Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck Read Online Free Page A

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 ofsaying
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. Theglazed 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