I didn’t need to read the journals long to realize the identity of the man I hunted. He was known as The Crucifier. It was a much less subtle title than my own, and I’m fairly certain it missed the point of his undertaking entirely—as much as my own moniker missed the point of my work, subtlety or no. According to one of his journals, he saw himself as the reincarnated fifth prefect of Judea—Pontius Pilate. He professed nothing less than the destruction of all false prophets, which from the number of his works, were more numerous than I expected.
Initially, I continued with the journals, hoping to convince the killer I was off my guard, too distracted to afford a proper vigilance. But as I descended further into a particular journal, something did in fact surprise me—a drawing of a pack of daemonic, hungry wolves. It was as if the Crucifier had transferred the image directly from my own dream. However, unlike my dream, his picture included an additional presence—a solitary creature standing amid the sea of wolves, hooded and gripping a red crook. The words scrawled above the figure read, “The Shepherd of Wolves.”
Unfortunately, my preoccupation did indeed cost me my vigilance. The Crucifier was already upon me, cloaked in hunter’s silence. As he charged from beyond the light, my sister leapt into my hand, grinning through the shadows, whispering a warning from betwixt her metal teeth. I took several steps backward, placing Mr. Trill in front of the candles, silhouetting him.
A large, ornate hammer was swung at me in a blur, and I seized the arm holding it. I tossed Mr. Trill into the darkness that obeyed him, cowing the shadows rising against me at his behest. Across the chamber, I heard his hammer clang to the floor, far behind the candlelight. I closed the distance and the hunter bent low, avoiding my sister’s flashing teeth. Stepping back and lowering his shoulder, he lunged at me with the force of a bull. Anchoring myself in the shadows that would have denied me, forcing them into service, I stood immovable. His momentum crashed across me like a wave tossed against a mountain. He stumbled backward, stunned. I delivered him to the ground with a fist, readying both sisters for the kill.
Immediately, Mr. Trill was thrown from the floor as if by unseen hands, brandishing a small silver blade. Hissing like a snake, it struck out all around me, arcs of blood tracing its rapid movements. My sisters greeted polished fangs with steel smiles, filling the air with their glittering laughter and the blood of my opponent. His strength was conditioned well beyond ordinary limits, born from the inspired repetitions his chosen calling exerted upon both his mind and body. More importantly, our respective might was an extension of our dreams—and mine was the night terror to his nightmare.
Realizing this as well, he attempted a formidable retreat, at one point drawing a bladed arc in his wake that nearly opened my retina. I would have happily allowed him escape—call it a courtesy between predators—but he was on my list. Just as he all but escaped into the darkness I’d stolen from him, my sister left my hand, flying across the room and finding his spine. His body fell at the feet of its own shadow, stretching long and twisted by the dancing candlelight. I stood over him in my new darkness, looming. His eyes glowed with fury, raging at his unresponsive body, a broken vessel no longer capable of killing or crucifying. I let him watch the shadows he no longer commanded fill my eyes. No words were exchanged, for what was there to say?
Suddenly, from upon my back I could feel a terrible unrest. My father was awake—his time had come. I lifted my great forebear from his resting place, swinging him high above my head, his edged face gleaming with the amber glow of candlelight. The massive axe passed through the crippled hunter so smoothly, I thought I’d missed him entirely.
CHAPTER THREE
When the candlelight began to die down, the shadows grew wide and indistinct as they joined with the larger body of darkness that flooded the under-church, and still I sat upon the stone floor, wondering. After the first night, the light completely passed away, leaving only my memory of candlelit spaces to illuminate the basement. Though the blackness had become absolute, I still felt the cold shadows of over a dozen crosses pushing softly against the currents of flowing darkness, refusing to melt back into oblivion. When the second night came and went, I was still sitting upon the floor, losing myself in the cool stream of silence pouring from corpses and cold candle wax, from old books and dried blood.
