Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (6 page)

MARLO SUNK DOWN
as best she could into the unyielding vinyl upholstery of the clown car as the circle of sizzling flame sped ever closer.

She wasn’t sure if she could believe her brother’s nearsighted eyes. The blazing hoop just
had
to be another one of Barnum’s lies, but it seemed so real. In any case, Marlo didn’t relish the thought of getting the third degree from Milton about his third-degree burns, in the off chance that they ever reunited.

P. T. Barnum reached through the nonexistent windshield and grabbed an orange crash helmet.

“I will see you gentlemen on the other side,” he said as he secured the helmet’s strap in between two of his chins.

With that, P. T. Barnum gave a thumbs-up to Scampi, who jabbed a button on the dashboard with a decommissioned
G.I. Joe. The hood flung open, sending Fibble’s vice principal soaring through the air. Fortunately for the passengers, the hood also acted as a parachute, bringing the hurtling car to a halt before its hot date with the hissing hoop of flame.

Marlo and the other boys were dragged out of the car by a sudden rush of shrimp demons in clown wigs.
It’s like being attacked by bait
, Marlo thought as she and the boys were herded into the darkened Big Top and shoved into the stands.

A spotlight stabbed the dark. Teetering thirty feet above the Big Top floor on a high wire was a tiny man smoking a cigar, holding a balancing pole with two shrimp demons in face paint on either side.

Just then, P. T. Barnum popped out of a paper painting of himself popping out of a paper painting of himself. He strutted out beneath the high wire, tugging at his flame-retardant suspenders with one thumb and holding a bullhorn to his toadlike face.

“Fibble’s three rings work in perfect concert with one another,” Barnum bellowed. “It’s how we turn mere marketing into the ultimate show!”

The little man inched along the wire above, trembling as he steadied himself and his squirming shrimp cargo. His smoldering cigar sizzled toward his lips.

“The first ring, as our diminutive dynamo Tom Thumb is illustrating up above, is a precarious walk between truth and lie. Too much candor will turn
customers away, while heaping on too many fallacious claims … well, customers will sniff those out like a dog-hair toupee, and then your whole enterprise crashes to the ground.”

Just as Tom Thumb crept toward the end of the high wire, his cigar sputtered like a fuse to his pursed lips. Sweating, he swallowed his cigar butt. After a violent belch of smoke, Tom Thumb listed sideways. Several shrimp demons rushed beneath him holding an overflowing tub of cocktail sauce, just in time to catch the plummeting pint-sized acrobat and his shellfish companions.

“The second ring,” Barnum continued, “is where you take your carefully crafted messages—blended like the perfect martini—and create breathless spectacle: a dizzying display that cuts through apathetic haze, a stupefying cure for shrugs and malaise! In short, a media circus that short-circuits common sense!”

There was something about the vice principal that Marlo despised—and that something was
everything
. He acted like he knew all the answers, which is easy when you make up all the questions.

“Moving right along,” P. T. Barnum bellowed as he waved the spotlight toward the far end of the Big Top. The circle of glare settled on a pair of tiny orange-and-green cannons.

Marlo noticed the dried, desiccated remains of some fishlike creature hung on the wall above the cannons. Beneath
the black, mummified body was a sign reading THE FEEJEE MERMAID. Marlo had thought it a patch of particularly industrious mold until the creepy eyesore began furiously pumping a hurdy-gurdy.

The Feejee Mermaid squeezed its accordion in languid, drawn-out gasps. Two shrimp demons with crash helmets were prodded toward the cannons by what looked like floating pitchsporks, but—Marlo could tell if she squinted Milton’s eyes just right—they were wielded by tall, lanky chameleons that nearly blended perfectly with the background.

This has got to be the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen
, Marlo thought as the creepy mermaid music wheezed faster and faster.
Unless I saw something incredibly, jaw-droppingly freaky-deeky in the last week or so that I still can’t really remember
. While flashes of Marlo’s memory were indeed returning, her recollection of the last few days in particular was patchier than a hobo’s pantaloons.

“The third ring is how all this razzle-dazzle is dispatched, so that every message is dished out just right—oh so shiny, oh so bright—so they oompah like a big brass band!” Barnum bellowed, liltingly, through his bullhorn.

The two struggling shrimp demons—sporting tutus and false eyelashes glued to their black olive-like eyeballs—were shoved in the cannons. Tom Thumb struck a match on the heel of his boot and lit the twin fuses.

P. T. Barnum, already froglike with his sagging jowls
and protruding eyes, hopped spryly upon an overturned basin.

“When the three rings are linked together,” he said, flamboyantly waving his disproportionately small hand toward the cannons, “it’s bigger than a movie, than a TV show … it’s pure, breathtaking marketing theater! And, with a potent advertising cocktail such as this, what could possibly go wrong?”

With that, the cannons exploded. Yet instead of discharging the two shrimps in drag, the cannons merely disgorged a foul-smelling spray of fish bits and face paint.

It’s like a beluga’s backwash
, Marlo thought in the stands as she waved away the salty stink.

The Feejee Mermaid’s demented music slowed to a creepy crawl before stopping altogether. The Big Top went suddenly dark.

The brief moment of silence was shattered by the skull-cleaving din of horns and noisemakers as the Big Top was engulfed by floodlights.

The Scampi-driven clown car zipped along the rim of the ring, stuffed with squealing shrimp demons holding buckets.

“Who wants their new Fibble uniforms?!” Barnum squawked through his bullhorn.

The boys shared blank looks of disinterest while Marlo tried to control the sharp, gender-specific curiosity she had toward what she would be forced to wear.

Marlo tentatively raised Milton’s scrawny arm.

