Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck

by Dale E. Basye

  “Annubis!” Milton called to the dog god as he crossed into the fortress courtyard. “Principal Bubb is here! And we could really use your help in Fibble, but I’m not sure how you would get—”

  Milton saw Cerberus frolicking with his tri-haunched girlfriend back in the Really Big Farm behind Annubis’s shoulder. The two cavorted happily, rolling across piles of fresh dung.

  “Maybe we could hold Cerberus hostage!” Milton exclaimed. “Perhaps Bubb would back down!”

  Annubis shook his jackal’s head soberly.

  “It would never work,” he replied. “She’d only double-cross us … perhaps triple-cross us, with Cerberus involved. Besides, I know exactly how we can use Cerberus to our advantage.”

  “How?” Milton asked.

  “We leave him in the Really Big Farm.”

  Milton’s jaw fell open.

  “Why would you reward that horrible, three-headed beast an eternity in pet paradise?!”

  Annubis smiled as he cradled, in his paw-hand, the latest copy of GYP.

  “Justice will be served, I assure you,” he said. “But you and your party must go … Fibble is at least thirteen miles away, as the crow flies.”

  Marlo and Zane were suddenly—inexplicably to Milton—teetering atop their now-towering stilts at Milton’s side. He squinted his eyes in the foul wind, watching the stagecoach, helplessly, as it slowly approached the fortress.

  “As the crow flies,” Milton muttered. He turned to watch Noah flapping his arms in front of the eight remaining Scarecrows. “I think I know how we can get out of here, Van. But be prepared to fly coach.”

  Annubis watched the stagecoach swerve back and forth in the flaming poop storm, diverted from the Kennels by the Scarecrows and focused out beyond the gates.

  “I will be joining you soon,” he replied mysteriously. “But you and your friends must leave. Now. Or all will be lost.”

  Milton nodded as Lucky bounded toward him.

  “Lucky,” Milton said, kneeling down, as he gazed into his ferret’s crazed pink eyes, “you don’t have to come with me. You can stay here in the Really Big Farm. I’d … understand.”

  Lucky spun around in a circle and sniffed the air. After a moment’s hesitation, he leapt into Milton’s arms. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Lucky,” Milton said, beaming, as he gently placed his pet at the bottom of his tote bag. “I need all the luck I can get. Let’s go!”

  27 • FOLLOW THE MISLEADERS

  THE COLOSSAL SCARECROW clutched Milton’s shoulders tight with its talons as it glided across the bleak mosaic of dried hexagonal plates below. The pain was incredible, though it helped to take Milton’s mind off the fact that a giant crow was clutching his shoulders, whisking him high across some grim no-man’s-land toward certain doom.

  The Scarecrow fluffed its gleaming black crest and swooped down to join the Scarecrow pinching its talons into Van. Just below were Marlo and Zane, sweeping the edge of the Broken Promised Land atop their elongated Pinocchio-wood stilts.

  They were now safely beyond the ammonia-soaked apocalypse unleashed from Pandora’s Cat Box, though it seemed to have died down to a mere dense, eye-stinging mist with the occasional chance of flaming turd-fall. The toxic output of feline-spurned ills, toil, and sickness had provided excellent coverage for which to escape the Furafter undetected. Milton, however, was conflicted: he was both relieved and thrilled to be fleeing the Furafter, yet had no clear idea how to deal with what awaited in Fibble … whatever that was. If only he and Marlo had some support—beyond a dead British boy with an incomprehensible crush on his sister (whose weird body was unfortunately the current resting place of Milton’s eternal soul) and a has-been actor with a sense of self so inflated that it could lead the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  Just then, Milton noticed below him a bank of three gray machines, like drab metal refrigerators. Surrounding them were dozens of castaway bottles, like the kind that the PODs, the Phantoms of Dispossessed, used to collect—

  “Liquid silver!” Milton yelped, the wind nearly stuffing the words back into his mouth. “Those are the deposit stations the PODs used to trade that weird glittering fluid they collected for supplies.”

  Milton grasped the Scarecrow’s ankles.

  “Down, please,” he asked the sturdy bird as it ceased flapping its majestic wings and drifted down toward Marlo.

