Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (17 page)

“Plane ticket?” Dale replied before realizing Damian had hung up on him. He cradled the phone for a moment longer, hoping to save face with the accusatory mob of
Star Trek
(original series) action figures staring back at him from his desk. “That will be just … fine.”

Dale put the phone back in its cradle, opened his journal, and added “sudden plane flights,” “bossy kids,” “ghostwriting,” and “Kansas” to his ever-expanding list of irrational fears.

His hasty deal with Damian reminded Dale of
Christopher Marlowe’s classic play
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
, in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge.

Hmm
, Dale contemplated as he scribbled the names Marlowe and Faustus in his journal,
maybe Damian’s right—this book practically writes itself
.

HAVING TROTTED STEALTHILY
through the mind-warping haze of liedocaine all the way from the Totally Bunks to the R & D lab, Marlo bent over—her palms wedged on the front of her thighs—and panted.

“Man … Milton sure is … out of shape,” she puffed. After a short breather, Marlo edged her way along the Sheetrock walls toward the lab. The entire third tent was benumbed by a thick, late-night hush.

I hope Dr. Brinkley was able to drug the guards with those full-spectrum kaleidoscopic color pills he was talking about
, Marlo pondered.
If not, I don’t know—

“What are you doing out of bed?” Vice Principal Barnum’s voice boomed from behind her.

Marlo’s heart was suddenly “it” in a game of neurobiological Freeze Tag.

Wow, I don’t know if it’s the sleep deprivation or the liedocaine that’s slow-leaking out of the ceiling, but that sounded like he
really
was right behind me
, Marlo thought as she fought back the asthma that so often called Milton’s lungs home.

“Plug your blowhole, you blabbering blowhard,” she muttered, Marlo thought, to herself as she turned to face the furious face of her vice principal, his pants sizzling angrily.

“… is an excellent example of something you would never say to a respected authority figure,” Marlo continued, holding her brother’s arms to prevent them from trembling loose from their sockets.

Vice Principal Barnum tapped his hard-leather shoes against the floor in time with his own irritation.

“Imagine my surprise, Mr. Fauster, when I entered the Boys’ Totally Bunks with the intent of arousing my students from slumber to instigate an impromptu midnight brainstorm and, shock of shocks, one Milton Fauster is not in his assigned bunk.”

Marlo fingered the bauble of truth dangling from inside her white lice–infested hair pajamas. It burbled angrily at the fib poised to take off from Marlo’s tongue.

“To tell you the truth,” Marlo lied as the vice principal shuddered at the mere mention of the word, “I found out about the brainstorm and was taking a late-night
stroll to hatch some great ideas to impress the flaming
pants
off you, since you’ve always been such a role model for me. Truly inspiring. I found out from Scampi … but don’t blame him, I grilled the little guy. I mean, I just
love
grilled shrimp!”

Perplexed yet appeased by his ego’s midnight snack, the vice principal’s temper—and pants—relaxed to a rankled crackle.

“If I catch you wandering my halls after hours again, I will damage your perceived brand value so completely that no campaign, however ingenious, will ever hope to resuscitate it,” the vice principal said as he grabbed Marlo by the scruff of the neck and led him down the hallway. “Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal Light,” Marlo murmured as she was dragged into the Big Top. Vice Principal Barnum threw her to the sawdust floor as he lumbered toward the center of the ring.

“Take your place in the stands with the other hunks of fresh gray matter,” he ordered as he yanked down the microphone suspended from the ceiling and held it to his face. Marlo, naturally, climbed up the stands to sit next to Zane, who—even crumpled, yawning, and bleary-eyed—made her heart, or Milton’s, feel like it was jumping a game of double Dutch.

“Judging from the results generated in class, it seems as if we’ve thought ourselves into a corner,” Vice Principal Barnum barked into the dangling microphone,
scowling as he gazed upon the glazed faces in the stands. “And my latest campaign is so sweeping in scope, so epic in grandeur, so groundbreaking in its artful dodginess that I felt it necessary to pluck you from slumber—where the creative mind is at its most fertile—and assemble you here for a spontaneous late-night brain-storming session.” He looked over at Tom Thumb, who was twiddling his surname at the base of the bleachers.

The dapper, diminutive man nodded, then marched up through the stands, passing out pads of paper and pencils. Vice Principal Barnum walked over to the Feejee Mermaid—the disgusting semiliving amalgam of kelp and bone mounted to the wall—and transferred it to the middle of a large whiteboard, wedging a marker to its withered flipper.

