Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  Milton scrambled across Jacob’s stepladder for the fourth and final time.

  “Shoo! Shoo!” Calliope called as she evacuated the Tomiary of its prized collections. She and her fellow muses—upon seeing Mr. Wilde, Mr. Dickens, and Miss Parker reuniting with their inspiration—agreed to release the flocks of soul-fattened books so that they might again inspire their masters, not waste away in some ivory tower. Lucky twitched inside Milton’s No-Flak jacket.

  “We’re almost at our last stop: the left spire,” Milton soothed. “No more windy ladder rides, I promise …”

  Milton hopped off into the empty cell. He noticed a strand of blue hair resting on the floor of sound.

  I was right: Marlo was here, Milton thought as he scanned the cell for any activity. Phew … no guards is good guards. Milton removed Gabriel’s kazoo from his pocket and knelt before the first earpiece he saw.

  “I’m sorry,” he hummed. The ear pricked at the pure, resonant sound. As the jabbering mouth outside calmed, the ear-mouthpiece fell to the floor. Then another. Then another. Soon, wind was pouring into the cell as the walls and ceilings disappeared.

  “Good—” Milton said before the floor beneath his left leg vanished.

  “—grief!”

  Milton scrambled out of the cell and down the stairs, the Tower of Babble dematerializing behind him, undoing itself faster and faster with each coil of stairway.

  He leapt upon the moving sidewalk of sound that spiraled down the base of the tower. Behind him, the left tower had all but disappeared. King Nimrod’s servants clogged the sidewalk.

  Through the thinning blur of wall, Milton could see that the Tomiary—still loaded with all-too-solid books and art objects—was lowering like an elevator, as his infectious “I’m Sorry” virus spread, undoing the tower tongue by tongue.

  He sprinted along the sidewalk, through the shimmering halls, barely outrunning the contagious apology that spread from lip to ear, loosening grudges, unfastening hatred, and soothing the tension that kept the Tower of Babble standing.

  “Milton!” Roberta cried as she and the other children—led by Moxie, pushed along by Rakeem—escaped the vanishing left tower. They joined Milton where the moving sidewalks converged in loops and knots like a Los Angeles freeway.

  “It’s working!” Roberta gasped.

  Milton’s sides ached. He felt like he was on the crest of a wave, one that could never break or be rolled back. But at least he wasn’t alone.

  “Well, Captain,” Moses said with a salute that was only mildly sarcastic. “Where to now?”

  Milton looked around him, catching his breath.

  “I don’t know … this whole place is being yanked away, like when Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown.…”

  Moses scratched his arm. “Please … I’m allergic.”

  “Oh … right,” Milton replied. “Well, I guess we should just go—”

  Milton could hear dance music drifting up from the auditorium below.

  “Down. As fast as we can. Before Marlo gets what’s coming to her …”

  37 · ADDING INSULT

  TO IRONY

  A DARK, BLACK-AND-WHITE storm cloud settled over Marlo. She looked up, its raw force reflected in her wide violet eyes. The cloud churned and seethed with words. Millions of them. The cloud whirled faster and faster until it was a concentrated cone focused directly above the Rod of Irony.

  “We’d best seek cover,” Vice Principal Carroll said to Principal Bubb as they backed away from the pole. “I’ll fetch the Orb-Servers. They’ll broadcast the event: me at my creative zenith!”

  Principal Bubb gazed up at the shimmering tower. She slipped her spectacles up her snout.

  “I thought that the Tower of Babble was shaped like a big fork,” she commented.

  “It is,” Vice Principal Carroll replied as they scrambled off the mound.

  “Not anymore …”

  The vice principal’s jaw dropped open. The tower had lost its colossal prongs. It was now merely a quarter-of-a-mile tall and resembled a gigantic rook snatched from God’s chessboard.

  “N-n-n-no,” Vice Principal Carroll stammered. “I … n-n-need it … its reach and frequency … I’ve g-got to act quickly … while there’s still t-time.…”

  A mass of ear-mouths rained down from the sky, landing with a sickening plop by Principal Bubb’s hooves.

