Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (4 page)

Milton sighed as he wadded up the Penta-gram and tore open the next.

Milton furrowed his brows, which—he had recently realized—his sister plucked on a regular basis.

“But I thought Satan already had URN: the Underworld Retribution Network?” Milton said to Mr. Welles, who was leaning against the desk and unwittingly pressing it into Milton’s chest. “Why does he need another television network?”

Mr. Welles smiled around his fat, smoldering cigar.

“Ah, yes, but T.H.E.E.N.D. goes straight to the top!” he said with a sly purr. “Or the Surface, I should say …”

“The Surface?!” Milton yelped. “Satan is broadcasting to the
Surface
?”

Mr. Welles grinned.

“Yes … Satan is ready for prime time,” he snorted, belching clouds of sickening smoke. “A genius idea if I do say so myself! Those philistines upstairs are going to find out that Orson Welles, while dead, is very much alive … with creative fire and burning ambition!”

Mr. Welles continued. “Mysteriously, the Big Guy Downstairs found out about a way to pierce the Transdimensional Power Grid from beneath, sending transmissions from below
up above
. The key just seemed to fall into his lap from some unknown source. And while it’s all too easy to pierce the grid to arrive on this side, it’s quite something else to send information the other way … it’s like a catfish dog-paddling upstream—”

“I think you mean like a salmon swimming—”

“Regardless of the particular fish or stroke, it’s unprecedented. T.H.E.E.N.D. is not
just
a television network. It is a piece of sprawling theater—impervious to DVR, I might add. A collection of volatile, religious-themed shows that play off and directly against each other, creating a complex web of divisive controversy, pushing the buttons of their specific audiences as if they were on speed dial. The network is like an ensemble cast
of antagonistic programming, where each show has its own, unique role to play.…”

Mr. Welles flicked cigar ash to the ground.

“And the play’s the thing, after all,” he added, before pointing to a cast-iron hatch at the far end of the room with the tip of his cigar.

“… and
that
, young lady, will be your playpen for the next month or so.…”

Milton swallowed as he eyed the windowless metal door edged with steel bolts.

Just when we thought TV couldn’t get any worse
, Milton reflected,
along comes the devil to lower the bar … all the way down to h-e-double-hockey-sticks
.

MARLO AND THE
half-dozen boys that had been waiting in the grandstands squeezed into a red-and-yellow clown car. A pasty-faced, shifty-eyed kid with brown stringy hair that hung in his face like a shredded curtain accidentally put his hand on Marlo’s knee.

“Watch it, Grabby,” she spat. “Keep those hands where I can see them.”

The boy’s pupils darted toward Marlo.

“What?” he said, puzzled.

Marlo realized that she was Milton—a lanky, grubby boy—and not a girl surrounded by lanky, grubby boys.

“Um … just joking,” she replied carefully. “The name is Milton Fauster.”

The boy held his hand out at his side like a little flipper, being that personal space was nonexistent in this stuffy, smelly clown car.

“Colby Hayden,” the boy said. “Youngest American astronaut. Ever. Died upon reentry after delivering puppies from a Soviet canine cosmonaut trapped aboard a Russian spy satellite as its orbit decayed. Luckily I’m also a veterinarian paramedic.”

“Right.”
Marlo nodded. “I think I read about that in
Deluded Dork
magazine.”

P. T. Barnum, pants still ablaze, hopped up on the hood of the clown car. Seconds later, a stooped, shrimp-like demon—a foot and a half tall in its rainbow-colored fright wig—dove into the car, scrambling atop a pile of broken toys, dismembered Barbie parts, and already-colored coloring books to reach the tiny steering wheel.

The vice principal swelled to dangerous life, a hot-air balloon buoyed by flammable gas in a lightning storm. “Okay, Scampi, now that all of our new guests have
finally
arrived,” he said, arching his bushy eyebrow Marlo’s way, “let us begin our spectacular tour!”

He signaled for Scampi to turn the key in the ignition.

“Welcome to Fibble, Heck’s very own Three-Ring Media Circus!” he barked through his tiny blue megaphone. “No bottles, cameras, or pictures of bottles or cameras, or tiny cameras in bottles,
please.
”

The car rumbled to life. Marlo could feel Milton’s body getting tight with claustrophobia, while the ache in her brother’s gut throbbed and thrummed like a big zit full of bees.

Thanks a lot, bro
, Marlo thought as the car lurched
forward.
At least
I
left my body in decent working order before you switched us
.

The car sped around the bright orange floor of the Big Top in tight circles, spinning faster and faster until it was balancing up on its two right-hand tires. With a sudden swerve and a puff of upturned sawdust, the car careened away, racing toward a solid brick wall.

An African American boy with a burgundy ski beanie sputtered in fear. “Mr. B-Barnum! What are we …? Where are we—?”

The portly vice principal dismissed the child with a wave.

“Please save your questions for after the tour, when they will have more than likely been forgotten,” he said, his chins jiggling with every bump.

“But we’re going to hit a wall!”

