I turned to leave for the second time.
“The second of my plans,” the Queen continued quickly, “the least preferable of them, in fact, is to force the issue and have my son join the Game at your expense. It’s a little clumsier than my previously outlined scheme, but it should do the trick. I assure you, this latest plan will hurt, artist. Why not take the easy road for a change?”
Her proposals were absurd, and my sisters were eager to supply them with the raucous laughter they so richly deserved. The Eater of Idols began to stir, sensing my decision. The creature was of the most bizarre cocktail of mismatched limbs, eyes, maws, and horns. I was shocked to know that such a fantastic thing could have originated with the White Mother. Yet there was an ordinariness beneath its demonic extravagance, as if it had been made demonical for mostly superficial reasons. Though I must confess, I was at a loss to even guess at such motives.
The beast’s ungainly form made me take its sloth as a given, and for the most part I was right to do so. However, at one point, as I dashed beyond a darting wave of barbed tentacles, the creature proved a bit faster than I had anticipated. A few of the graceless extrusions lashed my back, causing some of the worst pain I had ever known.
I had to keep in mind that what I fought was only slightly removed from godhood, and because of that status, my victory against it would be hard gained. To make matters much worse, it seemed the Red Dream was unable to fortify me. The abode of the Dead Mother likely excluded such creative, if ultimately practical, excesses. All of this was perfectly acceptable to me, as I did not want to become overly dependent on foreign influences for my victory over the creature. I was glad for the opportunity to seek my own path to its destruction.
The darkness of the White Gaia’s forest was entirely alien, lacking the most basic loyalties of standard lightlessness. Specifically, it was no friend to me and disallowed my want to disappear into its inky depths, forcing me into the open before the many keen eyes of the Gaia’s son.
Lacking even the most basic tools for a proper sneak attack, I was forced to act in plain view. I moved quickly to the side of the creature’s tumbling mass, running my sister’s blazing smile across its impressive length, freeing the septic fluids that served as its blood. I laughed as my enemy cried out, reflecting upon my silence when the thing had laid nearly unbearable pain into the flesh of my back. Its throes of anguish gave me ample opportunity to rouse my father and plunge him deeply into the quivering folds of the unwholesome beast’s flesh, summoning forth greater quantities of blood and much louder cries of pain.
The Eater of Idols realized I was no easy victim and withdrew from my father’s thunderous laughter, which rolled across the lifeless environs of my enemy’s putrid domain, tearing out the hollow silence that lurked between dead trees and underneath pale brooks.
I had taken the creature’s actions to be indicative of a temporary retreat, but I was mistaken—it was a feint. Something from behind me tore a channel across my back. The pain was largely numbed by the dead nerves that had fallen victim to the previous attack, but this newest transgression created a sensation more terrible than riven flesh. I felt a coldness—of mind and imagination—as if all the dreams that had ever been had suddenly died of an endless winter. I could feel the empty stare of sightless eyes crawling across my spirit, the sour of failed dreams rotting from within hollow skulls, the sterile collective indifference of the entire world—all soldered together to form a solid, breathless void. I fell to my knees.
I turned to see what had destroyed me and beheld a bloodied white claw retreating behind the wall of dead trees. The White Gaia had touched me, drawn my blood, felled me. I was sick beyond flesh and bone and blood and bile—she had deadened the rushing pulse of my soul. I watched the Eater of Idols lick my blood from its mother’s hooked fingertips. I saw the creature change, assuming a shape not unlike a man’s, but decorated with the darkest ornaments—horns and fangs and glowering eyes, dank with the perspiration of fresh rot. Most terrible of all, it bore a striking, if distorted, likeness to me.
Her last words to me were spoken upon winds colder than conscience. “Let wither the Shepherd’s dogs, for the Game is coming to an end. And it was you, dear Vincent, who made it all possible.”
As I tumbled into death, I passed the dreams of my fellow hunters and heard the din of their dying. I saw the Eater of Idols, red with the blood of Wolves, tearing, rending, killing—clutched in his hand, a kill list filled with the names of every surviving member of the Game. I saw the names drenched in blood, crossed-out, destroyed. I saw the Prince of the Deadworld wading through crowds of wincing shadows, seeking out his prey, roaring over the ruined bodies of hunters, Wolves, and artists. I saw months fall into the span of seconds, each compressed day that passed only a momentary glimpse into the slaughter I had fathered, the death I had loosed, the dreams I had failed.
I saw my family looking down at me, cursing me for a failure, dying as surely as I was. My sisters’ smiles had dimmed to cold, unliving steel. My father’s eyes filled with impotent rage, his laughter frozen into silence.
I had almost passed into that final darkness when suddenly, my mother’s hand reached out for me. I grasped at it with all the hope of a lost child, but I was too slow. Death had me by the bones of my last breath, and it would not relent its grip.
My mother wept. “You have failed me, Vincent. Yet I wish you all the peace of the dead. May you sleep soundly, my poor, twilit prince.”
I tried to ask for her forgiveness, but emptiness had replaced my voice. I had come so close to freeing us all, so close!
