Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (15 page)

“Miss Fauster?” Mr. Welles said suddenly from behind Milton.

Milton’s nervous system blew a fuse. Startled, he instinctively slapped off the VCR.

“What are … 
were
you watching?” the director rumbled from the doorway of the Vidiot Box. Luckily, Milton thought with relief, Mr. Welles was an enormous round man who couldn’t fit through the box’s square-shaped hole.

“The Man Who Soldeth the World,”
Milton blurted out, lacking Marlo’s ability to instantly prevaricate. He warily eyed Mr. Welles’s reflection in the darkened television monitor.

“Oh … how was this latest installment?”

Milton was at a loss at how to proceed. He still didn’t know what to make of the disturbing show. If it
was
all true, why would the mysterious man confess his crime in the making? Did he believe that, if you made the truth so convoluted and ridiculous, no one would believe it? Should he confide in Mr. Welles—an unwitting costar in the show—or would that only make things
worse
, leaving Milton without any possible bargaining chip later on if he
had
actually uncovered some kind of conspiracy.…

“Miss Fauster, you’re doing it again … too much internal dialogue and not enough action.
Show
, don’t tell.…”

“Right,” Milton answered as he swiveled to face Mr. Welles. “It’s just that—”

Mr. Welles cleared his spacious throat, breaking up a family of phlegm globs.

“In any case, I need you to run an errand for me,” he said as he turned and walked away through a humming hive of technical assistants.

Milton tucked the videocassette into his bag and followed Mr. Welles to the Hellywood Hole stage. The first episode of
The Man Who Soldeth the World
had been cleared for broadcast, but Milton decided to hold on to the second episode for the time being.
A mindless errand will give me time to sort out what to do
, he thought, as he joined Mr. Welles at the edge of the stage, which had been transformed into a suburban New Jersey synagogue.

Mr. Welles scanned the tacky set, his sagging eyes shining with disgust.

“This is not a synagogue, but a sin of gawdy-awfulness!”

A nervous demon slicked back his seaweed-like hair. Mr. Welles yanked away the creature’s clipboard.

“Looks like we’ll have to reshoot
Queen of the Shebrews
, where Newark’s most stylish superheroine, Bat Mitzvah, is revealed by her archenemy, the Jersey Jokester,” he grumbled as he flipped through the production notes. “Did you manage to shoot
The Ethel Mormon Show
?”

“J-just the ‘When the Latter-Day Saints Come Marching In’ musical number,” the twitchy demon gurgled back, licking his pencil-thin mustache.

The hunched mail delivery demon chose that inopportune moment to push his cart to the side of the stage.

“Delivery for Mr. Welles—”

“Miss Fauster!” the director shouted.

Milton grabbed the familiar manila envelope: another episode of
The Man Who Soldeth the World
!

Mr. Welles sighed, his chest collapsing like a gargantuan soufflé at a heavy metal concert.

“Do what you can to make this set worthy of the Chosen People!” he barked, thrusting the clipboard back to his slimy, kelp-haired assistant director. “Sancho!” Mr. Welles yelled, raising his arm with a flourish. “Stage switch,
por favor.
”

Sancho nodded his sombreroed head and yanked the massive lever.

The immense rotating stage shifted, settling on a set with a grim backdrop of smoke, fire, and epic desolation. Four glamorous teenage girls on small prancing ponies clopped onto the stage, each wearing a unique glittery T-shirt: “Pestilence,” “War,” “Famine,” and “Death.” The girl on a sickly Camarillo pony, Pestilence, carried a buzzing jar in one hand. War, on a red-spotted apocalyptic Appaloosa, carried a sword. Famine, riding atop an emaciated horse a few cents short of a quarter pony, held a scale in one hand, while the skeletal Death
held a tin of something labeled
FINAL JUDGMINTS
^®
as she steadied her deathly pale Shetland.

Mr. Welles stooped down to grab a stack of scripts from a messenger bag leaning against the stage.

“Miss Fauster,” he grunted as he handed Milton the pile of scripts. Each was lacerated with so much red ink that it appeared to be bleeding.

“The Big Guy Downstairs had a lot of changes for the series finales. Especially the endings, which seem pretty … 
final
, if you ask me. Have the writers make the changes, immediately.”

Mr. Welles stalked over to the camera.

“This will just take a moment, ladies,” he told the actresses as he squinted through the viewfinder. “I’ve got to rescue
The Queen of the Shebrews
, so we’ll have to do this in one take … but I’d expect nothing less from the Four Pretty Ponies of the Apocalypse.”

Milton flipped through the scripts. As Mr. Welles had said, each of the cliff-hanger endings had been scribbled out and replaced with new conclusions, each one more dark, abrupt, and calamitous than the last.
Teenage Jesus
, for instance, was to have ended with the title character bailing on college and going on a European road trip to “find himself” instead. Now the devil wanted Teenage Jesus to be believed dead, only to return three days later to confront his malevolent Auntie Christ, bringing about the end of the world: a sweeping wave of destruction, led by four young divas releasing pestilence, war, famine, death, and …

Milton waved away a buzzing insect.

Locusts
.

“The Revelation will be televised,” Mr. Welles chuckled.
“Action!”

Milton looked up at the stage, swarming with ravenous flying locusts streaming out of Pestilence’s jar.

A surge of dread flooded Milton’s borrowed body. He sat down at the edge of the stage.

Satan and—

Milton looked down at the manila envelope containing the latest episode of
The Man Who Soldeth the World
.

—whoever are not only plotting the biggest reality TV event the world has ever seen
, Milton thought with a shiver,
but I get a creepy feeling they want it to be the last
.

