Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (13 page)

The creatures circled around him, silent and purposeful. The dog god counted thirteen in all. The cats, like inky shadows spilled across the newspapered landscape, stalked nearer, crossing his path on all sides. Their ebony fur rippled with sly, predatory instinct as they tightened their circle, a black velvet noose cinching snug and deadly.

A ragged chorus of bays, howls, and yaps discharged from beyond the rim of brutal light. The cats froze, sniffing the air—stock-still—while their tails jerked about like angry black snakes. Suddenly, above them, sailing over the guard station, were a dozen whizzing balls of yarn. The cats exchanged quick, edgy glances before abruptly bounding away, yielding to their uncontrollable urges. They gamboled past the guard station to intercept the brightly colored balls.

A chaotic jumble of shapes emerged from the murky shadows. A pack of dogs. The first was a terrier, next an Italian greyhound, followed by a beagle, a Chihuahua, and a French bulldog with a limp. Each had a red plastic Speak & Spell strapped to its side and a stylus tied around its neck, all save for the Italian greyhound, who had a round, plastic wheel with farm animal pictures belted to its shaggy side. The beagle was fitted with a pneumatic toy cannon atop its sloping back.

The terrier approached, alert, taking in Annubis with its open, white-and-tan face.

“Um,
good doggie,
” Annubis said, crouching, holding
out the back of his paw-hand for the little dog to sniff. “Thank you for—”

The dog snatched the dangling stylus in its mouth and tapped the Speak & Spell’s keypad.

“Name is Virginia Woof,” the box squawked in a computerized monotone. “You are in Stay! … receiving area for Furafter. We saved you from cats.”

Annubis, realizing that he wasn’t dealing with your average “good doggie,” withdrew his paw-hand and rose.

“The yarn was a clever diversion,” he replied. “Lucky for me you had it with you.”

Virginia Woof nudged the sack lashed to her back with her nose, before typing another message.

“We are pack animals,” the flat voice explained. “Prepared for anything.”

“And resourceful,” Annubis said, gesturing to Virginia Woof’s Speak & Spell. “Why do you choose to communicate in such a way?”

The spry terrier jabbed the toy.

“Old caretaker, Mr. Noah, taught us years ago. Now habit.”

The other dogs joined Virginia Woof. First, the beagle.

“This is Poochiano Pawvarotti,” Virginia Woof said, expertly tapping the Speak & Spell with her stylus. The beagle nodded as the Chihuahua sprang forth, quivering as it tapped its name.

“Hola,” it relayed through the red plastic box on its
side. “I’m Chi-chi LaRue.” The French bulldog limped past the Chihuahua. Annubis noted that the dog had an artificial foreleg. “This is Faux Paw,” Chi-chi explained as the French bulldog let loose a tremendous fart. “Pardonnez-moi,” the three-legged dog apologized via Speak & Spell. The Italian greyhound bounded toward Annubis and leapt up on him with its bony, impulse-control-challenged limbs. “This is Napoleon Bone-apart,” Virginia Woof explained, concluding her introductions. The Italian greyhound, not having a Speak & Spell, nudged the round plastic toy strapped to its side.

“The cow says … 
mooooooooo
!” the See ’n Say said cheerfully. Virginia Woof tapped out her explanation. “All that was left. He’d probably say same thing even if he could speak, though.”

Annubis, proud and dignified, willed his tail to wag in canine camaraderie. Through years of working alongside humans, he had learned to restrain the flagrant expression of emotion so common with his species. Most humans—especially those in the aggravated bowels of Heck—had a way of holding something like that against you.

“My name is Annubis,” the dog god said, “and I am here to retrieve my wife and daughter, in addition to a friend’s ferret. I know that they are in the Furafter, yet I know not where.”

Poochiano Pawvarotti shook his droopy flews, then tapped a response.

“Ferrets,” he replied in a halting monotone. “Fun
chase, no fun catch. Probably in Kennels. Where they put pets don’t know what to do with. As for wife and child—”

The klieg lights—obviously set on some timer, Annubis thought—winked off, submerging the dogs in darkness. Almost immediately, the faint, guttural sound of malicious feline boredom pricked Annubis’s ears.

