Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck Read Online Free PDF

lightly in his palms.
    “Lay some divine magic upon us,” Jack asked. “A righteous, so-help-me path. Like
solid.”
    Rod pointed to Jack’s pendant. “That’ll throw off the reading,” he said in a voice like crumpled butcher’s paper.
    Jack pulled the pendant over his head—somethingMilton had never seen him do before—then tucked it in the back of his khaki pants.
    Rod held the forked branch in his outstretched hands, sweeping the point slowly across the Wastelands.
    “What’s he doing?” Milton whispered to Moondog. “Trying to find water?”
    Moondog scratched at the unruly beard that coiled out of his face like the branches of a hardy white bush.
    “Nope, even better: Liquid Silver,” Moondog replied as he set down his walking stick. “It always leads us to fortune, especially since the deposit for the stuff is so dern good.”
    The point of Divining Rod’s branch began to wobble. His sweeps became tighter, more focused.
    “Deposit, like with bottles and cans?” Milton replied. “So you’re telling me that there’s
recycling
in the afterlife?”
    Moondog laughed and nodded. His Norse-style robe, which made him look like a bedraggled Thor, rustled in the wind.
    “Are you kidding me? The whole
place
is recycled,” he replied. “The same old song only played in a minor key. We’ll come across a deposit station every so often. We pour in the Liquid Silver and get food and supplies from these odd lockboxes. We don’t know why, how, or where the stuff comes from—not even my fifth-and-a-halfth sense can crack it—but beggars can’t be choosers. Even professional beggars like us PODs.”
    Divining Rod’s branch trembled furiously. He set it down and pointed beyond the Wastelands.
    “There,” he declared.
    Milton noticed something shimmering in the distance where Divining Rod had instructed the phantoms to go. Warped, hazy structures materialized. If he squinted through his glasses, Milton could just make out rusted trailers overrun by thickets of brambles. The structures winked in and out of existence like weak, dying lightbulbs. Then, in one great flash of clarity, Milton saw the unmistakable outline of a circus tent. The largest that he had ever seen, like the Matterhorn upholstered in striped orange and green canvas.
    “Please
tell me you see what I see,” Milton told the phantoms at his side.
    “Well, I don’t exactly
see
it,” Moondog replied. “But I
do
sense it…. It flickers in my thoughts, like the reception on an old TV. It’s like this place is caught in between two frequencies and can’t quite get a fix on either one.”
    The phantoms trudged onward across terrain as flat, dull, and appealing as old pudding skin. After a grueling twenty-minute slog, the PODs moved past a small, partially enclosed arena littered with bumped-off bumper cars, their once-cheerful colors pockmarked and blistered, and their electrical poles bent forever at half-mast. Weeds grew through the cracks in the concrete.
    The final structure was the towering big top—thebiggest, toppiest big top ever—with several great gashes in its striped orange and green canopy.
    The PODs stood before the tent, which was surrounded by thatches of dead, reddish brown briars.
    “What is this place?” Milton asked no one in particular.
    “Savage Bumble’s … Tragical … Confusement Park and Midway,” a stocky phantom named Cody replied simply.
    Jack, Milton, and Moondog stared at the round, red-faced man. Cody blew a strand of dirty-blond hair from his face and pointed to a collection of large dull-bronze letters strewn about the overgrowth nearby. The letters were clustered in mangled groups, as if the once-intact marquee had been ripped apart by a cyclone.
    “Let’s check it out!” Milton said, his inner toddler hopping with excitement.
    Jack rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet.
    “I don’t know,” he murmured uneasily, staring at the direction Divining Rod had divined. “Demon guards are