Marlo looped her thumbs beneath her telephone-wire suspenders.
“See, Colby didn’t see the first blow coming, and he was totally fine with that,” she explained. “But the second time, he thought something was going to happen and was all stressed out about it, even though nothing ultimately did happen. What’s more, his worrying about getting punched was sort of … irritating. Like a little dog that’s all scared of you and you end up wanting to kick it, even though you had no intention of kicking it in the first place. It’s like your soothsaying or whatever. It makes people freak that something is going to happen that wouldn’t to the point where they make it happen, probably because they can’t stand worrying about it anymore—”
The room was suddenly filled with the sound of sizzling pants. In the doorway stood Vice Principal Barnum. Marlo noticed that his hair seemed to … sputter. One second he had a full, sleek mane, the next it was gone, leaving Mr. Barnum’s head looking like a gleaming cue ball. The vice principal tapped his brass belt buckle, and his hair regained its thickness and luster.
“Good day, Mr. Nostradamus,” he stated, gazing at the boys as if they were an assembly of crash-test dummies. “Class, we have a special treat for you. You are all hereby invited to partake in Focus Group.”
The stout, chinless man waddled over to Mr. Nostradamus—how the vice principal’s fine, tailored waistcoat wasn’t even singed by his burning britches was beyond Marlo—and set a brass briefcase on the teacher’s desk.
Zane raised his hand.
“Focus Group, Mr. Covington, is where you and members of your highly sought-after demographic chime in on a host of proposed products,” Mr. Nostradamus replied.
P. T. Barnum flipped open the briefcase. It crackled, hummed, and exuded a faint scent of smoke and ozone.
“Enjoy, students, and I look forward to your opinions,” the vice principal said as he turned to leave. “Mr. Nostradamus, I will be in the usual place.”
The teacher nodded, his eyes darting to a large mirror on the side of the classroom wall.
The mirror is set into the wall, Marlo thought, her mind going back to countless department store reconnaissance missions. Like a two-way mirror.
“Class, please move your chairs closer,” Mr. Nostradamus said as he spun the briefcase forward, revealing a selection of strangely glimmering products tucked inside the velvet-lined attaché.
The boys obliged, while Marlo took the scenic route. She sashayed past the mirror, grazing her fingernail against it.
Yep, no gap between my nail and the reflection, she observed. There’s definitely a room on the other side of this thing, with somebody inside … watching.
Mr. Nostradamus curled his long chalk nails around a strangely glimmering, cellophane-wrapped pastry sporting a black label with neon green, Gothic letters: DOOMSDANISH®. The pastry itself was shaped like a mushroom cloud and was iced in fiery reds and yellows.
“Cool,” the chubby boy with the curly brown hair said as he reached for the danish. Mr. Nostradamus pulled it away.
“This is a prototype, Mr. Stawinski,” the wizened teacher scolded. “Not for consumption, but for discussion. So you were obviously drawn to it.”
The Stawinski boy nodded.
“It’s actually just Stawinski,” the boy replied with a flip of his curly hair. “Anyway, it looks like it would be rad to eat, or even just cool to have packed in your lunch!”
Mr. Nostradamus gave a sideways glance to the mirror.
“Excellent. Just the kind of feedback we’re looking for. What if Doomsdanish were available in a variety of ‘extreme’ shapes and colors? Say, flaming skulls with prunes for eye sockets, horsemen wielding banana-cream swords, sweeping scenes of civil unrest studded with Red Hots, and angry angels armored with almond slivers? Are these options that you and your specific age group would be interested in?”
Colby bobbed his head.
“Yeah!” he replied enthusiastically. “I’d probably trade them with my friends at school or collect them. That’s sort of what I was thinking when I invented Pokémon cards—”
“Thank you, Mr. Hayden,” the teacher interrupted. “Now, are there any potential taglines that spring to your young minds?”
“Bite me,” Marlo offered, her arms crossed, leaning against the mirror.
Mr. Nostradamus fumed at Marlo.
“I will not tolerate your insolence!” he roared.
“Insolence?” Marlo replied. “Isn’t that for diabetics? I meant ‘Bite Me’ as in a tagline.”
The teacher straightened his poofy velvet beret.
“Of course,” he replied stiffly. “Any others?”
