Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck by Dale E. Basye

Author:Dale E. Basye
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780375893056
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-23T14:00:00+00:00

19 • JOINED AT THE HYPE

“HEY, GIRLY,” THE faceless, chain-smoking writer said to Milton the second he walked into Hack: Where the Bad Writers Go. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

The office roared with the incessant clacking of bulky tripewriters and the occasional carriage return and bell.

Milton looked around and noticed that all of the writers, stooped over their desks, looked as if they were wearing sheer pantyhose over their heads, their features dull and nondescript.

“Actually,” Milton replied, cradling a stack of edited scripts, “I just came to drop these—”

“What blood type is deadly to proofreaders?” the writer posed.

Milton shrugged.

“Type O!” the writer blurted out. “Get it? Like a typo … a mistake!”

Milton scratched at the waist of his dress, which he had put on backward, accustomed as he was to zippers up front.

“That’s not bad,” he replied nervously as he set the stack of T.H.E.E.N.D. season finale scripts on the writer’s desk. “So, here are Satan’s edits. Mr. Welles wanted them back right away, so if you guys can just smooth out what he wrote and messenger them back—”

The writer flipped through the scripts, examining them closely.

“Wait a second,” he said as he pulled out a large electric magnifying glass that cast a vivid blue-white glow upon the pages. “Just what I thought,” he pronounced, setting the instrument down on his desk. “Not all of these are his edits. Some are, but the ones at the end … someone wrote over them in red ink.”

Milton gulped and glanced down at his sister’s ink-stained fingers. He quickly clasped the incriminating digits behind his back, not wanting to be caught red-handed.

“Hmm … are you sure?” he asked, staring down at his sister’s painful black shoes.

The writer smirked, which simply creased his beige, creepy-smooth face.

“Yeah, girly. I’m sure. Look, we were given specific instructions to only make edits where we saw this distinctive writing … inscribed in blood with a quill.”

That writing, Milton thought as he tried to wipe his hands on his sides. Those fussy loops and swirls. It looks so familiar.

The writer got a glimpse of Milton’s red-tipped fingers.

“Everybody wants to break into this business,” the man said, gesturing at his fellow execrable scribes bent over their tripewriters. “And, while I appreciate a plucky bobby-soxer trying to get her foot in the door, I ain’t going to let your chicken scratch through and incur the wrath of Old Scratch, dig?”

Milton did not dig, exactly, but gathered that his attempts at softening the apocalyptic endings to all of the T.H.E.E.N.D. finales had been thwarted.

“So you cool your heels, Little Red Writing Hood,” the man croaked as he lifted his bones from his hard metal office chair. “I’ll get the boys to make the real edits for you,” he added with a wink—a quick wrinkle where his eye should have been—as he trundled down the row, tossing scripts to the faceless hacks.

Milton hobbled over to the Waiting and Waiting Area. He plopped down on the couch and anxiously bit his sister’s fingernails, listening to the writers grumble and grouse at their latest deadline.

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