Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (30 page)

Marlo leaned close to her stilts and whispered.

“I wish I were still alive,”
she murmured sadly as her stilts instantly collapsed into two pieces of wood roughly the size of school rulers.

The Scarecrows dropped Milton and Van from a few yards above ground before soaring back into the sky. After a quick circle of Fibble, the majestic monster birds flapped back toward the Furafter with nary a caw for goodbye.

Milton and Van landed hard on their knees, rolling to a stop, as Zane tumbled from his pair of rapidly contracting stilts. Milton rose and tugged down his irritating creeping-terror-of-a-dress, joining Marlo and Zane at Fibble’s perimeter. Wind gushed in a steady rhythm, squished out from between the ground and the platform supporting the tents.

Zane studied the festively striped tents of Fibble as they tossed and joggled.

“It’s as bonkers as when we left,” Zane explained. “Fibble rises about fifteen meters, then comes whooshing down, stopping about thirty centimeters from the ground, and then flies back up.”

“Caught between a lie that’s a truth, and a truth that’s a lie,” Marlo muttered.

A plume of silvery smoke drifted out from the Big Top’s tip, snaking up into the sky and birthing a confusion of glittering tendrils.

“What’s that?” Milton asked as the smoke clotted and
coiled high above his head, gradually blocking the light as it thickened.

Marlo gulped.

“You’re not scared of clowns, are you?” she said as she wrapped her brother’s gangly arms around her.

The sparkling cloud spread out across the sky and darkened, slowly coagulating into a massive head leering out at the horizon. It turned an angry shade of red and sprouted a pair of horns.

“That’s like no clown I’ve ever seen,” Milton murmured. “It looks more like … Satan.
Almost
. But not quite. The horns are shorter, his complexion is lighter …”

“You’re right,” Marlo whispered. “And you know how much I hate saying that. But it was totally a clown before.”

The demonic head roared up at the sky, exposing a pair of lightning-white fangs. Its eyes belched fire.

“Let’s get out of here!” Van yelped as he turned to make a run across the frozen Falla Sea. Marlo grabbed him by his talon-soar shoulder.

“
We’re right underneath it
. If we run away, it’ll see us. The best thing for us to do is to break into Fibble as planned. C’mon.”

They crouched as they jogged to the perimeter of Fibble.

“Follow me, mates,” Zane said as he fell to his hands and knees and crawled swiftly ahead past a squealing contracting/expanding Pinocchio post. “We’ll want to get just under the Big Top.”

Milton hunkered to the frosty, murky ground. It was hard not to flinch all over when Fibble zoomed down, only to stop inches above their backs.

“You’re sure this place isn’t going to squash us?” he asked as he crept behind Zane.

“Not to worry, luv,” he replied, looking back with a sly wink. “I’ve got you covered.”

I’m not sure which is worse
, Milton thought as he scrabbled along in the icy muck,
being crushed by Fibble or crushed
on
by Marlo’s boyfriend
. Several yards to his right, Milton noticed a glinting cylinder.

“It’s one of those … bombs,” Milton panted to Marlo. “Like you used … in the Kennels.”

Marlo crawled over to the truth bomb, snatched it up, and put it into her satchel.

“Could come in … handy,” she replied. “Nothing like a little truth … to clear a room. Like … a fart. Kinda feels good to let one out. But then … everything stinks and no one likes you anymore.”

They crawled through the freezing mud on their hands and knees, past the fractured gates of Fibble—its broken, rainbow-hued neon lights sputtering like sick electric snakes—and beneath the torn paper center-ring of Fibble’s Big Top.

Milton stared at the underside of Fibble, its lattice of wood and brass bobbing up and down at him like a yo-yo.

“How do we get up there?” Van asked, his vestments
covered in muck. “One second it’s there, then it’s not … like my agent up on the Surface.”

“We just time it, sync up to the rhythm,” Milton replied as the flapping paper entrance to the Big Top brushed his head, “then jump inside.”

Milton rose, tightly reining in his instincts that told him to lie flat.

Maybe I’m not as scared because I’m Marlo
, he thought as the top of his head popped into the hole on the Big Top floor—springing inside like a jack-in-the-box—before Fibble shot back up into the sky. Milton crouched down, his legs coiling like springs.

“One-two-three … one-two—”

He leapt inside the Big Top, as hard and as far as he could.

