Chương 8: The Language Ventilation

Bart sat in his plastic chair. The plain white bathroom door was gone. The angry king was gone. Everything was quiet. But Bart could not stop thinking about what the Royal Historian had said right before he left.

"Those shelves over there are breathing strangely." Bart looked past his wooden desk. He looked past the empty, wobbly gold shelf, where a glowing blue card now read: ON LOAN TO KING AURELIUS. He looked deep into the dark, empty space of the East Wing, where the floating stone floor was broken into jagged pieces. Something in the dark was making a sound. It was a slow, heavy breathing sound. In. Out. In. Out. It really did sound like a giant breathing.

Across the desk, Gregor lowered what remained of his squished turkey sandwich.

"Boss? What is that noise?" Before Bart could answer, the sound of flapping pages filled the air. The Almanac of Inevitable Doom swooped down from the ceiling. It spiraled down in a wild, panicked circle before hovering right in front of Bart's face. The book snapped open. Bright red ink began to write across the blank page.

"WARNING," the book wrote.

"The East Wing is…." But before the sentence could finish, the red ink peeled right off the paper. The letters turned into a thin red mist and floated away into the dark. The book tried again.

"DANGER. The vent is…." Once again, the ink turned to mist and was sucked into the dark space. The Almanac snapped shut and shook, looking completely terrified.

"Albert," Bart said, standing up.

"Why are the words flying away?" Albert dropped his broom. The heavy wooden handle hit the stone floor with a loud clatter. The skeleton's empty eye sockets stared into the dark.

"Oh dear," Albert whispered. His jawbone clicked very fast.

"The Language Ventilation. It is failing."

"The what?" Gregor asked.

"The Archive does not just hold books," Albert explained, his bony hands shaking.

"Ideas need air. The vents maintain conceptual pressure. Without them, the emptiness outside pulls language through the weakest wall! The Archive is leaking!"

"Leaking what?" Bart asked.

"Words, sir! Vocabulary!" Albert yelled, waving his arms.

"The ideas are still there. For now. But without words, we cannot reach them. If the leak continues long enough, the ideas will follow!" Bart did not wait. He opened his desk drawer and grabbed the rolled up Sunday edition of the Beaumont City Times. He had confiscated it from the angry city guard on his very first day. Because it had never been formally cataloged, it was the only dense block of printed text he could legally sacrifice.

"Show me," Bart said. Albert ran toward the dark space. Bart and Gregor followed close behind.

"We need to run!" Bart yelled over his shoulder. Gregor stared at him blankly.

"We need to what?" Bart opened his mouth. The concept was still there, but its name had vanished. He pointed urgently toward the East Wing.

"Fast walking!" Bart shouted.

"Do the fast walking!" They hurried to the edge of the safe zone. Before them lay a wide, empty gap between the broken floating stones. Below was endless, starry darkness.

"Jump!" Bart yelled over the growing sound of rushing wind. Gregor stopped right at the edge, waving his arms to keep his balance.

"Do what?"

"Propel yourself into the air!" Bart yelled. The word was gone too.

"The... the upward falling! Do it!" Gregor threw himself across the gap, landing hard on the next floating stone. Bart gritted his teeth, ignored his bad back, and did the upward falling right behind him.

"Go left!" Albert yelled from ahead.

"Which one is left?" Gregor shouted back in a panic. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Bart looked at both of his hands. He suddenly had absolutely no idea.

"Just follow the skeleton!" They scrambled over the broken floor. The breathing sound was deafening now.. It was the sound of a massive, conceptual vacuum. At the very edge of the ruined floor, Bart saw it. There was a long, jagged crack in the stone wall of the Archive. Glowing blue letters A, B, C, and whole sentences were being sucked out of the air and pulled through the crack into the dark space beyond.

"Hurry, sir!" Albert yelled over the loud rushing wind.

"It is taking the verbs!" Bart ran to the wall. He unrolled the Beaumont City Sunday newspaper and pressed it flat against the glowing crack. The rushing wind sucked the paper hard against the stone. The black ink from the newspaper began to glow. Thousands of normal, boring Earth words peeled off the page and filled the crack like magical glue. The sucking noise started to quiet down. Then, the newspaper began to tear.

"It is not enough!" Albert cried out.

"The crack is consuming the verbs too fast! The section is completely depleted!" The top corner of the newspaper ripped loose. A fresh gust of wind hit them, threatening to pull the paper into the void.