“A Taste to Die For?” Zane offered.
“That’s good,” Marlo whispered, trying desperately to train her puppy love to not yap and make a mess everywhere.
“Doomsdanish, for when you’re filling bad?” Darnell said. “See, danishes have fillings, and ‘filling’ sounds like—”
“Let’s move along,” Mr. Nostradamus said as he put the odd pastry back in the case and removed another faintly glimmering product: a tube glazed in a weird, swirling paint that actually moved like smoke and fire. Printed on the side of the tube, in flaming letters, was the word APOCALYPSTICK®.
“Now, even though you are boys,” Mr. Nostradamus continued, “perhaps you could share your impressions—”
“Let me see!” Marlo blurted before the stares of her fellow classmates dampened her overenthusiasm. “I mean, it looks cool. Is it, um, a game controller or USB drive or something?”
The teacher rubbed his smoky gray beard.
“It’s a tube of lipstick, Mr. Fauster,” he said slowly. “Apocalypstick, to be precise.” Mr. Nostradamus tapped the bottom of the tube with his finger. The lipstick uncoiled, revealing not just one color, but a churning collage of complementary colors in progressively incendiary shades of neon.
“Cosmetics in Explosive Colors?” Colby interjected.
“Look Great and Devastate?” Marlo suggested. “Stop, Drop, and Roll It On? Apocalypse Wow?”
Mr. Nostradamus snickered, a creepy laugh that sounded like a baby hyena in a vacuum cleaner bag.
“You certainly are in touch with your feminine side, Mr. Fauster,” he said.
Marlo’s face grew hot.
“Well, my sister and I are … close,” Marlo murmured. “She’s really cool,” she added, her eyes darting toward Zane. “Like one of the guys, but, you know, totally a girl. Totally.”
“Right,” the teacher said, distracted, as he put the lipstick away—much to Marlo’s disappointment—and removed a gray tombstone-shaped tin marked FINAL JUDGMINTS®. “Now, this product is in a very experimental stage, and the staff of Fibble are not responsible for any ill effects incurred.… I’ll consider your silence as implied consent. Now give me your hands.…”
The boys held out their palms as Mr. Nostradamus sprinkled tiny, sparkling mints into their waiting mitts.
“Final Judgmints,” Colby said before popping the mint in his mouth, “Make Your Last Breath Your Best … oww!”
The mint felt like a drop of stinging electricity on Marlo’s tongue. Smokey, sharp, shocking, and totally without substance. Then, after the initial wave of tingly pinpricks, she was gripped with the sensation of burning spearmint, hot peppermint, and nuclear winter mint. They weren’t flavors, exactly, but swarms of impressions that buzzed in her brain like locusts before abruptly flitting away.
“Twern Yer Mowf into a Toxic Twaste Doomp?” Darnell attempted to say despite his electrocuted tongue.
“What?” Mr. Nostradamus asked.
“Gwound Zewo fo Yer Twaste Buds?” Colby managed through his short-circuited mouth as the class bell tolled.
Mr. Nostradamus sighed as he put the tin of Final Judgmints back in the humming briefcase. “We’ll try again tomorrow, class,” he muttered.
Vice Principal Barnum appeared in the doorway as Marlo and the other students filed past him into the hallway.
A few yards out of the classroom, Marlo noticed a door masquerading as a not-door, which is to say, it was almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Yet, luckily, Marlo’s eyes were always dressed for mischief, even when they were her brother’s. She gently pressed her palm to the door. It opened inward to a dark, L-shaped room. At the end, just beyond the turn, was a large window looking into Mr. Nostradamus’s classroom. The room smelled faintly of burning pants.
“Score,” she giggled as she sat down in a folding metal chair set in front of it. Her giggle, though, soon became a subaudible “eewww” upon feeling, first-hind, how uncomfortably warm Barnum had left the seat.
Through a speaker mounted off to the side of the mirror, Marlo could hear the vice principal and her pathetic, prophetic teacher talking.
“Without advertising, something terrible happens, Mr. Nostradamus,” the vice principal said bitterly. “Nothing! It’s like that campaign for scented underwear—Gee, Your Farts Smell Terrific!—all over again! I have half a mind to cram those students in the box!”
