My father carefully studied my face even as he went about destroying it, blow after bone-smashing blow. I could tell that the eyes which now looked upon me belonged only to him, and something powerful was stirring within them.
Another layer to the hidden memory was torn away beneath a storm of Tom’s laughter, and a terrible knowledge began to trickle into my once abandoned recollection. I remembered that the cages were filled with little muses. There were also paintings, such beautiful paintings, filling the walls of a wine cellar. I remember looking out at it all from my own cage, which hung from the ceiling by a rusty chain. He put them in there.
Before the memory could reach its terminus, my father roared like never I’d heard, his stolen body freezing, disallowing even the slightest twitch. He was trying to fight back the Secret Eater’s grip. Tom only laughed at my father’s efforts, but perhaps sensing a change in the wind, chose to rip my memory free of its prison rather than entertain the slow process of recollection to conclude its awful course.
A forgotten memory emerged from the blacked-out spaces of my mind, and spoke. Vincent, what a fine collection of cherubs you’ve led me to. That raw sugar of innocence! Oh, how I admire the sweet crudity of childhood, its vast potential mixed with little limbs and soft skin. They will do nicely, my boy. Very nicely, indeed. There’s a showing next month, in a gallery not far from here, and my mind is already alive with the art from another world. Those lovely little ones will brighten my paints and bless my canvas, allowing dreams to flow like blood from the deepest wound, and all the world will love me for it!
My body trembled as poison memories began to master my body. What had been done to me? What had I done? The man’s voice belonged to no one I could clearly remember. Tom was laughing again, holding my secret in his hand and squeezing it over my head, allowing its terrible juices to fall over me, seasoning my soul for the eating. I knew that once I remembered completely, I would be over, just an unhappy tenant of Tom Hush’s churning bowels.
“Poor little Vincent, all alone with your terrible truth. No mother to whisper to you. No fiery father to save you. Your sisters all but lost to their darkest passions. Where, oh, where has your family gone, Family Man?” Tom almost sang the words.
I looked to where my sisters whirled and laughed, splattered with death, having forgotten me within their wild red dance. I looked to my father, where he struggled against the power of his captor, apparently in vain. I was almost entirely the property of the antlered god. I was no longer a Wolf, but merely a caged animal—and perhaps, given my recent memory, quite ironically so.
I could feel the finale of my once-forgotten memory fast approaching as the maw of Tom Hush widened. I could feel myself falling across the bloodied alter of ancient stone, where man sacrificed to the horned god of darkest secrets.
All faded as the man’s voice rose again into realization, this time bearing a forgotten lesson. Children are merely the larval dead, Vincent, waiting to bloom into full-fledged corpses, dried and colorless. While in that larval phase, they are fat with the stolen nectars of lost dreams. They conserve it, I believe, for their long crawl across the face of a dead world, finally draining the last of that wonderful elixir to grow transparent wings and forever worry at the flaccid and rotted bosom of Mother Death.
It’s a rather sad and senseless journey, really, but it’s that rote effort that supplies us, you and I, with the brittle bones of our frailest hope. We take their burden from them, you see, ending their painfully protracted and wholly pointless metamorphosis. And unlike them, we employ that potential to a purposeful end—we create wonder. Like the magician devil standing upon the shore of the burning lake, dipping his fiery hand into a bottomless black hat, we conjure flowers for the damned.
This is our art, Vincent—to spite the world by painting all the corpses the color of dreams, and defy death with the beauty from another world. Just you and me, my boy.
Am I ever going into the gallery? my younger self asked. I can feel myself getting older. I don’t want to go to waste.
Oh yes, certainly, the man replied. But not just yet. I still have need of you in this world, my little wolf in sheep’s clothing. After all, I must have supplies if I’m to conjure miracles.
Why do the other children hate me? Is it because I tricked them, like you taught me, to make art for the artless? I asked, my voice as small and fragile as the memory that contained it.
