Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (18 page)

I’m … an awful person.… I’ve hurt so many people.… I deserve to be down here in Heck. And I’m not even—

Suddenly, Marlo could feel her soul wriggling inside of her body—struggling in fear and agony—as if it were being torn away.

—me! I’m a lie
!

With that, Marlo’s consciousness—like a guttering candle—was snuffed out.

Moments later, the sound of booming voices roused Marlo from unconsciousness.

“Yo ho ho!” two female voices squawked. “It’s ARGH: dropping anchor in yer eardrums once again. I’m Scurvacious Dee—”

“And I’m Shabby Bloomers,” a salty-throated woman chimed in.

“And she ain’t kidding, folks.… Next up, we have another
smash hit from the Truthador that’ll surely get you rockin’ the plank! Here he is with ‘Terranean Eviction Blues’!”

The door of the Box of Bitter Truth opened. Marlo shielded her tear-swollen eyes from the glare. Zane scooped her up and dragged her out onto the sawdust.

The Big Top resounded with the sound of crackling static.

“Can’t someone do something about that?!” Vice Principal Barnum yelled as Tom Thumb and the shrimp demons milled around in confusion, clapping their ears. Marlo took in the scene with groggy detachment, as if Fibble’s Big Top was a ginormous dryer and everyone in it simply articles of brightly colored clothing just spinning and spinning and spinning.…

Marlo heard a weird woody scream, a muffled wail coming from all around her. She noticed the wooden supports of the Big Top tent contracting, causing the canvas to scrunch and crinkle. Barnum, his face slick with the oily sheen of worry, began whispering to the major support beams bracing the tent. The posts moaned as they returned to their original length.

Marlo shivered and tilted her aching head, still sore on the inside from her blunt truth bludgeoning.
On the side of the box was a pressure meter, with the red needle hovering between Honesty and Cold, Bitter Truth.

“Milton,” Zane whispered, “let’s sneak you to the back of the grandstands before Barnum gets wise.”

Marlo smiled faintly.

“That should take a while,” she murmured as Zane slung his arm around her and led her up the bleachers.

Vice Principal Barnum scanned the ring, his bulging eyes settling on a small, red cannon.

“Okay, put some shrimp demons in the cannon and aim them at the speakers.…”

Marlo and Zane climbed to the top of the grandstands. The wooden beams behind the benches creaked violently. Marlo leaned against the back of the Big Top as Barnum wedged wriggling shrimp demons into the cannon. Marlo examined the contracting wood, stained with splotches resembling screaming faces. At the bottom of each beam, Marlo noted a name burned into the wood. She knelt down to read it.

“Geppetto Lumber Company?” Marlo murmured as she read the branded inscription. “Geppetto, as in Pinocchio’s dad?”

With each word the Truthador sang, the wooden beams strained, contracting smaller and smaller.

“The Truthador,” Marlo mumbled. “The Truth!”

And in that instant, Marlo knew
exactly
how to escape from Fibble to—hopefully—rescue Lucky from the Kennels. Grinning madly, she teetered back to Zane and tapped him on the shoulder.

“How would you like to get out of this place?” she said, her brother’s fingers reflexively pushing nonexistent glasses up his nose.
“Honest.”

ANNUBIS AND THE
dogs padded across the crinkling newspapered no-man’s-land of Stay! toward the low-lying fortress in the distance. The structure was a massive, nine-sided pen reinforced with heavy-duty steel bars. Atop the nine-foot walls was a parapet of scaffolding, broken up every nine feet by a pair of bronzed pets: a house cat and a watchdog. Inside the enclosure were two spherical portals that shimmered and crackled like great balls of invisible fire. These rounded, energetic doorways, according to the dogs, allowed a creature entry from any side to cross through to their specific destination.

If Annubis squinted his eyes just right, he could make out blurry images inside the humming, sputtering spheres. The doorway on the left held a muddled view of crates—thousands and thousands of them—stacked
willy-nilly into towering walls set upon acres of cracked, stained concrete.