  “I swallowed a necklace before we switched!” Milton yelled to his sister. “Did it … come out?”

  She looked up at her brother.

  “Yeah,” Marlo replied as sweat trickled down her brow. “I barfed it up in the Fibble boys’ room.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “Yeah … why?”

  “I’m requesting backup. You know: calling in the cavalry,” Milton replied. “A bunch of friendly phantoms said to call if I ever need any help. I just hope they come in the nick of time, like on TV.…”

  “Here comes … another fog wall,” Marlo said while maintaining her steady stride. “I think it’s … the last.”

  Milton, Marlo, Van, and Zane pierced the billowing barrier of electrified vapor. The cold, tingling fog wiped Milton’s mind clean. However, after he passed through the wall, his jumbled thoughts and feelings quickly returned. It was like his brain was a rebooted computer.

  At the edge of a valley of fractured salt plates was Fibble, bordering the rim of the frozen Falla Sea.

  “There it is!” Zane called out, though with his British accent, it sounded more like “theri tizz.”

  The three tents of Fibble jostled about like demonically possessed Hippity Hops.

  “Why is it bouncing up and down like that?” Milton yelled.

  “It’s … because the wood that supports it … is made of Pinocchio people …,” she panted with exhaustion. “Man … I get to go by … crow … next time.”

  Marlo leaned close to her stilts and whispered.

  “I wish I were still alive,” she murmured sadly as her stilts instantly collapsed into two pieces of wood roughly the size of school rulers.

  The Scarecrows dropped Milton and Van from a few yards above ground before soaring back into the sky. After a quick circle of Fibble, the majestic monster birds flapped back toward the Furafter with nary a caw for goodbye.

  Milton and Van landed hard on their knees, rolling to a stop, as Zane tumbled from his pair of rapidly contracting stilts. Milton rose and tugged down his irritating creeping-terror-of-a-dress, joining Marlo and Zane at Fibble’s perimeter. Wind gushed in a steady rhythm, squished out from between the ground and the platform supporting the tents.

  Zane studied the festively striped tents of Fibble as they tossed and joggled.

  “It’s as bonkers as when we left,” Zane explained. “Fibble rises about fifteen meters, then comes whooshing down, stopping about thirty centimeters from the ground, and then flies back up.”

  “Caught between a lie that’s a truth, and a truth that’s a lie,” Marlo muttered.

  A plume of silvery smoke drifted out from the Big Top’s tip, snaking up into the sky and birthing a confusion of glittering tendrils.

  “What’s that?” Milton asked as the smoke clotted and coiled high above his head, gradually blocking the light as it thickened.

  Marlo gulped.

  “You’re not scared of clowns, are you?” she said as she wrapped her brother’s gangly arms around her.

  The sparkling cloud spread out across the sky and darkened, slowly coagulating into a massive head leering out at the horizon. It turned an angry shade of red and sprouted a pair of horns.

  “That’s like no clown I’ve ever seen,” Milton murmured. “It looks more like … Satan. Almost. But not quite. The horns are shorter, his complexion is lighter …”

  “You’re right,” Marlo whispered. “And you know how much I hate saying that. But it was totally a clown before.”

  The demonic head roared up at the sky, exposing a pair of lightning-white fangs. Its eyes belched fire.<
br />
  “Let’s get out of here!” Van yelped as he turned to make a run across the frozen Falla Sea. Marlo grabbed him by his talon-soar shoulder.

  “We’re right underneath it. If we run away, it’ll see us. The best thing for us to do is to break into Fibble as planned. C’mon.”

  They crouched as they jogged to the perimeter of Fibble.

  “Follow me, mates,” Zane said as he fell to his hands and knees and crawled swiftly ahead past a squealing contracting/expanding Pinocchio post. “We’ll want to get just under the Big Top.”

  Milton hunkered to the frosty, murky ground. It was hard not to flinch all over when Fibble zoomed down, only to stop inches above their backs.

  “You’re sure this place isn’t going to squash us?” he asked as he crept behind Zane.

  “Not to worry, luv,” he replied, looking back with a sly wink. “I’ve got you covered.”

