Crap Kingdom (25 page)

“I know,” Kyle said.

“When are you coming back?” Tom said.

“I dunno,” Kyle said. “There’s going to be a lot of rebuilding with the Ghelm, and seeing if we can live with them peacefully now that their king’s gone, so that’ll be a lot of work, and we still have a lot to do here.”

“Cool,” Tom said.

“Let me talk to him,” Kyle said. “It’ll probably take a while, but I’ll talk to him.”

“Cool. Thanks, man.”

“Are you guys done?” said someone who wasn’t Kyle or Tom.

Tom looked over. A pink bunny in a princess costume jumped out from behind a huge pile of old VHS tapes. The bunny reached up and removed its head. It was Pira. She ran over to them.

“Welcome back, Tom! He didn’t want me to be in here for the spell, but there was no way I wasn’t going to be.”

“Yeah, we were just talking about how your dad’s kind of a—”

“No, not my dad,” Pira said. “
Kyy-uhhhl
.”

“Don’t say my name like that,” Kyle said.

“I’ll say it however I—what is it? Damn well please?”

“Yup,” Kyle said, “that’s it.”

She stood very close to Kyle. Kyle leaned down and kissed her. They kept kissing.

Tom had no idea this had been going on. He’d missed a lot of things in a lot of worlds. He let himself feel jealous for a second. He’d never even wanted to kiss Pira, except for that one day. He knew he only wanted to now because someone else was. He commanded himself to knock it off. It worked.

His eyes drifted down to Pira’s big, fuzzy pink bunny mascot head. He recognized it but he wasn’t sure from where.

“Jealous?” Pira said. Tom opened his mouth and realized she was talking about him looking at the bunny head.

“How could I not be?” Tom said. “I’ve always wanted my own bunny head.”

“It’s not a ‘bunny head,’” Pira said. “It’s the fuzzy helmet I got off the mustache guy.”

“You ready?” Kyle said.

Tom nodded.

“Hey, Tom?” Pira said. “On behalf of the people of Rfhfhhhuptpth . . . thank you.”

Tom smiled. “Was that your princess impression?”

“What?” Pira said. “No, I was being . . . I mean, yes, it was! Funny, right?
Ha!
”

“Bye, you guys,” Tom said.

Kyle stuck his arms out and Tom unconsciously braced for the push. One second later he was still in Crap Kingdom because Kyle didn’t push him, he hugged him.

Kyle broke the hug. “See you later?”

“Yeah,” Tom said.

He pushed Tom.

Tom felt himself swinging backward through the void toward Earth, and then he felt a strong push in the other direction. He stopped in mid-swing. He was hanging upside down in the void. He didn’t panic. He was used to voids by now.

“Ggggogogogood. It worked,” said a reverse-echoing voice with a British accent. “At least I can do something right.”

A jellyfish soul with a hundred dancing faces appeared in front of Tom.

“Jason?”

“Ththththththat’s me, sorry to say. I’ll let you pass back to Earth in a second, I just—How did it go? I’m afraid I made a right mess of things, and—”

“No. It’s okay. Kyle and I took care of it. The Ghelm overlords are gone.”

“Ohohohohoh good, that’s such a relief, you have no idea. So you’re coming back from your big celebration, then?”

“Not at all. The king still hates me.”

“Whwhwhwhwhwhaat? But you’re a hero!”

“Maybe. Not the way he sees it.”

“Anananananand that doesn’t bother you?”

Tom thought about it and answered honestly. “No. I know what I did.”

“Yoyoyoyoyou’re still banished?”

“Guess so.”

“Thththththththat’s so unfair!”

“Maybe.”

“Tototototototototo be a hero in a world to which you can never return. I must say, I know quite a bit about that.”

“I have the one world,” Tom said. “That’s enough for right now.”

“Sososososososo after all that,” Jason said, “You’ve reached a kind of
Wizard of Oz
, never-further-than-my-own-backyard conclusion?”

