“You’re bluffing,” the little man replied with a cruel, underworld-weary chuckle.
“Oh yeah?” Marlo retorted, realizing instantly that this was not one of her better retorts. “What makes you think so?”
Tom Thumb laughed as he let his cigar fall on the ground.
“Because you’re blushing,” he said as he stomped his cigar out with his pint-sized foot.
Marlo felt her burning cheeks.
Darn Milton’s goody-good body, she cursed to herself as she twisted the truth bomb’s handle and hurled it underneath Fibble. The bomb clattered and rolled to the midget’s feet. The shrimp demons soiled each other with fear in anticipation of an explosion that, with each passing second, seemed increasingly unlikely.
“Run!” Dr. Brinkley yelled as he speed-waddled toward his carriage.
An idea popped into Marlo’s head. She leaned beneath Fibble and screamed at the top of her brother’s burning lungs.
“I am lying!”
The Pinocchio-wood support beams trembled, and after several confused seconds, Fibble itself rose and fell in fierce, unpredictable spasms as the wood reacted to either the truth that was therefore a lie, or a lie that was therefore the truth.
The shrimps screamed like a pot of boiled lobsters and ran back toward the target beneath the Big Top.
Marlo and Zane trotted carefully across the slippery ice as Fibble bounced up and down—never quite fully rising, never quite completely falling—behind them. As they neared the carriage, a large shadow engulfed them, spreading out like an oil spill. Marlo looked up at the sky and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Looming above, composed of glittering, electrically charged tufts of smoke, was the massive, sneering clown head.
The Night Mares whinnied with terror, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, and bolted for the horizon.
“Shuck! Jive!” yelled Dr. Brinkley as he watched his carriage disappear across the Falla Sea. A roar filled the air, so deep that it rattled every bone in Marlo’s borrowed body.
“You will never leave!” the jumbo-sized clown face boomed. The head pressed close over them until it became the sky. The glittering smoke buzzed like a swarm of bees dipped in melted mirror. The sickly sweet smell of it prickled Marlo’s nose. With each breath, the gargantuan, malevolent clown head became more real.
“It’s … not … real,” Marlo said to herself, curling her fists as panic squeezed her in its cold, sickening grip.
“It’s the liedocane,” Dr. Brinkley cautioned. “Pure, high-grade stuff … so strong that, in the end, it won’t matter if it’s real or not. It will be to you. We have to get out of here.”
“But how?” Marlo asked as she scanned the bleak, frozen horizon.
The clown head laughed and swooped down upon them. Its wind knocked Marlo over and sent the doctor quacking, end-over-end. Marlo’s arms were bleeding from the millions of mirror shards that cut like tiny, shining razors. Zane noticed the broken support beam a dozen yards away.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said as he dashed toward the quivering timber. He scanned the ground and found a sharp chip of cleaved ice. Zane lifted the heavy chunk and—raising it above a section of wood—began hacking away. The Pinocchio plank screamed with each blow. Zane soon had cut the forty feet or so of wood into six pieces of equal length.
Marlo walked over to Zane, scooping up Dr. Brinkley’s abandoned satchel and slinging it over her shoulder. She stared at the trembling planks.
“So … you’re taking out your frustration on defenseless Pinocchio wood?” she asked as the leering clown head chuckled wickedly from above. Zane carved notches into the faintly whimpering planks.
“I’m makin’ us a way out of this bloomin’ freak show,” he said, his intense gaze fixed on the wood. Finished, he set his ice chisel down. Taking two severed beams, Zane positioned them like crutches on either side of himself, then—balancing them perfectly—shimmied his way to the freshly cleaved notches toward the top.
“Britain has the best food in the world,” Zane said firmly to the wood. His makeshift stilts grew to nearly three times their original size. Marlo clapped her hands and laughed.
“Brilliant!” she exclaimed.
She grabbed a pair of stilts and climbed—shakily—up to the foot notches.
“School counselors truly love their jobs,” Marlo whispered to the wood. Each stilt instantly grew twenty feet tall. She wobbled alongside Zane and turned, jabbing the ground step by step until she faced the doctor.
