Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (33 page)

Vice Principal Barnum was nowhere to be seen, though Marlo noticed a faint, dissipating plume of smoke snaking down the hall.

“What’s happening?” Milton asked as he ran alongside his sister to the Big Top.

“The truth bomb,” she replied, panting. “It blew up … amplified by the Humbugger machine. I thought
it would wash out Barnum’s lies … so they wouldn’t make it to the Surface.”

Marlo gaped at the incredible shrinking circus toppling down around her.

“But the Humbugger must’ve also been keeping Fibble together,” she continued as they sped around the corner to the Big Top, “feeding the weird wood with fibs … so it stayed big. And once the truth got into the ducts—
boom
. It was like Fibble was a gigantic silk camisole … that someone washed in hot water.”

“What?”

“Girl stuff … anyway, unless we make it out the main ring in time, we’re going to get squashed along with everything else!”

They skidded across the orange sawdust of the Big Top. Through the tattered paper bull’s-eye they could see the frozen Falla Sea—inches below, then lurching hundreds of feet away.

Milton held his hand out to his sister.

“One,” he chanted as Marlo grasped his hand, then held out her other hand to Zane.

“Two,” Van joined in as he held his hand out to Milton who, reluctantly, took it.

“Three!”
they shouted as they sprang through the ring.

They fell to the silver ice on all fours. Fibble zoomed back up, though—Milton noticed as he crouched and
crawled, scraping his sister’s knees raw—only a dozen feet or so this time.

The truth is winning out
, Milton thought as Fibble returned, threatening to crush him and his partners-in-undoing-crime. Inches above his head, the lattice of tormented, living wood and brass pipes that made up Fibble’s foundation quivered and strained as it compressed dangerously tight. Milton noticed the anguished whorls in the grain of the wood, like screaming faces frozen and trapped inside.

The sound of footfalls spilled out across the ice behind Milton, Marlo, Van, and Zane. Six lizard demons slithered swiftly toward them. They led a huddled mass of freshly evacuated students and faculty close through Fibble’s battered rainbow gate.

“Those children!” Nostradamus shouted. “They are responsible for this! Guards, seize them!”

Milton emerged from beneath Fibble’s quaking foundation and sprinted across the Falla Sea. Beneath his feet he noticed waves of liquid silver lapping up beneath the ice floor, pools of swirling, gleaming, agitated “truth” cracking the shifty surface.

“The ice,”
Milton panted as the others scrabbled to their feet. “It’s cracking!”

A demon lizard guard, its skin mimicking the grimy frost beneath it, sprung at Marlo and seized her ankle with its tongue.

“Help!! This leapin’ lizard’s got me t-tongue-tied!” she yelled.

Zane stomped the long, sticky tongue and pulled Marlo away. As the guard and the rest of its squad rose to their feet, a great geyser of liquid truth shot up out of the thawing Falla Sea. The demon lizards were tossed about like toys—hundreds of feet into the air—by the foaming blast.

The teachers and students clambered out from beneath Fibble’s shrinking foundation as screams of creaking wood split the frigid air. Drenched by fountains of silver truth, the tents of Fibble crumpled, sagged, then fell in on themselves in a heap of gnarled, striped canvas.

“Look!” Zane yelled, pointing to a tubby man with blazing pants walking across a cable suspended between two straining tent posts above the mound of buckled tents. “It’s Vice Principal Barnum!”

The chunky charlatan wobbled across the tightrope, followed by his shrimp demons Scampi, Louie, Kung Pao, and Annette. “When the world has got hold of a lie,” he shouted against the roar of gushing liquid, “it’s astonishing how hard it is to kill it!”

The stout man edged himself across the wire toward a pole that, Milton could see, had several rockets strapped around it and a snub-nosed capsule on top.

“An escape pod!” Milton exclaimed.

A cloud of black, buzzing energy swooped overhead,
rushing at P. T. Barnum. The vice principal ducked as the angry cloud attacked, but Scampi, Louie, and Kung Pao weren’t so lucky. They were swept off the tightrope and tumbled down into the crumpled wad of tents below. A fresh geyser of truth stabbed the shriveling foundation of Fibble. The silver gush smashed apart the lattice of wood and piping, sending broken planks and twisted tubes flying into the air.

“What’s that mean black cloud all about?” Milton asked Marlo as Vice Principal Barnum frantically waved away the darting globs of energy.

“Must be his lies,” Marlo replied with a shrug. “And it looks like they’re coming back to bite him on the butt.”

