Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  “Scarecrows,” she replied in the toy’s flat, digitized voice. “To be honest, never thought cats let us get this far.”

  “Scarecrows?”

  “Guard Globeways. Many-sided portals, ideal for transport struggling animals. Ever try herd cats? Globeways make easier for Scarecrows, virtually scratch-free.”

  The imposing crows spread out their wings until they formed a wall of gleaming black feathers.

  “Caw!”

  Annubis’s eyes grew wet as he stared longingly into the rotating spheres beyond the fence, one of which led to his wife and daughter.

  “Well, we stand no chance vanquishing them through force … especially since none of us are bird dogs,” Annubis commented with resignation. “So I suppose I’ll just have to reason with them.”

  Annubis smoothed out his shimmering white tunic. Virginia Woof whined and gently nipped at his ankle.

  “Careful,” the terrier tapped. “Crows be murder.”

  Annubis nodded and approached the fortress. The Scarecrows paced along the parapet nervously, hunching their shoulders and puffing their crest feathers, and turned their backs. He stood at the front by the latched gate, took in a deep breath, and addressed the birds.

  “Good day, good crows … Scarecrows, forgive me,” Annubis declared in a smooth, diplomatic tone. “Might I speak with—”

  The dog god was barraged by a hot salvo of viscous white crow droppings, accompanied by a cacophony of caws. The crows shuffled about their roosts with their tail feathers quivering in satisfaction.

  Annubis, stiff with mortification, smeared clumps of thick, oily excrement from his face. The dog god at least had got his answer: there would be no reasoning with these sometimes predatory, sometimes scavenging, all-the-time intimidating birds. He saw the pack of dogs retreat behind a wall of old yellowed newspaper stacks.

  A muffled clutter of mews filled the stale, still air around them. In the distance, a roving mass of cats came, their tails twitching in their maddening, secret cat language.

  The dog god shook himself alert, as one should never have a fuzzy head inside when dealing with cats. He trotted stealthily to the newspaper wall.

  “Chairman Meow, Claude Yereyesout, Hannibal Lickter, Felonious Mouse-de-meaner, and … Lulu,” Virginia Woof said as she scrutinized the front line of shabby, filthy, snaggletoothed felines. “Those are some bad, bad kitties.”

  Suddenly, parting the sinewy sea of cats with his three noses, came Cerberus, who pranced to the front of the ragged team of felines, and drank in the feast of smells around him.

  Annubis’s jaw dropped.

  “Cerberus!” he gasped in shock. He rubbed the crown of his sleek head. “Where that hound of Heck goes, Bubb is sure to follow,” he added miserably. “Figures that treacherous, disloyal lapdog would side with the cats.”

  Napoleon Bone-apart scratched and barked.

  “Shhh!” Annubis scolded.

  The Italian greyhound whimpered and scratched at the newspapers beneath him. Virginia Woof cocked her ears as she tentatively pawed the hole Napoleon Bone-apart had started. The ground beneath the shredded newspaper was softer than she had expected, a mixture of sawdust clumps and cedar shavings.

  Annubis’s tail waggled beneath his tunic as he examined the terrier’s freshly dug hole—already a foot deep—then followed with his eyes to the inside of the fortress.

  “You are in no way obliged to help me further,” Annubis said. “I don’t wish to put you and the pack in harm’s way.”

  Virginia Woof stopped digging, her muzzle clumped with sawdust.

  “In Noah’s absence, you closest thing to a master,” she said, working the Speak & Spell with difficulty in the cramped space. “We no roll over, lie down, and play dead while one of own in need.”

  As it is physically impossible to not crave cheese puffs at the sight of someone eating cheese puffs, the other dogs were incapable of standing idly by as one of their pack joyously dug fresh earth. Together, the dogs made quick work of the hole, soon an expansive tunnel. Even the noble dog god could not resist the lure of soil sifting and tickling between his claws. Annubis just hoped, as he dug his way in the dark, moist soil beneath Stay! that he and his adopted pack would strike pay dirt.

  * * *

  Loose clumps of compressed cedar shavings fell down the dog god’s back. He could see faint light trickling through the ceiling of the tunnel. Annubis stuck his slender nose up through a small opening and inhaled deeply. The sharp tang of crow droppings was powerful. Peeking through the odor were faint traces of dog, cat, and other domestic mammal musks, along with the occasional canine crazy-making scent of squirrel. Annubis cautiously peered past the lip of the newly dug hole.

