“Yes … Lewis Carroll,” Mr. Twain said with a bemused smirk. “The architect of Wonderland itself. A man a few saucers short of a tea service … It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
Principal Bubb tried to muster as much composure as a festering, several-thousand-year-old (give or take a century) demonness could.
What is this all about? Who would go around me and do something like this? Why Wise Acres? Why now?
“Principal Bubb has obviously taken that old adage never the ‘twain’ shall meet to heart … having her demons do her dirty work for her,” Mark Twain continued, veins of outrage bulging on his sagging old neck. “The principal, as we all know, is the poster creature for gross incompetence … heavy on the gross. And now it is quite clear that she is determined to surround herself with fellow incompetents who won’t question her unquestionably inept decrees.…”
The principal sighed with bitter frustration as Bobo shook her platinum-blond head, forcing her perpetually smiling face to frown with concern.
“Wasn’t Mr. Carroll—excuse me, Vice Principal Carroll—the unwilling guest at a minimum-security Bedlam and Breakfast for a spell?” she asked.
Mr. Twain nodded. “Yes, the Placid Pastures Easy-Breezy and Extra-Restful Resort for the Criminally Insane,” he explained.
Principal Bubb’s jaw fell open like a trapdoor with a rusty hinge.
“Wise Acres’ new vice principal was institutionalized?!”
Mark Twain gave a wry chuckle. “The only job that man should be holding is a nut job,” he continued with a weary shake of his head. “Apparently he has a little problem in the ‘distinguishing his own self-conceived fantasies from the world around him’ department.”
The two newscasters shook their heads with mirth and outrage.
“Sounds like the children deserve better than Lewis Carroll,” Bobo said with a smirk. “And certainly better than Bea ‘Elsa’ Bubb …”
“You heard it here first: ‘Baby Gate: Upheaval in Principal Bungle’s Rumpus Room’!” Muck chortled. “With the principal as the butt of a Netherworld-wide joke! And that’s a big butt, Bobo.”
“This sort of rash move isn’t her usual, for lack of a better word, style,” Bobo added. “Bubb is known for being an unquestioning line toer and shameless manure shoveler.”
“Well, there is rather a lot of it down here,” Muck interjected with a wicked laugh.
Principal Bubb slashed angrily at the television with her remote as if she were waging an invisible sword fight. The anchorman’s smug face fizzled out of existence.
This could only be the work of one creature, the principal fumed. A creature with majestic wings soaring high above both my head and my authority.
“Michael!” Principal Bubb barked, her voice exploding throughout her Not-So-Secret Lair like a verbal grenade.
She couldn’t just come out and say this whole thing was a mistake. That would make her look like she didn’t know what was going on, which she didn’t. Better to be viewed as a rash and reckless decision maker than to be perceived as weak, powerless, and ineffectual.
Principal Bubb activated her No-Fee Hi-Fi Faux phone—two electronic, voice-activated thimbles, one on her thumb and one on her pinkie talon—and extended her claw, holding it up to her ear.
“Michael,” she hissed into her thumb as the phone dialed the number.
“We are sorry,” an obnoxiously calm recorded voice relayed in measured syllables into her ear, “but the party you are trying to reach—THE ARCHANGEL MICHAEL, NOW THE BIG GUY DOWNSTAIRS, RULER OF THE UNDERWORLD, EVERLASTING—is unavailable.…”
Principal Bubb slammed her claw down upon her desk, briefly forgetting in her fury that her claw was her phone.
“Children deserve better, my hoof! The only thing those whippersnappers deserve is the snap of a whip!”
The Principal of Darkness shoved her throbbing talons beneath her armpit and plopped down in her chair.
In the afterlife—as up on the Surface—image is everything. And it was hard to imagine an image as unimaginably ravaged as her image was now. If Principal Bubb wanted to remain in charge of Heck, she needed to turn this runaway twain, er, train around.
“I don’t even know where I’d begin,” the principal moaned, kneading her face like warm Silly Putty into something that was as far from silly as you could get without accidentally backing into it.
