Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (25 page)

“My followers love doing that stuff for me,” he replied groggily. “Makes them feel useful. And who am I to take that away from them? Oh wait—I’m their salvation, their almighty Bridge to the Omniverse. I’m also the kid who keeps your lights on, so even if you don’t believe in me, you surely believe in my money, don’t you, old man?”

Lester clenched his fists and gritted his yellow, nicotine-stained teeth.

“Didn’t your parents ever teach you any manners, you little creep?” Lester seethed, his morning mellow irreparably harshed.

Damian ran a hand through his dark, curly hair and yawned.

“Why should kids respect old people just because they’re
old
?” he replied. “They’ve only had more time to screw things up. Like my parents. Ever since I came back from the dead, they just don’t get me. Not like they ever did, but—man, after that cheapo funeral they threw
me—it was obvious. Nothing like being dead to see what people
really
think about you. So me and today’s kids are just taking
what
we can
while
we can.…”

Lester shook his head as he dusted the twinkling papier-mâché flying saucer suspended from the museum’s rafters.

“Milton wasn’t like that,” he murmured sadly. “Like
you.
”

Damian chuckled as he slipped on his sour, crunchy sweat socks.

“Good ol’ Milquetoast,” he muttered as he searched for his Doc Martens. “First I send him to Heck, then he escapes and sends
me
there, then he goes back down while the KOOKs drag me up. He and I just can’t seem to hook up … but we will. Oh, boy,
will we ever.
”

Damian gave his laces an angry tug, snapping them. Lester stifled a laugh.

“I’ll be out of your hair soon … what’s left of it,” the boy seethed as he leveled his dark gaze at Lester Lobe, his eyes compressing into sinister slits, as if he were trying to crush Lester with his eyelids. “And you’ll
all
wish you had treated me better. You’ll see.…”

The five tones from the
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
theme chimed as two of Damian’s fellow KOOKs stepped into the Paranor Mall.

The Guiding Knight threw off his gold Members Only jacket, revealing his blue ceremonial robe. The middle-aged man’s face was so angular that it could have
been used for a geometry test. Next to him was Necia Alvarado, a twitchy, ratlike girl with eyes as dark and fathomless as an abandoned well. They both set down canvas bags marked VitaMold.

“Where’s the rest of my flock?” Damian said, glaring at the Guiding Knight.

The thin, vaguely wizardish man (perhaps it was the robe) stiffened with irritation.

“Most of your flock have
jobs:
that’s when you agree to perform a certain task in exchange for pay,” the Guiding Knight replied, his tone like an overly starched shirt. “And, on top of that, you have us all selling this VitaMold stuff.”

“It’s not
selling,
” Damian corrected. “It’s providing marketing opportunities. At least that’s what my lawyer says, Algernon Cole—”

“Lawyer!” laughed Lester as he combed out Bigfoot’s back.
“Right, and I voted for Nixon.…”

“Just tell my flock to show up when it’s
convenient
for them to worship me as their Bridge,” Damian continued.
“He who will cross over to prepare for their imminent arrival in the Next Life, and hasten the Last Days, which serve as our new beginning.”

The Guiding Knight set his bag down.

“Speaking of ‘hastening,’ ” the man said as he unfolded a card table and set out a stack of
Get KOOKy: Why It’s AWESOME to Be in a Death Cult!
pamphlets, “your flock is getting restless.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Damian said as he strung a black tie around his neck. “You just tell my flock that I’ve been really busy on their behalf. Sure, we have had some setbacks, like getting kicked out of Mazel Top-to-Bottom after Milquetoast’s dumb ferret Lucky got killed—”

Necia’s eyes grew wet. She wiped her nose with her bony, clawlike hand.

“He wasn’t dumb, O Bridge,” Necia said as she unbuckled her black wool coat. “Lucky was sweet. Just vicious and unpredictable.”

“Well, it was the excuse Grizzly Mall needed to kick us out,” Damian continued. “But look: we’re actually part of a museum now. In downtown Topeka, not that yahooville Generica! And Algernon Cole is working hard on settling my multiple suits against Generica General Hospital and the Barry M. Deepe Funeral Parlor. In the meantime, he helped me to invest our membership dues into something
big
—now we’re the regional distributor for VitaMold fungus-based nutriticeutical drinks!”

“Have you actually
tasted
this stuff?” The Guiding Knight grimaced as he kicked his VitaMold bag in the corner, where it joined three dozen other bags. “It’s like licking an old basement.”

Lester Lobe shrugged as he drained his cup.

“I actually like it,” he said as he blew the tassel of his fez out of his eyes. “It’s got an … earthy taste.”

“See?” Damian shot back. “Freaky old hippies like it! And no, I haven’t tasted it, but that doesn’t matter. VitaMold
is a conversation starter, a way to get suckers interested in the cult.”

The Guiding Knight tugged on his droopy blue silk hat while Lester clipped pictures from a stack of tabloid magazines and glued them to the side of the Psychomanthium.

“Maybe, but—” the Guiding Knight interjected.

