Hellhole Read online

  Burg was nodding. “Before I get the chance to kill her myself,” he said thoughtfully, stroking his chin. “Yes, I can see why that would be undesirable.”

  Max let this slide, if for no other reason than the mere possibility made him too lightheaded to form a response. “Third, you can’t mess up any of our stuff. I don’t want to come home from school and find a smoking crater where my Xbox used to be. You can use it, just don’t break it. And don’t poke any more holes in the ceiling with your horns.”

  “Hey, these bad boys go where they want to go,” Burg said, polishing his horns with his buttery hands. “I can’t be held responsible for their natural urges.”

  “Speaking of which—where are your pants?”

  “I’m not a fan of pants.”

  “Yeah, well, fourth rule: Pants. Pants at all times.”

  Burg pushed himself away from the counter and towered over Max. “What exactly makes you think you’re in a position to tell me what to do? Need I remind you again of my insatiable bloodlust?”

  “I’m good, actually, on the reminders of the insatiable bloodlust,” Max said, averting his eyes, which were frantically darting across the linoleum as he had a panicked internal conversation with himself.

  This is never going to work. You can’t treat a being of the underworld like a disobedient toddler. You can’t give him a time-out if he breaks the rules. He’ll burn your friggin’ house down.

  But I can’t get rid of him, either. Not yet.

  You’re never going to be able to find a house, let alone steal one.

  Then what am I going to do? The longer I take, the more pissed he’ll get, and then he’s gonna kill us!

  So stall. STALL.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” Max blurted. “You work hard in your daily life, down there in hell, doing . . . whatever it is you do. Probably a lot of paperwork. So why cut short your once-in-a-century getaway to earth? Sure, you could kill me and my mom and engulf the town in a blaze of hellfire, but there’s no point in doing all that right off the bat if you could instead luxuriate in all the junk food and video games you want. Pretty good gig, right? And all you have to do is follow my puny little human rules. Which, you know, are just so lame and so puny, right?”

  Burg let out a snort. “So puny.”

  “Exactly. What do you think?”

  Burg stared at him for a moment. “I think that seems fair,” he said, taking off the apron and flopping it into Max’s hand. “As long as you really do make it feel like a vacation. And bring me all that stuff you just promised. And do the dishes,” he said, nodding at the pile of dirty pans he’d piled up on the stove.

  “Got it,” said Max, relieved. “I mean, I will.”

  “Good.” Burg grabbed his mug of pancake batter and started to make his way toward the basement door, then turned back to speak into Max’s ear. “Oh, and if that flowery little speech of yours was the best your negotiating skills can offer, you may want to read up on my kind. This ain’t my first barbecue, Shovel.”

  Max paled.

  “And don’t even think of locking that basement door,” Burg continued. “I laugh in the face of your locks. Hahaha! Ha!”

  He got halfway to the basement door before running back into the kitchen and sweeping the two syrup mavens into his arms. “I’m taking these ladies with me. I won’t elaborate on why.”

  For the first time in his life, Max was riffling through a phone book.

  “I can’t believe people used to live like this,” he said, smearing ink on his sweaty fingers. Whatever electronic temper tantrum Burg had triggered the night before had not only knocked out all the phone lines in Max’s house—cell and land—but had extinguished the Internet connection on his crappy computer as well. And the library was closed on Sundays. So here Max was, back in the Stone Age, using the yellow pages at an old pay phone down the street to look up Satan Worshippers.

  Except that such a category did not exist. Nor did Devil Exterminators. Or Demonologists. The closest thing he could find to a paranormal solution was an ad for “Mythica’s Discount Clairvoyant Readings: Where P-S-Y-C-H-I-C spells S-A-V-I-N-G-S!”

  It was bad enough that he’d had to call Stavroula to say he wouldn’t be at work; she had not been pleased, for the first time muttering a “headaches and scoundrels” in which Max surmised that he was both the source of the headache and the scoundrel in question. With a frustrated grunt he tried to hurl the phone book to the ground, but since it was attached to the booth with a heavy cable, it happily swung back around and smacked him in the groin.

