Here There Be Grammonsters!
Another sticky note was stuck to the map, with a few of those strange metal cricket toys secured to the desk with tape. Marlo squinted hard to read the precise, infinitesimally small lettering, a labor made extra-challenging as her vision began to go dark around the edges, as if she were looking at the note through the wrong end of a glass telescope.
The Rosetta Tone virus grows at an astonishing clip, gripping on to sympathetic memories to create a startlingly real and infectious delusion: tricking the mind into expelling all reason! The sonicrobial virus—that is to say, a disease composed of sound waves rather than bacteria—effectively converts the human mind into a factory for multiplying fantasy a millionfold. A virulent, phantasmagorical free-for-all! The speed of mutation is astounding. When directed and shaped by specially modulated Retuning Forks, the Rosetta Tone wages a high-intensity at tack on its host, foisting upon the victim a predetermined reality that unfolds in surprising ways. When the outbreak hits its perfect fever pitch—multiplied and solidified by multiple hosts experiencing the same delusion—all sanity perishes!
Marlo heard voices outside the Absurditory. She quickly unbuckled herself and—clutching the velvet armrests tightly—flipped herself upright and hopped onto the wooden floor.
“What a lovely jabber-walk: the perfect blend of jabbering and walking. And a most productive morning, setting the Retuning Forks about the Terristories … Oh dear: we are nearly half-past teatime! Imagine, if it were perpetually teatime, we would never be late for it!”
Vice Principal Carroll, Marlo thought, her heart racing as she knelt, prone and all too visible, in the middle of the wooden ceiling-floor. And he’s got company.…
Marlo spotted a long cupboard in the corner of the room. She hopped atop the nearest toadstool, opened the cupboard door, and slipped inside just as the vice principal parted the cat-tooth doors.
“Splendid!” Vice Principal Carroll exclaimed as he entered the Absurditory. “Our tea is here!”
The vice principal had a peculiar speech affectation—not quite a stutter, but more of a slight verbal stumble.
Marlo could hear him stop just outside her cupboard.
“Oh goodness! I count eleven meringues! I will have a word with the waitstaff, and I assure you that it shall be a stern one.”
His footsteps retreated. Marlo breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
“How long do we have before the assembly?” asked a queer, high-pitched girl’s voice.
Assembly? Marlo thought, crouched low in the cupboard, pressed against an assortment of cups and saucers.
“Not to worry, my dear Sylvie,” Vice Principal Carroll replied. “As I am the vice principal, the assembly shall begin promptly upon our arrival. Would you care for a spot of tea, Bruno?”
“Not unless you have some spot-of-tea-remover,” replied a low, gargly sort of voice. “I wouldn’t want to soil my nice new clothes.”
The vice principal chuckled blithely. “You young sprites are certainly particular about the state of your wardrobe!”
Sprites? Like fairies?
“Well,” Sylvie said in her strained squeak of a voice, “an upsy-daisy teatime—while a charming diversion—can be a sloppy affair.”
“I shall fetch us additional teacups, then,” the vice principal said as his footsteps approached the cupboard. “To better capture our upturned tea tempests …”
Marlo gulped her beating heart back down her throat as Vice Principal Carroll grabbed the doorknob.
“Please … don’t go through the bother,” Sylvie exclaimed. “Let us simply have our tea beneath the mushroom, as we shall be running out of time.”
“Hopefully not before we run out of conversation,” Vice Principal Carroll replied as he walked away from the cupboard.
Phew, Marlo thought. That was too close for comfort … but just close enough for discomfort.
She could hear the dainty sipping of tea.
“Ah … nice and black, just like I like it,” the vice principal murmured. “It helps when the tea is steeped in ink!”
“Tell us your new story!” Bruno said with a slurp.
“Yes! Oh do!” Sylvie exclaimed. “And, Bruno, mind your manners!”
Vice Principal Carroll snorted with mirth. “Sillies … my next story shan’t be told—it shall be lived! That is rather the point of this whole escapade: to wipe away the limitations of language—obliterate the very need for it—and create something fresh and whimsical, something free and unencumbered. And once all of their wagging, wasteful Mother Tongues are tied, I will remake all of creation however I like: to weave the ultimate story, with Lewis Carroll as the master storyteller!”
