“Well, it was the excuse Grizzly Mall needed to kick us out,” Damian continued. “But look: we’re actually part of a museum now. In downtown Topeka, not that yahooville Generica! And Algernon Cole is working hard on settling my multiple suits against Generica General Hospital and the Barry M. Deepe Funeral Parlor. In the meantime, he helped me to invest our membership dues into something big—now we’re the regional distributor for VitaMold fungus-based nutriticeutical drinks!”
“Have you actually tasted this stuff?” The Guiding Knight grimaced as he kicked his VitaMold bag in the corner, where it joined three dozen other bags. “It’s like licking an old basement.”
Lester Lobe shrugged as he drained his cup.
“I actually like it,” he said as he blew the tassel of his fez out of his eyes. “It’s got an … earthy taste.”
“See?” Damian shot back. “Freaky old hippies like it! And no, I haven’t tasted it, but that doesn’t matter. VitaMold is a conversation starter, a way to get suckers interested in the cult.”
The Guiding Knight tugged on his droopy blue silk hat while Lester clipped pictures from a stack of tabloid magazines and glued them to the side of the Psychomanthium.
“Maybe, but—” the Guiding Knight interjected.
“But nothing,” Damian interrupted. “I’ve also got that book idea brewing. And once that’s finished, it’ll not only make us some money, it’ll be the first wave of propaganda for the cult. Better than those lame pamphlets.”
“Have you even read a book?” the Guiding Knight replied.
Damian scratched at a tiny white feather growing out of his chin.
“It’s like VitaMold,” he replied. “I don’t have to taste it to sell it. Sure, I haven’t had a lot of luck writing the book myself. That’s why I found a ghostwriter.”
“Oooh, spooky!” Necia replied as she helped Lester snip pictures from magazines.
“No,” Damian said, pressing his thumbs into his temples, “a writer to write the book for me: Dale E. Basye. The guy that writes those dumb Fartisimo Family books.”
“My mom won’t let me read those,” Necia said as she cut out a picture of a bat-boy flying over the Great Pyramid. “She says that their … gas … is a metaphor for demonic possession.”
“The point is that I’m doing a lot while all you folks do is sit around and complain,” Damian continued. “Now I need some time to myself. Business …”
Damian pulled out a Ouija board, a pad of paper, and a pen from his tent. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Damian set the heart-shaped planchette on the board, touched it delicately, and closed his eyes. The wooden heart quivered momentarily, then slowly slid to the letter Y, then O, then U …
Damian opened one of his eyes and reached for his pen and paper with his other hand. He strung the letters together on the pad.
Damian sighed. This was the third time he had received the exact same message when trying to contact Satan in the not-so-great beyond. He flipped back through the pad of paper.
Damian shoved aside the Ouija board and paper.
Forsaken by Satan, he thought as he threw himself back on a white beanbag chair. Well, I’ve got it all covered. He’ll be so proud of me. Can the devil be proud? Pride’s a sin, so yeah. Then he’ll give me everything I want: absolute, corruptive power over all. Send more souls his way by lying to kids, telling them how fun and awesome the afterlife is. And then let me rule over them. The only thing Satan doesn’t see coming is that I’ll train these stupid kids to be my personal army, and when we turn eighteen, the devil is due for a big, bad surprise.…
The Guiding Knight glowered at Damian, who was slouched back on his white beanbag chair spitting sunflower seed husks onto the floor like some lazy, freakishly large chicken with a raging superiority complex. A chicken, the Guiding Knight mused as he recalled, with regret, the moment he and his fellow KOOKs had brought Damian back from the dead using the sacrificial energies of twenty-seven Rhode Island Reds. Damian seemed, himself, a big chicken in the “letting a religious cult take your life so that you may prepare the everlasting everyplace beyond for its 14,217 believers across the Northern Hemisphere” department. Worse than that, the boy’s attitude was having a devastating effect on cult morale, especially among the elder members.
The Guiding Knight sighed and picked at the nachos stain on his midnight-blue robe.