  Max limped down the sidewalk. He looked up at the sky and pleaded with the clouds, as if the answer might come from above.

  To his surprise, a heavenly chorus sounded.

  Grinning with bliss, he staggered forth, angelic voices calling him toward salvation.

  Sneaking in through the back door of a church in the middle of services was probably not going to be earning him any brownie points with the guy upstairs, but Max was desperate. Besides, he wasn’t there to see Him anyway.

  “Audie!” Max whisper-yelled, ducking down behind the bleachers of the gospel choir. Luckily, she was in the back row, and luckily, the singers were belting and clapping too loudly for anyone to notice him. He pulled on the hem of her robe. “Audie!”

  She sank to her knees, the soprano section forming a satiny cocoon of noise around them. “Max? What are you doing here?”

  He ducked out of the way as a dancing foot swung perilously close to his head. “I need your help.”

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

  “I know, but this is important! I have a big problem!”

  “This song ends in about two minutes, so unless your problem can be solved in that amount of time, or unless you spontaneously develop the ability to hit a high C, you best be scramming.”

  “Tell me everything you know about Satan!” he shouted, unfortunately doing so just as the chorus cut out to allow for a solo. A very large woman looked down at him with confusion and a fierce desire to kick his scrawny ass.

  “Satan?” Audie repeated, incredulous. “Like, the devil?”

  “No, Steve Satan, hairstylist to the stars. Yes, the devil!”

  Audie looked adorably lost. “What makes you think I’d know anything about the devil?”

  “I don’t know.” Max’s mom had never been religious, so his views on what happened at church were somewhat spotty. He knew that some places gave out free wine, while others made you play with snakes. He was unclear on pretty much everything else. “Isn’t it part of the package deal that comes with all of this?” He gestured at the altar, inadvertently getting his hand caught in the hem of another woman’s robe and feeling a little more leg than necessary.

  Audie looked scandalized. “Max, are you okay? Did something happen to you? You smell like bacon.”

  “I’m fine,” Max said. “Come on, anything at all. I need it for a . . . school project. I just remembered it’s due tomorrow and I’m desperate.”

  “For school? What class?”

  Max didn’t always think well under pressure, which is why he was so impressed with himself for being able to remember that neither Audie nor any of her friends were in his section of—“Calculus.”

  The self-congratulations faded rapidly.

  She stared at him. “Calculus. You need to know about Satan for math class.”

  “Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “I’m trying to, uh, disprove him. Using . . . derivatives.”

  Audie rubbed her temples. She’d officially become only minorly exuberant. “Max,” she said, “you’re giving me a headache.”

  “Are you sure it’s not the singing? It’s really loud—”

  “You need to go.” She began to shove him away from the bleachers. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, or why on earth you need to know about Satan at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, but it’s called Wikipedia. Look it up.”

  “I can’t—” He fell
to the floor with a thud. “Aud, please. Anything you can tell me will help,” he said, pulling himself back up and talking to the back of her legs. “Anything at all.”

  She squatted back down with a huff. “Lore Nedry,” she said. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “Who?”

  “Remember her from elementary school? She switched to Westbury Prep after sixth grade, then last year transferred back to Eastville High. There were rumors that she’s a Satan worshipper, or used to be. She wore all black, and Chuck Bryant told me she kept a dead rat tacked up in her locker. Give her a ring, I’m sure she’ll be overjoyed to chat with you. Now get. Out.”

  The voices of the chorus rose to a deafening pitch, and even Max could tell that they’d reached the final notes of the song. He stumbled toward the back door that he’d slunk in through and exited into the unseasonably humid morning air.

