The Unspeakable Unknown

by Eliot Sappingfield

  I wasn’t ready for that. “Oh, I . . . I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sad,” he said. “They died a long time ago. They left me here.”

  Hypatia gasped. “You’re here alone?”

  “Yeah. I hate it,” he said, rubbing his eyes. I wanted to give him a spare shirt, or a sandwich, or even a hug, but he was still standing a solid five yards away and seemed to want to keep his distance for the moment. He looked sleepy and rubbed his eyes again.

  “Did we wake you?” I asked.

  “You were talking. I heard and came to see.” How old was he? Seven? Eight?

  “How long ago did your parents die?” Hypatia asked, her voice quavering slightly. She had lost her parents to the Old Ones at about the same age.

  “A long time ago. I’ve been alone for a long time. I hate it here.”

  “Do you want to leave?” she asked.

  The boy’s smile took on a wistful quality. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “What do you do down here?” I asked. “Where do you sleep?”

  He shrugged noncommittally.

  “How do you get food?” Hypatia asked.

  “A girl brings me food sometimes. But it’s never enough. Never. I’m always hungry.”

  “At least someone is looking after him,” Hypatia said to me, relieved. “I wish I’d saved some Pizzatillos.”

  The boy did not react to this. He just kept staring at us, smiling warmly. I wasn’t sure I could sustain a cheery disposition in his situation.

  “You’re trying to leave this place,” he said. A statement, not a question.

  What point was there in denying it? I realized that we had to take him with us, even if he didn’t want to come along. “Yes, we are. And you can come with us. We can give you clean clothes and hot food. We know people who can take care of you.”

  Hypatia nodded in agreement. She was about to make the same suggestion. “Maybe Dr. Foster can help him.”

  Hypatia had a point. If anyone could help him, the School’s doctor, who had dealt with people suffering the effects of Old Ones in the past, could.

  “Okay. It’s settled,” I said. “You can come with us.”

  He smiled even wider, as if we’d told him what he’d always wanted to hear. “No,” was all he said.

  “No?” I asked. “Don’t you want to sleep in a bed and not be hungry?”

  He seemed to think this over, and by his expression I could have sworn it sounded good to him, but all he said was “No.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I hate it here. I’m hungry and I hate it here and I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want anyone to be here anymore.”

  He wasn’t understanding. “You can leave here,” I said. “You can come with us, and we won’t be here anymore. How long have you been alone?”

  “A long time.”

  “If you hate it here, why not leave with us?”

  He kicked a clod of dirt half-heartedly, his grin never faltering for a moment. “It doesn’t matter. You aren’t leaving. Not really. When you leave this place, you’ll still be here. Nobody ever leaves here. I hate it here.”

  “But you’ve never been anywhere else,” Hypatia reasoned, kneeling down to look him in the eye. “You know what? I think you’re just scared because you’ve been alone so long. How old are you, honey? What’s your name?”

  “I’m not scared,” he said with a twinge of boyish defiance. “I don’t get scared. I get bored. I get hungry. Sometimes I get sleepy, and sometimes I get angry.”

  Poor kid. “What makes you angry?” I asked.

  “This place. And people.”

  Hypatia cocked her head to one side. “People make you angry? Which people?”

  “All people.”

  “Are we making you angry?” I asked.

  His face lit up in the sweetest, most charming smile I think I’ve ever seen. A person could fall in love with that smile all by itself. “Yes, you are.”

  My hand found Hypatia’s. I pulled her to her feet. “How old are you again?”

  “I am old.”

  “How old?”

  “I. Am. Old.”

  “You are old?”

  “I am not old,” he said with a little laugh. “Old is what I am. I am what defines age. I am old and I am angry and I am hungry and I hate it here. I hate it here and I am hungry. I am awake.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, gently pulling Hypatia’s hand back toward the others. God, I hoped she understood.