It’s because they don’t understand the importance of what we’re doing. They are such little flies anyway, the lowest hanging fruit, really. You shouldn’t pay them any mind. They’ll thank you once they’ve gone into the gallery. I promise you.
I had a dream last night, Father. I dreamt that Mother was coming to visit us, but she looked different. Really different. She was dressed in fire, and when I hugged her, I didn’t burn. She said she was coming to see you, and that she was going to give me a new father. Oh, and I had little sisters, too! You should have seen how they smiled at me! Can Mother even come back from the gallery?
I woke up, standing in the middle of a hallway choked with red debris. My father was in my right hand, covered in steaming blood. My sisters were asleep at my sides, exhausted. Every muscle in my body burned, and I could hear the echo of my father’s terrible laughter disappearing into an inner darkness, where he waited to lay his giant hands upon the world. On the other side of my senses, the smell of burning flowers—my mother’s perfume.
As I stood in stunned silence, mentally pushing away my incipient and desperate curiosity, I watched the pale hands of moonlight struggle through the gore-sprayed windows, sifting through the devastation, slightly reddened by the journey through blood. I could feel the killing-dream lingering over me. Tom Hush was still alive, and he was close.
I heard a vehicle start. I ran in the direction of the sound, toward a barred window. As I dashed across the corpse-littered floor, I heaped darkness and silence upon that raw reopened memory, hoping to drown it away, forever. The sound of my flesh overcoming steel bars and concrete did well to mute the shouting, caged children who cursed me. The ruin of the wall was swept up in my wake, following me out onto the rooftop, three stories above the ground. The reawakened memory was right behind me, burning and screaming.
Below, I could see a single pair of headlights piercing the night. I leapt into the darkness, my father stretched out before me. Forsaking silence, I roared through my parched throat, a sound like thunder falling down a mountain. I watched my shadow soar across the pavement beneath me, framed in moonlight, closing on what I quickly recognized as an ambulance.
My father and I crashed through the back of the speeding vehicle, my body raked by riven steel and glass. Bottoming out upon the road from the weight of my fall, the ambulance called up a shower of sparks. Glass and steel fragments were still turning through the air when I returned my father to his rest. Plunging my open hand beyond the small window into the driver’s compartment, I closed my fingers over the intervening steel partition, tearing away the divider to reveal the driver—a hapless professor of folklore, overfilled with the unwholesome essence of the God of Secrets.
Producing a handgun, he emptied its contents in my direction, laughing hysterically above the din of screaming steel and shrieking rubber. “Do you feel their hatred, Vincent? Their righteous rage reaching out from your own broken mind, demanding retribution?” The god’s aim was terrible. A shot struck something volatile behind me, causing it to explode, splashing fire and glass and debris into my back. I didn’t care.
The ambulance careened out of control and skidded into a tight knot of traffic. The weight of the barreling vehicle prevailed over the smaller cars caught within its zigzagging path, smashing them into the moonlit darkness where they wheeled and corkscrewed. The impact hurled me through the windshield, but not before I caught hold of Tom. We tumbled through space, my fingers passing through the flesh of his shoulder and alighting upon bones t
hat shattered beneath my grip.
My other hand punched through the hood of the flaming ambulance, allowing me to deny my momentum. The roar of the engine spoke to a stuck accelerator as we screamed through the wreckage and continued barreling through the streets. I drew him close to me and growled, “I will crush whatever lives you hide behind, creature, until there is only yours left to kill. But before I’m finished with you, you will know pain beyond skin and screams. This, I promise you.”
Tom’s stolen face twisted into a blistering expression of hatred that outstripped his host’s ability to articulate. His coat of graying professor was shredded into gory flaps of hanging facial flesh, revealing the death mask the antlered god was far better known for wearing. When the meat of his face had all but retreated from his cleft, glistening skull, Tom’s cracked teeth and bloody tongue came together around the words of his counter proposal “I will forget your name moments after you fail, little killer.”
