Breathing hard in that way that only the morbidly obese do, Mr. Welles looked like a big bomb with a stinky, smoking fuse, his cigar flaring with every wheeze.
“I don’t think the elevator has ever been in,” Milton replied.
Mr. Welles wiped his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief.
“Well, this building has more flights than a commuter airline,” he gasped before noticing Milton’s “Yes” and “No” piles.
“You didn’t like The Rabid Rabbi?”
Milton shrugged his shoulders.
“I wasn’t mad about it.”
Mr. Welles flipped through the script.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he murmured. “The production values on the temple flood scene alone would have laid waste to our entire budget … it’s odd, Miss Fauster. I heard that you were an impudent young lady, but you actually seem respectful and forthright.”
Uh-oh, Milton thought.
“Whatever, Mr. Well-fed. I just looooove my new job,” Milton replied quickly, feigning his sister’s insincerity.
Mr. Welles leveled his penetrating stare at the Man Who Soldeth the World video sticking out of the VCR like a petulant toddler’s tongue.
“Did you have the opportunity of screening that mysterious submission?” he asked, his eyebrow arching like a suspicious scalene triangle.
Milton gulped. He wanted to keep an ace up his sleeve, and The Man Who Soldeth the World was the only card he had to keep. Whether it could beat whatever a jack-of-all-trades like Mr. Welles was holding, or even the hand Satan, the King of the Bottomless Pit, had been dealt, he had no clue.
“Miss Fauster?” Mr. Welles coughed. “Are you having an internal conversation? The audience can’t follow along unless there’s a voice-over track.…”
“Oh, right … sorry,” Milton replied. “The tape. Yes, it was … kind of weird. But I … well … I’ll need to see where it’s going to be sure.”
Mr. Welles nodded.
“Fine. I’ll add it to the roster anyway. It might achieve cult status … especially with viewers who happen to be in cults.”
He picked up the Teenage Jesus script and grinned.
“This, however, is pure ratings gold,” Mr. Welles said.
Milton caught his reflection, Marlo’s reflection, in one of the video monitors, noticing that—once again—he had gotten lipstick on his teeth.
“It’s a great story,” Milton said, brushing his tooth with his index finger. “One of the greatest stories ever told. But that puts a lot of pressure on the lead. He needs to be, like, Jesus perfect.”
Mr. Welles tilted back his head and expelled a great cloud of cigar smoke. He looked like a carcinogenic PEZ dispenser.
“And I have found the perfect Jesus,” he replied with a smirk.
Mr. Welles scooped up the “Yes” scripts and cinched them under his arm.
“Come with me, Miss Fauster. Son-of-God speed.”
Milton picked up his purse, missing his trusty backpack. He couldn’t fit nearly as much stuff in it, and missed the reassuring pressure of it between his shoulder blades. He slipped the videotape inside the bag.
“What about the Boob Tube?” he asked, hesitant to wean himself from his multimedia sanctuary.
“We have a Vidiot Box all set up for you at our next destination,” Mr. Welles replied.
“But why do you need me?” Milton said as he rose and straightened his skirt. “Don’t I just read scripts and make notes?”
Mr. Welles held the door open for Milton. It was nice to know that chivalry wasn’t dead, even if everything else here was.
“Satan wants you to edit the scripts … on the fly,” Mr. Welles panted as they rushed across the production office to the stairs. “To ensure that … the shows speak to their intended demographic. And to keep … the talent … pacified.”
“Pacified?” Milton replied, clutching the handrail to avoid tumbling down the stairs in his clearly-designed-by-a-sadistic-misogynist heels.
Mr. Welles stopped on the stairwell between the mezzanine and the main floor. The portly director was huffing and puffing harder than the Big Bad Wolf during Crafty Pig Awareness Week.
“As you mentioned yourself … an actor cast as the son of God must surely exude, if anything, a sense of suffering and perfection,” Mr. Welles said. “And, that said, I’m sure you will find the star of Teenage Jesus perfectly insufferable.”
They pushed open the double doors to the parking lot, where, waiting for them, was a ruby-red, over-the-top, ultraelegant, four-wheeled SUV mansion.
“A Cadillac? A Lincoln?” Milton said, gawking at the luxury car that sneered back at him with its chrome-accented grille.
