Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  Miss Parker smiled as the girls complained, struggling to remove the masks that sealed over their faces. “You might want to save your witticisms until I’ve had a chance to explain what exactly a Sass-Mask is,” the teacher said, fiddling with her fake pearls. “They’re a little experiment of Vice Principal Carroll’s. He’s developing a subscription-based language, where one would have to pay to use it.”

  “What?!” Marlo gasped inside the stifling mask. “That’s crazy … a language you have to pay for?”

  The readout on Marlo’s goggle lens now read 87.

  “Off the record, I think most of our eccentric new vice principal’s ideas are not just plain terrible, they’re fancy terrible: terrible with raisins in it. But at least with these Sass-Masks, you might learn the value of words.”

  “What are the numbers in this thing all about?” Winifred Scathelli gasped from inside of her mask. “They keep counting down!”

  Miss Parker paced in front of the class in her plain black dress. “If we were to dish out words as if they were currency, like money, and not squander them recklessly as if they didn’t mean anything—and what are words if they have no meaning?—then we would all be much better off.”

  Miss Parker took a handful of brightly striped straws and walked up and down the rows of confused, snorkeled girls, dropping the straws into their air tubes.

  “The numbers on your goggles are your allotted words. Think of words as a gift and your Sass-Masks as a prepaid gift card.”

  “What happens when it gets to zero?” Marlo asked, her goggles blinking 80.

  “Why don’t we find out?” Miss Parker replied. “First, what do you fine young women think of my dress?”

  There was a sudden, muffled explosion of derogatory commentary spewing from the girls’ mouths.

  “Words can’t describe your outfit, so I’ll just barf!”

  “Your dress makes a statement. Too bad it’s ‘I have zero taste’!”

  “That outfit is so ratty it belongs in the sewer!”

  Miss Parker smiled.

  “Excellent. Now complete this sentence.…” She wrote on the chalkboard.

  YOUR MOMMA’S SO FAT …

  “… her belly button makes an echo!”

  “… she climbed into the Grand Canyon and got stuck!”

  “… when she wears a red dress, all of the kids yell, ‘Hey, Kool-Aid!’ ”

  Marlo noticed her goggle readout hovering at 16.

  “What-if-I-just-hyphenate-all-of-my-words-so-they-only-count-as-one?” Marlo asked.

  “While clever, Miss Fauster, your Sass-Mask knows better.”

  “Oh,” Marlo said, her goggles flashing red. Suddenly, a gush of sticky sweet-and-sour paste filled her mouth. She could hear the girls around her gasping.

  Yuck! Marlo screamed out in her mind as her lips were sealed shut. She tried to wrench them free, but the inside of her mouth felt like a balled-up fist wearing a flypaper glove.

  “You all sound like Neanderthals with toothaches,” Miss Parker snickered. She grabbed a large bottle of fizzy liquid from the canvas sack.

  “Finally … I can hear myself think,” she said as she systematically drizzled the liquid down the girls’ snorkels. “The reason you can’t talk is because of the Epoxie Stix I put in your masks. It’s sort of a candied cement.”

  Miss Parker poured the liquid down Marlo’s breathing tube. The sweet-and-sour paste was washed away by a carbonated wave of astringent citrus.

  The class bell tolled. Marlo’s Sass-Mask relaxed its grip on her face like a starfish hit with a tranquilizer dart.

  “Vice Principal Carroll will soon have all the students wearing these things, I’m afraid,” Miss Parker muttered. “And probably the teachers, too, soon after that. Wise Acres will become a quieter place, I’m sure, yet a much more boring one.…”

  Marlo tossed her mask aside and slowly staggered toward the door, joining the gurgling flow of the other girls, all of them smacking their lips like dogs eating peanut butter.

  “Miss Fauster … as one Nosy Parker to another, try to remember the cure for boredom,” the baggy-eyed woman said with a smeary, weary smile.

  Marlo wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Curiosity,” Marlo replied with a croak.

  And while the vice principal might be able to shut my mouth, he sure as heck won’t shut my mind, she thought as she stumbled into the hall.

  11 · MAY I TAKE A MESSAGE?

