Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (13 page)

26 · ALWAYS WINTER, NEVER CHRISTMAS

A LITTLE BOY
sat on a bed, clutching his knees. Across from him was another bed covered with pink stuffed unicorns, on which a little girl—wide awake—shook back and forth excitedly.

“Hello!” said the trembling little girl, who looked like she was about to wet her bed.

Marlo and Milton stared at each other.

“Where are we?” Milton asked.

“You're in our bedroom, silly,” the little girl replied. “What do you think Santa is going to bring you?”

“Santa?” Virgil said, reaching instinctively for a half-eaten cupcake on the boy's bedside table. “There isn't any…”

Marlo nudged Virgil in the ribs with her elbow—no easy feat.

“What do you mean?” asked Milton.

“Christmas!” shrieked the little boy and girl. “It's almost Christmas! Look!”

The little girl pointed at a snowman clock on the wall, framed by twinkling Christmas lights. The clock read “11:59.”

Milton was filled with a strange electricity. This cheery room made him feel happy and warm inside. But it wasn't your standard-issue kind of joy. It was joy with an edge. Happiness with a hunger to it, an appetite that ached, that could never be filled. It crackled all around him, making him itchy and agitated. It was like when he waited in line to see
The Lord of the Rings.
It was exciting, yet it gave him an ulcer. If he felt any merrier, he would explode.

“Lucky” chose that moment to poke his white fuzzy head out of Milton's backpack, sniff the air, and bound out of the bag.

“Oh boy!” yelped the little boy. “A weasel! Just what I always wanted!”

The counterfeit ferret crawled toward a glass of milk and a plate of cookies on the girl's nightstand.

“He's
not
a weasel,” said Milton defensively. “He's a ferret. And he's mine.”

“Hey!” the little girl shouted. “That milk is for Santa!”

The creature looked up from the milk and hissed.

Milton looked at the clock on the wall: 11:59.

Virgil wiped frosting from his lower lip and whispered to Milton. “It's been 11:59 for a while now.”

“Maybe the clock is broken,” said Marlo.

“No,” Virgil replied. “The second hand keeps moving around; it just never gets to midnight.”

“Always winter, never Christmas,” murmured Milton.

“Huh?” asked Marlo.

“It's from a book,” he replied. “Never mind.”

“It's like we traded one Limbo for another,” Virgil muttered weakly.

“And another, and another…,” added Marlo.

“Hey!” the little boy screamed. “Stop!”

The not-so-Lucky, with a frosted reindeer cookie in his mouth (Rudolph with a cinnamon Red Hot for a nose), leapt off the table and scurried out of the room.

“Lucky! Wait!” Milton screeched as he ran after him.

“You can't go down yet,” wailed the little girl. “IT'S NOT TIME!”

Cerberus, in his ferret suit, rippled down the stairs like a fuzzy white Slinky, the glazed Rudolph still clutched in his jaws.

Milton rushed after him. Marlo started to follow, but, as she passed the clock on the wall, she began to twitch. It was what happened when she saw something she was about to steal. An itch she had to scratch. As she, with her near-legendary light touch, plucked the clock from the wall, the word “evidence” popped into her head. Her thoughts were tugged back to Ms. Mallon's class. With any crime, you needed to collect evidence to support your case. If anything was a crime, it was this place, and she felt sure her brother would think of something. He always did.

So she tucked the clock beneath her arm and descended the stairs into a living room decked out in magical Christmas finery. It looked like an explosion at a tinsel factory. Twinkling lights in a rainbow of colors, candy-cane candles flickering, battery-operated snowmen waving…and in the middle of it all, a massive pine tree—twenty feet tall at least—surrounded by heaps of presents lavishly wrapped with green and red bows.

It was painfully beautiful. It was almost enough to make a jaded kid believe in Santa all over again. But there was something about the festive scene that made Milton uncomfortable. It was too perfect. Cruelly so.