“Best be moving,” Virginia Woof suggested. “Place is regular Katmandu when lights out.”

The dogs’ home resembled a dank, wood-paneled rubbish heap composed of all the castaway junk that remained unsold at the worst garage sale
ever
. The stiff, orange shag carpet—a horizontal work of abstract expressionism made of oil stains, cigarette burns, and what Annubis prayed was fossilized spaghetti—was, to Annubis’s eyes, perhaps the most pleasing aspect of this caved-in rumpus room on the haunches of the Furafter.

The dogs led their guest to a clutch of gutted beanbag chairs.

Annubis sat, cross-legged, beneath a black velvet picture of a group of dogs huddled around a table engaged in a game of poker. The painting seemed, by its gilded frame and position at the intersection of two beams of track lighting, to hold some importance to the dogs.

“A Bold Bluff,”
Virginia Woof commented through the flat tone of her Speak & Spell.

Annubis cocked his head. It was amazing how all of these old habits came flooding back when surrounded by your own species.

“Excuse me?”

“Name of painting,” Chi-chi LaRue clarified, trembling on a burned-out chesterfield that appeared to have not quite survived a fire sale. “Masterpiece.”

Annubis turned back to Virginia Woof as she cleaned her back foot.

“This is all very … cozy, but I need to find my family, who I assume are suffering in the Kennels. Now this caretaker, this Mr. Noah …”

“He greet every new arrival in Stay! before leading to either Really Big Farm, pet Heaven, or—in extreme cases—Kennels: pet
you know where,
” Virginia Woof said, tapping the red plastic toy strapped to her side. “But haven’t seen him for weeks. Without Noah, cats treat place like scratching post.”

“In any case,” Annubis pressed, “I need to go to the Kennels. As soon as possible. I don’t care if the cats play—”

“
Ruff
 … the dog says … ruff!” Napoleon Bone-apart, tongue lolling out of his mouth with happiness, communicated with a nudge of his See ’n Say.

Virginia Woof rubbed her face against Annubis’s leg reassuringly before tapping out another message.

“It’s okay,” she said through the toy’s flat, digitized voice. “We take you there when cats nap in Catacombs.”

Annubis bared his teeth in a half-dog, half-human smile.

“Thank you,” he said, patting Virginia Woof on the head. “It is a pleasure to know again the loyalty of my kind.”

He rose from the floor and walked to the broken window of the dogs’ house. Annubis stared off across the grim newspapered wasteland toward the maddening stillness of Stay!

“And, perhaps, tomorrow, I will be reunited with my beloved wife and daughter.…”

Annubis tasted the stale air with his elegant nose, sifting through the complex clot of odors that settled at the back of his throat. They seemed far more intricate than he would expect in a dominion of once-domesticated pets, more redolent of the ambiguity of humans.…

Annubis felt a cold nose poking his ankle. At his sandaled feet, Napoleon Bone-apart nibbled at a mound of dry dog food that Annubis had been unwittingly standing in.

With a bleary half-smile, the exhausted dog god sensed that his journey to locate his family and Milton Fauster’s ferret had only just begun, and that he had trod in some very deep kibble indeed.

THE FEATHERS SPROUTING
from the neck of Dr. Brinkley’s white laboratory smock stood on end.

“Quack!” he quacked again. “I mean, what are you doing here, young man?!”

“I, um,” Marlo quavered in shock, gazing down at the gleaming linoleum floor, as if for an easy answer, “got up early. That Truthador—gosh—who can sleep with all that, all that … 
truth
blaring down the halls!”

Dr. Brinkley waddled to the door. He peered out the chain-link reinforced window, his bright orange bill tapping against the glass, and noticed the sickly white chameleon demons splayed out, unconscious, on the ground.

He turned and glared down his bill at Marlo through his spectacles. Marlo backed away until she was up against a brushed platinum counter covered with
gurgling beakers. She clutched a glass vial in her hand and held it behind her back. The odd duck demon scratched the rim of his goat horns as he goose-stepped toward Marlo.

“I’m on to your little secret,” he seethed, drawling slightly like a talking duck in a balmy South Carolina pond. Marlo tightened her hand around the neck of the glass cylinder.

“My secret?” she said as she prepared to smash the beaker across the doctor’s beak.

