Behind me, I heard the singular tone of an elevator reaching its destination. I chuckled a bit too loudly at the image of such brilliantly vile creatures as the Wakeless loading into an elevator like so many office workers, tapping their clawed feet to “The Girl From Ipanema” as they awaited the proper floor. Despite the amusement the chase provided, I grew tired of being rushed. I summoned my father to my grip, and with deafening force he brought down the stone ceiling—I believed he was still upset about his previous failure to finalize matters between himself and a certain tongueless nightmare. Massive chunks of earth crashed to the floor in thick clouds of dust and debris, blocking the way behind. My father was not pleased at having been awoken for so pedestrian a task, but the freedom he afforded me made the weight of his silent reproach bearable.
Wandering the cave system, I imagined myself as Black Molly Patience—listening intently, gliding the hollows of the earth, waiting to strike. With victim in hand, I send my venom coursing through its bloodstream and steal it into the subterranean rooms of my home. The bones of prior meals worry at my naked feet as I devour my paralyzed prey. I was so absorbed in daydream, I’d failed entirely to notice the gathering light. Before I knew it, I was exiting a densely overgrown cave in the middle of the woods. Not long after, I drew to the top of a nearby hill and observed the distant spires of New Victoria. They seemed to pierce the sky, the blood of twilight everywhere. I gave the city one final look, wondering if I would ever tempt its power a third time. I certainly hoped so.
Once out from beneath its shadow, I moved back onto the main road beyond the broken barricades. I wasn’t ten feet before I sensed a presence, resentful for my leaving. Were it not for the smell, I might have thought it the residuum of sour grapes—one of the Wakeless bemoaning my escape. But it was nothing less than the White Gaia herself. She stood on the far side of the pavement, her sickly yellow light pouring atop the cracked blacktop, emphasizing each pebble of artificially blackened stone. I could feel her gangrenous thoughts pulling at the shadows around me, trying to weed her garden of stinking blacktop. Her stench—a horrible mixture of tar and heat—swept back and forth across the air, causing even the light to recoil. It was the pattern of cracks in a nearby concrete wall that betrayed her shape, a corpulence of swollen rot piled into the crude likeness of a woman. Her head was buried in the sun—just a sickly bloom of yellowed light spread wide and warm across my upturned face. This was a powerful omen, indeed. She wanted me dead in that city, so that I might not continue the Game. She was threatened by me. Before she vanished into the reeking air, I managed the Dead Queen a thin smile—a mere sample of smiles to come.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After many days of travel, I found myself in a small village, its sole redeeming feature a large stone statue carved sometime during the Great Darkness. With the blackest of anthracite wings framing a largely skeletal frame, the clam of death settled like dust across the expertly engraved nuances of pores and frown-marks. The creature seemed more breathing flesh than cold stone. Inscribed upon its base was Mother of the Stillborn. While lacking any Pre-Darkness existence, the statue was only a graven dream, a form without substance. But this fact had not stopped cabals and cults from gathering in its—her—honor.
Where there is mystery, there is religion, so they say, and the Darkness has been the source of many a new faith, often to the destruction of an older one. Here was just such a case—the dark woman seemed to demand a past, a mythology all her own. It might have been her exquisite construction, or perhaps her darksome, unending stare that compelled the specific folklore that was draped across her delicate frame. Or, more likely, and the reason I much prefer—the lady herself commanded such supplications, as she partook of a genuine existence that black stone and story had only recently caught up with.
Whatever the reason for her rise to prominence, her given mythology was fairly uniform. She was believed a spirit, or dour angel, who caught the tiny souls of the stillborn, replacing them to her own cold, dead womb, to later be reborn—or perhaps unborn. Supplementary concepts to this wishful interpretation included a rather whimsical function to the faded lady’s soul-catching. Specifically, that after enough stillborn souls were collected, she would give birth to the Ancient Child—a tiny, wizened heir to the boneyards of the world, who would preside over the courts of the dead atop a throne of tombstones. It was a lovely Post-Darkness religion, one that I wished all the best.
