Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (29 page)

“Cut!” Milton yelled as he turned off the video camera perched on his shoulder.

“That was beautiful,”
Saint Francis sniffed from a nearby tree as he walked over to Van, handing the sweaty actor a shroud.

Van wiped his face as he set Inga down with a grunt.

“Wow … live TV … beamed out to the whole world,” he said as he handed Saint Francis back his scrap of sheet. “What a rush!”

Saint Francis stared in awe at the shroud that had Van’s pancake face makeup smeared inside.

“Wait, you’re not really … Him?” the kindly deacon asked, looking up at Van with his soulful eyes.

Van chuckled as he sat beneath a tree and stroked a chocolate Labrador retriever.

“Nah … I’m not a messiah,” he replied. “I just play one on TV.”

Milton set the heavy video camera down on the vibrant green grass.

“I just hope this does the trick,” Milton mumbled to his sister.

“It
has
to,” she replied, scratching underneath her hair pajama top. “But now we have some unfinished business back in Fibble. Barnum’s machine … he can still beam up horrible things to make people think the world is ending, even if we sent this message that it
shouldn’t
. People on their own are dumb enough. Put them together and they can do some seriously stupid things. Remember the state fair Mom made us go to when we first moved to Kansas?”

Milton shuddered.

“Yeah,” he replied spookily. “That stampede on the All Manner of Things Deep-fried and Placed on a Stick pavilion. I can still hear the screams.…”

“So we should hurry,” Marlo interjected, “but maybe Annubis can do his ol’ switcheroo thing on us before we am-scray.”

Milton beamed from ear-to-ear.

“Awesome!”
he exclaimed. “Getting back in my own body will be like coming home after a long trip. Cozy and familiar, even if it isn’t the greatest house ever.”

“What are you guys on about?” Zane asked, suddenly appearing behind the Fausters. Marlo instantly went red.

“We—um—have a secret twin language,” Marlo lied. “See, I—I mean Marlo—was born first, then I—Milton—due to complications, didn’t pop out for another fifteen months. But we still have this creepy connection.…”

“Excuse us,” Milton said as he dragged his sister to the garden shed Annubis had set up for his family.
“Why
do you have to go out of your way to make up this stuff?”
he whispered as they crossed the deep green-blue grass. “Isn’t it a pain to keep track of all your lies?”

Marlo shrugged as they stepped up to the charming, moss-green cottage.

“It keeps me sharp,” she replied as Milton knocked on the door. “It’s like Exaggercise.”

Annubis poked his head out the door.

“Hello,” he whispered. “My family is resting … perhaps for the first time in months. It’s hard to sleep when you fear you may never wake.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Milton said, giving a quick look over his shoulder. “But we were wondering if you could … 
switch us back
. Before we go back to Fibble.”

Annubis nodded.

“Of course,” he replied as he emerged from the cottage, closing the door softly behind him. “It’s unnerving, at first, but fascinating to see you both forced to work with each other
as
each other.”

“Well, it’s getting
way
old,” Marlo said as Annubis led her and Milton to a secluded, nearby dogwood.

The dog god motioned for the Fausters to sit. He knelt before them, rubbing his paws together in a quick, circular motion until his paws smelled like popcorn.

“Lay down all thought and surrender to the void,” Annubis coached as he set one warm paw on Milton’s chest and the other at the base of his neck.

Harsh, explosive caws shattered the placid calm of the Really Big Farm.

Milton whipped his head to face the portal to the courtyard.

“Something’s going on outside!” he exclaimed.

“Duh … 
a Catbox–ageddon
 …”

“No, something new. C’mon!”

Milton and Marlo raced out to the courtyard.

The cawing was deafening. Beyond the veil of sooty wind and puke-green drizzle, Milton could see a stagecoach on the horizon led by a team of Night Mares. A demon driver cracked his licorice whip over the horses’ snarling heads, but his team was so spooked by the output of Pandora’s Cat Box, they could barely trot. A sizzling fireball whizzed over the vehicle, illuminating, briefly, a passenger within: the ghastly, unmistakable silhouette of Principal Bubb.