Interpreting silence was one of the first lessons my mother taught me, when I was but a child. In the middle of the night, during one of the fiercest thunderstorms I can remember, I was huddled in the corner of a room, wincing at the thunder. My mother knelt down beside me, placed her lips almost upon my ear, and whispered, “It’s not the thunder you should be listening to, but the silence it leaves behind. Before there was anything, there was silence, and after everything is gone, silence will remain. All that ever was, or could be, whispers its soul into the sound of silence—and the only thing you will ever need to do, to know anything at all, is listen to it.”
Within the piling dust I imagined the thing that held me in its sight, driving me onward. I conjured images of the Shepherd with the red crook, standing tall and solemn upon cresting, frothing waves of hungry wolves. I fantasized the thing in service to a secreted queen of murder, deep in her hive far below the earth. She wore a bloodied crown and held an ornate rusted knife in each of her many crimson-dripping hands. She was surrounded by her retinue of worker-killers, orchestrating the red business of murder. I smiled when I thought of her looking like my mother. But beyond my imaginings, I couldn’t help but feel shameful—I had brought an untimely end to a wonderful dreamer, who had waged as fierce a war against the Mother of the Dead as myself. Still, as before, I could feel purpose behind my actions—a grand scheme that moved within and without me, gathering strength beyond death, preparing. Whatever the reason behind my new calling, it grew all the more forceful and terrible when I found a familiar list of names in the pockets of both the Crucifier and the hunter he had slain. Most important and perplexing of all—my own name appeared on one of the lists. Something familiar drifted down beside me, put its lips almost upon my ear and whispered, “The wolves are coming, son.”
Before I left the church to the slinking death of its dying city, I nailed the Crucifier to one of his own crosses, merging artist with art, preserving his legacy. I hoped he would be taken for one of his own victims, and while his lethal dream would cease, he would remain an unnamed monster, forever. As for the new kill lists I discovered, I transferred the names that hadn’t been crossed off to my own list—all save my own, of course. I noticed that the Crucifier’s list included names from the murdered hunter’s list, none of which were crossed off on the latter. I assumed I’d unconsciously followed some kind of unspoken protocol.
I wasn’t one to devolve mystery into fact, but the game I was engaged in threatened my life in ways I’d never imagined—as embarrassing as that is to admit—and I needed a fuller understanding than what was provided by intermittent dreams and murdered men. Thus, my next stop was a place I had only called upon once before—New Victoria.
The city had been erected from the broken corpse of fallen Boston, its name and aesthetic lifted from the only part of the Cradle of Liberty to survive the mysterious storm that killed her—the South End. In short order, it would serve as the surest counterexample to solid reality, prior to the Darkness, that is. The New Victorian Dream Plague was almost twenty years older than the Great Darkness. And while it might have been more circumscribed in its range, it was no less portentous for the lesser reach. It was only after the military proved insufficient at halting the spread of contagious nightmare that it was determined the city would be evacuated and quarantined. Despite the plague and razor wire and walls, and given its association with dreams, I had once found it a suitable place to visit. But I was quickly and thoroughly disillusioned of any relationship my art and the city might have shared.
Perhaps foolishly, I fear very few things. What I encountered in New Victoria inspired a feeling t
hat surpassed any of the best formulations of fear I know. While my memories only carry back a hazy recollection of my time in the City that Never Wakes, they’re more than enough to convince me that sometimes, sleep is not worth the risk of dreaming.
Unfortunately, New Victoria was the only place my recent—and apparently, shared—dreams might be given some useful interpretation. I knew of certain persons who dwelt there, somewhere between this world and some much darker place, who interacted with dreams as intimately and completely as sculptors work clay. Given my insight into the wicked city, I hoped to safely and ever-so-briefly revisit it. I only needed to stay awake within its borders, or I might find myself eternally trapped within the alien sleep of wakeless, unspeakable things.