“The Kennels,” Annubis muttered with dread as he fixed his gaze upon the doorway on the right, revealing warped, wavering images of a gorgeous, expansive ranch drenched in sun-soaked splendor.

“The Really Big Farm!” he said with an uncontrollable grin. “Now it’s just a question of opening the gates—”

An explosive chorus of caws rent the air. The unmistakable sound of liquid splashing on newspaper followed shortly thereafter.

“Pardonnez-moi,”
Faux Paw apologized through his Speak & Spell.

Annubis could now see, perched atop the walls, nine oversized crows peering out across Stay! with their beady, incomprehensibly black eyes. Annubis turned to Virginia Woof, who was panting anxiously by his side.

“Crows,”
Annubis said with irritation. “How come none of you thought it important to mention the presence of nine freakishly large crows?”

Virginia Woof sat down on her haunches, her back legs splayed ladylike to one side. She grabbed the stylus dangling from her collar and jabbed a message into her Speak & Spell.

“Scarecrows,”
she replied in the toy’s flat, digitized voice. “To be honest, never thought cats let us get this far.”

“Scarecrows?”

“Guard Globeways. Many-sided portals, ideal for
transport struggling animals. Ever try herd cats? Globeways make easier for Scarecrows, virtually scratch-free.”

The imposing crows spread out their wings until they formed a wall of gleaming black feathers.

“Caw!”

Annubis’s eyes grew wet as he stared longingly into the rotating spheres beyond the fence, one of which led to his wife and daughter.

“Well, we stand no chance vanquishing them through force … especially since none of us are bird dogs,” Annubis commented with resignation. “So I suppose I’ll just have to reason with them.”

Annubis smoothed out his shimmering white tunic. Virginia Woof whined and gently nipped at his ankle.

“Careful,” the terrier tapped. “Crows be murder.”

Annubis nodded and approached the fortress. The Scarecrows paced along the parapet nervously, hunching their shoulders and puffing their crest feathers, and turned their backs. He stood at the front by the latched gate, took in a deep breath, and addressed the birds.

“Good day, good crows … 
Scarecrows
, forgive me,” Annubis declared in a smooth, diplomatic tone. “Might I speak with—”

The dog god was barraged by a hot salvo of viscous white crow droppings, accompanied by a cacophony of caws. The crows shuffled about their roosts with their tail feathers quivering in satisfaction.

Annubis, stiff with mortification, smeared clumps of
thick, oily excrement from his face. The dog god at least had got his answer: there would be no reasoning with these sometimes predatory, sometimes scavenging, all-the-time intimidating birds. He saw the pack of dogs retreat behind a wall of old yellowed newspaper stacks.

A muffled clutter of mews filled the stale, still air around them. In the distance, a roving mass of cats came, their tails twitching in their maddening, secret cat language.

The dog god shook himself alert, as one should never have a fuzzy head
inside
when dealing with cats. He trotted stealthily to the newspaper wall.

“Chairman Meow, Claude Yereyesout, Hannibal Lickter, Felonious Mouse-de-meaner, and … 
Lulu,
” Virginia Woof said as she scrutinized the front line of shabby, filthy, snaggletoothed felines. “Those are some bad, bad kitties.”

Suddenly, parting the sinewy sea of cats with his three noses, came Cerberus, who pranced to the front of the ragged team of felines, and drank in the feast of smells around him.

Annubis’s jaw dropped.

“Cerberus!” he gasped in shock. He rubbed the crown of his sleek head. “Where that hound of Heck goes, Bubb is sure to follow,” he added miserably. “Figures that treacherous, disloyal lapdog would side with the cats.”

Napoleon Bone-apart scratched and barked.

“Shhh!” Annubis scolded.

The Italian greyhound whimpered and scratched at the newspapers beneath him. Virginia Woof cocked her ears as she tentatively pawed the hole Napoleon Bone-apart had started. The ground beneath the shredded newspaper was softer than she had expected, a mixture of sawdust clumps and cedar shavings.

