Chapter 17: Raymond, Who Whispered to Ants
Raymond Muncer clicked in syllables too fine for flesh, a tongue trained not on speech but the ritual murmuration of mandibles. In his backyard—a rotted mesh of roots and wires where once a shed had blistered with lawnmower dreams—he hunched beneath a sky swollen with static glyphs, whispering into the cracks.
The ants listened.
They did not obey.
But they... remembered.
Each click of Raymond's jaw sent carbon-etched instruction through chitinous carriers. Not commands, no—commands are the fiction of monarchs. These were evocations, hauntings encoded in sugars and scent. The ants bore them down, down, beneath the mulch into the linguo-bone hollows of their queens, and there the meanings festered.
He had once been a linguist, they said, though the word linguist now felt like a dog bark in a slaughterhouse—insufficient to describe one who had tasted the blood-meat of every alphabet. He had devoured vowels from thirty-two lost tongues before breakfast each morning. And when the fever began—oh yes the fever—he stopped hearing English at all. It dissolved like a wet napkin in a sewer of feral semantics.
What remained was click. And click meant you are not real unless touched by six-legged theology.
By the end of March, the ants built him a throne. Made not of dirt nor leaf but language—braille in pheromone, a syntax of motion, spirals, death queues. They did not crawl on him. He was them. Their thoughts climbed into his ears, bored canals into his mind, reprogrammed his sense of I.
That’s when the neighbors began to vanish.
First Mrs. Grenley, who liked birdseed and routines. She stepped outside one morning and her body simply forgot how to hold itself together. A pile of meat in the shape of disbelief. All Raymond said was: s-z-z-zzt-n!—a trill that meant return to unuttered origin in the aphid dialect of the red carpenter tribe.
Then the mail stopped arriving. Then the sky grew flat. Then the words on cereal boxes began to melt if read aloud.
And in the deep hours, when even owls forgot how to blink, Raymond whispered the master phrase into the dirt. It had no vowels. It had no stop. It simply curled forever into itself like a Möbius thought-loop of recursion: Tzch'tk-nrx–shluuush–∞–
It began the unmaking.
The ants spread it outward, one queen to another, through root-channels and rain-lattices. Trees started stuttering in leaf. Dogs barked in unknown grammars. Babies dreamt of diagrams.
And in the center of the hive-world now leaking from Raymond’s skull, the Un-Ear began to open. The entity who listens only when nothing is left to say.
Raymond smiled, empty-mouthed. His teeth had long since migrated into the colonies.
Soon, all languages would be eaten.
Even this one.