If the Bridge of the Knights of the Omniversalist Order Kinship, subordinate chapter of the lower Midwest sect, won’t play nice by letting me slit his obnoxious throat up on the altar so that he may cross to the other side and we can get this whole death cult thing moving along, the Guiding Knight mused, then he leaves me no choice but to give him a firm shove through death’s door.…
24 • THE CATASTROPHE’S MEOW
“WHAT WAS THAT?” Barbra Seville asked her crew as she peered into the fortress courtyard. Her cameraman, a paunchy fellow with a receding gray hairline, shrugged his shoulders.
“Sounded like some kind of explosion,” he said with a hand-rolled cigarette balanced between his lips.
Five REPEAT protesters jogged to the fence—their ANIMAL RIGHTS/PEOPLE WRONGS, CRUEL AIN’T COOL, and NEVER FUR-GET! signs resting on their shoulders.
“An atomic flea bomb?” the group’s dowdy leader, Brigid Brophy, speculated.
Another protester—a freckle-faced woman with pigtails and overalls—frowned.
“I don’t, you know, think so,” she murmured as she eyed the energetic portal to the Kennels. “There’d be, like, tiny portobello-sized mushroom clouds.”
Barbra beckoned her crew toward the fence, crooking her finger.
“This is Barbra Seville with URN News—no snooze, just news—reporting to you live from the Furafter,” she said, holding her microphone urgently as she wedged herself into the line of protesters. “I am at the epicenter of a raging volcano of controversy, a pro-pets protest that is testing the patience of authorities here, if the sound of explosions can be believed. The only question is how this band of animal-loving—”
Barbra examined the five drab, visually unthreatening women and crinkled her brow.
“—Amazons will retaliate.…”
Annubis stirred to consciousness. He rolled on his side to see his family, motionless beside him.
“Are you all right?!” he yelped as he clutched Kebauet’s emaciated arm.
His wife and daughter nodded groggily. Annubis sighed with relief as he eased himself upright.
Crates lay strewn about the Kennels, coated with a clinging, silvery vapor that drifted across the concrete floor, then climbed up the crates on hazy, glittering tendrils.
Virginia Woof lay on her back at the base of the Nullification Tub. She sneezed herself awake and rolled over, having played dead a little too convincingly for her liking. The Speak & Spell strapped to her side was crushed and useless.
Annubis sniffed the air. The fog tickled his nose and smelled faintly of menthol. He could detect the acrid stench of animal fear wafting from the crates, but not the dark, uncomplicated musk of the headless/heartless demons. Annubis peered into the vat. Beneath the flitting eddy of sparks was a dull film of translucent sludge.
The demons must have tumbled in, Annubis thought, and were energetically undone. Their soul residue is so weak … barely there at all.
Milton and Marlo lay on the concrete floor under a small pile of fallen crates. Lucky rippled forward like a Slinky sheathed in a fuzzy white sock. He licked Milton’s face. Milton opened his eyes, reaching out of habit for the glasses he no longer needed, seeing the world through his sister’s sharp, kleptomaniac’s eyes.
“We’re …?” he mumbled before sitting up with a start. “The bomb!”
Marlo stirred sluggishly awake.
“The bomb?” she mumbled. “No one says that anymore.…”
She bolted up.
“The truth bomb!”
Annubis strode toward the Fausters and knelt down before them.
“You saved
us … me and my family,” the noble dog god relayed as he placed his paws on the Fausters’ shoulders. “For that I am eternally grateful. And, as I am a several-thousand-year-old demigod, the phrase ‘eternally grateful’ really means something.…”
Milton wrapped his arms around Annubis and hugged him tight. Annubis felt solid. Real. And—as Milton wasn’t exactly himself, awash in a raging river of lies—holding on to the dog god felt like clutching a life preserver. Reassuring and hopeful. Annubis patted Milton’s head.
“Ah, Milton … that’s right,” he said with his curled dog smile. “I almost forgot I had switched your souls.”
He turned to address Marlo.
“Tell me about the device you used to thwart our nullification,” Annubis said. “It had a peculiar explosive power, seeming to vanquish only those in need of vanquishing.”
“Nullification?” Milton asked. “You mean, that vat would have neutralized you?”
