“Say five, say six, you’re the grooviest of chicks!”
Damian grimaced.
“No thanks,” he said as he scooped up some sunflower seeds from the plastic bag in his pocket. “I’m good.”
“Hardly,” Algernon muttered underneath his breath as he settled back on his Skinny Elvis beanbag. “So, how do you turn this thing on?” the barely certified lawyer said, gesturing to the six mirrored walls surrounding them.
“Say seven, say eight, you are my far-out soul mate!”
Damian pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from his jeans.
“Last time you mentioned Milton saying something about,” Damian scrutinized the paper in his hands, “guardians of the spirit realm hearing his cry, and summoning those spirits from the other side …”
The heavy rock song exploded with a percussive avalanche of drums, a tuneless blizzard of distorted guitar, and a high-pressure front of blustering, blistering vocals.
“Say nine, SAY TEN …”
The music rattled the chamber. The six mirrors surrounding Damian and Algernon ruffled, like reflective fur being rubbed the wrong way. An icy wind blasted through the Psychomanthium.
“… you’ve gone and blown my mind again!”
Algernon’s eyes widened as his reflection was pulled apart, as if by invisible wolves. Damian smiled with wicked satisfaction as the frigid wind sculpted his greasy hair into a crown of shiny spikes. A flat, nasal voice leaked, eerily, into the chamber through the mirrors surrounding them.
“Your call is being forwarded.”
Damian’s reflection melted into a warped, pulsating blob. The blurry, restless shape calmed into a dull lump while the rock music outside the Psychomanthium downgraded from “Deafening” to only “Terribly Loud.”
“I’ve run out of fingers and my heart’s run amuck,
My love for you lingers, and I just gotta say …”
“Yuck!” Algernon Cole exclaimed as Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s image was brought into tight, unforgiving focus in the mirrors. “It’s that … woman,” he continued, stretching the barely descriptive word in hopes that it would cover the beastly image before him.
Principal Bubb’s putrid yellow goat eyes bore twin holes through the mirror.
“Mr. Ruffino?” she rasped. “What are you doing in the shiny windows and gleaming door handles of my stagecoach?!”
Damian scowled.
“I was trying to contact …,” he replied, giving the shaken Algernon a sideways glance, “Louie Cipher … you know. The Big Guy Downstairs.”
Principal Bubb expelled a frustrated sigh.
“You and half the underworld,” she said.
Damian grumbled as he flipped through the pages of his manuscript, Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go, on his lap.
“I need to renegotiate my deal with … him,” he spat. “This book thing is going to be big! And I need an advance to match … like, right now!”
Principal Bubb laughed uproariously.
“Renegotiate a contract?!” she repeated. “With the creature who invented contracts? You can’t be serious.…”
“Of course I’m serious!” Damian roared. “I even have my lawyer here with me.…”
Algernon rubbed the lenses of his glasses with his sleeve, hoping that the six ghastly images of Principal Bubb surrounding him were just a smudge to be wiped away. Trembling, he set his glasses back on his nose and gaped, slack-jawed, at the mirrors.
“Is that … a dog in a tunic?” he muttered weakly.
To Principal Bubb’s side on the sealskin seat sat Annubis.
Damian scooched his overstuffed beanbag closer to one of the mirrored walls.
“Hey,” he murmured. “That’s the dog that took out my soul and weighed it, back in Limbo.”
Annubis’s dark lip curled up against his fang.
“The darkest soul I’ve ever seen for someone so young,” the dog god recalled with disgust.
“I’m just a prodigy, I guess,” Damian replied. “Like Mozart, only meaner and without all the fruity music stuff.”
“Look, I don’t have time for this,” Principal Bubb hissed impatiently as she shrugged out of her pony-leather shrug. “Annubis here is leading me to some old friends of ours, who are apparently up to no good, as usual. They are one heck of a problem—”
“A HECKUVA problem!” Algernon interjected. “The elements of adverse possession: Hostile, Exclusive, Continuous, Known, Uninterrupted, Visible, and Actual! HECKUVA! I just remembered.…”
Damian glared at his lawyer with his fathomless black slits.