The approach to the towering statue was crowded with small humps of piled dirt, each one marked with the browned blossoms of baby’s breath. The meadow had become the burying place of tiny hopes, where grief-stricken mothers came to offer their departed children one last chance at life. The contemplative statue had become the sole gravestone for throngs of the tiny dead, a lonely anchor for a last and darkest hope.
I once considered a relationship between this mother and the White Gaia, supposing one for the cultural appropriation of the other, as Jupiter was of Zeus. But as I stood before Black Helen, as she was often called, I knew I was completely wrong. There was no lasting death among the tiny, nameless graves, only a desire to overcome at any price. Alternately, it was the elegance of her worked stone, the sublime coherence of purpose, which recalled my own mother. The resemblance stirred a memory—my mother’s face, twilit and doubtful. Yet it was her eyes I remembered best, the gentle pull of purest darkness. When I touched the hand of the statue, I might have spoken a name, a sound haunting two worlds, lost to both.
I slept at the foot of the statue, where dreams might cluster thickest. I remember the touch of a hand against my cheek. It gently drew me to my feet. A composite mother made from my own memories and the one whose feet I laid at examined my face, turning it within her grasp. Two voices joined by their words came to me. “You might have been one of my own.” Then, from behind me, I heard the baying of wolves. I turned toward the sound, but there was nothing. When I turned back to face the mother, I was met by a wave of them, monstrous and starving. As I sank into their numbers, I spied the woman made of two mothers. She only smiled as the beasts tore the flesh of my mind from the bones of an old dream.
When I awoke, it was night. It pleased me to imagine the black statue’s shadow having swallowed up all the light. The goddess above me had exchanged her smile for a faraway stare that likely settled upon invisible worlds filled with the laughter of lost children, thrilling to games only the dead may play. As I rose to my feet, a third woman entered my thoughts—Black Molly Patience. I had no idea where to find her. She roamed under the night with the flow and freedom of a whisper, devouring whomever her appetite adored. However, like the deathly woman carved from coal, she was not without a following of faithful. I would start with them.
The next town was hardly in need of a name, untroubled as it was by any meaningful distinction. I roamed muted streets coiled lazily around staggered lines of nearly identical houses—if it weren’t for the numbers engraved upon them, there would have been no telling them apart. The few people I observed were as iterative as the buildings, and I wondered if numbers hadn’t been carved into them as well.
Coldchester—it did have a name, for whatever reason—was either remarkably brave, or so foolish it considered its fine view of the nearby mountains an acceptable reason to risk its close proximity to New Victoria. Although, oddly enough, the place did appear untouched by the sleeping metropolis. And I detected none of the characteristic screaming and moaning that generally accompanies an outbreak of the sleeping sickness.
Before long, I’d broken into the city’s Museum of Darkness, which was significantly smaller than others of its kind. This was likely owing to the want for all evidence of the Darkness to be destroyed—despite the law decreeing its preservation—along with a burgeoning black market for Darkness artifacts, known as Obscuruum. A hopeless project to be sure, the official preservation effort had been abandoned years ago. Yet most of the structures still remained, though they were largely
shunned by all but the biggest cities and universities.
I happily sorted through hundreds of bizarre baubles before finding my signpost. In a box marked monsters, I recovered yellowed newspaper clippings tracking the antics of persons referred to by certain medical professionals as Noctu-psychotics, or Noctupaths—individuals possessed of such Post-Darkness insanity that they proved capable of inhuman feats. It was speculated that they evolved a mental equilibrium with the Darkness, tapping into vast storehouses of human potential. Unfortunately, when the Darkness concluded, so too did the functional nature of the strange adaptations, abandoning affected persons to a world no longer capable of making sense of them, or to them. Her near-impossible feats of murder placed Black Molly on a short list of killers suspected of being Noctupaths. The articles detailing her exploits were many and varied, not to mention enthralling. But one stood out above all others—the tale and location of her fist recorded kill. She would have abandoned much of herself to such a place, clues she’s since learned not to leave behind. And many of her doting well-wishers would likely flock to such a place—beginnings often overflowed with power, and few were stronger or more compelling than that of Black Molly Patience.