“Wrong and wrong,” Mr. Welles replied as he blotted his forehead with his hanky. “A Badillac, by Wilkes Booth motors.”
The door opened, the limousine exhaling a breath of rich leather, oiled wood, and polished aluminum. Milton slid across the cool-despite-the-heat bucket seats. Behind the wheel was a chauffeur demon that, with his pleated leather skin, blended perfectly with its seat. A third arm sprouted from the creature’s chest with a round, oversized hand boasting twenty fingers, each of which curled perfectly around the leather-wrapped steering wheel. He turned to address Mr. Welles as the large man struggled to get inside the limousine.
“Where to, sir?” he asked in a smooth, snooty tone, like freshly ironed silk. Milton noticed the chauffeur had a bony ridge fused across his brow that jutted out of his forehead like the calcified brim of a cap.
“The Hellywood Hole,” Mr. Welles answered. “With a pickup at the Four Treasons Hotel.”
“Yes, sir,” the demon replied as the glass panel separating the passengers’ and driver’s areas closed. The limousine pulled out noiselessly onto a potholed street, shaking and shimmying, before barreling down an emptied aqueduct. Milton stared out the window at the bleak, barren terrain that limped by, block after block of burned-out homes surrounded by chain-link fences—whether to keep people out or in, Milton couldn’t tell.
“So what’s at the Hellywood Hole?” Milton asked as the charred skeletons of dilapidated buildings streamed by.
Mr. Welles lit a fresh stale cigar.
“That’s our base of operations,” he rumbled. “T.H.E.E.N.D. Headquarters, where we weave our dark dreams and unleash them upon the Surface.”
Milton’s stomach churned like a washing machine full of marbles and rancid buttermilk. He opened the window to clear his head and his lungs of cigar smoke. Outside, however, rows of chemical plants spewed noxious plumes of smoke that swirled together to form an oppressive, deep brown haze, like a radioactive milk shake of pollution.
“Why the Surface?” Milton asked as he quickly rolled up his window.
“Satan has his reasons, and I have mine.” Mr. Welles shrugged. “I suppose the devil just wants to make a statement, as do I. We both have something to prove. Me, that I can produce several network lineups on one stage in less than a month. Satan? He’s more than likely just thumbing his snout at the Big Guy Upstairs.”
He tapped on the chauffeur’s glass window. “Turn here.”
The demon nodded his head and swerved the car up and out of the aqueduct toward a gleaming skyscraper that reflected the smog-smothered blight surrounding it. Illuminated in black light above the portico entrance was a fluorescent green-and-orange sign: THE FOUR TREASONS HOTEL.
Milton noticed a lone figure standing outside the hotel’s lavish foyer, a tanned young man with long blond hair, expensive sunglasses, and pouty lips, wearing a cream-colored robe, sandals, and a look of supreme self-possession.
“That guy looks familiar,” Milton said as the limo drove up to the entrance.
Mr. Welles laughed.
“Yes, I’m sure he looks familiar to every girl your age.”
Milton rolled his sister’s eyes.
“Okay, I’ll play your little game, Miss Fauster,” Mr. Welles continued. “The charismatic vampire-wolf in Crashing Daybreak? The you
ng rookie cop who must deactivate a runaway hovercraft in Fastness? The amnesiac secret agent in Bourne Yesterday? The young rapper who joins the army to help pay for his mother’s tummy tuck in Hip-Hop Hup Two Three?”
The limousine stopped. The chauffeur bounded out of the vehicle and placed the young man’s luggage in the trunk. The man took off his glasses to glare at the demon with his squinty, steely blue eyes.
He looks familiar, Milton thought, but I still can’t place his smug face.
“Miss Fauster,” Mr. Welles said as the chauffeur demon opened the limousine door, “meet the heartthrob of every girl, whether their heart still throbs or not. Van Glorious: action hero, rapper, clothing line, cologne, and poster boy for not doing your own stunts.”
Van Glorious scooted into the limousine, seemingly taking up every spacious square inch of the luxury vehicle with his sheer over-presence.
“But you can call him … Teenage Jesus.” Mr. Welles smirked around his smoldering cigar.