  MARLO AND FLOSSIE sat across from one another in the Audaci-Tea House, a tray of grammar crackers between them, desperately trying to remove the gummy taste from their mouths. Marlo looked down at the little phrases etched into her grammar cracker.

  CONRAD AND ELIZA CAN’T HARDLY BELIEVE THEY WON’T BE GETTING PUDDING AFTER SETTING THE FIRE.

  Marlo bit into it. A rotten-tooth-mold taste flooded her mouth.

  “Yuck!” she said with a grimace. “This is even worse than those Epoxie Stix.”

  Flossie nibbled carefully along her grammar cracker.

  “You’ve got to be careful to just eat the parts with good grammar,” she said, looking up at Marlo through a part in her stiff, orange-red bangs. Marlo glanced back down at her cracker.

  AFTER ROTTING IN THE CELLAR FOR WEEKS, MY SISTER BROUGHT UP SOME APPLES.

  Hmm … that seems weird. Like the sister is rotting, not the apples, thought Marlo.

  “YOU’RE MESSING UP ITS HAIR,” THE DOG GROOMER TOLD HER ASSISTANT.

  That seems okay, Marlo thought as she took a bite. She was rewarded with a gush of warm, nutty sweetness.

  “Yum,” she said. “Good grammar tastes good.”

  The goddess Peitho walked by carrying a bowl of fruit. “Sour grapes?” she offered.

  Marlo plucked a grape from the bowl and popped it into her mouth. She grimaced at its sharp, pungent taste. Flossie stared at the goddess as she swept away in her flowing white gown.

  “Peitho sure is pretty,” Flossie said with a soft sigh.

  “I wouldn’t want to be that pretty anyway,” Marlo lied as she munched on her sour grapes. “Too much trouble.”

  Outside the teahouse, a boy darted down the hall after a fuzzy white blur with a leather pouch lashed to its back.

  “Lucky! He’s back!” Marlo said as she bolted from her chair.

  Milton was panting at the end of the hall, with Lucky—at his feet—chewing at the leather strap tied around his midsection.

  “Let’s see what the carrier-ferret brought back for us,” Marlo said as she caught up with her brother.

  Milton nodded, unlatched the pouch’s clasp, and pulled out a scroll. He unrolled the parchment on his thigh.

  My dear mysterious, anonymous benefactor: a guardian angel if there ever was one!

  To think, only a few weeks ago I was tucked away in Bedlam, with nothing to do but tear my hair out and surrender myself to a sad tale not of my making. And now—such Fortune!—a new story with me as the protagonist, in a set ting ripe with arcane knowledge! So many pieces to the ultimate puzzle that most everything else has been driven out of my head!

  I feel I am so very close to cracking the code: finding the “cheat” as the young people here say. There are just a few stern wrinkles—the kind that plague the faces of so many adults—that are in want of ironing. Some final artifacts are needed to create artifiction.

  So, to make a short story long, I remain very truly yours, and look forward to the latest illuminating missive from my benevolent patron,

  The Late C. L. Dodgson

  P.S. Included is—in my waggish way—a status report on my progress!

  Reason’s picnic ruined: rant-by-crawling rant

  Overwhelmed by whimsy’s vertigo Spinning yarn with abandon Expressing the inexpressible with thunder divine

  Tales told till true, every ear shall see; every eye shall hear

  To have the last word, I have found the very first word

  And so I’ll spread an affliction of fiction till t
he afterlife is mine to dream!

  Milton studied the message. There was more to it than just a bunch of scattershot phrases. It felt like some kind of puzzle. Like an …

  “Acrostic,” Milton said. “That’s what this is.”

  “A crossed tick? And who is C. L. Dodgson?”

  “An acrostic. It’s a type of word puzzle. And Dodgson was Lewis Carroll’s real name. He was really into word puzzles. Alice in Wonderland is filled with them. Most of the so-called nonsense parts were actually a kind of clever code—”

  “Anyway.”

  “Anyway an acrostic is a poem where certain letters form a secret word, usually the first letter of each line.” Milton traced the letters with his fingertip. “See? It spells R-O-S-E-T-T-A. Rosetta. But this looks like a double acrostic. See the last letters of each line? T-O-N-E. Tone … hmm …”

  Milton dug into his pocket and pulled out the encyclopedia page he had found stuck to his shoe.

