Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck (23 page)

Marlo swept the horizon with her eyes. Grim sheets of vertical fog hung down from the sky, like rippling gray curtains separating miles of nothing from miles of nothing.

“I have no i—” Marlo said before stopping herself. She reached for the Smell-O-Vision goggles tucked into her hair pajama bottoms, carefully steadying herself as she teetered twenty feet above the ground. Marlo clipped the spring-hinged temples over her ears and flicked the switch on the goggles’ nose bridge. She
scoured the horizon through the electric Smell-O-Vision glasses and laughed.

“Scratch that,” Marlo said with a smirk. “I know
exactly
where to go!”

The stocky, marbled-meat demon cinched Annubis’s paws tight behind his back with twine. Another guarded Anput, Kebauet, and Virginia Woof while the last of the monstrous creatures hovered about dumbly, which made sense considering it didn’t have a head. All three demons sported sturdy tree-trunk legs, sledgehammer arms, and a sort of all-beef-doughnut torso with a gaping hole where their hearts should have been.

Annubis was shoved toward the vat. Nine hemlock steps led to its rim. The vat’s surface swirled with whorls of sparks, like eddies of fireflies caught forever in a draft.

“What is this about?!” Annubis barked to the dapper, demented man in the ascot.

“Jest a leedle flea dip,” the man replied as he fiddled with his shimmering holographic model. “In zhe Nullification Tub.”

Annubis peered across the vat at Noah, who was gagged, red in the face, and struggling against the bonds tied around his wrists and ankles.

“But … why?
Who are you
?”

The man tilted the brim of his black felt fedora to shield his eyes from the harsh fluorescent lights above.
He moved a sparkling, holographic clot in the air with the tip of his laser pen.

“Zhey say that art imitates life,” he replied as he fixed the glistening clot of light at the center of his levitating, three-dimensional blob. “Me, zhough—Elmyr de Hory—have spent my life
imitating art
, committing forgeries so perfect that zhey are indistinguishable from original. Some of my forgeries sell
as much
as original, jess because zhey are mine! That is because I don’t just match an artist’s work stroke-for-the-stroke. I infuse each piece with
soul
, the spirit that guides zhe brush.…”

That’s it
, Annubis thought as he examined the twin holographic blobs that looked like a floating figure eight made of blown glass, rainbow sprinkles, and splotches of molasses.
A model of the human soul
!

“So who better than to forge the very essence of art—the human soul?” Mr. de Hory continued, confirming the dog god’s suspicions.

Resting his chin on his delicate hand, Mr. de Hory judged his creation.

“But I am victim of my materials,” he sighed. “To counterfeit the billions of fakes I agreed to make, I must use melted-down souls of animals—dogs, mostly—as my canvas.”

“Agreed to make?” Annubis interrupted as he shook off the beefy purplish hands of the headless/heartless demon. “For whom?”

Mr. de Hory’s thin lips creased into a cryptic smile.

“A patron of the arts,” he replied with a shrug. “I know not who … I
care
not who!”

Virginia Woof—pinned between a demon’s legs—managed to type out a comment on her Speak & Spell.

“Why dog?”
the mechanized voice, muffled by the demon’s massive calves, inquired.

Mr. de Hory clapped his hands with delight.

“Zhat is it, exactly! Dogs are so similar to zhe humans … so adaptable—”

A Siamese cat, a mangy black-and-tan spotted Manx, and a patchwork calico slunk around the corner, followed by dozens of other cats twitching their tails.

“No, offense, felines. You and zhe three-headed one have helped me immensely.”

Cerberus trotted around the corner and hiked his leg in the air, relieving himself from his post to relieve himself on a post. The cats circled and pranced around Cerberus in a sickening display of flattery.

“But zhey—even dogs—lack zhe complexities and contrasts I need to make a convincing forgery. I need something … in-the-between. A missing soul link that will connect my human reproduction with zhe coarser canine materials available. I need to cast something that is both animal
and
human.”