Blackness—inert and endless—piled atop me, became me, and I joined the great company of dead, defeated wolves.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Entry 1
I no longer determine time by clocks or available light. My new world is now completely oriented by the comings and goings of a single sinister man. I don’t know his real name. I’m not sure that knowing it would do me a bit of good, anyway. I’m not one hundred percent certain the guy’s even human. But he’s definitely one of those Noctu-psychotics—persons affected by a Post-Darkness insanity that has taken them almost completely out of the human category. Let me assure you, this fella is as far from your Average Joe as it gets. Not to mention, he’s also one of the nastiest serial killers you’ve likely never heard about.
He assures me he’s over one hundred years old, and that he lived through the original Wasting House Tragedy—by the way, he doesn’t look a day over thirty-five. He doesn’t look like much of anything really, just an ordinary guy, maybe a tad on the thin side. Lean might be a better word for him, now that I think about it. He’s got a predatory look to him.
While he looks innocuous enough, he completely switches gears when he’s on the hunt. On those occasions, he wears a ragged moth-eaten suit, something you’d expect to find hanging off the bones of a late-eighteenth-century corpse. He also balances this shabby stovepipe hat on his head, which adds six inches or so to his height. He insists the entire outfit was made for him by a “wildly talented tailor of yore,” and it’s held together by “more than string and skill.” To counterbalance the ragamuffin look of his clothing, he perches these tiny octagonal, black-tinted eyeglasses on the tip of his nose. Taken all together, he looks like something straight out of a goddamned nightmare, which is likely the vibe he’s shooting for, I’m sure.
Beyond all the oddities I already mentioned, he claims to have been called upon to play some sort of game. He generally refers to it as the Great Bloody Wolf Hunt, a slaughter-sport that pits serial killers against one another. I must admit, that is something I’d pay damn good money to watch, which is precisely where I come in. You see, Mr. Grey—that’s what he calls himself—can no longer waste his mind and hands on the “pedestrian, although wonderful, craft of writing,” as he must dedicate the sum of his dexterity and concentration to The Great Bloody Wolf Hunt. So, someone�
��s got to keep his journals up to date—lucky me.
I won’t bother giving you my name—Mr. Grey wouldn’t have it, anyway. Besides, I’m not much of anyone really, which I’m sure is part of the reason Mr. Grey nabbed me. There’s no wife or kids to worry about me, no close friends to get concerned and go poking around looking for me. I’m just a chubby loner who writes books that few people read. I’m not much of a novelist, but I’ve managed to get a few published, shitty though they are. Mostly, I write (bad) short fiction. And I certainly regret writing the short story “Songs to Scream By.” That’s the one that caught Mr. Grey’s eye. Shortly after abducting me, he explained I was the only writer he’d ever read who could “conjure the true failure of the spirit and its many and inevitable deaths.” I took it as a compliment. I think.
Anyway, Mr. Grey’s been having me record his thoughts and exploits in this big beautiful journal of his. Good Christ, the thing’s even got handmade vellum pages. As a writer, I’ve got to award him some points for that. Up to the time he stole me away, he’d been keeping his own notes, and I was curious to know where he kept his other journals. Our conversations are generally pretty free-flowing and personal, so I wasn’t too frightened to ask. He actually seemed glad I’d taken an interest in him, and offered to take me to see the books, when time and circumstance allowed, of course. It wasn’t long after when he whisked me off to a small farmhouse in the country, way back in the sticks. In the attic of the rickety old place, he showed me stacks and stacks of fancy journals—just like the one he gave me to use. Christ, there must have been thousands of them. After thumbing through a bunch while he cheerfully looked on, I began to seriously consider what he’d said about his age. And that wasn’t his only claim that began to wash with me.
Now, God knows how many of what sort of people he’s killed since I’ve known him, but I’m positive that at least some of them were in fact serial killers. One of the heads he brought home was a dead ringer—pun intended—of the killer called Quiet Quentin, a little person. Not long after that, he brought home the mostly intact corpse of Paul Stillwater, the Gobb’s Town Goblin. I’m absolutely convinced it was the Goblin, as the cops later found and identified the carcass we left behind. There are a few more noteworthy stiffs, but I’ll not get into those just yet. For now, I just want to assure you that some of his body count really did come from genuine, honest-to-goodness killers.
As for his motive for killing, I have no idea what the hell drives him. No idea, that is, save for the insane gibberish he’s let slip from time to time. He appears to believe that killing is his job—his duty, more like—handed down to him from way back, something like 150 years ago, by some anomalous force he’s yet to properly comprehend. He says he must kill and dismember so as to “empower the next tides of change,” and that he’s got to “fill the pot with broth, which others are responsible for stirring and cooking.” I don’t exactly know what all that means, but I’ve a feeling he’s talking about bringing about a second Great Darkness. I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that the very idea of wanting to kick off another Darkness is flatly insane.
Well, I’d better close up shop for the night—I can hear him on the stairs outside. He’s likely dragging a body with him. That’s been his routine for the last few months, whenever he comes home this late. It’s likely the corpse of one of his Great Bloody Wolves.
Entry 2
Well, that sure was a long session. Generally, he’s a bit more circumspect about his nighttime dalliances with death, preferring to let the reader fill in some of the blanks. Not tonight, though. I haven’t really seen him like that before.