  “I’m … sorry,” apologized one of the disembodied mouths. The principal grimaced with disgust. She stamped out the murmuring lips with her hoof as if they were a talking cigarette butt.

  I know who’ll be sorry, Principal Bubb thought, grinding her fangs. This has to be the work of that miserable twerp Milton Fauster. This has his fussy signature scrawled all over it.…

  Crowds of people began pouring out of the Tower of Babble like blood gushing from a fresh wound. A team of servants shuttled King Nimrod out of the slowly dissolving building. The king was sobbing into his hands. Vice Principal Carroll rushed up to him.

  “Where is the media?” he asked with frantic desperation. “I need to conclude the War of the Words while there’s still time!”

  King Nimrod shook his head, inundated in and incapacitated by failure.

  “Inside,” the broken man muttered. “They must think that the destruction of the great Tower of Babble is more important than a little girl getting her comeuppance.”

  Milton and the other children rushed through the crowd. Milton stopped short as he saw his sister struggling to free herself from the pole two hundred yards away. A large funnel cloud spun over her head.

  “Are those … words?” he asked.

  Vice Principal Carroll rushed past him toward the collapsing tower.

  “Words are like b-boomerangs,” he replied. “They always come back … every one of them.”

  Principal Bubb spotted Milton and the ragtag survivors of Spite Club. She pointed her angry, trembling claw.

  “Heck’s Angels … grab those children!” she roared.

  The fallen angels circled around the children and teachers, cinching slowly like a noose.

  Marlo’s too far, Milton thought feverishly. We need a diversion.…

  His eyes settled on Moxie Wortschmerz. The little girl was writhing and vibrating with pent-up rage: so many terrible, terrible words wanting out. Milton grabbed the handles of Moxie’s hand truck and pushed her out into the fray, as far and as fast as he could.

  “Sorry, Moxie,” he panted. “Desperate times … desperate measures … at least you’ll be able to get everything off your chest.”

  Heck’s Angels formed an impenetrable gauntlet around Marlo. Milton skidded to a stop forty feet from the surly barricade. One of the angels looked fatally familiar. A boy with burnished black skin and piercing blue eyes.

  Angelo … or whoever he really is, Milton thought. He doesn’t seem to recognize me … not that it matters much now.

  Milton reached around Moxie’s head and plucked the silver sheath from her waggling tongue as if he were removing the pin from a grenade. He ran, covering his ears, then dove to the ground. Moxie’s eyebrows furrowed. Her dark green eyes bulged. Her turned-up nose flared with indignation, sucking up air. Her tiny lips puckered and pursed before opening like the petals of a carnivorous flower. The little girl trembled and hissed like an angry teakettle full of boiling nitroglycerine, before flushing deep red and stretching her mouth wide.

  The stream of stinging, caustic curses spewing out of Moxie’s mouth was the most brutal string of explosive expletives that Milton had ever heard. They effortlessly tumbled out of the little girl’s mouth—shocking swear words in dozens of languages—and spread across the grounds like verbal mustard gas. Even the Deaditors and demon guards blushed at Moxie’s abrasive firestorm of uncorked profanity. The girl grinned maliciously, finally obscene and heard.

  Vice Principal Carroll ushered a small flock of Orb-Servers out of the tower, like a mother duck corralling her ducklings across a busy street.

&n
bsp; The Orb-Servers skidded to a stop as their large red lenses locked on Moxie. Some of the creatures shut their eye-bodies and plugged their ears, censoring the feed, while the others made the mistake of looking to one another for guidance. But when they locked eye-bodies, they created an infinity loop—a camera broadcasting a camera broadcasting a camera—that immobilized them.

  The fallen angels drew their swords and leaned into the howling gale of abuse. Milton scanned the scene frantically. There was no way he could make it to Marlo in time.

  Suddenly, a squadron of flapping books soared over the children’s heads.

  “Huh?” Milton gasped before turning back to the shrinking tower, now just a massive, glimmering steeple missing its three lofty prongs.

  The Tomiary traveled slowly down the disintegrating skyscraper like a multistory elevator. Milton could see Miss Parker, Mr. Dickens, and Mr. Wilde leaning out the window. Behind them, the muses watched the scene below. And the muses were not amused.