  Entry: Music of the Spheres (SEE: Rosetta Tone)

  Milton rummaged through Lucky’s leather pouch.

  “Wait, there’s something else.…”

  Milton pulled out a windup metal cricket and a tiny fork. He studied the silver, tri-pronged piece of cutlery.

  “It’s like a tuning fork,” he mumbled.

  Marlo snickered and shook her head. “This is great.”

  “What?”

  “You’re like my outboard brain,” Marlo said. “Why should I waste my time stuffing my head full of junk when I have you? So what’s with the tuning fork and cricket toy?”

  “I don’t know,” Milton said while Marlo wound up the odd brass cricket. “Usually tuning forks have two prongs, but this one has three. Most tuning forks are designed to vibrate at a specific pitch.…”

  Milton tapped the fork against his knee while Marlo released the windup key, causing the cricket to chirp in the most peculiar—

  Everything seemed to go white and fuzzy around the edges. Milton’s and Marlo’s minds went blank. Whether for five seconds, five minutes, or five hours, they couldn’t be sure.

  “What happened?” Marlo asked.

  Milton looked around the hallway, dazed, as if he just woke up from a short yet intensely deep nap.

  “I’m … I’m not sure,” he said. “I must have zoned out or something.”

  “Yeah, me too. We’re probably exhausted from all of this nothing-going-on.” Marlo rose to her feet. “Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere. All we have for our trouble is a weird fork, a sticky ferret, a metal grasshopper, and a cross-stitched poem—”

  “Acrostic.”

  “Whatever. The point is …,” Marlo said before faltering as she noticed two aardvark demons waddling out of the Audaci-Tea House. Each had a silver tray strapped to its back. The demons were headed toward the entrance.

  “Interesting,” Marlo muttered as she followed them down the hall.

  Milton trotted after her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  On one tray was a teapot and a porcelain teacup. On the other was a plate full of tiny white blobs.

  “Hey!” Marlo shouted out. “Where are you two going?”

  One of the lumbering creatures glanced over its shoulder as it toddled along.

  “It’s Vice Principal Carroll’s teatime,” the demon aardvark grunted. “He has the same thing every day: two cups of strong tea and a plate of meringue cookies.”

  The aardvarks snuffled along the hall until they arrived at the base of the turret staircase.

  “Listen, you guys work … way too hard,” Marlo said, a little out of breath after rushing behind the two surprisingly fast “pig-aroos.” “Let me take him his tea.”

  The two demon guards traded a quick, dark glance before snorting in what must have been laughter but sounded more like a spoon caught in a garbage disposal.

  “I don’t think so,” one of the guards grunted as it made its way toward the first step.

  Marlo jumped in between the two creatures.

  “Marlo,” Milton said, forcing his voice into something that sounded calmer than he felt. “What do you think you’re—”

  “Hey, you two anteaters or whatever,” Marlo said, sensing that there are few things more offensive to an aardvark than being referred to as an anteater. “I wasn’t asking. I’m going to take the vice preposterous his tea and there’s nothing you can do about it.…”

  The two aardvark demons—their brown-gray skin flushed red with rage—squared off on either side of Marlo.

  “I wish these things had Mute switches on them,” one of the guards grunted. “But since they don’t, maybe a good tongue lashing will keep her quiet.”

  Marlo swallowed. “Strawberry shortcake, huckleberry pie …,” she chanted, keenly assessing the aardvark demons as they reared to attack. “I’m going to jump till your tongues are—”

  The demons shot out their long, sticky tongues. Marlo hopped into the air just as the creatures’ tongues slurped and curled beneath her feet, tying themselves into a pink, slobbery knot.

  “—tied,” Marlo said.

  She quickly robbed the demons of their silver trays and keys. Marlo bounded up the stairs with a rattle of teacups and plates.

  “Marlo!” Milton gasped as the demon aardvarks played a futile game of tug-of-war with their tongues.

  Marlo cast her crooked, mischievous smile down at her brother from the top of the stairs.

