ALSO BY DALE E. BASYE
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go
Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck
Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Dale E. Basye
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers
wherethebadkidsgo.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Basye, Dale E.
Fibble : the fourth circle of Heck / by Dale E. Basye ; illustrations by Bob Dob. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When goth teen Marlo wakes up in Fibble, the part of Heck that is reserved for liars, she is disgusted to find out she is in her younger brother Milton’s body.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89305-6
[1. Honesty—Fiction. 2. Future life—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Reformatories—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Humorous stories.] I. Dob, Bob, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.B2938Fi 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010009460
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY EDITOR—NOT THAT ONE CAN
TRULY POSSESS AN EDITOR ANY MORE THAN ONE CAN
COPYRIGHT A BABY’S FIRST SMILE … THOUGH, HMM …
I SHOULD HAVE MY LAWYER LOOK INTO THAT—
DIANE LANDOLF, WHO, UPON READING MY SURREAL,
STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS FIRST DRAFTS,
ALWAYS GIVES IT TO ME STRAIGHT AND SEES THE POSSIBILITY
STRUGGLING TO EMERGE FROM ALL THOSE PAGES OF
PROFLIGATE PROSE. THIS BOOK IS DUE TO HER AS MUCH
AS IT IS TO ME (THOUGH IT IS MOSTLY DUE TO ME).
ALSO, MY AGENT MICHAEL BOURRET, WHO MAKES
THE TRUTH GO DOWN AS SMOOTH AS A HOT BUTTERED LIE.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
FOREWORD
1. WHAT LIES AHEAD?
2. HOORAY FOR HELLYWOOD
3. TOUR DE FARCE
4. ONE HOT PROPERTY, PRICED TO MOVE
5. FROM AD TO WORSE
6. A PET PEEVED
7. DÉJÀ VOODOO
8. GETTING DOWN TO SHOW BUSINESS
9. SEEING IS DECEIVING
10. SEARCH PARTY POOPER
11. IF THE SHOW HITS, BEWARE IT
12. REIGNING CATS AND DOGS
13. DUCK UNCOVER
14. EVERYBODY WANTS TO FOOL THE WORLD
15. ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO BE TIED
16. WRITING WRONGS
MIDDLEWORD
17. RIDING OUT THE BRAINSTORM
18. CAWS FOR ALARM
19. JOINED AT THE HYPE
20. WOOD I LIE TO YOU?
21. BAD BREAKS AND BREAKOUTS
22. TOGETHER FUREVER
23. THAT’S THE WAY THE KOOKS CRUMBLE
24. THE CATASTROPHE’S MEOW
25. THE STY OF THE STORM
26. A LIE FOR A LIE
27. FOLLOW THE MISLEADERS
28. THE PLOT SICKENS
29. ASUNDER THE BIG TOP
30. THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
BACKWORD
Acknowledgements
About the Author
FOREWORD
As many believe, there is a place above and a place below. But there are also places in between. Some not quite awfully perfect and others not quite perfectly awful.
One of these places is a gaudy nest of deception, hurricane-force bluster, and artful manipulation so surgical in its precision that you could use it to remove the modesty from a naked mole rat.
This place is a lot like a rainbow.
A rainbow is a breathtakingly gorgeous arc of vivid colors, an unexpected feast for the retinas. It’s like watching a giant box of crayons and a beam of radiant sunlight exchanging wedding vows in Heaven, their divine love melting across the sky for all to see. A rainbow is something that is almost too beautiful to be true.
That’s because it isn’t. A rainbow is a polychromatic lie scrawled across your gullible peepers. It’s simply a host of mysterious atmospheric conditions conspiring to form a false perception, albeit a lovely one. The closer you get to a rainbow, the closer you get to realizing that you can never truly get close to one.
This place of illusions, delusions, and oftentimes contusions (it’s located on a slippery slope, so watch your step) is infested with truthless scoundrels spouting bright and shining lies of every hue, though the biggest, nastiest lie of all is growing like a mushroom in the shadows.
