Beyond the burning dream, within the smoldering ruins of so many deadened memories, I could see Marvin, his body renewed in stitches and staples, aiming a whisper in my direction. Before I heard my neck-within-a-dream snap like a twig, I heard the hushed words of the man-monster. “Serpents are far deadlier than wolves, my friend—and your bed is teeming with them.”
When I awoke, the sun was burning into the retreating night, and my throat still vibrated with a phantom pressure that refused to submit to waking. I replaced my sisters to their sleeping places and made ready to depart, my itinerary ever-growing. Though I had my sights set on Tom Hush and Doctor Joshua Link, my mind was pinned to the dream of my mother, and only to a slightly lesser extent, the whispered words of Marvin the lunatic. His warning burned like a small fire in a dry field, an infant inferno. Even under the hot light of the sun, I could feel the burning gaze of my father, watching. I put down the dream-memory and walked away slowly, waiting for the sun to fall away. I had no intention of entering the next city in broad daylight.
The eastern entrance to the sprawling metropolis of Nighthead was littered with the lingering machinations of the Great Darkness. Obscuruum here were treated with far more respect than other cities, and nowhere else was the history of the Great Darkness exploited with more enthusiasm, save perhaps Autumn City.
The glassed-in monuments to madness were legion and breathtaking. Some of the buildings located within the city’s downtown area even incorporated various Obscuruum into their construction, allowing nightmares outlined in glass and concrete to stand beneath the sun and beyond the sleep of reason. To be honest, there were several other cities I could have traveled to for the information I sought, but it was the lure of grimmest history that brought me here.
I made my way through the cobblestoned streets, around nightmares frozen in municipal stone, and into the finest shelters for shadows available within city limits. At last, after I stepped out from an alleyway sideshow of black-clad clowns reenacting a scene from the Darkness, I found a newspaper left to the wind. The headline read: ANTLERED CORPSE FOUND MUTILATED UPON STONE ALTAR.
CHAPTER TWELVE
There’s more to an artist than this world can ever satisfy. Thus, an artist is ultimately born inherently incomplete. I suppose it wouldn’t be too much different than realizing—through a dream, more than likely—that one’s eyes held the power to see in the dark, but regrettably, there was only sunlight. How terrible would it feel to know such sights existed but could never be glimpsed? This is the exquisite torment of the artist—to know something has been omitted from reality, or worse yet, never created in the first place. In either case, the artist finds the world wanting. The only reasonable resolution to this conundrum, of course, is to create—to change the universe.
It was my mother who taught me what an artist truly is. I refuse to believe that such lessons, and the time and energy required to properly impart them, would have been wasted on anyone less than her own son. But what I learned from the madman’s dream couldn’t be minimized, no matter how hard I tried to keep my mind upon the many wonders of Tom Hush. On that score, it had become altogether obvious to me that Tom Hush had successfully hidden himself away in a tidy cluster of what appeared to be random occult murders, all of which were most likely perpetrated by unwilling dupes. I didn’t know if Joshua Link was one of many such enablers, or the sole vehicle through which Tom worked.
I was torn between tasks. On the one hand, I wanted desperately to speak with Marvin the monster, and on the other, I needed to seek out the latest pawn in Tom Hush’s murderous undertakings, this Joshua Link. Marvin would come to me eventually, seeking to strike my name from his list, so it seemed a waste of time to reverse my course to find him. Therefore, I reasoned, Tom Hush must garner my strictest attention.
When I learned the occult slaying had taken place on the outskirts of Nighthead, I realized the delicate, imperceptible pull of the Shepherd’s Game. It had blended itself into my very thoughts, masquerading as free will, causing me to believe I’d chosen to visit the City of Many Shadows of my own violation. Had it not been for the lure of unnamed possibility, I would have quit the game then and there. But I was an artist, and the chance to change the world was too great, both as an obligation and as a passion.
Tom Hush was a strange addition to the game, though. I had no doubt the demon was killing in accord with its own inscrutable designs and not at the behest of the Shepherd, so I failed to see the reason for his inclusion. That is, unless he functioned as a test to further demonstrate the mettle of those who had been chosen. Or perhaps he was a rival of the wolf-herder, and the Shepherd’s Game served as an effective means to eliminate him—provided of course that Tom Hush didn’t eliminate all the competition first. Regardless, he was on my list, and now that I knew Nighthead was predestination rather than a mere destination, there was only one place in the city fate would offer a straightjacketed lunatic.
Moving through the plentiful back alleys and sunken gutters, I drank heavily from the city’s conviction to mystery, trying as best I could to collapse the distinction between the secrets within and without myself. I would need to be nearly invisible to have any real chance at surprising a secret-eating god. Yet I could not repress my desire to turn over certain memories, knowing full well the consequence of such attempts. Not only would their mystery give me away to Tom, but my father would sooner set me aflame than let me dwell upon them.
I loved my father. He taught me how to summon the fire of my body, how to own it and to kill with it. He showed me death, let me hold it in my hands, play with it, master it. I remember the heft of his shadow, the smell of his ruined skin, the thunder coiled in his voice. And now, after everything he was to me, he would deny me a part of myself? Though it pained me, I finally resolved that if he would not step aside, I would have no choice but to force him to recall the one lesson I’d taught him, the one he had failed to teach me—how to die.
