Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  “Thanks?” she murmured. “I must have slipped into a comma?”

  The snark galloped toward them along the flattened paper-lands.

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  With a deep inhale, Dale E. Basye bounded up the slope to the long, sharp point. He dodged the various round stones and puddles dotting the landscape.

  Dale E. Basye was running! Fast! He felt strong! Sure, terrified and confused—like at a family reunion—but remarkably alive, considering the fact that he could very well be dead! Each step felt bold and sure! Positively declarative! He felt as if he were rushing toward some emphatic conclusion!

  Milton grabbed his sister by the hand. Up ahead, their paths ran parallel to each other, the ground broken up into a series of uniform grooves.

  “We have to dash!” Milton shouted.

  Milton and Marlo—running side by side—leapt over each dash—the dashes breaking up the path every so often—with the snark—huffing and snarling behind them—gaining with every hoof-fall—of which it had nine, outnumbering the Fausters’ frantic feet by five—until the beast was practically upon them—its fetid breath blasting their backs—with Milton and Marlo giving one last surge of speed …

  The snark cantered to a stop. It stared at three dots on the ground, blocking the trail.

  “What is that?” Marlo asked, trying to catch her breath as she looked behind her.

  “An ellipsis,” Milton replied. “The three dots. They symbolize an omission of words, or when your thoughts just sort of …”

  “… trail off?”

  “Yeah.”

  The snark stared at the ellipsis … gently swaying with numbing doubt. The snark shuddered, shook its head fitfully, and rose suddenly to its nine feet. It furiously stomped the ellipsis until the ground was pockmarked beyond comprehension.

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  The snark settled its glare on Milton and Marlo. Milton swallowed. He noticed a pair of thin, curved shield-like curls of metal lying on the ground nearby.

  “Grab a parenthesis!” he shouted to Marlo.

  Milton and Marlo snatched up the parentheses just as the scaly-skinned beast careened toward them. The large metal hammer lashed to the back of its neck glittered. The snark charged (with Milton and Marlo hiding inside the two curved brackets) but the beast couldn’t get at them. The creature quickly recovered and came at them again, gaining momentum with every hoof-fall. Yet when it rushed at the pair of parentheses (Milton and Marlo protected within), its hammer blow merely glanced off. The snark stomped in frustrated circles.

  Milton and Marlo slowly backed away, huddled together, halfway up Punctuation Point. Marlo stepped on a large pair of dots in the ground.

  “Ouch: my colon?” she yelped. She dropped her parenthesis shield and clutched her lower abdomen in agony.

  “Another punctuation mark,” Milton wheezed. “It’s used to … separate two clauses. Too bad you didn’t step on a semicolon; then it would just … half hurt.”

  The fallen parenthesis disappeared in the mud.

  “Snnn​aaa​hhhh​rrrrk!!”

  The snark sniffed the air, leveled its hammerhead toward them, and charged.

  “We can’t protect ourselves with just one parenthesis … can we?” Marlo grunted. “Or … outrun it?”

  Milton shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then you should run?” Marlo said, supremely irritated that every statement she made curled up at the end like a question.

  “I won’t leave you here. End of statement.”

  Dale E. Basye ran toward the end of his path, toward Exclamation Point, for all he was worth, which—given the inflation of age—wasn’t much. He looked over his shoulder at Milton and Marlo.

  Dale E. Basye swallowed as the hideous snark galloped toward the two children in 9/8 time.

  “No!” the man yelled. He ran to help them, but as soon as he strayed from his path, he was besieged by a swarm of tiny marks.

  “Hyphens?”

  With his bluish-green-gray eyes, Dale E. Basye saw the hideous bird-lizard-bull-horse creature stagger toward the pale-faced blue-haired girl and her four-eyed brown-haired beanpole of a brother. The middle-aged man tried to shuffle his size-ten feet to help the down-on-their-luck preteens out of their not-to-be-believed situation, but the poorly-developed sentence was so ludicrously-burdened with over-hyphenated words that the late-author found it next-to-impossible to move, despite his highly-motivated state. With a mighty shiver, he shook off the hyphenating-hive of word-linking marks and rushed to Milton and Marlo’s aide.

