Wise Acres Read online

  ALSO BY DALE E. BASYE

  Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go

  Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck

  Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck

  Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck

  Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck

  Precocia: The Sixth Circle of Heck

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Dale E. Basye

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2013 by Bob Dob

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  wherethebadkidsgo.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Basye, Dale E.

  Wise Acres : the seventh circle of Heck / by Dale E. Basye ;

  illustrations by Bob Dob. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “Milton and Marlo Fauster are sent to Wise Acres, the circle of Heck for kids who sass back, where the new vice principal, Lewis Carroll, has them debate in a War of the Words broadcast throughout the underworld, with a reward of heaven for the winner and the ultimate punishment, the real h-e-double-hockey-sticks, for the loser.” —Provided by publisher

  ISBN 978-0-307-98185-1 (trade : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-307-98186-8 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-307-98187-5 (ebook) [1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Behavior—Fiction. 3. Future life—Fiction. 4. Reformatories—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Humorous stories.]

  I. Dob, Bob, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.B2938Wi 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012037195

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  COMEDIAN GROUCHO MARX ONCE SAID, “OUTSIDE OF A DOG, A BOOK IS MAN’S BEST FRIEND. INSIDE OF A DOG, IT’S TOO DARK TO READ.” SO I CAN THINK OF NO BETTER DEDICATION FOR A BOOK ABOUT BOOKS AND READING AND LANGUAGE THAN MY LATE DOG SIMON CORN KERNEL HAPPY TAILS BASYE, OR SIMON FOR SHORT. (ACTUALLY, AS A HEIGHT-CHALLENGED JACK RUSSELL TERROR/TERRIER, EVERYTHING ABOUT SIMON WAS SHORT.) I IMAGINE HIM NOW IN THE FURAFTER, A CANINE ON CLOUD NINE, GAMBOLING ABOUT ON THE REALLY BIG FARM UPSTAIRS, EITHER CHASING SQUIRRELS OR SOMEHOW CONVINCING THE MORE GULLIBLE DOGS TO DO IT FOR HIM. AFTER ALL, EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY, AND NOW SIMON HAS AN ETERNITY OF THEM. LUCKY DOG!

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  FOREWORD

  1. TO GRAMMAR’S HOUSE WE GO

  2. BIRDS OF A FEATHER MOCK TOGETHER

  3. LIVING IN A TAUNTED HOUSE

  4. A MATTER OF PRINCIPALS

  5. WHEN THE GOING GETS GUFF

  6. SPELLING DISASTER

  7. PUBLIC RELATIONS ENEMY NUMBER ONE

  8. LIVIN’ (AT) LARGE

  9. TEACHERS’ PET PEEVES

  10. BOTCH YOUR LANGUAGE!

  11. MAY I TAKE A MESSAGE?

  12. TEA AND PSYCHOPATHY

  13. READING BETWEEN THE ASSEMBLY LINES

  14. DEAD MAN’S BLUFF

  15. THEM’S FIGHTING WORDS!

  16. GETTING THE HANG OF IT

  17. CUTTING REMARKS

  18. WHERE ANGELS DARE TO TREAD

  19. HAVING THE LAST LAP

  MIDDLEWORD

  20. THE BEAST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES

  21. AT THE END OF THEIR TROPE

  22. SCOFFER UNDER THE BRIDGE

  23. REGARD A MERE MAD RAGER

  24. JOKES FALLING IN NOTHING FLAT

  25. DERANGED AND REARRANGED

  26. QUEASY AS A-B-C

  27. RUN OFF AT THE MOUTH

  28. A RAW DEAL

  29. LIKE A TONGUE OF BRICKS

  30. FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT

  31. DEBATE FOR DE-TRAP

  32. MEETING THEIR MATCHES

  33. BRAWL IN THE FAMILY

  34. THE EMPEROR’S NEW PROSE

  35. BY BOOK OR BY CROOK

  36. A TORTURE’S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

  37. ADDING INSULT TO IRONY

  BACKWORD

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  As many believe, there is a place above and a place below. But there are also places in between. Some not quite awfully perfect and others not quite perfectly awful.

