Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (26 page)

“Sure,” Marlo said. “That would be cool.”

Ms. O’Malley leaned into Marlo briefly. “Just remember, lass,” she whispered, “if you lie down with dogs … or wolves … you’ll rise with fleas.”

But Marlo wasn’t worried about that. Not now. She didn’t want to be like these self-consumed, tyrannical blowhards. She just wanted a little power. But Marlo,
never having held a position of power, had no clue as to its tendency to corrupt.

Lilith strutted to Mammon’s side. “Infernship?” she said quizzically. “I would have heard about a position like that—”

“Now, don’t make a scene, Ms. Couture,” he remarked with a sneer.

“Make a scene?!” Lilith yelped, causing dozens of gray heads to crane her way. “Someone like me can’t help
but
make a scene! What under Earth are you talking about?!”

“You’ve bungled this whole affair every step of the way,” Mammon replied.

Lilith gulped. The light behind her brilliant green eyes dimmed. She glared at Principal Bubb, who was radiating smug self-satisfaction. The demoness hadn’t felt
this
good about herself since inventing summer school.

“I can explain,” Lilith murmured.

“Don’t write a check you can’t cash, Ms. Couture,” Mammon countered. “You’re so concerned with your next step that you never look at what you’ve stepped
in.”

Lilith looked down at her perfect hooves. “I’m a self-starting go-getter with phenomenal people skills, you big, bad—”

Mammon gave a low, reverberating growl.

“Don’t think you can dig yourself a hole all the way
back down to”—he looked at the young girls staring at him—
“you know where
. Principal Bubb is obviously overtaxed, considering the sorry state of things down here. I mean, look at the poor woman. She’s an absolute disaster…”

“Thanks,” the principal mumbled under her fetid anchovy breath.

“And with the Grabbit permanently out of commission, Principal Bubb is going to need help here in Rapacia—”

“You have
got
to be kidding me!” Principal Bubb and Lilith fumed in unison. They glared at one another for a heated second, before Lilith split off into her own private tirade.

“You expect someone of my poise and potential to babysit a bunch of ill-bred, two-bit hoodlums as vice principal?” Lilith seethed.

“Of course not,” Mammon replied pompously. “I expect Ms. O’Malley to be the new vice principal. I expect
you
to replace her as a teacher.”

Lilith’s face burned crimson with rage. “This is
so
not over!” she huffed before turning on her well-heeled heels and storming off.

Ms. O’Malley approached Mammon cautiously. “Excuse me … sir. Did I hear ye right? Yer makin
me
the new vice principal?”

The chairman’s emerald eyes twinkled mischievously.
“Do you smell that?” Mammon said, pressing close to Ms. O’Malley The teacher’s eyes watered from the musk emanating from the chairman. “That aroma is the result of me being stinking rich,” he continued, backing away a step. “And I didn’t get that way by making bad decisions. Besides, it seems only fitting that Rapacia be in the hands of a pirate,” he replied. “Just watch your stern for bilge rats.”

He eyed Ms. Mandelbaum and Poker Alice as they fumed, cawing back and forth to one another like angry crows.

“And if this Marlo Fauster girl can help us out downstairs,” Mammon added, “then I think we’ve got ourselves a win-win. Now if you’ll excuse me …”

He lumbered away through the thinning crowd, not waiting for “permission” to take leave.

Ms. O’Malley looked over at Marlo, who was still perched on the stage—only now she was engaged in a conversation with a dark-haired boy in penny loafers. The teacher smirked as Marlo, dangling her feet off the rim of the stage in nervous, girlish kicks, gave Rapacia’s new vice principal a thumbs-up.

Meanwhile, Principal Bubb—riding a wave of supreme self-satisfaction—wandered away, bumping into confused old women in the process, and extended her thumb and pinky.

“All this and Milton Fauster’s head on a platter,” the
principal mumbled as she jabbed out Damian’s number on her No-Fee Hi-Fi Faux Phone. “Figuratively speaking, unfortunately. Damian’s sure to have nabbed that little twerp by now.”

“We are sorry,”
a prerecorded voice squawked through Principal Bubb’s thumb,
“but your party is well outside of range. Please try your call again, though we can’t promise anything. For a menu of other things we’re not responsible for, please press—”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb grumbled as she stretched out her claw and disconnected her call. As she stepped over a long, toppled golden statue that bore a strong resemblance to her special security squad, she sensed, deep down in the depths of her stomach, that all was not well. That pool of dread, though, could very well have been hunger. For the strangest reason, all Principal Bubb could think of right now was fried chicken.

As she boarded the plush, velvet-upholstered escalator to the Earn Your Wings stand up in the Angel Food Court, she ruminated on her next move. The only card she had left to play was Milton, and there was no way she was giving that one up. No way.

Up on the SkyBridge, a man stared down below through his burnished brass spyglass. Through the lens, he noted the lingering crowd loitering about the concourse, as
well as the tense post-Grabbit discussions held by various demons, faculty, and key members of the Netherworld political infrastructure.

He collapsed the spyglass with his palms and returned it to the inside breast pocket of his immaculate white suit.

A POD with a long grizzled beard wheeled his cart across the SkyBridge toward the man.

“Excuse me, sir,” the phantom rasped. “Could you spare some change?”

The man smiled.

