The quiet of Stay! was broken by the sounds of vehicles in the distance. Tires sliced and skidded across brittle newspaper. Suddenly, the klieg lights atop the guard tower exploded with their harsh accusing glare.
“Stay!” the recorded voice commanded. Two vans raced closer. One of the vans, a chugging Volkswagen bus covered in nappy pink faux fur, had THE REPEAT FURRARI stenciled sloppily on its side and was playing Beethoven’s “Für Elise” through a rooftop speaker. The other van, sleek and modern, sporting a satellite dish, had THE URN SHORT ATTENTION NEWS VAN detailed on its side. The vans squealed to a stop.
Marlo squinted through the bars—she just couldn’t get the hang of not having 20/20 vision—as the URN news crew set up their lights and cameras at the far wall of the fortress. Meanwhile, a half-dozen protesters spilled out of the fuzzy pink REPEAT van.
“Maybe all of this commotion can help us out,” Milton said as he kicked off his painful, irritating pumps. “Provide a distraction, while we find Lucky …”
Marlo chuckled.
“Odds are that he’s asleep,” she said. “Probably having this great dream about being asleep while we have to deal with this nightmare.”
Lucky reared back and hissed, arched with unfocused rage at all the awful creatures closing in around him.
Snarling, Annubis broke free of his muscular demon-captor’s grasp. The other two headless demons, sensing the dog god despite their being deaf and blind, lunged at him. Annubis bit hard into the hefty arm of the nearest demon, though the creature seemed unfazed as its skin was as unyielding as a fresh rawhide chew.
“Grab him!” Mr. de Hory yelled as hissing cats pounced upon the dog god. Annubis kicked away a spitting calico. It leapt at Mr. de Hory’s face, biting his mouth.
“Mwrghleorff!” he yelled as he tried to bat the cat away from his face.
“Cat got your tongue?” Annubis roared as he shoved the demon up the hemlock steps.
The headless/heartless demon staggered back into the vat and fell through the billowing film of sparks. The flickering layer flared angrily as the demon passed through, though the creature never emerged on the other side. It disappeared. Vaporized. The only remnant an oily white residue dripping down the insides of the vat, a phosphorescent grease that smelled of methane and old Certs, covered with lint, dredged from the bottom of some old lady’s handbag.
“Nulled,” Annubis panted as he gaped into the vat. “It’s true. Returned to nothing.”
He looked back over his shoulder as a headless/heartless demon seized Anput and Kebauet.
“What happened, Paw-paw?” Kebauet yapped.
“There is life and there is death,” Annubis sighed, his head hung low as the second remaining headless/heartless demon lumbered up the steps of the vat. “But there is also something else. And that something is … absolutely nothing.”
Lucky—coiled protectively around Kebauet’s ankles—stood suddenly erect, panting, gorging on a familiar scent wafting into the Kennels, undetectable to the rest but, to Lucky, the most wonderful scent in the world. The ferret bobbed and weaved but Cerberus matched and bested his every move.
“I won’t be scared, Paw-paw, you’ll see,” Kebauet said, more in hopes of convincing herself than her father. “Will it hurt?”
Mr. de Hory wiped his scratched, cat-spit-soaked face with a starched handkerchief.
“It vill feel like nothing,” the man interjected. “Like sleeping wizzout dreaming … wizzout ever waking. But if your father vould jest be a good doggie …”
Lucky’s pink eyes rolled to the back of his head. He fell to the ground at Annubis’s feet. Cerberus sniffed at the seemingly unconscious ferret with all three snouts. The hound of Heck moved in closer.
Lucky lunged at Cerberus, savaging his middle face, then sprang across the floor of the Kennels, his tiny nails scrabbling across the concrete. Simultaneously whimpering with pain and yowling with rage, the dog bounded after Lucky and out of the Kennels.
Marlo watched the media event she had hatched play out through the fortress bars. She clutched her arms together and trembled. She had been so concerned with meeting Milton in the Furafter that she had no idea what to do next.
“There’s something going on,” she murmured. “Not only here, but … everywhere. Vice Principal Barnum, Nostradamus—who knows who else—”
Lucky shot out of the Kennels, sniffed the air, and dove into the freshly dug hole inside the courtyard. The Scarecrows cawed from the parapets, unsettled by the cameras and lights below, and shifted in their roosts.
