Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  “Again, yeah. And again, what’s it to you?”

  Dale E. Basye scratched his head. “Well, this is rather odd. See … I’m an author.”

  Miss Parker folded her arms like a cranky old woman on a cruise collapsing a deck chair.

  “Oh really? What have you authored?”

  Dale E. Basye arched his eyebrow. “Well, I got my first break with The Breathtaking, Wind-Breaking Fartisimo Family,” he said, tooting his own horn.

  Miss Parker smirked, her baggy eyes crinkling into mischievous slits.

  “Sounds like a book not to be tossed aside lightly, Mr. Basye, but instead thrown with great force.”

  “Well … I really made my name with a book called … er … Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go.…”

  Miss Parker and the children stared back at him with thick stupefaction.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Miss Parker replied icily.

  “No, I’m not,” Dale E. Basye replied. “Usually when I’m kidding, people laugh … or get mad … or sue me for reckless endangerment. Anyway, the book didn’t really sell, but the concept was turned into a video game: the biggest video game ever.”

  A flock of goose pimples swam across Marlo’s forearms.

  “Yeah … I remember something about that,” she said, recalling her experience as a shadow-ghost back in Generica, where she got sucked into a creeptastic video game—Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go—and thrust back into the underworld.

  “Really?” Dale E. Basye said, eyeing Marlo curiously. “Well, it was a big deal before it turned into an even bigger deal: apparently turning teens into apathetic, monosyllabic zombies. As if anyone would even notice. The point is, I came up with this place. This dream. And I’m dreaming you, Marlo Fauster.…”

  Marlo walked up to the man and hit him on the arm.

  “Oww!” Dale yelped. “You little psychopath!”

  “What’s wrong?” Marlo said. “I mean, I’m your creation or whatever, so you must have made that up too … and this …”

  She kicked him in the shin. Miss Parker stifled a giggle. Dale E. Basye hopped around on one foot, shouting at the sky.

  “Why am I here?! I’m just an opportunist with an overactive imagination!”

  “Shush!” Hadley said from behind her curtain of blond hair. “I hear something.”

  A peculiar clopping noise traveled steadily just beyond the grove of trees. It sounded like a team of horses.

  “Snnnaaahhhhrrrrrk!!”

  A wet, furious growl filled the grove. It was the sound of a huge, vicious beast hoping to sonically paralyze its next kill. Marlo noticed dozens of the tiny, three-pronged tuning forks—or Retuning Forks as Vice Principal Carroll had referred to them—sticking out of the ground, vibrating, producing a hypnotic hum.

  “Those crickets and the tiny forks,” Marlo murmured, slipping slowly into a trance, “they kind of make my mind go blank.”

  Cookie laughed. “Your mind’s always blank … I mean, looking into your eyes is like staring at a window display for a department store that’s gone out of business.”

  Marlo stared groggily at Cookie’s shimmering, lip-glossed lips.

  “What department store?” she replied before shaking herself awake. Another low, reverberating growl filled the grove.

  Marlo couldn’t locate where the growl was coming from. It sounded like it was growling on all sides, as if she were deep inside the creature and could hear it rumbling all around her. The growl was oddly familiar.

  “Where—” Marlo began before something clicked in her mind. “Wolf?”

  The growl sounded exactly like that of the big, bad disappearing wolf that she and Milton had seen on their way to Wise Acres. Marlo and the other children traveled around the grove, but no matter where they walked, the growl got neither closer nor farther away.

  “Maybe we’re surrounded,” Bree Martinet said, biting her nails.

  “It doesn’t sound like different wolves, though,” Marlo said, puzzled. “It’s the same growl, only coming from … everywhere at once.”

  It’s like Vice Principal Carroll’s ventriloquism, Marlo thought with a cold shiver of dread trickling down her spine. One of those wolves must be able to throw its voice. But why? It must be how it hunts. It can growl and freak you out, make you stupid-drunk with fear juice, but you don’t know if you’re escaping it or walking right into its—

  Marlo saw a set of slavering jaws peeking out of one of the trees.

  “Is that tree … panting?” Ahmed Crump said weakly.

  “Panting … huffing … puffing,” Roget murmured.