  “What is your name? Who are you?” the boy asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  The boy smiled wider still, wider than a person should be able to smile, a smile so wide and so charming that I wanted to cry. His smile and his smiling eyes climbed into my head and found everything and everyone I had ever loved inside my mind and touched them and made them feel dirty and ruined. Everything but the boy was awful. For a moment, I hated everyone and everything that wasn’t him.

  “I am older than names, Nikola.”

  Everything in my mind screamed at once in joy. Everything was wonderful and everything everywhere was going to be okay forever. How did he know my name? How old was he? Older than names? None of that mattered, because everything was finally perfect.

  I was at home and my dad was there and Mom hadn’t really disappeared when I was a baby. She was just in the other room the whole time.

  I looked at Hypatia. She was smiling the biggest grin I’d ever seen on her. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he? Let’s stay, Nikola! We can take care of him here. If he doesn’t want to leave, then we should stay with him. Don’t you think?”

  Of course she was right! Why did we want to leave, anyway? We had been such idiots.

  Everything was here and we could stay forever and die in the dark. Dad would stay, and Mom was coming back, too. Everyone goes to the dark sooner or later—the sooner the better!

  NO. I screamed at myself in my mind. That wasn’t true. Mom wasn’t coming back—I knew that much.

  But Dad was staying, and he would read me stories every night. There would be hugs and bedtime kisses, hot chocolate, piggyback rides, checkers, and—

  No, that was a lie, too. Dad didn’t hug, and he didn’t read stories. He emailed me papers from journals.

  But everything is lovely and soft here in the cold dark and—

  No. It wasn’t perfect—that was another lie. It was all lies inside lies. The boy without a name was lying and not talking anymore—had he been talking at all? The talking had been a lie, the smile was a lie, the boy was a lie.

  I knew I could do it. I had to do it, even if it killed me. I had to see him, or I would believe his lies. I had to stop seeing the lie and see him.

  I closed my eyes. I decided to see what was really there. I’d done it before. I took a deep breath and opened them again.

  What I saw I will not write here.

  With every ounce of effort I could summon, I forced my voice to work. “Hypatia. You have to trust me. Do you trust me?”

  She smiled placidly. “Of course!”

  “Then come with me a moment.” I turned a smile to . . . it. Smiling at it instead of screaming in terror was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, but had I allowed myself even one indulgence I was certain I would go insane. I had thought seeing his true form would be like Tabbabitha, or Darleeen, not like . . .

  I couldn’t think about it. “We’re going to get our friends so we can come back with you. Is that okay?”

  The boy smiled, and a new invasion launched inside my head. Beauty and love and wonderful wonderful wonderful flooded my mind and was all I could think of. I forced myself to see him, and all of it turned brown, rotted, and died. Lies. That was all it was. How could someone see what he really was and think anything anywhere could b
e wonderful?

  “Come back soon,” he said.

  A nod was all I could manage, and I pulled Hypatia back toward the others. Forty yards away. Thirty yards away. Did he know? Could he see what I was doing, what I was thinking? Twenty-five yards away. I tried not to think, not to think about what I was thinking. I forced myself to recite the ABCs backward in my head. Twenty yards. Fifteen yards. Ten yards.

  The others were looking at us. The battery was detached from the power hub and glowed weirdly under the laptop, which was hooked up to the door with about five cables. The space inside the door shimmered weirdly, and Darleeen peered through with faint impatience. The door was ready. How long had we been over there?

  “ . . . can only keep it open for a minute longer,” Darleeen was saying.

  “Girls! Where have you been?” Dad asked.

  “The door is ready. It’s time to make our big escape, and you two are out for a stroll,” Warner said, gathering what few things we were taking with us. He’d picked up my bag, and I retrieved it from him.

  “We can’t leave. We have to stay,” Hypatia said.

  That got their attention.

  Gus was the first to speak. “WHAT?”

