Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (32 page)

Damian plugged his ears and waited for his lawyer, Algernon Cole, to show up. Damian
hated
the awful music but—somehow—it seemed to unlock the powers of the Psychomanthium, granting him the ability to connect with the underworld. And since Satan refused to pick up his Ouija board, Damian was going to up the ante, whatever it took—short of a face-to-face visit, Damian wasn’t ready for that just yet—to get the devil on the horn and renegotiate his book contract.

“Hello, hello.” Algernon Cole, a spry man wearing khaki shorts, white socks, Birkenstocks, and a pink dress shirt, walked into the Paranor Mall. “Sorry if I’m a bit tardy. My No Fuelin’ hybrid is in the shop so I had to take the bus. But you know what they say: better
litigate
than never!”

Lester Lobe hopped off a stepladder, having replaced the black light over the UFOria! exhibit so that it continued to exude its otherworldly glow.

“Hey, legal seagull—”

“You mean
eagle,
” Algernon replied haughtily.

“Do you know how I’d go about getting a restraining order against someone who keeps making
unannounced
visits?” Les added, folding his arms together and leaning against a large, heavily muscled “Abdominal Snowman” mannequin in gym shorts.

“Well,” Algernon Cole went on, “first you would file a formal complaint with your local county court … hey, wait a second …”

Damian grabbed his lawyer’s arm and led him to the Psychomanthium.

“As fun as it is to watch two old farts get snippy with each other, I asked you over here for a reason,” Damian said gruffly as classic rock filled the museum.

“Yes, I know,” Algernon replied, “to renegotiate your book contract with that eccentric publisher of yours, Louie Cipher … 
oww
, you’re hurting me.”

Damian released his exceptionally powerful grip on his lawyer’s bony arm.

“Sorry,” Damian offered as they reached the mysterious chamber. “I’m just a little on edge. Luci, um,
Louie
, can be a little … 
intense
.”

Damian turned the chamber’s brass knob, stomped into the Psychomanthium, and plopped down in the Fat Elvis beanbag chair.

Algernon, still seething from his encounter with Les Lobe, clasped his hands together and stood unsteadily on one foot like a wobbly crane in an attempt to center himself.

“That irritating hippie crackpot,” he muttered. “You know, you and your KOOKs could take this whole place away from him. Squatter’s rights, or adverse possession as we say in the law biz. There’s some mnemonic device, a handy acronym to remember the components of an adverse possession action, but it escapes me at the moment.…”

Damian yawned and rubbed the dark circles under his eyes with a grubby fist. Algernon broke his pose and examined Damian over his tortoiseshell designer glasses.

“Hey, you don’t look so good,” he commented. “Here, try a swig of this.” Algernon held out a plastic bottle emblazoned with the fuzzy green VitaMold logo. “It’ll kill whatever ails you, and
then
some.”

Damian grimaced.

“No thanks,” he said as he scooped up some sunflower seeds from the plastic bag in his pocket. “I’m good.”

“Hardly,”
Algernon muttered underneath his breath as he settled back on his Skinny Elvis beanbag. “So, how do you turn this thing on?” the barely certified lawyer
said, gesturing to the six mirrored walls surrounding them.

Damian pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from his jeans.

“Last time you mentioned Milton saying something about,” Damian scrutinized the paper in his hands,
“guardians of the spirit realm hearing his cry, and summoning those spirits from the other side …”

The heavy rock song exploded with a percussive avalanche of drums, a tuneless blizzard of distorted guitar, and a high-pressure front of blustering, blistering vocals.

The music rattled the chamber. The six mirrors surrounding Damian and Algernon ruffled, like reflective fur being rubbed the wrong way. An icy wind blasted through the Psychomanthium.

Algernon’s eyes widened as his reflection was pulled apart, as if by invisible wolves. Damian smiled with wicked satisfaction as the frigid wind sculpted his greasy
hair into a crown of shiny spikes. A flat, nasal voice leaked, eerily, into the chamber through the mirrors surrounding them.

Damian’s reflection melted into a warped, pulsating blob. The blurry, restless shape calmed into a dull lump while the rock music outside the Psychomanthium downgraded from “Deafening” to only “Terribly Loud.”

“Yuck!” Algernon Cole exclaimed as Bea “Elsa” Bubb’s image was brought into tight, unforgiving focus in the mirrors. “It’s that … 
woman,
” he continued, stretching the barely descriptive word in hopes that it would cover the beastly image before him.

Principal Bubb’s putrid yellow goat eyes bore twin holes through the mirror.

“Mr. Ruffino?” she rasped. “What are you doing in the shiny windows and gleaming door handles of my stagecoach?!”

Damian scowled.

“I was trying to contact …,” he replied, giving the shaken Algernon a sideways glance,
“Louie Cipher
 … you know.
The Big Guy Downstairs.”

Principal Bubb expelled a frustrated sigh.

“You and half the underworld,” she said.

Damian grumbled as he flipped through the pages of his manuscript,
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go
, on his lap.

“I need to renegotiate my deal with … 
him,
” he spat. “This book thing is going to be
big
! And I need an advance to match … like, right now!”

Principal Bubb laughed uproariously.

“Renegotiate a contract?!” she repeated. “With the creature who
invented
contracts? You can’t be serious.…”

“Of course I’m serious!” Damian roared. “I even have my lawyer here with me.…”

Algernon rubbed the lenses of his glasses with his sleeve, hoping that the six ghastly images of Principal Bubb surrounding him were just a smudge to be wiped away. Trembling, he set his glasses back on his nose and gaped, slack-jawed, at the mirrors.

“Is that … 
a dog in a tunic
?” he muttered weakly.