  The energetic portals leading to the Kennels and the Really Big Farm were only a few yards away. Beyond, up on the parapets, the crows were perched, facing out with agitated interest at the cats languidly swarmed outside the fortress.

  Annubis hoisted himself out of the hole and sprinted on all fours toward the sputtering, spherical portal leading to the Kennels. Virginia Woof hopped out and trotted at his heels.

  The sensation of passing through the Globeway was, to Annubis, like running through an electric, full-body flea comb. Annubis skidded across the concrete floor and slammed against a wall of metal crates that stretched above, nearly touching the ceiling of flickering fluorescent tubes. The pungent odor of animal despair and the harsh, relentless din of whines, meows, and barks knocked the wind out of Annubis as he crumpled to the floor.

  “No creature … no matter how they behaved while living … deserves to be treated … like this!” he snarled in between labored breaths. “Forgotten … furever …”

  Annubis’s long, droopy ears pricked at a sound poking through the wall of miserable noise. A yap. And this yap held with it a special timbre to Annubis, a precise flavor unique in all the universe.

  “Kebauet!” Annubis yelped as he sprung to his feet.

  The yapping gained in urgency and intensity.

  Annubis cocked his ears, separating yelps from bays, until he isolated his daughter’s plea for help.

  “Paw-paw,” she whimpered from twenty crates above.

  “Nub-nub?” a weak, crumpled velvet voice queried from a nearby crate. “Am I … dreaming? My legs aren’t twitching.…”

  “Anput!” Annubis howled with longing. “I’m coming.” The dog god darted his head from side to side, searching for some way to reach his family.

  “I apologize, my fellow creatures,” he said as he began assembling stray crates into a sort of stairway, leading him as close as possible to his wife and daughter.

  Virginia Woof bit into the wire mesh of the cages and dragged them to Annubis, one by one, with feisty heaves and jerks.

  “Thank you, my friend,” Annubis said gratefully as he hoisted the cage of a hissing tabby to the top of the ad hoc stairwell. The dog god clambered up the steep, gently swaying tower of crates until he could just touch, by fully extending his long, graceful limbs, the cage of his beloved daughter. He felt the pink tickle of her tongue.

  “We knew you’d come!” yapped the odd-looking girl, with her glossy gray coat and dark pointed ears. Annubis wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his paw-hand.

  “Of course, my pup,” he said as he strained to lift her latch. He unclasped the rusty cage door and Kebauet leapt into her father’s arms. Annubis hugged her close before, reluctantly, lowering her down to a ledge of crates five feet above the floor.

  Annubis scrambled to rearrange the crates to reach his wife, imprisoned across the cramped channel separating the wall of cages. Anput was several stories higher than Kebauet had been, so Annubis climbed upward using a series of meager footholds until he made his way to his wife’s cage.

  “My dear,” he said as he took in the shocking image of his wife, a Weimaraner, her pelt a once-lustrous charcoal-blue storm cloud of fur now worn in patches.

  The light behind Anput’s amber eyes flare
d at the sight of her husband.

  “I had … nearly given up hope,” she replied, her short tail wagging feebly. Though emaciated, Anput still radiated elegance and nobility. Annubis tucked his paws around her frail form and pulled her to his chest.

  “You have lost so much weight,” he said as he draped his wife across his back and, with great care, inched his way toward his pile of cages.

  Anput clutched tightly around Annubis’s neck.

  “I would flick whatever stale kibble bit the auto-feeders deigned to give toward our daughter,” she replied with effort. They arrived at the crate tower, with Annubis folding his fragile wife in his arms and climbing down to the concrete floor. He set her beside his daughter, the two gripping each other tightly.

  A pungent, curry-dusted musk caught the attention of Annubis’s nostrils, cutting through the sour wash of urine and feces.

  “A ferret,” Annubis said as he attempted to zero in on the odor’s source with his keen nose. “Lucky!”

  A fierce scrabbling rattled a cage stacked twenty feet high in the corner by the glimmering Globeway entrance.