Algernon hopped up from his beanbag chair.
“See, the H stands for ‘hostile,’ as in trespassing. The E is for ‘exclusive’: holding the property to the exclusion of the true owner. The C is for holding the property ‘continuously,’ the K is for ‘knowledge,’ as in the legal owner knowing that the squatter wants to take over the property, and the U is for—”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Principal Bubb gasped, rolling her eyes like a pair of loaded dice.
“It actually stands for ‘uninterrupted’—”
The music outside the Psychomanthium suddenly stopped.
“I can’t stand this song,” Lester Lobe muttered. “Just because it’s old doesn’t make it classic.”
The six mirrors shimmered and rippled, with the dark swirling blobs therein returning to the shocked, clammy faces of Damian and Algernon.
“That could have gone better,” Algernon murmured with a nervous smile of artificially whitened teeth.
The freaked-out lawyer took a swig from his VitaMold bottle.
“These people you work for at Brimstone Publishing,” Algernon continued shakily, “they’re … unnerving. Really committed to their image, though.”
Damian emptied the bag of sunflower seeds into his mouth.
“Yeah, but cheap as used, imitation dirt,” he said. Suddenly, he grabbed his throat.
“I’m … ch-ch-ch,” he said as he slowly turned purple.
Algernon handed Damian his bottle.
“Here!” he shouted. “Take a drink!”
Damian nodded and tilted the VitaMold back into his throat until dark green ooze spilled out of the corners of his mouth. Damian gasped as he struggled for breath.
“I think that did it,” he managed before his face went from purple to a sickly green. His cheeks puffed out as he shot to his feet, running out of the Psychomanthium, blowing chunks all the way.
Algernon Cole sat back into his beanbag chair and settled himself with his kundalini breathing exercises.
“Never a dull moment here,” he said between deep, goggled breaths. “And to think, some people practice law in a stuffy old office building.”
He sighed wistfully.
“I’ve got to get a stuffy old office someday,” Algernon murmured, his eyes settling on the jar of jellyfish beans. “But until then, I’ll take my perks where I find them.”
He scooped up a handful of the deceptively merry, multicolored treats and plopped them into his mouth. Almost immediately, Algernon’s face was covered with patches of angry red hives. His lips swelled around his lolling, swollen tongue, and he clutched his throat just before his air passage closed.
“I … object,” he whispered before falling dead on the Psychomanthium floor.
“This is address you gave, I assure,” the cab driver said as he pulled up beside the ambulance and police cruiser parked outside the Paranor Mall. “I’m not pulling legs.”
Dale E. Basye took in the scene dubiously.
“Fine,” he replied tentatively. “Just in case, could you wait here for a bit?”
“Stay here, I will,” the cab driver replied as he turned on the radio, filling the taxi with relentlessly buoyant Indian pop music.
Dale tread cautiously across the sidewalk and into the Paranor Mall. He was immediately paralyzed by the commotion surrounding him, his feet stuck to the floor as if it were covered with wall-to-wall flypaper. Param
edics hovered over a burly boy puking his guts out into a bucket. A body covered in a sheet was wheeled out into the waiting ambulance. A frantic ex-hippie was waving his arms as he was questioned by police. A tall, gaunt man in a blue floor-length robe, his arms cinched behind him with handcuffs, was led away by two police officers. Several other creepy people in robes fidgeted in a corner behind a desk stacked with religious pamphlets and nutritional supplements. And all of this craziness was happening within the craziest place Dale had ever seen, like a lunatic asylum lavishly decorated with space aliens, UFOs, and painted in every shade of weirdness imaginable.
Dale’s heart palpitated. His chest tightened. The Paranor Mall began to slowly spin around as if it were an elaborate carnival ride.
He reached for his notebook, hoping that jotting each of the irrational fears currently being hurled his way would stem his budding panic attack. His hand shook. The notebook dropped to the floor.
As he bent to pick it up, he saw a manuscript splayed out beside it.
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go.
Without thinking, the middle-aged man grabbed the manuscript and fled the Paranor Mall, telling himself—between gritted teeth—that good authors borrow, great authors steal, and desperate authors take whatever they can get their hands on.
