“I don’t really understand what happened in that hotel room,” I said, “what happened in that whorl.”
I know. A piece of sardine fell out of her mouth onto the floor while she chewed. It’s a lot to take in all at once. When nemaloki cackle is combined with the cackle of an oshara like Blanche, whose cackle is constantly spreading, that cackle becomes a disease that can infect anybody. It’s a disease of the mind, of personality. It turns people, anyone, into Blanche, basically. It gives her control of them. Arawok, or God, or Nature, or whatever you want to call it, has a natural defense against this. It vomits the infection into the void. Or however you want to describe it. The point is, it gets rid of it. Zelda moved on to the quesadilla, trying to flip the whole thing into her mouth at once. Now here’s where you come in. There are seven stomachs, or worlds, right? Seven worlds and the void. And one of the only things that can travel through these worlds is a rekulak. Now forgive me but we have to use the stomach metaphor for this next part. It’s going to be gross but it’s the easiest way to picture this. Imagine your rekulak is an infinitely long string passing through all seven stomachs, extending out from the anus and the mouth for infinity. When you left a corruption of yourself summoning your rekulak inside of Blanche’s whorl, you attached her to the string, changed its nature. As long as your corruption is typing inside her whorl, Blanche will be part of the string. And it won’t matter how much Arawok tries to regurgitate her, more string will just keep coming up from the anus for eternity, and she will have access to all of the stomachs, and there is nothing Nature or Arawok can do about it. She’s infecting this stomach, this world now. And she’ll move onto the next one and the next one soon enough.
“Okay. But why did my sister have to die?”
She wanted Em’s body, an oshara’s body to help her spread her disease. But more importantly, she needed the vast amount of cackle an oshara can produce to get through your rekulak’s defenses so you could even enter her whorl in the first place. But mobiak cackle is always tethered to their mothers until they go through an untethering ceremony, which is what you went through in that deprivation tank when this all began. So when Blanche took over Em’s body, she also took over May’s, which caused May to be regurgitated into the void. Em was spared this fate because the Zaditorians were hiding her from Arawok’s detection.
My head was swimming. On top of this, Blanche had used the Nabobs of the Lodge, like Nancy and Brad, to convince everyone who might have been able to stop her that there was an impending war with Zaditor, and Arampom was the safest place to wage that war. Every mobiak at the Lodge, every potential threat to her plan, had marched into their prison voluntarily.
After our meal, Zelda had me draw a bath, then jumped in before the tub was full. The water turned brown. I poured some soap in while the faucet ran, and bubbles stacked up around her little fox face. She closed her eyes halfway. Ahhhh.
I shut off the water, sat against the opposite wall, and gave her a few minutes of silence before saying, “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can go back to that cheese danish whorl.”
You have to. The fate of reality depends on it.
“The pain was too much.”
It won’t be next time. I’ll help you. You get in, use your blood to free the corruption you left behind, like you did in my candy-dish whorl, then ride the Ghost out of there. Bob’s your uncle, Craig will be freed and the world will be saved.
“But we don’t have the totem. And we don’t have Blanche’s cackle.”
We have the Wall of Blanche, don’t we? I should say that’s enough cackle to get past Craig’s defenses. And I have a plan for the totem—two, actually, in case one goes wrong. We make the totem. There’s no flour in this house but I’m sure I can find some somewhere. It takes what, five days for a sourdough starter to be viable? It won’t be the same as your family’s, but it might work. In the meantime, we plan our escape. If the new starter doesn’t work, Naomi has a piece of the original, right? All she wants in exchange are Bruce and Pam. Well, Lou brought Bruce and Pam here, so they must be somewhere around. We can bring them to her.
“How do you know about all that?”
I know everything about you, Charlie. Up to the point I became a fox, at least. I lose you now if you are far away and not in pain.
She knew everything? The thought made me recoil. Sensing my discomfort, Zelda said, I judge without condemnation, Charlie, and I love you unconditionally.
Then I felt her love, genuine, warm, and beautiful. Tears welled in my eyes. I’d never needed a friend more than I did now,