  The trotting snark was only a few dozen yards away. Thinking either fast or not at all, Dale E. Basye ran at the snark and, with a heroic leap, bounded onto its back.

  “Man, this thing gives ugly a bad name,” Dale E. Basye muttered as he fought to stay on. He clutched the large metal hammer and hung on for dear afterlife.

  “Giddy-up!” he yelled as he kicked the beast in its sides with his heels.

  The snark charged blindly toward the tip of Exclamation Point, blindly in that Dale E. Basye had his arms wrapped around the creature’s eyes. Dale stared at the tall, rigid obelisk, resting defiantly atop a rounded boulder, up ahead.

  “An Exclamation Point!” he exclaimed as the snark charged up the steep slope. “What a way to end a sentence! So, now where were we? Oh yeah …”

  Straddling a stampeding monster toward a precarious precipice guarding an invisible tower of sound, Dale E. Basye felt like a character in one of his own crazy stories.

  Maybe it didn’t matter if this was all in his mind or if he was, indeed, dead—swept under the rug of the afterlife in some kiddie version of h-e-double-hockey-sticks—but, instead, maybe it mattered that he was finally doing something for others, somehow saving the day in a place that never saw the sun, running off the edge of a cliff with a run-on sentence crowding his feverish mind.…

  The snark tried to stop as it galloped full speed, but its nine-legged velocity was unstoppable!

  With that, Dale E. Basye—astride the galloping snark—soared off Exclamation Point, his afterlife sentence complete, falling into the velvet arms of a vaporous, infinite whiteness. It was as if he, the subject of his own sentence, had trailed off the margins of a colossal sheet of paper. The snark hurtled through the air, screeching as it twisted in arcs of flailing surprise, until the silver hammer lashed to the creature’s head slammed into the base of the Tower of Babble.

  The sky-high cathedral of sound vibrated with the brutal impact. Milton and Marlo panted at the edge of Exclamation Point.

  “What’s going—” Marlo began until shock waves shook the Outer Terristories.

  Milton’s mind …

  … started …

  … sinking.

  E v e r y t h i n g a r o u n d t h e m b e g a n t o l o s e i t s g r i p o n e v e r y t h i n g e l s e , g o i n g s o f t a n d s l a c k a l o n g t h e e d g e s .

  Soon everything went w h i t e. Absolutely …

  W H I T E.

  28 · A RAW DEAL

  PRINCIPAL BUBB TEETERED atop a chair as she tacked a tacky poster onto the wall of her Not-So-Secret Lair. The poster depicted a gazelle straggling behind its herd as the creatures fled the dogged advance of a fierce wolf.

  INDIVIDUALITY: STANDING OUT IS THE QUICKEST WAY TO BECOME SOMEONE ELSE’S DINNER

  As the principal strained desperately to balance her tremendous bulk upon the pitiable chair, everything suddenly …

  … went …

  w h i t e.

  After a …

  … moment the …

  … principal carne to …

  … on the floor …

  What was that all about? she thought, her mind feeling scrubbed raw like a freshly dressed wound. Principal Bubb glanced at her clock that read 13:13—the same time it always read—yet the principal had the nagging feeling that time had somehow passed, as much as time could here in Limbo.

  The princip
al clawed her way back to her feet, clutching her desk to support her wobbly legs.

  It must be the stress, Bea “Elsa” Bubb thought, rubbing her horn nubs.

  A hermit crab-like demon stuck its eyestalks through a crack in her door.

  “Mmmm … ma’am,” it mumbled shyly. “I … um … there is something to see you, Madam Principal.”

  “Something?” she replied as she clacked to her imposing desk. “Don’t you mean someone?”

  The demon guard waggled one if its eyestalks out the door while keeping the other trained on Principal Bubb. “I … um … I’m not completely sure,” it replied meekly.

