Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (36 page)

Milton straightened up. His face was hot with aggravation. There was something about this creature that made the normally peaceful Milton want to punch it in the face.

“We’d like to … to come in.”

“We’d like to come in,”
the creature mocked, seeming to have grown several inches in the last few seconds. It folded up its newspaper and hopped off its stool. It leered at Milton like a living, taunting troll doll, with a smug, self-satisfied grin etched on its annoying face.

“Ugh, look at you,” the creature jeered in its nasal, helium twang. “Was anyone else hurt in the accident?”

Milton fumed.

“Why, you little—”

The creature began to swell in size. When they had arrived, it had been maybe ten inches high. Now it was at least three feet tall … and rising.

“Why you little
what?”
the creature said, its pudgy arms pressed against its hips. “I have a name—it’s Yukkah. And you’d better mind your manners if you want inside. By the way, can I borrow your face for a few days? My butt is really tired from sitting and wants a little vacation.”

Milton clenched his teeth and fists, vibrating with rage. Yukkah puffed up, taller and wider, with a triumphant sneer smeared across its face.

Annubis tapped Milton’s lower leg with his nose.

“Don’t give him the satisfaction of your anger,” he whispered. “He feeds on it.”

Yukkah stepped closer, leaning toward the new arrivals in a condescending manner, as if he were addressing a pair of mismatched sock monkeys stuffed with shredded “dumb.”

“Your doggie has a face like a saint,” he grated.
“A
Saint
Bernard.”

Annubis growled as Yukkah grew.

“Hey, I’m just kidding, you two. Your dog is actually dark and handsome: when it’s dark, he’s handsome! Do you need a dog license to be that doggone ugly?”

The hair on the back of Annubis’s neck rose. Teeth bared, the irritating troll gatekeeper was starting to look more and more like a talking chew toy to the dog god.

Milton patted Annubis.

“Now, now … remember,
don’t give him the satisfaction of your anger.”

Annubis grumbled as he set his haunches down on the scorched ground.

Yukkah was now roughly half the size of the gate itself. With every inch and pound he gained, there seemed only more of him to detest.

“I don’t get it,” Milton said. “Why would the Powers That Be Evil block the way to …
you know where …
with that awful, grating little …
you know what?”

Annubis, his lip caught in midsneer on his canine tooth, shivered despite the heat.

“This place must take its
troll
on all who pass,” he snarled. “Yukkah gets you so worked up that, pretty soon, you are
begging
to get in. It makes what’s beyond the gates even worse, because you
willingly
went inside. The last part of you that perhaps could be saved is left at the door. You know how a vampire needs to be formally invited before it can enter a house?”

Milton shrugged. “Yeah, I think Marlo mentioned that once.”

“Well, it’s sort of like that, only in reverse.”

The grinning troll ran its pink, pudgy fingers through it multicolored mane.

“You wanna play, you sorry-looking, bowlegged, pigeon-toed, crusty Underoos-wearin’ waste of time?” the troll said, glowering down upon Milton.

Milton was so suddenly angry that, before he knew it, he had stalked right up to the ever-expanding troll,
his fists trembling at his side. Yukkah now totally obscured the gate.

Milton looked down at his shaking hands. His chewed nails and the weird Rhode Island–shaped birthmark on the back of his hand were slowly coming back. His imaginary-friend soul was wearing off. Milton didn’t have much time.

“What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?” Yukkah mocked. “From your nasty fish breath, it smells like you got his in trade.”

Milton drew in a long, deep breath.

“It must get lonely here,” he said compassionately. “Sitting outside this depressing gate, each and every day.”

Yukkah’s eyes bulged out, as if something were squeezing his midsection (something Milton and Annubis very much wanted to do). He wilted like leftover salad.

“What? Yes, sort of … I mean. NO! I love my job. I … I’ve seen people like you before, but … but … I had to pay admission!”

Milton forced his grimace into a tender smile.