“Now, the only rule with brainstorms is that there
are
no rules,” the vice principal relayed. “And that there is no such thing as a bad idea. Now I would like your young noggins to chew upon a purely hypothetical advertising scenario, pretending that if the afterlife were, say, a brand, what would it need to communicate in order to connect with your demographic?”

P. T. Barnum crossed his fingers behind his back.

“Please, be free with your thoughts, as I value your opinions most highly.”

Marlo heard a peculiar creaking noise behind her. She turned and noticed the creepy wooden beams framing the tent tremble and … 
stretch
. Subtly, but enough to
cause the canvas to grow taut. The boys around her were oblivious as they rubbed the sleep out of their eyes. Colby stretched and yawned.

“Yes, Mr. Hayden?” the vice principal said.

“Uh, me? Well, what if the afterlife was like some awesome amusement park, where you got your hand stamped and could leave whenever you want and come back?”

The Feejee Mermaid’s marker squeaked across the whiteboard.

“That’s a terrible idea,” Vice Principal Barnum declared flatly.

“But I thought there
weren’t
any bad ideas in a brainstorm?” Marlo replied.

“I lied,” the vice principal said with growing irritation. Zane raised his hand.

“What if it was some super exclusive, totally brilliant club?” he posed in his crisp London accent. “With perks and rewards, you know? Not some naff church club, but something really posh?”

The vice principal, having contracted a contagious yawn from Colby, opened his mouth wide as the mermaid wrote down Zane’s idea. “Congratulations, Mr. Covington,” he said with a dismissive stretch, “you’ve just reinvented the Paradisco: Heaven’s after-hours never-quite-nightclub.
Next
!”

Marlo seethed at the dissing her not-quite boyfriend received. Her hand shot up.

“What if the afterlife were like some awful circus run by an arrogant madman?” she said.

The vice principal’s face flushed red.

“This is to be the high point of my career! To deploy the most shamelessly ambitious marketing campaign ever devised!”

The vice principal shot a loaded, sideways glance to his team of shrimp demons. Scampi and Annette nodded, their creepy feeler eyes bobbing with comprehension, and disappeared underneath the bleachers. Barnum shuffled in tense circles across the sawdust floor.

“My entire life has been spent attempting to dupe the masses with spectacle. Now, by removing all of the typical restraints that confine even the most successful marketing campaigns, I can permanently blur the line between reality and advertising, giving people both what they want and what they fear the most.…”

The shrimp demons emerged from the grandstands lugging behind them a wooden crate crisscrossed on the outside by a network of brass tubes.

“Speaking of which,” P. T. Barnum said with a smirk, tilted drastically to one side as if his lips were surreptitiously pouring poison into someone’s glass, “I have a little surprise. Since I can’t seem to get you to think outside the box, maybe it’s time I put one of you
in
the box … the Box of Bitter”—an expression of sour distaste darted across the vice principal’s face—“
Truth
. Mr. Fauster, since
you seem so eager to participate, I’d like you to be the first pupil to climb inside.”

Marlo shivered as she eyed the splintered, unvarnished crate.

“That’s okay, I’m good,” she replied just as Tom Thumb, swirling a loop of rope above his top-hatted head, lassoed Marlo and tugged her off her seat and down to the ring.

“Ugh,”
Marlo grunted. “You’re pretty strong for a pygmy!” she groaned as she struggled against the midget’s surprising might. The vice principal sneered.

“My generous attempts to reward you children by involving you in the campaign of a lifetime
—and then some
—seem to have failed,” he said as Marlo—with a little help from the swarming shrimp demons—was pushed into the claustrophobic crate. “So you’ve forced me to motivate you all with another, baser advertising tactic: the threat of shame and punishment.”

Tom Thumb shut the lid of the Box of Bitter Truth, sealing Marlo in darkness. She could hear a beam of wood falling into place, bracing the door from the outside, and the squeal of a metal spigot being turned. The box vibrated as something gurgled through the lattice of pipes girding the crate. At first, Marlo was filled with a pleasant sense of clarity—her head unburdened by the noise of doubt and worry—but then this feeling of naked insight became raw and painful.

“A truth that’s told with bad intent,” the vice principal said, his voice piercing the hiss and rattle of the pipes, “beats all the lies you can invent.”

Rolling waves of barbwire anguish scratched at Marlo’s insides, scraping away at her thoughts and feelings like electrified cheese graters. The little white lice infesting her clothes wriggled in pain before drying up and dying. Marlo’s mind was rubbed raw and tender by a caustic Brillo pad parade of bitter, painfully amplified realization.