“Something big is about to happen on the Surface,” Milton said. “We’ll figure it all out once we get Lucky and find Annubis so he can switch us back.”
Lucky emerged from the other end of the hole, hopped up on a stack of old GYP newspapers, and caught the scent of his owner.
“Lucky!” Milton cried out as his ferret scrambled toward him. Lucky skidded to a stop, sniffing both Milton and Marlo. Though confused by their muddled scents, Lucky finally settled on Milton, currently inhabiting his sister’s body.
“You escaped!” Milton said as he stooped down to scoop up his pet. Lucky fought the urge to hop into his master’s arms, and—with a full-body twitch—doubled back and headed for the tunnel.
“Where are you going?” Milton shouted as he ran after Lucky, with Marlo close behind. “Where’s Annubis? Wait!”
Milton and Marlo stepped into the mouth of the tunnel after Lucky.
“Marlo?!” Zane called through cupped hands. “Where are you scarpering off to?”
Marlo turned and gave Zane her widest, brightest smile … only, as she was her grubby runt-of-a-brother, her attempt to dazzle merely puzzled.
“I—” Marlo attempted before Milton jabbed her with his elbow.
“We’ll be right back,” Milton explained. “We’re just scouting locations.”
Van Glorious, rubbing his black eye, gave Marlo a thumbs-up.
“That’s my girl!” he called out to Milton as he yanked his sister into the hole. On their hands and knees, Milton and Marlo crawled through the tunnel after Lucky. Marlo chuckled.
“That’s my girl?” she mocked.
“Shut up,” Milton replied, sweating in the cramped space that felt as if it were strangling his entire body. “I’m sure we have … all sorts of dirt on one another. We can come clean once … we find out what … Lucky is freaking out … about.”
Lucky shot out of the tunnel and back through the portal leading to the Kennels. Milton and Marlo pushed themselves up out of the hole and into the fortress courtyard, as pressed-sawdust earth spilled back into the tunnel.
Cerberus came running out of the Kennels just as Lucky whizzed past him. Not a creature built for sudden changes in movement, the three-headed lapdog skidded and rolled on the crow-dropping-encrusted floor as each head gave its hapless body conflicting orders.
“Cerberus?” Milton murmured with alarm as he scanned the inner courtyard for Lucky. “Here? I hope that doesn’t mean—”
“There’s Lucky!” Marlo yelled, spotting the wispy ferret back in the Kennels rushing down an aisle bisecting a massive pile of crates. “He went through that weird round doorway. C’mon!”
Cerberus righted himself and—his six eyes fixing upon the Fausters—galloped toward them.
Filled with disgust at seeing the horrible, three-headed lapdog that had terrorized her back in Limbo, Marlo sprinted toward Cerberus and punted him full-force into the spherical portal leading to the Really Big Farm.
“Touchdown!” Marlo shrieked as she turned to join her brother rushing toward the Kennels.
“I think you mean a goal,” Milton said as he dove into the portal, his skin prickling with electricity, rushing to keep up with Lucky several yards ahead of them.
“This place is awful.” Marlo grimaced as she entered the wretched warehouse of imprisoned pets. “The noise … the smell.”
She pulled the collar of her hair pajama top over her face as she ran
alongside her brother, their bare feet slapping against the concrete floor, racing after Lucky toward the back of the Kennels.
They cleared a winding wall of crate towers and skidded to a halt. A group of assorted creatures surrounded a large tub nestled in a clearing of crates. Ushered up the steps by a gruesome, headless meat-doughnut demon was—
“Annubis!” Milton yelled.
The dog god snapped his head back as a headless/heartless demon shoved him to the rim of the vat.
“Milton! Marlo!” he bayed. “Do something!”
Marlo, never one for thinking a plan through mentally before enacting it physically, instinctively plunged her hand into her satchel, removing the last of the truth bombs. She brought it back over her shoulder.
“What is that?!” Milton shouted.
“It’s a bomb,” she said as she pitched it over her head toward the vat.
“A bomb?!” Milton repeated with disbelief.
“Yeah,” Marlo replied as she hit the floor. “No lie.”