  “Fine. Send whatever in,” she ordered as she sat in her chair, the sitting device squealing in structural pain beneath her inelegant bulk. “But I have to be going.…”

  The hermit-crab demon skittered away. Through the door passed a lumbering quilt of wounded meat held together with scabs and spite. The principal winced at the sight of it. There was something familiar about the creature, right around the area where its face should have been.

  “Um … yes?” Principal Bubb hissed with disgust. “May I, er, help you? Though you seem well past that …”

  The five-foot, ten-inch hodgepodge of weeping sores seemed to nod.

  “Principal,” it gurgled weakly in a voice knotted with strain. “It’s me … it’s …”

  Principal Bubb peered deeply into the creature’s dark, cruel eyes thrown haphazardly onto its head by Fate’s sinister game of roulette.

  “Damian Ruffino?” she gasped.

  Damian Ruffino was one of the worst children that Principal Bubb had ever encountered in her timeless tenure as Heck’s principal of darkness. He made being bad look so easy. Yet while Damian had been a maestro of malevolence, now he was just a mess of meat.

  “What on Earth happened? I assume that’s where this happened … on Earth.”

  Damian scratched at a rough, crusty patch that seemed to serve as his neck.

  “I … long story,” he replied with a thick rattle of phlegm. “I’ve come … to have a word with you … about a deal.…” He continued with difficulty. “A deal that we made …”

  “A deal? Whatever do you mean?”

  “You said … if I helped you capture … Milton Fauster … and deliver you … loads of corrupted … easily manipulated souls … you would make me … make me …”

  Principal Bubb screwed up her seriously screwed up face.

  “Well … you didn’t exactly deliver Milton Fauster to me, nor did you—”

  “I had to dress up like a girl to find out about the Grabbit’s plan in Rapacia, and I nearly pierced Milton’s heart with a scepter; then I helped flush him out of Blimpo when his dumb ferret died.… I took over a death cult up on the Surface and got new recruits.… I tried to make Heck sound cool by getting a book published; then it turned into a really popular video game.…”

  “So what do you want?” the principal hissed.

  “What I want most is for … everyone else to be … miserable,” Damian managed. “But I suppose I would be … satisfied with my own … my own … Circle.…”

  Damian’s pained voice drowned in a pool of pus and self-pity. The hermit-crab demon tapped on the door with its claws.

  “Yes?!” the principal snapped like an arthritic twig.

  “Um … Heck-o … Madam Principal, ma’am,” it replied in a soft, unassuming wheeze.

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?!”

  The creature skittered back in alarm. “I … it’s … you see, time for … the War of the Words.”

  The principal sighed. She snatched her sneezing baby panda-skin clutch bag.

  “All right, Mr. Ruffino,” the principal said as she clacked out of her Not-So-Secret Lair. “Speaking of words, I am a demonness of mine. As good as my word, I mean to say,” she said, crossing her talons behind the small—or least-large—of her back. “So we have a deal. Shake?”

  Principal Bubb offered her claw. Damian moved to extend his arm but pulled it back just before contact, instead smoothing down his hair.

  Bea “Elsa” Bubb rolled her eyes.

  Once a reprehensible jerk, always a reprehensible jerk. At least the boy’s consistent …

  “We’ll talk later and sort out the details,” Principal Bubb continued. “I’ll have a team of plastic surgeons—we have so many down here—try to put you back together again, Humpty Dumpty. I could never understand that rhyme. Why someone would employ a king’s horses to perform delicate surgery, on a large sentient egg, no less, is beyond me.…”

  A bad feeling started hatching among the nest of bad feelings already occupying the principal’s loathsome body.

  “Now I must have a word with some mutual fiends of ours,” Principal Bubb said before pausing for a full-body flesh crawl, “Milton Fauster and his impertinent sister … the last word, if I have anything to say about it.”

  “Tell them … hi,” Damian gurgled with utter contempt from the doorway. He attempted a smile, exposing a mouthful of jagged yellow teeth. “From their ol’ … pal …”

  Damian hobbled away from the principal’s lair, escorted by the crab demon, for rehabilitation. Soon he’d have no one to answer to, he reflected. And he’d be the one giving all the orders.…

  29 · LIKE A TONGUE

  OF BRICKS

  A TALL, IMPERIOUS brute of a man loomed over Milton and Marlo as they regained consciousness, stroking his long, plaited beard. Milton recognized the man from the assembly back in Wise Acres.