29 • ASUNDER THE BIG TOP
MILTON, MARLO, ZANE, and Van slid down the metal ladder as Fibble collapsed around them. They whizzed past the stunned lizard guards that were stuck fast to the walls of the constricting tube leading back to the secret Focus Group room, their protruding eyes scanning, desperately, for some way out. The foursome were soon sprinting out into the hall, the walls bowed and bent as their Pinocchio-wood frames violently shrank.
Vice Principal Barnum was nowhere to be seen, though Marlo noticed a faint, dissipating plume of smoke snaking down the hall.
“What’s happening?” Milton asked as he ran alongside his sister to the Big Top.
“The truth bomb,” she replied, panting. “It blew up … amplified by the Humbugger machine. I thought it would wash out Barnum’s lies … so they wouldn’t make it to the Surface.”
Marlo gaped at the incredible shrinking circus toppling down around her.
“But the Humbugger must’ve also been keeping Fibble together,” she continued as they sped around the corner to the Big Top, “feeding the weird wood with fibs … so it stayed big. And once the truth got into the ducts—boom. It was like Fibble was a gigantic silk camisole … that someone washed in hot water.”
“What?”
“Girl stuff … anyway, unless we make it out the main ring in time, we’re going to get squashed along with everything else!”
They skidded across the orange sawdust of the Big Top. Through the tattered paper bull’s-eye they could see the frozen Falla Sea—inches below, then lurching hundreds of feet away.
Milton held his hand out to his sister.
“One,” he chanted as Marlo grasped his hand, then held out her other hand to Zane.
“Two,” Van joined in as he held his hand out to Milton who, reluctantly, took it.
“Three!” they shouted as they sprang through the ring.
They fell to the silver ice on all fours. Fibble zoomed back up, though—Milton noticed as he crouched and crawled, scraping his sister’s knees raw—only a dozen feet or so this time.
The truth is winning out, Milton thought as Fibble returned, threatening to crush him and his partners-in-undoing-crime. Inches above his head, the lattice of tormented, living wood and brass pipes that made up Fibble’s foundation quivered and strained as it compressed dangerously tight. Milton noticed the anguished whorls in the grain of the wood, like screaming faces frozen and trapped inside.
The sound of footfalls spilled out across the ice behind Milton, Marlo, Van, and Zane. Six lizard demons slithered swiftly toward them. They led a huddled mass of freshly evacuated students and faculty close through Fibble’s battered rainbow gate.
“Those children!” Nostradamus shouted. “They are responsible for this! Guards, seize them!”
Milton emerged from beneath Fibble’s quaking foundation and sprinted across the Falla Sea. Beneath his feet he noticed waves of liquid silver lapping up beneath the ice floor, pools of swirling, gleaming, agitated “truth” cracking the shifty surface.
“The ice,” Milton panted as the others scrabbled to their feet. “It’s cracking!”
A demon lizard guard, its skin mimicking the grimy frost beneath it, sprung at Marlo and seized her ankle with its tongue.
“Help!! This leapin’ lizard’s got me t-tongue-tied!” she yelled.
Zane stomped the long, sticky tongue and pulled Marlo away. As the guard and the rest of its squad rose to their feet, a great geyser of liquid truth shot up out of the thawing Falla Sea. The demon lizards were tossed about like toys—hundreds of feet into the air—by the foaming blast.
The teachers and students clambered out from beneath Fibble’s shrinking foundation as screams of creaking wood split the frigid air. Drenched by fountains of silver truth, the tents of Fibble crumpled, sagged, then fell in on themselves in a heap of gnarled, striped canvas.
“Look!” Zane yelled, pointing to a tubby man with blazing pants walking across a cable suspended between two straining tent posts above the mound of buckled tents. “It’s Vice Principal Barnum!”
The chunky charlatan wobbled across the tightrope, followed by his shrimp demons Scampi, Louie, Kung Pao, and Annette. “When the world has got hold of a lie,” he shouted against the roar of gushing liquid, “it’s astonishing how hard it is to kill it!”
The stout man edged himself across the wire toward a pole that, Milton could see, had several rockets strapped around it and a snub-nosed capsule on top.
