“True,” the doctor said with a nod.
“The thing is, you are—whether you know it or not—helping him to spread some nasty viral marketing thingie up on the Surface. Something he said would seem real … and, I’m guessing—considering the source—real bad.”
Dr. Brinkley’s feathers ruffled as his head hung low.
“He would have told me,” the doctor said sadly. “After my team of Night Mares were … were”—the doctor sniffed back a tear—“flattened by Fibble, he offered me a position as a partner.”
Marlo scooted her chair closer to the doctor until they were almost knee-to-knee.
“And you believed him?” she asked. “A man who made his living, and apparently his dying, too, telling the biggest, most fantastic lies imaginable?”
Dr. Brinkley absentmindedly picked at the webbing between his fingers as he stared at beakers of burbling liquid truth.
“My Night Mares,” he muttered.
Marlo heard stirring outside the door. She padded across the floor and peered out the window. The chameleon guards, though still unconscious, were coming to. Their luminous white skin gradually emulated the grimy yellow-orange sawdust strewn across the floor.
“Your Night Mares,” Marlo repeated as her mind chewed on a faint idea that suddenly burst in her head like a Blow Pop. She turned to face the doleful duck.
“We can’t believe anything around here,” she said. “So let’s check out the Big Top to see for ourselves if your horsies really are today’s special at the International House of Pony Pancakes … and maybe I-hop the next stagecoach out of Fibble.”
Dr. Brinkley fluttered to the door as Marlo crept out into the empty-save-for-several-semiconcious-lizards hallway. The two snuck down the dim, smoky corridor, hugging the drywalled walls, until they reached the Big Top.
Marlo scanned the less-than-grandstands, shrouded in clots of shadow, and grabbed the doctor’s hand.
“C’mon,” she said before taking her hand back and grimacing. “Eww … clammy.”
“Shhh!” Dr. Brinkley said as he pointed to the Feejee Mermaid hung on the wall, asleep, sucking in air through its dried-up sliver of a nose and snoring out through its gills. Scattered across the seats were sleeping shrimp demons and Tom Thumb—his tiny top hat covering his eyes.
Marlo nodded. She crouched down and scooted toward the center of the ring, where a large hoop framing a sheet of paper painted like a bull’s-eye lay on the ground. She waved the doctor over. They slunk down at the target’s edge, then crawled to the center on their bellies. Marlo began pounding the thick paper.
“Are you insane?” Dr. Brinkley hissed. Marlo, on her stomach in the middle of a darkened circus talking to a duck, had to admit that this was a valid question. “We’ll tear right through and join my flat little foals,” the doctor explained.
Marlo swallowed as she contemplated plummeting several hundred feet to the frozen Falla Sea.
“Understood,” she whispered as she carefully pressed her fingers into the paper. Unfortunately, Milton’s nails weren’t chewed into sharp points like hers, but—by twisting her fingers—Marlo was able to drill two holes into the bull’s-eye. She peered through the ragged punctures. Marlo gasped at the distance between her and the rugged ground below.
The two demon guards, wearing their scary brass metal masks, sat inside the Gates of Fibble at the center of the brightly colored concentric rings. Marlo strained to see beyond the gates until there, at the edge of sight, she saw a pair of gleaming black horses, snorting and stomping their hooves in the cold.
“Guess what?” Marlo smiled. “Mr. Pants-on-fire is a total liar. See for yourself.”
She rolled away to let Dr. Brinkley take a gander.
“Shuck and Jive!” he exclaimed. “My Night Mares are alive!”
The Feejee Mermaid stirred, giving its hurdy-gurdy a sharp squeeze before returning back to sleep. Marlo crept close to the doctor.
“That means if we can get down, we can get out,” she whispered. “It’s just a question of … um, down-and-out. But before we vamoose-and-squirrel out of here, we do a number on the vice principal’s lab so he can’t spread his junky ads and freaky-deeky products up on the Surface—as if there’s even any room for more junky ads and freaky-deeky products up there. So … are you with me?”
The edges of Dr. Brinkley’s bill curled up into a smile as he tore his gaze away from the eye holes.