  Max knew he had no right to be upset with Audie, seeing as how he’d burst into her house of worship and demanded some really strange information from her and all, but he was generally quite frustrated with the world at the moment and didn’t know who else to take it out on. “Gee, thanks, Aud,” he said out loud, kicking a rock as he shuffled back down the street. “What am I supposed to do, just call her up and be all like, hey girl, wanna talk about Satan?”

  “Um, hi,” Max breathed into the phone. “Wanna talk about Satan?”

  “What?” said the voice on the other end.

  “Or—sorry, the Prince of Darkness. Or, um, His Evil Lordship. Whatever you call him. I don’t want to be disrespectful.”

  “Who is this?”

  Max nervously drummed his fingers on the fiberglass of the small pay phone enclosure, feeling a sudden swell of affinity for the antiquated thing. Its phone book had given him the right number, after all—only one listing under the name Nedry—and she’d picked up after the first ring. He didn’t want to think about how he would have reacted if a parent had answered instead.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself. “This is Max Kilgore.”

  A pause.

  “Isn’t that the new Michael Bay movie?”

  “I can see why you might think that, but no,” he said. “I go to your school. I don’t think we’re in any of the same classes—actually, I don’t even know what you look like—”

  “Then it must be hard for you to picture the face I’m making right now,” she answered dryly. “I’ll give you a hint: it’s the one that precedes me hanging up the phone.”

  “Wait, don’t hang up!” Max wiped a drop of sweat from his eye. “I was hoping you might be able to help me. I’ve heard that you dabble in the satanic arts, and—”

  A long, guttural noise rumbled out of the earpiece.

  Once it was complete, she grumbled, “I don’t do that stuff anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  Max did not have a Plan B, so he had to resort to Plan C: awkwardly breathing into the phone until she elaborated.

  Which she did not.

  “Um,” he said after a time, “why not?”

  Another pause, as if she was being careful to think before she spoke. “It was just a phase. Not that I need to explain myself to you, whoever you are.”

  Max’s palms were so sweaty they could barely grip the receiver. Confrontations always did this to him. He was practically hyperventilating, fighting a strong urge to sink to the ground and start rocking back and forth in a fetal position. “Look, I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he heaved. “I heard that you were into satanic worship, and due to some unforeseen circumstances that have recently cropped up in my life, I am now very desperate for more information on the matter. But obviously that rumor was untrue, and obviously it’s kind of a sore subject for you, and obviously I’ll just be hanging up now and dying of embarrassment, so have a nice life, bye-bye then—”

  “Wait.”

  Max paused, then coughed because his throat was so dry. “Hmm?”

  “Why do you need to know more about Satan?”

  He blew out a puff of air. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  More silence.

  “Meet me later tonight at the craft store on Main Street,” she said.

  Max nearly dropped the phone. “Huh?”

  “Just Glue It. Around six thirty, back door, near the dumpsters.”

  “Uh, okay. Sure. Thanks!”

  Max hung up, so thrilled at this positive turn of events that he forgot about the vengeful swinging phone book, still hell-bent on destroying his crotch.

  Frequently

  MAX SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY sitting in his living room, looking at his dinosaur watch, and listening to Burg play Call of Duty. It wasn’t the game Max would have chosen; the near-constant firing of machine guns didn’t exactly soothe his troubled soul. But as long as virtual soldiers were being killed downstairs, no real people were being killed upstairs. Hopefully his mom would think he was the one playing, and not abandon her Sunday reruns to come out and investigate.

  At one point—and then another point, and another—Audie rang the doorbell and demanded to be let in, but Max had turned off all the lights and locked all the doors. He knew that she knew that he wasn’t really out, but there was no way he was letting anyone inside the house, for their sake and his.

  He made a peanut butter sandwich. He ate it.

  He did a crossword puzzle. Then another.

  He killed a fly, taking note of the way the gunshots stopped for a brief moment as the yellow goo oozed out onto the table, as if Burg could sense the death. As if he were enjoying it.

  Max shuddered a little.

  He shuddered some more.