I need a publicity campaign, she thought. If I can get the Powers That Be to believe I am competent and respected, I’ll become competent and respected! And if the underworld sees me as a beloved, nurturing caregiver, they will have trouble unseating me.
The principal rose from her chair but had trouble unseating herself.
But who should I hire? Principal Bubb wondered.
Just then, a peculiar yet ingenious idea crossed Principal Bubb’s mind like a raccoon loping across the street in the dead of night.
I’ll get those tart-tongued brats in Wise Acres to come up with a campaign for me … while I still have the power to do so. A campaign for kids by kids!
Bea “Elsa” Bubb, the torment of terrible tots for time immemorial, stewed as she gritted her fangs.
Michael’s not back up in Heaven plucking harp strings, the principal fumed. He’s in the Netherworld, where humanity shows just how low it can go. And now it’s time to show Michael how low I can go … by keeping a very high profile indeed.…
5 · WHEN THE GOING
GETS GUFF
MILTON AND MARLO were shoved along the dusty, rubbish-strewn hallway carved out of dense deposits of old, outdated reference books.
“Move it!” one of the two badger demons growled. “You know what happens to slowpokes here?”
“No … what?” Marlo replied as she dragged her feet.
“They are poked slowly,” the creature replied, emphasizing the words “poked” and “slowly” with twin jabs of his pitchspork.
The digital news tickers lining the peeling paper walls streamed an intensely boring salvo of blather.
Hey. What’s Λ? DY wn2 hng ot @ d mal? mayB aftr we cUd hng ot sumwhr Ls? WE … Then I was like why are you looking at me like that and then she was like …
Milton shook his head.
“With the news ticker, this place is kind of like a shabby Times Square,” he commented. “Maybe ‘Divided By’ Square. Get it? Because—”
“It’s the Fritter-Tape Machine,” a demon badger snarled, gesturing to the wall with his long striped snout. “It’s where wasted words go. Pointless text messages … worthless phone calls that impart nothing … blogs—lots of blogs—meeting minutes that seem like hours …”
They stopped in front of a door marked DRESSING-DOWN ROOM. The badger demons shoved Milton and Marlo inside.
The room was a large walk-in closet with a cracked mirror, a couple of folding metal chairs, and a garbage can overflowing with clothes.
“Brock! Look what the badgers dragged in!” screeched one of the two decomposing parrot demons perched before the mirror.
The badgers threw Milton and Marlo into the chairs. The parrots fluttered to their shoulders.
“Brock! I’ve seen better hair in a shower drain!”
“Brock! My cat coughs up better-looking stuff!”
“What are you two squawking feather dusters doing?!” Marlo complained, sticking a finger in her ringing ear.
The parrots shot each other a quick sideways glance.
“Brock! Teasing your hair, of course!”
Marlo batted her parrot away and bolted to her feet.
She walked over to the overflowing garbage can and picked through the clothes. There were threadbare tweed jackets with elbow pads, scratchy mismatched socks, wingtip shoes, bow ties, and weird, shiny electric shirts with terrible slogans scrolling across them.
Chronic Bed Wetter … If Stupidity Were a Crime, I’d Totally Be in That Place Where They Keep All of the Crime People … No, I Didn’t Fart. That’s
Just How I Smell … What Is Having a Friend Like? …
“We’re not wearing this junk,” Marlo said, crossing her arms defiantly.
“Brock! You know that dream where you show up at school naked?”
“Um … yeah,” Marlo replied tentatively.
The parrots fluttered above Marlo’s head, brandishing their cruel talons and slashing at the air around them.
“Brock! We could make that dream come true!”
As the Fausters grudgingly changed, Milton noticed a piece of paper stuck to his shoe. He knelt down and pulled it free. A dried glob of Double-Bubble Soap foam had glued the torn page to his sole.
I must have stepped on this in the Audaci-Tea House, he thought as he read the page. It was an entry from an old encyclopedia.
The Encyclopediatric Whybrary of
Wide-Eyed Wonder Series
Volume 19: Maulstick—Mysophobia
Entry: Music of the Spheres (SEE: Rosetta Tone)
Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher back in a time even before your parents were born! He was very smart yet he wore curtains. He founded a religious cult based on loving mathematics and despising beans.
