Chapter Text
Their time in the Unknown was exactly that: unknown.
And Wirt was determined to leave it there.
Greg, on the other hand, seemed determined to bring it back.
It hadn’t been like that at first.
In the days after their adventure, the Unknown had lived and breathed in both of them. Crayon drawings of “Unkie Endecott” and a dog with glowing eyes decorated the fridge and covered the walls of Greg’s room. Lights were kept on past midnight. Poetic whispers drifted from Wirt’s room: lines about garden walls, the flight of a bluebird, spider webs and lanterns. The whispers always ended abruptly when it came to beasts and twisted trees. Pieces of paper dotted with music notes littered Wirt’s bed, “Skeleton Dance,” “Potatoes and Molasses,” “Secrets in the Wardrobe,” and “Beatrice’s Wings.” Eager-eyed six- and seven-year-olds trooped to Greg’s room to see “the singing frog” and left when he never croaked a note. (“I think he has frog laryngitis, you can get it when you swallow magic bells. It’s a pebble-I-found-on-the-sidewalk fact!”)
There had been a visit to the vet soon after their release from the hospital, and the vet had found no evidence of Jason Funderburker the Frog having swallowed a bell. And even though Greg had tried to point out the faint glow emanating from the frog’s stomach, the vet had merely smiled.
The hardest part were the gasps when Wirt woke up in a dark bedroom alone, with a pounding heart that only a peep into his brother’s room to see Greg—sleeping peacefully, not a pale, empty face protruding from a tree stump or a small body in a dark, freezing pond—could slow down.
And sometimes Greg would blink awake from dreams—the feeling of not being able to move, of being cold, of not knowing where Wirt was and waiting and waiting for the sun to disappear into a china cup—grab Jason Funderburker and a blanket, and pad his way into Wirt’s room, curling up on the other side of the bed where his brother’s breathing would help him go back to sleep.
Fall drifted its way into a harsher winter, one where Greg wore two coats no matter what the temperature and spent less time making snowmen than previous winters, and one where Wirt spent a lot of time inside, drinking hot chocolate with Sara and doing homework together (their hands accidentally touching over their geometry books) and listening to the Black Turtles on Wirt’s tape player. References to the Unknown dwindled to only a few times a week and were mostly prompted by Greg.
And even though Jason Funderburker the Frog hopped around Greg’s room and the box that Wirt’s stepdad had hauled out for him and would croak and ribbit like any other frog, there was still no bell. Greg pestered Wirt with questions (“Will Jason Funderburker be okay? Maybe we have to wish for the bell to go away? Is he going to sing again? Does he need more socks?), and Wirt had pointed out that Jason was acting totally fine and that the song had probably been a one-time thing. (“Maybe he’s a one-hit wonder kind of frog.”) Greg had refused to believe that, so Wirt had fallen back into the old, lame adage that he’d heard adults give thousands of times. (“Just give him some time, Greg.”)
Then Sara had listened to the For Sara tape on the small tape player Wirt had bought her for Christmas, eyes opening in surprise while Wirt sat fidgeting and turned every shade of red possible and died a million deaths.
After that, their hangouts became dates, and Wirt played his clarinet at basketball games with the pep band while Sara danced in her bee costume and Greg pointed out both of them (“That’s my brother, Wirt! And that’s his girlfriend, Sara, Sara the bee! She’s really nice, and she gave me a book about bee facts!”) to anyone on the bleachers that would listen to him.
Winter warmed into spring. Wirt dropped pep band (after a thousand apologies to Sara, who had just shrugged and said “That’s okay, Wirt”) and joined orchestra. Sheet music from classic composers fell around the room instead, and the songs about the Unknown were stuffed under his bed. Less poetry curled out from under his door at night. Lines were written into notebooks instead, the subjects being more about Sara’s eyes and love metaphors than creepy trees. A stray poem about sharp-tongued birds wandered in but was quickly torn out of the notebook.