“But nothing,”
Damian interrupted. “I’ve also got that book idea brewing. And once that’s finished, it’ll not only make us some money, it’ll be the first wave of propaganda for the cult. Better than those lame pamphlets.”

“Have you even
read
a book?” the Guiding Knight replied.

Damian scratched at a tiny white feather growing out of his chin.

“It’s like VitaMold,” he replied. “I don’t have to taste it to sell it. Sure, I haven’t had a lot of luck writing the book myself. That’s why I found a ghostwriter.”

“Oooh, spooky!” Necia replied as she helped Lester snip pictures from magazines.

“No,” Damian said, pressing his thumbs into his temples, “a writer to write the book for me: Dale E. Basye. The guy that writes those dumb Fartisimo Family books.”

“My mom won’t let me read those,” Necia said as she cut out a picture of a bat-boy flying over the Great Pyramid. “She says that their … 
gas …
is a metaphor for demonic possession.”

“The point is that I’m doing a lot while all you folks do is sit around and complain,” Damian continued. “Now I need some time to myself.
Business
 …”

Damian pulled out a Ouija board, a pad of paper, and a pen from his tent. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Damian set the heart-shaped planchette on the board, touched it delicately, and closed his eyes. The wooden heart quivered momentarily, then slowly slid to the letter
Y
, then
O
, then
U
 …

Damian opened one of his eyes and reached for his pen and paper with his other hand. He strung the letters together on the pad.

Damian sighed. This was the third time he had received the exact same message when trying to contact Satan in the not-so-great beyond. He flipped back through the pad of paper.

Damian shoved aside the Ouija board and paper.

Forsaken by Satan
, he thought as he threw himself back on a white beanbag chair.
Well, I’ve got it all covered. He’ll be so proud of me. Can the devil be proud? Pride’s a sin, so yeah. Then he’ll give me everything I want: absolute, corruptive power over all. Send more souls his way by lying to kids, telling them how fun and awesome the afterlife is. And then let me rule over them. The only thing Satan doesn’t see coming is that I’ll train these stupid kids to be my personal army, and when we turn eighteen, the devil is due for a big, bad surprise.…

The Guiding Knight glowered at Damian, who was slouched back on his white beanbag chair spitting sunflower seed husks onto the floor like some lazy, freakishly large chicken with a raging superiority complex.
A chicken
, the Guiding Knight mused as he recalled, with regret, the moment he and his fellow KOOKs had brought Damian back from the dead using the sacrificial energies of twenty-seven Rhode Island Reds. Damian seemed, himself, a big chicken in the “letting a religious cult take your life so that you may prepare the everlasting everyplace beyond for its 14,217 believers across the Northern Hemisphere” department. Worse than that, the boy’s attitude was having a devastating effect on cult morale, especially among the elder members.

The Guiding Knight sighed and picked at the nachos stain on his midnight-blue robe.

If the Bridge of the Knights of the Omniversalist Order Kinship, subordinate chapter of the lower Midwest sect, won’t play nice by letting me slit his obnoxious throat up on the altar so that he may cross to the other side and we can get this whole death cult thing moving along
, the Guiding Knight mused,
then he leaves me no choice but to give him a firm shove through death’s door.…

“WHAT WAS THAT?”
Barbra Seville asked her crew as she peered into the fortress courtyard. Her cameraman, a paunchy fellow with a receding gray hairline, shrugged his shoulders.

“Sounded like some kind of explosion,” he said with a hand-rolled cigarette balanced between his lips.

Five REPEAT protesters jogged to the fence—their
ANIMAL RIGHTS/PEOPLE WRONGS, CRUEL AIN’T COOL
, and
NEVER FUR-GET
! signs resting on their shoulders.

“An atomic flea bomb?” the group’s dowdy leader, Brigid Brophy, speculated.

Another protester—a freckle-faced woman with pigtails and overalls—frowned.

“I don’t, you know, think so,” she murmured as she
eyed the energetic portal to the Kennels. “There’d be, like, tiny portobello-sized mushroom clouds.”

Barbra beckoned her crew toward the fence, crooking her finger.

“This is Barbra Seville with URN News—no snooze, just news—reporting to you
live
from the Furafter,” she said, holding her microphone urgently as she wedged herself into the line of protesters. “I am at the epicenter of a raging volcano of controversy, a pro-pets protest that is testing the patience of authorities here, if the sound of explosions can be believed. The only question is how this band of animal-loving—”

Barbra examined the five drab, visually unthreatening women and crinkled her brow.

“
—Amazons
will retaliate.…”

Annubis stirred to consciousness. He rolled on his side to see his family, motionless beside him.

“Are you all right?!” he yelped as he clutched Kebauet’s emaciated arm.

His wife and daughter nodded groggily. Annubis sighed with relief as he eased himself upright.

Crates lay strewn about the Kennels, coated with a clinging, silvery vapor that drifted across the concrete floor, then climbed up the crates on hazy, glittering tendrils.

Virginia Woof lay on her back at the base of the Nullification
Tub. She sneezed herself awake and rolled over, having played dead a little too convincingly for her liking. The Speak & Spell strapped to her side was crushed and useless.