Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (7 page)

8 · GOiNG TO CRACKPOT

THE PARANOR MALL
was less a “mall” than a crazy old mans garage sale. Except that there was no garage. And, to the best of Milton’s knowledge, nothing in the countless overflowing boxes and unruly stacks of yellowing paper was actually for sale. The crazy-old-man element, however, was spot-on.

“Of course, I don’t have to tell you about cattle mutilations,” the mall’s owner, Lester Lobe, said between coughing fits.

Milton pretended to be interested in a “life-sized” fiberglass alien statue. “Yeah, you’re right,” Milton replied. “You don’t have to tell me.”

Lester, with tufts of wild gray hair snaking out from beneath a fez, shuffled closer to Milton, who was, unsurprisingly, the only other person there. Milton noticed
that, though the man was fully dressed, he wore a pair of fuzzy green
Mars Attacks!
slippers.

“Have you heard about the mysterious rash of dead ‘half-cats’ found in Canada?” he inquired. “Obviously a message from alien visitors.”

“Maybe the half-cats were just half-curious about something,” Milton quipped.

Lester Lobe stared at Milton blankly with eyes bloodshot with fatigue and quivering from too much caffeine. He suddenly erupted with laughter.

“Good one!” he guffawed, rubbing his gray goatee and nodding. “It’s humor that separates us from the extraterrestrials—unless you find kidnapping and human experimentation humorous.”

Milton looked glumly at the fiberglass alien’s emotionless head. “Not particularly,” he murmured.

Lester scrutinized Milton’s face.

“You’re that kid,” he whispered with awe. “The one who came back. I just finished clipping out the newspaper articles.”

Milton had hoped he’d stumble upon some cure for his out-of-body predicament without having to solicit the help of a crackpot. But the cure for this vexing condition clearly sat outside Milton’s realm of rationality … though, considering the events of the last few weeks, he worried that perhaps he himself sat outside that comforting realm.

Milton sighed. “Yes, I’m the zombie kid who shouldn’t be here but is,” he said.

Lester smiled, revealing a mouth full of crooked, nicotine-stained teeth. “Then you’ve come to the right place,” he said with frenetic energy. “The Paranor Mall is all about things that shouldn’t be here but are. I boil down all of the urban myths, hysteria, psychobabble, and weirdness that make up our culture today and inject it straight into your eyeballs. It’s a lot like watching daytime television.”

Milton eyed the mall’s Elvis Abduction Chamber. It was a photo booth—or something—covered with rhinestones and clippings from the
National Midnight Star Weekly
, that magazine Milton’s grandmother used to pick up at the checkout counter of the supermarket, with stories about Bigfoot’s secret daughter brawling at a New York club with E.T., or the Olsen Twins revealing that they were time travelers sent here to caution humanity about our warlike ways. That sort of thing.

Milton fondled the tarnished brass doorknob of the chamber and peered inside the dark opening. The Elvis Abduction Chamber was just a six-sided box lined with mirrors.

“I need some help with a … p-problem,” Milton stammered. It had been about twenty minutes since his last spell, so he wanted to get to the point before his
train of thought derailed again. “After reading your ad, I thought that I might find some answers.”

“Yes,” Lester said, blowing the tassel of his fez out of his eyes. “Lots of people come here, all for different reasons. Drew Barrymore was here, mainly because she was kicked out of the place across the street for smoking. She
did
buy some T-shirts, though, and some unicorn-on-the-cob holders—”

“The ad mentioned … subtle energies,” Milton interrupted, “the ones holding us together.”

The man looked Milton up and down.

“Of course,” he said with a mad twinkle in his eye. “Someone in your situation is probably missing a little in that department. I could tell by your aura. Faint, but nearly spotless. So clean you could practically eat off it.”

A blinking flying saucer suspended overhead seemed to blur and wobble. Milton’s energy was beginning to loosen and split.

“Do you know anything about,” Milton mumbled,
“etheric
energy?”

“Hmm,
etheric …
” Lester abruptly walked away to a leaning tower of books and expertly yanked a volume from the middle without disturbing the rest. He flipped through the book, titled
Everything You Know Is Wrong
, and walked back to Milton, skirting stacks of junk and pop-culture debris while never once taking his eyes off the pages.

