CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nobody

IX

In the beginning, there is one.

From the one, two and three come.

From two and three come many more.

From the many, one is born.

Having spoken thusly, Red Guy bowed, neither to Wilburn nor the Girl in Black, but seemingly to the universe at large. Next instant, he was gone, leaving the children squinting after him as he hurtled upward through the ranks of assembled hornets and vanished into the brightness of the Category-Q. The swarm followed close behind him in one immense formation. The temple darkened as the hornets poured back into the light from whence they had recently been born. There was a moment’s blurry transition during which Wilburn sensed the presence shrinking away into the distance, fading like an echo. Then everything went black.

X

Wilburn found himself floating in total darkness, surrounded by splashing afterimages. He might have been a thousand miles in the air, or deep beneath the surface of the earth. His eardrums tingled. There was no buzz. The hornets were gone. Better yet, the the presence had gone with them. Unfortunately, the light of the Category-Q had also gone, but that was a small price to pay for the riddance of Her. Wilburn felt buoyant without Her scrutiny upon him, without the weight of Her insatiable desire.

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In the absence of buzzing and chanting, the darkness shivered with heavy bass frequencies, deep-belly grumblings from a monster made of stone and fire. There were other sounds: snaps and cracks as if someone was making popcorn, except that each percussive note was followed by a whistling hiss. Like a teakettle coming to a boil, Wilburn thought.

Alas that tea and popcorn are not the order of the hour, my boy, but it would seem the acoustic ambiance is the result of ancient stones fracturing under the accumulative pressure of magmatic gasses.

Relief washed over Wilburn at the sound of Iddo’s thought-voice. He hadn’t realized how stressed-out he’d become, how anxious. Tears sprang unbidden to his eyes as tension melted from his body. It wasn’t Iddo’s words that moved him so—no, the words were only music, a decorative package around a deeper, emotional form of communication. Iddo’s true message was energy. It was a feeling of strength that was good in an uncomplicated way, and exactly what Wilburn needed. The effect was not to diminish the recent horrors of the ritual, but to recast them in the grander context of adventure. Yes, it had been scary; it had been terrible. Hundreds of ritual suicides-by-hornet was not an easy thing for a boy of seven to witness; yet witness it Wilburn had, and here he was, rattled, but unbroken. You’ve got this.

I know. And it was true. In that moment, Wilburn saw the Path illuminated. Not a metaphor: an actual path stretching ahead of him through time and space, into the wildest reaches of the universe, and out the other end. His path. His alone. A path that no one else could walk—not even Iddo. He was seeing his own future. It was, admittedly, a pretty blurry picture, but Wilburn recognized its truth. His life was going to be bonkers. It was going to get much crazier than this, and a whole hell of a lot scarier. It was going to suck hard, deep, major donkey-balls. And it was going to be glorious—not in spite of the suckage, but in virtue of it. Glory through suckage! It made perfect sense to Wilburn in his moment of epiphany; later, however, he was unable explain why, even to himself.

You mean, he thought to Iddo, smiling in the darkness, these noises are, like—rock farts?

Precisely, my boy.

And Wilburn understood that Iddo understood that they both understood that they weren’t really talking about rock farts.