Another surge of seething lies dove down to attack the vice principal. He staggered yet retained his balance upon the swaying suspension wire, though the vengeful cloud claimed the last shrimp demon, leaving Vice Principal Barnum crossing a tightrope without Annette.

“More persons are humbugged by believing in nothing than by believing in too much!” he shouted as two more geysers burst through the ice, splintering Fibble’s rapidly shrinking foundation, now about the size of a large raft. A swarm of dark, stinging lies consumed Barnum, knocking him off the wire.

“And there’s a sucker born every minute!”
he bellowed as he plummeted down into the shredded wreckage of Fibble just as it was consumed by liquid silver and dragged down into the Falla Sea.

“And a sucker is
unborn
every minute too,” Marlo mumbled to herself.

The Falla Sea’s icy surface was savaged by gushing liquid truth, cleaved into floes, then consumed by gleaming swells of silver. The neon gates of Fibble fizzled out as truth devoured lie. A thick vapor spilled forth from the silvery froth and formed a shiny canopy overhead.

Sandwiched between the gleaming ice and glittering cloud cover, Marlo felt as if she were pressed in between two gargantuan mirrors, reflecting themselves into infinity.

Milton, meanwhile, as the small ocean calmed itself smooth, examined it for any sign of the Man Who Soldeth the World. The frosty rim, the last remnant of the frozen Falla Sea, melted away. Milton stepped back from the quickly dissolving shoreline to the dried mud of the Broken Promised Land.

Just then, a familiar squeal and clatter broke the profound silence. Milton turned and saw, over a ridge of cracked mud plates behind him, a rolling fleet of shopping carts, pushed by a motley chorus line of haggard phantoms: the Phantoms of the Dispossessed.

“The PODs!” Milton shouted with joy as he ran toward their lanky, dark-haired leader, Jack Kerouac. The wild-eyed phantom cocked his eyebrow at the girl with the blue hair racing toward him.

“Jack!” Milton cried as he embraced the baffled Beat poet.

“Um, have we, like, met before, pigeon?” Jack asked.

“Oh, right … my body,” Milton replied. “It’s me, Milton. I’m my sister now. See, we had our souls switched in h-e-double-hockey-sticks … it’s complicated.”

Milton noticed a blind phantom with wild white hair and a Viking robe that flapped in the wind like the flag of a land long erased by time.

“Moondog!” Milton cried out as he embraced the haunted old man. “Surely you have to know it’s me!”

Moondog smiled as he took in Milton with the eerie sixth sense of a career medicine man.

“Yep … it’s our little unborn,” Moondog replied. “But don’t call me Shirley.”

The phantoms pushed their shopping carts toward the cascading fountains of gleaming truth.

“So you got the note I left?” Milton asked.

Jack smiled a boyish grin.

“Looks like we crashed this crazy clambake a little late,” he said. “But, yeah, Popsicle, we lamped on your note—the pendant you borrowed grabbed Divining Rod’s divining rod and took us straight to it. Then, like in your note, we took liquid silver and put some in every deposit station we found,” Jack explained. “Like, gallons and gallons of it.”

Moondog drew in a deep breath and grinned, basking in the refreshing spray of honesty.

“I always had a strange feeling about the liquid silver, that it was, somehow, pure truth: that rarest of substances
down here,” he said in a craggy wheeze as the wind parted his beard.

“Truth is the unshakable shake, the unquakable quake that topples all of man’s lies built atop it,” Jack added with a lopsided smirk. “We must’ve overloaded the plumbing—which, like, led straight to Fibble, by the looks of it. Makes sense: if you’re going to make lies, you gotta know what the truth is. But this place couldn’t handle the truth, not when it came, like,
flooding
, pure and strong.…”

Milton and the PODs reflected upon the mirrored horizon, until the sound of wheels slicing through dry mud snagged their ears. Through a fog wall, a thousand yards away, Principal Bubb’s black stagecoach came whizzing toward them. A lump of cold lead formed in Milton’s belly.

“It’s Principal Bubb,” he murmured dismally.

Jack squinted at the luxurious, horse-drawn SUV.

“Yeah, the
death
of the party, from what I’ve, like, heard.”

Moondog tilted his head toward the glimmering cloud cover above. “And she’s not alone,” he said as he eyed the clouds with sightless eyes.

Through the silver mantle overhead descended a luminous milk-white chariot with great, flapping wings on either side.