Mr. de Hory lowered his thick, black-rimmed glasses.

“Vhat I need, actually, is
you
, Mr. Jackal. Or the females.”

“
You wouldn’t dare
—” Annubis growled.

The foppish con artist waved the demon holding Annubis forward.

“The great artist is zhe who turns pain to advantage, lets suffering deepen his understanding, and grows through zhe pain.”

The headless/heartless demon shoved Annubis up the steps of the Nullification Tub.

“But I am artist that makes living through zhe work of others,” Mr. de Hory said, loosening his white silk ascot. “So you vill do my suffering
for
me.”

RIVERS OF SCENT
flowed past Marlo and Zane as they strode across the Broken Promised Land atop lofty stilts of lie-lengthened Pinocchio wood. Marlo squinted through her Smell-O-Vision goggles, her eyes trained on the deep-brown/gray coil of odor she had been tracking since Fibble. Other tufts of scents—burbling blues and scattered scarlets—drifted sporadically in the dull, oatmeal-colored sky. Only the dense, brown-gray tangle of smell, though, had been a constant fixture, bunching up and thickening with each mile. At the lower left-hand corner of the goggles’ lens was a tiny digital meter—a flat red arch marking “Mineral,” “Vegetable,” “Animal”—with the needle trained firmly on “Animal.”

“Still on track,” Marlo called out to Zane behind her. She could, only now, detect the faint musk herself as it tickled the back of her nose.

Marlo’s legs and arms ached. With the stilts, they had probably covered five miles by now … or ten. Marlo had no idea, really. It wasn’t like there were signs reading “15 Miles to the Furafter” staked into the ground at regular intervals. If there were, they would probably be in kilometers just to confuse Marlo. But Zane—being English and
awesome
—could probably help with that.

“Here comes another one,” Marlo called out to Zane as they walked through a massive wall of swirling fog. Passing through these electrified barriers—this latest one made three, total—felt like when you lie back on the wicked cold porcelain of your bathtub after just getting in—that dull, horrible shock. It was like that, only all over, a strange, blurry chill.

This new realm wasn’t much different from the last one … or the one before that. It seemed, to Marlo, that these in-between places, these expansive pockets of nothing, were afterlife afterthoughts. Dreary supernatural subdivisions, where even color seemed like a costly “extra” that the developers weren’t going to just throw in for free.

“Can you still see the stench?” Zane asked. Marlo slipped back on her Smell-O-Vision goggles. The dense, knotted rope of pet musk snaked beside them—creepy how it was right there but she couldn’t see it without the goggles—and led to a sheet of fog to their left.

“We must be close,” Marlo said, willing her aching limbs to push faster, as both she and Zane slammed into the last churning fog wall.

* * *

The Badillac lurched. The passengers fell in a heap onto the floor.

“What now?!” Inga shrieked at the chauffeur.

Milton noted that, through the floor of the limo, the road sounded different. Not the steady thrum of asphalt but the crinkle of … 
paper
.

“We’re here-ish,” the driver replied.

Milton climbed up off the floor and stared out at the horizon whizzing past: a flat, unbroken plain laid with acres of old yellow newspaper. A tall wood tower to the right of the Badillac shone bright with floodlights.

“Stay!”
a mechanized voice ordered as the limo raced past.

In the distance, Milton could see a large cage of some kind. An imposing structure with big feathery gargoyles perched atop its nine walls. At least they
looked
like gargoyles, Milton thought, just as something tall and skinny skittered across the plain in the corner of his eye.

The chauffeur demon slammed on the brakes. Wood clattered across the hood of the limo. Milton could see, through the rear window, two figures fall to the ground: two boys in hairy pajamas. In fact, one of them looked really familiar.

The Badillac zigzagged across the newspaper valley before plowing into the side of the metal fortress. A broken chorus of caws thundered from above. A half-dozen
Err bags rapidly inflated in the back of the Badillac and pitched the passengers out of the car, into the arms of whatever harm awaited them.