  “You rest there, my treasures,” he said as he dragged crates toward the source of the sound. “I made a promise to a friend.”

  Virginia Woof tapped her displeasure into her Speak & Spell.

  “Must hurry,” she relayed through the plastic box. “Can’t rescue every creature.”

  Annubis doggedly constructed another tower of cages by the Kennels’ entrance. “We’ll see about that,” he panted as he hauled the heavy crates into a jumbled yet sturdy-enough heap. Annubis scaled the pile nimbly until he was greeted by a pair of glowing red eyes and a blast of anchovy-hiss.

  “You must be Lucky,” Annubis said as he noted the pair of dice hanging from the ferret’s collar. “Or as lucky as a creature can be in the Kennels.” Lucky spun about frantically in his cramped cage, a white whir of restlessness. Annubis unlatched the cage, and the ferret spilled out onto his back like a living fur stole.

  “Don’t … worry,” Annubis said between clenched teeth as Lucky buried his claws in the dog god’s back, “we’ll be out of here soon, and no one will be the—”

  Annubis froze as he turned to descend the jumble of crates, staring straight into a security camera mounted in the corner.

  “—wiser.”

  The red light blinked mockingly, as if to say “gotcha.” Annubis hurried down to Anput, Kebauet, and Virginia Woof waiting obediently for his return.

  “You’re right, Virginia,” he said with haste as he scooped up his family in his arms. “We must make haste, before the Scarecrows come to—”

  “Caw!!”

  Through the electric blur of the spherical portal, Lucky and the petrified dogs saw three giant crows, their gleaming black wings flapping with menace. At the base of their cruel black talons sat Cerberus, his three mouths panting smugly.

  19 • JOINED AT THE HYPE

  “HEY, GIRLY,” THE faceless, chain-smoking writer said to Milton the second he walked into Hack: Where the Bad Writers Go. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

  The office roared with the incessant clacking of bulky tripewriters and the occasional carriage return and bell.

  Milton looked around and noticed that all of the writers, stooped over their desks, looked as if they were wearing sheer pantyhose over their heads, their features dull and nondescript.

  “Actually,” Milton replied, cradling a stack of edited scripts, “I just came to drop these—”

  “What blood type is deadly to proofreaders?” the writer posed.

  Milton shrugged.

  “Type O!” the writer blurted out. “Get it? Like a typo … a mistake!”

  Milton scratched at the waist of his dress, which he had put on backward, accustomed as he was to zippers up front.

  “That’s not bad,” he replied nervously as he set the stack of T.H.E.E.N.D. season finale scripts on the writer’s desk. “So, here are Satan’s edits. Mr. Welles wanted them back right away, so if you guys can just smooth out what he wrote and messenger them back—”

  The writer flipped through the scripts, examining them closely.

  “Wait a second,” he said as he pulled out a large electric magnifying glass that cast a vivid blue-white glow upon the pages. “Just what I thought,” he pronounced, setting the instrument down on his desk. “Not all of these are his edits. Some are, but the ones at the end … someone wrote over them in red ink.”

  Milton gulped and glanced down at his sister’s ink-stained fingers. He quickly clasped the incriminating digits behind his back, not wanting to be caught red-handed.

  “Hmm … are you sure?” he asked, staring down at his sister’s painful black shoes.

  The writer smirked, which simply creased his beige, creepy-smooth face.

  “Yeah, girly. I’m sure. Look, we were given specific instructions to only make edits where we saw this distinctive writing … inscribed in blood with a quill.”

  That writing, Milton thought as he tried to wipe his hands on his sides. Those fussy loops and swirls. It looks so familiar.

  The writer got a glimpse of Milton’s red-tipped fingers.

  “Everybody wants to break into this business,” the man said, gesturing at his fellow execrable scribes bent over their tripewriters. “And, while I appreciate a plucky bobby-soxer trying to get her foot in the door, I ain’t going to let your chicken scratch through and incur the wrath of Old Scratch, dig?”

  Milton did not dig, exactly, but gathered that his attempts at softening the apocalyptic endings to all of the T.H.E.E.N.D. finales had been thwarted.

  “So you cool your heels, Little Red Writing Hood,” the man croaked as he lifted his bones from his hard metal office chair. “I’ll get the boys to make the real edits for you,” he added with a wink—a quick wrinkle where his eye should have been—as he trundled down the row, tossing scripts to the faceless hacks.

