She had to move away often, because there were others around, homeless people who appeared on the corners of streets opposite and wandered over to stand in the park for a time, not doing anything, before shuffling on. Sometimes they took a drink of water. They seemed to want to be there for a while, but not to stay. She wanted to stay, but she could not. When you’re a little girl you’re not allowed to do a lot of things. Being a little girl sucked. She had never realized just how much before now, how bad it could make you feel.
Eventually she just got too tired to keep moving. She climbed over a low wall and found a door where the bottom half was broken, and via a short passage made her way into a parking lot that was shaped like a sinking ship. On the very top level was a single car, left alone and by itself overnight.
The car was like her, she decided. The back door was unlocked.
She climbed in and made herself comfortable.
And woke, very suddenly, an hour later. For a moment she had absolutely no idea where she was. But there was something else that she could remember now. Very clearly.
She pulled out the Post-it note and pen from her pocket and quickly wrote down the four numbers in her head, as fast as she could, convinced that they would be snatched away from her as they had been before.
But no, this time she made it. She counted the numbers, feeling her heart start to race. It looked like enough. It finally looked like the whole number.
Moving quickly now, she got out of the car and ran down through the parking lot and back out through the passageway. She emerged in the side street and spun around, looking for a phone. Couldn’t see one and started running again, knowing that this would draw attention but also that she had very limited time.
She ran and ran until she finally found a phone that worked. She grabbed the handset and stabbed in the numbers from the piece of paper. She let out a short, fierce shout of triumph as she got the last one done.
Hopping from foot to foot, she waited until she heard it picked up at the other end and a voice—and then she started to babble, talking as fast as she could.
But a blackness poured down across the inside of her eyes, and she stopped being able to hear what she was saying. She fought it, as she had fought in that man’s office the previous afternoon and seemed to be always fighting now, struggling against this dark cloud that got thicker and thicker around her, a cloud that sparked and was lit from within with thoughts and memories that made no sense, that made her want to do bad things. She screamed in her head and pushed harder and harder, trying to keep them away from her.
But the next thing she knew, she was walking away from a phone that was now broken, and the piece of paper that had been in her hands was shredded to pieces and floating away on the wind, and her knuckles hurt, and when she realized that there was blood on her hands, her first thought was surprise that for once it was her own.
She was woken again sometime later by the sound of a car door opening.
“Jesus Christ,” said a voice.
Madison sat up quickly. She was back in the car, and it was bright now. She felt like she’d slept for quite a while. She felt a little better, too. Less…confused.
A man was standing outside the car, staring wide-eyed at her. He had pale skin and sandy hair. He was looking not at her face but lower down. She looked, too, and saw that both her hands were speckled with patches of dried blood. There was a little on her coat, too.
“It’s okay,” she said, though actually she now realized that her hands hurt quite a lot. “I’m fine. I broke a phone, that’s all.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I needed somewhere to sleep. You left the door unlocked. Don’t worry. I haven’t stolen anything.”
“That’s…look…”
The man evidently didn’t know what to do. He was wearing a suit and a tie and had the glaze in his eyes that Madison’s dad did when he was really busy and was having trouble seeing past the front of his own head. But he obviously also believed he had to do something nice.
“It’s okay,” she said soothingly. “I’m fine. Honestly.”
“I need to…I’ll take you to the nearest police station. Come on.”
“That really won’t be necessary,” Madison said, slipping out of the car and smiling up at him.
“I think it kind of is. Necessary. I can’t just…”
She shook her head. “What time is it, friend?”
“What? It’s nearly midday. But…”
“Perfect,” she said. “Thanks for everything. I shall recommend your facilities very highly.”
She reached her right hand up toward him. Disconcerted into an automatic response, the man shook it limply. Madison shook his hard and then walked away. As she started down the stairs, she turned and glanced back. He was still standing there, looking down at his hand. She knew he wouldn’t be coming after her. She’d never understood how easy it was to deal with grown-ups, after you realized most of them were basically frightened of you. Sure, moms and dads were okay with their own children, but they always watched other children out of the corner of their eyes, as if all other kids were wild and ungoverned. And children could be, Madison knew. Little girls had a power and light all their own. It was something most grown-ups couldn’t see—but something that, once glimpsed, you wanted to share. You wanted to spend time with them, to get to know them thoroughly, get to know them very well. This was what the man in the yellow car in Portland had been about, she now realized, though he’d been an amateur. He didn’t know you could find the spark and keep it, too. If she had her time again, she would have talked to the man properly, told him what she knew.
She emerged from the parking lot and walked down toward the square with the totem pole and the drinking fountain. A lot of things were clearer to her now, even parts of the notebook that had originally been inexplicable:
The seven ages of man?
Of course not. As with everything, there are nine.
By 9—we must be rooted, living securely above or below. 18—we may start pulling strings. By 27—there should be sufficient control to be consistent in aim. At 36—adulthood, true Dominance begins. 45—without integration, the crisis point. 54—the age of Power. 63—Wisdom. At 72—the search starts again. 81—time to leave: we do not die as others do, and so the parting of this place must be under our control. Add the numbers which make up these nine ages—3 + 6 or 7 + 2—all in turn resolve to a digital root of 9. So it has been enshrined, hidden in plain sight. A triangle = 180° (1 + 8 + 0 = 9); the square and circle are 360° (3 + 6 + 0 = 9)—all regular geometrical shapes have a digital root of 9. Even 666—do I need to tell you by now to add those three numbers, and then add them again?
This is not an accident. Our mathematics was created to honor the power of 9. To the power of the Nines. But the Nines themselves have become weak in the meantime, spiritualized, have even come to believe in their own cramped version of the lies. To believe that our power must be constrained, that we must enter life as a newborn—must hide in plain sight, just another tree in the forest.
But the forests have all been cut down.
I will not fall with them. Did Aristotle not say “The weak are anxious for justice and equality: the strong pay no heed to either”? What happens to those who do not believe as the Nines do? Those who dare contradict them? Ah—over those souls, the truly free, then they would make themselves gods, sitting in judgment upon us.
St. Thomas Aquinas said: You must know a soul by its acts.
You are free to know me by mine.
And Lichtenberg said: We imagine we are free in our actions, just as in dreaming we deem a place familiar which we then see doubtless for the first time.