The mysterious Powers That Be (and any of its associated or subsidiary enterprises, including—but not limited to—the Powers That Be Evil) have stitched this and countless other subjective realities together into a sprawling quilt of space and time.
Some of these quantum patches may not even seem like places. But they are all around you, and go by many names. Some feel like eternity. And some of them actually are eternity, at least for a little while.
Honest.
1 • WHAT LIES AHEAD?
BEING A BOY feels really weird, Marlo thought as she dangled her brother’s gross feet off the backseat of the stagecoach taking her to Fibble, the circle of Heck for kids who lie. Her borrowed body felt alternately simpler and more complicated—frustrating in its sheer, dull straightforwardness. Just like boys, she reflected. Marlo tried her best not to overanalyze the skin she ached to jump out of: just thinking about being her younger brother, Milton—at least on the outside—made her skin crawl. Or his. Whatever.
Marlo was still fuzzy on the particulars of her current situation, but flashes of what had happened, and who she truly was, floated to the top of her brain like the cryptic messages of a Magic 8 Ball. She remembered graduating from Madame Pompadour’s Infernship program and becoming Satan’s Girl Friday the Thirteenth. Then she remembered Milton—though for some reason, at the time, she’d had no idea that the little twerp hopping around in his Stargate Atlantis underwear was her brother—storming the Surly Gates of h-e-double-hockey-sticks with Annubis, the dog god, and dragging her from her Deceptionist post to the Break Down Room with Principal Bubb and her demon guards in hot pursuit, before drugging her with a moldy cheese sandwich.
It was here that things got a little strange.
When Marlo had come to, she hadn’t felt quite … herself. Annubis had once presided over Heck’s Assessment Chamber, where souls were weighed on the Scales of Justice, so he had the power to pluck people’s spiritual essence from their bodies with his bare paws. He must have switched Milton’s soul with mine, Marlo presumed. To what end, Marlo could not be sure. But as she dredged the sludgy slough of her mind—still yawning and stretching from its peculiar nap—Marlo knew that her little brother was essentially a good kid, so whatever Milton’s spe
cific intent, his heart was sure to be in the right place (even if his soul wasn’t). Marlo also knew that Milton had an ulcer, not because of any prior knowledge as his sister, but because of the waves of pain radiating from the pit of Milton’s stomach.
The man sitting across from her in the musty stagecoach coughed. He leered at her with a freaky smirk: a knowing grin that was totally one-sided.
“How long are we going to play this little game?” the old, dough-faced man said as he ran his fingers through his slicked-back hair. Marlo swallowed down the bile that kept creeping up her throat.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” she replied in her brother’s squeaky voice. “And I’m not afraid of anything.”
The man laughed mirthlessly.
“You could have fooled me,” he said, training his beady black eyes on Marlo. “You seemed plenty afraid back in Limbo.”
Her stomach suddenly felt as if it housed an unchaperoned, all-ages dance club. He must have been some teacher in Limbo, Marlo speculated. One of Milton’s teachers … and that’s who he thinks I am, naturally, because that’s who I am. But I can’t blow my cover, or else I’ll screw up whatever Milton has planned.
“Yeah, of course I remember you … sir,” Marlo replied. “You were my, um, teacher. Back in Limbo.”
The stagecoach shuddered. The hoofbeats of the Night Mares pulling the carriage clattered uncertainly before regaining their confident rhythm.
The man squinted so hard at Marlo that it looked as if the bags beneath his eyes would burst.
“What’s my name, then?” he asked, suspiciously, as he leaned in close to Marlo and stared into her borrowed hazel eyes.
“What, did you forget?” Marlo replied, using her patent-pending “tact-evasion” technique. “Didn’t your momma sew it in the lining of your jacket?”