“Change is coming soon, my brother,” he replied in a thick, mannered lilt with just a whiff of upper-class Englishman. The man fished out a coin from his pocket and flicked it into the POD’s open palm. The phantom nodded his head and wheeled away.

The man fingered his headpiece—a thin band of gleaming gold crowning his head—causing it to hover slightly with a barely perceptible hum. He tilted the rim of it down to his ear.

“Hello, Uriel?” the man asked. “This is Gabriel. It seems to be all over now. I’ll give you a full report upon my return, but suffice it to say, it’s chaos down here, simply chaos.”

The seasoned gentleman scratched his dark, bushy eyebrows and smirked gently.

“Which is another way of saying that everything is going according to plan.”

Gabriel straightened his golden hoop and flicked it off, where it nestled back onto his freshly trimmed, salt-and-pepper hair.

He straightened his white silk tie and polished his badge with his thumb. The badge, pinned to his lapel, was a pair of golden wings sprouting from a glowing pyramid with a little eye perched at the tip. Beneath the pyramid were words written in tiny diamonds: galactic order department
(GOD)
.

BACKWORD

If money is, as it is often posited, the root of all evil, then where does that leave greed? Let’s do the math: Greed takes up most of your time and most of your money, so therefore greed = time x money. And, as we all know, time = money Ergo, greed = money x money So, if money is the square root of all evil, then we are forced to conclude that greed is evil as well, perhaps even more so, in that it forced us to do math
.

But when does the desire to simply possess something turn into unchecked greed? That’s easy: when the things that you possess start possessing
you.

It’s something of a paradox, or a pair of socks, if one of those socks was really cool and all your friends were wearing them even though they were scratchy and uncomfortable and the other was warm and sensible but nothing to write home about, unless
you were in the habit of writing home about sensible socks, which is sweet and sad—like when your dad starts humming a song by the pop star you were
so
into last week
.

So, by offering to satisfy, this greedy place deep down in Heck left everyone wanting more. People, demons, phantoms, assorted creatures and entities all pining desperately for things: power, prestige, decent toilet paper … you name it. But this desperate pining doesn’t guarantee happiness. All it guarantees is desperate pining. But rest assured, there are those who are about to get far more than they ever bargained for. Boy howdy. And
then
some
.

For these certain people, demons, phantoms, assorted creatures and entities are about to realize that fate is not cut like the perfect diamond. Rather, like the cracks in a mirror, it takes a multitude of unpredictable paths and can bring with it years and years of bad luck
.

THE BOOK THAT
is in your hands, or that is dangling from your special reading helmet, or that you had tattooed to the back of a friend sitting in front of you on the bus who lost that big bet you had going, wouldn’t have been possible without the complete lack of support of the following persons:

The countless boys and girls who—through inflated senses of self, overindulging parents, or self-loathing projected outward, then trained unfortunately in my direction—made my life a living heck through the rubbing of fancy things in my face (sometimes literally), psychological torment, or gross failure to appreciate the snazzy denim suits my mom would lay out for me each morning.

The teachers, school administrators, and after-school athletic “supervisors” who aided the above group—either knowingly or unwittingly—in their pre-pubescent reign of thuggery, manipulation, and almost surgically precise teasing.

The hungry machine we call society that both feeds off and perpetuates the above behavior.

I’d also like to thank Paul Harrod, with whom I shared many delightfully devilish hours discussing all manner of things fire and brimstone, stoking the flames that would become this book; Jennifer Pidgeon, who, when presented with a list of story ideas I was considering, laughed when I got to Heck; and my mom, who, apart from the aforementioned snazzy denim suits, was an incredibly supportive force through childhood and continues to be to this day.

DALE E. BASYE
(a subsidiary of his parents) has written stories, screenplays, essays, reviews, and lies for many publications and organizations. He was a film critic, winning several national journalism awards, and published an arts-and-entertainment newspaper called
Tonic
. He was also the driving musical force behind a series of bands, very few of which sported names suitable for a respectable book jacket. To be perfectly frank (or whomever), if any of them had been any good, you would probably be reading this biography on the back of a CD instead.

Here’s what Dale E. Basye has to say about his second book:

“There is a time where you don’t fully know what you have, though there is no lack of models, celebrities, and the inexplicably famous rubbing your face in what you
don’t
. You’d give anything to have what they have, and that yearning gnaws at you from the inside as if you had swallowed a small, vicious shrew—which, to the
best of your knowledge, you haven’t. Heck is like that. And, no matter what anyone tells you, Heck is real. This story is real. Or as real as anything like this can be.”

Dale E. Basye lives in Portland, Oregon, where he must, on a daily basis, wage life-or-death struggles with grizzly bears, nettled beavers, and inconsistent Wi-Fi signals.

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2009 by Dale E. Basye
Illustrations copyright © 2009 by Bob Dob

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Basye, Dale E.

Rapacia : the second circle of Heck / by Dale E. Basye ;
illustrations by Bob Dob. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Formerly dead Milton Fauster tries to save his older sister
Marlo from “eternal darnation” when she is sent to another level of the underworld reform school known as Heck.

eISBN: 978-0-375-85387-6

[1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Future life—Fiction. 3. Greed—Fiction.
4. Reformatories—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Humorous stories.]
I. Dob, Bob, ill. II. Title.

PZ7.B2938Rap 2009    [Fic]—dc22    2008019115

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