“Does someone need a hug?” Milton cooed as he stepped closer to the deflating troll.

Milton wrapped his arms around Yukkah’s bulbous, prickly pink belly. The troll recoiled with full-body disgust.

“Stop!!” Yukkah screamed as he shrunk down to the size of an NFL linebacker, albeit nude, pink, and with hair like a box of crayons after a few seconds in the microwave. “How did you get here? Did someone leave your cage open? Here’s a dime … call all your friends and bring me back the change!”

Milton motioned for Annubis to come closer.

“Do we need some puppy lovin’?” Milton murmured with so much artificial sweetness that he nearly threw up a little bit. Annubis jumped up on Yukkah and began licking his face until it looked like a glazed troll donut. Yukkah howled as he got smaller and smaller.

“No, no … anything but puppies!” the gatekeeper whined, his voice a sonic trickle from a punctured water balloon.
“I’m
melting!”

Yukkah was now about as large and threatening as something dangling from a preteen, homeschooled girl’s key chain.

Annubis gazed up at Milton with wide, wild eyes.

“Can I eat him?”

Milton shook his head, which was now virtually back to its usual Milton-like state.

“I don’t think that would be such a hot idea. He’d only give you indigestion, which would make you mad, and then he’d just become more and more of a problem.”

Milton eyed the dismal metal gate. It was cast with hundreds of suffering, all-too-detailed figures depicting
every shade of agony and woe. A distraught woman hovering over a corpse. Two inconsolable lovers pried apart by laughing demons. A writhing crowd of anguished souls trapped in a pit, crawling and clawing over one another in hopes of escape. A man beginning his first day as a school guidance counselor. It was nearly too much for Milton to bear. He had a feeling that the door served as a teaser trailer for the awful movie within, like
Dances with Wolves, Shakespeare in Love, Evita
, and
The English Patient
all spliced together. He collected himself carefully as if every fear were a rare Pokémon card. He turned to Annubis.

“Can you help me with this?” Milton asked, gesturing toward the gate.

“Can you help me with this?”
Yukkah teased, desperately hoping to achieve an at-least-somewhat-imposing size. Annubis kicked the creature, now the approximate shape and stature of a finger puppet, off to the side with his back leg.

Together they pulled the massive gate open, inch by inch, until they were both ankle-deep in the disgusting tributary of turds otherwise known as the River Styx. Milton’s eyes were scrunched tight, like a toddler’s fist around a tube of Go-GURT. Slowly, Milton wrested his eyes open and peered beyond the Surly Gates and into h-e-double-hockey-sticks.

He had expected fire, brimstone, and burning images of eternal misery and despair. And he got that—
in spades—only in the form of a painting in the lobby. Little did Milton know, the “painting” was really a framed window, looking out upon a throng of persecuted souls forced to spend their eternity in a never-ending game of freeze tag.

The lobby was surprisingly unexceptional. The walls were lined with a deep greenish brown marble bordered with bronze girders. The floors were laid with the same slabs of marble as the walls and ceiling, creating the claustrophobic sense that one was trapped in a box, despite the foyer’s grand size. The lobby was virtually empty save for a massive, burnished-bronze desk with the words
DECEPTION AREA
spelled out in blood diamonds. Hanging behind the desk was an immense, garish corporate-style logo: two gilded hockey sticks, crossed, a real flame spouting from the point of their intersection, with a bronzed goat head skull on top. Beneath the logo was a leather banderole with the slogan
COME FOR THE HEAT
…
STAY FOR ETERNITY
elegantly lettered in crimson.

Milton and Annubis crept closer to the desk.

“Ow!” Milton yelped. Beneath his bare feet were shards of broken glass and cigarette butts. Milton hopped toward the massive desk on one foot. A small head leaned down toward the desk, nodding subtly. Milton saw the flash of a gleaming headset and a shock of lustrous blue-black hair, the color of the perfect bruise.