P. T. Barnum sneered. “
Hit a wall
? Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve only just started!”

The boy pulled his beanie down over his eyes as the clown car slammed into the brick barricade. Luckily for all concerned, the wall was simply another piece of expertly painted paper, just like the one at the center of the Big Top floor.

“Here in Fibble, you will be tutored in the fine art of advertising—the massaging of perception for fun and profit,” the vice principal shouted through his mini-megaphone. “That brick wall was your first lesson. Advertising is about creating problems that aren’t real so that they can be solved by otherwise pointless products.”

The clown car shot into another spacious circus tent. This one was lavishly decorated, like some kind of comic-book palace painted in bright yellows, reds, and blues, with ornate Middle Eastern archways, high ceilings, and flickering candelabras. The round tent was lined with rooms—classrooms, Marlo assumed—with an open, second level above crammed with bunks. As the gaudy decor whizzed past, Marlo realized that the walls were really just moldy old drywall, their garish paint job and fussy details mere projections cast upon them from above. The archways were plaster—Marlo could see chicken wire poking out from behind—the candles were sputtering electric bulbs, and the high ceilings simply mirrors (unless there was another crazy shrimp-driven clown car snaking up above Marlo’s head, she thought).

It was like speeding through a cheap set for a bad TV movie that people on a bad TV show would watch: a tacky, secondhand imitation.

Marlo’s quickening pulse slowly cleared her cloudy soul, as if her racing heart were carefully shaving the fuzz from a peach. Crisp images flashed in Marlo’s mind before quickly fading away: doing ridiculous errands for Satan as part of her Girl Friday the Thirteenth training, Madame Pompadour’s weird Me-Wow spa …

“Advertising is another way of saying
marketing,
” P. T. Barnum said as his twin trouser torches left trails of sooty smoke behind the speeding car. “Which is another way of saying
manipulation
. Which is another way of
saying
the expert sculpting of lies until they resemble a sucker’s
—I mean,
customer’s—unexpressed desires
, those irrational wants and foolish aspirations that gnaw upon our souls like a dog on a bone.”

The shrimp demon banked hard to the left, nearly falling off his seat of amputated dolls, while P. T. Barnum struggled to right himself.

“Careful, Scampi, or do I need to put another shrimp on the Barbies?”

The demon shook his rainbow-hued head and honked his squeaky red nose twice. Marlo took that to mean no.

Marlo stared at her brother’s hand, knuckles white as it clutched the side of the hightailing clown car. As her sense of herself sluggishly returned, Marlo’s immediate circumstances and surroundings seemed all the more hard to believe. It was as if fate had written her a Reality Check that threatened to bounce due to insufficient funds.

Shabby plaster fixtures and flickering projections of opulence streaked past as the clown car scooted toward a massive portrait of a young, slender, ludicrously idealized P. T. Barnum at the far end of the tent.

“In Fibble, we are all craftsmen, fashioning plush pillows of lies for a world sore from sitting upon the hard truth,” the real Barnum squawked through his megaphone.

Marlo grew dizzy. Fact and fiction blurred and commingled like a library floor after an earthquake. The
glazed faces of Marlo’s fellow Fibble freshmen crammed in the backseat like sardines—sardines driven by a jumbo shrimp with horn-nubs poking through its clown wig—confirmed that Marlo wasn’t the only one losing her grip on reality.

The lurid light dazzled. Barnum’s voice held her in its charismatic sway. The car’s steady cradle-like rocking lulled her into a pleasant stupor. Marlo felt drunk on hollow spectacle, disorienting motion, and a steady stream of blustering lies.

Marlo looked up above her and noticed a dome on the ceiling that oozed plumes of heavy, glittering smoke. The projected light danced and twinkled in the shifting haze.

That smoke must be clouding our minds
, she thought as she scrunched closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her eyelids, Marlo felt as if her soul was
driving
her brother … his body and mind were laid out before her like a dashboard, but her soul was in the driver’s seat. Somehow, Milton’s innate goodness seemed to help Marlo steer clear of whatever Barnum was trying to sell.

Marlo shook the sticky gossamer cobwebs from her head and opened her eyes. Unfortunately, this was the exact moment that the clown car was about to make impact with the vice principal’s larger-than-life-sized portrait. The boys squeezed their eyes shut, yet Marlo’s clarity revealed that the painting was merely another portal of flimsy paper.

The clown car tore through the vice principal’s pompous visage and careened into the third tent of Fibble’s Three-Ring Media Circus.

Marlo’s throat tightened. She tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Blue lasers inset in the ceiling sliced through the glittering smog, creating a maze of illusionary paths. Scampi the shrimp demon spun the steering wheel hard to the left, then the right, as he navigated the labyrinth of swirling smoke and light.

The vice principal chortled, like a fleshy frog having just snatched a juicy fly with its tongue. The paths of laser light converged as the car sped toward pitch-black nothingness.

“Advertising is like learning … a little is a dangerous thing. That’s why all you gifted young liars are here: to learn the power of puffery and to help propel the Greatest Show Under Earth to new heights of dizzying hype! And that, my prevaricating pupils, will be the most dangerous thing of all!”

The clown car hurtled through a wall of black velvet into a concrete hall strewn with castaway props and sets.