  One of these places is crowded with kids with sharp tongues that cut deep, kids who sass back with a vengeance, kids who—if served a bowl of alphabet soup—don’t merely see lunch but see an opportunity to deeply offend.

  Even just talking about Wise Acres—the seventh (or sixth, depending) of Heck’s sinister circles—is enough to get one’s verbal hackles up.

  Sticks and stones may break your bones, but down here, words hurt far, far more. Especially when wielded by those with a cool and cruel demeanor (and in Heck, demeanor you are, the better).

  You tart-tongued tykes out there are likely grumbling as to why being “sassy” is even a bad thing to begin with. Well, it depends on who you ask. To your parents, teachers, and most any authority figure, sassiness is soundly in the “bad” column. To your friends, it’s probably endlessly amusing—that is, until your sassy tongue is trained upon them, then maybe, um, not so much.

  Imagine, if you will (or even if you won’t, just shut your eyes and play along), a battlefield of barbs where every spiteful soldier, dug deep in their trenchant trenches, prays they never run out of ammunition. A combative zone where no one has the right to remain silent, and anything and everything you say can and will be taken out of context, garbled, spat back, and used against you in a court of finding flaw.

  The mysterious Powers That Be (and any of its associated or subsidiary enterprises, including but not limited to the Powers That Be Evil) have stitched this and countless other subjective realities together into a sprawling quilt of space and time.

  Some of these quantum patches may not even seem like places. But they are all around you and go by many names. Some feel like eternity. And some of them actually are eternity, at least for a little while. Think all of this sounds foolish? Well, I know you are but what am I?!

  1 · TO GRAMMAR’S

  HOUSE WE GO

  ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD MILTON FAUSTER and his thirteen-year-old sister, Marlo, were not so different from your average children making a grudging trek to their first day at a new school. Only instead of having been dropped off by distracted parents on their way to work, Milton and Marlo had been dragged kicking and screaming out of a stagecoach by decomposing demons and thrown roughly to the unhallowed ground. Instead of carrying backpacks stuffed with new notebooks and sharpened pencils, Milton cradled his pet ferret, Lucky, in a filthy kerchief while Marlo sulked along holding nothing but a grudge against the snarled web of supremely sucky events that conspired against her. And instead of making their way to a new school wearing the latest fall fashions, Milton and Marlo were headed for Wise Acres—the circle of Heck for kids who sass back—dressed in shabby hand-me-downs splotched with dried blood.

 
Oh, and there was the whole “being stone-cold dead way before your time” thing, too.

  The sleek black stagecoach, drawn by two hideous, snorting Night Mares, sped away behind the Fauster children in a tight crescent, its wooden wheels slicing across the rumpled, reddish-brown hills. The freakish whinnies of the festering horses faded away into nothing.

  The only sound Milton and Marlo made as they trudged along was the crinkle of footfalls. The rolling hills seemed to be coated with a vast carpet of paper so ancient that it shredded beneath the Fausters’ filthy boots. It was as if their shoes were having a secret conversation composed of dry crumples and scrunches.

  A wind picked up, whipping itself into a squall. Milton coughed at the gagging, sickly sweet stench. His face and arms were speckled with dark, pricking droplets of what looked like ink. Milton glanced over at his sister. Marlo was slogging through the shredded paper just behind him, her head hung low and brooding.

  Marlo sighed softly to herself and rubbed her red-rimmed eyes, wiping away a tear that left a smudge of black ink-rain on her cheek. Being dead was starting to get her down. Even her first kiss had been tainted by the fact that the boy on the other side of those perfect, pouty lips had been a fallen hit-angel who was simply using her to find Milton and slit his throat with a gleaming razor-feather.

  “Oww!” Milton cried out, touching his now-bleeding cheek. He pulled out what looked like a big splinter. A few hundred feet away was a gnarled grove of nasty-looking trees. Angry blasts of wind sheared swarms of needles from the trees and sent them whizzing into the air like clouds of tiny wooden daggers.

