Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (10 page)

MIDDLEWORD

To live in Limbo is to live in a pit full of not-so-quicksand, waiting. Just…waiting. It's suffering without the torment.

What's the point of Limbo, you may ask impatiently, hoping to jump to a hasty conclusion? Well, just hold your skittish ponies, now. Limbo isn't just nothing. It's the excruciating awareness of nothing.

Think of Limbo as a big, slow spiritual laundry that is trying to cleanse you of impatience. Time doesn't pass, but that doesn't mean nothing happens: it just never happens fast enough. And in the waiting is the lesson.

You know when you're in the dentist's office, flipping through those horrible, ancient magazines like
Livestock Today, Macramé World, Slug Fancy,
and
Modern Tax Adviser,
listening to music so boring that it's barely music? And it's not only deadly dull, but the whole time that you're there doing nothing you hear the whine of the dentist's drill, the sound of someone trying to talk but they can't because they have a rubber glove in their mouth, and the thousand-year-old receptionist blathering on to her aunt Edna on the phone about the meat loaf she ate last night and how moist it was—ugh, the worst word in the English language,
moist—
and, to top it off, there's some toddler with sniffles in the corner banging the back of his chair against the wall.

This is Limbo. It's frustrating, irritating, and nothing happens fast enough because nothing is happening. It's like racing toward a horizon that you can never reach. It's like trying to catch a rainbow. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a spatula.

Limbo is a lot like growing up.

19 · THICKER THAN WATER

MARLO STAGGERED DOWN
the hall, a look of almost animal desperation in her eyes. As she passed the sizzling torches on the beige concrete walls, she noticed a small glass box just outside of the girls' bathroom. Inside was a lever with the words
PULL IN CASE OF WATER
painted on it in bright blue letters.

Marlo bit her thumb and cased out the empty hallway. Convinced she was alone, she rubbed her huge silver skull ring, closed her eyes, then smashed it into the glass. Quickly, she thrust her hand into the box and pulled the lever. The instant she gave it a tug, the fluorescent lights shut off and flames belched from the ceilings.

Miss Borden came rushing out of her classroom.

“Water! Water!” the teacher screamed. “Everybody run! Water! This isn't a drill!”

Panicked, girls began to stream out of the classrooms and into the blazing hallway.

Meanwhile, Milton and Virgil walked out of the cafeterium just as plumes of flame began to shoot from the ceiling.

“What's going on?” Milton gasped.

“I don't know,” Virgil replied, “but this could be our chance. Quick, let's go to the little boys' room. I have an idea.”

Just then they heard a pair of hooves clatter down the hall. Virgil and Milton traded looks of sheer terror.

“C'mon.” Virgil grabbed his friend by the sleeve. “We've got to skedaddle.” The two boys and one fake ferret dashed down the crowded hallway that had now become a fiery, frenetic free-for-all.

         

Milton stared at the toilet. Actually, the word “toilet” was far too poetic a word for the dark hole that assaulted Milton's senses. Try “horrid, reeking pit.” While the toilet in the boys' bathroom would have made even a sewer rat wrinkle its nose, to Milton the sight was far more traumatic, causing a full-body paralysis of pure revulsion.

Milton had acquired, during the course of his short life, the ability to hold his bodily fluids in check until safe in the clean sanctuary of his own bathroom. It had been years since he'd seen the inside of a school restroom.

And Virgil wanted him to climb inside the stinking hole before him.

“It's the only way, man,” Virgil explained. “Do you think I want to dive down into
that
either?”

Milton stared into the darkness, somehow transported thousands of miles away by his thoughts.

“It's always darkest before the dawn,” soothed Virgil as he put his pudgy hand on Milton's trembling shoulder. “No guts, no glory. It's time to poop or get off the pot.”

“I don't know what's worse,” Milton mumbled, “that toilet or your clichés.”

Virgil smirked. “I'll be right back. I know where I can score us a couple of teeny flashlights. I saw some this morning in the nurse's office when she/it/whatever fixed my hand.”

Virgil left Milton to stew in his thoughts. He closed his eyes. His therapist had told him to go to his “happy place” whenever Milton was faced with an anxious situation, which was almost hourly. Milton's happy place was a musty library full of books. All he needed to do was pretend that the powerful stench that prickled his nose was the intoxicating perfume of paper, dust, and old wooden desks. This was simply a case of mind over fecal matter. And the only thing Milton had to fear was fear itself (
Oh no,
Milton thought,
Virgil's got
me
doing it now…
). Wasn't the remote possibility of freedom—not to mention the rightful possession of his eternal soul—worth tromping through a little poop? He had to, at the very least, give it a try. After all, how bad could it really be?

20 · TUNNEL OF DUNG

IT WAS BAD.
Worse than bad. Terrible.