  She started explaining as I moved her carefully toward the door. Five yards . . . She twitched and pushed back, wanting to return to the boy. My free hand clutched inside my bag. Book . . . extra sock . . . tablet . . . another book . . . pens . . .

  “There’s a beautiful little boy just over there, and he’s all alone and he needs our help. We can stay and love him here. In the dark. Forever. It’s lovely and soft in the dark. We can die here whenever we want!”

  “Nikola,” Warner said. “What is going on? You’re white as a sheet. What the hell is she—”

  “Shut up and listen,” I said. “Dad, the wormhole doorframe looks like it’s mostly wood?”

  “What?” he said. “Yes. It is.”

  Two yards. “Hypatia, go through the door. I need you to—”

  “NO,” she said, too firmly. “We need to stay. He’s all alone, and he hates it here.”

  “Who hates it here?” Dad asked. “Nikola. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong!” Hypatia said. “Everything is great—look at him!”

  “Who?” Warner asked, craning his neck.

  “Don’t look!” I said.

  “Oh,” Warner said, sounding suddenly calm.

  That was it. Time to go. “Sorry, Hypatia,” I said, and shoved her toward the door with all my might.

  She tripped, stumbled, turned, and clutched at me, but she was too slow. Just before she passed through, her fingers caught the sleeve of Darleeen’s Dairy Shed polo and took her along for the ride. As they disappeared, Hypatia’s voice screamed at a terrifying volume, “NO! STOP IT! WE CA—”

  And she was gone.

  That had been enough. The cavern shook, and the boy moved. I could feel him moving in my mind. It was awful. He was searching, finding what I had in there. A second later he knew what I knew. He knew what I had been thinking.

  He was very unhappy.

  My fingers found it. Small and round and hard. Way at the bottom of the bag and covered with lint. The button was soft and begged to be pressed. I pressed it, removed Ms. Botfly’s magnetic singularity from my bag, and threw it at the boy.

  But he wasn’t a boy anymore. Boys aren’t that big. Not as big as a thunderstorm. I realized this was the storm that was part of Darleeen’s true name, but it had only been a hint of the real thing, a bad description of the absolute horror that was his real form. How could you do more than hint about something that terrible, that immense, that perfectly, flawlessly appalling?

  I heard a faint tink as the tiny, round gadget hit the floor and rolled in the general direction of . . . it. Nothing was happening. Warner stared transfixed and gaping. “What’s going on? What is that? Can I touch it? I want to go over there.”

  Gus was still staring at the door, with his back to the gaping chasm of madness that was filling the dome. Dad had his hands held up like blinders at the sides of his head, making sure not to look away from the door. “Take Warner,” I said as I shoved Gus easily through the door.

  Dad had Warner by the shoulder, but he was struggling. “No, no! I don’t want to leave! Bring Hypatia back! What are you doing?” He tried wrenching away with all his might. He was about to break away from my dad, but that’s when the magnetic singularity went off.

  The sound was a thrumming noise, like what it must sound like to stand inside a guitar, deep and reverberating, and for a moment every lie screaming for attention inside my head simply disappeared. Something about magnetic fields, Dad had said.

  Warner, still looking at what he had thought was absolute beauty, suddenly caught a glimpse of what was actually there and screamed so loud his voice cracked and disappeared. Instantly, he was not at all opposed to leaving at that very moment and actually pulled my dad through the doorway with him. I was the last through, and just before I stepped in, I heard the father of the Old Ones speak my name.

  He swept into my mind again, but this time he wanted to kill me. I felt my brain inflating in my skull and experienced a flash of unimaginable pain as he told me his own true name and promised to find me soon. It would have worked; I’m certain it would have killed me had the golf cart and large chunks of every nearby building not shot through the air and crashed into him at that moment, pulled by their metallic nails, pipes, and machines. It was enough. The pain faded and I fell back through the door, still alive. Better yet, somehow I was still me.