Likely due to its proximity to New Victoria, Coldchester housed a train station—though it was so run down I could scarcely believe any trains still called upon it at all. And the complete lack of travelers did little to bolster that belief. So when a train did indeed make its scheduled stop, I was happily surprised. The interior seemed oddly lean, as if the small number of commuters had caused its belly to narrow from malnutrition. I took a seat in a dark corner, the surrounding dirty windows pleasantly resistant to the setting sun’s rays. All too often, the light overemphasized the world, eradicating shadows and denying mystery its purchase upon the unseen.
According to my travel guide, the train had been repurposed back to its initial use, having been used previously for the transportation of the dead. Corpses were as abundant as flies directly after the Darkness, and many fixtures of the old world were converted for the clean-up effort. Though smartly redecorated, the train failed to conceal its history, feeling more like a physical memory of darker times.
My car was empty save for one other man. He carried a vintage camera apparatus, the kind that sat atop a tripod of wooden legs. It appeared carved entirely from the darkest wood and the most lusterless of metals. He occasionally looked over at me, smiling like a mortician after a disaster, his teeth so large they seemed almost cartoonish. He disembarked at the next stop, somewhere in the middle of the woods, atop a platform even more abandoned than the Coldchester station. The darkness seemed to mourn his absence. I tried to imagine what the photographer wished to photograph, so far out in the middle of the woods, and so late in the evening.
The train pushed on for some time, its rhythm calming. The passing sights, frozen into view by the cold light of the moon, were hypnotic. Reclining my seat, I nearly merged with the aged leather, sinking into sleep as deeply as I did the seat. I wondered why dreaming wasn’t listed as one of the train’s enumerated attractions.
As soon as my mind drifted beyond the gentle specter of the moon, I reached out for a dream. Yet where my dream should have been, there was something else entirely—a changeling of sorts, as if my own dream had been stolen and somehow replaced with someone else’s. I am a dreamer of no small skill, and I know my own dreams. This was not one of them.
***
I dreamed of a house—ample, outfitted with a sort of expensive, faux rusticism. I was looking out a window, watching a bird take its meal from a tray feeder. A sound spread across the sky. It wasn’t so much loud as it was alien, and it was becoming everything. The bird vanished. In the span of a thought, the world changed. I ran through the streets wearing only the skin on my feet. All around me, the world was breaking apart, giving birth. The sound was as big as the world, and I felt incredibly small, caught underfoot, without place or purpose. Finding a hole in the earth, I plunged into darkness. There were other things in there like me, abandoned by the world, by nature.
The dream changed sharply. While I remained the same, I was also different—better. The time had changed, but my place underground had not. I was moving at a brisk but decidedly measured pace, despite the utter lack of light. There were other things surrounding me in the darkness. Whatever they were, they belonged to me, body and soul. Up into the moonlight we went, all clicking claws and licking lips. Looking upon the moon, I beheld weird shapes stretched dark and massive across its face. The intervening sky was alive somehow, alien, but not hurtful to look upon. I’d long made peace with the new world. I was right with it, prepared—designed for it.
My pack and I made our way through corpse-piled gutters and lanes carved clean and straight by rivers of gushing gore. We moved upon roads paved by living tars, crept the thickets of rambling, rusted, barbed wires. We ignored the pleading, ensnared shapes—prey to unseen things haunting the webs of bloody, serrated steel.
Finally, we came upon our destination—a gigantic factory. I lifted my gaze to leer at a massive smokestack throwing black plumes at the sky. We entered by way of a ragged hole, and something monstrous rose against us as we poured inside. We fell upon the faceless thing, devouring it. We were almost a single entity as we crossed the lower floors of the building, seeking the rooftop. More outrageous shapes attempted to block our path, but we were a biblical flood that couldn’t be stopped or slowed. Every living thing we washed over became a pile of picked bones. The last door fell to us, and we surged across the roof.
There, squatting atop a throne of smokestacks, was a terrible creature—an unapologetic existence of violated logic and common sense. Snarling, it lifted itself from the toxic smoke. I answered in equally guttural fashion, the collective chortle of my monsters embellishing my voice. I had become no less a violation of nature than the thing standing before me, and I was pleased for the opportunity to demonstrate the fact.