“Yes,” Annubis replied somberly, looking back at his family. “But about this bomb—”
“Truth bomb,” Marlo replied as she rubbed an aching lump on her forehead. “I got it from a doctor back in Fibble. A big duck. He made it using liquid truth and little white lice, that—when smooshed together—make a big explosion.”
Annubis rubbed his bristly chin in contemplation.
“A volatile blend of fact and fission,” he said with a nod. “Lobbed in the nick of time, too.”
Someone moaned from behind the vat. Virginia Woof bounded toward the slow, pained groan. After several seconds of delighted yaps, an old man rose to his sandaled feet.
“Mr. Noah,” Annubis muttered as he stood tall, straightening his tunic and smoothing down his ruffled fur.
Milton and Marlo helped each other to their feet and stared, slack-jawed, at the ancient man with the flowing white beard and robe as he scritched the terrier in his arms.
“Mr. Noah … as in the Noah?” Milton asked as he tucked his sister’s unruly blue hair behind his ears.
“A robe, huh?” Marlo replied with a smirk. “I guess I always expected him to be wearing floods … get it? You know, cropped pants that aren’t quite capris? Because of the ark and—”
Milton nudged Marlo hard in the side.
“Show some respect,” he whispered as the Fausters followed Annubis to the Nullification Tub. “Especially since he’ll think you’re me.”
Annibus extended his paw-hand to Noah, who—after setting Virginia Woof gently down to the ground—shook the dog god’s hand warmly, his restraints hanging, shredded, from his wrists.
“Mr. Noah,” Annubis said with reverence. “My name is Annubis. Can you tell me what happened here?”
Noah scratched the thick hair coursing out of the rag cinched around his head. Milton had never seen a face with so many lines carved upon it before. It looked like a street map of New York etched on skin. The ancient man smiled a toothless grin at Milton.
“Never seen a nine-hundred-fifty-year-old man before, little girl?” Noah laughed.
He cleared his ancient throat, unearthing a ball of phlegm so old that it may have been of archaeological import.
“I had noticed that some creatures—dogs, mostly—had begun to disappear from the Really Big Farm. And the Scarecrows had been acting … odd. Listless and distracted … I thought they had, perhaps, gone raven mad!”
Noah looked at Milton’s, Marlo’s, and Annubis’s faces for signs of mirth, yet there was none to be found.
“So I investigated the Kennels—a place I abhor and would eliminate if I could convince the Powers That Be Evil otherwise,” he continued. “I only use it when trying to rehabilitate difficult animals before releasing them into the Really Big Farm. And that’s exactly what I was doing when I discovered, back here, this dreadful vat, those hulking, horrible titans, and the man with the shiny necklace. The necklace that controls the Scarecrows.”
“What man?” Milton asked.
Noah pointed to a fallen row of crates to the side of the Nullification Tub.
“That man.”
A smooth white hand, one that had never performed a moment of honest work in its life, twitched beneath two crates: one holding a sandy-colored dingo, and the other a feral Chartreux. Annubis walked over to the mound of crates and pushed them aside with his foot, freeing the man beneath.
“Mr. de Hory!” Milton exclaimed as he saw the man’s dapper, disdainful face. Annubis snatched the dazzling pewter necklace and turned to Milton.
“You know this man?” the dog god asked as Mr. de Hory came to, the man’s dark eyes fixing upon the faltering holographic soul model projecting weakly just beyond him. The fuzzy, multicolored light sculpture winked on and off in the air by a large wooden crate marked DO NOT OPEN: EVER.
Milton shrugged as he watched the man creep forward, painfully, on his hands and knees.
“Sort of … I saw him on TV.”
A group of black cats slowly oozed around the bend, followed by Napoleon Bone-apart. The blithe Italian greyhound nudged his See ’n Say.
“The cat says … meow!”
Milton and Marlo stared at one another. Marlo reached to pinch Milton, hard, on the side of the arm.
“Oww!” he yelped. “Why did you do that?”
Marlo shrugged.
“I wanted to see if I was dreaming … this is all too weird.”
Milton watched as the mist wafted up the steep wall of crates.