“If I was found out by Mr. Barnum, I’m afraid I’d be one dead duck,” he whispered. “We must work in stealth, and be extra careful not to draw attention to ourselves.”
With that, a thundering bell tolled and the Big Top flooded with light.
“Quack!”
“Quick!” Marlo yelped.
“Quack?”
“The morning bell!” Marlo clarified as the sleeping shrimps awoke. “Let’s go!”
Marlo and Dr. Brinkley raced out of the Big Top, leaving an incriminating cloud of sawdust behind them, and entered the main Classroom and Boarding tent. Above them on the exposed second level, grumbling boys emerged sleepily from their bunks.
“You should get back to the lab,” Marlo panted as fresh glitter-smoke—otherwise known as, Marlo now knew, liedocaine—wafted down upon them. “I’ll drop by tonight.”
Dr. Brinkley skipped down the hallway, delighted at the prospect of being free as a bird, even if that meant running a-waterfowl of Barnum. Marlo dashed to the ladder leading to the bunks.
“What do you think you’re doing this morning?” boomed the vice principal from behind her. “Actually, save your excuses … I know where you’ve been, what you’ve done—” He stopped suddenly, then added with a wretched cackle, “and where you’re going!”
14 • EVERYBODY WANTS TO FOOL THE WORLD
THE MAN WHO SOLDETH THE WORLD
PART TWO: THE TEAM
MILTON COULD ONLY catch brief glimpses of the man behind the camera—fleeting, garbled reflections caught in a crystal mug brimming with some steaming elixir. The mysterious figure sat at an immaculate marble table cluttered with manila envelopes and videocassettes.
“The perfect crime requireth the perfect team,” the man said, his flawless voice burning like ice-cold fire. “And I am, humbly, as neareth to perfection as one can be. Nearethly. But all that may change if I can zingest a fast one past He Who Apparently Knoweth All and start my own heaven. And—who knoweth?—perhaps by swindling a supposedly omniscient entity, I could one day lay claim to His tarnished kingdom as well … but I digress …”
In the man’s white-gloved hand was what looked like a contact lens. He affixed it to one of the envelopes, where it was virtually invisible.
Milton, nestled inside the cramped, multiscreened tomb of the Vidiot Box, examined the manila envelope in which this latest videocassette had arrived. There, just above the address, was a tiny, nearly imperceptible lens. Milton looked back up at the screen.
The image of the marble table, stacks of handwritten notes, envelopes, and swaying tendrils of burning incense blinked.
A contact lens camera! Milton thought. Like the one Principal Bubb put in Cerberus’s eye back in Limbo to track us! That’s how he’s able to record everything he does.
“It taketh teamwork for a team to work,” the man continued as he folded several impeccably inscribed parchment notes into an envelope. “But when your team is composed of charlatans, frauds, and career criminals, you suddenly find yourself with an abundance of self-serving Is in the word “team.” Which is why each member of my team haveth no idea that they are actually on my team … or anyone else’s, for that matter. Brilliant, of course, though blowing one’s trumpet is a sin, so I’ll leave it for history to decide … that is, before history itself is history.…”
The man wrote a name on an envelope with a white quill dipped in ink. Milton blew away his sister’s irritating blue hair that was always getting in her face. The name was Elmyr de Hory. Address: The Furafter.
“Let us meet them
now!” the man declared in a voice as cool and unyielding as marble. The image spasmed with bursts of static before settling on the suspicious face of an old man with refined features and a pink-and-green paisley ascot cinched to his neck. “Firstly is master forger Elmyr de Hory.”
The elegant man, Mr. de Hory, arched his eyebrow to the camera quizzically as he set it down—apparently a contact lens camera attached to an envelope, Milton surmised—and squinted at the almost too-florid-to-be-deciphered handwriting of the notes within. Behind Mr. de Hory were rows and rows of cages.
“Ridding the earth of human infestation without actually … K-I-L-L-I-N-G them—or arousing undue suspicion—is a thorny endeavor, which is why I must forgeth a billion or so makeshift souls and transfer them to the afterlife at the exact moment of relocation,” the man explained off-camera as the image fast-forwarded to Mr. de Hory sculpting a shimmering hologram of globs and sparkles with a pen laser. “Mr. De Hory, as the world’s greatest art forger, is deftly fashioning a mold approximating the human soul that—after the souls of forgotten, forlorn animals trapped in the Kennels are melted down—will be used to cast as many convincing knockoffs as needed.”