“I can tell you’re covering up something,” the man spat back. “I can see it in your—”
Suddenly, the stagecoach bumped and shook so violently that the old man slammed his head into the top of the carriage.
“Oww!” he yelped as the demon driver—a swollen, bespectacled creature with goat horns and a white goatee growing around his orange duck bill—leaned into the carriage.
“Are you injured, Mr. Nixon?” the demon quacked. “I mean, Mr. President, sir.”
Mr. Nixon rubbed the swirling slick of hair atop his head.
“Pardon me, Mr. Nixon?” Marlo said, making Milton’s voice smugger than it had ever sounded before. “You were saying that you saw something in my oww?”
Mr. Nixon’s ashen face flushed red.
“I pardon no one! I’m the one that gets pardoned!”
The stagecoach fishtailed wildly, sending Marlo and Mr. Nixon crashing to the floor. The carriage skidded to a stop. Marlo crawled up off the floor and gazed out the window.
They were on the edge of a vast, frozen mound of water that shimmered weakly beneath the filmy crust. The swollen sea of frost resembled a massive Hostess Sno Ball dipped in crystal. Studding the distended icy knoll were clumps of scraggly bushes that—when rustled by the breeze—almost seemed to … talk. What they said, Marlo couldn’t make out. It just sounded like yammering nonsense.
Marlo pushed open the door and hopped onto the ice, steadying herself with the carriage. The horizon was clogged with a thick, gently seething bank of sparkling pea-soup smoke. The glimmering, billowing murk spewed from a towering structure in the distance perched atop the summit of the swollen, frozen sea.
Through a fleeting crack in the clouds Marlo could see that the structure was a cluster of grand, gaudy tents propped up on massive, swaying stilts. The wound in the cloud bank quickly healed, leaving Marlo dazzled, disoriented, and wanting to disgorge whatever her brother had last eaten all over his freaky skinny-long feet.
Mr. Nixon moaned as he rose from the floor. He crouched through the open stagecoach door, waving “V” for victory signs at the nonexistent crowd that roared in his mind, and joined Marlo. The demon driver waddled over to them, handing the ex-president a thermos.
“Thank you, doctor,” Mr. Nixon replied as he twisted the top.
Marlo gently patted her stomach, as if it were a nervous stallion she was trying to calm.
“Doctor?” she repeated.
“Yes, Dr. Brinkley,” Mr. Nixon continued as the demon shuffled to his team of Night Mares. “License revoked many, many times. Which explains his current condition.”
Marlo studied the ducklike doctor.
“The big bill?” she enquired. “You know, because doctors charge too much?”
Mr. Nixon tilted the thermos but nothing came out.
“No, because he was a quack,” the old man replied as he spanked the bottom of the empty thermos.
The duck demon patted the ice and grit from his white-feathered hands as he tightened his horses’ bridles.
“The team is ready,” Dr. Brinkley said in an odd, duckish drawl. “I trust they’ll find the least perilous path.”
Marlo scowled as she noted the team shifting uneasily on the ice.
“Find the path?” she said. “Haven’t you been to Fibble before?”
The duck demon’s feathers ruffled in the wind.
“No, young man, I haven’t. Snivel is my customary route. The usual driver, Baron Munchausen, called in ill today … something about contracting swine flu from a pork chop, which—even as a fraudulent practitioner of medicine—I don’t believe is—”
“Maybe we should just walk the rest of the way,” Marlo said as the wind tickled the fronds of the ragged brown shrubs, their leaves rubbing against one another in a murmuring chorus that sounded a lot like “walk the rest of the way.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that, from what I’ve been told,” the duck demon clucked. “This is the Falla Sea. It is, by definition, misleading and unsound. My Night Mares, though, can beat a safe path around the bushwas.”
“Those creepy talking bushes?” Marlo asked as she stared out, mesmerized, at the churning clouds of vapor spilling out across the horizon.