Annubis’s tail waggled beneath his tunic as he examined the terrier’s freshly dug hole—already a foot deep—then followed with his eyes to the inside of the fortress.

“You are in no way obliged to help me further,” Annubis said. “I don’t wish to put you and the pack in harm’s way.”

Virginia Woof stopped digging, her muzzle clumped with sawdust.

“In Noah’s absence, you closest thing to a master,” she said, working the Speak & Spell with difficulty in the cramped space. “We no roll over, lie down, and play dead while one of own in need.”

As it is physically impossible to not crave cheese puffs at the sight of someone eating cheese puffs, the other dogs were incapable of standing idly by as one of their pack joyously dug fresh earth. Together, the dogs made quick work of the hole, soon an expansive tunnel. Even the noble dog god could not resist the lure of soil sifting and tickling between his claws. Annubis just hoped, as he dug his way in the dark, moist soil beneath Stay! that he and his adopted pack would strike pay dirt.

* * *

Loose clumps of compressed cedar shavings fell down the dog god’s back. He could see faint light trickling through the ceiling of the tunnel. Annubis stuck his slender nose up through a small opening and inhaled deeply. The sharp tang of crow droppings was powerful. Peeking through the odor were faint traces of dog, cat, and other domestic mammal musks, along with the occasional canine crazy-making scent of squirrel. Annubis cautiously peered past the lip of the newly dug hole.

The energetic portals leading to the Kennels and the Really Big Farm were only a few yards away. Beyond, up on the parapets, the crows were perched, facing out with agitated interest at the cats languidly swarmed outside the fortress.

Annubis hoisted himself out of the hole and sprinted on all fours toward the sputtering, spherical portal leading to the Kennels. Virginia Woof hopped out and trotted at his heels.

The sensation of passing through the Globeway was, to Annubis, like running through an electric, full-body flea comb. Annubis skidded across the concrete floor and slammed against a wall of metal crates that stretched above, nearly touching the ceiling of flickering fluorescent tubes. The pungent odor of animal despair and the harsh, relentless din of whines, meows, and barks knocked the wind out of Annubis as he crumpled to the floor.

“No creature … no matter how they behaved while living … deserves to be treated … like this!” he snarled in between labored breaths. “Forgotten … 
furever
 …”

Annubis’s long, droopy ears pricked at a sound poking through the wall of miserable noise. A yap. And this yap held with it a special timbre to Annubis, a precise flavor unique in all the universe.

“Kebauet!” Annubis yelped as he sprung to his feet.

The yapping gained in urgency and intensity.

Annubis cocked his ears, separating yelps from bays, until he isolated his daughter’s plea for help.

“Paw-paw,” she whimpered from twenty crates above.

“Nub-nub?” a weak, crumpled velvet voice queried from a nearby crate. “Am I … dreaming? My legs aren’t twitching.…”

“Anput!” Annubis howled with longing. “I’m coming.” The dog god darted his head from side to side, searching for some way to reach his family.

“I apologize, my fellow creatures,” he said as he began assembling stray crates into a sort of stairway, leading him as close as possible to his wife and daughter.

Virginia Woof bit into the wire mesh of the cages and dragged them to Annubis, one by one, with feisty heaves and jerks.

“Thank you, my friend,” Annubis said gratefully as he hoisted the cage of a hissing tabby to the top of the ad hoc stairwell. The dog god clambered up the steep, gently
swaying tower of crates until he could just touch, by fully extending his long, graceful limbs, the cage of his beloved daughter. He felt the pink tickle of her tongue.

“We knew you’d come!” yapped the odd-looking girl, with her glossy gray coat and dark pointed ears. Annubis wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his paw-hand.

“Of course, my pup,” he said as he strained to lift her latch. He unclasped the rusty cage door and Kebauet leapt into her father’s arms. Annubis hugged her close before, reluctantly, lowering her down to a ledge of crates five feet above the floor.