“Quick, Dr. Brinkley!” she shouted as the clown head darkened, collecting itself like a storm cloud ready to spew lightning and vengeance. Zane and Marlo staggered away from Fibble as Dr. Brinkley grabbed two stilts and fluttered to the foot wedges.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor—” Dr. Brinkley muttered just as the clown head pounced upon him, drawing in a deep slurping hurricane of a breath.
“Dr. Brinkley!” Marlo screamed as the doctor was sucked toward the clown’s swirling, cavernous mouth. “It’s not real! It’s just one of Barnum’s tricks!”
The colossal clown’s face contorted into a nightmare of a smile, its eyes a familiar dull black.
Like a shrimp’s, Marlo thought. Like Scampi’s …
The sucking vacuum stung Marlo’s eyes as it whipped past her. To her nose, the air smelled of lightning, black pepper, and Lucky Charms.
The Humbugger amplifies and lies, so a little clown shrimp would seem huge and scary.
Marlo leaned forward to keep from falling into the slurping, chuckling wind.
“We’ve got to scarper, Milton!” Zane yelled. He wobbled forward, unsure at first, but with each step gained speed and confidence.
Marlo tottered and swayed until she achieved a steady clip. She glanced behind her as the clown head consumed the screaming duck doctor. Dr. Brinkley swirled inside the tornado of smoke and mirrors until he was nothing but a white, squawking blur.
Terrified, Marlo sped across the tundra in great strides. She took one last peek over her shoulder.
The clown head roared and reared, yet the sparkling smoke grew so thin that you could see the bobbing circus tents of Fibble right through it. Marlo noticed a bright, white beam of light streaming from the tip of Fibble’s R & D tent, leading back to the twinkling haze of the clown-shaped vapor like an umbilical cord of pure energy. “Milton,” Zane called out, huffing, sweat streaming down his face. “Where to?”
Marlo swept the horizon with her eyes. Grim sheets of vertical fog hung down from the sky, like rippling gray curtains separating miles of nothing from miles of nothing.
“I have no i—” Marlo said before stopping herself. She reached for the Smell-O-Vision goggles tucked into her hair pajama bottoms, carefully steadying herself as she teetered twenty feet above the ground. Marlo clipped the spring-hinged temples over her ears and flicked the switch on the goggles’ nose bridge. She scoured the horizon through the electric Smell-O-Vision glasses and laughed.
“Scratch that,” Marlo said with a smirk. “I know exactly where to go!”
The stocky, marbled-meat demon cinched Annubis’s paws tight behind his back with twine. Another guarded Anput, Kebauet, and Virginia Woof while the last of the monstrous creatures hovered about dumbly, which made sense considering it didn’t have a head. All three demons sported sturdy tree-trunk legs, sledgehammer arms, and a sort of all-beef-doughnut torso with a gaping hole where their hearts should have been.
Annubis was shoved toward the vat. Nine hemlock steps led to its rim. The vat’s surface swirled with whorls of sparks, like eddies of fireflies caught forever in a draft.
“What is this about?!” Annubis barked to the dapper, demented man in the ascot.
“Jest a leedle flea dip,” the man replied as he fiddled with his shimmering holographic model. “In zhe Nullification Tub.”
Annubis peered across the vat at Noah, who was gagged, red in the face, and struggling against the bonds tied around his wrists and ankles.
/> “But … why? Who are you?”
The man tilted the brim of his black felt fedora to shield his eyes from the harsh fluorescent lights above. He moved a sparkling, holographic clot in the air with the tip of his laser pen.
“Zhey say that art imitates life,” he replied as he fixed the glistening clot of light at the center of his levitating, three-dimensional blob. “Me, zhough—Elmyr de Hory—have spent my life imitating art, committing forgeries so perfect that zhey are indistinguishable from original. Some of my forgeries sell as much as original, jess because zhey are mine! That is because I don’t just match an artist’s work stroke-for-the-stroke. I infuse each piece with soul, the spirit that guides zhe brush.…”
That’s it, Annubis thought as he examined the twin holographic blobs that looked like a floating figure eight made of blown glass, rainbow sprinkles, and splotches of molasses. A model of the human soul!