“Bushwas,” Dr. Brinkley repeated as he rubbed clean his round spectacles. “To our ears, they spew mocking, befuddling gibberish, meant to lead one astray—which can be especially harmful in an inhospitable place such as this. My Night Mares have a peculiar horse sense that’ll pull us through. They won’t be flustered by any sidetracking shrubs.”
Marlo shrugged, and she and Mr. Nixon climbed back into the black stagecoach. As the carriage lurched across the Falla Sea—the bushwas blathering outside and the Night Mares whickering amongst themselves—Marlo wondered why the dead president sitting across from her had been transferred from Limbo.
“So what gives?” Marlo asked, as blunt as a pair of scissors in a preschool. “Why are you being sent to Fibble?”
Mr. Nixon stared down his ski slope of a nose at Marlo. “I remember you as being more polite … nice and nervous, just like I like ’em,” he grumbled.
He glared at Marlo’s primly crossed legs. “Though Heck has also, strangely, made you more demure, by the looks of it.”
Marlo looked down at her legs and quickly uncrossed them. She kept them apart as if she were cradling a watermelon between her knees.
“You’re dodging the question, Mr. Nixon,” she replied. “Bubb sent you to spy on me, right?”
Mr. Nixon sighed with resignation.
“Yes and no,” he said, his beady black eyes darting nervously about the carriage’s interior. “Yes, she did, and no, she didn’t ask me to not spy on you. But I’m also here to act as a demotivational speaker—giving workshops to the faculty on The Ins and Outs of Getting In and Out of Things, How to Lie Through False Teeth, and my Gettin’ Shifty wid It: Go from Educator to Equivocator in Three Easy Steps program.”
The stagecoach stopped.
“We’re here,” Dr. Brinkley quacked dismally as he hopped off the driver’s box and made his way to the door.
Marlo and Mr. Nixon clambered out of the carriag
e, stepping tentatively down onto the edge of the Falla Sea. They were instantly engulfed by a gargantuan shadow. Marlo looked up.
Hovering above her was, for all appearances, a ginormous, glittering clown head, smiling in that gruesomely gleeful way that clowns do. Why is it, Marlo thought, that the happier a clown is, the sadder everyone else is around it?
Marlo shivered as she wrapped her brother’s skinny arms around her. Marlo was—in general—fearless to a fault. Many faults, actually. But somehow an unease surrounding circus performers had slunk into the big, bad big top of her subconscious.
Fibble just had to be a circus, she thought. With clowns. The face paint … the wigs … and those wicked long shoes …
The frightening, monstrous head, thankfully, was just a floating mass of sparkling gas streaming from the tip of one of three circus tents towering over Marlo, Mr. Nixon, and Dr. Brinkley. The clown head was smeared briefly into twinkling vapor by a strong gust of hot wind, releasing Marlo’s eyes from their horrific hostage situation.
The trio of tents—merrily banded as if sheathed in enormous sheets of Fruit Stripe gum—sat upon a great wooden platform forty feet above Marlo’s head. The circus shantytown was supported by a wide circle of gently swaying stilts that creaked in the wind … almost screaming, Marlo thought, as her gaze traveled down the spindly stilts to the garish Gates of Fibble.
Why the gates to Fibble were actually forty feet directly below Fibble, planted on the frozen Falla Sea, baffled Marlo. The three new arrivals walked past the rim of stilts bracing the circus above and toward the gates, located in the middle of Fibble’s shadow. The stilts were made of a light brownish wood that looked like dozens of little anguished faces. Marlo shuddered.
It’s just my mind—or Milton’s—playing tricks on me, that’s all, Marlo thought as she approached the gates, a flickering rainbow of long neon bars. Just like when you look at clouds and think you see faces and shapes. Marlo looked up at the clown cloud as it grinned malevolently down on her at the edge of Fibble’s wooden platform. Okay, maybe it’s not like that, but how bad can a place be with a rainbow for a gate? I mean, what’s more genuinely cheerful than a rainbow?
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 1