To Principal Bubb’s side on the sealskin seat sat Annubis.

Damian scooched his overstuffed beanbag closer to one of the mirrored walls.

“Hey,”
he murmured. “That’s the dog that took out my soul and weighed it, back in Limbo.”

Annubis’s dark lip curled up against his fang.

“The darkest soul I’ve ever seen for someone so young,” the dog god recalled with disgust.

“I’m just a prodigy, I guess,” Damian replied. “Like Mozart, only meaner and without all the fruity music stuff.”

“Look, I don’t have time for this,” Principal Bubb hissed impatiently as she shrugged out of her pony-leather shrug. “Annubis here is leading me to some old
friends
of ours, who are apparently up to no good, as usual. They are one heck of a problem—”

“A
HECKUVA
problem!” Algernon interjected. “The elements of adverse possession: Hostile, Exclusive, Continuous, Known, Uninterrupted, Visible, and Actual! HECKUVA! I just remembered.…”

Damian glared at his lawyer with his fathomless black slits.

Algernon hopped up from his beanbag chair.

“See, the
H
stands for ‘hostile,’ as in trespassing. The
E
is for ‘exclusive’: holding the property to the exclusion of the true owner. The
C
is for holding the property ‘continuously,’ the
K
is for ‘knowledge,’ as in the legal owner knowing that the squatter wants to take over the property, and the
U
is for—”

“
You’ve
got to be kidding me!” Principal Bubb gasped, rolling her eyes like a pair of loaded dice.

“It actually stands for ‘uninterrupted’—”

The music outside the Psychomanthium suddenly stopped.

“I can’t
stand
this song,” Lester Lobe muttered. “Just because it’s old doesn’t make it classic.”

The six mirrors shimmered and rippled, with the dark swirling blobs therein returning to the shocked, clammy faces of Damian and Algernon.

“That could have gone better,” Algernon murmured with a nervous smile of artificially whitened teeth.

The freaked-out lawyer took a swig from his VitaMold bottle.

“These people you work for at Brimstone Publishing,” Algernon continued shakily, “they’re … 
unnerving
. Really committed to their image, though.”

Damian emptied the bag of sunflower seeds into his mouth.

“Yeah, but cheap as used, imitation dirt,” he said. Suddenly, he grabbed his throat.

“I’m … ch-ch-ch,” he said as he slowly turned purple.

Algernon handed Damian his bottle.

“Here!” he shouted. “Take a drink!”

Damian nodded and tilted the VitaMold back into his throat until dark green ooze spilled out of the corners of his mouth. Damian gasped as he struggled for breath.

“I think that did it,” he managed before his face went from purple to a sickly green. His cheeks puffed out as he shot to his feet, running out of the Psychomanthium, blowing chunks all the way.

Algernon Cole sat back into his beanbag chair and settled himself with his kundalini breathing exercises.

“Never a dull moment here,” he said between deep, goggled breaths. “And to think, some people practice law in a stuffy old office building.”

He sighed wistfully.

“I’ve
got
to get a stuffy old office someday,” Algernon murmured, his eyes settling on the jar of jellyfish beans. “But until then, I’ll take my perks where I find them.”

He scooped up a handful of the deceptively merry, multicolored treats and plopped them into his mouth. Almost immediately, Algernon’s face was covered with patches of angry red hives. His lips swelled around his lolling, swollen tongue, and he clutched his throat just before his air passage closed.

“I … 
object,
” he whispered before falling dead on the Psychomanthium floor.

“This is address you gave, I assure,” the cab driver said as he pulled up beside the ambulance and police cruiser parked outside the Paranor Mall. “I’m not pulling legs.”

Dale E. Basye took in the scene dubiously.

“Fine,” he replied tentatively. “Just in case, could you wait here for a bit?”

“Stay here, I will,” the cab driver replied as he turned on the radio, filling the taxi with relentlessly buoyant Indian pop music.

Dale tread cautiously across the sidewalk and into the Paranor Mall. He was immediately paralyzed by the commotion surrounding him, his feet stuck to the floor as if it were covered with wall-to-wall flypaper. Paramedics hovered over a burly boy puking his guts out into a bucket. A body covered in a sheet was wheeled out into
the waiting ambulance. A frantic ex-hippie was waving his arms as he was questioned by police. A tall, gaunt man in a blue floor-length robe, his arms cinched behind him with handcuffs, was led away by two police officers. Several other creepy people in robes fidgeted in a corner behind a desk stacked with religious pamphlets and nutritional supplements. And all of this craziness was happening within the craziest place Dale had ever seen, like a lunatic asylum lavishly decorated with space aliens, UFOs, and painted in every shade of weirdness imaginable.

Dale’s heart palpitated. His chest tightened. The Paranor Mall began to slowly spin around as if it were an elaborate carnival ride.

He reached for his notebook, hoping that jotting each of the irrational fears currently being hurled his way would stem his budding panic attack. His hand shook. The notebook dropped to the floor.

As he bent to pick it up, he saw a manuscript splayed out beside it.

Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go
.

Without thinking, the middle-aged man grabbed the manuscript and fled the Paranor Mall, telling himself—between gritted teeth—that good authors borrow, great authors steal, and desperate authors take whatever they can get their hands on.

MILTON, MARLO, ZANE
, and Van slid down the metal ladder as Fibble collapsed around them. They whizzed past the stunned lizard guards that were stuck fast to the walls of the constricting tube leading back to the secret Focus Group room, their protruding eyes scanning, desperately, for some way out. The foursome were soon sprinting out into the hall, the walls bowed and bent as their Pinocchio-wood frames violently shrank.