Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (22 page)

Cerberus lunged at Lucky, who—though bristling with fury—was too weakened to rip into the three-headed hound with all the ferretish ferocity he would have liked. He managed a wet hiss, like a punctured bicycle tire filled with anger, as Cerberus stepped back through the prickling, energetic portal. One of his heads licked its chops, another snarled, and the other sniffed
the air with ravenous abandon, as if the Furafter were an “all-you-can-smell” buffet.

Annubis took a whiff of the pet-pourri of scents: the stench of the Kennels, like a sharp and acidic slap, and the intoxicating aroma of the Really Big Farm, a sweet mixture of hay, alfalfa, and pine. Underneath it all the pervasive reek of crow droppings, a thick pungent paste that coated the inside of the courtyard, fortifying it like cement. Cerberus growled at Kebauet, angered by her unique blend of human and canine odors. The pointy-eared girl wrapped her arms tight around her father’s leg.

“If you so much as bare your nasty teeth at my daughter,” Annubis snarled, “I’ll roll up the biggest newspaper I can find and smack you so hard that you’ll win an Oscar for playing dead! Do you hear me, you loathsome cur?!”

Annubis could see, through the convex blur of the portal, two monstrous Scarecrows in the courtyard flapping, strutting, and pecking at the other dogs, herding them into the center of the courtyard.

“Is there another way out?” Annubis asked Virginia Woof.

The white-and-tan terrier tapped out her reply.

“Not that I know.”

Cats spilled into the courtyard outside, brushing themselves against the fence, laying claim to it in their
casual, dismissive feline way. The two Scarecrows perched atop the parapets anxiously paced sideways, back and forth, as they eyed the herd of cats with unease.

“Let’s see if there’s a back door,” Annubis said as he put his arms around his shaken family. “Maybe we can find Mr. Noah and put a stop to this.”

The dogs turned and trotted through the labyrinth of whimpering crates. Claws scratching concrete and tongues lolling out of mouths, the four canines scurried along the winding path, its bleak scenery of rusted, reeking cages never seeming to change, only recycle.

The dogs rounded a bend at the center of the maze, arriving at a clearing. They skidded to a stop with horror.

Three hulking, monstrous demons trudged about a spacious vat. Each of the heavily muscled creatures was nearly eight feet tall. But the most disturbing aspect of these dark red beasts was that they were headless, and sported gaping holes in their chests. They turned—swiftly, considering their bulk—and regarded the intruding dogs without need of eyes.

Tied up with twine alongside the wooden vat was an old man with a pillowy white beard, wearing sandals and a light brown robe. A look of fierce determination crinkled his otherwise kindly face.

Virginia Woof yapped and leapt in the air. Annubis gave the gagged and bound man a sniff.

Ancient … redolent of the sea and every flavor of beast …

“Noah?” Annubis muttered. “The Noah?”

The old man struggled futilely against his bonds.

Behind the vat Annubis noted another old man, un-tethered, dressed flamboyantly in a white ascot, navy blue cloak, and dazzling chunky pewter necklace. He stood before a shimmering, blobbish hologram that he delicately sculpted with two laser pens. The man turned and arched his bushy eyebrows at Annubis, assessing him with his gleaming eyes.

“Vell, vhat have we here?” the man asked as the demons swarmed around the dogs. The man set his laser pens down on a small table by the levitating hologram. “Vhy, are you a … half-man, half-dog?”

“I’m technically half jackal,” Annubis replied.

The man’s pupils dilated until his eyes were black with dark, self-consumed merriment.

“So prayers can be answered, even down here,” he laughed in his halting yet refined accent. “Jes, you’ll do nicely. And, eef at first I don’t succeed—”

His beady, glittering eyes settled on Anput and Kebauet.

“—I can jest try and try again!”

Zane and Marlo screamed, yet the gush of wind stoppered up their gaping mouths. Dr. Brinkley inched toward the rim and peered downward.

“It’s working!” he gasped, amazed. “You were right, Mr. Fauster! The truth is bringing Fibble down!”

Vice Principal Barnum staggered into the quaking Big Top.

“What in blazes is going on?!” he roared, his flaming pants leaving a sooty contrail of smoke in his wake.

Dr. Brinkley hurriedly reached for the canister of liedocane tucked into his satchel.

“Time to put on the brakes,” he said as he tossed the canister to the ice below, now only twenty feet away. “The sudden influx of highly concentrated lies should stop the wood from contracting.”