  I’m not sure which is worse, Milton thought as he scrabbled along in the icy muck, being crushed by Fibble or crushed on by Marlo’s boyfriend. Several yards to his right, Milton noticed a glinting cylinder.

  “It’s one of those … bombs,” Milton panted to Marlo. “Like you used … in the Kennels.”

  Marlo crawled over to the truth bomb, snatched it up, and put it into her satchel.

  “Could come in … handy,” she replied. “Nothing like a little truth … to clear a room. Like … a fart. Kinda feels good to let one out. But then … everything stinks and no one likes you anymore.”

  They crawled through the freezing mud on their hands and knees, past the fractured gates of Fibble—its broken, rainbow-hued neon lights sputtering like sick electric snakes—and beneath the torn paper center-ring of Fibble’s Big Top.

  Milton stared at the underside of Fibble, its lattice of wood and brass bobbing up and down at him like a yo-yo.

  “How do we get up there?” Van asked, his vestments covered in muck. “One second it’s there, then it’s not … like my agent up on the Surface.”

  “We just time it, sync up to the rhythm,” Milton replied as the flapping paper entrance to the Big Top brushed his head, “then jump inside.”

  Milton rose, tightly reining in his instincts that told him to lie flat.

  Maybe I’m not as scared because I’m Marlo, he thought as the top of his head popped into the hole on the Big Top floor—springing inside like a jack-in-the-box—before Fibble shot back up into the sky. Milton crouched down, his legs coiling like springs.

  “One-two-three … one-two—”

  He leapt inside the Big Top, as hard and as far as he could.

  “Three!” he yelled as he rolled onto the sawdust floor of the darkened, empty tent.

  Soon after, Van, Zane, and Marlo were lying beside Milton on the orange sawdust floor, panting, the latest attractions of Barnum’s Three-Ring Media Circus.

  They emerged into a darkened hallway in Fibble’s second tent, leading to the classrooms. The projectors that normally cast the drab walls with flickering opulence were dark.

  “It’s so quiet,” Milton said as he snuck down the jerking hall behind his sister.

  “They must have all the blokes confined to their bunks,” Zane speculated. “Because of what we did to this mental place.”

  “Where are we going?” Milton asked.

  “To this secret room, behind Nostradamus’s classroom,” she replied. “Maybe we can eavesdrop on Barnum and learn where his Humbugger machine—”

  A tall, robed figure burst into the hall from, seemingly, nowhere. The hem of its immaculate white cloak dusted the floor.

  The Man Who Soldeth the World! Milton screamed inside his head as he, Marlo, Van, and Zane clung to the wall and held their collective breath, willing themselves invisible. Sizzling just behind the mysterious figure was—what had to be, Milton thought as he gaped at the man’s slacks of flame—Vice Principal Barnum. They both disappeared into a classroom.

  Marlo felt along the wall until she came to a large, barely noticeable beige rectangle. Voices—tense and testy—spilled out of the classroom several yards away. Marlo turned back to the boys and held her finger to her lips.

  “This way,” Marlo whispered as she pressed her palm to the door and slipped inside. Zane, Van, and Milton followed, with Milton closing the secret door behind him. They clustered behind the large, chalkboard-sized two-way mirror looking into Mr. Nostradamus’s classroom.

  On the other side of the mirror were Vice Principal Barnum, Nostradamus, and the Man Who Soldeth the World: a basketball player–sized creature with broad, quivering shoulders, completely concealed by a luminous white silk robe and cloak.

  “It’s … him. I just know it!” Milton exclaimed.

  “Who?” Van whispered.

  “The guy from the TV show we watched in the limo,” Milton replied. “He’s real.”

  Van shrugged and sat back in the cheap plastic chair.

  “As real as any actor can be, that is.”

  Milton couldn’t believe his sister’s eyes.

  “So I trust trying out the Humbugger yourself soothed your ruffled feathers,” P. T. Barnum proclaimed as he paced across the room in his sizzling slacks.

  “Feathers?” the man replied abruptly in a voice as booming and smooth as an explosion in a velvet museum.

