Despite my analysis, the partial dream did contain something pleasing—and importantly, it was beyond the simple imagination of the killer, regardless of his pedigree. There was something terribly vital about the thing that drew near the edge of the forest, and I couldn’t deny the possibility that the actual daemon had indeed tread the fleeting soils of the wooded dream. Where exactly that thought left me, I didn’t know. I would need a more complete view of my adversary, and for that I would need to pry my dream from the jaws of a particular and toothy whisper.
As the only man to have ever trespassed into the nightmared lanes of New Victoria—both its waking and wakeless incarnations—and lived to contemplate the experience, I had good reason to believe I could shield my dreams from the predations of a fellow monster. My sisters stretched out in my hands as I laid upon the ground, their laugher lulling me into sleep. Soon after, the baleful eyes of my father led the way into contested nightmare.
I set foot into a room filled with cages hanging from a water-damaged ceiling. In each rusted space huddled a pale child studying me from behind the bars. One of them started to speak. “You know our names— “
My father’s giant hands seized me by the shoulders and thrust me beyond the words of the small boy, aiming me toward a gigantic wooden door.
I did know their names.
The door was nothing to me, and I tore it away with ease. The darkness that replaced it was pierced by a single tawny light. With my family walking by my side, I realized the light was a window looking down upon a familiar fantastical forest.
My sisters were fogging the glass with their breath and drawing strange shapes upon the misted panes. The hot light from my father’s awful gaze fought with the moonlight atop the canopy of the forest. Finally, his illuminated glare settled upon something I’d missed the last time—a small straightjacketed man seated upon the ground near the entrance to the wood. Before I had a chance to inspect the person more thoroughly, the forest began to hemorrhage woodland animals. I needed to know who the man was. My father’s axe was almost to the glass when we heard something from behind.
A door had opened from the shadowy depths of another hallway that also converged upon the window. I initially failed to notice these details, as is the way of dreams. Something was strolling boldly toward us, soaking up the darkness.
“Hi,” said the whisper.
“Hello, little whisper,” I said. “Have you come to again deny me what is mine?”
“I’m afraid he has,” the whisper replied. “You really should have run. This can only go badly for you.”
“So you’ve intimated, through memory and fire and death,” I said. “Thank you for that, by the way. It was quite lovely. I’d like—”
“Enough of this stupid banter!” my father bellowed. “Let this first death be a taste of the death to come, whispering fool!” His hateful eye-light fell upon the whisper, revealing a corpulent and unusual man. He was covered in stiches, straps, ropes, and staples. Even his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were painfully sealed off from the outside world, leading me to wonder how the whisper managed to whisper at all.
“Oh, no,” said the shivering, sealed-up man. The sound of straps stretching and stitches ripping began to fill the corridor. “Now you’ve gone and done it. He’s coming,”
“Who—or what—is coming, whisper?” I asked.
“I call him The End of the World,” the whisper said, sadly. “I’ve tried to keep him locked away, but I’m afraid he gets out from time to time. You should see the awful things he’s done, before I’m able to coax him back inside. But ever since he killed me, he’s proven much more difficult to put back. Goodness, is he ever a foul, foul thing. I’d wake up if I were you. He’s all the more terrible inside a nightmare.”
A bleeding seam tore the man’s abdomen open, revealing eyes the color of blood. They ignited, pushing back against my father’s burning gaze. A terrible voice blasted into the room, washing the lingering echoes of my father’s rage from the air. “What a fantastic nightmare you’ve brought me, Marvin! And you’ve even managed to corner my next victims! How delightfully thoughtful of you!” The tearing and snapping sounds intensified as “Marvin” began to swell and split, firing blood and flesh and staples and stitching into the shadows of the nightmare. Something was stepping from beyond the ruined curtains of Marvin’s dreamed flesh. The End of the World was as monstrous as it was marvelous.