Van looked Milton up and down and sneered.
“Wow, drop-dead gorgeous … hold the gorgeous,” he said. “I’m just joking, honey,” he said, putting his hand on Milton’s. “Besides, beautiful women make terrible assistants!” Van added with a condescending wink.
Milton’s whole body grew white-hot with rage and revulsion as he tried to, molecule by molecule, creep away from the smarmy, arrogant actor.
“Assistant?!” Milton said, turning to Mr. Welles. “I thought I was Satan’s production assistant?”
Mr. Welles stared out the window as the Badillac drove away from the hotel, merging onto a crowded highway.
“You are, dear, you are,” he replied. “Since T.H.E.E.N.D. is Satan’s production, you must, therefore, assist with it. And, as Mr. Glorious here is so crucial to the network-of-network’s appeal, he definitely falls under your nebulous job description.”
“Blast it,” Mr. Welles muttered, looking out the window at the busted-fender-to-busted-fender traffic jam. “Crush hour is especially bad today.”
Van took out his copy of the Teenage Jesus script. The text itself was nearly obscured by hundreds of sticky notes and comments scribbled in the margins.
“Good,” Van said as he scooched closer to Milton. “That will give us a chance to go over my suggestions. And by suggestions, I mean mandatory changes. Let’s start with my first line: ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ That sounds so passive. And if there’s one thing that the Messiah isn’t—especially one on the cusp of manhood—is passive. So if we switch it to …”
Milton sighed and slunk back in the overly upholstered seat. He had a feeling that his eternity had just gotten a little longer.
9 • SEEING IS DECEIVING
THE CADAVEROUS TEACHER looked like a withered wizard straight from Central Casting. He scrawled Milton’s name on the chalkboard in just a few squeaky strokes with his creepy chalk manicure, which allowed the teacher to write using all of his bony fingers at once.
Marlo’s hand shot up.
The teacher, with his back facing the class, let out a dry, mirthless chuckle.
“Because of the wad of paper you throw at me,” the teacher continued, scratching beneath his poofy black velvet beret.
“But I haven’t—” Marlo shot back.
“You will,” the teacher said as he scraped the chalkboard like a large, literate cat sharpening its claws. After a split-second symphony of wince-inducing screeches, the teacher had finished:
“Soothsaying and World Hysteria 101 with Mr. Nostradamus.”
Marlo was furious.
How dare some phony-baloney wannabe warlock act like he knows what I’m going to do! she fumed as she ripped out a piece of paper from her binder, wadded it up in her fist, and—without thinking—tossed it at Mr. Nostradamus. If Marlo Fauster is anything at all, she’s—
The ball of paper knocked the teacher’s velvet beret to his desk, knocking over a small container of milk.
—unpredictable? Marlo thought, puzzled, as Mr. Nostradamus knelt down over his desk, righting his box of milk and retrieving his ridiculous cap.
“Told you so,” he croaked, screwing his cap back onto his head.
Colby raised his hand.
“Soothsaying is the art and practice of foretelling events,” the thin, drawn man said, his back still to the class. “And World Hysteria is the study of global panic and how it can be stoked through targeted prophecy.”
Spooked, Colby lowered his hand. Darnell scowled and raised his.
“And, Mr. Cummings, I knew what Mr. Hayden was going to ask because I’m a certified seer, and a certified seer sees everything with certainty,” Mr. Nostradamus answered before any question was formally posed. “My credentials speak for themselves.…”
He turned, took off his large, dark glasses, and gestured to a wall of framed certificates: a B.S. in augury from the University of Phoenicia and a degree in second sight from the Learning Annex. Mr. Nostradamus set his glasses on his desk beside a crystal ball that held down a stack of parchment paper. Marlo noticed that the edges of his glasses were extra reflective on the inside, just like those cheap novelty spy glasses she saw advertised in the back of Milton’s comic books.
So that’s how he saw Colby and Darnell raise their hands, she thought. But how did he …
Marlo stared at the angry remnants of the torn sheet from her binder.