“Not exactly,” Tom said. “The backyard trains you for the bigger adventures without you even knowing it.” Tom found it much easier to say things he was actually proud of when he didn’t actually have a mouth.

“Bububububut you’re banished! What if you never get a chance to have any bigger adventures?”

“Did you ever think you’d get pulled up out of the void?”

All of Jason’s glowing floating heads shook from side to side in unison.

“Well, there you go. And it was nice being in a body while it lasted, right?”

“Sususususususure, until I went and almost got your body
killed
.
Right away, too! I had another chance and I fouled it up and now I’ve just got to float here and think about it, possibly for eternity.”

“You’re still a mind, correct? In the void, your mind is literally the only thing you can control. So, I don’t know . . . maybe try not to think about it as much?”

“Ohohohohohohoh, I see, big adventurer. You know everything now, I suppose.”

“I know almost nothing,” Tom said. “But that’s a whole lot more than nothing.”

Then he said, “Can I go home now?”

EPILOGUE

“YOU GOTTA BE
more careful,” Tobe said.

Tom looked down. He was in the scene shop behind the stage, surrounded by other kids working with power tools. It was loud, but it wasn’t as loud as the Vortex. He must be in seventh-period stagecraft. There was blood on his fingers again, but this time the blood was coming from the fingers themselves. There was a small cut on his right index finger that Tobe was in the middle of putting a Band-Aid on.

“Thanks,” Tom said. Apparently the placeholder soul that had been in his body wasn’t as skilled at operating it as Jason had been. As it turned out, Tom thought, Jason hadn’t been that skilled either. This made Tom, who had always been only okay at operating Tom’s body, feel a lot less alone.

“A band saw,” Tobe said. “A toy. One of these things is not like the other.”

Tobe finished with the Band-Aid and looked up at Tom.

“Got it?”

“You have sawdust in your mustache,” Tom said.

Tobe reached up and wiped his mustache with his hand. “Thanks,” he said, and walked away.

The mustache. Tobe’s office. Something about his office and the mustache and that day Tom had tripped over the—

—Bunny outfit. What Pira had called the fuzzy helmet she had taken from the mustache guy the night someone slipped Gark an updated prophecy.

Tom walked up to Tobe, who had moved on to overseeing a kid who was using a circular sander.

Tobe shouted over the machine. “Yes?”

Tom leaned very close to Tobe and shouted: “Jason. Gark. Doondredge. Ghelm. Elgg.”

Tobe reached up and put one finger to his mustache.

“We can’t talk here,” he said. He checked his watch. He motioned for Tom to follow him. They went up the stairs to the wardrobe room. Tobe walked to the last row of costumes, dusty from under use, crappy itchy stuff consigned here, to the back, to get eaten by moths. Tobe shoved aside two big lumps of clothes on hangers. The hangers shrieked against the metal pole that held them up. There was a door there, behind the clothes. Tom had never seen it before. Then again, he’d never needed the twenty nun habits that were in front of it.

Tobe took out his big janitor-sized ring of keys. He stuck a strange, two-pronged key in the door’s lock. He turned the knob and the door swung in. It was dark in there. Tobe stepped in. Tom followed.

The walls of the passageway on the other side seemed to be not brick, not concrete, but just plain unformed rock. And at the end of the passageway, beyond a bend, there was light.

They reached the light and turned.

They had come out of a cave onto the top of a grassy hill. Below them was a valley of tiered lakes, one flowing into the other, bodies of water stacked on top of each other, somehow defying gravity. Great arches soared into a golden sky. Stalactite palaces hung down from them, with floating gondolas darting between their upside-down towers. Everything seemed to be made of frozen honey that refused to melt in the ultra-brilliant sun.

“Wow,” Tom said.

“Yttethlae,” Tobe said. “A real gem among the All-Worlds. Not bad, right?”