Milton was propelled through the rear window. He bounced out onto the trunk that—as his sister’s body dented the metal—popped open, breaking his fall while nearly breaking his neck. He stumbled off the Badillac and broke a heel.

“Marlo!” a boy yelled at Milton from beyond the wreckage. “It’s me!”

The boy, English by the sound of it, ran at Milton, clad in coarse brown hair pajamas. Van Glorious rose from the shredded newspaper ground, mourning his expensive broken shades for a split second before tossing them aside and bounding to intercept the boy.

“You stay away from us, you little creep!” Van bellowed. “We’re just like real people, with real lives. Not animals in a zoo—”

He grabbed Zane’s arm, just as Zane was about to embrace Milton.

“Marlo!” he panted. “I can’t believe it’s you! Hey … let go, you—!”

Van belted Zane across the chin, knocking him to the ground.

“What did you do
that
for?” Milton asked.

Van shrugged.

“I just assumed he was the paparazzi,” he explained, rubbing his fist.

“You leave her alone, you great plonkin’ pillock!” Zane yelled as he leapt to his feet.

“Not the face! Not the face!” Van yelped as the two exchanged blows.

Milton leaned back against the wrecked limo.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder
, he thought,
I have two guys fighting over me
.

“Milton?” a voice called out.
Milton’s
voice. It sounded higher and shakier than he expected, like when he’d hear his voice on a recording. To the side of the wreck, by the fortress cage, stood … 
himself
.

“Marlo!” Milton called back as he hobbled toward his sister. It was like rushing into a mirror.

The Fausters hugged each other, tight, as if hoping to merge into one fearless, invincible force. Tears streamed down their faces.

“I missed you,” Marlo said, choking back her sobs. “I missed me, too.”

She pushed Milton back, peered over his shoulder, and smiled her trademark crooked smile, a broken pink crayon even on Milton’s face.

“Is Zane fighting with that dead action hero guy over … 
me
?” she asked coyly.

Milton shrugged.

“I guess … Van Glorious, the dead actor, is a few shows shy of a full lineup … a franchise that’s spawned too many spin-offs, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t,” Marlo replied as she tucked blue hair behind Milton’s ear.

“Sorry, industry jargon,” Milton apologized.

He swatted his sister’s preening hands away.

“We don’t have time for this,” Milton said as he scrutinized the fortress behind his sister.

“Right,” Marlo said as she tore her eyes from Zane, now propped up against the damaged limousine, panting alongside Van Glorious. “Time to put our freaky Fauster powers into action.” She looked over her shoulder at the fortress.

“Are those … 
crows
?” she gasped as her bulging eyes, having traveled up the bars, settled on the massive feathered guardians perched on the parapet.

The quiet of Stay! was broken by the sounds of vehicles in the distance. Tires sliced and skidded across brittle newspaper. Suddenly, the klieg lights atop the guard tower exploded with their harsh accusing glare.

“Stay!”
the recorded voice commanded. Two vans raced closer. One of the vans, a chugging Volkswagen bus covered in nappy pink faux fur, had
THE REPEAT FURRARI
stenciled sloppily on its side and was playing Beethoven’s “Für Elise” through a rooftop speaker. The other van, sleek and modern, sporting a satellite dish, had
THE URN SHORT ATTENTION NEWS VAN
detailed on its side. The vans squealed to a stop.

Marlo squinted through the bars—she just couldn’t
get the hang of not having 20/20 vision—as the URN news crew set up their lights and cameras at the far wall of the fortress. Meanwhile, a half-dozen protesters spilled out of the fuzzy pink REPEAT van.

“Maybe all of this commotion can help us out,” Milton said as he kicked off his painful, irritating pumps. “Provide a distraction, while we find Lucky …”

Marlo chuckled.

“Odds are that he’s asleep,” she said. “Probably having this great dream about
being
asleep while
we
have to deal with this nightmare.”

Lucky reared back and hissed, arched with unfocused rage at all the awful creatures closing in around him.