Hellhole (8 page)

“I will
bring
embezzled bacon to the basement,” Max said through clenched teeth. “And butter, and whatever other artery cloggers you want. Okay?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Burg said, whisking a bowl of pancake batter into a mug and taking a large swig. “As long as it's all stolen.”

“Stolen. Right.” Max's breath skipped away as he remembered that little detail. “Why can't you steal your own snacks? And your own house?”

“I'm on vacation, remember? We devils have a terrible benefits package, only get time off once a century or so. I ain't lifting a finger while I'm up here.”

Max wrung his hands. If only the Max of two days ago could see him now, so worried about stealing a plastic cat. Now he had to steal three square meals a day for this dickhead?

Burg was squeezing a long string of syrup into his mug and talking to his concoction. “Oh, Mrs. Butterworth, you saucy little minx, you—”

“Hey, I'm not done,” Max said.

But Burg wasn't listening. He was now holding a second bottle of syrup, making it walk like a puppet. “Aunt Jemima, I didn't hear you come in! Why no, I'd
never
be opposed to a ménage-à-trois,
especially
not when syrup is involved—”

“Stop talking to the condiments and listen to me!”

Burg dropped the syrups and leaned back against the counter, folding his hands in front of him in a laudable impression of Mrs. Butterworth. “Proceed.”

“Rule number two,” Max said, “is that you can't make any noise. My mom is just down the hall. If she hears you, she'll freak out and have a heart attack and die.”

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.