Milton and Annubis stepped nearer until they could hear the soft babble of conversation.

“How may I disrespect your call? Can I tell him what this is disregarding?”

The deceptionist held up a finger, somehow noticing Milton and Annubis despite not having looked up once since their arrival. The voice … so familiar yet so different. Like when you ride your bike past a home you used to live in, and the new owners have repainted, re-landscaped, and renovated everything, but your memories still manage to peek through regardless.

“Is he expecting your call? Not exactly? I’ll take that as a
no
. Hold, please, and enjoy our selection of off-Broadway musical numbers as sung by lisping, two-carton-a-day smokers and hyperactive children taking hits from a helium tank.”

The deceptionist looked up.

“Welcome to—”

The immaculately groomed young woman was …

“Marlo!” Milton cried.

Marlo, her face a made-up mask of high-fashion indifference, regarded Milton blankly.

“It’s
Milton,”
he added, baffled by his sister’s expressionless expression.

“And I would know that name because …”

“Because I’m your brother!”
he yelped, hobbling deeper into the Deception Area, his foot bleeding, his
body shivering, and his mind at a loss as to what to do next.

Marlo raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow at Annubis.

“I’m sorry, but there are no dogs allowed, as they’re man’s best friend and all. She—”

“He,” Milton whimpered.

“He
will have to wait outside …
forever.”

Milton put his hands on the smooth, uncomfortably warm desk.

Marlo considered Milton’s grimy fingers with disgust.

“Hands off the desk.”

“Don’t you even
recognize
me?” Milton pleaded, staring into his sister’s dark, blank eyes, which, with their fuzzy yet steely stare, answered his question loud and clear.

“Should I?” Marlo replied, bored, doing something that Milton had never, ever seen her do before: buffing her nails. After a few curt sweeps with her emery board, Marlo gazed back at Milton, taking him in with slits that were half suspicious and half awake.

“Wait …,” she replied dimly, leaning forward slightly. “I think I
do
recognize you.”

Milton allowed himself a smile.

“You’re the boy who escaped!” she shouted.

“Milton,” murmured Annubis as he nodded his head toward a bank of insecurity cameras embedded in the ceiling behind the desk. Like thirteen glowing red
eyes, they glared at Milton and Annubis with a penetrating disdain.

Marlo bolted up in her perfect black turtleneck dress.

“Guards!” she shrieked as the lobby echoed with a cacophonous chorus of sirens.

35 • PRESSED TO CHANGE-O

MILTON AND ANNUBIS
rushed back to the still-open Surly Gates.

“What do we do?” Milton shouted desperately against the din of alarms and his sister’s shrieks. “Do we swim back?”

Milton’s entire nervous system dry-heaved as he considered plunging into the pungent waterway of human waste. Annubis scanned the dreary horizon.

“I suppose—
”

The dog god cut his sentence short as he saw, chugging along the River Styx in the distance, a gray metal barge. Aboard the carrier were dozens of demon guards and, at the center of it all, Principal Bubb atop her freakish, curly tusked beast.

“
—not,” he continued as he stood, positioning one
of his bright, checkered bandanas strategically around his waist, then tugged free his collar.

“As the jig appears to be up, I can at least elude the law with some modicum of dignity.”

Milton looked down at his
Clone Wars
underwear.

“That makes one of us,” he said. “So if we can’t escape outside—”

“We escape
inside,”
Annubis interjected.

“Are you crazy?!” Milton replied with disbelief.

Annubis eyed the approaching carrier grimly.

“Crazy like something bred to hunt foxes,” he mumbled.

“When they capture you, you can tell them everything you know,” Yukkah screeched from outside the gate. “That should take about ten seconds.”

Annubis growled at Yukkah, baring his teeth, but then, in an instant, he began to grin.

“I have an idea,” he said. Annubis stalked over to the naked, pink, rainbow-maned troll and then snatched him up quickly with his paws.