Their questions sent me tumbling into yet another terrible memory.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Young Vincent: Why are you hurting them, father?
Father: Honestly son, what harm can really be done to the dead? Do you think those children alive? You’ve so much to learn, my little apprentice. There’s no life in those little corpses. They’re merely the freshest cadavers this Deadworld has to offer, nothing else. You see, my art is very much like blood magic, in so much that it draws its strength from the most vital sources that can be had. And here, where people are only plastic and dead, the youngest corpses are the most useful corpses, as they are the only things likely to furnish even a speck of vitality. The dust of their dreams is what gives my paints, clays, and canvases their true colors—not the dull, lifeless combinations of earthly constituents.
Young Vincent: But they cry for me to save them. How could they be dead?
Father: They have no idea they’re dead, son. They woke up in the middle of their sweet dreams, spilling out cold and lifeless into this land of unloving, shuffling strangers. They—we—are all at best, only ghosts. At worst, corpses. I pray we are the former, for that means there’s still a chance that life—and by life, I mean dream—can again dawn upon us all. But for that to happen, I must play god, which is the purpose of any artist worth a bucket of paint. I must reconstitute life from loam. The only thing those little creatures can try to save is their skin—the webbing that constricts their dreams, anchoring them to this alien graveyard. What you hear is the dead pleading to stay dead, nothing more. Do you want those poor children to stay dead forever, Vincent?
Young Vincent: No.
***
Lilly’s face lacked even a shred of understanding—it merely hung dead and vengeful, long lost to the tides of pain that had stayed her soul from oblivion. Neither she nor the rest of the dead children understood what had been done to them, for them. And while I didn’t share my father’s particular views concerning the role of children in art, I was nonetheless sympathetic to his efforts, if not his methods. However, my sympathy was not shared by the deceased children standing before me.
“I did not allow you to die, little ones,” I said gently. “I had been given to believe, incorrectly, that you were being made to truly live, as once we all did before all this death became us. I am so truly sorry that my father’s efforts failed you. But, I am afraid I cannot be the inheritor of his sins. All I can do is hope that my efforts will be more successful than his. Perhaps you might assist me in my efforts, if you truly care to rid yourself of all that aforementioned death. I want nothing more than for you to learn to dream again, little ones.”
I knelt down before Lilly, and the little corpse searched my eyes, finding only death, dream, and truth. I could feel the dead flower of her soul take strength from my conviction, blooming in the darkness of her tiny, beautiful sadness. She threw her arms around me and sobbed into the shadows. One after another, the dead children came to me. With each new embrace, my strength swelled, joining with the power of the Red Dream. Their fragile, wonderful hugs were so filled with hope, even after death. It was that rootless little hope, in amalgam, that powered the undead giant known as the Missing Child.
Lilly placed her blackened, twisted hand to my face. “You poor, poor monster. So broken, so beautiful. Go to them. We will tend to these fools for as long as we are able. Find your family, Vincent, and avenge us all for being so rudely awoken from such a beautiful dream.” I kissed her upon her spoiling forehead and rose from the gathering of children, changed.
My tears held the smoke from my eyes as I strode through the fire, crushing the fools who rose against me. I now moved through the hordes of soldiers with a new conviction, a new burning dream—dead children lifted from grave to glory, thrilling through black skies, with bits of rolling thunder surging through their hopeful hearts.
I reached the last door—a fabricated drawbridge, barred shut by a length of red-hot iron. Standing before it was the Prince of Smoke, holding a dagger in each hand, laughing. However, the laughter was not the property of any one single triplet, but rather the conjoined cackling of the lot of them. “I see you are finally coming to understand things, Family Man—if only slightly. Yet secrecy is ever the magician’s prerogative, is it not?”
I clenched my fists, every fiber of them aching from the absence of my sweet sisters. “I’m rather relieved to see you’re not nearly so dull as I had been led to believe via our many conversations together. Regrettably, like the many interesting individuals before you, I must remove you from my kill list. And because of what you have done, you will be removed with great and painful prejudice.”
