Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (2 page)

Honest
.

BEING A BOY
feels really weird
, Marlo thought as she dangled her brother’s gross feet off the backseat of the stagecoach taking her to Fibble, the circle of Heck for kids who lie. Her borrowed body felt alternately simpler and more complicated—frustrating in its sheer, dull straightforwardness.
Just like boys
, she reflected. Marlo tried her best not to overanalyze the skin she
ached
to jump out of: just thinking about being her younger brother, Milton—at least on the outside—made her skin crawl. Or his.
Whatever
.

Marlo was still fuzzy on the particulars of her current situation, but flashes of what had happened, and who she
truly
was, floated to the top of her brain like the cryptic messages of a Magic 8 Ball. She remembered graduating from Madame Pompadour’s Infernship program and becoming Satan’s Girl Friday the Thirteenth.
Then she remembered Milton—though for some reason, at the time, she’d had no idea that the little twerp hopping around in his
Stargate Atlantis
underwear
was
her brother—storming the Surly Gates of h-e-double-hockey-sticks with Annubis, the dog god, and dragging her from her Deceptionist post to the Break Down Room with Principal Bubb and her demon guards in hot pursuit, before drugging her with a moldy cheese sandwich.

It was here that things got a little strange.

When Marlo had come to, she hadn’t felt quite … 
herself
. Annubis had once presided over Heck’s Assessment Chamber, where souls were weighed on the Scales of Justice, so he had the power to pluck people’s spiritual essence from their bodies with his bare paws.
He must have switched Milton’s soul with mine
, Marlo presumed. To what end, Marlo could not be sure. But as she dredged the sludgy slough of her mind—still yawning and stretching from its peculiar nap—Marlo knew that her little brother was essentially a good kid, so whatever Milton’s specific intent, his heart was sure to be in the right place (even if his soul
wasn’t
). Marlo also knew that Milton had an ulcer, not because of any prior knowledge as his sister, but because of the waves of pain radiating from the pit of Milton’s stomach.

The man sitting across from her in the musty stagecoach coughed. He leered at her with a freaky smirk: a knowing grin that was totally one-sided.

“How long are we going to play this little game?” the old, dough-faced man said as he ran his fingers through his slicked-back hair. Marlo swallowed down the bile that kept creeping up her throat.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” she replied in her brother’s squeaky voice. “And I’m not afraid of anything.”

The man laughed mirthlessly.

“You could have fooled me,” he said, training his beady black eyes on Marlo. “You seemed plenty afraid back in Limbo.”

Her stomach suddenly felt as if it housed an unchaperoned, all-ages dance club.
He must have been some teacher in Limbo
, Marlo speculated.
One of
Milton’s
teachers … and that’s who he thinks I am, naturally, because that’s who I am. But I can’t blow my cover, or else I’ll screw up whatever Milton has planned
.

“Yeah, of course I remember you … 
sir,
” Marlo replied. “You were my, um, teacher. Back in Limbo.”

The stagecoach shuddered. The hoofbeats of the Night Mares pulling the carriage clattered uncertainly before regaining their confident rhythm.

The man squinted so hard at Marlo that it looked as if the bags beneath his eyes would burst.

“What’s my name, then?” he asked, suspiciously, as he leaned in close to Marlo and stared into her borrowed hazel eyes.

“What, did you forget?” Marlo replied, using her
patent-pending “tact-evasion” technique. “Didn’t your momma sew it in the lining of your jacket?”

“I can tell you’re covering up something,” the man spat back. “I can see it in your—”

Suddenly, the stagecoach bumped and shook so violently that the old man slammed his head into the top of the carriage.

“Oww!” he yelped as the demon driver—a swollen, bespectacled creature with goat horns and a white goatee growing around his orange duck bill—leaned into the carriage.

“Are you injured, Mr. Nixon?” the demon quacked. “I mean, Mr. President, sir.”

Mr. Nixon rubbed the swirling slick of hair atop his head.

“Pardon me,
Mr. Nixon
?” Marlo said, making Milton’s voice smugger than it had ever sounded before. “You were saying that you saw something in my
oww
?”