Heedless of the unearthly transformation and the doom and pain it foretold, my sisters and I advanced. But before we could engage Marvin’s lovely counterpart, my father’s massive arm swept us aside, clearing the way for himself. He roared with laughter, stepping before the monster Marvin had become. “I didn’t expect the end of the world to be so puny, whelp!”
“Come, then, you fool!” Marvin raged back. “Do you really expect to defeat the end of all things with an axe?”
“With this axe,” my father bellowed, holding up the giant weapon in front of his burning eyes, “I do, indeed!” My father charged, only to crash headfirst through the gigantic window from a blow that, should it have been delivered outside of a dream, would have beheaded a man. But it was a dream, and my father was no ordinary man. My dread forbear immediately recovered from his flight, firing thunderous laughter up through the twinkling rain of glass shards. The End of the World leapt through the shattered window after him, following the stream of burning laughter.
My attention lay elsewhere, however. After my turn through the window, I approached the shivering man in the straitjacket. The forest was on its last breath, the fleeing wind having shrunken to murmurs. The quiet of forgotten, ancient things swelled monstrous.
I looked back into the broken sky of the nightmare, where glass tumbled like broken teeth from the gaping window. Two devils wrestled across the worlds of three minds, all of it held together by the unseen hands of a dark Shepherd. My father continued to laugh in the face of The End of the World, who continued avoiding the axe that hung upon his every move as if it were his own hateful, serrated shadow.
The tethered man’s eyes fixed upon a small path that disappeared into the forest as a storm of shadows took shape just beyond the brambles. The man’s fear was drawing the thing from the forest as surely as corpses catch flies.
When I reached the man, he was pleading at the encroaching presence to be spared. “Who are you?” I asked, looking down upon the trembling man. But my words were pulled into the woods, absorbed into the silence of prehistoric secrets. I seized the man by the leather straps so tightly binding him, drawing him close, so that my words might reach him. The enemy silence was nearly upon me, and the entire world—molded from dream though it might have been—began to fade into whispers as the night paled into the quiet of forgotten places and half-remembered names. I began to feel my own persona washing away, leaving behind only the uncovered bones of my wonder. The man was screaming now, trying desperately to convey something to me. I could almost hear what he said, but before I could make out his screams, the world died into the raging silence of unguessed secrets—and something stepped from the woods.
Standing atop cloven hooves, casting a horned and hateful shadow that caused the grass it fell upon to twist and curl like spasming insects, stood the inimitable Tom Hush.
The creature was dressed in the finery of a child’s unfettered imagination—claws, antlers, and a death-mask of palest bone displaying a grin colder than winter. And when his shadow crawled across my body, I could feel the claustrophobia of buried bodies and the rhythm of countless dead hearts soaking into my skin.
“So, the Shepherd has sent another of his ‘Wolves’ to the slaughter, eh?” The dreamworld had become the creature’s voice—the singular and fearsome sound of deepest secrets.
“Yes,” was all I could utter. I was compelled to say aught else.
“You had better cry quits, man-child, lest your little life end in shrieks.
I’m off to do my good business, and I’ll not suffer the bother of sparks who think themselves stars.”
My voice was dead. I could not speak. The creature was beyond my expectations, extensive though they were. My purpose had melted into wonder, my confidence merely awe. Distilled from all the macabre spectacle was one simple realization, although its simplicity made its implication no less monstrous—I had indeed been called upon to kill the actual Tom Hush, the Eater of Secrets—not some hollow prop molded from human dream. Despite the intoxicating mystery of the creature, I’d been tasked by the Shepherd to meet his challenge, and I meant to demonstrate my prowess.
Having no words in reserve, I roused my sisters from their resting places, their teeth sinking into the flesh of a god. Tom Hush broke his own silence with a roar that rivaled my father’s, and I turned to the man wearing the straitjacket. “Give me your name! Now!” I shouted into the broken storm.
“Josh Link!” the man shouted. “I’m Doctor Joshua Link! Please find me—and kill me!”