***
Soon, I was traveling the haunted countryside, wandering the dust of forsaken places, where artifacts of the Great Darkness still stood, heaving with mystery. In the distance, rising up from the mists of dawn and the green tresses of the wandering woods, I saw one of my favorite monuments, The Tower of Teeth. How many mouths were plundered to make the monolith, a thing taller than any man-made structure in the world? Here was a piece of art holding dream like a dam, threatening at any moment to drown the world in unreformed revelation. Most intriguing was that not all the mouths harvested for their teeth had belonged to earthly bodies. But the tower was as much a monument to banality as dream, for even in the face of such proof of paradox, there persists a belief in a solid world, a desire for the deadness of dreams, a want for nothing but nothingness. And the tower was but one of countless artifacts of the Darkness, a fact that through its denial outlined the enormity of man’s addiction to dullness. But it rode high in the grey sky, blatant, if not altogether vulgar, tempting those who might believe in it to question the fitness of their pragmatism. I wouldn’t let man’s collective tediousness darken my spirits. Not today.
Around noon, I saw dust tumbling across the thickets and heard the asthmatic wheezing of an engine in need of repair. I emerged from the woods to see a rusted-out shell of a bus heading toward me. It was crawling along a narrow stretch of dirt road that seemed to move randomly about the woodland, as though it were looking for something. The man behind the filth-splattered windshield smiled at me and brought his groaning vehicle to a halt.
The door to the bus opened and a corpulent man with small, dark eyes called out to me. “Excuse me, pal, but I was wondering if you knew where I could find a decent garage? My jalopy’s on its last legs, wouldn’t you know. This is a new route to me and I’m not quite up on the lay of the land.” The man’s eyes studied me, an intense calculus burning between his ears, fast and lethal. He tried too hard not to stare at my father, who protruded from my back, sealed away in rags.
I withheld a response until my stare entered his blood and coursed through his body. My voice came out low and full of gravel—it’d been ages since I’d cause to use it. I placed my gaze within him, severing his concentration. “I can take a look if you’d be willing to bring me closer to my destination. I’m heading north.”
He tried to match my stare, but my eyes only devoured him whole. He winced and pretended to shield his eyes from the sun. After he regained himself, he accepted my offer. “You got yerself a deal, mister. While you’re working on the engine, I can stretch my legs a bit. I’ve been wandering these back roads forever. I could use a walk and a cigarette. By the way, the name’s Grimes.”
Mr. Grimes committed to his ruse, which was perfectly fine. Should he attempt my murder, the innards of the dying bus would make a fine gallery. The area I traveled was a notorious feeding ground for bandits and killers. The law was thin where the shadows of the Great Darkness were thick. The shunned locale was pleasant enough, and the murderer was a pleasant if predictable distraction.
The bus had nothing specifically wrong with it—just a few plugs and wires that needed adjusting. It was simply a part of the man’s story to lure in victims—though I could tell it wasn’t an altogether normal piece of machinery either, which was a delightful surprise. But as for its more mundane, mechanical aspect, it was rather sound. It had certainly seen better days, but the gurgle and roar of its straining engine were to be expected, given its age. I played along with the charade, adding some oil and checking the spark plugs while he wandered the area. Before long, I slammed the hood shut and joined killer-in-driver’s-clothing, who was patiently waiting by the folding doors of the bus. The man gestured to the stairs leading inside, grinning. “Be my guest, big guy.” I nodded, and we both walked up the steps, the vehicle groaning beneath our combined weight.
We were soon back on the road, traveling through a forest darkness so dense, it seemed to offer resistance to the big vehicle’s movement. A thin rain began falling, and the distant flashes of lightning promised a far grander show to come. For the most part, the driver kept his eyes on me via the sizable rearview mirror, only periodically glancing back at the road for direction. A painfully poor liar, he was clearly no newcomer to this route.
“So, tell me, how far north am I taking you?” He asked with a smile.
“Until I tell you to stop,” I replied. As much as the killer amused me, I was far more interested in the gathering storm.
“C’mon, I appreciate the fix and all, but I’m not drivin’ ya too far off my route.” His insistence at pretending to be a bus driver was comical, but the noise of his ridiculously transparent effort caused me to refuse him an answer. He finally reciprocated my silence, but I could sense dark thoughts orbiting his mind like flies circling a corpse. A few minutes later and he made his killing move. I didn’t hold it against him— he was, after all, a killer.