The fake ferret rushed toward the largest gift under the tree, then suddenly stopped in his tracks. He dropped the cookie and sniffed the box with abandon, baring his needle-like teeth into something like a smile.

“What is it, little guy?” Marlo asked, stooping next to him.

Just then the oversized box shuddered.

Milton instinctively scooped up his pet. “Don't worry,” he said. “I've got you.”

The fuzzy imposter squirmed and spat, wanting nothing more than to get back to the box.

“He's really upset,” Milton said. “This is all probably too much for him.”

Milton stuffed the twitching animal deep into his knapsack, then strapped it shut. The sack quivered and quaked as “Lucky” desperately fought to get out.

Milton took a deep breath and approached the trembling package.

“Stop!” screamed the little girl from the top of the stairs. Both she and her brother acted as if there was an invisible force field preventing them from descending. They shook with both fear and excitement. Their hair stood on end.

“You can't open a present before Christmas!” the little boy yelled desperately. “You'll spoil everything!”

Virgil slogged past them down the stairs. The terrified children gawked, as if he had just jumped off a cliff.

“I don't like this,” Marlo murmured as she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

The box convulsed anew. Virgil pushed the Fauster children aside, stepping defiantly toward the present.

“It's okay,” he said. “I'm Jewish. I'll be fine.”

Virgil bent down. Up close, the green and red foil and silver silk bow looked somehow sinister. The quivering box was both wonderful and wicked, like a chocolate-covered jalapeño.

Virgil examined the tangle of ribbon as if defusing a bomb, cautiously gauging which wire to cut. He gave the bow a tug. Suddenly a long black claw stabbed through the “gift” from the inside.

Virgil jumped back and fell on his substantial backside.

The little boy and girl craned their necks to see.

“Is that Santa Claus?” the girl asked timidly.

Virgil, Milton, and Marlo stared bug-eyed as the gift began to unwrap itself.

“Whoever's claws those are,” muttered Virgil, “they sure as heck ain't Santa's.”

His curiosity getting the best of him, Milton inched toward the gift.

With a great pop, the box's lid shot off like a rocket, hitting the ceiling. The gift wrapping shred into a cloud of glittering confetti and the lofty, lavishly decorated pine tree toppled as Bea “Elsa” Bubb climbed out of the box.

Towering over the threesome, Bea “Elsa” Bubb pulled a large can of Not-So-Silly String from her purse.

“This is going to hurt you much, much more than it will me,” she said with a sneer.

She sprayed the trembling escapees, coating them thoroughly with yards and yards of gooey, multicolored ribbons. The candy-colored cocoon stiffened into a hard, unyielding shell, with Milton, Marlo, and Virgil sealed inside.

27 · TO HECK IN A HANDBASKET

THE ELEVATOR—MORE
like an oversized wicker hamper—shook, clacked, and squealed its way down…or up…or across. It was hard to tell when you were wrapped up like a mummy.

In the darkness Milton bobbed in and out of consciousness. He could only imagine what kind of punishment Bea “Elsa” Bubb had in store for him. What could she possibly dish out that could be worse than simply going back to Heck—that is, if they had ever truly left?

The suffocating heat inside the Not-So-Silly String shell sent him back inside his feverish brain.

         

Milton was in his bed. He rose and stretched, comforted by his familiar surroundings. Something troubled him, however. He looked at the lump next to him beneath the sheet. He ripped off the sheet and lying beside him was Marlo, physically attached to him like a Siamese twin. They gaped at each other in horror and screamed.

         

Milton came to in the dark shell, screaming. Marlo was wedged into his left side (luckily not permanently), while Virgil woke up on his right.

Phew,
Milton thought.
Just a dream. No Siamese twin. Just me, encased in thick plastic strings, imprisoned by a demoness in the underworld.

Virgil's eyes bulged from their sockets in sheer panic.

“Where…what…I'M FREAKING OUT!” Virgil flailed in vain trying to escape from the hard Not-So-Silly String coating.

