Precocia: The Sixth Circle of Heck, page 1
ALSO BY DALE E. BASYE
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go
Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck
Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck
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 © 2013 by Dale E. Basye
Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2013 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.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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wherethebadkidsgo.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Basye, Dale E.
Precocia: the sixth circle of Heck / by Dale E. Basye;
illustrations by Bob Dob.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Following sentencing in the court of Judge Judas, eleven-year-old Milton and his older sister Marlo find themselves in Precocia, the circle of Heck for kids that grow up too fast.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89885-3
[1. Future life—Fiction. 2. Reformatories—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.
4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Humorous stories.] I. Dob, Bob, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.B2938Pre2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012002296
Random House Children’s Books supports
the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY SON’S TEACHER, MR. KIM LE BAS. KIM IS THE KIND OF TEACHER WHO TREATS HIS STUDENTS AS FELLOW EXPLORERS, GUIDING THEM GENTLY YET FIRMLY THROUGH THE PRICKLY LABYRINTH OF CHILDHOOD SO THAT THEY MAY EMERGE UPSTANDING, OUTSTANDING, AND WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT EVERY JOURNEY IS AN EDUCATION. THAT EVERY DAY IS A CRAYON OF A NEW COLOR. A MYSTERIOUS PACKAGE ON THE DOORSTEP STAMPED WITH FOREIGN POSTAGE. AN ICE CREAM TRUCK ON FIRE, CAREENING AROUND THE CORNER. OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT …
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
FOREWORD
1. IN THROUGH THE OUT DOOR
2. CLIMB DOESN’T PAY
3. INSPECT THE UNEXPECTED
4. STUCK IN THE RIDDLE
5. THE PRICE OF ADMISSIONS
6. THE FACTS OF AFTERLIFE
7. THE TRAGIC SCHOOL BUS
8. THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
9. ANGELS WITH DIRTY HALOS
10. LITTLE KIDS IN THE BIG HOUSE
11. GROWING UP THE RIVER
12. LEARNING THEIR KEEP
13. WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE
14. MERCI, MERCI ME
15. THE HAND THAT WRECKS THE CRADLE RE-RULES THE WORLD
16. A MARRIAGE MADE IN HECK
17. A NASTY PIECE OF WORK
18. MORE OF LES
MIDDLEWORD
19. THE MINE BOGGLES
20. ARMED AND DANGEROUS
21. BOY ABOUT CLOWN
22. A GHOST OF A DANCE
23. FROM KIDDY TO OLD BIDDY
24. RUN-IN THE FAMILY
25. AN INHOSPITABLE HOSPITAL
26. ESCAPED CRUSADER
27. GONE TO MEET HIS TROUBLEMAKER
28. FROM A WHISPER TO A SCHEME
29. MIDNIGHT SNACK ATTACK!
30. VOLCANIC DISRUPTION
31. ALWAYS THE CENTER OF DETENTION
32. YOUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
33. A GLITCH IN TIME SAVES MANKIND?
34. THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT
35. TILL DEPTHS DO US PART
36. OUT THROUGH THE IN DOOR
BACKWORD
Acknowledgments
About the Author
As many believe, there is a place above and a place below. But there are also places in between. Some not quite awfully perfect and others not quite perfectly awful.
One of these places is crowded with children who, in their attempt to grow up way too fast, went down way before their time. It’s a place where every day of the week is Freaky Friday; Halloween and Christmas have been permanently canceled because they’re just so, you know, immature; and everyone’s Salad Days are served with some awful No-Regret-Vinaigrette.
Here children are saddled with bulging backpacks and schedules packed tighter than a tin of fat sardines in spandex and forced to rush frantically toward some kind of finish line. But the only things truly finished once that line is crossed are the exhausted, overburdened runners. Seriously: these kids are all stressed up with no place to grow.
And, really, what’s so great about being grown up? When you get right down to it, being fully grown is a big groan. Sure, you get to stay up all night, but if you do, you’re exhausted for work the next day and risk losing a regular paycheck that, oddly, you don’t get to squander on candy but instead is almost entirely gobbled up by your monthly rent. Playing dress-up becomes something you do for work, every day, first thing in the morning when you’re half asleep. Instead of hours of make-believe, it’s hours of itchy discomfort and aching feet. Good news, though: there are no more nasty monsters under your bed. Bad news: that’s where you keep your tax returns.
The mysterious Powers That Be (and any of its associated or subsidiary enterprises, including—but not limited to—the Powers That Be Evil) have stitched this and countless other subjective realities together into a sprawling quilt of space and time.
Some of these quantum patches may not even seem like places. But they are all around you and go by many names. Some feel like eternity. And some of them actually are eternity, at least for a little while.
But be warned: In this place—where the bad kids who don’t think they’re kids go—there’s no kidding around. Ever.
THE ONLY THOUGHT in Milton Fauster’s baffled head that seemed to make any sense at all was that nothing around him made any sense at all. He had a sinking feeling that he was floating … or a floating feeling that he was sinking … and that something terrible had just happened, something that he couldn’t prevent but had tried to prevent, right up to the very end until it had proved unpreventable.