Dr. Brinkley stopped before her, scowling, his wing-arms akimbo. “Yes … that Vice Principal Barnum sent you here to spy upon me.”

Marlo loosened her grip on the beaker.

“Uh … okay,” she said. “But if I’m Mr. Barnum’s spy, then why did I knock out the guards?”

Dr. Brinkley rubbed the silver-gray goatee surrounding his bill.

“To make me believe you were working alone,” he surmised. “But I know better … I didn’t die yesterday.”

Marlo smirked as she stepped away from the counter and took in the laboratory. It resembled a game of Mouse Trap, only constructed with glass tubes, glittering vials, Bunsen burners, sizzling electric coils, and jars of glimmering smoke instead of bright plastic boots and bathtubs.

“Since you found me out,” Marlo said, carefully feeding the doctor words as if luring a cat into its crate with
Fancy Feast, “perhaps you can give me an overview, and I’ll spill to Mr. Barnum, omitting whatever you don’t want me to pass along. That way, we both come out smelling like … whatever flower they have down here that doesn’t stink.”

The doctor nodded and smiled as he passed his hand through the thinning down on his head.

“I find that arrangement most agreeable: spreading flimflam to a flimflam man,” he responded with a nasal pseudo-quack. “Well, since the tragedy that befell my beloved team of Night Mares, the vice principal has had me working in indentured servitude here in his laboratory.”

Like the laboratory of a mad scientist who got some
serious
grant money
, Marlo noted as her brother’s hazel eyes darted about the room.
Wow … it’s like Toys ’R’ Nuts in here. An Evil Genius Superstore …

Marlo had to squint Milton’s myopic peepers nearly shut to force the smudgy blobs around her to submit to full clarity. She followed a thick, double-barreled pipe leading from the floor connecting to a large brass water heater thingie that was, itself, connected to several glass domes full of glittering smoke. The brass cylinder branched out into thinner pipes that led out of the room in a variety of directions. The pipes were fastened to the unusual beams Marlo had seen throughout Fibble, made out of that creepy wood that seemed almost flesh-stained, with knotholes every yard or so, that resembled anguished faces, knotted in pain.

“What’s this all about?” Marlo queried, gesturing to the tangle of plumbing. “Not like I don’t know, but just so I can tell Mr. Hot Pants that I asked.”

Dr. Brinkley rubbed his spectacles clean with his subtly webbed hands.

“I’m game,” he said, before clearing his throat and motioning to the wall. “This main pipe on the left arrives from Fibble’s Boiler Room, supplying ample hot air to the facility, while the one on the right feeds all of the vice principal’s lies into the prevarication system.”

“His lies?” Marlo asked. “What do you mean?”

“The brass buckle he wears collects lies, fibs, falsehoods … all manner of malarkey,” Dr. Brinkley said before perching on a metal stool.

“You see, young man,” he continued, “lies are composed of a certain energy, a negative charge that repels them from the truth. This is how lies push us away from who we really are. Deep inside, on a molecular level, we recognize the honest truth, even when our minds are muddled by skillful falsifications. This is why advertising has, historically, had to try so hard to sway our decision-making processes. To its credit, it has done so with flying colors. Yet Mr. Barnum believes that flimflammery can be made even
more
deceiving with far
less
effort. Which is why he has commandeered my services to help aid in his experiments, due to my past history with both questionable, leading-edge chemistry and unorthodox marketing campaigns.”

This was a lot to take in, thought Marlo, especially for someone who hadn’t bothered to finish her school counselor’s attention deficit disorder test. But if Milton’s body was designed for anything, it was prolonged mental focus. Plus, as a gifted liar herself, Marlo noticed that Dr. Brinkley was actually making eye contact, something almost impossible to do when trying to pawn off a whopper.

Marlo’s skittish attention was captured by a bubbling beaker of silver liquid. A rubber tube snaked from its stoppered top to a small aquarium filled with little white lice. Every few seconds, a drop of the liquid fell on a wriggling mound of the tiny parasites. The liquid, at first, made the lice intensely agitated, biting each other and thrashing about. But after these brief, angry spasms, they smoldered and died. Marlo fingered the pendant hanging from her neck beneath her hair pajamas. It quivered, as if with excitement.