  “Seriously, li’l bother,” Marlo said with a croak, her voice craggy from lack of use, “how much can a splinter possibly— Oww!”

  Marlo yanked a small needle, sort of like a pine needle, from her forearm. After examining it, though, she discovered it was really a tiny, tightly rolled parchment. Marlo unrolled it and squinted at the itsy-bitsy letters formed in the pulpy, leaflike paper:

  What are yew looking at?!

  Milton glanced over Marlo’s shoulder at the note, then surveyed the grove of sinister trees up ahead. The trees sported ropes of mottled, flaking bark coiling up their trunks.

  “They spelled ‘you’ wrong,” Marlo said.

  “No, they didn’t … or it didn’t,” Milton said, pointing to a nearby tree. “It’s like a weird hybrid of a sycamore and a yew tree.”

  “Must be a Syca-Yew,” Marlo said as she crumpled up the parchment and tossed it at the tree. “Well, I’m sick of you, too, you dumb tree!”

  Milton squinted through his broken Coke-bottle glasses at another clump of spindly trees covered with furrowed bark and sharp, pink-purple leaves. A gust of wind rustled the leaves, causing them to wag mockingly and—if the irritating hiss was any indication—jeer.

  “I’m going to say, considering we’re near Wise Acres, that those are a form of Sassafras,” Milton said.

  Marlo plunked down on the shredded-paper ground. “Where is Wise Acres anyway?” she groused, taking off her boots and massaging her aching feet. “Maybe it disappeared, too … just like Precocia did.”

  Milton sat cross-legged beside his sister.

  So many unbelievable things had happened to him and Marlo since their untimely passing. Yet their latest exploits in Precocia—the circle of Heck for kids who grow up too fast—were their most unbelievable, in that not only did Precocia no longer exist, but also apparently it had never existed in the first place.

  Precocia’s vice principals, Napoléon and Cleopatra, had wanted to plug up the Fountain of Youth, effectively terminating childhood, making Heck—where the souls of the darned toil for all eternity or until they turn eighteen, whichever comes first—obsolete. To save childhood, Milton and Marlo had altered reality: thwarting Napoléon and Cleopatra’s plot by eliminating Precocia altogether.

  Milton sighed and stared up at the smudgy orange-purple sky, which looked like a bruise in the final stages of fading, and untied his kerchief pouch. Lucky, Milton’s pet ferret, spilled out of the filthy rag like fuzzy white milk, pooling on the ground to yawn and stretch. Milton scratched his pet just underneath the chin. Lucky pressed into his master’s touch, hoping to squeeze out every drop of sensation from the boy’s just-made-for-scritching fingers before curling up and falling back asleep on Milton’s lap.

  “That was it?” Milton said with a smile. “That was your big day and now it’s back to bed?”

  A gust of wind sent another swarm of Syca-Yew needles into the air.

  “Oww! Fluffernutter!” Marlo squealed as she sat up and picked a needle from her forehead. She unrolled the parchment leaf.

  You fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. And I should know!

  Marlo tore up the leaf in disgust. She cast it into the reeking wind. “This already blows and we’re not even there yet!” she complained.

  ZOT!!

  With an explosive clap of thunder, a huge, shaggy something suddenly appeared a dozen yards away from Milton and Marlo. Something with big, bad eyes. And big, bad ears. And big, bad teeth. Something that looked a heck of a lot like a big, bad wolf.

  “Okay, maybe the rude needlely trees weren’t so bad,” Marlo whispered.

  The seven-foot-tall beast stood upright on its muscular haunches, looking every inch the savage monster. Its pupils “ticked” along the rims of its wide yellow eyes like the hands of a nightmarish clock. Its coarse gray fur was matted with blood. The only element detracting from the creature’s untamed ferocity was the half-eaten briefcase it clutched with its razor-sharp claws.

  Milton’s throat was so tight and dry with fear that swallowing felt like trying to drown an inflatable pool toy.

  The creature growled softly as it sniffed the air with its foam-flecked muzzle.