“Oww!” yelped Marlo as she was squeezed awake by Virgil's fit. She stole a look through a crack in the shell.

Next to them Bea “Elsa” Bubb sighed and stared at the elevator wall as it blinked its journey: Snivel, Fibble, Blimpo, Rapacia. She grudgingly scraped away a patch of crusty string from the children's heads.

“Yuck!” Milton spat out a glob of green and yellow string. “What—
where
were we?”

“You mean Candyland, Oz, the mythical Secret Toilet?” the principal laughed.

Marlo shot Virgil an “I
so
told you so” look. Milton sighed and shook his head as much as he could.

“No, the tunnel, the Department of Unendurable Redundancy and…
whatever…
the classroom with all the chairs…the almost-Christmas house…”

Bea “Elsa” Bubb rolled her lizard eyes as she jabbed the elevator button with her claw.

“The Department of Unendurable Redundancy, Bureaucracy, and Redundancy,” she said with fatigue, “just off the Netherworld Distressway. It's where all the paperwork in the netherworld goes to get sorted, filed, and ultimately misplaced, part of our Purgatory While-U-Wait project. Now, as we continue our descent, please return your nasty trap to its original, sealed-shut position before I shut it for you.”

“But what about—” Milton continued.

“What part of ‘shut up' don't you understand?” the principal snapped. “The netherworld is a vast and complicated place. Did you think that the little corner of it you saw was all there was, you self-centered little twerp?”

If Milton wanted answers, he knew he'd have to try a different approach. He thought about all those goofy spy movies where the evil villain felt compelled to tell the hero absolutely every detail of his dastardly plan out of arrogance and pride. Milton decided to play to Bea “Elsa” Bubb's vanity.

“It's just that I find this whole place fascinating, Principal Bubb,” Milton said sweetly. “How you can keep track of everything. I mean…
wow.
”

Principal Bubb considered Milton suspiciously before ultimately falling prey to the quicksand of flattery.

“Well,” she replied awkwardly, “it really…you get used to it. It's not easy. In fact, it's the hardest job you'll ever loathe.”

“What about the place with the chairs?” Marlo interjected while trying vainly to wriggle out of her crunchy coating.

“And the Christmas house,” Milton chimed in.

“Time-out,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb replied, rubbing her temples as if she were trying to subdue a migraine that had been festering in her head for the last century, give or take a decade. “Where impulsive, not-too-bad, not-too-good toddlers go until they are reintroduced to the Surface. Time-out and Purgatory While-U-Wait are basically collections of moments strung together in infinite loops. States of mind more than physical places.”

“How innovative,” Milton said.

The principal's ample chest heaved with self-satisfaction.

“Yes,” she answered with a grin, “an idea that I, if I may humbly add, conjured one morning while sitting on the…”

The beastly demoness coughed.

“Anyway,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb continued, “instead of wasting surreal estate on cells for our temporary guests, we just carve out desperately dull moments, slice them thin, and tie their ends together, seamlessly, so that they are perpetual instances: little curls of time that simply never begin or end. They just
are.
It's very economical. We save a lot on overhead, not to mention enjoy some significant tax breaks.”

The elevator buzzer rang and the basket slowed to a stop.

“There's no place like homeroom…,” she clucked.

Milton looked at his demonic headmistress nervously. “I suppose that being sent back here is punishment enough, right?” he asked hopefully.

“Of course,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb replied with a dry, disingenuous chuckle. She reached inside the sticky, multicolored shell and patted Milton on his backpack. He shivered, though her gesture was actually just a guise to slip Cerberus a succulent lump of foie gras she had tucked into her sleeve.

“In fact,” she continued, “I want to reward you three for helping to find the holes in our security system.”

Milton wanted to believe her, but his gut had trouble swallowing her words. Cerberus, though, had no trouble devouring his goose liver pâté. Little did Milton know, his digestive troubles were just beginning.