Seems Mr. Grey’s been getting these strange dreams about his fellow killers, or Wolves, as he oft calls them. You see, he believes all the killers in the Great Bloody Wolf Hunt share a single, if highly compartmentalized, dream. Initially, the dreams were just so much “red static,” but as the number of players lessened with each kill, the dream became more coherent. Eventually, the dream allowed the remaining killers to not only communicate with each other while they slept, but even, if they had a mind to, mosey into one another’s dreams.
Recently, there’s been some drastic changes to the Game. Specifically, a major player just got himself clipped, but not by another player—by a “creature who abides the spaces beyond the Game, within a white wasteland of plastic bones and solid souls.” Worse still, this outsider has begun murdering the other murderers. All of this was the gist of Mr. Grey’s most recent dream.
Oh, and it was indeed a body my captor had been dragging behind him when last I wrote. You might recall that shit-bird a few years back who filled up his victims’ emptied corpses with the ashes of cremated children. Well, it was that guy. Gordon Flint was his name. At least, that’s what his driver’s license said. After Mr. Grey took what he wanted from the body—more on that in just a bit—we left the ruined thing behind, bobbing in the Arkansas mud. As I said, the corpse has since been identified by the cops, so there’s your proof in the pudding, folks! But Gordon didn’t feature too largely in tonight’s debriefing, so it’s best I move on.
The most important part of tonight’s transcription was that at some point during Mr. Grey’s clash with Flint, something showed up and interrupted the showdown—a monstrous creature that “had the appearance of borrowing from hell its least attractive characteristics.” The monster’s presence forced the two adversaries into an awkward alliance—to fight it off so they could get back to fighting each other.
Unfortunately for Mr. Flint, the creature proved too much for even their combined strength, and Mr. Grey ended up dragging what was left of him back to the house. As for Mr. Grey’s performance in the brawl, I can only assume it was good enough to get him the hell out of Dodge while the getting was good. Though I have to admit, it’s a little hard to think of my abductor as an underdog in any fight.
Now, on more than one occasion, I’ve seen hints of what Mr. Grey gets up to when he’s on the hunt, and I can tell you it’s some dark and dangerous business, indeed. One horrible rainy night, while we were hiding out in an old abandoned candy factory, I got to see one of my keeper’s infamous Wolves up close and far too personal. The guy just seemed to melt out of the shadows, dripping with all these clinking hooks and chains, and wearing the most bizarre mask you can imagine—at least, I hope it was a mask. Before I knew it, the thing had spread out his chains all across the ceiling and walls like some goddamned metal spiderweb. He sprang into the middle of the web and crouched down into the darkness of the room. What I hadn’t noticed was that I’d been attached to the web by means of a hook that’d slid through the palm of my hand. Didn’t even feel it, at first. Mr. Grey later told me the killer laced his hooks with some kind of chemical agent that dulled nerve endings, so the victims wouldn’t know they’d been snagged. Anyway, I started to scream, which I suppose was the point—to lure Mr. Grey into a trap.
My kidnapper, whether or not he’s a century old, is an uncommonly wise fella, and had already prepared for the killer. I was the bait, you see—to lure the killer into thinking I’d be good bait for luring Mr. Grey, if you can follow all that. Mind you, before that point, I’d never seen my captor participate in The Great Bloody Wolf Hunt, and I was a little worried about his chances against the web-casting freak. I had nothing to fear, it turns out. Mr. Grey dealt with the other killer handily, jumping onto the chain-link web, and like some berserker gymnast, kicking and slashing his way to a gory victory.
I only mention all of this to introduce you, dear reader, to another of Mr. Grey’s weird claims—his “itinerary.” Apparently, every killer in the Great Bloody Wolf Hunt is given an old, yellowed list—how they come by them, I’ve no idea—on which is printed the names of the killers they’re responsible for murdering. I know this because after the chain and hook guy was dead, Mr. Grey slid a piece of paper out from the corpse’s inside pocket. Then, while he perused the names on the paper, he explained to me w
hat he was doing. He said, “Every list marks a Wolf by his God-given name, which I use to track my prey. And every Wolf I bring to ground, their names I shall inherit, until no Wolves are left and the Dire Shepherd stands before me, bearing a red prize.” And that’s just what he did—copied the names from the other killer’s list onto his own. That’s how I know the real names of the killers he dispatches—his itinerary.
All of this comes to bear in my most recent rap session with Mr. Grey. Apparently, while he and Mr. Flint were battling the creature, Mr. Grey caught sight of a piece of paper tucked into the beast’s back pocket. After some fancy and violent finagling, my captor managed to grab hold of it, scanning it for a brief second before the creature snatched it back. My kidnapper then informed me that “it was a complete list, from A to Z, of every Wolf left in the contest, written in the rigid script of a corpse, the neatest of lines crossing out the names of the dead.” Among the other unusual features of the monster’s itinerary, there lurked a stark departure from any murderer’s catalogue he’d ever seen before—there was one name which wasn’t crossed off, but only had a question mark next to it. He only glimpsed the first name. Vincent.
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