23 • THAT’S THE WAY THE KOOKS CRUMBLE
THE THREE BLOND boys walked down Avenue 51 in downtown Topeka, Kansas. The tallest, wearing a Teenage Jesus T-shirt, turned back to his friends.
“Just be cool, like TJ, got it?” he said, whispering, as Topeka—which means “a good place to dig potatoes” in the languages of the Kansa and the Ioway peoples—slowly yawned and stretched in the early morning air. “I know it seems wrong, but it’s one of those wrongs that’s right, okay?”
The two shorter boys—one wearing a Keepin’ It Christian T-shirt, the other a There’s a Methodist to My Madness tee—nodded, their curly hair flopping into their eyes.
“Okay,” the tall boy said as he popped a Final Judgmint in his mouth, wincing as his tongue crackled briefly with electric yet undeniably minty pain. “Here they are.”
Plastered across the plywood wall of a boarded-up lot were dozens of posters touting the season finale of Allah in the Family. The tall boy handed his friends some black T.H.E.E.N.D.-branded Sharpies.
“Like the ads on T.H.E.E.N.D. say,” he explained as he uncapped his pen, “if we want our favorite shows back next season, then they have to win the ratings war, all right? And the website gave us all those great ideas how to make that happen, even if it comes to defacing public property, which is totally against the law. But we have to obey a higher power: television. So let’s be quick.”
The boys nodded and proceeded to scrawl the word “sucks” to the posters.
“This one’s out of ink,” one of the boys muttered as someone behind him offered a red T.H.E.E.N.D. Sharpie. “Wow, cool. Red. Where’d you get this …?”
The boys turned to find three dark-skinned boys—wearing Allah in the Family, Wholly Shiite, and Malibu Mosque T-shirts—standing behind them, glaring, biting into freshly unwrapped Doomsdanishes. The leader, a boy with black close-cropped hair and big ears, pointed over his shoulder, across the street, with his thumb.
On the other side of the avenue, against a boarded-up Liquid Paper Depot store, were dozens of Teenage Jesus posters, with the word “sucks” scrawled upon each one in red.
“Why, you … !” the tall blond boy said as he set himself upon the leader of the rival gang. A little boy with a shaved head walked past in his Peek-a-Buddha T-shirt.
“Hey, guys,” the boy said with a peaceful smile. “Free yourself from this cycle of conditioned existence and suffering … oww!”
The boys dragged the peace-loving passerby into their brawl. As the seven boys exchanged blows, Lester Lobe—owner of the area’s only metaphysical museum, the Paranor Mall—shuffled out onto the sidewalk to put out his extraterrestrial-shaped sandwich board.
“Hey, not cool!” the wild-eyed man yelled, straightening his red fez.
The kids stopped brawling and stared at the crazy old man in the pink-and-green camouflage Bermuda shorts and combat boots.
“I ain’t no friend of ‘the man,’ but I’ll yell ‘sooie’ and bring the pigs out here so fast, your heads’ll spin around like in The Exorcist!”
The boys had no idea what the man was shrieking about, but rightly assumed that his rant had something to do with calling the police. They scattered.
Lester shook his head and muttered.
“Man, I’m on edge,” he said as he drained his second cup of chewing tobacco juice, espresso, and blue-green VitaMold powder. “It’s those KOOK tenants of mine. I feel like a stranger in my own strange land.”
He pushed open the door—his entrance announced by the five tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind—and stepped into his crowded, cockeyed cathedral of curiosities.
The Paranor Mall was an 800-square-foot collection of supernatural-themed ephemera, including a big rhinestone-encrusted Psychomanthium, otherwise known as the Elvis Abduction Chamber.
But, due to the recession—which had been murder on the fringe phenomena industry—Lester had been forced to sublet half of his museum to the KOOKs, otherwise known as the Knights of the Omniversalist Order Kinship, to make ends meet.
As a condition of their lease agreement, Lester had made the KOOKs part of his Krazy Kultz exhibit just so that the Paranor Mall wouldn’t lose its “flow.” Puzzlingly, the new exhibit was drawing better crowds than all of his other displays combined.
I suppose it makes some sense, Lester thought as he flipped the sign in the window from CLOSED MIND to OPEN MIND, with all the wackiness, paranoia, and tension in the world lately—especially with all of those weird new TV shows—people are confused, seeking answers in unlikely places.…
Lester Lobe shivered as twelve-year-old Damian Ruffino emerged from his tent. He was a living exhibit, the preadolescent “prophet” of the KOOKs’ religion, their bratty “Bridge to the Other Side.”