Certified seer, my brother’s foot. Nostradumbus knew that telling me what I was going to do would make me mad, and that I would do the first thing that popped into my head, which just so happened to be the last thing he said.…
“Let me tell you something about myself and the prognostic arts,” Mr. Nostradamus said as he rustled around his desk in his flowing, velvet robes. “In 1555 I wrote my first collection of prophecies, which, in a fit of inspiration, I decided to call The Prophecies. It’s one of the bestselling books of all time, somewhere between The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Who Moved My Cheese?”
Colby raised his hand, then, self-consciously, put it down.
“Some of my more famous predictions, Mr. Hayden, include: ‘The young lion will overcome the older one, on the field of combat in a single battle …,’ which, obviously foretold the death of Henry II. ‘Pau, Nay, Loron will be more of fire than of blood …’ plainly speaks to the reign of French emperor Napoleon, with ‘PAU, NAY, LORON’ an anagram for NAPAULON ROY. You know: ‘Roy’ as in French for ‘king.’ And then there was perhaps my most unsettling prognostication: ‘In the year 1999 from the sky will come the great King of Terror,’ which is an indisputable reference to George Lucas’s release of The Phantom Menace.”
A pudgy boy with a mop of stringy brown curls raised his hand.
“Prophecy involves a number of complex methodologies, Mr. Stawinski,” Nostradamus replied as the boy sheepishly lowered his hand. “There’s scrying, for one—”
Zane raised his hand.
“—which is the act of predicting the future using a crystal ball, Mr. Covington.”
Zane lowered his hand, baffled, as Mr. Nostradamus peered into a snow globe submerged in a small pool of milk on his cluttered desk.
“Hmm … the future is clouded,” the ancient man mumbled. “Well, one should never scry over spilt milk.… In any case, prophecy can also involve comparative horoscopy, where the planetary configurations corresponding with past historical events are used to predict similar events based on equivalent celestial arrangements. Also helpful are—”
Marlo raised her hand. Mr. Nostradamus studied her with unease.
“I … you … Mr. Fauster,” he faltered. “You … want to … know what sign I am—”
“Actually, I didn’t want to ask a question at all but to share a story,” Marlo said with a knowing smirk. “But nice job anticipating everybody’s questions based on the last thing you said, not quite explaining something so someone naturally has a question. It’s like when a lawyer leads the witless.”
“You mean witness,” the teacher interject
ed, his nostrils flared with outrage.
“Wrong again, Mr. Nostradamus,” she replied. “I meant what I said. Anyway, my mom went through a spooky phase when I was little. Numerology, horoscopes, hypnosis to stop smoking, which—in a way—worked because, after all those sessions, we were so broke that she couldn’t afford cigarettes. All in all, she was flakier than an apple turnover with psoriasis. When her favorite psychic, Yuri Null, predicted the end of the world, my mom wrote the date on our family calendar that hung on the refrigerator. The date that we were all supposed to die. The day came and, of course, nothing happened. At that point, I decided that life was just too short to worry about how short life was and that all that psychic friends network junk was bunk.”
Zane bit his lower lip to hold back his laughter. “Brilliant,” he snickered under his breath.
Marlo’s chest swelled with pride. Mr. Nostradamus, however, swelled with bristling irritation, like an anaconda that had just swallowed a porcupine. “While I have, with eerie precision, pinpointed the most significant events in history, I cannot pin down your point, Mr. Fauster,” the teacher spat through thin, foam-flecked lips in desperate need of Atomic Cherry Balm.
“Well … um … let me show you,” Marlo said as she sat up, scooted her desk back, and walked over to Colby’s desk.
“Hey, Colby. How’s it going?” she asked.
“Fine, I guess,” Colby replied, “though, as the real Dalai Lama, I find the air here super thick, not like back home in Tibet—”
Marlo punched Colby in the arm, then returned to her seat.
“Now watch,” Marlo said as she again rose from her desk and walked over to Colby, who was rubbing his aching shoulder. “Hello, Dalai. How’s it going?”
Colby flinched.
“Why’d you hit me, psycho?!” he replied, shrinking back in his seat.
Marlo smiled and returned to her seat.
“See?” she said as she crossed her brother’s legs.
Mr. Nostradamus scratched his wooly gray beard.
“Well, of course I knew you were going to do that,” he replied in a voice like a wheezy pair of bellows. “But perhaps you could explain to the students exactly why.”
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 6