The Prince twirled a dagger and smiled. “Out of respect for the Game—and no small amount of fear of consequence—I’ve not inspected your kill list. However, I’m certain it isn’t nearly so extensive with crossed-out names as mine. Soon, you will discover why that is.” I hoped his surprise was more than the realization that the Prince of Smoke was a composite entity, manifested from the joining of the three miserable brothers, as that rabbit was already out of the hat. Though, how they managed it remained an interesting secret. In the next moment, the men of one body vanished in a thick plume of smoke.
Wrapped in the Red Dream and the hope of lost children, I moved to the massive door and seized the glowing steel bar that held it shut, snapping it in half. My hands caught fire, allowing me to augment the blow I struck against the Prince as he appeared behind me, knives in hand.
The composite man was knocked into roaring flames, but I knew it would take more than fire to finish him, just as it would take more than a predictable sneak attack to finish me. “If the extent of your magical prowess is limited to performing such cheap tricks, you may have oversold yourself, Your Highness.”
The magician fell silent, allowing his soldiers to answer my taunt, but the Prince of Smoke wasn’t the only one who could vanish. The killers’ gunfire failed to find me as I loosed myself into a strong current of shadow and silence, disappearing from sight. Within moments, I had gained the courtyard surrounding the false castle. I could hear my sisters’ weeping like never before, the sound filling me with even more fire. I couldn’t bear their cries. The Prince of Smoke would have to wait.
Just before I merged into the nearby woods, I cast my glance backwards. The Prince was standing in the sky, apparently held against gravity by only the plumes of smoke that rose out of the burning castle. His gaze pushed against the darkness by which I traveled, and I could feel his strange power reaching out for me. I threw out a cloud of quiet and disappeared anew.
As I crossed beyond the entrance to the nearby forest, I quietly asked the trees and the cool babbling brooks if they might keep my presence a secret. For incentive, I promised to unpeel them all from the solid world, should I manage to win my war against waking. Only seconds passed before the forest had completely embraced me, taking me into its confidence and revealing to me all of its secret paths. I quietly thanked the woodland as I rushed through its ancient darkness—a silken gloom that had been hidden and nurtured since time immemorial, passed between shady meadow and benighted thicket, to be preserved against the day forever. Yet despite the forest’s best efforts, I could detect from somewhere within those undisclosed lanes a Wolf keeping pace with me, deciphering the confusion I left in my wake, avoiding my every trap and predicting my every feign. The Prince of Smoke was a formidable hunter, indeed.
A hollow in the woods yawned wide as the Prince, preempting the path I would take, rose from the mists directly in front of me. He showed me his hands, clad in black leather gloves, and began moving them with an awful celerity. He thrust them out in front of the darkness that held his face from sight, beneath a hood seemingly stitched from the gossamer of shadows. Instantly, a swarm of fat flies swept out from between his dancing fingers and splashed across my face, the entire cloud trying desperately to bury itself in my eyes. An
enemy silence bloomed all around me, turning my vigilant senses aside and inviting a blade deep into the flesh of my back.
I followed the pain to the exact point at which my skin ended and the Prince’s knife began, hoping to seize it. But my hands only clasped the tail of a mist that twisted in the moonlight. My renewed silence closed the wound as the blade vanished, and I called the shadows to reveal the void where hid my opponent.
My fist followed where the shadows led, and the magical murderer spat his broken teeth onto the twisting coils of ancient tree roots. The conjoined triplet backpedaled into his strange and magical smoke as I sunk into my obedient darkness. Not even the searching songs of crickets and frogs could find the silence through which we stalked, nor could the gloom of moonstruck swamps foreshadow the savagery we intended to impart to one another.
Cold whispers from the pursed lips of the Prince would drift across my path, searching me out. “Come and see what wonderful magic tricks I’ve yet to show you, my friend. They’ll wrap you in wonder and allow you to see by the most wonderful and secret lights.” I can’t deny that I found the offer nearly irresistible, but my sisters were in dire need.