There was a brief pause, filled with the tinkling of teacups. Marlo’s breath sounded like a hurricane to her ears.
“I must be off,” Vice Principal Carroll said.
Yeah, Marlo thought. Way, way off!
“Would you two care to be my special guests at the assembly?” the vice principal inquired.
“I don’t want to go among mad people,” Sylvie replied with distaste.
The vice principal laughed.
Marlo had watched more than her fair share of horror movies. She had heard crazed psychopaths, mad scientists, and fiendish creatures laugh their respectively crazed, mad, and fiendish laughs, but Marlo had never heard a laugh as unmoored from the sandbags of sanity as Vice Principal Carroll’s.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” the vice principal said as Marlo heard the creak of him rising from his chair. “We’re all mad here!”
13 · READING BETWEEN
THE ASSEMBLY LINES
THE AUDACITORIUM WAS a deafening hall of echoing noise. The large assembly space was completely covered—the floors, the walls, the ceiling—with mildewed ceramic tiles. Marlo felt like she was wading into a thick pool of sound.
There was a round, slowly rotating stage in the middle of the Audacitorium, with the sassy boys and girls of Wise Acres seated around it on stacks of rotting encyclopedias and phone books. The teachers sat in bent, rusted chairs on the stage. Vice Principal Carroll stood at a podium, his back facing Marlo, cradling what appeared to be a child under each arm.
Marlo spotted Milton up by the stage, sitting in typically nerdy “Oh, pick me! Pick me!” fashion near the front. She scampered urgently up to a pile of decomposing books next to him.
“Milton!” she yell-whispered amid the hum of snide chatter.
Milton’s eyes went wide at the sight of his sister: her tweed coat shredded, her cheeks scratched and oozing blood.
“What happened to you?”
“Let’s just say that I really, really hate mockingbirds and I really, really know how to type my name on those big stone-step letters,” she replied, setting herself down beside him. “The front drum door was closed by the time I got out of Carroll’s Absurditory and I had to spell my way back inside.”
Marlo scooted up close to Milton, sitting cheek to cheek.
“I found some old papers,” she said, her breath redolent of flavored soap and sour grapes. “Another Bibley thing, an encyclopedia page about a Weisen hammer, and a map of the land between Wise Acres and some big tower.”
Marlo explained what she had found, trying hard to relay the ancient, prehistorical texts word for word, as well as describe the mysterious map charting the region between Wise Acres and the Tower of Babble.
Milton scratched at his tweed-aggravated neck. “Vice Principal Carroll is, while one of the most imaginative writers in history, definitely, a little, um … touched. In the head. So I would take anything he says or writes with a colossal grain of salt.”
“Well, he wasn’t alone,” Marlo whispered as a little girl named Hadley Upfling, sitting just behind Milton, trained her frizzed-out mop of blond hair toward them in interest. “He was with two sprites, talking about his plan to undo language and create something new so he could tell the ultimate story: one without words. Like … a living story.”
“Well … that’s what he said they were,” she replied uncertainly. “I heard them from his cupboard.”
Milton glanced up at the slowly rotating stage. “And were these sprites named Sylvie and Bruno?”
“Yes!” Marlo exclaimed. “He invited them to the assembly! Did you see them?”
Milton pointed to the stage. “Yeah, you just missed them. They gave a little performance with the vice principal.…”
Vice Principal Carroll sat down on a busted metal chair, smiling vaguely, with two large puppets on his knees: a little boy and girl, wearing dark green tunics.
Marlo’s mouth fell open. “But … but he was talking to them,” she murmured. “I mean, they had different voices, talking over each other at the same time.…”
Milton shrugged. “He’s really good.”
Up on stage, Mr. Wilde paraded languidly to the podium.
“Thank you, Mr. Vice Principal, for that stunning display of ventriloquism,” he said in a weary, put-upon voice, as if even the act of being bothered was something that he couldn’t be bothered with. “You can throw your voice with the force and precision of a baseball pitcher, and—as we all know—a pitcher is worth a thousand words.”
The man loosened the red ascot tied tight around his throat.