“I KNOW WHERE
you’ve been, what you’ve done, and where you’re going …,” P. T. Barnum bellowed. “So what do you have to say for yourself?!”

The vice principal’s words were tranquilizer darts paralyzing Marlo, inside and out. Somehow P. T. Barnum had found her out, but how?

The boys filed out of the Totally Bunks above her on the second floor of the boarding tent, oblivious to Marlo’s predicament.

“Can’t he keep it down?” Colby whined as he changed out of his hair pajamas into his Fibble uniform. “I have sensitive ears, ever since I had that bat-blood transfusion.…”

Marlo drew in a deep breath and turned to face her tormenter.

“I can explain,” she said in her brother’s unsteady voice. “It’s really—”

Marlo stared dumbfounded as, expecting the blustering bulk and flared trousers of the vice principal, she instead found herself face to face with emptiness.

“Nothing?”

“These are just some of the difficult questions we must ask a brand when developing a meaningful marketing campaign,” P. T. Barnum declared through the PA speakers in the ceiling.

He sounded like he was right there behind me
, Marlo thought, shivering, as her eye caught a plume of heavy, glittering vapor drifting down from the ceiling. “Liedocaine,” she muttered.
It must be messing with my head
.

“And when the right questions are asked, the answers rub against one another and create a shower of sparks!” the vice principal continued. “A shower of ideas! But just having an idea is not enough … it must be released into the world in the best way possible, able to leap over customer objections in a single bound! Think hard upon this today, young
marketeers
! Good day and good fibbing!”

Marlo slowly regained the use of her limbs as the numbing fear of being found out fled her system.

“D’you know what that nutter Barnum loves more
than the sound of his own voice?” Zane asked Marlo, startling her, as he descended the ladder.

“Um … n-no … wh-what?” she stammered.
Man, he’s even dreamy when he’s just woken up after a night in hair pajamas
, she thought, both tormented and giddy.

“Beats me,” he said with a shrug and smile. Marlo squealed with the weird disproportionate laughter symptomatic of a girl smitten.

“That’s good,” she replied, pinching herself hard on the thigh to help stop her deranged giggling. Zane cocked his eyebrow at her before staring at Marlo’s rumpled hair pajamas and overall bleary, up-all-night appearance. How Milton’s hair managed to contract chronic bed-head without ever making contact with a pillow baffled Marlo.

“Did you get up early or something?” Zane asked with his faint British lilt.

Marlo absentmindedly tried to smooth the split ends from her hair shirt.

“Just, you know, getting a little bit of early morning exercise. There’s nothing I—but especially my sister, Marlo—like more than to be fit and healthy. But not
too
fit and healthy, you know? Not in that irritating obsessive gym-rat or carry-my-yoga-mat-wherever-I-go way, but—”

The class bell tolled, a mixed blessing for Marlo in that, while it brought her runaway rant to a merciful end, it also meant that she had sixty seconds to get into her uniform and to her next class.

“Flip a chip in old onion dip!”
Marlo muttered through gritted teeth as she scaled the ladder, peeled off her itchy pajamas, pulled up her red, blaze-emblazoned uniform by its telephone-wire suspenders, then slid back down the ladder and dashed to her class.

Marlo broke the imaginary tape of the classroom’s doorway just as the last bell tolled. Her prize was a reeking blast of ink fumes.

“Mr.…
Fauster,
” the teacher croaked in an unexpectedly high voice. The man’s head was shaped like a hard-boiled egg, with wrinkled folds of speckled flesh serving as its shell. His eyes were cold and bright with dark purple circles blotched beneath as if two tiny sports cars had spent the entire night spinning doughnuts under them. “Sit down or else I’ll force you to write your own postmortem obituary for Heck’s prestigious newspaper,
GYP:
The news that leaves a bruise!”

Marlo found an empty seat in the back, something of a rarity in Heck, next to a row of machines, each with a large drum in the middle and a hand crank on the side. As soon as Marlo settled, she realized why she had been able to secure this primo classroom real estate: the old contraptions were the source of the horrid chemical stench. Each desk in the class held a bulky old Underwood typewriter.

The teacher rose from his seat as most old people do—slowly, painfully, and under protest—and wrote his name in yellow chalk on the yellow chalkboard. Luckily
for the students, the glare on the slate made the teacher’s scratches somewhat legible: “Yellow Journalism. Mr. Hearst.”

The teacher set his chalk down, leaned over his desk, and glared at the boys with his abandoned-lighthouse eyes. Colby tucked a strand of stringy hair behind his ear and raised his hand. Mr. Hearst stared at the boy’s arm until it drooped under the weight of his stony gaze.

“Journalism is something that somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising,” he declared with a shrill wheeze. “And yellow journalism is just like regular journalism, only slathered with a bright coat of paint so that it’s lively, feisty, and unencumbered by fact. Yellow journalism is information that never fills you up and leaves you hungry for more.”

Mr. Hearst stooped down to open his lower drawer, his brittle back popping like a tap dancer on a sheet of Bubble Wrap. He pulled out a stack of yellow legal pads and a half-dozen yellow highlighter pens.

“I was an American success story, the epitome of a self-made man,” he squeaked as he passed out the pens and paper.

“I don’t think I’d want to accept responsibility for making
that,
” Marlo whispered to Zane as the decrepit, broken man shambled down the aisle.

Mr. Hearst gave Marlo a stink-eye so pungent that it nearly overpowered the reek of toxic ink. The teacher returned
to his desk and yanked a handkerchief from his double-breasted suit.

“Since I’ve always been an advocate of teaching by
doing,
” he muttered while mopping his damp brow, “I’m going to have you do all of the work.
My
work. As editor-in-chief of
GYP
—Heck’s Golden Youth Periodical.”