“This place is beyond awful,” he murmured. “Just leaving all these pets here, forgotten, seems like the worst kind of abuse. And what are they being punished for, anyhow? Because they weren’t as domesticated as their owners expected? Like that’s their fault?”
Lucky coiled up Milton’s leg and shot into his arms. Milton stroked his ferret as, eyes wet, he gazed upon the countless, caged animals.
“We’ve got to do something,” he continued.
Annubis shook his head sadly while the cats skulked closer, slinking from shadow to shadow.
“There just isn’t enough time in eternity to open all of these cages ourselves—”
The spirals of luminous silver mist whirled about the crate doors like tiny hurricanes. Suddenly, with an explosive clatter, the doors of every crate sprang open.
Most of the animals vaulted instinctually out of their cages, while the smarter ones carefully climbed down to the floor. Many, however, had been caged for so long that they had forgotten what freedom even looked like.
The black cats hissed, arching their backs so that they were spiky black croquet hoops of aggravation. Milton and Marlo stepped back from the crate walls as furry creatures spilled forth like a mewling, yapping waterfall.
“But—” Milton said before his sister interjected.
“The truth,” Marlo offered in a spooky hush as animals wriggled past her ankles, “shall set you free.”
Annubis’s cryptic dog smile vanished as he saw the wooden sides of the huge crate marked DO NOT OPEN: EVER collapse. Inside was a rectangular green igloo adorned with yellow quartz cat’s-eye gems and etchings of ancient, pampered felines wrapped in gauze tunics cleaning themselves.
Noah shuddered.
“Pandora’s Cat Box,” the old, old man gasped.
“Pandora’s Cat Box?” Annubis repeated. “But that’s only a myth.”
“Apparently not,” Noah replied. “This place has often served as a dumping ground for unwanted artifacts too terrible even for museums. But I never thought that it would house this … this vessel containing all of the plagues, pestilence, burdensome worry, and unrest that cats have never known. Locked away in an era when felines were revered as gods incarnate … what lies within is potentially cataclysmic.”
Filled with curiosity—despite its potentially deadly effect on cats—Chairman Meow, Frankenpuss, and a dozen other felines padded cautiously to the crate. Milton eyed the box with unease.
“Where did it come from?” Milton asked, now knee-deep in squirming, thrashing animals.
“Egypt, by way of Katmandu,” Annubis replied. “It is said that the ancient Egyptian cat gods partook in the burdens of the world, then, um, passed them into this cat box so that their feline progeny would be free of all worry, woe, and the onus of obligation.”
Marlo scratched at her brother’s forearms, which were ready to hatch a litter of cat-allergy-induced hives.
“Are we safe?” she asked, her gaze glued to the centuries-old box packed tight with despair and disease.
“Yes,” Noah said tentatively as more cats circled the box, their vague interest blossoming into obsession. “As long as what is within—”
Frankenpuss stuck his blocky, calico head into the box. Chairman Meow, Hannibal Lickter, and thirteen other cats soon followed suit. Clawed Yereyesout gave the box a few dainty sniffs, rubbing his side against it indifferently, before—suddenly—he and the other cats bolted inside.
“—stays within,” Noah added miserably. “If only I had a spray bottle. That would dampen their enthusiasm.”
The sound of furious scratching echoed from the box. Out darted the cats, their ears pinned back to their head, frisky in that “I just did something terrible in there like you wouldn’t believe and it’s your problem now” cat way.
“Bad kitties!” Annubis yelled. “Pandora’s Cat Box is not for … that!”
The box trembled, its eerie green glow throbbing and pulsing, ever quicker. The last of the cats emerged, pupils dilated, tails twitching.
Some of the freed pets in the higher crates took brash leaps downward. They struck the sea of animals below with squeals of pain.
“This is getting out of control,” Annubis said as a surge of animals nearly swept his daughter away.
“Paw-paw!” she yelped as Annubis grabbed hold of her arm. The scrabbling swells of pets grew higher, to the dog god’s thighs.
Pandora’s Cat Box quaked, hissing like a neglected teakettle.
Noah stood atop a mound of vacated crates.
“Two at a time! Two at a time!” he shrieked through cupped hands above the din.
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 18