“So who better than to forge the very essence of art—the human soul?” Mr. de Hory continued, confirming the dog god’s suspicions.
Resting his chin on his delicate hand, Mr. de Hory judged his creation.
“But I am victim of my materials,” he sighed. “To counterfeit the billions of fakes I agreed to make, I must use melted-down souls of animals—dogs, mostly—as my canvas.”
“Agreed to make?” Annubis interrupted as he shook off the beefy purplish hands of the headless/heartless demon. “For whom?”
Mr. de Hory’s thin lips creased into a cryptic smile.
“A patron of the arts,” he replied with a shrug. “I know not who … I care not who!”
Virginia Woof—pinned between a demon’s legs—managed to type out a comment on her Speak & Spell.
“Why dog?” the mechanized voice, muffled by the demon’s massive calves, inquired.
Mr. de Hory clapped his hands with delight.
“Zhat is it, exactly! Dogs are so similar to zhe humans … so adaptable—”
A Siamese cat, a mangy black-and-tan spotted Manx, and a patchwork calico slunk around the corner, followed by dozens of other cats twitching their tails.
“No, offense, felines. You and zhe three-headed one have helped me immensely.”
Cerberus trotted around the corner and hiked his leg in the air, relieving himself from his post to relieve himself on a post. The cats circled and pranced around Cerberus in a sickening display of flattery.
“But zhey—even dogs—lack zhe complexities and contrasts I need to make a convincing forgery. I need something … in-the-between. A missing soul link that will connect my human reproduction with zhe coarser canine materials available. I need to cast something that is both animal and human.”
Mr. de Hory lowered his thick, black-rimmed glasses.
“Vhat I need, actually, is you, Mr. Jackal. Or the females.”
“You wouldn’t dare—” Annubis growled.
The foppish con artist waved the demon holding Annubis forward.
“The great artist is zhe who turns pain to advantage, lets suffering deepen his understanding, and grows through zhe pain.”
The headless/heartless demon shoved Annubis up the steps of the Nullification Tub.
“But I am artist that makes living through zhe work of others,” Mr. de Hory said, loosening his white silk ascot. “So you vill do my suffering for me.”
22 • TOGETHER FUREVER
RIVERS OF SCENT flowed past Marlo and Zane as they strode across the Broken Promised Land atop lofty stilts of lie-lengthened Pinocchio wood. Marlo squinted through her Smell-O-Vision goggles, her eyes trained on the deep-brown/gray coil of odor she had been tracking since Fibble. Other tufts of scents—burbling blues and scattered scarlets—drifted sporadically in the dull, oatmeal-colored sky. Only the dense, brown-gray tangle of smell, though, had been a constant fixture, bunching up and thickening with each mile. At the lower left-hand corner of the goggles’ lens was a tiny digital meter—a flat red arch marking “Mineral,” “Vegetable,” “Animal”—with the needle trained firmly on “Animal.”
“Still on track,” Marlo called out to Zane behind her. She could, only now, detect the faint musk herself as it tickled the back of her nose.
Marlo’s legs and arms ached. With the stilts, they had probably covered five miles by now … or ten. Marlo had no idea, really. It wasn’t like there were signs reading “15 Miles to the Furafter” staked into the ground at regular intervals. If there were, they would probably be in kilometers just to confuse Marlo. But Zane—being English and awesome—could probably help with that.
“Here comes another one,” Marlo called out to Zane as they walked through a massive wall of swirling fog. Passing through these electrified barriers—this latest one made three, total—felt like when you lie back on the wicked cold porcelain of your bathtub after just getting in—that dull, horrible shock. It was like that, only all over, a strange, blurry chill.
This new realm wasn’t much different from the last one … or the one before that. It seemed, to Marlo, that these in-between places, these expansive pockets of nothing, were afterlife afterthoughts. Dreary supernatural subdivisions, where even color seemed like a costly “extra” that the developers weren’t going to just throw in for free.
“Can you still see the stench?” Zane asked. Marlo slipped back on her Smell-O-Vision goggles. The dense, knotted rope of pet musk snaked beside them—creepy how it was right there but she couldn’t see it without the goggles—and led to a sheet of fog to their left.