Before I could sink Tom’s real face into the steel of the vehicle’s hood, the ambulance struck a tractor trailer and flipped, rolling over and crashing through the glass façade of a rambling hotel, finally coming to rest within the glittering lobby.
Rising from the conflagration, I glared at the retreating figure of Tom Hush. I no longer cared about the Shepherd’s Game or the approaching police sirens at my back. Not even the terrible memory that burned through my mind like poison fire gave me pause. All I desired was before me, backpedaling away in the ruined skin of a folklorist—no doubt wondering how a mortal could rise from a bloodstained alter, bearing fire and vengeance against the gods.
A storm broke behind me as a fresh gust of bullets blew across the already ruined lobby. Before the Darkness, the police exercised far more discretion as to where they pointed and fired their weapons. But now, with remainders of the Darkness seasoning an otherwise dead world, discretion was not a care they took very seriously.
Luckily, the Red Dream held fast, transforming most of the deadly injuries I should have suffered into only cuts and bruises. Yet the police and their gunfire were far from primary to my thinking—only the fleeing form of Tom Hush pinned my attention.
He raced up a nearby staircase, still laughing. I almost stepped on his shadow as I gave chase, nearly catching him in the grinning arc of my sister’s shining teeth, but he managed to push the remains of his borrowed body just slightly beyond her reach.
As we rounded a corner I was surprised by a mob bearing knives, keys, canes, anything they could seize upon. I should have known that a luxurious hotel, little more than a hive of the rich and indulgent, would be thick with secrets for the antlered god to sup—and feast he did. I could hear the floors above me shaking under the wide trample of secret-keeping crowds. Mercifully, these new devotees were without the physical adjustments that madness could supply, so I was confronted only by crazed humans.
My father cleared a flowing red path amidst the teeming throngs, but my pace was sorely wounded. I lost sight of the bleeding god somewhere on the third floor. I slipped into a hallway that had been closed off for some kind of maintenance, hoping the god had taken the same route. Sure enough, he stood at the far end of the corridor, holding the slack darkness that tumbled all around him as if it were a pull string. “Where is your mother now, Vincent? Do you even remember what you did to her? What she did to you? Think hard, Vincent. You can do it, my boy. I’ll even help you.” I felt the god’s psychic fist slam into my mind, crashing past memory and dream alike, searching and clawing for more secrets.
This time, though, my family was home, and they were admitting no visitors. I grinned at the terrible violence that greeted the god’s efforts. After all the slashing, hacking, and smashing, Tom seemed to reel from the inner conflict, holding himself up via the grip he continued to exercise upon the flowing darkness of the corridor. After a few moments of satisfying quiet, Mister Hush seemed to regain his sense of humor, letting drip a small stream of oily laughter as he rose from his psychic defeat. “Oh, yes. I forgot about that awful family of yours. It’s funny how they look nothing like you, hm?”
The taunt found its mark, and I raced forward, heedless of the god’s cleverness. Tom yanked away the darkness as if it were a magician’s curtain, revealing the trick beneath. His laughter sank beneath the sound of something large and mechanical, and the god’s shadow stretched toward me, pushed by a large, blinding spotlight projecting from somewhere behind him. The shadow transformed as it fell over me, revealing the monstrous outline of the thing hidden within the dead, ever-crumbling folklorist.
The sight almost distracted me from the gunfire thundering through the window at the end of the hallway—a police helicopter fired both its mounted machine guns, chewing the world around me into so much smoking ruin.
I followed the curve of silence where it diverted into an adjoining hallway. More police vehicles massed around the building as the skies filled with additional spotlights. I needed to finish the god quickly if I was to have any chance of escaping. Tom would need to conserve and repair what was left of his vessel, I suspected. It seemed a worthy idea to make my way toward the hotel wedding chapel, should it have one. Secrets have no greater haven than beneath the shadow of religion.