The big-boned bruiser stretched, farted, then spat out a moist clump of sunflower seed husks, tinted in a rainbow of artificial colors due to a mouthful of Gummi Worms.
That boy puts the “mess” in “messiah,” Lester thought with disgust.
“Aren’t you going to clean that up?” Lester said as he glared at the shells scattered about the floor.
“My followers love doing that stuff for me,” he replied groggily. “Makes them feel useful. And who am I to take that away from them? Oh wait—I’m their salvation, their almighty Bridge to the Omniverse. I’m also the kid who keeps your lights on, so even if you don’t believe in me, you surely believe in my money, don’t you, old man?”
Lester clenched his fists and gritted his yellow, nicotine-stained teeth.
“Didn’t your parents ever teach you any manners, you little creep?” Lester seethed, his morning mellow irreparably harshed.
Damian ran a hand through his dark, curly hair and yawned.
“Why should kids respect old people just because they’re old?” he replied. “They’ve only had more time to screw things up. Like my parents. Ever since I came back from the dead, they just don’t get me. Not like they ever did, but—man, after that cheapo funeral they threw me—it was obvious. Nothing like being dead to see what people really think about you. So me and today’s kids are just taking what we can while we can.…”
Lester shook his head as he dusted the twinkling papier-mâché flying saucer suspended from the museum’s rafters.
“Milton wasn’t like that,” he murmured sadly. “Like you.”
Damian chuckled as he slipped on his sour, crunchy sweat socks.
“Good ol’ Milquetoast,” he muttered as he searched for his Doc Martens. “First I send him to Heck, then he escapes and sends me there, then he goes back down while the KOOKs drag me up. He and I just can’t seem to hook up … but we will. Oh, boy, will we ever.”
Damian gave his laces an angry tug, snapping them. Lester stifled a laugh.
“I’ll be out of your hair soon … what’s left of it,” the boy seethed as he leveled his dark gaze at Lester Lobe, his eyes compressing into sinister slits, as if he were trying to crush Lester with his eyelids.
“And you’ll all wish you had treated me better. You’ll see.…”
The five tones from the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme chimed as two of Damian’s fellow KOOKs stepped into the Paranor Mall.
The Guiding Knight threw off his gold Members Only jacket, revealing his blue ceremonial robe. The middle-aged man’s face was so angular that it could have been used for a geometry test. Next to him was Necia Alvarado, a twitchy, ratlike girl with eyes as dark and fathomless as an abandoned well. They both set down canvas bags marked VitaMold.
“Where’s the rest of my flock?” Damian said, glaring at the Guiding Knight.
The thin, vaguely wizardish man (perhaps it was the robe) stiffened with irritation.
“Most of your flock have jobs: that’s when you agree to perform a certain task in exchange for pay,” the Guiding Knight replied, his tone like an overly starched shirt. “And, on top of that, you have us all selling this VitaMold stuff.”
“It’s not selling,” Damian corrected. “It’s providing marketing opportunities. At least that’s what my lawyer says, Algernon Cole—”
“Lawyer!” laughed Lester as he combed out Bigfoot’s back. “Right, and I voted for Nixon.…”
“Just tell my flock to show up when it’s convenient for them to worship me as their Bridge,” Damian continued. “He who will cross over to prepare for their imminent arrival in the Next Life, and hasten the Last Days, which serve as our new beginning.”
The Guiding Knight set his bag down.
“Speaking of ‘hastening,’ ” the man said as he unfolded a card table and set out a stack of Get KOOKy: Why It’s AWESOME to Be in a Death Cult! pamphlets, “your flock is getting restless.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Damian said as he strung a black tie around his neck. “You just tell my flock that I’ve been really busy on their behalf. Sure, we have had some setbacks, like getting kicked out of Mazel Top-to-Bottom after Milquetoast’s dumb ferret Lucky got killed—”
Necia’s eyes grew wet. She wiped her nose with her bony, clawlike hand.
“He wasn’t dumb, O Bridge,” Necia said as she unbuckled her black wool coat. “Lucky was sweet. Just vicious and unpredictable.”
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 17