***
The excitement from the impending clash woke me from my displaced dream, and I immediately wondered—if I was dreaming someone else’s dream, who was dreaming mine? The answer was obvious. I hoped Miss Patience enjoyed the exchange as much as I did.
The swapping of dreams was a new development to the Red Dream—a power that seemed to visit itself upon those joined in the Shepherd’s Game. The Sage was correct, though I never truly doubted the general shape of his knowledge. The players of the game—the Wolves—were indeed caught up in the same dream. More specifically, our dreams were now accessible to one another. Even more precisely, it seemed the specific dreams we shared were determined by the next names upon our lists. Black Molly was next upon mine, and so her dreams had come to me, enlightening me to the wonders of my opponent, and perhaps even the wider game now afoot.
With the dream concluded, I was immediately sad for the hope I had gained. But this was only a rote response, loath though I am to admit such occurrences. My entire life had been filled with moments of possibility, scattered between art pieces and dreams, affording me the wherewithal to continue my work, but only enough to persevere. Hope had become a predictable, even necessary staple to my life, at least as much as eating and drinking. But like food and drink, hope is consumed in short order, to fuel the mind if not the body. And so, the sight of hope was merely the expectation of its passing, a recognition of futility.
But if what I dreamed was true, and I was reasonably sure I was, I’d glimpsed a sleeping sliver of the Great Darkness—Black Molly’s share in it, at least. Here was something precious and singular—a preserved fragment of a banished history. I saw what the world had become, and could perhaps become again. I witnessed the overthrow of the Dead Queen, her corpulent dullness scattered like ashes across a world of resurrected dreams. Was this the purpose of the vision—to advertise a possible reward for a game well played? Or was it only a parenthetical slideshow of the next name on my kill list?
What
ever the case, the dream had appreciably lightened my desire to eliminate the subterranean cannibal, for she was pure monster—forged from primal forces, mistress to dark hordes, and hunter of fiends. Alternatively, I was anxious to meet her monstrous legions and stand before her bleeding smile, which could easily pass for one of my sisters’. I would have liked to believe that I had some choice in the matter, but in truth, I had none. I was in love with the drift of inscrutable purpose and the power of endless possibility. As an artist, to see your work actually affect the world was too wondrous a reward to pass up.
A line of mountains meandered into view as the train slowed, clouds tumbling down their eastern face like a phantom avalanche. The next stop was listed as “Orphan.” As the train came to a halt and opened its doors, I peered out the windows intently, hoping to glimpse the species of creature affording the city its strange name. While the train lingered at the boarding platform, a tinny voice announced a two-hour layover before resuming. I happily disembarked, eager to explore.
Few passengers departed the other cars. Exactly twelve people, all told, not a stitch of the remarkable about them. I took to the shadows of the path we all followed into town, not giving the small crowd a second thought. The town itself was trivial and quiet, but the echoes of horrors past still sounded within its neglected spaces, always reminding those sensitive to such reverberations that past is prologue. Yet beyond its connection to plague and death, it was a quaint, only slightly haunted little hamlet.
There were sights in and around any city, if you knew where and how to look for them. For instance, after following a trail of old death into the woods surrounding Orphan, I located a wonderful and well-hidden mass grave. It had nourished a collection of the most monstrous trees I’d seen since traveling the back roads around Autumn City, near the infamous September Woods. A short while later, I discovered a small smokehouse converted into an art gallery. Something left over from the past must have found a willing supplicant somewhere in the city, calling upon them to recount their darkest visions in pig’s blood, and to paint those images across the dried skins of deer and bear. The gallery was fresh, as some of the paintings had dried only recently. One piece caught my eye—a tall, gaunt man had been painted against a background composed of many hundreds of knotted serpents. He wore a dainty crown fashioned of small snake bones. Above his head was written, The Prince of Snakes. Despite the one mature work, the remaining pieces were only fledglings. The animal materials satisfied an embryonic art that would soon call for more blood and skin, of a species requiring a gallery less easily stumbled upon by persons wandering the woods.
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