  “Unless that’s a halitosis tree,” Marlo said, beads of cold sweat forming on her forehead, “I think we found another wolf … or it found us. Hurry!”

  The teachers and children ran as fast as they could out of the grove.

  “AHROOOOOOO WOO WOOOahhhhh!” howled the wolf-beast from behind.

  They dashed across a small field of shredded paper. An orchestra of mechanical crickets droned beside clusters of silver tuning prongs, vibrating like nervous metal flowers.

  “Whoa!” Marlo said, as if addressing a team of invisible horses as she skidded to a stop. She found herself on the precipice of an expansive gorge—a great cleft in the ground hissing with a jeering gale of wind. The two sides of the gorge were connected by a rickety wooden bridge that swayed dangerously in the howling wind. A pair of seriously bent trees framed the entrance to the bridge, bowing toward another pair of similarly stooped trees on the other side.

  Lani Zanotti, her dark hair pulled tight from her face in cruel braids, rolled her eyes. “Right. Like I’m going to cross this crazy bridge.”

  “Yeah … really first-class construction there,” Bree Martinet said, jutting out her lower lip so she looked like a spoiled guppy princess.

  “How are we supposed to get across?” Cookie asked, her nostrils flared wide.

  Marlo bowed, holding her arms out before her in exaggerated supplication. “Oh, Lady Fartface … your bejeweled unicorn-drawn carriage awaits.…”

  Cookie glared at Marlo before forcing her sour grimace into a fake smile.

  “Ooh, that’s—what is that word?—oh yeah, ‘hilarious,’ ” Cookie said, making air quotes with her fingers around the word “hilarious.”

  Marlo straightened as a sharp, merciless flurry of wind whipped down the vast ravine. She held on tightly to the tree to keep from being blown over the edge.

  “AHROOOOOOO WOO WOOOahhhhh!”

  Mathis Vittorio looked over his broad shoulder. His dark eyebrows knitted together into one long caterpillar of bushy hair.

  “I’m not waiting around to be eaten or mauled or whatever,” he said in his thick, perpetually put-upon voice.

  “Me neither,” Mungo Ulyaw said, his brown bowl cut blowing in the wind at Mathis’s side.

  The two boys ran across the unsteady bridge, gripping the rope rails as they navigated the creaking floor of irregular planks. An explosion of wind, traveling at about half the speed of sound, detonated throughout the chasm, sending a surge of raw force at Mathis and Mungo, slamming into them from behind like invisible hammers, until—

  “Nooooo!” Miss Parker screamed.

  Mathis and Mungo were pitched forward, swept off the bridge, and cast into the gorge below. The two boys, just as they struck the shredded-paper bottom, seemed to transform, turning into two masses of kid-shaped words.

  “What happened to them?!” Marlo screamed over the lip of the chasm.

  Miss Parker and Dale E. Basye peered fearfully over the edge.

  “I … don’t know,” Miss Parker muttered in quiet horror, her face round and distorted, as if reflected in the back of a spoon.

  Vice Principal Carroll’s amplified voice boomed from beyond the grove.

  “Your friends, Team Two, are on the bench, beyond the aid of bandage.

  They’ve both been pitched into the trench, translated into language.”

  Miss Parker clapped her hands over
her ears. “That insufferable man! Doesn’t he ever stop? His running commentary is like one long tiresomely tireless monologue!”

  Miss Parker is right, Marlo thought as she stared into the chasm. Vice Principal Crackpot has been talking ever since we started this War of the Words business. Describing everything we do right as we do it, if not just before.…

  Marlo puzzled over the hooked trees bracketing the bridge. They reminded her of Cookie’s mocking fingers earlier.

  “Oh … I get it,” she said. “This chasm. It’s a Sar-Chasm.”

  “Right … like you’d know,” Cookie began before stopping short. “Really?”

  “Listen, I have a black belt in sarcasm. I know this. The trees are quotation marks, like your sarcastic air quotes.”

  “So we have to be really sarcastic or something to get across?” Cookie replied. “Yeah … like that makes sense. I don’t see how that’s going to help us from being swept away like Mathis and Mungo.”

