Chapter 6

The land was an island, and not a very big island at that.

The island appeared to be in the shape of a giant pyramid. From every, every side of the beach rose at roughly a thirty degree angle until at last the island naturally came to a climactic peak. It was an odd form. The boy briefly wondered whether it was this very shape of land that convinced the Egyptians to recreate such a feat by their own hands.

And so, like any boy his age, or, perhaps more truly, any human with free time and a beating heart, the boy found himself ascending the island pyramid. The ground below was a deep red, presumably clay, but nevertheless it was quite brittle and soft, often breaking into small chunks under the strength of the boy's plodding might. Up and up he went. What an odd creation, he continually wondered. The island appeared to support no life whatsoever, as there was not even the smallest of shrubbery about. Nothing. Just this red clay leading him further and further up its scale. This narrator, however, would be remiss not to note that despite the lack of flora and fauna, there did exist large splotches of white amidst the boy during his descent. The lad honestly did not take these splotches into much account at that time. He assumed it was something of a calcium deposit. It was not.

As he neared the summit, the boy caught the outline of a pigeon dart of what appeared to be thin air, bounding straight up into the orbit. The bird had the form of a pigeon, of this the boy was assured, but he'd never had imagined a pigeon catapulting itself into the stratosphere with the intensity that this one had. Never.

Again.

Out of nothing, suddenly flying straight up to the clouds went another pigeon-esque specimen.


A mad thought entered the boy. He spoke it to himself out-loud to feel the words leave his lips; "Is this the source of creation."

He was no less than fifteen yards from the peak, scrambling on his hands and knees when the first revelation showed itself to him. A dart slipped down from the heavens. In a straight vertical descent the streak blazed down. It suddenly disappeared at the very pinnacle of the island. Two or three seconds later (and what the boy would later incorrectly estimate as ten or fifteen seconds, when reviewing the scene to himself), a sonic boom shimmied through the course of the island. At this juncture the boy came to understand what was happening.

He finished his ascent with haste. Breathing desperately, his whole body seemingly involved in the intake process, the boy examined the situation. His suspicions were proven accurate. He was right.

Those pigeons were not flying out of nothingness. This was not some ex nihilo wormhole. No. The top of this pyramid was no top at all. It was a hole. The pigeons were flying up from the inside of the island. He peered a glance down the hole. It was brightly lit with white neon lights. The sides were a glimmering steel color. The island, was, after all, artificial. The clay was merely covering this labyrinthine structure.

Reader beware, a normal citizen of this world would have felt some deep dread of fear at such a revelation as this that the boy just experienced -- but the boy was no normal specimen, and having lost his brother, and sailed the open seas with a trove of stuffed animals for company, fear was not a thing to be considered. The young man peered up into the heavens quickly to make sure a torpedo wasn't about to explode down, and, noting the vista above as free of piloting, he dove down the hole. Where those pigeons came from, he would go.

As he descended the steely rabbit hole, the boy pondered that perhaps he was the pawn in someone's giant 'chutes and ladders' game.

The hole curved before it finally spit him out on a long hallway. This drab and somewhat dank corridor held within it the strangest sight the boy had ever comprehended. Here stood door after door on either side. Each door stood to be regular in construct, perhaps slightly taller than normal, each maybe nine or ten feet tall. At the base of every door there was an opening like that of a doggy-door. But in the stead of dogs, there were very prim-and-proper pigeonesque birds, standing single-file, waiting to enter into each door. There were, in front of most doors, conservative little lines of six or seven birds awaiting their door-appointments. For quite some time the boy simply stood and beheld this mechanism at work. As far as the boy surmised, the pigeonesque creatures (let the reader know: the birds are stated as pigeonesque, in that we know them to be in resemblance of form to that of pigeons, but in many other ways the two specimens are distinct, but to how exactly these birds should be called, this narrator does not know, and therefore they are herein referred to simply as pigeonesque) had a two step process they went through.

When a bird first arrived into the hallway, it held something in its beak. The boy couldn't organize the arsenal of things these creatures bore with them. Some of them brought cell phones, some porcelain dolls... one even awkwardly towed a man-sized unicycle somehow. These birds would wait in a seemingly random line, enter through the doggy-door (let the reader understand: the boy only spotted the unicycle in line, he never saw how the bird got the enormous device through the too-small door. This remained a mystery to the lad), and then exit minus the commodity.  Said bird would then get into a new line seemingly randomly. The bird would enter through the hole in the door with nothing in the beak, and then soon enough exit, with a new beakful of random substance. Upon exiting the room, the bird would walk, then flutter, then propel itself to a roar of speed before zooming up and out the hole from which the boy came. This was how it went.