Beans, beans the tragic fruit!
Pythagoras feared that when you’d toot
You’d lose your soul, and then you would die.
So be wary of beans if you’re some old Greek guy!
Pythagoras and his followers thought that the universe was made up of numbers. Smarty-Pants Pythagoras, though not in possession of pants, also realized that music was made up of mathematical intervals that made a musical tune either pleasant (ooooh!) or unpleasant (ugh!).
The Music of the Spheres was—according to our friend Pythagoras—the musical intervals that described the distance between the planets. By using these ratios, Pythagoras discovered the physical relationship between mass and sound … the symphony of the stars that keeps the heavens spinning! It was, he theorized, a specific harmony that called Creation into being and a complementary dissonance that gave the universe its tension, keeping everything “just right!”
We can’t hear the tone that makes a symphony of life because we’re not God. Even Pythagoras, when he wasn’t wearing drapes and clenching his butt for fear of farting to death, couldn’t hear it!
So next time you’re practicing your violin, be careful: you just might hit upon the Music of the Spheres and accidentally remake Creation!
Milton tucked the page into his new pants. Minutes later, Milton and Marlo emerged from the Dressing-Down Room. They were clad in rumpled tweed jackets, ill-matched socks and shoes, and shirts flashing humiliating phrases.
“We look like complete dorks,” Marlo groused, trying to button her way-too-small coat to hide the blinking “Everybody Likes Me … To Go Away” slogan creeping across her chest.
“Worse: you look like writers,” slurped one of the aardvark demons as it waddled toward them.
“But what’s with the demeaning slogans?” Milton asked.
“We find it slows down sassy tongues,” the demon explained in a sloppy, wet gurgle. “Now move along. Girls and boys are separated for classes. You’re only allowed to trade jibes in the Audaci-Tea House.”
Marlo grabbed Milton by the hand. “Remember, whatever happens, we stay together,” she whispered, leaning into her brother. “We’ll meet up in that tea place between classes and trade intel, okay?”
Milton nodded, just before the aardvark demon lassoed him with its tongue and dragged him away down the hallway.
The classroom was a small lecture hall with a pitched floor, a lectern at the front of the class, and rows of elevated seating. What set the room apart from your ordinary lecture hall was that it was composed entirely of moldering old books, as if it had been carved out of the most overstocked library ever. The lectern was a teetering totem pole of textbooks, the benches were rows of stacked novels and manuals, and the desks were piles of notebooks and message pads. Unfortunately, every message pad was filled with notes from past students of Wise Acres, going back—if the Ye Olde English was any indication—thousands of years.
Though the teacher—an old man with a grizzled, unkempt goatee and dark hair swept over his balding head—hadn’t yet begun the lesson, Milton felt as if he were barging in on some private party. He edged along the rows of staring, smirking children and found an unoccupied patch of bench. He moved to sit, yet a stern, dark-haired boy with knitted eyebrows scooted to block him.
“This seat is taken,” the boy grunted.
“By who?” Milton asked, looking around the class but not seeing anyone else searching for a seat.
“By anybody but you,” the boy replied, glowering, his gaze daring Milton to do something about it. “You want the seat? Go on. I’d like to see you try. If you have a problem with me, go tell Mr. Dickens.”
Charles Dickens … the author of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol? Milton thought, casting a quick glance at the teacher as he arranged his notes on the lectern.
“Hey,” Moses Babcock called out from the next row over, beckoning Milton with his finger. “There’s a space over here.”
Milton climbed down to the next row and sat down.
“Thanks, um … Moses, right?”
The boy nodded and held out his hand. His dark, judgmental eyes grazed Milton up and down like fingers on an abacus, trying to solve Milton as if he were an equation that didn’t quite add up. Milton shook the boy’s hand. The boy’s serious, professional manner made Milton feel like he was meeting with a lawyer or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, not a fellow kid darned to Heck.
Mr. Dickens coughed.
