It all starts in English, as a surprising amount of things in Wirt’s life do. They’re reading poems and eventually come to one called ‘The Beast’ by a woman named Adelaide which is too familiar for Wirt to ignore.
The moment he gets home he starts to research the author. He reads about how she and her sister almost died when they were young, around the same ages as Wirt and Greg are now. He reads accounts about how both of them changed after the accident, how they became estranged but always shared an intense interest in the occult. He reads about the children found in Adelaide’s basement after she died.
That last part makes him cry for a long time.
Even though he hates Adelaide, and he now knows that it’s the same Adelaide as he met in the Unknown, he can’t help but keep reading about her life. Finding out that someone other than himself and Greg made it out makes him believe that a life after the Unknown might be possible, that this isn’t just a dream and he’s going to wake up any moment to fire and heat and smothered in the Beast’s soul.
And then there’s the witchcraft. As far as Wirt knows, Adelaide and Auntie Whispers are the only people in the Unknown who could do magic. Finding out that they went there when they were younger makes him wonder if maybe having escaped the Unknown in the past is what gave them their abilities. He wonders if the same rules apply to him and Greg.
So Wirt looks into the occult. He tries not to get too interested in it, he doesn’t want people to think he’s some kind of weirdo, but he likes it. He likes the patterns and the sounds and the way that when he reads the words out loud they make him feel powerful in a way he never has before.
Wirt asks Greg if he wants to read the words as well, once. When he repeats the same words that Wirt has said to himself a thousand times his eyes go watery and he has to spend the next hour hugging Jason Funderburker close to his chest.
Because of this, along with a thousand other things, Wirt worries. He worries because his brother is the best person he knows and he wonders what it says about him that something that makes the best person in the world cry makes him want to shout out in exultation.
Wirt worries so much that he thinks his head might explode and leave everything dripping with the black sludge of fear and unease and worry that lives in his head.
But he doesn’t stop.
~
Wirt is in his room, alone in a sea of hand-written notes and books on the dark things in the woods that he used to be more afraid of. He sits in front of a mirror covered in sigils drawn on in whiteboard marker and encircled in candles.
He waits for the clock to strike midnight and recites the same words he’s said a thousand times before.
The air in the room gets warmer as he speaks. The air twisting and writhing with the forces upon it. It’s all confusing and chaotic and not at all how things in the real world tend to be.
It’s how things in the Unknown tend to be.
Wirt tries to keep his focus, he tries so hard to make the words do what he wants them to that for a moment he forgets to be scared or nervous or worried at all.
The candles burn brighter. The mirror cracks.
Wirt smiles, and manages to picture a life for himself after the Unknown for the first time since he got back.