The boy walked down the long hallway. Past door after door. In white paint, often very sloppily, every door had a different set of words painted on. It seemed very random. The first door to the right had written on it, "Beware the ides of August." Another read, "Eat, Sleep, Pray, Love, Sleep." Still another, "What goes around and comes around is a frisbee." Yet another, "Surely you won't die." That one rather scared the lad. He would certainly not choose that one.

The boy wasn't at all sure what he was going to do at all. He just kept walking down the hallway. He couldn't yet see the end; only the horizon. But then he came to a door which read, "O Come, O Come." The boy was drawn to it. One year long ago during a rainy Christmas a bunch of bums huddled around a flaming trashcan bursted out in a cryptic iteration of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel". The words to that song always left the boy with a keen and somewhat pleasant sense of longing. For what he was supposed to be yearning and waiting for, he didn't know. But he waited, nonetheless. And now, in this underground bunker in the middle of an island pyramid who-knows-where in the Pacific, the boy felt compelled to open this one door.

What he saw stumped him.

There was a desk, a chair, a pile of stuff that stood taller than the boy... and a donkey. That donkey somehow, and mind you -- this was the first thing that left the lad dumbfounded, was seated on the chair like a human, huddled over the desk as if ready to write down his memoirs. At once the donkey noticed the door's opening, and immediately spoke up.

"Oh good, a human boy! What a joy! O come, O come good sir!"

The boy, not having one of his most profoundest moments, replied, "You can talk."

The donkey was puzzled. He thought too himself for a bit, "I... well, I... I suppose I can." The donkey let out a somewhat fierce sounding hee-haw and then beckoned the boy to come closer with one leg. The boy took one step closer and then paused. "I suppose I can make this easier for you."

At once the donkey removed his head with two of his feet. The reader may expect that this explanation means that the individual took off his donkey mask, but the reader would be wrong in picturing it as such. No. The donkey took off his head. He had a donkey head, and then he did not. Underneath however, was something like a human male's head. It had all the pieces that a human man would have; two ears, two eyes, a mouth, tongue, teeth, a chin, and a nose, sure enough, and all the parts seemed to be in the right places, but somehow it wasn't right. This was not a man. At least, it was not a human man.

The donkey held his donkey head in his lap.

"Hi," the boy suddenly blundered into saying.

"Hi yourself! Why are you here, human boy?"

"I landed here."

"No one just lands here."

"I did."

"Did you fall out of a plane?"

"No."

"Well then let it be known. How did you come here?"

"My boat took me here."

"Your boat?"

"Yes sir. I built it."

"Oh. Very well then." The boy was happy that the donkey seemed satisfied with that answer. "But tell me, why did you build a boat?"

"I'm looking for someone."

The donkey got excited. "Me! Are you looking for me? Here I am!" The donkey seemed quite proud of himself.

"Umm... is this yours?" The boy presented his little lock of blonde hair to the creature.

The donkey needn't look at it to know his answer. "Oh no, oh no. That surely is not mine. Say, I bet one of my workers was sent to give that to you."

"One of your workers?"

"My flyers. They take objects and fly them all over the world."

"Why?"

"Oh, that's not for me to know. That's not my job." Then the donkey got an idea, "Say..."

"Yes?"

"Would you hold onto my head for a moment?"

Thinking that the donkey needed to get up or something, the boy obliged. He immediately grabbed the head out of the creature's lap, but as soon as he did, something happened. The head turned into a small, black square. Out of surprise, the boy dropped the cube.

"Now now, don't do that," remarked the donkey.

"I'm sorry." The boy shamefully picked the cube back up. "What is it?"

"I'll tell you, but it's a secret."

"Okay."

"It's the secret of life."

"What?"

"All of it."

"But it was your head!"

"That's what I've been made out of. Don't worry, it'll grow back for me. I'll get more of it."

"More of what?"

"Aren't you listening at all?"

The boy wanted to defend himself, but it came out as more of a whimper, "I'm trying to!"

"You were brought here. You may think you made that boat and brought yourself here, but that is mere illusion, just like the current illusion that I can come to resemble a man human."

"So what are you?"

"I am made from the source."

"Oh."

"You will use the secret of life and be united with your haired one."

"My haired one?"

"Your girl?"

"My what?"

"Go."

And so the boy went.