  Marlo clutched the trunk of the sloped tree as another savage gust blasted through the gulch. “You know when some character in a book says something sarcastic, how the words are all bent over in Italian?”

  “I think you mean italics,” Miss Parker corrected.

  “Unless the characters are sarcastic Italians,” Dale E. Basye interjected.

  “Italics. Right, those,” Marlo replied. “So maybe that’s what we have to do to cross this Sar-Chasm thing. To keep from being blown away.”

  The teachers and children played a game of optic catch with their eyeballs.

  Mack Hoover shook his head. “Of all the stup—”

  “AHROOOOOOO WOO WOOOahhhhh!”

  “—endously smart ideas I’ve heard, that’s the smartest,” Mack said, his voice craggy with fear. “Let’s go.”

  Cookie extended her arm grandly toward the bridge. “Team captains first,” she said. “You know, those who know enough to know that they don’t know anything.”

  Marlo sighed.

  Sometimes I wish I had a junk folder for my brain, to send all of the spammy stuff I say that always seems to get forwarded back to me.…

  Marlo grabbed the wooden posts at the end of the bridge. The briefcase handcuffed to her wrist quivered in the breeze.

  “Yeah, right, like this will work,” Marlo grumbled as she leaned forward at a ten-degree angle until the buffeting wind blasting her back seemed to glide right up off her. She carefully placed one foot in front of the other onto the crooked, sparsely placed planks, which was harder than expected when tilted forward. She gripped the ropes tightly as the wind sent her blue hair streaming up into the air like a fountain.

  “Really safe,” Cookie mumbled as she stepped onto the bridge, carefully leaning forward until the wind that so desperately wanted to shove her off the bridge flowed up and over her shoulders.

  “I’ve never had so much fun in my life,” Mack Hoover said as he trod cautiously behind Cookie.

  “Totally not scary at all,” Bree Martinet groused as her dense curly hair danced on top of her head like an Ewok after vanquishing an Imperial Army.

  One by one the children made the slow, maddening trek across the Sar-Chasm.

  “Did you know that italic type was invented in the fourteenth century as a space-saving device?” Dale E. Basye said as Miss Parker readied herself for her crossing.

  “That’s really interesting,” Miss Parker said as she leaned forward, the wind blasting her face. “I could listen to you prattle on about the history of typefaces all day.…”

  Marlo neared the other side of the Sar-Chasm. The rope bridge shuddered as the wind screamed across its slats and ropes.

  “Darn, and I was so enjoying myself,” she muttered as she carefully placed her foot onto the next warped plank.

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  Marlo looked behind her. Pacing on the other side of the Sar-Chasm was the ugliest, most pants-dampening monster Marlo had ever seen. The creature was nine feet tall as it reared up on its back four legs, brandishing another set of legs (two on each side with one up front) with frustrated menace. For reasons as yet unclear, it also had a tremendous silver hammer tethered to its head. The monster glared at Marlo with its puffed slit eyes.

  Marlo stumbled as her mind went limp. Her leg dangled between the last two planks. The wind assailed her back, lifting her up and over.

  “Right, like I’m going to let some dumb wind be the thing that blows me away here in Heck,” Marlo said as she gripped the rope railing tight and—remembering yet another move from her brief yet surprisingly useful stint in gymnastics class—tilted forward into the wind. Suddenly she was released from its gusty grip, and she slid onto the other side of the Sar-Chasm.

  Something seemed to skitter away from her. Like a big red eye.

  “An eye?” Marlo groaned. “I’m probably just seeing things.…”

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  The children rushed off the shaky rope bridge that swayed violently back and forth like a jump rope in the hands of two transparent Titans.

  “That thing,” Marlo said. “It’s—”

  “Barf-inducing,” Cookie interrupted.

  “Unfading crib,” Annabelle Graham muttered.

  “No … I mean, yes—it’s way hurl—but it’s like it’s hunting us,” Marlo explained. “And didn’t the vice principal say something about a—”

  “Snark,” Miss Parker interjected.

  “A snark?!” Hadley exclaimed as she stepped off the bridge, her hair swept free of her usually concealed and now openly fearful face.