“That seems a touch extreme. While some of the students’ marketing suggestions may not seem like much to us,” the teacher replied, “they may resonate with the intended demographic.”
Mr. Barnum nodded and sat down on Mr. Nostradamus’s desk, his flaming pants igniting a stack of un-graded tests.
“The children did seem to respond to the test products, even though they weren’t real,” Mr. Barnum said, flipping open the buzzing briefcase. “The Humbugger is an amazing machine—projecting the most realistic illusions ever—though it is still having trouble simulating flavor.”
It’s kind of like electric tofu, Marlo thought as she swished her prickly tongue around in her mouth.
“So we’re fine-tuning our product messaging and—with the Big Guy Downstairs’s help—securing media saturation,” he continued with a wicked snicker. “And now that I’ve got Dr. Brinkley toiling away in the R & D lab, we’re poised to bring our little marketing sideshow all the way up to the Surface.”
“The Surface!” Marlo gasped, her hands rushing to cover her mouth as Mr. Nostradamus gave a suspicious darting glance to the mirror.
“Advertising as theater … as shameless spectacle,” Barnum murmured, nestled deep in his unfathomable thoughts. “And, in the end—the very end—no one will be able to tell the difference.”
He flipped a toggle switch on the inside of the briefcase. All of the products in the briefcase winked out of existence.
Dr. Brinkley is helping them peddle this junk to the Surface? Marlo thought with alarm. I’ve got to find a way into that lab!
10 • SEARCH PARTY POOPER
THE PRINCIPAL’S ELECTRO-TORCH beam sliced through the darkness like shears through black velvet. Unfortunately, the pitch-black velvet had been graciously concealing miles of poop-encrusted pipe and fresh pools of fetid sewage.
Bea “Elsa” Bubb crouched down, skittering sideways into the murk like an Alaskan queen crab clad in lime-green spandex. “Sweetums?” she called out in an uncharacteristically quavery voice. “Moopsie Sugar Britches? My Whiddle Honey Bunches of Goats?”
Principal Bubb’s snout wrinkled as a somehow even more disagreeable odor elbowed its way to the front of the disagreeable odor line. She turned sharply and screeched. Caught in her flickering torch beam was Limbo’s Metaphysical Education teacher, Blackbeard, sheepishly tugging at one of the dozen or so ribbons tied into his fittingly black beard.
“Argh, Miss Principal, forgive me if I a-startled ya,” the pirate apologized.
“Mr. Beard—”
“Call me Black,” the pirate smiled, exposing two teeth, both of which were capped with gold.
“Mr. Beard,” the principal repeated. “What are you doing here?”
“Excuse the intrusion, ma’am,” he said with a voice like a blast of swamp gas. “I saw yer flyer—”
He held out a soiled handbill.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
MISSING:
Almost-unendurably adorable three-headed hound of Heck
Pomeranian/Shih Tzu/Chimera mix
AGE:
Approximately 13 millennia
Answers to Cerberus, Sweetums, Mr. Fancy Puddles, or the sound of struggling prey (go online to www.houndbgone.hck for a complete list of nicknames and endearments)
IDENTIFYING MARKS:
Three heads up front, small rash in back
REWARD:
Your freedom*
*Heck staff not eligible
“Ah, I see,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb replied. “I must ask you, though, did you read the fine print?”
The burly pirate rubbed one of several long scars on his weathered cheek.
“I can’t say I’ve had an eye fer the finer things, Miss Principal. But with the right woman to help trim me ragged jib …”
The principal held her torch to the bottom of the flyer, highlighting the fine print: “Heck staff not eligible.”
The realization was, to Blackbeard’s spirits, like a cannonball tearing through a damp paper dinghy: a swift, deadly assault for which there was no counter-maneuver.
The principal looked down the subterranean conduit of caca that shuttles every last plop and tinkle of waste down the River Styx to h-e-double-hockey-sticks. She sighed with the enormity of the task ahead.
“So I understand if you’d prefer to shiver your timbers elsewhere,” she said.
Blackbeard hoisted his thick black belt over his grog-fattened belly.
“Nah, I’ll help ya find yer salty sea dog,” he replied with a sigh.