The image flickered again, now showing Mr. Welles raising his eyebrow as he opened the envelope containing the first The Man Who Soldeth the World episode. Milton—as Marlo—joined the portly director.
“Second is master of dramatic illusion Mr. Orson Welles,” the man continued in his eerily smooth voice. “He who-eth perpetrated one of the most ambitious hoaxes of all time: an ingenious radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. By presenting fantasy as fact, he convinced listeners that the Earth was under Martian invasion.”
The image on the monitor crackled back to the man scribbling notes with his quill on what looked like, to Milton, a script.
“This time I will helpeth him to effectuate another brilliant Wellesian ruse, only this time presenting fact as fantasy.”
The man lifted his crystal mug from a white lace doily to take a sip of his steaming, almost luminous beverage. Written on the doily in fussy cursive calligraphy was REVELATION 12:7.
The image, after a brief seizure of static, resolved to another hidden-contact-lens view of a froggish fop of a man, roasting marshmallows over what looked like a pair of flaming trousers.
“Third is P. T. Barnum,” the man continued, “the famous showman and charlatan who turned his wily frauds into wild applause. His celebrated hoaxes were spectacles that even the most jaded human couldn’t—”
“Miss Fauster?” Mr. Welles said suddenly from behind Milton.
Milton’s nervous system blew a fuse. Startled, he instinctively slapped off the VCR.
“What are … were you watching?” the director rumbled from the doorway of the Vidiot Box. Luckily, Milton thought with relief, Mr. Welles was an enormous round man who couldn’t fit through the box’s square-shaped hole.
“The Man Who Soldeth the World,” Milton blurted out, lacking Marlo’s ability to instantly prevaricate. He warily eyed Mr. Welles’s reflection in the darkened television monitor.
“Oh … how was this latest installment?”
Milton was at a loss at how to proceed. He still didn’t know what to make of the disturbing show. If it was all true, why would the mysterious man confess his crime in the making? Did he believe that, if you made the truth so convoluted and ridiculous, no one would believe it? Should he confide in Mr. Welles—an unwitting costar in the show—or would that only make things worse, leaving Milton without any possible bargaining chip later on if he had actually uncovered some kind of conspiracy.…
“Miss Fauster, you’re doing it again … too much internal dialogue and not enough action. Show, don’t tell.…”
“Right,” Milton answered as he swiveled to face Mr. Welles. “It’s just that—”
Mr. Welles cleared his spacious throat, breaking up a family of phlegm globs.
“In any case, I need you to run an errand for me,” he said as he turned and walked away through a humming hive of technical assistants.
Milton tucked the videocassette into his bag and followed Mr. Welles to the Hellywood Hole stage. The first episode of The Man Who Soldeth the World had been cleared for broadcast, but Milton decided to hold on to the second episode for the time being. A mindless errand will give me time to sort out what to do, he thought, as he joined Mr. Welles at the edge of the stage, which had been transformed into a suburban New Jersey synagogue.
Mr. Welles scanned the tacky set, his sagging eyes shining with disgust.
“This is not a synagogue, but a sin of gawdy-awfulness!”
A nervous demon slicked back his seaweed-like hair. Mr. Welles yanked away the creature’s clipboard.
“Looks like we’ll have to reshoot Queen of the Shebrews, where Newark’s most stylish superheroine, Bat Mitzvah, is revealed by her archenemy, the Jersey Jokester,” he grumbled as he flipped through the production notes. “Did you manage to shoot The Ethel Mormon Show?”
“J-just the ‘When the Latter-Day Saints Come Marching In’ musical number,” the twitchy demon gurgled back, licking his pencil-thin mustache.
The hunched mail delivery demon chose that inopportune moment to push his cart to the side of the stage.
“Delivery for Mr. Welles—”
“Miss Fauster!” the director shouted.
Milton grabbed the familiar manila envelope: another episode of The Man Who Soldeth the World!