The demon guards ran past the Gates of Fibble in fear as the can of liedocane exploded, spraying its distorting rainbow fog in all directions. The support beams screamed as the collapsing Pinocchio wood froze.

“Let go of me, Milton!” Zane yelled as the ice rushed to meet his head. Marlo, her brother’s hands cramping, couldn’t help but comply. Zane fell onto the ice, landing on his shoulder and rolling out of the target zone through the abandoned gates.

“No!” screamed Marlo as the mass media circus screeched to a halt just two feet from the ice floor.

“I’m fine,” Zane called out. “The demon guards … not so much.”

“Run!” quacked Dr. Brinkley as he jumped through the hole, lugging the remaining truth bombs.

“Run?” Marlo replied as she hopped onto the ice. “There isn’t enough room.”

“
Then crawl
! Here, take one of the bombs in case we’re separated!”

Marlo grabbed the truth bomb, tucked it beneath her arm, and crawled on her knees toward Zane, sandwiched between Fibble and the Falla Sea.

Dr. Brinkley saw to his right, twenty yards beyond the rim of Fibble, eight hooves tromping nervously in place.

“Shuck and Jive!” he clucked with excitement as he wriggled toward his Night Mares.

Marlo’s knees and palms burned with scrapes yet at the same time were frozen numb by the cold. She grunted yard by yard alongside Zane and Dr. Brinkley. Every labored breath felt like she was inhaling crushed ice. Above her head was the foundation of Fibble, a lattice of wooden joists and brass plumbing.

As Marlo wiggled onward, her body—
Milton’s
body—was freaking out. She could feel his chest tighten, his throat constrict, and his whole body break into a sweat.

Vice Principal Barnum vaulted down upon the ice and crouched low. Marlo could hear Barnum’s sizzling pants hiss and crackle beneath Fibble as if through an echo chamber.

“Tom Thumb! Louie! Kung Pao!” he bellowed. “Get your small, freakish selves here this instant and capture the runaways! Annette! Have the teachers contain the
other students! Scampi! Man the Humbugger and be the biggest, baddest clown you can!”

Marlo heard a clatter of tiny feet. And those tiny feet were getting closer, unencumbered by the need to crawl, crouch, and/or wriggle.

Pushing herself harder than she ever had before, Marlo reached the edge of Fibble’s foundation, just behind Zane. The skittish black Night Mares stomped and snorted, backing away in fear. Marlo straightened her aching back, then helped Dr. Brinkley to his feet. A mixture of stale smoke and salty brine filled her nostrils. Still panting, Marlo stooped down and saw a scowling midget smoking a cigar charge toward her, with four scurrying shrimp demons—tiny horns piercing their filthy rainbow wigs—at his itty-bitty heels.

Marlo cradled her truth bomb in her hand.

“Don’t come any closer or I’ll blow you up!” she yelled.

Tom Thumb and the shrimp demons skidded to a stop. The midget squinted and considered Marlo with his dark, jaded eyes. He took his cigar out of his mouth.

“You’re bluffing,” the little man replied with a cruel, underworld-weary chuckle.

“Oh yeah?” Marlo retorted, realizing instantly that this was not one of her better retorts. “What makes you think so?”

Tom Thumb laughed as he let his cigar fall on the ground.

“Because you’re blushing,” he said as he stomped his cigar out with his pint-sized foot.

Marlo felt her burning cheeks.

Darn Milton’s goody-good body
, she cursed to herself as she twisted the truth bomb’s handle and hurled it underneath Fibble. The bomb clattered and rolled to the midget’s feet. The shrimp demons soiled each other with fear in anticipation of an explosion that, with each passing second, seemed increasingly unlikely.

“Run!” Dr. Brinkley yelled as he speed-waddled toward his carriage.

An idea popped into Marlo’s head. She leaned beneath Fibble and screamed at the top of her brother’s burning lungs.

“I am lying!”

The Pinocchio-wood support beams trembled, and after several confused seconds, Fibble itself rose and fell in fierce, unpredictable spasms as the wood reacted to either the truth that was therefore a lie, or a lie that was therefore the truth.

The shrimps screamed like a pot of boiled lobsters and ran back toward the target beneath the Big Top.

Marlo and Zane trotted carefully across the slippery ice as Fibble bounced up and down—never quite fully rising, never quite completely falling—behind them. As they neared the carriage, a large shadow engulfed them, spreading out like an oil spill. Marlo looked up at the sky and immediately wished she hadn’t.

Looming above, composed of glittering, electrically charged tufts of smoke, was the massive, sneering clown head.