“We are—for lack of a better term—fortunate to have with us today our neighbor from the Tower of Babble, King Nimrod.…”
King Nimrod—the tall, power-hungry ex-king who, at one point in his arrogant life, wished to control Heaven itself—nodded from his chair. He bit into a moldy jelly doughnut. The filling squirted out onto his tunic, causing the vain titan to grimace. Nimrod wiped the vile glob off of his clothing and sniffed it: whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t jelly.
“Without further ado,” Mr. Wilde said, “let us give a rousing round of applause for Vice Principal Carroll, who has what he considers an exciting announcement.… And no slow, sarcastic clapping. We figured out that trick long ago.…”
The children grudgingly gave the vice principal a smattering of applause as he set Sylvie and Bruno down onto the stage, looking something of a rumpled puppet himself, and approached the podium. Vice Principal Carroll gave a weak, distracted grin, though—with his eyebrows raised up in the middle of his forehead—his face seemed permanently cast in a troubled sadness.
“Ch-children,” he said, his slight stammer returning now that he wasn’t speaking through twin ventriloquist dummies. “As you know, you have all participated in a little contest at the behest of Principal B-Bubb. But what you didn’t know is that this contest was actually contained within a larger contest context!”
The audience grumbled in confusion. The vice principal’s face grew stern, yet—with effort—he forced his expressive features into a smile of batty benevolence.
“Little ladies and junior gentlemen, I would like to announce—and am announcing, at present, a present I will open right now—the very first War of the Words!”
The children whispered the name back and forth to one another, the four words spreading throughout the large, loud room like a contagion.
“What’s a War of the Words?!” shouted a third of the audience in unison, bypassing—as usual—the courtesy of a raised hand.
Vice Principal Carroll waved away the disagreeable outburst. “The adventures first … explanations take such a dreadful long time,” he said. “I will tell you th-this much … there will be two teams, waging verbal warfare against one another. And those teams were decided by your teachers as well as Principal Bubb herself.”
“We decided?” Miss Parker asked from her seat with a look of petulant disdain.
Vice Principal Carroll nodded. “Yes, Miss Parker. From your rankings of the contest entries for the principal’s new publicity campaign. Now on to the stupendous, tremendous, kick-you-in-the-endous War of the Words! Let’s meet our valiant contestants!”
He glanced down at his note cards.
“T-Team One: Moses Babcock, Clem Weenum, Roberta Atrebor, Winifred Scathelli, Mordacia Caustilo, Ursula Lambarst …”
Marlo leaned into Milton. “What do you think this is all about?” she whispered. “Do you think it has anything to do with what I found in the Absurditory?”
Milton shrugged. “It could, but honestly I’m not sure how much stock to put in anything the vice principal says. I mean, his belfry is almost completely bats. Maybe what you found was just some story he was working on.”
“Pansy Cornett, Sareek Plimpton, Moxie Wortschmerz, Concordia Kolassa, Jesus Descardo, and Rakeem Yashimoto,” Vice Principal Carroll concluded.
Mr. Wilde shifted uncomfortably in his uncomfortable seat. “Vice Principal,” he asked stiffly. “Could you please tell us more—or any—of the specifics of this event of yours?”
The vice principal looked up from his note cards with soft befuddlement. “Well, Mr. Wilde, the promise of crippling v-verbal humiliation has made the War of the Words the must-hear event of the afterlife. See, the contest will be b-broadcast live—or as live as death can be—on NPR: Netherworld Punishment Radio. PURE—Paradisiacal Unity Radio Evangelism—will also be covering the event for those listening upstairs.…”
Vice Principal Carroll returned to his note cards.
“Now for T-Team T-Two … Hadley Upfling, Flossie Blackwell, Mungo Ulyaw, Bree Martinet, Mack Hoover, Lavena Duckworth …”
Marlo tugged her brother’s earlobe, as if she were ringing a doorbell, hoping to gain entrance to his brain.
“Oww!”
“Maybe this War of the Words thing is a chance for us to escape,” Marlo whispered. “If we get picked, we could—I don’t know—just sort of disappear in the hubbub.”
“I don’t know,” Milton replied. “If it’s going to be broadcast throughout the underworld, it might be hard to just wander off.”
“Roget Marx Peters, Ahmed Crump, Cookie Youngblood, Annabelle Graham, Mathis Vittorio, and Lani Zanotti.”