The approach to Warfield Sanitarium was thick with trees, which only assisted me as I made my way to the main fence enclosing several small gardens and koi ponds. A single leap put me on the other side, and I stared up at the building, soaked to its steel and concrete bones with madness. I could hear its soul, a song no longer restricted to meter and tempo, fully free despite its body of walls. I slipped into and beyond a service entrance foolishly left ajar.
The interior was remarkable, every inch the face of a practiced sociopath—tender with flourishes of false empathy, and totally placid in places where one might expect a dash of compassion. A soft music played into the darkness of the hallways, almost a lullaby. Here was the comedy of lunatics, trying to pass off pigeons for doves, water for wine.
I entered the first room I came upon, encountering a man secured to his bed with strong leather straps. As I’d hoped, there was a button located on the bed that could be pressed to summon an orderly or nurse. The man awoke quietly, looking at me with no small amount of concern. He did not speak, but only eyed my father with fear. I’m sure I was an awful sight, with my coat of shadows and red-dimmed family eager to escape their resting places. I put a finger to my lips, and he nodded in understanding. He even smiled as I moved to push the call button—there was seldom any love lost between the insane and their keepers.
As I awaited the arrival of a staff member, I chatted casually with the lunatic, who informed me they were rather slow to respond to summons. The man, Cecil Barnes, was pleasant enough, and even possessed a delicate sort of sanity, whereby a single thought out of place could send it crashing to the ground. I decided to inform Cecil’s swaying mind with tales of my exploits. My goal was to fill his dreams with some measure of my own. Joined in the collective sleep of over a thousand lunatics, I could only wonder at the shapes they might make. Would they do as fine a job with them as had the New Victorians? I wondered.
The orderly was not pleased to see me, much less the stinging smiles of my sisters. I handled
him a bit rougher than was necessary, for Cecil’s sake. “Where is Joshua Link?” I asked.
The man swallowed deeply, his eyes bulging. “Room 349.”
I rarely if ever actively deny myself the pleasure of my art, but I’d never set myself against a deity from antiquity—so, to pause for art’s sake would not be helpful. I had little choice but to leave the orderly unconscious in the half-lunatic’s bathroom. I also loosened Cecil’s straps. I always rooted for art of some kind.
When I stepped into the hall, it became immediately apparent all was not well with the darkness—it seemed too rich, like the soil of a nightmare. It seemed as if the insanity of the patients was somehow being pumped into the darkness of the hallway, whipping it into a frenzy, shaping it. There could only be one reason for the disturbance—Tom Hush had discovered me.
What most failed to understand was that some lunatics are like artists—they court dreams just as surely. Regrettably, their refusal to accept defeat for their efforts leads them to become entirely absorbed in their work, and like art, they become only symbols for dreams, even if they don’t realize it. Still, such a doomed enterprise is not necessarily without its worth. There is wisdom in madness, just not the kind belonging to this world. It was that alien insight that Tom Hush, the eater of darkest secrets, worked through.
While madness was busy endowing shadows with lungs, I couldn’t help but laugh at the passing sights. The wardens were being overtaken by the manifest infirmities of their wards. A fairly stout man, who likely possessed an infinite happiness only when cruelly exercising his limited authority, was being filled with locusts, and no small representation of the species, either. The faces he made as they turned him into a human hive were beyond hysterical. When they came bursting out of his mouth, flying away with chunks of his organs, I nearly burst open myself. But it was to the madness-repurposed custodian with the handgun that I was forced to direct my strictest attention. He tried to say something—which his new foot-long tusks made quite difficult—as my sister passed through the pipes of his throat. Likely, it was something terribly menacing passed along from the mind of Mr. Hush, but I had little time for an exchange of threats, as unfortunate as that was.
My shoulder opened the way into an adjacent room, as the hallway before me had become complicated by a web of barbed and knotted flesh embellished with dripping spears and hooks fashioned from the bodies of once-wardens. Some of them were still trying to push screams out of their red, clogged mouths—those who still possessed that particular orifice, at any rate. The Red Dream was upon me again, engaged no doubt by my proximity to prey—my strength ignored the customs of its construction, allowing me to smash through the wall and circumnavigate the fleshy custodian-barrier with relative and enjoyable ease.
I couldn’t help but chuckle as some of the remaining wardens and a small group of garden-variety mad-persons took me for their savior, following my path, hoping I might deliver them from wickedness incarnate. I had never been thought of as such, so I decided to indulge the fantasy, if only for the opportunity to be part of their nightmares to come.
I could feel a lingering animosity as I gripped my father. Yet it was not the time for griping, and so he yielded to my strength and allowed me to lift him into the air. But before I brought him down upon another wall, which would have likely freed my small bevy of well-wishers, I decided to grant him a boon, for reconciliation’s sake. I handed my father to one of the custodians, and the uniformed man smiled as if I had done him a favor.