“Not at all,” Tom said.

“This is not exactly the time I would have chosen to explain, but—”

“Um . . . hi guys.”

Tom turned around. Lindsy was standing at the mouth of the cave.

Had she followed them? What would she think? How would Tobe explain this? He hoped he told her the truth, whatever the truth was. There had been enough lying all around.

“Tom and I just needed a place to talk,” Tobe said. “Mind if we borrow your world for a minute?”

Moments later, they were seated in the grass beneath the rich amber sky, and Tobe began. “Once, a long time ago, I was what’s called the World-Finder General. It’s one of the top positions in the All-World Federation. The World-Finder is in charge of finding new worlds that have not yet been made aware that there are other worlds out there, and peacefully bringing them into our organization. At least, that’s how I did it. There have been other World-Finders who were more, shall we say, aggressive. And I like to think I’d still be doing it, but I made a mistake. I think you can sympathize with that.”

“What mistake?” Tom asked.

“I tried to integrate Earth into the All-Worlds, but I went about it all wrong. So wrong I was stripped of my title as World-Finder General, and exiled to a world of my choosing.”

“Why did you chose Earth to be exiled to?”

“Well, Earth is not my first-world. I mean, it’s not where I’m from originally. Someday, you might have the opportunity to live in some other world and tell someone, ‘This is not my first-world. My first-world is a place called Earth.’ I would like everyone on Earth to have that opportunity. And you, and Kyle and Lindsy, and hopefully a few others, will be the first, the ones that prove to the All-Worlds at large that humanity ought to have that opportunity. I chose to be exiled to Earth so that I could figure out how to try again. So far, this second attempt has been sloppy, I’ll admit. Planting prophecies by night in a bunny suit and everything. And I think I could have been more careful finding the world for you to be a representative of Earth in. I’m not perfect. But I don’t think that my not being perfect is enough reason for me to not try and do something I believe is worth doing, as many times as it takes until I get it right.”

“So we’re representing all of humanity?”

“Apparently so,” Lindsy said.

Tom turned and looked at her.

“Lindsy’s heard this already,” Tobe said, “when I introduced her to Yttethlae last week. Straightforwardness seemed best. When it came to you and Kyle and Thhhptphtphl, some of my tactics—the prophecies, et cetera—may have hurt more than they helped. But Chosen Ones . . . It seemed like the sort of thing you’d be interested in.”

Tom said, “Wouldn’t it maybe have been better if you’d told me I was representing all of humanity?”

“Wouldn’t it maybe be better if you always behaved as though you were representing all of humanity?”

Tom would have to think about this. He had a lot to think about.

“It’s okay,” Tobe said. “You’ll try again just like I’m trying again. And I’m already receiving reports that you may have done something very brave, something that makes you more than worthy of another shot. Maybe back there, maybe some other world. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Tom,” Lindsy said. “What happened?”

Tom didn’t know where to start. But he knew that not knowing where to start should not prevent him from starting.

“Okay,” he said. “Here goes.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS ARE DUE to extraordinary editor Kendra Levin and everyone on her team, to Daniel Greenberg, Dianne McGunigle, Lev Ginsburg, and to Meggie, Dan, and the rest of DERRICK. Thanks and love to Haley, thanks and love to my family, especially grandmas Pat, Jan, and Mary. Peace to the UCB Theaters on both coasts. Thanks to Idler, Rollins, Quinn, and Fineman, and shouts out to every recovering high-school theatre kid. I beg forgiveness from the immortal Tattoo Club, Darryl Seeliger, Jeremy Seeliger, and Jason Artigas. Thanks to Ken Plume and Eliza Skinner. Thanks to Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster, who make worlds every Tuesday night, and a salute to all FOTs. Thanks to Brian Jacques, chief world-builder of my young reading life. So long and thanks for all the mice.

The bulk of this book was written while listening to the album Challengers by The New Pornographers.