Mr. Welles sighed, his chest collapsing like a gargantuan soufflé at a heavy metal concert.
“Do what you can to make this set worthy of the Chosen People!” he barked, thrusting the clipboard back to his slimy, kelp-haired assistant director. “Sancho!” Mr. Welles yelled, raising his arm with a flourish. “Stage switch, por favor.”
Sancho nodded his sombreroed head and yanked the massive lever.
The immense rotating stage shifted, settling on a set with a grim backdrop of smoke, fire, and epic desolation. Four glamorous teenage girls on small prancing ponies clopped onto the stage, each wearing a unique glittery T-shirt: “Pestilence,” “War,” “Famine,” and “Death.” The girl on a sickly Camarillo pony, Pestilence, carried a buzzing jar in one hand. War, on a red-spotted apocalyptic Appaloosa, carried a sword. Famine, riding atop an emaciated horse a few cents short of a quarter pony, held a scale in one hand, while the skeletal Death held a tin of something labeled FINAL JUDGMINTS® as she steadied her deathly pale Shetland.
Mr. Welles stooped down to grab a stack of scripts from a messenger bag leaning against the stage.
“Miss Fauster,” he grunted as he handed Milton the pile of scripts. Each was lacerated with so much red ink that it appeared to be bleeding.
“The Big Guy Downstairs had a lot of changes for the series finales. Especially the endings, which seem pretty … final, if you ask me. Have the writers make the changes, immediately.”
Mr. Welles stalked over to the camera.
“This will just take a moment, ladies,” he told the actresses as he squinted through the viewfinder. “I’ve got to rescue The Queen of the Shebrews, so we’ll have to do this in one take … but I’d expect nothing less from the Four Pretty Ponies of the Apocalypse.”
Milton flipped through the scripts. As Mr. Welles had said, each of the cliff-hanger endings had been scribbled out and replaced with new conclusions, each one more dark, abrupt, and calamitous than the last. Teenage Jesus, for instance, was to have ended with the title character bailing on college and going on a European road trip to “find himself” instead. Now the devil wanted Teenage Jesus to be believed dead, only to return three days later to confront his malevolent Auntie Christ, bringing about the end of the world: a sweeping wave of destruction, led by four young divas releasing pestilence, war, famine, death, and …
Milton waved away a buzzing insect.
Locusts.
“The Revelation will be televised,” Mr. Welles chuckled. “Action!”
Milton looked up at the st
age, swarming with ravenous flying locusts streaming out of Pestilence’s jar.
“Make your last breath your best!” Pestilence said with a grinning mouth full of rotten teeth.
“Because when we come to judge you,” War added, “don’t you want your breath to be minty fresh?”
“Right before we take it away!” Famine laughed.
Death flipped open the tin of mints and popped one into her mouth. Unfortunately, her head was nothing more than a grinning skull smeared with makeup, and the mint fell through her jaw. Her fellow pony princesses laughed.
“Oh, Death,” Pestilence clucked. “Go take a holiday … but be back soon. We’ve got a lot of work to do!”
A surge of dread flooded Milton’s borrowed body. He sat down at the edge of the stage.
Satan and—
Milton looked down at the manila envelope containing the latest episode of The Man Who Soldeth the World.
—whoever are not only plotting the biggest reality TV event the world has ever seen, Milton thought with a shiver, but I get a creepy feeling they want it to be the last.
15 • ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO BE TIED
“I KNOW WHERE you’ve been, what you’ve done, and where you’re going …,” P. T. Barnum bellowed. “So what do you have to say for yourself?!”
The vice principal’s words were tranquilizer darts paralyzing Marlo, inside and out. Somehow P. T. Barnum had found her out, but how?
The boys filed out of the Totally Bunks above her on the second floor of the boarding tent, oblivious to Marlo’s predicament.
“Can’t he keep it down?” Colby whined as he changed out of his hair pajamas into his Fibble uniform. “I have sensitive ears, ever since I had that bat-blood transfusion.…”
Marlo drew in a deep breath and turned to face her tormenter.
“I can explain,” she said in her brother’s unsteady voice. “It’s really—”
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 10