“It’s Bubb!” Marlo gasped. “We’ve got to get out of here
now
or it’s curtains for the Surface!”

Milton wracked his mind for a way out. The tunnel in the courtyard was blocked off by the overturned REPEAT Furrari, and there wasn’t time to dig a new one. Marlo squinted through the dismal murk outside of the fortress, searching for her Pinocchio-wood stilts.

“I should have taken the stilts with me,” she muttered.

“Stilts?” Milton asked.

“Yes,” Zane interjected, as he walked up beside Marlo holding four small pieces of wood in his hands.
“Stilts.”

Marlo laughed and moved to hug Zane, but—after catching sight of Milton staring back at her with her own eyes—Marlo was too weirded out to carry out her squeeze play.

“So those little things are stilts?” Milton asked suspiciously.

Zane nodded, his deep brown eyes twinkling.

“I’ll show you how to use them,” he said, inching closer to Marlo. “Because I’m going with you … I know the layout of Fibble even better than your brilliant brother.”

Milton sighed.

“Okay, whatever. You and Mar … you and
Milton
can use those weird things to get there since I don’t have a clue. Now
I’ve
got to find a way to Fibble.”

“Hey, doll face!” Van shouted with a grin as he sandal-flopped across the courtyard to Milton. “What a scene, huh? Live TV, running around, sticking up for causes,” he added, motioning to the REPEAT protesters behind him, who were helping the sick and wounded pets from the Kennels.

“Yeah, it’s a real blockbuster in the making,” Milton said as his sister’s blue hair whipped about in the wind, “but I’ve got to get out of here. Something is going on in
Fibble … it’s part of this whole T.H.E.E.N.D. thing, a plot to clean the Surface of humanity.”

Van grabbed Milton by the arm. His eyes blazed crazy blue, like a swimming pool full of Ty-D-Bol at a mental asylum.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “I’m like an actor-slash-activist now. It’s what Teenage Jesus would do. I
get
it now. And besides, if my show has caused any trouble up on the Surface, then
I’m
the only one who can fix it.”

Milton sighed. Van’s logic, like his complexion, was flawless.

“Fine,”
Milton said as he stared into the blur of energy leading back to the Really Big Farm, hoping that a new avenue of escape would somehow pop into his head. Through the portal he could make out Cerberus—easy to identify, what with his three heads—nuzzling a curly-haired dog with a dense black-and-white mottled coat. For a moment, it looked as if they were one long dog. Then—as the waves of portal energy cleared—Milton saw, to his intense disgust, that Cerberus’s three snouts were firmly implanted beneath the other dog’s three wagging tails. A tall, slender blur walked urgently through the portal.

“Annubis!” Milton called to the dog god as he crossed into the fortress courtyard. “Principal Bubb is here! And we could really use your help in Fibble, but I’m not sure how you would get—”

Milton saw Cerberus frolicking with his tri-haunched girlfriend back in the Really Big Farm behind Annubis’s shoulder. The two cavorted happily, rolling across piles of fresh dung.

“Maybe we could hold Cerberus hostage!” Milton exclaimed. “Perhaps Bubb would back down!”

Annubis shook his jackal’s head soberly.

“It would never work,” he replied. “She’d only double-cross us … perhaps triple-cross us, with Cerberus involved. Besides, I know exactly how we can use Cerberus to our advantage.”

“How?” Milton asked.

“We leave him in the Really Big Farm.”

Milton’s jaw fell open.

“Why would you reward that horrible, three-headed beast an eternity in pet paradise?!”

Annubis smiled as he cradled, in his paw-hand, the latest copy of
GYP
.

“Justice will be served, I assure you,” he said. “But you and your party must go … Fibble is at least thirteen miles away, as the crow flies.”

Marlo and Zane were suddenly—inexplicably to Milton—teetering atop their now-towering stilts at Milton’s side. He squinted his eyes in the foul wind, watching the stagecoach, helplessly, as it slowly approached the fortress.