Regrettably, according to the map of the hotel carved beautifully into a nearby wall, the chapel was located many floors above me, near the “rooftop lagoon,” of all things. The most direct paths to my destination lay on the outside of the building or up the elevator shaft, and I was fairly certain my armor of dream would not long survive the vulgar reality of several police gunships’ sustained showers of high caliber rounds. I pried open the elevator doors and scaled the shaft to the top of the building.
It was a predictable route to take, I confess, but I hadn’t realized how predictable until large numbers of people began tumbling down at me from the floors above. I was growing more irritated by the antlered god, though I admit I was slightly taken with him. He was a crafty one, after all. It was a surreal scene—persons falling silently through the darkness at me, each one carefully aimed to knock me from the wall, to send me hurtling down. Tom smartly denied them their screams, so that I was given no warning as to the direction or angle they fell. When Tom finally ran out of people to drop, I continued my ascent.
Reaching the appropriate floor, I was confronted by a wall of armed and armored policeman eager to be done with their night’s business. Pushing their obnoxious lights from my face with obedient shadow, I stood to my full height, my father’s head nearly scraping the ceiling. One of them croaked into the radio, “We got ‘em, alright. He’s cornered and all out of tricks. Were gonna bring him down the easy way.” I was amused by the bravado.
Without warning, the power went out, followed by explosions and screams. It seemed my sister had done her work well. I’d inserted her into one of the plummeting secret-keepers from the elevator shaft, hoping that she might help improve my situation from below. The bravado vanished from the men gathered before me. I remained amused, but no longer stationary.
I was quick, if not particularly gentle. I sensed no good reason to spare them the pain they would have gladly given to me. I heard the police radio squawk a second time. The voice on the other end called out to the dead policemen as chaos and death reigned in the background. Apparently, my sister had transferred herself to the operator of an armored communications vehicle on the scene, and was making quite merry. The voice ended in a single, wet shriek.
I hastened up the stairs to the rooftop, weeding my path of any lingering ill-wishers as I went. I saw a small bit of blood just outside the door to the chapel. Tom was inside. Somewhere in the darkness of my mind, I heard my father cracking his knuckles.
Closing the double doors behind me, I could feel the ample spaces around me piling with an elder time—a forgotten age of cold stone and burned offerings. Tom was setting up shop, his ancient props—idols and alters and antlers—materializing. Prehistor
ic shadows flooded the chapel, removing the contemporary darkness entirely, allowing lost epochs purchase upon the present. This was to be our last stand—we would finish things here.
My father shook with poorly contained anger as the leather of my gloves began to smolder. He was still quite upset over his mistreatment at the secret-seizing hands of the ancient god.
Tom’s words came from across eons as much as from across the room. “I’m left wondering, Vincent, if I should take your secret with me. There’s little flavor to be had in the eating of a secret that’s not yet ripe. And while most secrets are tastiest just before the telling, yours seems like it would be spoiled if eaten a moment before it was told.”
“You speak as though you’ve been given invitation to eat of my secret, whatever it might be, but I don’t feel inclined to turn it over to you just yet,” I said. “You may find my mysteries harder to acquire than those of a dusty folklorist. But of course, you know this already.”
“Please!” The god shouted. “You face a timeless opponent, Vincent. Do you truly think my violence your inferior? Your hands have gripped weapons less than a lifetime. I’ve been eating secrets long before man had hands.”
I recalled the god’s aim with a gun and chuckled at the superiority of his violence. “I suppose I grasp some measure of your problem, Secret Eater, but I can see no resolution to it, save for the testing of your timeless violence.” I hefted my father in both hands. “Which, as you can see, I’ve come prepared for.”
Tom Hush smiled. “Oh, the violence is inevitable, certainly! I wouldn’t dream of leaving without it! But it’s the degree to which I should want to apply that violence that confounds me. I wouldn’t want to ruin your ability to enjoy your . . . my secret, now would I? But unfortunately, I can see your father’s anger has you far too inclined to put away the civility of a pleasant conversation. So, if you’re ready?”
The Red Son Page 18