“Nothing specifically about
etheric
energy,” he mumbled, “but there are many accounts of missing energy at the point of death. Twenty-one grams worth, in fact.”

“Grams?” said Milton weakly. “But energy is measured by watts and volts …”

“Yes, of course,” Lester continued. “But the human body, after death, weighs exactly twenty-one grams
less
than it did when it was alive. Many philosophers theorize that this must be the approximate weight of the human soul, which—as it is invisible when leaving the body—must be a form of vaporous energy that … are you okay, little dude?”

Milton was swaying with full-body nausea. He wiped his beaded-sweat mustache. “I’m just not … the same,” Milton whispered as Lester pulled a milk crate of old magazines close for the boy to sit on. “I may have lost some energy by coming back.”

“Interesting,” Lester replied. “You obviously still have both your body and soul, or you wouldn’t be here. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, felt that man was composed of
three
aspects: reason, emotion, and appetite. Reason being the rational mind, hungering for wisdom and truth; the body hungering for, well, just about everything; and the emotional body, which acts as a sort of bridge, or glue …”

Glue
, thought Milton as he fought to hold on to himself even though his world was now a spinning
Tilt-A-Whirl. Ever since his return, he had begun to feel listless and strangely hollow. Perhaps that’s because his emotional, etheric energy—the spiritual glue that had been his emotional body—was now helping to power the Transdimensional Grid.

“… could probably refill it by getting some etheric juice back into your pineal gland.”

Milton shook his head. “What was that?” he managed. “Something about a gland?”

“The pineal gland,” Lester repeated. “It’s this cone-shaped part of the brain, and no scientist really knows what it’s for. Some ancient cultures, however, felt that it regulated mysterious dynamic forces within us, perhaps even the soul. In the early 1900s, Sir Edward Tylor, Oxford professor of anthropology, electroshock therapy advocate, and founder of the Subtle Energies Commission, had a theory that if one were to harness the power of other living creatures and direct that power straight to the pineal gland, then a living person could advance to the next step in human evolution. It is speculated that this technique could even reanimate the dead.”

“The dead … the …”
Milton’s sense of reality winked on and off like the old, run-down television in Limbo’s cafeterium.

Lester kneeled close to Milton. His breath was hot, musty, and sharp with dental decay. “You don’t look so good, kid,” he murmured. “If you’re going to die again,
can you not do it here? I have enough problems with the authorities as it is. It’s all an intricate government plot. Of course, you’ve heard of the Illuminati and how—with the Freemasons—they’ve established a New World Order that …”

The blinking UFO, the plastic alien, the moldy towers of paper, and Lester’s convoluted conspiracy theories crowded together in Milton’s consciousness until they formed a big clot, like some gross, hairy clump clogging a drain.

Then, with a few sudden jerks, the Etch A Sketch of Milton’s mind shook itself blank.

9 · STEALING THE SHOW

The girls read Marlo’s blotchy handout as they followed Poker Alice through a long, coiling corridor. The empty hallway sloped upward at such a steep incline that it gave Marlo shin splints.

Even though she had stayed up all night writing her shoplifting ground rules, Marlo was kind of buzzed. She had a dopey grin smeared across her face (along with some blue ink from her leaky pen) and her fingers ached. But despite her fatigue and discomfort, Marlo was oddly proud. She had, as the Grabbit had suggested in its creepy, rhymey way, taught what she knew.

The corridor’s gleaming floors reflected the fluorescent lights above so that it seemed like you were walking on the ceiling, which is exactly how Marlo felt.

Her gravity-defying mood irritated Poker Alice to no end.
“Miss Fauster,”
the weathered hag groaned. “Exactly what is this …
paper?”

Marlo smiled with bleary energy. “It’s a list of ground rules,” she replied, “for our class field trip.”

Poker Alice shifted her cigar from one corner of her mouth to the other and grumbled.

Marlo’s bloodshot eyes sparkled. “You know, the
field trip,”
Marlo repeated, rotating the words slowly like a knife in her teacher’s abdomen. “The one that the Grabbit said I could lead, taking the class on a learning expedition, up to …”

The teacher’s eyes bulged out from behind their droopy folds. “I know what the Grabbit said!” the teacher barked, her cigar slipping out and falling onto the ground below. Poker Alice stared at the smoldering, now-broken cigar and trembled with rage. Slowly, the teacher raised her head, her neck creaking like that of a library gargoyle brought to sudden uncomfortable life, and locked eyes with Marlo. “What I would like to know is what the blazes shoplifting has to do with Consumer Math?” Poker Alice seethed.

