’s
recycling
in the afterlife?”

Moondog laughed and nodded. His Norse-style robe, which made him look like a bedraggled Thor, rustled in the wind.

“Are you kidding me? The whole
place
is recycled,” he replied. “The same old song only played in a minor key. We’ll come across a deposit station every so often. We pour in the Liquid Silver and get food and supplies from these odd lockboxes. We don’t know why, how, or where the stuff comes from—not even my fifth-and-a-halfth sense can crack it—but beggars can’t be choosers. Even professional beggars like us PODs.”

Divining Rod’s branch trembled furiously. He set it down and pointed beyond the Wastelands.

“There,” he declared.

Milton noticed something shimmering in the distance where Divining Rod had instructed the phantoms to go. Warped, hazy structures materialized. If he squinted through his glasses, Milton could just make out rusted trailers overrun by thickets of brambles. The structures winked in and out of existence like weak, dying lightbulbs. Then, in one great flash of clarity, Milton saw the unmistakable outline of a circus tent. The largest that he had ever seen, like the Matterhorn upholstered in striped orange and green canvas.

“Please
tell me you see what I see,” Milton told the phantoms at his side.

“Well, I don’t exactly
see
it,” Moondog replied. “But I
do
sense it…. It flickers in my thoughts, like the reception on an old TV. It’s like this place is caught in between two frequencies and can’t quite get a fix on either one.”

The phantoms trudged onward across terrain as flat, dull, and appealing as old pudding skin. After a grueling twenty-minute slog, the PODs moved past a small, partially enclosed arena littered with bumped-off bumper cars, their once-cheerful colors pockmarked and blistered, and their electrical poles bent forever at half-mast. Weeds grew through the cracks in the concrete.

The final structure was the towering big top—the
biggest, toppiest big top ever—with several great gashes in its striped orange and green canopy.

The PODs stood before the tent, which was surrounded by thatches of dead, reddish brown briars.

“What is this place?” Milton asked no one in particular.

“Savage Bumble’s … Tragical … Confusement Park and Midway,” a stocky phantom named Cody replied simply.

Jack, Milton, and Moondog stared at the round, red-faced man. Cody blew a strand of dirty-blond hair from his face and pointed to a collection of large dull-bronze letters strewn about the overgrowth nearby. The letters were clustered in mangled groups, as if the once-intact marquee had been ripped apart by a cyclone.

“Let’s check it out!” Milton said, his inner toddler hopping with excitement.

Jack rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“I don’t know,” he murmured uneasily, staring at the direction Divining Rod had divined. “Demon guards are bound to be tailing us. Plus we’re low on provisions and can’t, like, afford to gas and groove at the circus for some freak show kicks, dig?”

A chorus of distressing brays reverberated throughout the grim, gray valley.

“Wherever we go, we’d better get there in a hurry,” Moondog said, looking yet not looking around him. “We’re disturbing the locals.”

“We’re
disturbing
them?”
Milton asked with a full-body shiver.

“Bewilderbeasts,” Jack said in a hoarse whisper. “We’re, like, solid as long as we don’t lamp directly at them.”

Milton’s unease ratcheted up a notch.

“You mean not look at them?! That’s like trying not to think of … a banana cream pie.”

A chorus of “mmm”s rumbled from the famished phantoms.

A trio of creatures emerged from a bank of mist. The cluster of dark, restless shadows stalked the ground, heads hung low, eyes burning red, then blue with an insistent, dumbfounding pulse. Moondog locked eyes with the creatures, though—since he was blind—that lock was rusty.

“Bewilderbeasts mean that we must be near the Disorient, by the dried-up At Sea,” he murmured. “A fitting place for a confusement park.”

Without warning, the herd charged toward the phantoms.

“They’re attacking!” Milton yelped. “We’ve got to run!”

“No, Popsicle,
chill,”
Jack said calmly as he put his hand on Milton’s shoulder. “That’s what they want: for us to wig out. That’s how they grease …
how they feed
. First they capture your attention and then they capture everything else.”

The bewilderbeasts galloped closer, their hoofbeats a syncopated rhythm that lulled Milton into a stupor. The fur of the shaggy creatures twisted and contorted the light into something hypnotic and impossible to describe—and impossible to take your eyes off of. The herd leader leveled its mesmerizing gaze at Milton. Milton, like the proverbial deer in headlights, was caught.

“Don’t look at it!” Jack barked. Milton tried to look away but, transfixed by the creature’s shimmering fur—swaying back and forth, oozing like fronds of jelly light—he couldn’t. Soon, all Milton could see was the alternating red-blue-red-blue of the creature’s eyes that seemed to lock in time with Milton’s slowing pulse.

Suddenly, a scream pealed from the mist-shrouded herd of bewilderbeasts. In the blink of an eye, a swooping shape had attached itself to the creature charging toward Milton. The bewilderbeast screeched, the unmistakable shriek of something about to be killed. Nothing was as frightening, Milton thought in the abrupt silence after the creature’s scream, than some terrible creature terrified by something even
more
terrible.

“We’ve got some nasty party crashers here,” Moondog said solemnly. “Some big, bad bugs that make bewilderbeasts look like My Little Ponies.”

Milton gasped as a bewilderbeast broke from the herd, wrapped in a tendril of vapor, before something sprang onto the squealing creature’s back, then dragged it back into the cloud.

Worry crept into Jack’s rugged face.

“I suggest we make like bananas and split,” he said, stepping up to a large flap in the canvas tent and widening it for his followers. “In here, dig? Do the circus thing, like Popsicle here suggested. And wait out this bad scene.”

The PODs pushed their carts into the tent in a single-file line.

Milton looked nervously over his shoulder. From the mist, he saw a bristly, reddish brown creature bound into the air with a swift jerk and land by one of the outlying trailers. In its front legs, it clutched the body of a bewilderbeast that it appeared to be …
sucking the life out of
with its long, tubelike mouth. It was some kind of gargantuan, leaping …
flea
or …
tick
.

The creature was quickly joined by another. And then another. The mottled creatures quivered and scanned the confusement park with their dull red eyes.

Moondog grabbed Milton by the shoulders and heaved him into the tent.

“Incoming,” he croaked as he closed the tent flap behind the last phantom. “And they’re hopping mad!”

5 • STARK, RAV
i
NG MADAME

“SHE W-WILL S-SEE
you n-n-now,” said Farzana Daffney, a willowy, impeccably dressed girl.

Standing next to her, thirteen-year-old Marlo Fauster felt like Farzana’s photo negative. Farzana’s hair was red and effortlessly sleek while Marlo’s blue mop had taken an hour to become perfectly unkempt. Farzana was dressed in a creamy designer outfit so crisp and form-fitting that it was hard to distinguish whether Farzana was wearing
it
or it was wearing
her
. Marlo, on the other hand, was going on day three of her fave black velvet vintage top and bulky, knee-length tulle skirt.