“Well, I guess I do owe ya, so I should probably give ya something fer yer troubles, right?” His massive, hairy hand left its perch upon the steering wheel and moved to a small set of buttons beneath the steering column. Suddenly, his eyes widened, flooded with fear. It was the first time I could make out the whites of his beady eyes. After a few moments, the man cleared his throat and spoke again. “So, what’s north?” His words were accompanied by an increase in his quite noticeable body odor. Mr. Grimes clearly had no head for operating at even the slightest disadvantage.
“My destination.” Again, I hoped for the smallest possible exchange. If the man had indeed abandoned his bid to kill me, I wanted to be able to enjoy the coming thunderstorm in peace. Unfortunately, my brevity didn’t deter him.
“Well, only thing I know of that’s a-ways up north is New Victoria, and I know you can’t be wanting to go there.” After he realized I had no intention of responding, he added, “But what do I know, eh?”
I decided to do away with pretense in order to achieve the silence I required. “You know that I am dangerous,” I growled. “You know that I’ve disabled your traps. You know that I might kill you. However, on the last count, should you take me where I desire to go, you will have nothing to fear—provided you remain quiet for the rest of the journey.”
Again, he transgressed the silence. “So, what? You got a gun, or something? That some kinda weapon on yer back?” He was testing waters best left untried. “Look, yer a big guy and all, but do you really think yer gonna just stare me into doin’ what you say? What’s to stop me from just comin’ back there?”
As I directed my gaze at him through the mirror, I knew his memory conducted my earlier glare to the other side of his eyes. A well-deserved fear of me now lived within Mr. Grimes, and he understood. After some quiet deliberation, he sloughed down into his dirty seat and took out a cigarette.
“Mind if I smoke along the way?” he finally managed.
“Roll down the window, please,” I said, feeling accommodating.
“You got it, chief.”
Thunder soon filled the killer’s bus, and lightning made terrible things of the shadows, possibly illuminating ghosts of Grime’s victims still in the process of digestion, deep within the rusted bowels of his demon-machin
e. My would-be killer was oblivious to it all, preferring to divide his attention between watching me and emptying his pack of cigarettes. Truly, he had nothing to fear from me—short of appearing on my list, there was no way I would take him from the world. Mr. Grimes cast a truly beautiful shadow, in his own depraved way.
With the storm directly overhead and the dirt road quickly becoming a swamp, our route became nearly impassable. Mr. Grimes had no choice but to pull onto a small patch of gravel sheltering beneath an overhang of tree branches, like a giant green claw reaching up for the storm. “We’re gonna have to hold up here for a bit until the storm blows over,” Mr. Grimes announced as he produced a fresh pack of cigarettes.
“Fine,” I said, distracted, still watching dreams trying to break through the places where storm and death intersected.
“You ever gonna tell me where we’re goin’?” As he spoke, and as the dashboard lights slowly sank away into the darkness, the killer blended into the unfolding nightmare, becoming a monstrous, smoking silhouette possessed of a single, burning eye. At that point, I had no difficulty engaging the monstrous man. He was now part of the nightmare whirling with the storm.
“You’re bringing me to the outskirts of New Victoria,” I said.
“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” Grimes said, exhaling smoke into the shadows. “What the hell ya gotta go there for?”
The sound of rain and rolling thunder filling the long pause between his question and my response. “I need answers that cannot be glimpsed by mortal dreams,” I informed him.
“Ya don’t say? Well, that’s mortal dreams for you, I guess.” Mr. Grimes’ sarcasm was as thick as the smoke that filled the bus, but his crude wit was almost entertaining. “Ya know, a while back, I knew this guy, Jackie I think was his name, and he had a brother that got caught sleepin’ just inside New Victoria. It was sometime just before the military put up all them barriers an’ razor-wire.
The Red Son Page 3
