Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (14 page)

“This weird liquid,” Marlo said. “I’ve seen it before.” She pulled the pendant out from beneath her pajama top. Though Marlo didn’t completely trust the untrustworthy doctor, he was at least no friend to the vice principal. Dr. Brinkley’s beady, bespectacled eyes widened at the sight of the gurgling pendant.

“Where did you ever procure this?” he said. “It’s so pure.”

Marlo shook her head.

“To tell you the truth, I really don’t know.”

The pendant hanging from Marlo’s hand began to, almost magnetically, gravitate toward the beaker of shimmering fluid until it touched the glass, as if to kiss a reunited friend.

“The truth,”
she muttered. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she continued, igniting her brother’s eyes with the spark of realization. “
This stuff is truth
. And the little white lice. They feed on fibs and can’t stomach the truth. It gives them full-on, full-body indigestion. Right?”

Dr. Brinkley rubbed his goatee and nodded.

“Exactly, Mr. Fauster,” he replied with a smirk. “Distilled truth. The scarcest substance in the Underworld. Which is why Mr. Barnum has me trapped here, perfecting his personal formula. He calls it
liedocaine.
”

“Why would you use pure truth to make something called
lie
docaine?”

“There is always a grain of truth in the most effective lies,” Dr. Brinkley explained. “After all, what is a lie if not measured against the truth? It’s how an expertly crafted distortion makes it past the gateway of your frontal lobe. So liedocaine is a delicate and potentially volatile mixture of lies with trace amounts of truth. Just a
touch
so that it can be swallowed whole yet not
too
much or else it rips itself apart on a molecular level …”

Dr. Brinkley considered Marlo, probing her eyes so deeply that it made Marlo swallow with nervousness. He grabbed one of the beakers of liquid truth and held it to Marlo’s face.

“I seem to be explaining an awful lot of Mr. Barnum’s work to someone who is supposedly acting on his behalf,” the doctor said. “I suspect, perhaps, that you are not being completely up-front with me, so I am going to ask you a simple question.…”

Please don’t ask me if I am really
me
hiding out inside of my brother’s body
, Marlo fretted as she squinched up her eyes, hoping to avoid detection.

“Are you
truly
working for the vice principal?” the fowl doctor posed.

“Of course I am—” Marlo blurted out as the liquid within the beaker roiled with distress. Marlo eyed the gurgling liquid and sighed. “—not,” she added. The liquid truth settled, resuming its usual calm, billowing motion.

Satisfied, Dr. Brinkley set the beaker back atop the counter.

“Out with it then, young man,” he said, crossing his legs.

Marlo scowled at the beaker as if it were a friend that had betrayed her. She’d have to come clean, or at least splash some water on the truth.

“I overheard the vice principal talking,” Marlo said, trying to push the cuticles back on her brother’s nails, “and he mentioned something about a Humdinger—”

“Humbugger,” the duck demon corrected. “It’s the machine that allows him to create, distort, amplify, and transmit illusions—such as his guard clown outside the gates.”

“The point is, he’s figured out some way of beaming his illusions to the Surface.”

“The Surface?!” Dr. Brinkley quacked. “That’s impossible! The Transdimensional Power Grid doesn’t grant access back up, unless cleared by the Galactic Order Department in cases of birth, rebirth, possession, and the occasional April Fool’s prank.”

“Well, my brother … I mean,
oh brother,
” Marlo faltered, her eyes darting to the beaker of truth as it birthed a herd of confused bubbles. “I was able to do it … somehow.”

“True,” the doctor said with a nod.

“The thing is, you are—whether you know it or not—helping him to spread some nasty viral marketing thingie up on the Surface. Something he said would seem real … and, I’m guessing—considering the source—real
bad
.”

Dr. Brinkley’s feathers ruffled as his head hung low.

“He would have told me,” the doctor said sadly. “After my team of Night Mares were … were”—the doctor sniffed back a tear—“
flattened
by Fibble, he offered me a position as a partner.”

Marlo scooted her chair closer to the doctor until they were almost knee-to-knee.

“And you believed him?”
she asked. “A man who made his living, and apparently his dying, too, telling the biggest, most fantastic lies imaginable?”

Dr. Brinkley absentmindedly picked at the webbing
between his fingers as he stared at beakers of burbling liquid truth.

“My Night Mares,”
he muttered.

Marlo heard stirring outside the door. She padded across the floor and peered out the window. The chameleon guards, though still unconscious, were coming to. Their luminous white skin gradually emulated the grimy yellow-orange sawdust strewn across the floor.

“Your Night Mares,” Marlo repeated as her mind chewed on a faint idea that suddenly burst in her head like a Blow Pop. She turned to face the doleful duck.

“We can’t believe anything around here,” she said. “So let’s check out the Big Top to see for
ourselves
if your horsies really
are
today’s special at the International House of Pony Pancakes … and maybe I-hop the next stagecoach out of Fibble.”