At last the sun began to stir at the horizon, and the sky began to pool at its most distant edges with drowsy light. I assumed the Prince, if he was any kind of a hunter or at all like myself, would likely postpone our dealings until nightfall. I found a cavern filled with wolves hidden deep within the woods, replete with the recent kill of a large deer. I slew the wolves and lined the earthy space with their soft bodies, providing myself with comfortable sleeping arrangements. After I had filled my belly with fresh deer meat, I slept.
I was finally allowed to sink into the depths of dream my previous earthly accommodations had made all but impossible. And as is usually the case, there was something waiting at the bottom.
“Shall I be forced to come find you, Family Man?” It was Mister Hide, calling out to me from our shared dream. “Given the dwindling number of contestants, I’d thought to get things done and over with. I’ve all but sent you a written invitation to my whereabouts, so I’m curious if you’ve reconsidered your chances of victory against me. Perhaps rather than face me, you’ve elected to hide in a hole somewhere.”
I couldn’t blame him for his impatience, or even his theory concerning my prolonged absence. It would certainly seem that I’d reconsidered my bid against him. “My most sincere apologies, Mister Hide. I have been somewhat detained as of late. Have you ever heard of this Prince of Smoke?” I wondered if my most recent opponent was as famous as he would have me believe.
“I have,” replied Hide. “He’s a bit of an escape artist, is he not? I believe he was responsible for the mass killing of several convicted murderers reposed within a maximum-security prison, a structure quite famous for its impregnability. Quite the feat—if the story is true, of course.”
“From what I’ve seen, it seems likely,” I said ruefully. “I have to admit my initial impression of the creature was a bit lackluster. However, that impression has since been revised, and considerably so.”
“I can’t say I’m not disappointed he hasn’t killed you,” Hide said. “I see our meeting going rather poorly for you, and with precious few stand-out moments to satisfy me long after your pelt has been treated and hung. When you get right down to the bones of the matter, you’re little more than an inferior version of myself. Your chief attributes are all similar to my own, only less refined and powerful. It seems to me the Prince of Smoke could do you the favor of sparing you an awful lot of humiliation, while providing me with a more diversified and thus challenging opponent.”
“Your obsession with your swollen muscles is disappointing,” I countered, smiling. “I’d hoped you’d be a bit more refined by way of an operating philosophy, which is precisely why you and I are not very alike at all. You see, my primary attribute is my artistic sense, a particular quality that seems wholly lost on you, regrettably. And there’s the fact that you’re clearly the smaller and weaker creature between us.” I desperately wanted to yield to at least one of the baser temptations I’d experienced that night—though truth be told, I was much more interested in the Prince’s advertised magic show.
Up to this point, the dream was largely unformed, merely a dark place at the bottom of a murky ocean. After my poorly veiled insult, the waters began to churn with the blood and body parts of ferocious beasts. Each of the sundered creatures were entirely undressed of their skins. Moments after the water had been all but replaced with blood and bodies, the Skinner drew up to me, seeming much deflated, as if he’d lost a considerable amount of his vaunted mass.
When the once massive killer spoke, it was in a much different voice. “You’ve chosen a poor place to hide, Family Man. Magic within a dream is so much stronger than beneath the sun—or even the moon, for that matter.” The Prince of Smoke stood before me, from the bottom of a Red Dream, from behind the poached dream-skin of a massive serial killer.
The Prince laughed as my body was overcome with a thousand points of pain. Suddenly I was awake, covered with the dead and drooling wolves I had slain earlier. I threw them from me, crushing out what life had been smuggled into them by the unclean magics of the Prince. I saw a familiar mist gathering at the mouth of the cavern, giddy from its most recent assault upon me.
“You are a fine opponent, Family Man,” said the Prince, “and I now feel that if I’d continued to dangle you out as bait, I would have denied myself some of the grandest fun I’ve ever known. Most importantly, you seem to have a unique appreciation for my craft. I can tell by the way your eyes retreat from the world as you marvel at my tricks. And unlike so many, you never seek to look behind my apparent chicanery. You stare into my mystery with the wide eyes of a child, accepting everything and questioning nothing. As a magician, I can prize nothing so highly as your ceaseless wonder. For that, I must thank you.”