Mr. Nixon’s ashen face flushed red.

“I pardon no one!
I’m
the one that gets pardoned!”

The stagecoach fishtailed wildly, sending Marlo and Mr. Nixon crashing to the floor. The carriage skidded to a stop. Marlo crawled up off the floor and gazed out the window.

They were on the edge of a vast, frozen mound of water that shimmered weakly beneath the filmy crust. The swollen sea of frost resembled a massive Hostess Sno Ball dipped in crystal. Studding the distended icy
knoll were clumps of scraggly bushes that—when rustled by the breeze—almost seemed to … 
talk
. What they said, Marlo couldn’t make out. It just sounded like yammering nonsense.

Marlo pushed open the door and hopped onto the ice, steadying herself with the carriage. The horizon was clogged with a thick, gently seething bank of sparkling pea-soup smoke. The glimmering, billowing murk spewed from a towering structure in the distance perched atop the summit of the swollen, frozen sea.

Through a fleeting crack in the clouds Marlo could see that the structure was a cluster of grand, gaudy tents propped up on massive, swaying stilts. The wound in the cloud bank quickly healed, leaving Marlo dazzled, disoriented, and wanting to disgorge whatever her brother had last eaten all over his freaky skinny-long feet.

Mr. Nixon moaned as he rose from the floor. He crouched through the open stagecoach door, waving “V” for victory signs at the nonexistent crowd that roared in his mind, and joined Marlo. The demon driver waddled over to them, handing the ex-president a thermos.

“Thank you, doctor,” Mr. Nixon replied as he twisted the top.

Marlo gently patted her stomach, as if it were a nervous stallion she was trying to calm.

“Doctor?” she repeated.

“Yes, Dr. Brinkley,” Mr. Nixon continued as the
demon shuffled to his team of Night Mares. “License revoked many, many times. Which explains his current condition.”

Marlo studied the ducklike doctor.

“The big bill?” she enquired. “You know, because doctors charge too much?”

Mr. Nixon tilted the thermos but nothing came out.

“No, because he was a quack,” the old man replied as he spanked the bottom of the empty thermos.

The duck demon patted the ice and grit from his white-feathered hands as he tightened his horses’ bridles.

“The team is ready,” Dr. Brinkley said in an odd, duckish drawl. “I trust they’ll find the least perilous path.”

Marlo scowled as she noted the team shifting uneasily on the ice.

“Find the path?” she said. “Haven’t you been to Fibble before?”

The duck demon’s feathers ruffled in the wind.

“No, young man, I haven’t. Snivel is my customary route. The usual driver, Baron Munchausen, called in ill today … something about contracting swine flu from a pork chop, which—even as a fraudulent practitioner of medicine—I don’t believe is—”

“Maybe we should just walk the rest of the way,” Marlo said as the wind tickled the fronds of the ragged brown shrubs, their leaves rubbing against one another
in a murmuring chorus that sounded a lot like
“walk the rest of the way.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that, from what I’ve been told,” the duck demon clucked. “This is the Falla Sea. It is, by definition, misleading and unsound. My Night Mares, though, can beat a safe path around the bushwas.”

“Those creepy talking bushes?” Marlo asked as she stared out, mesmerized, at the churning clouds of vapor spilling out across the horizon.

“Bushwas,”
Dr. Brinkley repeated as he rubbed clean his round spectacles. “To our ears, they spew mocking, befuddling gibberish, meant to lead one astray—which can be especially harmful in an inhospitable place such as this. My Night Mares have a peculiar horse sense that’ll pull us through. They won’t be flustered by any sidetracking shrubs.”

Marlo shrugged, and she and Mr. Nixon climbed back into the black stagecoach. As the carriage lurched across the Falla Sea—the bushwas blathering outside and the Night Mares whickering amongst themselves—Marlo wondered why the dead president sitting across from her had been transferred from Limbo.

“So what gives?” Marlo asked, as blunt as a pair of scissors in a preschool. “Why are you being sent to Fibble?”