Principal Bubb’s face trembled and quaked until it finally pushed out something approximating a smile.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Bea “Elsa” Bubb responded. “Really. It’s been so long since I’ve thanked anyone for anything, I’m truly at a loss.”
Blackbeard rubbed his bearded, braided chin.
“Well, ya could always—”
“And I’m perfectly fine with not knowing how to thank you, thank you,” the principal replied, turning back to face the stinky blackness up ahead.
The two splashed along the dark, cramped pipeline that smelled like the distilled essence of every neglected rest stop bathroom, everywhere.
“My Pookie Snuggle Bottom, er, Cerberus, is so sensitive,” Principal Bubb fretted. “I worry he won’t be able to smell his way back into my arms.”
“I doubt if that’ll be a problem, Miss Principal,” the pirate offered.
The principal’s electro-torch cast the River Styx with a sickly orange flicker, creating a dance troupe of nasty, prancing shadows.
“Do ye mind if I listen to me iPood?” Blackbeard blurted, his voice slapping against the sides of the sewer pipe like a doctor’s hand on a newborn’s bottom.
The principal shuddered.
“I certainly hope that last word was a victim of your accent,” she grumbled. “In any case, go ahead.”
Blackbeard grinned and plucked a brown MP3 player from the pocket of his bullet-ridden, gash-ventilated frock coat.
“Yo ho!” the pirate shouted as he wedged his earbuds into the nests of dark hair sprouting from his ear canals. “It’s time fer me favorite ARGH show!”
Unfortunately for Principal Bubb, a lifetime of drunken bellowing, cannon fire, and macaws squawking on his shoulder had rendered Blackbeard virtually deaf, so the strains of ARGH blared as loud as a conch shell blast. High-energy, techno-pirate pop with bubblegum buccanette vocals throbbed through Blackbeard’s earbuds.
“I’m a wench who wants a boy,
to weigh anchor in my heart.
And make me shout and scream ‘ahoy!’
And sail me off the chart!”
The DJ blew a bosun whistle and howled.
“Blow me down!” he roared. “This is Calico Jack here and that was Me Hearties, those scurvy and curvy pop sensations, with ‘Looking for My Jolly Roger.’ Next up, we’ve another ditty from that crafter of tuneful tales, the Truthador, with a s
plash of refreshing sea foam for yer ears, ‘Swan Song from the False Power.’ ”
The Truthador slashed power chords from his harp.
“ ‘We must get these monkeys out of here,’ said the E.T. to the thief,” the Truthador sang in his strained, raspy voice. “ ‘They’re infesting our new home, and we need some relief.’ ”
Principal Bubb rolled her curdled yellow goat eyes.
“I need some relief … from this awful music,” she said as her hooves slipped in a sludgy pile of dung. “Mr. Beard …”
The pirate crooned tunelessly along with the music, barking like a sea lion choking on a broken toy trumpet.
“ ‘But me and my fiends, we’ll move them to a duller, sadder fate,’ ” Blackbeard sang on. “ ‘We’ll use the power of falsity now, and their Last Judgment create.’ ”
The power of falsity? Principal Bubb thought. As in … fibbing?
She extended her thumb and foreclaw, activating the thimbles of her No-Fee Hi-Fi Faux-Phone.
Mr. Nixon sat in an overstuffed, rust-colored Sleazy Chair in Fibble’s Lie-Brary reading a book: Abraham Lincoln: Was Honesty Really His Policy?
The Truthador’s music squawked through Fibble’s PA speakers.
“Monkeymen, they moan and whine.
They just don’t dig the Earth.
None of them would know the diff,
if we sent them somewhere worse.”
A slender, twisted demon—rather like a leather curly fry with a face—peeked into the room.
“Telephone, Mr. Nixon,” he rasped as he entered the Lie-Brary, carrying a silver tray holding two thimbles atop a white lace doily.
Mr. Nixon picked up the thimbles and scowled at the tightly coiled demon as he struggled to affix them to his fingers.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Nixon …,” Principal Bubb answered as she waded in gallons of castaway human filth.
“ ‘So let’s show them the exit,’ the thief he slyly spoke,” the Truthador sang, eerily through both her phone and Blackbeard’s earbuds. “ ‘There is no one here among them that would know it was a hoax.’ ”
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 7