“Three!”
he yelled as he rolled onto the sawdust floor of the darkened, empty tent.

Soon after, Van, Zane, and Marlo were lying beside Milton on the orange sawdust floor, panting, the latest attractions of Barnum’s Three-Ring Media Circus.

They emerged into a darkened hallway in Fibble’s second tent, leading to the classrooms. The projectors that normally cast the drab walls with flickering opulence were dark.

“It’s so quiet,” Milton said as he snuck down the jerking hall behind his sister.

“They must have all the blokes confined to their bunks,” Zane speculated. “Because of what we did to this mental place.”

“Where are we going?” Milton asked.

“To this secret room, behind Nostradamus’s classroom,” she replied. “Maybe we can eavesdrop on Barnum and learn where his Humbugger machine—”

A tall, robed figure burst into the hall from, seemingly, nowhere. The hem of its immaculate white cloak dusted the floor.

The Man Who Soldeth the World!
Milton screamed inside his head as he, Marlo, Van, and Zane clung to the wall and held their collective breath, willing themselves invisible. Sizzling just behind the mysterious figure was—what
had
to be, Milton thought as he gaped at the man’s slacks of flame—Vice Principal Barnum. They both disappeared into a classroom.

Marlo felt along the wall until she came to a large, barely noticeable beige rectangle. Voices—tense and testy—spilled out of the classroom several yards away. Marlo turned back to the boys and held her finger to her lips.

“This way,” Marlo whispered as she pressed her palm to the door and slipped inside. Zane, Van, and Milton followed, with Milton closing the secret door behind him. They clustered behind the large, chalkboard-sized two-way mirror looking into Mr. Nostradamus’s classroom.

On the other side of the mirror were Vice Principal Barnum, Nostradamus, and the Man Who Soldeth the
World: a basketball player–sized creature with broad, quivering shoulders, completely concealed by a luminous white silk robe and cloak.

“It’s … 
him. I just know it
!” Milton exclaimed.

“Who?” Van whispered.

“The guy from the TV show we watched in the limo,” Milton replied. “He’s
real.
”

Van shrugged and sat back in the cheap plastic chair.

“As real as any actor can be, that is.”

Milton couldn’t believe his sister’s eyes.

“So I trust trying out the Humbugger yourself soothed your ruffled feathers,” P. T. Barnum proclaimed as he paced across the room in his sizzling slacks.

“Feathers?”
the man replied abruptly in a voice as booming and smooth as an explosion in a velvet museum.

“It’s just an expression,” Barnum replied tartly. “The point is—as you just experienced yourself—the machine to beam your doom-laden visions straight to the Surface is still online. Those schematics you provided were nothing short of groundbreaking technology—”

“It was a Promethean task … 
literally
, as Prometheus designed the machine himself,” the man replied laconically, crossing his legs as he sat on the edge of Nostradamus’s desk. “Now that my plans have changed, the Humbugger is more important than ever.…”

“Changed?”

“The unscripted finale of
Teenage Jesus
—the highest-rated
TV show
evereth
—has dampened the apocalyptic fervor I was toiling to achieve—”

Van was just about to whoop with delight until Milton silenced him with a hard punch in the arm.

“—so I am forced to evicteth the squatters on the Surface by
force …
employing our Humbugger machine to terrify them into a stampede toward the interdimensional openings I’ve created.
Putting the fear of God into the monkey people
. ’Tis a crude maneuver, but it appeareth to be the only option left available.…”

“Of course,” Barnum interrupted. “Then we should really—”

“The plan was as neareth perfection as I,” the man continued as he stared off into space, his face obscured by the shadow of his white hood. “Which is why I captured every moment of it. So that—when it was far, far too late—the Powers That Be would see how
easily
they were duped. And that a certain all-seeing/all-knowing being never even saw it coming and knew not what hit Him.…”

The man’s gaze rested on the clock on the wall, reading a quarter to eleven. “ ’Tis almost
the eleventh hour
. The Big Guy Upstairs was once the one who could bring about the end of days. Now man can do it himself. Everything has changed. I was intended to be their champion, their majestic defender. But now humanity isn’t
worth
defending … so I must fulfill the divine Revelation myself.”

Revelation
? Milton thought in the darkness of the secret room.