Mr. Nixon stared down his ski slope of a nose at
Marlo. “I remember you as being more polite … nice and nervous, just like I like ’em,” he grumbled.

He glared at Marlo’s primly crossed legs. “Though Heck has also, strangely, made you more
demure
, by the looks of it.”

Marlo looked down at her legs and quickly uncrossed them. She kept them apart as if she were cradling a watermelon between her knees.

“You’re dodging the question, Mr. Nixon,” she replied. “Bubb sent you to spy on me, right?”

Mr. Nixon sighed with resignation.

“Yes and no,” he said, his beady black eyes darting nervously about the carriage’s interior. “Yes, she did, and no, she didn’t ask me to
not
spy on you. But I’m also here to act as a demotivational speaker—giving workshops to the faculty on
The Ins and Outs of Getting In and Out of Things, How to Lie Through False Teeth
, and my
Gettin’ Shifty wid It: Go from Educator to Equivocator in Three Easy Steps
program.”

The stagecoach stopped.

“We’re here,” Dr. Brinkley quacked dismally as he hopped off the driver’s box and made his way to the door.

Marlo and Mr. Nixon clambered out of the carriage, stepping tentatively down onto the edge of the Falla Sea. They were instantly engulfed by a gargantuan shadow. Marlo looked up.

Hovering above her was, for all appearances, a
ginormous, glittering clown head, smiling in that gruesomely gleeful way that clowns do.
Why is it
, Marlo thought,
that the happier a clown is, the sadder everyone else is around it
?

Marlo shivered as she wrapped her brother’s skinny arms around her. Marlo was—in general—fearless to a fault. Many faults, actually. But somehow an unease surrounding circus performers had slunk into the big, bad big top of her subconscious.

Fibble just
had
to be a circus
, she thought.
With
clowns.
The face paint … the wigs … and those wicked long shoes …

The frightening, monstrous head, thankfully, was just a floating mass of sparkling gas streaming from the tip of one of three circus tents towering over Marlo, Mr. Nixon, and Dr. Brinkley. The clown head was smeared briefly into twinkling vapor by a strong gust of hot wind, releasing Marlo’s eyes from their horrific hostage situation.

The trio of tents—merrily banded as if sheathed in enormous sheets of Fruit Stripe gum—sat upon a great wooden platform forty feet above Marlo’s head. The circus shantytown was supported by a wide circle of gently swaying stilts that creaked in the wind … almost screaming, Marlo thought, as her gaze traveled down the spindly stilts to the garish Gates of Fibble.

Why the gates to Fibble were actually forty feet directly
below
Fibble, planted on the frozen Falla Sea,
baffled Marlo. The three new arrivals walked past the rim of stilts bracing the circus above and toward the gates, located in the middle of Fibble’s shadow. The stilts were made of a light brownish wood that looked like dozens of little anguished faces. Marlo shuddered.

It’s just my mind—or Milton’s—playing tricks on me, that’s all
, Marlo thought as she approached the gates, a flickering rainbow of long neon bars.
Just like when you look at clouds and think you see faces and shapes
. Marlo looked up at the clown cloud as it grinned malevolently down on her at the edge of Fibble’s wooden platform.
Okay, maybe it’s
not
like that, but how bad can a place be with a rainbow for a gate? I mean, what’s more genuinely cheerful than a rainbow
?

The gates were part of a circular fence, made of crisscrossed iron slats, that girded a small, enclosed area. Welded to the top of the arch—beneath a marquis reading
FIBBLE
! as if the circle was the latest blockbuster film—were a metal rooster and a cow. Marlo scrunched up her brother’s face.

“I don’t get the rooster and the cow,” she said to no one in particular, never completely taking her eyes off the malevolent clown head overhead.

“It’s a cock and bull, actually,” the duck demon said, waddling to her side with Mr. Nixon’s bags.

Marlo stared at Dr. Brinkley, still not getting it.

“Like a cock-and-bull story,” Mr. Nixon clarified. “You know … malarkey. A pile of cock-a-doodle-doo. Don’t you know that old phrase?”