  The flying books gathered in the sky, their pages screaming as they whipped through the air. They clotted together in a sort of gravity-defying archive before dropping down with deadly velocity.

  Heck’s Angels stood below, novel-gazing, until the mass of books swarmed upon them, hurtling faster and faster, rushing at them with a ruthless rustle. The fallen angels broke formation as they beat back the angry books with their swords.

  The funnel cloud seething above Marlo dropped down from the sky. The Deaditors fled.

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, Marlo thought, her eyes squeezed shut and tears streaming down her face. But words will never hurt me … even mine.…

  The countless words and phrases—Les-Is-Moron, Doodle-Fisted Lard Bomb, Short Bus, Little Miss Waste-of-Space, Brainiac, Sir Loser-Lot, Li’l Bro Pipsqueak, Bleached-Blond Toilet Brush, Mr. Substitute Creature—swirled around her in a malevolent, taunting tornado.

  Every wisecrack and not-so-wisecrack that she had ever EZ-baked in her mean-spirited head now besieged her. The words slammed into Marlo, burrowed into her thin skin, and writhed. And scratched. And burned. The pain was blinding. It hurt so much that Marlo’s nerve endings couldn’t even process it all. It felt like she was being whipped from inside. Like her soul had been wrenched from her body and stamped into the dirt by an angry mob wearing golf cleats.

  I … deserve this, Marlo thought, skating on the edge of consciousness. I put all of this pain into the world. With my words.

  Marlo felt as if she were having an ice cream headache all over her body.

  Hurting people I didn’t even hate. Just because I could. With my anger. That scorching, head-banging, stomach-churning, all-consuming anger. The only way I could get it out was to vent it at others … and now it’s payback time.…

  Her heart empty, her soul depleted, her will defeated, Marlo slid down the Rod of Irony and slumped over like a soggy rag doll.

  “No!” Milton screamed as he dashed across the chaotic battlefield of swooping books and fierce, sword-wielding angels to Marlo. He hurried behind the pole and untied her pink hands.

  “Marlo!” he yelped desperately as he unzipped his sister’s mouth. She was like a husk … a living shell. He looked into her heavy-lidded eyes, but there was no one home. Marlo was empty.

  “I’ll fix this,” Milton sniffed, whispering into his sister’s ear. “I promise.”

  Marlo seemed to nod as grunts, screams, and the sounds of flapping pages filled the air behind Milton.

  Squadrons of books ducked and weaved above, swooping down viciously upon the fallen angels. The winged mercenaries slashed away with their swords. Meanwhile, the teachers sent their beloved books into battle.

  “We’re really reading them the riot act now, aren’t we?” Miss Parker quipped, her eyes closed in concentration, her face decades younger than it had been only moments ago.

  Mr. Dickens grinned. He, too, resembled his younger self, at the peak of his powers, as he wielded David Copperfield at the chiseled jaw of Zagan, pummeling the barrel-chested creature with passionate prose.

  The teenage angel Marchosias, bleeding from paper cuts, swung her flaming sword at The Picture of Dorian Gray, removing half a chapter.

  Mr. Wilde groaned. “Everyone’s a critic!” he said with a grimace.

  In the distance, Milton could see Vice Principal Carroll backing away in horror. He was tugging behind him his gong and hammer.

  “This is not how it’s supposed to b-be at all!” he muttered as he stepped deeper in the rim of the Terristories. “My imagination was to weave the ultimate story … and now everything is unraveling.”

  The vice principal tossed aside his top hat. The spinning satellite dish of his Thinking Cap glinted, like the wink of a mad man, with each frantic revolution. He slammed the hammer into the gong.

  “Whoops! spoohW!” Vice Principal Carroll shouted, his supple ventriloquist’s voice rolling the words off his tongue both backward and forward simultaneously. Everything grew muzzy. Blurry. Simple. As if all personal responsibility was now in the hands of another. Yet, as swiftly as the Rosetta Tone gripped the minds of those in the immediate vicinity, its resonance passed and faded, like ripples in a pond.

  As Moxie’s storm of curses petered out, several Orb-Servers blinked their glassy eye-bodies and waddled toward the vice principal.