“As the crow flies,”
Milton muttered. He turned to watch Noah flapping his arms in front of the eight remaining
Scarecrows. “I think I know how we can get out of here, Van. But be prepared to fly coach.”

Annubis watched the stagecoach swerve back and forth in the flaming poop storm, diverted from the Kennels by the Scarecrows and focused out beyond the gates.

“I will be joining you soon,” he replied mysteriously. “But you and your friends must leave.
Now
. Or all will be lost.”

Milton nodded as Lucky bounded toward him.

“Lucky,” Milton said, kneeling down, as he gazed into his ferret’s crazed pink eyes, “you don’t have to come with me. You can stay here in the Really Big Farm. I’d … understand.”

Lucky spun around in a circle and sniffed the air. After a moment’s hesitation, he leapt into Milton’s arms. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Lucky,” Milton said, beaming, as he gently placed his pet at the bottom of his tote bag. “I need all the luck I can get. Let’s go!”

THE COLOSSAL SCARECROW
clutched Milton’s shoulders tight with its talons as it glided across the bleak mosaic of dried hexagonal plates below. The pain was incredible, though it helped to take Milton’s mind off the fact that a giant crow was clutching his shoulders, whisking him high across some grim no-man’s-land toward certain doom.

The Scarecrow fluffed its gleaming black crest and swooped down to join the Scarecrow pinching its talons into Van. Just below were Marlo and Zane, sweeping the edge of the Broken Promised Land atop their elongated Pinocchio-wood stilts.

They were now safely beyond the ammonia-soaked apocalypse unleashed from Pandora’s Cat Box, though it seemed to have died down to a mere dense, eye-stinging
mist with the occasional chance of flaming turd-fall. The toxic output of feline-spurned ills, toil, and sickness had provided excellent coverage for which to escape the Furafter undetected. Milton, however, was conflicted: he was both relieved and thrilled to be fleeing the Furafter, yet had no clear idea how to deal with what awaited in Fibble … whatever that was. If only he and Marlo had some support—beyond a dead British boy with an incomprehensible crush on his sister (whose weird body was unfortunately the current resting place of Milton’s eternal soul) and a has-been actor with a sense of self so inflated that it could lead the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Just then, Milton noticed below him a bank of three gray machines, like drab metal refrigerators. Surrounding them were dozens of castaway bottles, like the kind that the PODs, the Phantoms of Dispossessed, used to collect—

“Liquid silver!” Milton yelped, the wind nearly stuffing the words back into his mouth. “Those are the deposit stations the PODs used to trade that weird glittering fluid they collected for supplies.”

Milton grasped the Scarecrow’s ankles.

“Down, please,” he asked the sturdy bird as it ceased flapping its majestic wings and drifted down toward Marlo.

“I swallowed a necklace before we switched!” Milton yelled to his sister. “Did it … come out?”

She looked up at her brother.

“Yeah,” Marlo replied as sweat trickled down her brow. “I barfed it up in the Fibble boys’ room.”

“Do you still have it?”

“Yeah … why?”

“I’m requesting backup. You know: calling in the cavalry,” Milton replied. “A bunch of friendly phantoms said to call if I ever need any help. I just hope they come in the nick of time, like on TV.…”

“Here comes … another fog wall,” Marlo said while maintaining her steady stride. “I think it’s … the last.”

Milton, Marlo, Van, and Zane pierced the billowing barrier of electrified vapor. The cold, tingling fog wiped Milton’s mind clean. However, after he passed through the wall, his jumbled thoughts and feelings quickly returned. It was like his brain was a rebooted computer.

At the edge of a valley of fractured salt plates was Fibble, bordering the rim of the frozen Falla Sea.

“There it is!” Zane called out, though with his British accent, it sounded more like
“theri tizz.”

The three tents of Fibble jostled about like demonically possessed Hippity Hops.

“Why is it bouncing up and down like that?” Milton yelled.

“It’s … because the wood that supports it … is made of Pinocchio people …,” she panted with exhaustion. “Man … 
I
get to go by … crow … next time.”