“A Plymouth Valiant!” Jack exclaimed, slapping his thigh. “Wow, that is one sweet ride!”

The sculpted car with its dual headlights and grinning chrome grill settled to the ground just beyond the PODs’ line of shopping carts. The door swung open and, sliding out from the chariot’s white simulated-leather interior, emerged a seasoned gentleman in a white silk suit, with majestic white wings folded behind him.

The angel stared at the space formerly occupied by Fibble. He cocked his dark, bushy eyebrow and scratched beneath the gold halo hovering just above his head.

“Ah, yes,” he said to himself in an upper-class English accent. “Truth is the ultimate mirror. When it meets itself, it makes infinity.”

Principal Bubb’s stagecoach pulled up alongside the winged Plymouth Valiant as Marlo, Zane, and Van joined the scene. The angel elegantly glided to the stagecoach in an eerie way that seemed familiar to Milton, just as Principal Bubb kicked open the doors with her gleaming hooves.

Her rancid, custard-colored eyes settled, simmering, on the Fausters.

“Principal Bubb,” the distinguished angel said cordially, offering his hand. “Always a pleasure.”

The principal tore her gaze away from the children, painfully, like ripping off a scab.

“We’ve met?” she asked as she lowered her bulk from the stagecoach to the dried mud ground.

“Yes, briefly,” the angel explained. “A corporate off-site
years ago. The name is Gabriel. Archangel and representative of the Galactic Order Department.”

Principal Bubb nodded as her demon guards—snarling, bat-faced creatures with cobra-like hoods flared out on the sides of their necks—piled out of the stagecoach behind her.

“Now I remember,” she said with vague recollection. “Sorry, but with the wings, I can scarcely tell you heavenly creatures apart.”

Gabriel maintained a smile despite the slur.

“Of course,” he said, unruffled. “Well, I am here to declare Fibble—a circle of Heck under
your
purview, I may add—a disaster area—”

“It’s these Fauster children!” Principal Bubb hissed. “I
know
that they are at the heart of—”

“Please, let me continue,” Gabriel said, interrupting Principal Bubb’s interruption. “With the truth flooding this den of lies, Fibble is so irreparably permeated with pure, high-grade honesty that the Galactic Order Department is forced to proclaim this realm an official annex of Heaven.”

Principal Bubb’s jaw dropped open, revealing her yellow-brown Stonehenge of gnarled teeth.

“Heaven?!”
she croaked. “My circle of Heck zoned as Heaven?!”

She grabbed Marlo, thinking her Milton, roughly by the shoulders.

“So help me, I will throw the full weight of my
abused authority upon you … both of you!” she screamed.

“Please, Principal Bubb,” Gabriel urged, “this is most unseemly.”

“I will have you tried, do you hear me?!” she continued, her face as red as a mandrill’s bottom. “
Tried as adults
! Then I’ll send you both packing to h-e-double-hockey-sticks!”

Gabriel pulled Principal Bubb off Marlo.

“You will do
no
such thing,” the smooth, cultured angel commanded. “We will have no vigilante injustice here. All I’m interested in is the
truth.
”

Milton stepped forward.

“Mr. Gabriel,” Milton said. “I can explain.”

Principal Bubb scowled.

“Wonderful,”
she fumed, “another dramatic work of fiction from one Marlo Fauster.…”

“Shhh!” Gabriel scolded. “Please, young lady, continue.”

Milton quickly exchanged glances with Marlo, who was smirking at her brother for being addressed as “young lady.”

“It began when I was working with Mr. Welles on T.H.E.E.N.D.,” Milton summarized swiftly. “
The Televised Hereafter Evangelistic Entertainment Network Division
. I started to realize that all the shows seemed to have these apocalyptic finales.”

Gabriel snapped his fingers.

“
That’s
where I recognize you from,” the angel said, pointing to Van. “Teenage Jesus! I have to say, your portrayal is positively riveting!”

“Thank you, sir,” Van said with an uncharacteristic trace of embarrassment.

“Anyway, young lady,” Gabriel said, “I am aware of the unrest and fervor those shows have stoked upon the Surface.”

“So I figured that Satan was up to something awful—”

“That’s only his
job,
” Principal Bubb mumbled under her sour breath.

“—but then I began to suspect the Man Who Soldeth the World, this mysterious creature who had a weird show that no one watched. He was right here in Fibble, but he must have gotten away—”

“Convenient,”
Principal Bubb interjected.