The Night Mares whinnied with terror, their eyes bulging out of their sockets, and bolted for the horizon.

“Shuck! Jive!” yelled Dr. Brinkley as he watched his carriage disappear across the Falla Sea. A roar filled the air, so deep that it rattled every bone in Marlo’s borrowed body.

“You will never leave!” the jumbo-sized clown face boomed. The head pressed close over them until it became the sky. The glittering smoke buzzed like a swarm of bees dipped in melted mirror. The sickly sweet smell of it prickled Marlo’s nose. With each breath, the gargantuan, malevolent clown head became more real.

“It’s … not … real,” Marlo said to herself, curling her fists as panic squeezed her in its cold, sickening grip.

“It’s the liedocane,” Dr. Brinkley cautioned. “Pure, high-grade stuff … so strong that, in the end, it won’t matter if it’s real or not. It will be
to you
. We have to get out of here.”

“But how?” Marlo asked as she scanned the bleak, frozen horizon.

The clown head laughed and swooped down upon them. Its wind knocked Marlo over and sent the doctor quacking, end-over-end. Marlo’s arms were bleeding from the millions of mirror shards that cut like tiny, shining
razors. Zane noticed the broken support beam a dozen yards away.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said as he dashed toward the quivering timber. He scanned the ground and found a sharp chip of cleaved ice. Zane lifted the heavy chunk and—raising it above a section of wood—began hacking away. The Pinocchio plank screamed with each blow. Zane soon had cut the forty feet or so of wood into six pieces of equal length.

Marlo walked over to Zane, scooping up Dr. Brinkley’s abandoned satchel and slinging it over her shoulder. She stared at the trembling planks.

“So … you’re taking out your frustration on defenseless Pinocchio wood?” she asked as the leering clown head chuckled wickedly from above. Zane carved notches into the faintly whimpering planks.

“I’m makin’ us a way out of this bloomin’ freak show,” he said, his intense gaze fixed on the wood. Finished, he set his ice chisel down. Taking two severed beams, Zane positioned them like crutches on either side of himself, then—balancing them perfectly—shimmied his way to the freshly cleaved notches toward the top.

“Britain has the best food in the world,”
Zane said firmly to the wood. His makeshift stilts grew to nearly three times their original size. Marlo clapped her hands and laughed.

“Brilliant!” she exclaimed.

She grabbed a pair of stilts and climbed—shakily—up to the foot notches.

“School counselors truly love their jobs,”
Marlo whispered to the wood. Each stilt instantly grew twenty feet tall. She wobbled alongside Zane and turned, jabbing the ground step by step until she faced the doctor.

“Quick, Dr. Brinkley!” she shouted as the clown head darkened, collecting itself like a storm cloud ready to spew lightning and vengeance. Zane and Marlo staggered away from Fibble as Dr. Brinkley grabbed two stilts and fluttered to the foot wedges.

“
An apple a day keeps the doctor
—” Dr. Brinkley muttered just as the clown head pounced upon him, drawing in a deep slurping hurricane of a breath.

“Dr. Brinkley!” Marlo screamed as the doctor was sucked toward the clown’s swirling, cavernous mouth. “It’s not real! It’s just one of Barnum’s tricks!”

The colossal clown’s face contorted into a nightmare of a smile, its eyes a familiar dull black.

Like a shrimp’s
, Marlo thought.
Like Scampi’s …

The sucking vacuum stung Marlo’s eyes as it whipped past her. To her nose, the air smelled of lightning, black pepper, and Lucky Charms.

The Humbugger amplifies and lies, so a little clown shrimp would seem huge and scary
.

Marlo leaned forward to keep from falling into the slurping, chuckling wind.

“We’ve got to scarper, Milton!” Zane yelled. He wobbled forward, unsure at first, but with each step gained speed and confidence.

Marlo tottered and swayed until she achieved a steady clip. She glanced behind her as the clown head consumed the screaming duck doctor. Dr. Brinkley swirled inside the tornado of smoke and mirrors until he was nothing but a white, squawking blur.

Terrified, Marlo sped across the tundra in great strides. She took one last peek over her shoulder.

The clown head roared and reared, yet the sparkling smoke grew so thin that you could see the bobbing circus tents of Fibble right through it. Marlo noticed a bright, white beam of light streaming from the tip of Fibble’s R & D tent, leading back to the twinkling haze of the clown-shaped vapor like an umbilical cord of pure energy. “Milton,” Zane called out, huffing, sweat streaming down his face. “Where to?”