Tom Hush’s outrage melted the dream of forest and night into a ghastly scene of red-stained stone alters, where the rotting husks of numberless men, women, and children uncoiled in gruesome displays of ritualistic death. Looming above it all was a somber and sinister antlered idol, whose barely concealed smile spoke to an endless fascination with humanity’s ridiculous attempts to satisfy what they could never hope to appease.
“You dare?” howled the daemon as my sisters laughed, cutting and dancing.
“Yes,” was all I could utter. I was compelled to say aught else.
The dream shook and convulsed, tossing the bodies and blood and stone idols like toys. All the while, the sky darkened with shadows that spread like fire, burning the world back to primal pitch. My sisters continued their onslaught, but to a nearly negligible effect—the monster’s explosive reaction seemed largely due to indignation rather than laceration.
The creature was cocooned in secrecy, disallowing any clear view. Though Tom’s antlers were visible where they tumbled skyward and beyond, his eyes became suns. As for me, I was but a mote of dust caught momentarily in the eye of a storm—and I was enjoying every second of it.
I don’t know whether Tom Hush had struck me with his hand, or if the force of his burning red glare sent me crashing into the margins of the dream. Either way, I was nearly destroyed. Everything began to tremble as Tom began forcibly detaching his dream where it was joined with the others. Like a supertanker pulling away from a dock it was still moored to, everything began tearing away, pulled along in the wake of Tom’s withdrawal. I was caught in the middle of the tug-of-war, my mind trying to occupy all dreams at once. I could feel my physical body, stretched out and sleeping beneath the cold shadows of dead trees, begin to convulse, outlining my mind’s destruction as it outlined the death of the collective dream. My muscles tensed around my frame with such strength, they threatened to snap my every bone. My teeth ground my tongue to a flap of raw, red meat.
It was not a gentle hand that seized me from oblivion, snatching me from death and throwing me down upon the ground of what was left of the shared dream. My father stood wreathed in rage, his aspect darkened by the blood of The End of the World. “Weakling!” was all he said to me as he returned to his battle with Marvin’s monster.
Tom Hush had vanished, his ancient dream fading into distant sleep, Doctor Link in toe. As I returned to my feet, a stray fragment of the god’s nightmare settled across my mind—it was a message from the antlered lord himself. ’Twas merely a breath that defeated you, child. Imagine if I had chosen to enunciate, or if I had reached out to you. Now, away with you. And tell the rest of the Shepherd’s dogs of the calamity that is my displeasure.
I looked to the molten spaces that once held Tom’s dream—or more likely, Joshua Link’s dream. Ancient things like Tom Hush have no need for such things. They exist entirely at the pleasure of their own will. No, the Eater of Secrets was likely amusing himself using the body and soul of the poor man. The nightmare of the primal woodland and brooding idols were just a medium for Tom to work through. Finally, the spaces where once thundered a god went still—the red wake of a killer shark—as if the monster had never been.
Marvin and my father were buried in rage and bloodlust, having nearly smashed the remaining dreams to splinters, allowing me to make my way into Marvin’s dream unhindered. When I drew upon the hallway door by which Marvin had entered, I heard the most pathetic wailing imaginable—it was the cry of a child. I opened the door into what appeared to be a tiny, squalid apartment. Trash and debris lay heaped as high as the corpses. The bodies were in varying states of decomposition, the people seemingly killed in a variety of unrelated yet horrific ways. The dream was mostly memory, containing only the slightest specks of fantasy. Thin layers of cardboard had been crudely taped over the windows to prevent sunlight and unwanted attention. Occasionally, the shapes of monstrous things pressed their silhouettes against the covered windows, and a bit of rain fell from the shadows that stained the ceiling.
I followed the cries that now vacillated between the voice of a child and an adult, sometimes transitioning within the middle of a spoken, if indecipherable, word. While the words themselves were indistinct, they were intelligible in the broader terms of pain and suffering. As I closed on the voice, a single word broke through the static of sobbing—“mother.”