  When six o’clock finally rolled around, he stood up, opened the basement door, and crept halfway down the stairs.

  Burg was sitting on the couch in his underwear, shouting at the TV screen, and bending an old tennis racket in half, violating rules four, two, and three, respectively. The presence of his mom’s old tennis racket meant that Burg had ventured into the storage/workshop area of the basement, which would probably lead to some troublesome developments in the future, but for now, all Max wanted to do was get out of the house, and fast.

  “I’m going out,” he announced in a voice that was more high-pitched than he wanted it to be. “To, uh, steal you some dinner.”

  “Great!” Burg said. “I’ll have twin lobsters, a filet of elk loin, a vat of truffle oil, and a package of Twinkies.”

  Max sighed. “I can obtain exactly one of those items.”

  “Ugh, fine. Make the elk rare, with a side of mint jelly.”

  Max stood there a moment longer. Once he was satisfied that Burg was well into what he called his “Gutsplosion Campaign,” he snuck back upstairs to peek into his mom’s room. She appeared to be sleeping, but then she stirred and waved him in.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “I was just gonna run out for some food. How are you feeling?”

  “Exhausted,” she muttered, still half asleep. “Must be that marathon I ran yesterday. Rocketed right past the Kenyans. ESPN’ll be here later for an interview. Put out some quiche.”

  “Got it. Quiche. Anything else?”

  He was answered with a snore.

  Sweat was becoming a big problem in Max’s life. The amount of time he spent in the throes of nervous panic had gone up exponentially, and with it, the amount of perspiration. Not only had Burg somehow settled the basement into a permanent setting of a hundred-plus degrees, but now that Max had been forced to interact with a strange girl about a subject he had no earthly idea how to broach in a tactful, non–police-alerting manner, his hands were the clammiest they’d ever been. They became so wet on the way to the craft store that they kept slipping around the handlebars of his bike, at one point causing him to veer into traffic and almost be run over by a Little Debbie delivery truck, because getting flattened by a giant supply of devil’s food cake mix would have been just the most darling, ironic cherry on top of the shit sundae his life had become.


  Just Glue It sat between a seafood restaurant and a laundromat in a small block of storefronts along Main Street. Max hopped off his bike and walked it down the narrow alley behind the building, scrunching up his nose as he passed several trash cans and a river of malodorous, fishy slime snaking its way out the back door of the restaurant.

  At last he reached what he assumed to be the craft store’s dumpster, judging by the amount of sparkly debris surrounding it. He propped his bike against the wall, took out a granola bar, and waited, chewing and wondering how it had come to pass that every major traumatic event in his life these days seemed to involve a splash of glitter.

  The back door abruptly slammed open.

  Startled, Max began to choke on a cashew. Really choke—airway blocked, face turning blue, fingers clawing at the wall, as if tunneling through to the store and grabbing a handful of pipe cleaners was the best way to resolve the situation. Without missing a beat, the door opener smacked him hard on the back.

  Out came the nut. It ricocheted off the dumpster and sped off into the trees, where—Max fleetingly thought in what had to be a flash of near-death psychosis—it was found by a lucky squirrel, taken home to its squirrel family, and enjoyed as a jubilant part of Squirrel Thanksgiving, which, as everyone knows, traditionally takes place not in November, but in September, when half-swallowed flying nuts are more plentiful.

  At some point Max realized that he was saying all of this out loud to the girl, who was standing there and listening and not, astonishingly, emptying a can of pepper spray into his face.

  “What are you babbling on about?” she asked.

  Max blinked and cleared his throat a few more times, his mind settling back down to a level of low-to-moderate insanity. Only then did he feel ready to make eye contact, and when he did, he thought he might start choking again.

  It was Brown Ponytail. The one who came into the Gas Bag the day before. She wore a blue and green plaid skirt—the kind worn as part of a Catholic school uniform—plus sneakers, no socks, and a white polo shirt with rhinestones arranged in the shape of dancing teapots.