  Milton hobbled over to the Waiting and Waiting Area. He plopped down on the couch and anxiously bit his sister’s fingernails, listening to the writers grumble and grouse at their latest deadline.

  Figures the devil would edit manuscripts in blood, Milton fumed as he flipped through a copy of The Hellywood Reporter left out on the coffee table. He’s probably type O, too.

  Milton stopped at a full-page article, topped with a photograph of Satan, leering at the camera with a mouthful of capped fangs.

  DEVIL GETS DUE WITH BOFFO IDIOT-BOX OFFICE!

  Satan’s new T.H.E.E.N.D.-eavor racks up major aud up on Surface! This slate of niche chucklers and dramedies with unrepentantly religious themes are a resounding click with the demo. Critics wonder why all these hot shows are up against each other—their own worst competish—but with Orson Welles lensing, and Satan himself at the helm, who are we to judge this socko sked? The hit of hits of this—and only, if sources prove correct—season is Teenage Jesus, starring heartthrob Van Glorious, with Allah in the Family a close second, both of them chugging toward fiery finales.

  Satan has been strangely silent about T.H.E.E.N.D., only commenting on the hullabaloo brewing upstairs with this cryptic announcement: “I am honored to be at the center of this religious ratings war, and I can assure all of my fans that, yes, T.H.E.E.N.D. is closer than you think!”

  Milton reread the phrase again and again.

  T.H.E.E.N.D. is closer than you think.…

  What is Satan’s deal? Milton wondered. What’s in it for him?

  Milton crumpled inside, like an empty soda can crushed by sucky circumstance. The whole point of switching bodies with his sister had been to protect her, especially considering the weird brainwashed state she had been in as the devil’s Girl Friday the Thirteenth. He had also hoped to use Marlo’s status as an Infern to get to the bottom of whatever the devil was cooking up.

  But Milton was realizing, as he held The Hellywood Reporter in his sister’s trembling hands, that he was entrenched in a system devised by adults who had centuries of experi
ence working their own system. Milton was just a kid learning the ropes of eternity, and the only thing Milton knew for sure was that he was in over his head, and his head was halfway across the underworld in Fibble. He needed his sister, as much as that pained him to admit. They were like some pop group that squabbled all the time, broke up, and then put out solo albums that no one liked. They were, somehow, better together. And if Milton was to unplug whatever Satan had getting “boffo idiot-box office” on the Surface, he’d need his sister’s help.

  He threw The Hellywood Reporter on the table. Next to it was the latest copy of GYP. The grainy photograph on the cover caught his eye: a grim wall of cages each housing a miserable, dispirited animal. A dog, a cat, a ferret …

  A FERRET.

  “Lucky!” Milton yelped as he seized the newspaper and guzzled the cover story with his eyes.

  MILITANT ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUP

  WAGES WAR ON FURAFTER:

  Founder Vows That Fur Will Fly if Passed-on Pets Are Put Down

  By Milton Fauster

  The vigilantes of REPEAT (Recently Expired People for Ethical Animal Treatment) had their fur rubbed the wrong way at reports that animals were to be energetically “nullified” in the Kennels, the pitiless pet prison of the Furafter where the bad animals go down, boy, down. And these courageous cat and canine crusaders weren’t going to just roll over and play dead.

  “I and a crack team of armed animal activists are mounting a massive assault against the Kennels and all it stands for,” said REPEAT founder Brigid Brophy, as she and her team of ex-supermodels prepared leaflets, signs, and badges—their so-called weapons of mass instruction. “We will cross the line—between the Hereafter and the Furafter, between wrong and right, between protest and combat—because the Powers That Be have crossed the line!”

  No word on how REPEAT’s offensive will be greeted, but it can only be assumed that this band of angry Amazons will be the center of a raging media storm as all eyes fix on the untamed, anything-goes jungle that is the Furafter.

  “We’re going to raise an unholy stink as only we voluptuous, unpredictable animal-liberators can!” Brophy said, sneering, as she slipped into her sleek catsuit and flak jacket. “And woe be to those who stand in our way, ’cuz these kitties scratch!”