  Lucky stirred on Milton’s lap, awoken by the sudden blast of overpowering predator musk. Milton tried to clamp his ferret’s jaws shut with his fingers, but he was too late. Lucky hissed and spat at the wolf-beast with a ferret’s foolish fury.

  The creature spun about on its massive back paws. Milton and Marlo huddled together in a petrified ball. The wolf-beast reared back, snarling, as if to pounce, then stopped short as it sniffed at Lucky.

  “We’ve … g-gotta run,” Milton croaked as he contorted his paralyzed lips to form words. “Now’s our chance.”

  Marlo nodded weakly and the two of them sprang off the ground and toward the grove. The Fausters weaved past the prickly Sassafras trees that hissed and whistled at them in the sulfurous breeze. Milton could hear the wolf-beast trotting behind them. Faster and faster. Huffing and puffing and gearing up to blow them down.

  “Keep … going,” Milton panted, taking his sister’s sweaty hand. “It’s … closing in.”

  Marlo flopped along in her untied boots. A gust of wind pelted them with a shower of Syca-Yew splinters.

  “Oww!” Marlo grunted as she and Milton tripped through the tangle of roots and low-lying branches. “It’s irritating … like being … needled.”

  Their clothes ripped and torn, the Fausters cleared the grove. Milton and Marlo could finally see the gates of Wise Acres a few hundred feet ahead of them, crowning the top of the knoll like a towering tiara of gnarled black metal.

  The wind shrieked beyond the small hill, chilling Milton’s blood. Branches snapped behind him and his sister.

  “AHROOOOOOO WOO WOOOahhhhh!” howled the wolf-beast as it drew nearer.

  “I think I just peed a bit,” Marlo muttered as she cast a wary glance behind her. “Hopefully that will make me taste bad.”

  The trees shuddered in an oncoming rush of thrashing violence. Milton and Marlo could see the dark, shaggy shape of the creature lumbering toward them through the splintering trees.

  “Run!” Milton shouted.

  He and his sister scaled the steep hill, earning every labored footfall. The gates of Wise Acres were now less than a hundred feet away.

  The wolf-beast parted the
Syca-Yews as if they were a spindly wooden curtain. It glared furiously at Milton and Marlo, its pinpricked pupils ticking along the rims of its burning yellow eyes like a time bomb. It bounded toward them, pulverizing the trees behind it with a thump of its savage haunches.

  “We can’t … make it … in time,” Milton gasped.

  Marlo turned with a sudden surge of indignant rage. “Who’s afraid of you, you big, bad ugly wolf?!” she roared.

  Startled, the creature skidded to a halt.

  “Well, we are,” Marlo continued. “You can probably smell that. But we’re not going to just stand here and let you eat us! Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin that I probably should have plucked before I died!”

  The wolf-beast squinted its glowing yellow-green eyes at Marlo, momentarily appraising her as a potential threat before letting loose a keening howl.

  “AHROOOOOOO WOO WOOOahhhhh!”

  “Nice try,” Milton muttered as he clutched his sister’s hand.

  “I have a feeling this ain’t gonna be pretty,” Marlo whispered.

  Isn’t going to be pretty, Milton corrected in his head as the creature bared its long, yellow fangs and pounced.

  2 · BIRDS OF A FEATHER

  MOCK TOGETHER

  THE BLOOD-SPATTERED WOLF-BEAST lunged at Milton and Marlo. Yet suddenly, as if tugged back by an invisible leash, it stopped short. Milton peeked through his fingers. The creature rose onto its haunches and stared off into space, flickering back and forth. It was as if it were straddling two dimensions, its weight shifting from one reality to another.

  Milton looked in the direction of the beast’s startled gaze but could see nothing. The creature seemed to sputter on and off like a dying flashlight before it was engulfed by a large shadow. It dropped its mauled briefcase to the ground before covering its gruesome head and cowering. Whimpering like a scolded Chihuahua pup, the wolf-beast abruptly …

  ZOT!!

  … disappeared into thin air.

  The wind whistled its unnerving tune. After a few fearful seconds, Milton and Marlo disentangled themselves and rose to their feet. Marlo dusted off her filthy dress.