  “Humanity is trapped behind the bars of a verbal prison,” Vice Principal Carroll sobbed, surrendering to a complete meltdown.

  Bars began to grow around him as he fell to the ground, the gently rolling hill of shredded paper twinkling with tuning forks.

  “Whoops! spoohW!” the vice principal bellowed, sending out another fleeting blast of tampered creation.

  “Such clumsy forceps, words are! If we could only see the world the way a cat sees it … quietly, without words …”

  A litter of cats appeared, scattered around him, mewling and padding about in circles.

  A rogue flock of books swirled uncertainly in the sky, breaking apart from the mass migration of novels, freed, searching for their masters. The small library—pages flickering, covers flapping—dove downward.

  “Language is an oral contract not worth the paper it’s written on! A high-pressure whether-or-not system, raining down drivel!”

  A clap of thunder pealed from above, announcing a sudden downpour.

  “I would have remade the world in my imagination! And spun a story with more plots than a graveyard!”

  As the valley began to sprout tombstones, the flock of books descended upon the vice principal: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland … Sylvie and Bruno … The Hunting of the Snark.…

  Vice Principal Carroll peeked through his trembling fingers in wide-eyed amazement. A soft, silver-purple glow radiated around him like a small, touring production of the northern lights. His face pinched in the allusion of a smile.

  “What’s this?” the man muttered in wonder. “My babies? Can it be true?”

  One of the books—Through the Looking-Glass—fluttered by coyly. Vice Principal Carroll stuck out his arm, with the book fluttering down, alighting on his wrist. He grinned.

  “You were always my favorite. For you house my greatest work: Jabberwocky.…”

  Vice Principal Carroll rose slowly from the ground. All of his books, his original inspiration, roosted upon him until he resembled a shaggy creature composed of gently flapping pages and whimsy. The vice principal recited:

  “ ’Twos brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe …”

  An oddly brilliant light enshrouded him, as did slimy tendrils slithered in pools of melted crayon. Exotic vegetation sprang up from the ground—fuzzy, feathery plants the color of bruises. Fiery moths swarmed, tearing at the ground with their legs.

  “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”

  A hideous dragon materialized in the air. It burbled and whiffled from behind the vi
ce principal. It flapped its black leathery wings and extended long, sharp talons as it stared at the man, its eyes pure flame.

  “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”

  The creature seized the man viciously around the waist and, with one choking gulp, swallowed him whole. Instantly, the Jabberwock vanished, along with all of Vice Principal Carroll’s imaginings, leaving only the bleak hill of shredded paper, rustling in the wind.

  The Tomiary landed gently on the ground as the center steeple that had once supported it vanished into nothing.

  The De-Press Corpse slowly emerged from the not-so-towering Tower of Babble. Irv Chudley, a demon reporter from the Underworld Sintinel, turned to his photographer.

  “Whoa … we don’t get many of those to the gallon. Did you get that?”

  The bug-eyed creature behind the camera nodded.

  The flying books drifted above in a bunch, so high that they became mere specks in the darkening sky. They hung in the heavens, just below Heaven, balancing on air currents with scarcely a flap of their covers.

  The silence was profound. The intense, stifling atmosphere seemed to slowly bend toward Milton as the other children, the teachers, Principal Bubb, and the few Orb-Servers that were online turned toward him, sensing that he was at the center of what had happened and what was about to happen.

  Surrounded by King Nimrod’s shaken sentries and the bleeding but still-not-to-be-trifled-with fallen angels, Milton knew that the most he could possibly hope for was a standoff. Next to his crumpled, unconscious sister, Milton stared at the bloodred Inferno2Go stagecoach. The demon driver, a spiny-backed beast with a rotting pumpkin for a head, hopped down to the ground and tugged open the door, anticipating his next fare: Marlo.

  Milton had failed to spare his sister from her cruel and unusual punishment. But there was no way he was going to let them take her away to h-e-double-hockey-sticks. For as bad as Marlo could be—even at her worst—she didn’t deserve that.

  He mentally thumbed through his options, which took nearly half a second. Milton sighed, stood to his shaky feet, and waved his arms in the air.