  “It’s just an expression,” Barnum replied tartly. “The point is—as you just experienced yourself—the machine to beam your doom-laden visions straight to the Surface is still online. Those schematics you provided were nothing short of groundbreaking technology—”

  “It was a Promethean task … literally, as Prometheus designed the machine himself,” the man replied laconically, crossing his legs as he sat on the edge of Nostradamus’s desk. “Now that my plans have changed, the Humbugger is more important than ever.…”

  “Changed?”

  “The unscripted finale of Teenage Jesus—the highest-rated TV show evereth—has dampened the apocalyptic fervor I was toiling to achieve—”

  Van was just about to whoop with delight until Milton silenced him with a hard punch in the arm.

  “—so I am forced to evicteth the squatters on the Surface by force … employing our Humbugger machine to terrify them into a stampede toward the interdimensional openings I’ve created. Putting the fear of God into the monkey people. ’Tis a crude maneuver, but it appeareth to be the only option left available.…”

  “Of course,” Barnum interrupted. “Then we should really—”

  “The plan was as neareth perfection as I,” the man continued as he stared off into space, his face obscured by the shadow of his white hood. “Which is why I captured every moment of it. So that—when it was far, far too late—the Powers That Be would see how easily they were duped. And that a certain all-seeing/all-knowing being never even saw it coming and knew not what hit Him.…”

  The man’s gaze rested on the clock on the wall, reading a quarter to eleven. “ ’Tis almost the eleventh hour. The Big Guy Upstairs was once the one who could bring about the end of days. Now man can do it himself. Everything has changed. I was intended to be their champion, their majestic defender. But now humanity isn’t worth defending … so I must fulfill the divine Revelation myself.”

  Revelation? Milton thought in the darkness of the secret room.

  Nostradamus stared, mute, into his crystal ball paperweight as if it contained fate itself, coiled tightly, waiting to spring out and bite—which is exactly what it did. He shoved himself away from his desk, his filmy eyes bulging with fear.

  “In five minutes, Fibble will be destroyed!” Nostradamus yelped.

  The man glared at Vice Principal Barnum.

  “What is this fortune-telling flake on-eth about?” he asked, recrossing his legs beneath his robe so that his lap looked like an angry ocean of milk.

  “Though Mr. Nostradamus’s prognosticative powers are a little worse for the wear,” Barnum replied, “he can see five minutes into the future.”

  The man glared at the t
rembling pseudo-seer.

  “Explain thusly to me what you meaneth by ‘in five minutes Fibble will be destroyed.’ ”

  Nostradamus smoothed his pointy gray beard with his long, arthritic fingers.

  “Four minutes and fifty seconds,” he corrected. “Up in the Boiler Room, above the secret Focus Group viewing chamber, where the Humbugger is …”

  Milton looked above him. On the ceiling was a round hatch; behind him, a beige ladder hidden against the beige wall.

  “Up there!” he whispered to the others.

  “… four youths will undo this place,” Nostradamus continued. “Turning lie to truth.”

  Marlo gaped at her brother.

  “Us? But we wouldn’t even know where to go if Nostradamus hadn’t told us—”

  Milton shrugged, beaming.

  “Don’t argue with fate,” he replied as he clambered swiftly up the ladder.

  In the classroom, Vice Principal Barnum’s pants blazed with purpose.

  “Mr. Nostradamus,” he croaked. “Evacuate the teachers—”

  “And children?” the wizened teacher interjected.

  “Fine, them too,” Vice Principal Barnum replied crossly.

  The man abruptly rose to his feet and strode in elegant sweeps for the door.

  “If your crystal-gazing crank is correct,” he replied, “then this whole area will soon be buzzing with Galactic Order Department representatives like bureaucratic flies on procedural excrement. Which means that I’ll leaveeth you, Mr. Barnum, to handle this mess. For if you don’t, and my plan doesn’t go down as planned, then you’ll be going down. To h-e-double-hockey-sticks, where the really, really bad folks go. I haveth connections … an old coworker, you could say. Do I maketh myself clear?”

  The vice principal swallowed, though he needed to tug at his lapel to accommodate the downward passage of the lump in his throat.

  “Yes, sir,” Vice Principal Barnum replied unsteadily. “I’m like an abacus: you can count on me.”