"Hold it!" Bart yelled. Gregor scrambled forward. He slammed his hands against the paper, pinning it to the stone.

"It feels weird!" Gregor shouted.

"The words are moving under my fingers!"

"We need more vocabulary!" Bart shouted. Above them, the Almanac of Inevitable Doom swooped through the turbulent air. It was shaking with fear, but it snapped open right above the crack. In an act of incredible bravery, the flying book ripped one of its own pages out. The Almanac wobbled violently in the air. Its leather binding gave a painful, loud creak, and several loose pages sagged toward the floor. A blank gap remained inside the book where a page dedicated entirely to insulting King Aurelius had just been.

The torn page fluttered down and slapped perfectly over the ripping corner of the newspaper. The heavily insulted verbs and adjectives melted into the crack, glowing bright red. It was exactly what the seal needed. The crack sealed shut completely. The sucking noise stopped. The wind died down. The stone wall was quiet. The Almanac floated weakly down to Bart's eye level.

"Thank you," Bart said quietly. The Almanac opened to a clean page. Red ink slowly, weakly appeared.

"Do not make this emotional. Your hair remains disappointing." Bart let out a long breath and looked down at his newspaper. The weather report, the local sports scores, and the Beaumont obituaries were all completely blank. It had been an ordinary, comforting piece of home. Now it was nothing but white paper holding the universe together.

"Boss," Gregor said, stepping back from the wall. The thief looked very confused.

"I just remembered something. I need to pay my... my... the money the king legally steals from us." Bart frowned.

"The compulsory government payment," Bart said.

"The one I used to calculate every April."

"Yes! The yearly fee!" Gregor said, scratching his head.

"Why can I not remember what it is called?" Bart opened his mouth to say the word. But his mind was empty. He knew exactly what Gregor was talking about, but the actual noun was completely gone.

"Every language connected to the Archive has lost it," Albert whispered, staring at the blank patch of wall.

"Millions of people across the multiverse are currently trying to remember the same missing word." The blue System screen flashed in the air. SYSTEM ALERT: IDEA LEAK PATCHED Material Used: Beaumont City Times; One (1) Page of Highly Accurate Insults. Archive Health: 0. 0000005% WARNING: PERMANENT LEXICAL LOSS DETECTED Missing Term: [UNAVAILABLE] Associated Concepts: Government revenue. Compulsory payment. Gregor considers it theft. Back near the front desk, a loud snapping sound echoed through the room.

The little dark red book was snapping its pages wildly in the air, throwing a terrible fit. As Bart watched, the gold letters on the book's cover physically faded away, leaving a totally blank space where the title used to be.

"Oh dear," Albert said.

"That is a book about... well, the money the king takes. And now it has no title. Its index is probably a mess. It is very angry."

"We will have to find a new name for it later," Bart said. He knelt down to pick up a loose piece of the torn newspaper from the floor. But as he reached down, he noticed something strange hiding in the rubble right below the patched crack. It was a heavy, square metal door set into the stone. It looked like a small vault. Bart pushed some broken rocks away. The crack in the wall had not formed randomly.

It curved perfectly around the outline of the buried metal door, as though something behind it had been forcing the wall apart, pushing the pressure outward. The metal was covered in thick dust. Bart used his sweater sleeve to wipe it away. Words were scratched deeply into the metal. They were not written in ink, so the vacuum had not stolen them. They were carved by hand. Bart read the carving out loud. I am Keeper #4, 091. I should not have let them read the ending. Bart stared at the words.

A cold chill ran down his spine.

"Albert," Bart said quietly.

"Who was Keeper #4, 091? And what ending is he talking about?" Albert froze. The skeleton looked down at the carved words. For the first time since Bart had met him, the skeleton looked truly afraid. He stood perfectly still, his jawbone locked tight. Then, with sudden, frantic energy, Albert grabbed his broom. He swept the stones over the carved words with violent, desperate strokes.

"This door is sealed for a reason, sir," Albert said, his voice dropping low.

"What reason?" Bart asked.

"A reason I strongly recommend we continue not knowing." Albert used the wooden handle of his broom to push Bart and Gregor back toward the light.

"We have a very angry, unnamed red book to catch. Chop chop." Bart allowed Albert to herd them back toward the safety of the desk. For now. But he kept looking over his shoulder at the buried door. The Infinite Archive had not simply decayed. It had not just gotten old and fallen apart. Something had happened here. Something someone had tried very hard to hide.