One memory overtook another as the hallway I walked distended and became the muddy tunnel of an underground maze. The rain had stopped, and the monstrous shadows were replaced by the sounds of titanic things digging just beyond the hewn dirt walls of the burrow. The tunnel eventually concluded with another small, untidy room, replete with another menagerie of corpses—except these bodies had been far more brutalized than the ones prior. Still, the vacillating voice was beyond my reach.
The next door opened into an even smaller space—the bloodstained and corpse-strewn innards of a ruined RV. Through a filthy, cracked window, I could see the figure of a man on his knees, crying, pleading to someone. Clearly, this was Marvin, minus his monster, covered in his now signature stitches and staples. I could see a woman’s slender, delicate shadow falling across him. He was begging the woman—who I took to be his mother—not to abandon him. I bent lower to get a better look at the woman through the window. My breath vanished. The woman was my own mother.
If I’d only seen her smile, I would have known her. I would have remembered how it lived beyond her lips, and how the sweetness of its red glow always put the taste of honey in my mouth. She began to recede slowly into the shadows of the forest behind the RV. Marvin chased after her, collapsing to his knees in the mud.
As she merged into the darkness of the woods, I heard her speak to him. “The end is yours to keep, now. Cherish him, my son.” She called him son, but I knew this man to be no brother of mine. He was something else, though I had no idea what.
Her eyes blossomed at the touch of the shadows, as if like the moon, they were meant to be viewed exclusively from a position of darkness. Without thinking, I plunged deeper into Marvin’s memory, hoping to catch a final look at my vanishing mother. But she was gone, and my sadness knelt beside the sobbing memory of Marvin’s misery.
I needed to know more. I had to find another memory somewhere in the dream. I entered the ruined RV, searching. I flung a cupboard door open and watched as the space beyond stretched out and became a dark hole, leading somewhere deeper. Tearing away the old dream to get to the newer one beneath, I clamored into the hole, struggling over the corpses I suddenly realized were all but choking the small space. I heard something crashing behind me. Desperately, I scrambled through the narrow, earthy passage.
Again, the tunnel yielded a room, this time a closet. I was looking down into it from a small heating vent, where I heard the whimpering of a child. It was Marvin again, and this time, he spoke to me. “You think she’s your mother, don’t you?” said the mini
ature Marvin, standing on his tiptoes, whispering into the vent. “In that case, I should tell you— “
Something exploded into the tunnel behind me.
Child-Marvin giggled at the monstrous interruption, whispering, “You’re going to have to bleed for this one, I think.”
A titan hand wrapped around my ankles and pulled me from the tunnel. The transition from crawling to dangling was almost instantaneous as the hand quickly moved from my ankle to my throat. The grip was unbelievably strong. Again, my father held me in his hand. “Where are you crawling away to, whelp?” He was a specter of blood and fire. The previous dream-memory had ignited beneath his rage, and only the closet door remained, smoldering, covered in scratches made by the tiniest of fingernails.
“Release me, Father,” I said, despite the pressure applied to my neck. He held me up to the fires of his eyes. It had been some time since I had cause to look upon him for so long, and with such scrutiny. I searched his nearly indecipherable expression for some sign of an underlying motive. What was it I was not to know? My request was met with greater pressure. He left me no choice. My right fist collided with his jaw as my left moved to pry his immense hand from my neck.
He didn’t move or speak, but only squeezed tighter. The fire from his eyes burned across my face as he held me closer. I could see my sisters standing behind him, their smiles gone. Now, both of my hands were trying his individual fingers. They were immovable, squeezing tighter still. My father’s eyes poured fire into my mind, and I could feel certain memories crisping and curling within the inferno. I tried to open my eyes against his own, to dowse his fires in my silence, but all I could do was gasp. The Deadworld was opening, and I could feel waking sensations move into my fingertips as my father’s grip began to crush me out of sleep.
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