My father’s strength was a poor fit for the man’s body. The eager custodian’s muscles began to rip and tear, for my benefactor exercised a willpower that ordinary flesh and blood could not contain—at least not without great and horrific expense. Unfortunately for my small gathering of followers, my father did not relish the role of savior and quickly annihilated them, howling and laughing all the while. Together, my father and I tore through the sanitarium, decimating the shapes that madness made, closing on room 349.
As quickly as I might have regained my father’s approval, I just as quickly and foolishly decided to stoke fires best left to die. “Why won’t you stand aside, Father? I must know.” The hallway we walked was empty save for the echo of battle. My father, still wearing the wrecked body of the now-dead custodian, paused briefly. He did not speak, but only let his silent reproach attempt the extinction of my curiosity. At least that’s what I believed he was doing.
He struck out, his axe destroying the wall behind me in an eruption of smoke and fire. I barely escaped—the attack was not a warning, it was a killing blow.
“And what, pray tell, do you want to know, exactly?” It wasn’t my father’s voice. At first, I didn’t understand. Then I knew myself for a complete fool. “He may be your father, child, but his secret—that belongs to me. And now, so does he.”
Tom Hush’s antlered shadow replaced my father’s, where it once fell from the body he occupied. The custodian turned to face me, but it was Tom who looked at me, eyes blazing a terrible curiosity. “In time, all things are reborn, in one form or another, to lope across the stage of life in an infinity of pointless returns—but not you. It pleases me more than you could ever know to rob you of your fate, to sup upon one of the blackest secrets I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.”
Before I knew it, my father bore down upon me. My sisters rose against him, all of us wearing smiles worn countless times before, by gods and the fools who amused them.
My sisters were innocents in all of this. Carved from clearest purpose, they smiled out of the softest love for blood, spilled only for fun and family. I could not bring them before our father, not like this. As the Eater of Secrets hedged his bets by flooding the hallway with more maddened orderlies, I thrust my sisters into the metamorphosed flesh of two of the nearest abominations. Instantly, my sisters’ sweet smiles transferred themselves from steel and bone to insanity-infected flesh, their new bodies dripping with the honeyed and horrible laughter of the Devil’s children. They were beyond Tom’s reach, as they were absent worldly complexity, having long since filled their minds only with the brightest, sharpest thoughts that children could kill with.
As for my father and I, our battle would commence in earnest, but first I would need to relieve him of his weapon, for its lightest touch promised death. The axe—now no longer the seat of my father’s spirit—moved with prehistoric brutality, smashing about furiously, ceaselessly. Keeping the monstrous hordes at bay were my sisters, two slaughter-honed monsters whose wits were whetted upon the broken bones of countless victims. All the while, each swing of the giant weapon brought my death closer and closer.
The dream that unfurled around us translated my father’s seething indignation into fire, which poured upward and spilled across the ceiling. Pent within the raging flames was visible the shape of my father’s ruined face, filled with fury and stretched apart by the smile of a horned god.
I found a drifting patch of shadow and called it into my service, moving the itinerant darkness between myself and the deadly axe. Locating a surging vein of silence concentrated by the surrounding discord, I quickly put myself into its ghostly rhythms, disappearing.
My sisters sugarcoated the scene with wildest laughter and the squeals of dying monstrosities. My god, how beautiful the two of them were, free and feral, laughing and killing and dancing for the love of their dearest brother. They spun and leapt as they called out to our father. “Unburden yourself of your secret, Father, and join us! What good are secrets but to ruin those who keep them? Secrets want to be told! Look at what fun our sweet brother has given to us! Look at us, Father! Look at us killing and dancing and singing! Hurry and join us, before we’ve used them all up and there’s nothing left for you!”
My father’s burning eyes looked to his deadly daughters, where they played with death like two cats toying with wounded rodents. His envy ran thicker than the fire that poured from his dead flesh. I struck
, springing from shadow and silence, seizing the handle of his axe and tearing it from his momentarily distracted grip. But it was sent crashing to the floor when my father’s fist detonated across my skull like thunder. His strength was monstrous. My own fist answered his bone-cracking attack by smashing open his dead, flaming mouth. Despite his hatred at being used as a puppet, I could see him thrilling at the prospect of a good fistfight.
Tom Hush rudely violated the purity of our contest, smiling words into my father’s burning, broken mouth. “What secrets your father could tell you, boy! My goodness, what a horrible and wonderful thing that mother of yours was. That is, of course, if she is indeed your mother.” I could feel Tom’s hand moving around inside my mind, seeking out a secret for the seizing. I felt his power washing through me. He found something. “What’s this? Tell me, who are all those children in cages? Who put them in there, I wonder? Care to tell me?” His claim over me increased with each pass of his hand across the emerging face of the tarnished memory. Tom forced my arms down to my sides, allowing my father’s blazing fist to crash into me, crushing my left eye into pulpy blindness. Tom bellowed through my father’s fire-breathing mouth, “Who put them in the cages, Vincent?”
My name. He found it. He was running amok through my mind, carelessly flinging secrets to the wind like a child pillaging a toy box. Strangely, I found myself trying to mentally reinforce the barriers around the secreted memory, though I wanted nothing more than to know it.
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