  “A fictional animal species that Vice Principal Carroll created in his nonsense poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ … though apparently not so fictional after all. It might be a sort of portmanteau word—a word blending sound and meanings—of ‘snake’ and ‘shark’ perhaps, or maybe the sound it makes, a mash-up of ‘snarl’ and ‘bark.’ … In any case, I doubt something so inelegant and off-putting could make it across this bridge, though Mr. Basye was able to.”

  The snark set two of its nine hooves delicately onto a wobbly plank, leaning forward as it mounted the bridge. Vice Principal Carroll’s commentary squawked above the wind.

  “Oh yes! Miss Parker hit the mark. The puzzle ceases stumping.

  The beast before them is a snark. Let’s hear its happy hunting!”

  The snark waggled its huge paddlelike ears at the sound of its master.

  “Um … how can we stop it?” Lani Zanotti asked, clutching her braids for comfort.

  Miss Parker gulped as the hideous beast shrewdly navigated the perplexing puzzle of planks.

  “I believe Mr. Carroll wrote something about ‘charming it with smiles and soap’—”

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!” the monster roared, sending buckets of noxious green spit spraying into the wind.

  “But don’t quote me,” Miss Parker said. “Not that many do anymore …”

  Marlo saw, in the distance, a thick patch of jungle.

  “I say let’s play a game of hide-and-sick, you ugly hammerhead snark,” Marlo taunted. “And you’re ‘it’ … a big, steaming pile of it. Ollie ollie oxen freak!”

  Marlo tucked the briefcase under her arm and ran.

  23 · REGARD A MERE

  MAD RAGER

  “SNNNA​AAHHH​HRRRR​K!!” THE CREATURE bellowed, a cloud of swampy green mist spraying out of its long, black-and-green-mottled muzzle.

  “It’s coming for us!” Winifred squealed, unhinged with panic. The snark’s two long, spatula-shaped ears flapped out the back of its misshapen skull with annoyance at the girl’s piercing voice. The hideous beast bounded off the edge of the Metaphorest stage.

  “Run!!” Milton yelled.

  The children dashed madly across the shredded yellow paper ground. Milton resented the weight of the briefcase locked to his wrist, but he quickly learned how to swing it like a pendulum, which helped him stay a few strides ahead of his team.

  Clem Weenum and
Roberta Atrebor tripped behind him. Moses leapt over the two children while Milton stopped and helped them to their feet.

  Across the confetti-strewn tundra, Milton noticed a narrow, winding path surrounded by a thick fence of golden-brown reed stalks. The brushlike tips of the dense barricade fluttered in the breeze.

  “That twisty trail over there!” Milton panted. “The path is too narrow for the monster.… C’mon, hurry!”

  Milton led his team in single file a few hundred yards up the steep muddy path. The snark skidded to a stop at the mouth of the marshy trail. It nipped uneasily at the unyielding reed stalks.

  Rakeem trotted behind Milton, patting down his bleached-blond Afro.

  “I just don’t get it,” Milton panted. “Jesus, Pansy, Sareek … they were all too smart … to have their smart comments do them in like that. They should have known better … we all should have.”

  Rakeem looked up at the ashy orange-red sky. “It’s Wisecrackatoa,” the boy huffed, giving his braces a quick swipe with his tongue. “A volcano that belches up sassified ash. It fills the whole place with a kind of … ambient antagonism. It makes it extra hard for smart alecks like us … to hold our tongues.…”

  Milton sniffed the air. It smelled of hard-boiled eggs and burning paper. “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  Rakeem shrugged. “When your school is actually made of textbooks, you learn a lot,” he explained. “Even when you’re trying hard not to, na mean?”

  The trail ended abruptly. In the distance, roughly a parking lot away, set on the slope of a small hill, was a stone coliseum—a ruin—with columns encircling its crumbling marble exterior.

  A tsunami of sound washed over the teachers and children. Milton’s head was abuzz with cricket chirps. The befuddling swell, accompanied by the hum of vibrating tuning forks, created a stupefying, thought-melting symphony. And through it all, as if conducting the symphony with his tongue, was the voice of Vice Principal Carroll.

  “Are we not drawn onward to a new era?

  An era, midst its dim arena

  Elapses pale!

  Party booby trap?

  No! I save on final perusal a sure plan if no evasion.