“Good afternoon, young men,” the teacher said in a somber, British-inflected tone. “WISE ACRES. Uncreative Writing with Mr. Dickens. Our last class—and oh, how tiresome it was!—had us studying literary clichés. If you recall, clichés should be avoided like the plague.…”
Milton leaned into Moses. “Why is Charles Dickens, one of the greatest writers of all time, teaching in Heck?” Milton whispered.
Moses shrugged with indifference. “I beg to differ … though I never beg. I just differ,” the boy replied out of the side of his mouth, scribbling on his pad, taking notes over the notes that some other boy had taken years and years ago. “It is debatable that he is one of the greatest writers of all time, a phrase so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. But from what I have heard, he and the other teachers are here for how they lived, not for how they wrote. Personally, I much prefer nonfiction. Books loaded with irrefutable facts that you can use against people …”
Milton felt a strange sense of camaraderie with Moses. But not the warm and fuzzy kind. More like a pair of handcuffs linking one convict to another. He, like Moses, was a fussy, infuriating fault-finder who needed to prove how smart he was all the time by correcting others. Milton had thought that the other kids would appreciate him pointing out their mistakes. But instead of showering him with appreciation, they usually showered him with loogies for his efforts. The teachers never seemed all that pleased with Milton’s helpful corrections either.
A terrible scratching screech shattered Milton’s thoughts. Mr. Dickens had scrawled the word “Exposition” on the chalkboard.
“And that is clichés in a nutshell … and now on to exposition. It is to the fiction writer as Kryptonite is to Superman,” the teacher explained. “It turns a potentially heroic story into a flabby weakling in a leotard. Exposition is where excessive information is foisted upon our hapless reader under the auspices of helping them to better understand a story’s plot, characters, or setting. It is the labored telling, not the revelatory showing.…”
Mr. Dickens assessed the blank faces staring back at him. The teacher glanced down at his class roster.
“You … Milton Fauster,” Mr. Dickens said. “How did you get here? What led you to this peculiar fate, sitting here in this den of disquisition?”
“Well, I guess you could say I was the wrong boy in the wrong place at the wrong t
ime,” Milton replied.
Mr. Dickens shook his head. “No, that borders on the compelling,” he replied. “Your cryptic statement makes us want to learn more. Tell us, instead, using the cruel craft of exposition.”
Milton swallowed as the other children’s flat, disdainful stares bored into him like drills.
“Well, I was just your average, textbook almost-straight-A student—PE had always dragged down my grade-point average—who became a fatally injured human’s more after the school bully, Damian Ruffino, stuck dynamite up the butt of a gigantic marshmallow bear. After that, everything went downhill … all the way down to Heck. Soon after I got here, my sister Marlo and I—along with our new friend Virgil—stole jars of Lost Souls and used them to make a balloon. I was the only one who managed to escape, though. But after evading human sacrifice at the hands of a religious death cult, I got ‘popped’ back to Heck after hiding in a crate of popcorn kernels.…”
Milton prattled on for another twenty minutes, telling his tale of preteen torment in agonizing, almost real-time detail. He was blogging with his mouth. Though Milton knew he had long since lost the attention of his audience, he couldn’t stop.
“That was as boring as watching a banana take a nap,” a grumpy boy in a brown stocking cap declared after Milton had finally stopped.
Mr. Dickens flipped a willful strand of hair over his balding pate and patted it down onto his scalp.
“Exactly, Mr. Crump!” he said.
The teacher erased the chalkboard and wrote the word “Foreshadowing” in a fluid stroke scrawled with one unbroken squeal of chalk.
“An eraser hurtles through the air, striking an unsuspecting head,” Mr. Dickens muttered as he paced behind his gently listing lectern of books. The boys exchanged looks of smirking confusion with one another.
“Foreshadowing is a technique used by writers to arouse a reader’s curiosity,” the teacher continued, tossing the chalkboard eraser back and forth between his hands. “Like Hansel and Gretel leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs, foreshadowing is the deft placement of clues to hint at what may befall a character at story’s end, so that the event in question—when it arrives—seems somehow inevitable to the reader.…”
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