  19

  THE HOMECOMING GAME

  Long-distance wormhole travel is awful. I rate it zero stars. You should avoid it at all costs. When used for short distances, it’s over in about a nothingth of a second and you don’t even know it happened, so it isn’t that bad. This trip was much longer, and because of that, I had a few seconds to really experience it. The sensation is a bit like being sucked backward through a straw by your butt while being sprayed by a fire hose full of liquid pain. You think third-class airline seats are cramped? Try moving through a hole too small to exist at infinity miles per hour.

  There was a flash, a fraction of a second when I caught a glimpse of a familiar location—the School Town at the exact spot our kitchen wormhole always deposited Hypatia and me, right on Main Street. That was followed by a wrenching feeling like I was being yanked violently away from there by my entire body. The world twisted, revolved, and turned inside out, and less than a second later, I was dropped unceremoniously onto a hard tile floor. For once, I didn’t mind a hard landing on my butt.

  Instantly, everything was havoc and confusion. After an extended stay in a gloomy cave, the brilliant light blinded me, and I found myself amid a cacophony of shouts, screams, and utter panic. Someone tripped over where I had fallen and nearly joined me on the floor. Someone else thrust a water bottle into my hands. It turned out to be empty, but it’s the thought that counts, right? Eventually, I was able to get to my feet and make out where we were and what was happening.

  I was in a spacious, boxy white room. The center of the floor was mostly empty, save for a kiosk in the middle with a large digital display on it. The ceiling was a single slab of solid glass, through which the sun bathed the room in natural light. One of the walls was also made entirely of glass, presenting an uninspiring view of a barren, snowy field adorned with a single tree that supported an absurdly large beehive. The other three walls held a line of those uncomfortable hard plastic fold-down seats you see in airports and bus stations, an assortment of vending machines offering snacks and soda, and on the last wall, a wide gate that led into a hall completely covered in black-and-yellow caution stripes and adorned with multiple DANGER signs. An unnatural, almost invisible shimmer in the hall told me what the danger was. That hall led through the gap.

  That last wall also held a li
ne of extremely serious-looking security kiosks. I knew they were security kiosks because they all had bright digital screens that displayed the words SECURITY KIOSK in bright red letters. These were the source of half the noise in the room as electronic voices from each of them were shouting commands like “STOP,” “BE QUIET,” “PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS,” and “STOP EATING THAT PLANT” simultaneously.

  This was, I realized, the Wormport. That meant we’d made it out of Subterra and back into the actual aboveground world. It also meant we had a whole new assortment of problems to deal with.

  First problem: finding my dad and friends.

  I’m not sure how many containment chambers the Wormport had, but I do know we’d been dropped into a particularly busy one. There were maybe twenty-five people in the room, and at least nineteen of them probably hadn’t expected to be joined by an assortment of hysterical head cases.

  The crowd was in the process of doing what crowds do best—crowding. There was a lot of gawking as well. Calls of “What’s happening?” and “Who is that?” and pleas to send help were being offered to whoever was listening.

  Finally, I was able to spot Hypatia. She was craning her head wildly around, calling, “Boy! Boy! Where did he go? We have to go back! Oh no! Oh NO!”

  She lifted a random kindergarten-age student, who was clutching a colorful overnight bag, from the tiled floor and gave him a test hug. “You aren’t him! LIAR!” she said angrily, dropping him onto his butt and resuming her search.

  Warner was seated cross-legged on the floor a few feet away, running his hands through his hair, weeping, and mumbling frantically to himself. Dad stood over him, his hands resting on Warner’s shoulders. I almost thought he was comforting Warner, but a second later he tried to lean on him, and it became clear Dad had mistaken Warner for a bench or something more solid. Both of them went down, but neither seemed to notice or care.

  Gus was sitting on one of the fold-down seats, picking his nose and munching cheerfully on what looked like a decorative hibiscus.

  Darleeen was . . . nowhere to be seen. I stood and spun around.