“Well,” Marlo said nervously, noting that Poker Alice without a cigar was like a monstrous baby without its pacifier, “since we don’t have cash or credit down here, we’re forced to put up something else of value, in our case, risk of capture. So the very act of trying to
steal something is, to us, like racking up debt. Think of it as …”

Marlo followed the lines and crinkles of her teacher’s face, hoping they would lead her to some conclusion that Poker Alice would, if not quite buy, at least rent for the day.

“… a gamble. An
educational
one.”

“What’s that?” Norm asked, pointing ahead.

The girls stopped. Before them, just around the final coil of the ascending corridor, was a collapsible steel gate, barring a pitch-black metal hatch, with a sign above reading
DO NOT DARKEN DOOR. DOOR DARK ENOUGH ALREADY.
Poker Alice yanked a wad of keys from a keychain attached to her belt, unfurling the line as she held a stubby bronze key to the dangling padlock. With a twist, she opened the lock and pulled open the rusted gates. She leaned on the hatch and plucked a cigar from the back of her petticoat. The teacher struck a match on the sole of her well-worn granny boot.

“Jess because the bunny says ye can all have a field trip,” Poker Alice said with a steely calm, “doesn’t mean you lot can spend the whole day makin mischief. A class lasts an hour … a long hour, granted, but an hour nonetheless. And takin’ into account the walk here and back, as I see it, that leaves ’bout fifteen minutes for yer little learnin’ expedition.”

“Fifteen minutes?!” the girls carped as one gape-mouthed school of fish.

“That’s barely enough time to get my credit card warm,” Lyon whined.

Marlo chewed her lower lip in contemplation. “What if we were to make this a little …
wager
?” she proposed to her teacher. “In exchange for a full hour, that is.”

The butt of Poker Alice’s stogie flared in contemplation.

“What kind of
wager
?” she replied suspiciously.

Marlo eyed the hatch with extreme longing.

“We … we could,” she faltered, before her dark eyes grew round with inspiration. “Divide the class into teams.
Yes!
Make it a shoplifting bee. Whoever’s team lifts the most, passes. The other fails.”

Poker Alice smirked despite herself.

“Interesting,” she rasped between puffs. “You certainly know your antes.”

“Actually I hardly knew them,” Marlo said. “They lived halfway across the country.”

Poker Alice hacked indelicately, coughing up a glob of something so thick and gross she had to chew it a few times before she could swallow it down.

“Fine, then,” the old woman rasped.
“A half hour.”

“Deal!” chirped Marlo.

Poker Alice clutched the sides of the hatch’s rusty metal wheel, turned it with a squeak, then kicked it open with her boot as the girls cheered with unhinged glee. “Mallvana!! Mallvana!!”

Poker Alice led Marlo’s class beneath the white marble sign inlaid with gleaming brass letters and through a long tunnel of multicolored neon scaffolding. The class emerged into Mallvana’s concourse level, bustling with herds of little old women, grinning and chattering with one another.

If Marlo had still possessed a lungful of breath, it would have been taken away the moment she entered Mallvana. It was like wandering into the palace of an ancient god. Mallvana was a cathedral of consumerism with massive, intricately carved marble columns propping up lavish level after lavish level, capped off by the dazzling prism of colors that danced at its domed, stained-glass ceiling. At the center of the colossal mall were twin spiraling escalators that coiled like massive strands of DNA.

The air itself had an invigorating, citrus sweetness about it. Every breath lifted Marlo’s spirits higher, as if she were sucking in helium and her lungs were twin balloons soaring aloft.

Countless rows of stores edged with marble balustrades stretched out in great sweeps, girding the
cavernous concourse. Each store radiated its own peculiar power, twinkling and dazzling like glittering lures, row after row meticulously designed to catch their own unique fish. Music spilled out over the crowd, a soothing wash of smooth jazz agitated by a constant throb gurgling beneath, the pulse slightly faster than a heartbeat, forcing one’s nervous system to frantically catch up.

Overstimulation didn’t even begin to explain what Marlo was feeling. It was as if she had grown several new senses to overwhelm, since five couldn’t possibly digest this much sensory information.