“We must be close,” Marlo said, willing her aching limbs to push faster, as both she and Zane slammed into the last churning fog wall.
* * *
The Badillac lurched. The passengers fell in a heap onto the floor.
“What now?!” Inga shrieked at the chauffeur.
Milton noted that, through the floor of the limo, the road sounded different. Not the steady thrum of asphalt but the crinkle of … paper.
“We’re here-ish,” the driver replied.
Milton climbed up off the floor and stared out at the horizon whizzing past: a flat, unbroken plain laid with acres of old yellow newspaper. A tall wood tower to the right of the Badillac shone bright with floodlights.
“Stay!” a mechanized voice ordered as the limo raced past.
In the distance, Milton could see a large cage of some kind. An imposing structure with big feathery gargoyles perched atop its nine walls. At least they looked like gargoyles, Milton thought, just as something tall and skinny skittered across the plain in the corner of his eye.
The chauffeur demon slammed on the brakes. Wood clattered across the hood of the limo. Milton could see, through the rear window, two figures fall to the ground: two boys in hairy pajamas. In fact, one of them looked really familiar.
The Badillac zigzagged across the newspaper valley before plowing into the side of the metal fortress. A broken chorus of caws thundered from above. A half-dozen Err bags rapidly inflated in the back of the Badillac and pitched the passengers out of the car, into the arms of whatever harm awaited them.
Milton was propelled through the rear window. He bounced out onto the trunk that—as his sister’s body dented the metal—popped open, breaking his fall while nearly breaking his neck. He stumbled off the Badillac and broke a heel.
“Marlo!” a boy yelled at Milton from beyond the wreckage. “It’s me!”
The boy, English by the sound of it, ran at Milton, clad in coarse brown hair pajamas. Van Glorious rose from the shredded newspaper ground, mourning his expensive broken shades for a split second before tossing them aside and bounding to intercept the boy.
“You stay away from us, you little creep!” Van bellowed. “We’re just like real people, with real lives. Not animals in a zoo—”
He grabbed Zane’s arm, just as Zane was about to embrace Milton.
“Marlo!” he panted. “I can’t believe it’s you! Hey … let go, you—!”
Van belted Zane across the chin, knocking him to the ground.
“What
did you do that for?” Milton asked.
Van shrugged.
“I just assumed he was the paparazzi,” he explained, rubbing his fist.
“You leave her alone, you great plonkin’ pillock!” Zane yelled as he leapt to his feet.
“Not the face! Not the face!” Van yelped as the two exchanged blows.
Milton leaned back against the wrecked limo. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, he thought, I have two guys fighting over me.
“Milton?” a voice called out. Milton’s voice. It sounded higher and shakier than he expected, like when he’d hear his voice on a recording. To the side of the wreck, by the fortress cage, stood … himself.
“Marlo!” Milton called back as he hobbled toward his sister. It was like rushing into a mirror.
The Fausters hugged each other, tight, as if hoping to merge into one fearless, invincible force. Tears streamed down their faces.
“I missed you,” Marlo said, choking back her sobs. “I missed me, too.”
She pushed Milton back, peered over his shoulder, and smiled her trademark crooked smile, a broken pink crayon even on Milton’s face.
“Is Zane fighting with that dead action hero guy over … me?” she asked coyly.
Milton shrugged.
“I guess … Van Glorious, the dead actor, is a few shows shy of a full lineup … a franchise that’s spawned too many spin-offs, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” Marlo replied as she tucked blue hair behind Milton’s ear.
“Sorry, industry jargon,” Milton apologized.
He swatted his sister’s preening hands away.
“We don’t have time for this,” Milton said as he scrutinized the fortress behind his sister.
“Right,” Marlo said as she tore her eyes from Zane, now propped up against the damaged limousine, panting alongside Van Glorious. “Time to put our freaky Fauster powers into action.” She looked over her shoulder at the fortress.
“Are those … crows?” she gasped as her bulging eyes, having traveled up the bars, settled on the massive feathered guardians perched on the parapet.
Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Page 16