Greg’s drawings, while they focused more on Jason Funderburker or flying tigers, still featured the occasional pumpkin head or small frog boat or a deer playing the trumpet.
But Wirt no longer noticed the glow of the bell in Jason Funderburker’s stomach.
Summer came, hot and humid, and Wirt’s afternoons were spent with lemonade and riding bikes and reading books and holding hands with Sara. Greg trained Jason Funderburker to do tricks and built rock houses in the backyard and pulled up weeds in Mrs. Daniels’ backyard for cookies.
Both of them avoided swimming in the creek.
(Less of Greg’s friends came around that summer, which was weird, but Greg was happy enough playing in the mud with Jason Funderburker, so Wirt shrugged and left it alone.)
Then came the phone call from Sara, choked with tears, that her dad got a new job and that they were moving to Connecticut.
There was a lot of angsty poetry scribbled with black ink, crossed out and blotted, about tempest swells and doves plunging into the clouds, attempts to make a “For Sara 2” cassette that were quickly abandoned, and sad eyes from Greg peering around Wirt’s bedroom door.
On the day Sara left, there was an address exchange and promises to write and call.
And there was a first and last kiss.
It ended quickly and awkwardly, but Sara walked away with teary eyes and a red face and Wirt stumbled, dazed, out of the driveway and almost ran facefirst into the moving van.
Letters were written constantly, Wirt’s letters included a poetry verse or two, and there were many late-night phone calls where Greg would constantly whisper “Say hi to Sara for me! Is she a bee at the other school? Does Connecticut have bees?”
Summer dimmed into fall, and school started again. Wirt sat with friends from orchestra at lunch and took up handling the poetry section of the school newspaper, The Witches’ Gazette.
Letters came and went less often, phone calls dwindled into biweekly events, and Wirt only wrote angsty poems about departure and breakups maybe once a week instead of every night.
Greg jumped into leaf piles and wrote stories about ghosts and tried baking cookies by himself, forgetting half the ingredients and setting off the smoke alarm.
After being threatened with a grounding if he didn’t, Wirt cleaned up his room and dug everything out from the bottom of his bed. Lines of poetry and composed songs about the Unknown, along with a pointed red cap, found its way into the trash. The cape returned to a box in the attic.
However, “Beatrice’s Wings” was stared at, then slipped into a notebook and buried deep into the closet.
Halloween came in a shower of amber leaves and half-melted chocolate bars. Mom took Greg trick-or-treating in his George Washington Frog costume, Jason Funderburker in a tiny white wig made of a cotton ball.
Wirt refused Halloween party invitations and stayed home to read a new architecture book, radio turned up loud to avoid thinking about horns or talking horses or woodsmen or bluebirds, constantly checking the window to see when Greg was walking back.
He avoided looking in the direction of the graveyard.
But Greg was home safe and sound, with a bag full of candy that he sorted on Wirt’s bed and chattering a mile a minute about someone’s haunted house.
“They had eyeballs you could touch, but they were just grapes. And it really wasn’t scary. They had a ghost, too, but I told everyone that that wasn’t what ghosts were like, that they have big black eyes and lots of teeth, like Lorna, remember? And then Jenny said I was wrong and ghosts don’t have teeth, but then—”
“Greg, I think Jason Funderburker needs to go to bed,” Wirt had interrupted, and he had gently escorted Greg out of his room.
But he had lain awake all night, listening to various tapes to try to cleanse the image of a floating specter in a Puritan dress from his mind and the other images it conjured.
And now it was November, and the witch decorations were cleared out of business doorways and withered pumpkins were removed from neighbor’s porches.
Wirt had heaved a sigh of relief.
No more spooks.
No more ghosts.
Halloween had ended and the Unknown—whatever it had been—was gone, buried in a pond he wouldn’t ever go near behind a wall he would never cross again.
The Beast was gone. His brother was safe. And the Unknown wouldn’t take them again.
Never again.