Filthy drops dripped. Filthy drips dropped. Terrible plops and splashes echoed through the dark, cramped pipeline. The smell was like a mixture of vinegar, socks, rotten milk, and every imaginable shade of poo. The smell was so thick, it was like a putrid blanket wrapped over…
everything.
And that was the opinion of just one of Milton's senses. The other four weren't wild about their present situation, either.

Two weak flashlight beams slashed through the hot, stinky blackness. Milton and Virgil crawled on all fours with the flashlights duct-taped to their heads. Milton panted, his nose curling, feeling as if his lousy liver lunch were trying to make a break for it.

“It stinks in here,” he said in a colossal display of understatement.

“It's the…River Styx that…stinks,” wheezed Virgil. “It's the sewage.”

“So this is where it all goes?”

“Comes,” Virgil replied while wiping grime off his face. “Remember what Dr. Pemberton said: all the sewage in the world comes through here, down to…
the other place.
”

Milton gagged as blobs of toxic crud slithered down the great pipe.

“It's like a disease buffet down here. What I wouldn't give for an industrial-sized drum of antibacterial soap.”

Milton pulled up his shirt so it covered his mouth and nose. He looked like a germ-phobic bandit.

“So what's the plan?” he said, his voice muffled through his shirt.

Virgil pulled an ancient scroll from his knapsack and unrolled it. One side of the yellowing map featured a complex network of lines, curving and coiling like a convention of Krazy Straws.

“It says that if we follow this pipe here,” Virgil said, highlighting a tract of plumbing with a smudgy finger swipe, “it should lead us to…the Secret Toilet, just outside the gates.”

Milton's eyes peered out from above the collar of the shirt cinched tightly over his nose.
“The Secret Toilet,”
Milton repeated with disbelief.

“Yeah,” Virgil replied with a hopeful twinkle in his eye. “Just outside the—”

“I heard you,” Milton interrupted. “It's just so…
ridiculous.
Why on earth would—”

“We're not
on
earth, in case you hadn't noticed,” Virgil said, interrupting Milton's interruption. “A secret toilet isn't any more bizarre than the other things we've seen down here.”

Milton sighed. “I suppose,” he conceded. “Can I see that map of yours?”

Virgil shrugged and handed his friend the map. Milton flipped it over and pressed his broken glasses up the bridge of his nose. The other side of the ancient map featured nine concentric circles: the Nine Circles of Heck. Virgil knelt next to Milton and jabbed his swollen finger at the center of the map.

“Here's Limbo. That's where we were.”

He slid his finger down to a thick green ring on the map.

“Next is Rapacia, for greedy kids,” Virgil said.

“Sounds like my sister,” replied Milton somberly. “Speaking of my sister—”

“The Third Circle,” interrupted Virgil as he studied the map gravely, “is Blimpo for…
plump
kids. I'm pretty sure that's where I'll end up.”

Virgil pointed to a sketchy-looking ring that subtly seemed to shift every so often.

“Then there's Fibble for lying kids…”

He slid his finger down to a wavy ring that, in some impossible-to-describe way, just seemed really annoying.

“…Snivel, for whiny kids, Precocia, for kids who grow up too fast, Lipptor for kids who sass back, Sadia for really, really mean kids, and, lastly, Dupli-City for dirty, two-faced snitches.”

Milton turned toward Virgil, the flashlight beam shining in his chubby face.

“My sister,” Milton said with a gentle sadness. “Even though she's the reason I ended up here, I can't just leave her behind.”

Milton's eyes teared up. He took off his glasses and wiped a tear away, creating a smudgy streak across his filthy face.

“Pull yourself together,” said Virgil with a reassuring pat that left a hand-shaped patch of brown sludge on Milton's back. “There's probably a way to get her once we're back home, somehow,” he said unconvincingly.

Milton rose, smacking his head on the top of the slimy tunnel. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he asked.

Virgil shook his head. “Nope. My parents said that I was perfect, so why bother having another? Though the fact that I was sixteen pounds at birth might have had something to do with it.”

“Well,” said Milton. “Having a sibling is…complicated. It's like you're two prisoners handcuffed together through life. Half the time you want to strangle each other, and the other half…Well, okay, maybe you want to strangle them almost
all
of the time, but still: they are a part of you, and even though you dream about being apart, you can't really imagine it, know what I mean?”

Again Virgil shook his head.

Milton sighed. “Blood is thicker than logic, I guess. All I know is that I'm not leaving without her.”

Virgil grumbled. “We just don't have time. The second they notice we're gone, they'll drag us back here faster than you can say ‘The devil made me do it.'”

Virgil turned the map back over to the intricate diagram of Limbo's sewage pipes.

“And Heck is bad enough,” he added. “I can only imagine what their idea of ‘extra punishment' is.”

Virgil looked into Milton's sad eyes and sighed.

“Besides, how bad can Heck be for a girl, anyway?”