Milton—eleven years old at the time of his untimely death—was dizzy, nauseous, and utterly confused.
He also happened to be drowning.
Milton found himself thoroughly submerged in thick, shimmering liquid that made him tingle and itch all over. It was as if he were swimming in a gurgling aurora borealis filled with dozens of blurry, vaguely familiar faces … living memories that he couldn’t remember living.
Milton fought against the flow of flickering liquid, looking for a way out.
Spangled lights fluttered softly overhead. Kicking out in vigorous spasms, Milton shot to the surface of the glimmering pool, a preteen cork gasping for breath. He paddled to the shore against the surging undertow that fought to reclaim him.
Milton coughed up the weird, twinkling water and looked around, dazed and exhausted. He was inside a spacious underground grotto—at least a half mile across—filled with surging, radiant liquid. It trickled from dozens of burrows dug into the rock, feeding the massive, churning pool. The surface danced with fleeting images, squirming, darting, and flickering in mesmerizing ripples and eddies.
The kerchief pouch tied to Milton’s belt wriggled and hissed. Milton tried to untie the pouch but noticed that his hands were rigid, with the tip of his right hand pressed firmly into the palm of his left. The gesture was distantly familiar to Milton.
“Sign language for ‘again’?” he murmured, his lips numb from the water. “Again, what?”
Out through the loosened kerchief popped the fuzzy white head of Lucky, Milton’s ironically named pet ferret. Lucky always seemed to be at the epicenter of utter calamity, having died at least twice; for a cat, with its surfeit of lives, this might not be that big of a deal, but for a ferret used to sleeping at least fifteen hours a day, passing back and forth through death’s pet door was a hassle. Lucky yawned and glanced around the grotto with an expression of mild surprise before sneezing. Milton chuckled.
“Lucky!” he cried as he scritched the twitchy ferret’s head with his odd, stiff hands. “Finally something familiar!” The feeling was slowly coming back to his hands as he smoothed Lucky’s nappy fur.
A splash grabbed Milton’s attention. A mop of damp blue hair struggled in a Technicolor whirlpool a hundred feet away.
“Marlo!” Milton yelped as he set Lucky down and dove into the pool to save his thirteen-year-old sister from dying a second death.
Marlo was floating on her stomach like a Goth rag doll. Milton hooked his arm around her and towed her to the rocky shore.
Her eyes fluttered like moths drunk on the glow of a porch light. Milton pumped the center of Marlo’s chest with his palms. A gush of thick, iridescent water spilled out of her mouth like liquid velvet. He tilted Marlo’s head back, lifted her chin, and—after pinching her nose—did pretty much the most repulsive thing a brother could do to his sister: apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
After a few forced breaths, Marlo’s eyes shot open. She bolted upright, regaining sudden, furious consciousness.
“Back off, bro-fish!” she sputtered, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.
Milton went red.
“I was giving you mouth-to-mouth,” he said with unease. “The kiss of life.”
Marlo spat onto the black volcanic rock.
“If you give me the kiss of life again, it’ll be the fist of death for you,” she said, clenching her small yet not-to-be-trifled-with fist. “Or double-death … what-ev …” Marlo gazed out across the luminous pool. Slivers of flashing color reflected in her wide, haunted eyes. “Were we able to do it?” she murmured.
“Do what?” Milton replied.
The two Fauster siblings stared dumbfounded at each other.
“I’m not sure,” Marlo said with a hollow sadness. “All I remember is that I forgot something. And that something is …” She sighed. “Everything.”
“I feel the same way,” Milton added. “Like I showed up to school and forgot to study for a big test.”
“Me too,” Marlo replied. “Only for me it’s like I stole a Victorian corset dress from a thrift shop and forgot to nab the matching black ankle boots.”
“Yeah, just like that …,” Milton said with a roll of his eyes. He rubbed his stiff hands. “When I came out of this weird pool, my hands were frozen like this,” he said, pressing his right hand into his left palm. “The sign for—”
“Again.”
“How do you know sign language?” Milton asked.
“Aubrey Fitzmallow and I learned some signs to help us communicate when we’d ‘borrow’ stuff indefinitely from department stores,” Marlo explained. “But most of the time security thought we were flashing gang signs and kicked us out anyway.”
Lucky’s twitching pink nose peeked out of the sopping-wet kerchief, taking in the scent of his master’s sister, an odor that was reassuringly familiar yet often smelled like trouble.
“Lucky!” Marlo yelped as she reached over to scratch Lucky’s magic spot at the back of his neck. “Lucky fou fou.”
“Fou fou?” Milton asked as he lay down, exhausted.
“Fou is French for ‘crazy,’ ” Marlo replied. Lucky arched up and rubbed his head against Marlo’s hand to attain the perfect scratch.
“Since when do you know French?”
Marlo shrugged.
“Je ne sais pas. I guess there are things about me you don’t know that even I don’t know.”
Milton sighed. “The hand sign must mean something.…”
“Like how we need to do something again?” Marlo said next to him.