“Well, it looks like we weren’t picked anyway,” Milton said. “Which is probably a good thing, since we don’t know what we’d have to do. I mean, war is Heck, after all … even if it’s just with words.”
Vice Principal Carroll clapped his hands. “My … how very exciting!” he chirped. “I’m on tenterhooks, I daresay! Now, a contest isn’t much of a contest without reward, not to mention—though I have, just—reward’s dark twin, risk. And if the War of the Words is to be the underworld’s ultimate contest, it must therefore have the ultimate reward: release. The instant gratification of instant graduation—namely a golden ticket upstairs. To that lovely oasis above the clouds.”
The children gasped so hard that Milton’s ears popped. Vice Principal Carroll’s lips curled into an inscrutable smile.
“Wow,” Milton murmured. “A Get-out-of-Heck-Free card. Too bad we weren’t selected.…”
The vice principal flipped through his note cards. “And now our t-team captains,” Vice Principal Carroll said as he squinted down at the podium.
Marlo furrowed her brow. “Team captains?” she muttered. “What drippy dweebs would be picked as captains in a dumb war of words?”
“T-Team Captain One,” the vice principal announced into his microphone. “Milton Fauster.”
Milton swallowed as the children trained the full intensity of their hot, hateful glares upon him, with Moses Babcock shooting off an especially lethal discharge of eye daggers.
Marlo snickered. “Figures,” she said. “That’s what you get for being a brain. Now you gotta ‘honor roll’ with the punches in some nerd war.”
“And T-Team Captain Two, the opposing team,” Vice Principal Carroll declared. “Marlo Fauster.”
The scant amount of blood occupying Marlo’s deathly pale-to-perfection complexion fled to her extremities.
“Opposing team?” Marlo said, locking wide, quivering eyes with the equally tremulous eyes of her brother. “Good God-that-has-clearly-forsaken-us … I guess they liked my ‘Beh
ind the Brimstone’ idea for the principal’s new image.”
“Behind the Brimstone?”
“Yeah, turning Principal Bubb’s life into a reality TV show. Because, you know, when you see people act horrible on those shows, it’s strangely endearing. Probably because of all the editing and music they use to make reality so real. So, this way, the principal can continue to be awful and disgusting, and viewers won’t be able to take their eyes off her, like a slow-motion train wreck.”
Milton nodded and raised his hand tentatively.
“Yes, T-Team Captain One?” the vice principal said, sweeping away an errant lock of hair from his face.
“Y-you mentioned the reward for the winners,” Milton asked, the vice principal’s stammer apparently contagious.
“Winner,” Vice Principal Carroll corrected. “Only the team captain will enjoy the ultimate reward. There will be consolation prizes, however, for the rest of the winning team. Lovely gift bags loaded with fabulous freebies.”
“Then what happens to the loser?” Milton managed, suddenly shoving the words out of his mouth, like a skydiving instructor pushing a new student out of a plane.
The vice principal smiled, a Cheshire grin that seemed to dim the rest of his body. “As you can perhaps imagine, the risk must be as depressive as the reward is impressive.…”
The answer, before the vice principal even said it, trickled through Milton’s head like water through a sieve. The teachers, meanwhile, exchanged furrowed looks of utter disbelief.
“A contest is all about gravity. And, abiding the laws of gravity, if one goes up,” Vice Principal Carroll explained, his index finger traveling up to the ceiling before hovering above his forehead, “then it only makes sense that one would go”—his finger plunged southward, hitting the podium with a reverberating thud—“down.”
14 · DEAD MAN’S BLUFF
FAKING YOUR OWN death is murder, Dale E. Basye thought from his luxury Goodnight Room in the Wizard of Odds casino, the brand-spanking-new children’s book-themed gaming complex on the Las Vegas strip. He was wedging handfuls of rotting hamburger into the rib cage of a stolen skeleton while waiting for the Winderella Ball on the roof to end at midnight. Finding the discarded meat had been easy. The Dumpsters outside of the Very Hungry Caterpillar buffet were filled with it. And he had swiped the skeleton from a local chiropractic office. Dale sighed and stared at the mannequin of a quiet old lady whispering “hush,” positioned just next to a table set with a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush.
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