Nostradamus stared, mute, into his crystal ball paperweight as if it contained fate itself, coiled tightly, waiting to spring out and bite—which is exactly what it did. He shoved himself away from his desk, his filmy eyes bulging with fear.

“In five minutes, Fibble will be destroyed!”
Nostradamus yelped.

The man glared at Vice Principal Barnum.

“What is this fortune-telling flake on-eth about?” he asked, recrossing his legs beneath his robe so that his lap looked like an angry ocean of milk.

“Though Mr. Nostradamus’s prognosticative powers are a little worse for the wear,” Barnum replied, “he
can
see five minutes into the future.”

The man glared at the trembling pseudo-seer.

“Explain thusly to me what you meaneth by ‘in five minutes Fibble will be destroyed.’ ”

Nostradamus smoothed his pointy gray beard with his long, arthritic fingers.

“Four minutes and fifty seconds,”
he corrected. “Up in the Boiler Room, above the secret Focus Group viewing chamber, where the Humbugger is …”

Milton looked above him. On the ceiling was a round hatch; behind him, a beige ladder hidden against the beige wall.

“Up there!” he whispered to the others.

“… four youths will undo this place,” Nostradamus continued. “Turning lie to
truth
.”

Marlo gaped at her brother.

“Us? But we wouldn’t even know where to go if Nostradamus hadn’t told us—”

Milton shrugged, beaming.

“Don’t argue with fate,” he replied as he clambered swiftly up the ladder.

In the classroom, Vice Principal Barnum’s pants blazed with purpose.

“Mr. Nostradamus,” he croaked. “Evacuate the teachers—”

“And children?” the wizened teacher interjected.

“Fine, them too,” Vice Principal Barnum replied crossly.

The man abruptly rose to his feet and strode in elegant sweeps for the door.

“If your crystal-gazing crank is correct,” he replied, “then this whole area will soon be buzzing with Galactic Order Department representatives like bureaucratic flies on procedural excrement. Which means that I’ll leaveeth you, Mr. Barnum, to handle this mess. For if you
don’t
, and my plan doesn’t go down as planned, then
you’ll
be going down. To h-e-double-hockey-sticks, where the really,
really
bad folks go. I haveth connections … an old coworker, you could say. Do I maketh myself clear?”

The vice principal swallowed, though he needed to
tug at his lapel to accommodate the downward passage of the lump in his throat.

“Yes, sir,” Vice Principal Barnum replied unsteadily. “I’m like an abacus: you can count on me.”

Milton pushed open the hatch and scaled another ladder, ultimately leading to a second hatch. He twisted the handle and climbed onto the wooden floor of Fibble’s Boiler Room.

The round, cramped room was crowded with brass tubes and metal tanks that hissed with steam. The tubes coiled up the walls in a spiral, ending at the tip of the pointed roof. Across from Milton, on the other side of the room, hung what looked like a periscope, only instead of the conventional viewing goggles was a dangling mask. Marlo crawled into the loud, sweltering room beside Milton.

In front of the periscope mask was a tall, steel-backed high chair. The chair swiveled around with a startled squeak. Scampi the shrimp demon, his face smeared in clown makeup, gaped in shock at the intruders with his trembling, distended eyes.

“Is that a … 
shrimp
?” Van asked as he crept into the room.

Marlo nodded.

“Yeah, but he’s fairly harmless,” she replied. “He’s just a prawn in Barnum’s game.”

Zane pointed to the mask, smeared with whiteface and lipstick.

“The great, nasty demon clown that ate up Dr. Brinkley!” he exclaimed. “That’s how they do it … 
it’s just a mask
!”

“Yes!” Marlo cried. “Barnum has Scampi—the shrimp demon—stick his face in that Humbugger machine and, somehow, it becomes this gargantuan, freaky, scare-the-soiled-pants-off-you clown head! It’s the big, exaggerated
opposite
of whoever sticks their face in it, which is why he needed a tiny, totally unscary shrimp!”

“But that thing we saw outside wasn’t a clown, it was like … 
Satan
. Or a demon of some kind.”

“Do you think the man in the robe is Satan?”

“I don’t know,” Milton replied. “But whoever’s plan it
is
, we’ve got to stop it. And fast.”

Milton noticed a number of masks, disguises, and toys littering the console beneath the periscope: a collection of beards, four horsemen figurines on rainbow-maned ponies, an angel mask …