“Yeah,” Milton muttered. “Like we failed at something but have to give it another try. Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“It’s pretty,” Marlo said, staring up at the roof of the subterranean grotto. The rocky ceiling was covered in a gently glowing phosphorescent moss. The cool green light mingled with the varicolored glimmer thrown onto the ceiling by the swirling pool. “It’s like a laser light show, only without all the hippy-dippy music,” Marlo added. “Maybe we’re not in Heck anymore.”
“Then where are we?”
“Someplace else. Anyplace else. What does it matter?” Marlo sighed. “It’s so peaceful. I could spend the rest of my afterlife here. I never want to leave.…”
Suddenly, the serene quietude was shattered by a squealing scrape and a colossal splash. The pool was ruffled by something, a something the size of a killer whale, swimming fast just beneath the surface. Milton noticed an odd white light speeding toward them.
“I’m out of here,” Marlo said, rising quickly to her booted feet.
The beam of light blinked off and on as three barbed tentacles lashed out of the pool. Milton stepped back, feeling something squish underneath his foot. A fat greenish white worm was twitching at the end of a long spiral groove etched into the rock floor.
“Eww,” Marlo said, glaring at Milton’s shoulder. “You’ve got a maggoty thing on you.” A stalk of corkscrew-shaped asparagus with a tiny mouth at one end and feathery tendrils at the other crawled up Milton’s arm.
“No eating my brother just ’cause he’s dead,” Marlo said before swatting it away.
A horrific yowl exploded from one of the burrows, making the downy hair on Milton’s arms go stiff and bristly. Light glimmered from the mouth of the tunnel, growing brighter and brighter, until out shot a twenty-foot-long corkscrew squid with a great, blinking floodlight for an eye, pocked skin like a cheese grater, and flailing sawtooth tentacles waving behind it.
If Milton’s pants hadn’t been wet already, they surely would be now. He backed away from the pool and scooped up Lucky and his kerchief.
Marlo noticed hundreds of the tiny glowworms writhing on the ground, each of them scratching spirals into the rock with their rough, metallic skin.
“I think mommy maggot is back home from wriggling her errands,” Marlo said, “and doesn’t like the babysitters that sat on her babies.… C’mon.”
Milton and Marlo trotted across the glittering gravel floor.
“We got in here somehow … so there must be a way out,” Milton said.
Marlo dared a quick, fearful peek at the glimmering kaleidoscopic pond. Three of the squid creatures were slicing through the water, only moments from reaching the shore nearest the Fausters. The farther they strayed from the glowing pool, the darker it became.
“What if that curieux pool is how we got in here?” Marlo asked in the ever-dimming light.
“There’s got to be another way,” Milton replied, feeling his way across the rock wall. “And stop using French. It’s unnerving.”
“Bien,” Marlo murmured. “Hey … over there. There’s a crack in the ceiling.”
Above a cascade of luminous limestone that resembled a petrified waterfall was a wide crack. Weak yellow-orange light throbbed through. Beneath the crack were footprints, a dusty dance of sneakers and Goth boots.
“We were here before,” Milton whispered.
“At least our shoes were,” Marlo said.
A wet, furious yowl exploded throughout the grotto. The teeth-gritting sound of grinding, squealing stone and frantic splashing soon followed.
“Going up,” Milton muttered as he grasped a lump of limestone and scaled the ceiling.
“Next floor … hopefully something better than being ripped apart by angry squids,” Marlo grunted as she clambered up the wall behind her brother.
THE CLEFT IN the rock was too smooth to grab on to, yet narrow enough that Milton and Marlo could wedge themselves through and—using their backs and feet to press against the vertical walls—climb up to the open fissure forty feet above.
Milton’s back ached and sweat poured down his forehead, stinging his eyes. One of the creatures bellowed, its roar so thick with fury that Milton and Marlo could feel it whooshing past them in the crevice. Its breath smelled strangely pleasant, like dust and clocks and people.
“Hey, we’re … kind of like … a wedgie,” Marlo huffed, her face shiny with sweat, as she scrabbled up the rock face. “You know: halfway up … the crack.”
Below, the headlamp eye of a corkscrew squid blinked angrily at the two Fausters.
“What do you remember last?” Milton grunted, trying to take his mind off the clicking of the creature’s eyelids.
“I remember us … on the way to Precocia. We were … in the back of a stagecoach. It stopped. And … and I think … we bolted.”
“Yeah,” Milton puffed as he worked his way closer to the top, like a human inchworm with broken glasses. “That’s what I … remember, too.”
A tentacle—barbed and dangerous—wriggled up through the rock cleft.
“Hurry!” Milton yelped, scuttling up the crack as the creature’s limb strained upward, just out of reach.
After frenzied yards of grunting heaves and stretches, Milton cleared the crack, reaching down to grab Marlo’s wrist and hoist her up to the floor of a shallow cave. They rolled onto their backs, panting with exhaustion. A greasy brown-orange light spilled in from the mouth of the small rock hollow. They could hear the faint murmur of voices. Marlo put her finger to her lips and grabbed Milton by the hand. They peered cautiously out of the cave. Milton’s stomach dropped.