It was a sincere gesture, and I received it in the intended spirit. But this would not stop me from tearing him limb from magical limb, trickster from triplet. I would not relent until all of them were so much indecipherable ruin, their true magic left to fend for itself in a world of two-way mirrors, false-bottomed boxes, and eyes that could never behold wonder. My sisters would have it no other way.
My fists could find no purchase for themselves—nothing, that is, save empty air and the filthy walls of the cavern. While the Prince of Smoke was nowhere, his laughter was everywhere. It came from the deepest recesses of the cave, the broken jaws of twice-dead wolves, it even seemed to tumble from my own mouth.
I thought perhaps the deeper darkness that slept within the very guts of the cave might deny my opponent the trick of attacking from anywhere—I hoped his eyes were not as keen as my own. After much calculation of the Princes’ tactics, I managed to seize hold of him and cast him into the depths of the cave. Yet again there was no sound of flesh striking rock, only the laughter of a man who could apparently be everywhere and nowhere at once.
I splashed into the thick currents of darkness, brandishing a large stone I had wrenched free from the earth. I took pleasure at the thought of my enemy—as gaudy in his ways as a refined jewel sleeping upon a wrought bed of gold and silver—being dispatched by a crude and common rock.
The Prince revealed a side to his power I had not anticipated, a side that was as wonderful as it was wicked. I dropped through the world, ostensibly through a trap door that had been recessed into the irregular filth of the cavern floor. It would have been impossible for the magician to have the foresight to place it there. I realized the power of the man—men?—became greater the further he moved from the prying eyes of the world, where his magic could churn butter into butterflies and the world would never be the wiser. It became clear to me the banality of the trio was as fake as the floor, as deceptive as a mirage—as polished as a two-way mirror.
I fell into the thickest darkness that could be found within the
steadier boundaries of the Deadworld. This was a place of uncertainty—perhaps tucked under a leaf or at the back of a lunatic’s mind, it hummed with a potential that could only be coaxed into shape by the sharpest of wills or the strongest of magics—itself merely a dream given direction. Yet this was the Prince’s mistake, as my will was equally potent even without the benefit of magic words and sleight of hand. I had no idea where I was specifically, which was to my advantage. Without knowledge aforethought, my will could place me wherever I wished “here” to be. Hence I was able to bend the darkness into a journey—back home.
As I rode the darkness linking one shadow to the next, I could feel the blackness parting behind me, pushed aside by the Prince as he gave chase. I emerged from a night sky, tumbling like a comet to the earth, through tree branches and brambles, till at last the world rose up to greet me. I splashed down into the murky waters of a cold forest pool.
Of the Prince, I heard nothing, but he was close, perhaps only slightly farther than the distance of his magician’s blades. “I bet you didn’t know this, but your opponent is the son of a witch,” he said from nowhere in particular. “And his father was a thirteenth son. So you must see by now, you’ve really no chance, here. I’ve been charitable with you thus far, primarily because you’re nearly the anomaly I am. But regrettably for you, nearly isn’t quite good enough.”
“Strange, but you sound more like a cliché to me,” I jeered, “not at all the anomalous creature you make yourself out to be. You’re so rote, in fact, that I’m now fairly certain your trio form is merely the predictable side effect of the Power of Threes, undoubtedly exercised by your mother at your birth. Why, I’m even beginning to wonder what a common Halloween costume such as yourself is even doing in this Game of Wolves.”
It was clear the Prince would not be so easily rattled at the cusp of what he assumed were my final moments. “And what noble blood makes you a more qualified attendee to this sport of murderers, eh? It certainly couldn’t be those awful ‘works of art’ you leave in your wake. I’ve known butchers with more artistic flourish than you. You’re little more than a brute with a vocabulary.”
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