Scampi hopped out of the speeding car, coiled up into a ball around the spinning bucket, and skidded to a halt in front of Marlo. Unfortunately for his fellow demons, the now-unchauffeured car careened into a bale of hay.

Scampi pitched the contents of the bucket all over Marlo. The boys on either side of her dove away as she was coated by sodden, slimy white clumps. She watched her arm, in shock, as it shimmered with tiny, writhing worms. Marlo screamed, though the piercing timbre was dampened by her brother’s preadolescent vocal cords.

“What are these?!” she howled as the pale, wet worms slithered all over her body.

“Little white lice,” Barnum croaked. “Now you’re dressed for deceit—Fibble-style!”

The lice knitted themselves into a shimmering, constricting unitard all over Marlo.

“It
itches
!” she whined as the unitard tightened.

“They are hungry,” Barnum added, his sneer somehow amplified by the bullhorn. “And want to be fed … 
with fibs.
”

Marlo’s stomach lurched. The swirling queasiness in her belly, the suit of slimy white lice … it was all too much. She bolted down the stands and out of the Big Top, running through the next tent past the R & D lab. Marlo’s stomach folded in two like a gastrointestinal
deck chair. The little white lice girdling her belly bit angrily. She spun around, almost delirious with nausea, and saw the Boys’ Unrestroom.

Marlo charged through the door toward the sink with the intent of splashing water on her face and getting a grip on her gut. Instead, hit by the filth and depravity of the facilities—which, truth be told, weren’t a far cry from your average Little Boys’ Room up on the Surface—Marlo lost the lunch she hadn’t had yet in the sink.

As Marlo opened her eyes, she saw, amidst the confounding kernels of corn (
Is there some undiscovered organ that collects corn strictly for regurgitation purposes
? Marlo pondered fleetingly), a tarnished glass-and-metal pendant. She delicately scooped it up from the basin and washed it clean. Marlo held up the puzzling, puked-up jewelry to her face and rubbed the crystal droplet with her thumb. Inside was a gently swirling liquid, like melted silver, that burbled to her touch. The sheet of little white lice crawling on her sleeve unraveled themselves to move away from the pendant, giving Marlo’s arm the occasional stinging bite in protest. She looked over the pendant into her brother’s face staring back at her in the mirror.

Of all Milton’s freaky quirks, I never pegged him to be a compulsive jewelry swallower
, Marlo thought as she leaned against the disgusting roll of soiled cloth towels bolted to the wall.
He must have gulped it down just before he got to
h-e-double-hockey-sticks, before we switched souls, when I was still a zombie from Madame Pompadour’s spa, and that weird milk bath—

It was all coming back to her. Fuzzy, like your tongue the morning after Halloween, but—nevertheless—the fog shrouding her short-term memory was slowly beginning to lift.

Milk of Amnesia … that’s what it said on the bottle in Madame Pompadour’s spa. No wonder I couldn’t remember anything
.

Marlo was mesmerized by the soothing liquid inside the pendant. It was the only thing that seemed real here, a glimmer of truth in this circus of lies. Somehow, just holding it in her palm pushed out the noise crowding her mind, all the chatter left there by the bitter bureaucrats and antagonizing authority figures populating her so-called afterlife. The pendant made her feel like a once-living bar of Ivory Soap: 99.44 percent pure, give or take a few dozen percentage points.

The silver liquid inside seemed familiar in some hazy way, Marlo thought. It looked kind of like the stuff the PODs—the Phantoms of the Dispossessed—collected back … back … 
in Rapacia. Yes, that’s where I’ve seen it
, she thought as the murk in her mind thinned.
Like the stuff dribbling from the tubes in …

“The R & D lab!”
Marlo whispered.

Marlo wiped away a layer of disgusting, wriggling lice and stuffed the pendant in her pocket. The second
the pendant touched any of the little white lice, they immediately curled up, shriveled, and burned away, scattering to the ground like bits of Cajun fried rice.

Barnum said the lice were fed with fibs
, she thought curiously,
which means that—if they’re dying—this stuff must be full of …
the truth!

Marlo looked back at her brother’s face in the mirror.

“I have the truth in my pocket,” Marlo murmured to Milton’s image. “I just wish you were here
—really
here—to help me figure out what the truth even
means
in a place like Fibble!”

CERBERUS GROWLED IN
a three-part harmony, heavy on the
harm
. It was rare that his three heads agreed on anything. If you were to serve him a bowl of porridge, for instance, one head would find it too cold, the other head too hot, and the third head would bite your face off for having the audacity to serve it porridge in the first place. In this peculiar case, though, all three heads agreed to be disagreeable.

“There, there, my whiddle stack of whuffles all covered in syrup!” Bea “Elsa” Bubb cooed in a sickening gush of treacle that threatened all diabetic demons within a mile radius. “Why so tense? Do you need me to wub your whiddle footie pads?”

Cerberus bounded off the Principal of Darkness’s lap. His distress would not be allayed by a footie massage, even the kind with the imported baby dolphin oil.
Something familiar and tormenting tickled his six nostrils before taunting the back of his throat. The nagging musk of lost prey. Cerberus coiled himself in front of the door to the principal’s not-so-secret lair, his wet snouts flaring between the gaps of its rotten Foul Weather Stripping.

Principal Bubb rose from her chair, smoothing her new genuine Heckifino skirt.

“Fine, my bitter sweetums,” she said as she walked from her corn chowder–colored Barfolounger toward her desk. “Mommy’s not feeling her beast either. There’s something afoot, and it stinks.”

The principal sat down behind her imposing mahogany desk strewn with an assortment of official documents, less-than-official documents, definitely unofficial documents, and bags of empty Assaulted Unicorn chips. She sighed as she reread her Notice of Double-Secret Probation.