“An escape pod!” Milton exclaimed.
A cloud of black, buzzing energy swooped overhead, rushing at P. T. Barnum. The vice principal ducked as the angry cloud attacked, but Scampi, Louie, and Kung Pao weren’t so lucky. They were swept off the tightrope and tumbled down into the crumpled wad of tents below. A fresh geyser of truth stabbed the shriveling foundation of Fibble. The silver gush smashed apart the lattice of wood and piping, sending broken planks and twisted tubes flying into the air.
“What’s that mean black cloud all about?” Milton asked Marlo as Vice Principal Barnum frantically waved away the darting globs of energy.
“Must be his lies,” Marlo replied with a shrug. “And it looks like they’re coming back to bite him on the butt.”
Another surge of seething lies dove down to attack the vice principal. He staggered yet retained his balance upon the swaying suspension wire, though the vengeful cloud claimed the last shrimp demon, leaving Vice Principal Barnum crossing a tightrope without Annette.
“More persons are humbugged by believing in nothing than by believing in too much!” he shouted as two more geysers burst through the ice, splintering Fibble’s rapidly shrinking foundation, now about the size of a large raft. A swarm of dark, stinging lies consumed Barnum, knocking him off the wire.
“And there’s a sucker born every minute!” he bellowed as he plummeted down into the shredded wreckage of Fibble just as it was consumed by liquid silver and dragged down into the Falla Sea.
“And a sucker is unborn every minute too,” Marlo mumbled to herself.
The Falla Sea’s icy surface was savaged by gushing liquid truth, cleaved into floes, then consumed by gleaming swells of silver. The neon gates of Fibble fizzled out as truth devoured lie. A thick vapor spilled forth from the silvery froth and formed a shiny canopy overhead.
Sandwiched between the gleaming ice and glittering cloud cover, Marlo felt as if she were pressed in between two gargantuan mirrors, reflecting themselves into infinity.
Milton, meanwhile, as the small ocean calmed itself smooth, examined it for any sign of the Man Who Soldeth the World. The frosty rim, the last remnant of the frozen Falla Sea, melted away. Milton stepped back from the quickly dissolving shoreline to th
e dried mud of the Broken Promised Land.
Just then, a familiar squeal and clatter broke the profound silence. Milton turned and saw, over a ridge of cracked mud plates behind him, a rolling fleet of shopping carts, pushed by a motley chorus line of haggard phantoms: the Phantoms of the Dispossessed.
“The PODs!” Milton shouted with joy as he ran toward their lanky, dark-haired leader, Jack Kerouac. The wild-eyed phantom cocked his eyebrow at the girl with the blue hair racing toward him.
“Jack!” Milton cried as he embraced the baffled Beat poet.
“Um, have we, like, met before, pigeon?” Jack asked.
“Oh, right … my body,” Milton replied. “It’s me, Milton. I’m my sister now. See, we had our souls switched in h-e-double-hockey-sticks … it’s complicated.”
Milton noticed a blind phantom with wild white hair and a Viking robe that flapped in the wind like the flag of a land long erased by time.
“Moondog!” Milton cried out as he embraced the haunted old man. “Surely you have to know it’s me!”
Moondog smiled as he took in Milton with the eerie sixth sense of a career medicine man.
“Yep … it’s our little unborn,” Moondog replied. “But don’t call me Shirley.”
The phantoms pushed their shopping carts toward the cascading fountains of gleaming truth.
“So you got the note I left?” Milton asked.
Jack smiled a boyish grin.
“Looks like we crashed this crazy clambake a little late,” he said. “But, yeah, Popsicle, we lamped on your note—the pendant you borrowed grabbed Divining Rod’s divining rod and took us straight to it. Then, like in your note, we took liquid silver and put some in every deposit station we found,” Jack explained. “Like, gallons and gallons of it.”
Moondog drew in a deep breath and grinned, basking in the refreshing spray of honesty.
“I always had a strange feeling about the liquid silver, that it was, somehow, pure truth: that rarest of substances down here,” he said in a craggy wheeze as the wind parted his beard.
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 23