Dr. Brinkley fluttered to the door as Marlo crept out into the empty-save-for-several-semiconcious-lizards hallway. The two snuck down the dim, smoky corridor, hugging the drywalled walls, until they reached the Big Top.

Marlo scanned the less-than-grandstands, shrouded in clots of shadow, and grabbed the doctor’s hand.

“C’mon,” she said before taking her hand back and grimacing. “
Eww …
clammy.”

“Shhh!” Dr. Brinkley said as he pointed to the Feejee Mermaid hung on the wall, asleep, sucking in air through its dried-up sliver of a nose and snoring out
through its gills. Scattered across the seats were sleeping shrimp demons and Tom Thumb—his tiny top hat covering his eyes.

Marlo nodded. She crouched down and scooted toward the center of the ring, where a large hoop framing a sheet of paper painted like a bull’s-eye lay on the ground. She waved the doctor over. They slunk down at the target’s edge, then crawled to the center on their bellies. Marlo began pounding the thick paper.

“Are you insane?” Dr. Brinkley hissed. Marlo, on her stomach in the middle of a darkened circus talking to a duck, had to admit that this was a valid question. “We’ll tear right through and join my flat little foals,” the doctor explained.

Marlo swallowed as she contemplated plummeting several hundred feet to the frozen Falla Sea.

“Understood,” she whispered as she carefully pressed her fingers into the paper. Unfortunately, Milton’s nails weren’t chewed into sharp points like hers, but—by twisting her fingers—Marlo was able to drill two holes into the bull’s-eye. She peered through the ragged punctures. Marlo gasped at the distance between her and the rugged ground below.

The two demon guards, wearing their scary brass metal masks, sat inside the Gates of Fibble at the center of the brightly colored concentric rings. Marlo strained to see beyond the gates until there, at the edge of sight,
she saw a pair of gleaming black horses, snorting and stomping their hooves in the cold.

“Guess what?” Marlo smiled. “Mr. Pants-on-fire is a total liar. See for yourself.”

She rolled away to let Dr. Brinkley take a gander.

“Shuck and Jive!” he exclaimed. “My Night Mares are alive!”

The Feejee Mermaid stirred, giving its hurdy-gurdy a sharp squeeze before returning back to sleep. Marlo crept close to the doctor.

“That means if we can get
down
, we can get
out,
” she whispered. “It’s just a question of … um,
down-and-out
. But before we vamoose-and-squirrel out of here, we do a number on the vice principal’s lab so he can’t spread his junky ads and freaky-deeky products up on the Surface—as if there’s even any
room
for more junky ads and freaky-deeky products up there. So … are you with me?”

The edges of Dr. Brinkley’s bill curled up into a smile as he tore his gaze away from the eye holes.

“If I was found out by Mr. Barnum, I’m afraid I’d be one dead duck,” he whispered. “We must work in stealth, and be extra careful not to draw attention to ourselves.”

With that, a thundering bell tolled and the Big Top flooded with light.

“Quack!”

“Quick!” Marlo yelped.

“Quack?”

“The morning bell!” Marlo clarified as the sleeping shrimps awoke. “Let’s go!”

Marlo and Dr. Brinkley raced out of the Big Top, leaving an incriminating cloud of sawdust behind them, and entered the main Classroom and Boarding tent. Above them on the exposed second level, grumbling boys emerged sleepily from their bunks.

“You should get back to the lab,” Marlo panted as fresh glitter-smoke—otherwise known as, Marlo now knew,
liedocaine
—wafted down upon them. “I’ll drop by tonight.”

Dr. Brinkley skipped down the hallway, delighted at the prospect of being free as a bird, even if that meant running a-waterfowl of Barnum. Marlo dashed to the ladder leading to the bunks.

“What do you think
you’re
doing this morning?”
boomed the vice principal from behind her. “Actually, save your excuses … I know where you’ve been, what you’ve done—” He stopped suddenly, then added with a wretched cackle, “and
where you’re going
!”

MILTON COULD ONLY
catch brief glimpses of the man behind the camera—fleeting, garbled reflections caught in a crystal mug brimming with some steaming elixir. The mysterious figure sat at an immaculate marble table cluttered with manila envelopes and videocassettes.

Milton, nestled inside the cramped, multiscreened tomb of the Vidiot Box, examined the manila envelope in which this latest videocassette had arrived. There, just above the address, was a tiny, nearly imperceptible lens. Milton looked back up at the screen.

The image of the marble table, stacks of handwritten notes, envelopes, and swaying tendrils of burning incense blinked.

A contact lens camera
! Milton thought.
Like the one Principal Bubb put in Cerberus’s eye back in Limbo to track us! That’s how he’s able to record everything he does
.