“Who are all these people?” Marlo asked her cigar-chomping teacher, who was also clearly under Mallvana’s spell.

“What?” Poker Alice asked with her mouth hanging open yet still somehow supporting her ever-present stogie.

Marlo waved away an especially noxious cloud of burning dung-scented smoke. “These people,” she repeated. “They don’t seem like tormented souls undergoing eternal punishment—unless the prices are ridiculously high, or there’s a lousy return policy.”

“Oh, them,” the teacher replied as she stared, entranced by the mesmerizing helix of escalators upholstered in black velvet. “Mallvana is one of the lesser heavens, strictly Cloud One material. That Grabbit’s got a lot of pull—”

“Heaven?!” Marlo stopped abruptly in her tracks. “You mean I’m in Heaven??!!”

Poker Alice laughed like a bagpipe full of soot. “Oh mercy, no! For graspin’ gals like us, this is still Heck.”

“That makes no sense at all.”

The teacher’s face wrinkled up into a bitter accordion of creases and folds. “Teenagers,” she muttered with disdain. “They read one page and think they know the whole book.”

The girls filed by an opulent, heart-shaped fountain of cascading champagne, dancing laser lights, and golden koi fish with little scuba tanks on their backs—probably filled with water, Marlo thought—so that they could breathe.

“Contextual surreal estate,” the teacher continued. “One place that serves as many. Punishment for some, reward for others. The difference is circumstance … and credit limit.”

Several grinning old women tottered by carrying spacious leather shopping bags. Marlo noticed that they had wings sprouting from their backs, not majestic like an angel’s but small and trembling like a parakeet’s. Jordie, keeping up the rear of Marlo’s class, leapt out of ranks and growled at the old women. The women clutched their chests, then flopped away in their sensible orthopedic sandals. Jordie laughed uproariously.

“Miss Fauster,” said Poker Alice, leaning into Marlo with a smirk. “Keep your class in line.”

Marlo looked back at Jordie and sighed. “Hey, Jordie,” she called back halfheartedly, “let’s try to be cool, okay?”

Jordie glared at her.
“I’m
. always cool,” she said in a low rumble. “Like a morgue on Christmas.”

Marlo gulped. “Right. Of course. Good job. Thanks.”

Lyon and Bordeaux laughed in derisive unison.

The girls neared a trio of long-legged women whose bodies managed to be curvaceous without an ounce of body fat. It was as if they had been designed by a college fraternity.

“Oh my
gawd!”
squealed Bordeaux. “It’s Faith, Hope, and Charity! Those three supermodels that died on that humanitarian aid mission to Africanastan!”

The three flawless creatures sprayed the girls with perfume as they stepped onto the escalator. Normally, Marlo would have doused them with pepper spray—as the staff of Scents and Sensibility back home knew all too well. But the particular fragrance that the three dead-yet-still-super supermodels spritzed upon her was …
amazing … delicious …
like an aromatic rainbow.

“Chanel Number Six!” Lyon gasped. “It’s, like, supposed to be made from a patented blend of supermodel pheromones and puppy breath!”

Giggling drunk from Mallvana’s intoxicating cologne, the girls stepped onto the escalator. Marlo gripped the plush, vibrating handrail. It felt cool and
calming to the touch, like petting a sleek Persian kitten, and sent waves of relaxation throughout her body, until she could barely keep her eyes …

Marlo let go. She fought to stay focused amidst all the heady distractions. She concentrated on her surroundings, casing out this burglar’s buffet of retail riches.

The first floor of the main rotunda housed a Heaven on Ice rink and Seven Deadly Cinemas Complex. The second floor, from what she could make out, was home to an Om Depot, Epiphany’s Jewelers, and a store called Cleanliness, right next to another store called Godliness.

The girls alighted off the escalator and onto the gleaming, diamond-encrusted floor. To their left was a massive plasma-screen display—at least forty feet tall. On it was a gyrating, computer-generated teenage girl, dancing and singing into a sparkling headset.

The shimmering girl, her face lined with gold-glitter makeup, danced with an athleticism that mocked the laws of physics. Her voice hit notes so high that it probably sent dogs into seizures. Her silver spandex hot
pants looked as if they had been applied with a spray can. Her poreless complexion was so fine that she not only reflected light but also exuded it.