. . .
He writhes away from dead Mr. Loggins. He huddles there, taking desperate gasps of breath. Finally his thoughts clear enough to know roughly where he is.
He staggers up. He rests his weight for a moment on a chair. The chair falls over. He falls over. His eye-bone feels broken. He remembers after a moment that you cannot actually break your eye-bones, and then that there aren’t any. He feels the bone around his eye. It is OK. Maybe it is a little bit sore.
He does not know why Mr. Loggins is dead.
. . .
He does not know why Mr. Loggins is dead.
The medical examiners will later rule it an apoplexy. They will absolve him entirely; though, hearing that, and thinking of the channels crude-carved by his hat into Mr. Loggins’ brain, Tom will be unable to absolve himself.
In the old days that wouldn’t have happened. Science adventurers with parasitic serpent DNA can do a lot of bad things, like warming the Earth and killing off humanity, but they don’t accidentally give people aneurysms when trying to help them out.
It might have stopped him.
That guilt — it might have killed the dream-wroth, struck it from him, made him hang up the hat or even burn it, and never to fulfill the destiny that he had claimed. It might have made him remember that being human can be a good thing, that being imperfect can be a good thing, that there is a certain value in not having any particular destiny to, you know, kill off the world.
Only —
He can’t stop. Not now.
He has tipped over the edge now. He can see.
. . .
For Tom Friedman as for Mr. Loggins it is already too late. He is already caught in it, already tangled into the sinister hair-net of his fate. It is already in him and within him, his child, his future, his life, his death, and his enemy: the hat that he shall make.
It looms vastly in his mind. It turns there, the vision of it. It regards him without eyes and a glint like the scissors-glint rides back and forth between them.
It lives in him.
He cannot stay at his academy; he calls on Mr. Gulley and transfers to the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth.
There, to practice, he makes a hat. And another. And another, until finally he is ready.
. . .
His roommate Stephan pesters him. His roommate Stephan taunts him. His roommate Stephan locks Tom in the bathroom, plays with his hats outside the door, makes funny voices through them, and finally, unwisely, tries one on.
After that Tom is no longer pestered; nor neither does he relent.
. . .
He tries to stop but he can’t. He tries, he rubs convulsively at his head, he flings off his hat and he locks all his materials in a steamer trunk in his closet, binds them about with hardened chains, and seals the closet behind a wall of lead, but it doesn’t stop him.
He wakes one night to find himself half-started and he cannot help but finish.
He makes himself a crowning hat.
He makes himself a kether-hat.
He makes a hat to unleash the sacred flame.
. . .
He holds up the hat. He turns it in his hands.
There is no slime from it. It is not dead. It is like dead, it is from the stuff of the dead, it is made from the ruins of dead hats, but it is not dead. It is warm and living in his hands.
Its presence caresses him with electric sensations, holy shivers, it is as if it speaks to him in some numinous and angelic tongue.
“I —” he says.
Then he closes his eyes. He lets the tears flow.
“I have made this,” he says.
. . .
The hat is in Tom’s hands. He lifts it up.
It’s not all gone. Not all the science — is this really science? Nevermind. But —
It’s not all gone.
He smiles to himself.
He puts it on.
. . .
The hat aligns him, then. It makes him one thing, then, one singular purpose.
He flows with it. He burns with it. It is as graceful in him as a dance.
He runs straight from the past to the future; he is the spear of a single destiny; he is a single creature, animated by a single light.
. . .
He is no longer Tom Friedman.
His hat has sorted him and re-sorted him. It has changed him. It has made a certain amendment and rectification to the categories of the world.
He is no longer Tom, the mortal; nor Tom, the serpent.
He crowns himself a new Tom, that day: Tom, of the House of Dreams.
– 11 –
. . . but that isn’t who this story is about.
Tom is rising now. He is ascending. He is a self-reinforcing process; an evolutionary engine; he is climbing towards the omega plateau, towards the point without limitations, where he may coil his dreams around the naked Earth and decide all fates —
But this story isn’t about Tom.
– 12 –
As for Edmund, he has eaten the sacredness of death.
If you wrote it all out as a little list of ingredients —
* The footfalls of a cat
* The arms of a four-armed ape
* The spittle of a bird
* The sacredness of death
* The torment of the willing
* The bearing witness to the wrongness
* and the tape that binds an emu
* and the perseverance of hope
— you’d see that he’s making pretty good progress, as Gulleys go, against the chain that binds his wolf. A bit of eating an impossible thing here, a bit of luck with a swarm of scissors happening to attack the world and rattle down a chimney and cut a key bit of tape there, and hey presto, he’s on his way!
Which is pretty scary, I guess. I mean, that wolf (I hear), it’s going to eat the world.
But it also kind of goes to show you that this story isn’t about Edmund, either.
I mean, we haven’t even seen a four-armed ape.
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