  The man grabbed Milton and Marlo by the wrists and tugged them to their feet. Standing behind him were Vice Principal Carroll, Miss Parker, Mr. Wilde, and Mr. Dickens, along with the surviving Spite Club members. The two teams looked wasted and pale, like a police lineup of haggard ghosts.

  Milton noticed that the walls surrounding them were made from some odd, thin leaded glass. So was the floor. And the ceiling. Milton could see people all around him: slightly warped figures walking above, beside, and below. He knelt down and touched the floor. It was solid beneath his hand but trembling like a stereo speaker blasting music on full volume. But Milton couldn’t hear anything beyond a persistent, muffled yammering.

  “This is the Tower of Babble?” Milton asked incredulously. “A building held together with sound?”

  “Not just sound,” the regal man boasted. “But an endless, burbling stream of bickering, squabbling, and contention! Now I command you to accompany me on a tour!”

  Marlo folded her arms in defiance. “Who died and made you king?” she replied.

  The arrogant man folded his arms as well, resulting in a folded arms race. “That would have been my father,” the man said. “But I’m king now. King Nimrod: Tyrannical Ruler, Master Architect, and Certified Notary Public.”

  Milton tested the floor with his foot. It felt like walking across a taut, transparent-plastic trampoline. A little demon waddled forward. It was basically a large, unblinking red eye—almost cute—with tiny, rounded arm and leg stubs, a potbelly, and two black, cablelike ears snaking out from the top of its head.

  “It’s one of those eyeball things!” Marlo exclaimed as the short, two-foot-tall creature gazed upon her, registering her every move.

  “Yeah,” Milton murmured. “I thought I saw one, too.”

  Vice Principal Carroll stepped from behind King Nimrod.

  “One of m-many Orb-Servers we had recruited especially for the event,” the vice principal explained as another unblinking demon waddled into the room and bumped clumsily into its counterpart. “An eye-witless news team. Unflinchingly capturing your every move.”

  The pair of demons stared unnervingly at Milton, like a giant’s bloodshot eyes.

  “So that’s how you were able to report on us?” Milton asked. “To give a running commentary on everything that was happening?”

  “I wasn’t making comments,” Vice Principal Carroll said, smiling, though his eyes still had a strangely troubled cast about them. “I was making conten
t! I was telling the story into existence just as it happened! The Orb-Servers merely broadcast your reactions to me so I could incorporate them into the tale: in real time.”

  Milton’s mind was like an over-inflated balloon: totally blown.

  “But that’s impossible.…”

  “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” the vice principal replied. “See, Mr. Fauster, the Outer Terristories were awash in a specific tone that made you all highly suggestible. I fed this state with a story to guide you, while you all filled in the details. And—between your clever performances and my vivid narration—the radio audience was rapt!”

  Marlo’s skin prickled purple with rage. “So all of that—all those horrible grammonsters we faced … all of those nerdy-wordy puzzles … all those kids who turned into piles of letters—was just some story?!”

  Three tall, skinny demons filed into the humming room. They wore bright yellow jumpers and pink eraser top hats, and had—Milton realized with a gulp—rusted zippers for mouths. Each brandished a long, red wand that matched its beady red eyes.

  “N-now, don’t be upset, Miss Fauster,” the vice principal said as he sat down on a large, weathered steamer trunk in the corner, primly crossing his fidgeting legs. “Your ratings were through the roof! You, in particular, received nearly a gajillion votes! The most of any—”

  “A gajillion?” Milton puzzled. “That’s not even a real—”

  “It’s that attitude that’s costing you votes, Mr. Fauster,” Vice Principal Carroll replied. “Try to loosen up a bit.”

  Marlo smirked. “Wow … a whole gajillion!”

  As Marlo scanned the faces of her fellow team members, she was suddenly struck by their diminished ranks. A lump formed in her throat.