  “Malice in Wonderland is going to crash the Mad Hatter’s tea party,” she said as she unlocked the drum portal leading outside. “Don’t wait up!”

  12 · TEA AND PSYCHOPATHY

  “HELLO? TEATIME T-MINUS now,” Marlo called from the Absurditory’s double doors, which were painted to be the grinning Cheshire cat’s two front teeth. “Is anybody”—Marlo scanned the bewildering interior—“completely off their meds?”

  The small cottage was just one big room with all of the usual components: chairs, lamps, sofa, writing desk.… Only all of these furnishings were in the wrong place. Seriously wrong. A black-and-white checkerboard carpet was tacked to the ceiling along with a chair that hung down like a chandelier, while an actual chandelier sprouted up from the burnished wood floor. What Marlo had initially thought were suspended lamps proved to be large, red-and-white mushrooms that—judging from their shredded stalks—some of the more athletic messenger cats were using as scratching posts. And then there was the stuffed monster raven. It hung above like a big feathered bat, with a wooden tabletop nailed to its back.

  Marlo could see a sheaf of papers on the raven writing desk above, held in place with an elastic band. She set her silver tea service tray down beneath the prodigious cap of an upside-down mushroom, tucked her blue hair behind her ears, and jumped up toward the fiberglass mushroom, gripping the rim and pulling herself up onto the gills.

  Marlo shimmied up the stalk to the ceiling and reached for the capsized chair. She grabbed its arms, and—her body somehow recalling a summer’s worth of preteen gymnastics—executed an upside-down pull-up until she was “sitting” in the chair. Marlo carefully strapped herself into the dangling seat belt, wedging her legs under the chair’s red velvet-padded arms to prevent her from falling and breaking her neck.

  The blood rushing to her head and her hair hanging down like a stringy blue curtain, Marlo leaned toward the raven desk. Atop the sheaf of papers was an ancient parchment, yellowed and coarsened by time.

  Okay … let’s try this again. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And with this one, single, luminous Word, His True Name, He-see, now I’m doing the third-person thing. I think it works better that way, makes Me appear less conceited … You didn’t write that last bit, did you? And this part? Hey, cut it out or I will smote you, so help me, Me …

  There was a sticky note affixed to the side of the ancient document, written in different handwriting than that on the parchment. The same writing as in Lewis Carroll’s note …

  This unspoken Name. It i
s forbidden to speak, and therefore has yet to be captured by theologians. The oldest reference is “Jehovah,” yet His True Name would have to be much older than that, and—more than likely—beyond a human’s normal capacity for speech, keeping Creation “Password Protected” …

  Beneath the document was another page torn from an archaic encyclopedia.

  Weisen, Josef (Wīzǝnt, Jōzǝf), 1303–1392, German metallurgist obsessed with the resonant properties of metal. Weisen’s work involved the alchemical synthesis of rare metals such as theotonium (Th: the element of godliness) and ahsonium (Ah: the element of surprise) to fashion tools that would harness divine forces. Weisen, after losing his family to the Black Death, went mad and devoted his remaining years to harnessing elemental powers in order to “mock” the God that took his loved ones away. He recruited other “dark” artists to help him increase the spiritual resonance of his rare metals. Weisen’s forge had a strict “if you smelt it, you dealt it” policy, meaning that whoever created a tool had to test it themselves. Weisen died shortly after forging a divine hammer, which—purportedly after striking a blow—rattled him and his fellow metallurgists apart to nothing.…

  Beneath the documents was a map. Marlo smoothed it out. It was hard enough to read, in its fussy Victorian pen strokes, but all the blood in her head had her on the verge of fainting. At the top of the map was written:

  The Outer Terristories

  Wise Acres was at the bottom of the map, delineated as a great, gated mound. In the upper left-hand corner was a tall, sort of trident-shaped building marked THE TOWER OF BABBLE, opposite a dormant volcano marked WISECRACKATOA.

  Tower of Babble? We didn’t see anything like that when we came here, Marlo thought as her ears buzzed with blood. We totally would have seen something that big.…

  In between Wise Acres and the tower was a stretch of land, populated with hundreds of tiny “Y”s. Across them all, written in mad, florid loops, was a sentence that Marlo found both baffling and unnerving: