I hope you don’t mind how personal things have become here, but I’ve been a very careful student of your dreams. They have a certain sound to them—if you listen carefully, you can hear the din of terrible secrets, tolling somber and gray. What strange and splendid things have been done to you . . .
Hollow Day is right around the corner, Family Man. Soon the machines will celebrate their ascendency by wearing our skins, sleeping in our beds, drinking our coffee, and eating our lunches. They will become us and no one will be the wiser. Wind-ups all over the world turning for no reason but to turn. That’s why I had to come—to take the machine out of you. I couldn’t let the engineer wipe out the game before I’d figured out how to properly win it, if winning is even the right thing to do. Although, I do find it strange that the machines would fight amongst themselves in such a way. Perhaps it’s a metagame, where the engineers themselves seek each other’s demise, to wrest the master machine from one kind of programming in order to impose another. Anyway, I’m fairly certain the machine within you is now dying, as I had quite the conversation with it. No doubt, once it’s completely dead and you return to some semblance of yourself, you’ll be coming back this way for your family and this journal. While I’d love to be here when you return, I can already hear the quiet patter of careful feet—another Wolf who drew my name. Poor, poor beast.
***
Through blank silences, twilights stuffed with plastic light, beyond nights falling grey and dead—I climbed. It was not art or dream or darkness that brought me out from the pit of the world. It was blood.
I had been focused to primal dimensions, I had whet upon appetites that caused space itself to open its swirling maw, devouring stars, gnawing at the bones of creation. I was the moment of the kill, the last light before death. And I was coming for him—the Eater of Idols.
Fire and shadow spoke me back to life, and I stood before the thing that had once, through treachery, cast me down. My enemy had been injured, its blood spilled. I had been conjured back to life through the magic of its dying. But I would not spoil my victory with even the slightest taste of advantage. My teeth tore open the flesh of my arm, and I fed the flagging beast a thick stream of my blood. The son of the White Queen fell upon the ground, devouring my offering where it fell, reveling in the strength I had allowed it to recapture.
I smiled when the demon rose up before me—renewed, confident, doomed.
My family raged from the churning waters nearby. My father roared for me to take him up, his hunger burning maniacal and bloody. With a single look, I quieted him. He knew immediately—this fight was mine and mine alone. By my bare hands, I would unwrap this creature’s bones, feast on its darkness, feel the gristle of its soul snap and pop between my teeth.
The Mother of the Dead looked on from behind her copse of whited trees, her empty eyes showing wild and worried, my killing smile butchering her confidence in bestial sons and the diablerie of wicked mothers.
The Eater of Idols howled as once it had when we first met, and as before—it charged. But unlike our last contest, I did not move. We collided like a thunderclap, muscles tearing and bones creaking, hands threaded in massive knots. The creature should have overcome me easily, given its immense size and supernatural pedigree. But I would not allow it. I crushed its giant hands like eggshells underfoot, the corded muscles of its claws becoming viscous beneath my grasp, its bones grinding to dust. I inhaled the Eater’s screams as they escaped its mouth and spat them back in its face. I pulled the monster closer, whispering beneath the din of its pain, “Once I’ve consumed you, I will piss what’s left of your soul into a hole in the ground. This I promise you, Usurper.” My grin transformed into flashing jaws as I ripped out the creature’s lashing tongue and swallowed it into my guts. I could feel it convulse at its first taste of my stomach’s bitter acids. The Eater of Idols struggled to free itself from my grip, but I only put it to its knees, laughing as thunderously as ever my father had.
Just beyond the glen, straddling the lines that marked the boundaries of worlds, I sensed another presence—cold and lean and endless. The Shepherd of Wolves was with me. He had come with purpose. Here was vengeance.
Sickly yellow clouds began to wheel overhead, and the air began to sour into a graveyard mist. Forks of lightning shot from gathering storm clouds as a worried mother tried to save her lamb from the wolves.
Thunder smashed down upon my mirth, failing to quell the flood of laughter that overflowed me. Out of sheer desperation, the Eater lunged at me, its gaping maw trying to engulf my entire head. I thrust the monster’s own arm deep into its mouth, my laughter dancing with the fury of the storm. I began to roar as I ripped the arm fully from its socket, forcing the massive limb further down its throat.
The Eater of Idols shuddered as it died, an earthquake in my arms. The storm faded with the hopes of a broken mother.
With the eyes of the two gods upon me, I gathered my family. My father was quiet to the touch, having exhausted his volcanic rage through me. His steel was cold, proud. My sisters glittered in the moonlight, smiles like songs. They sang my praises, and I nearly cried at the sight of them.
The Shepherd had been with me, preserved me from the storm, made me into his vengeance—but it all meant nothing to me. In truth, I was no Wolf, only an artist in love with a dream. A dream worth killing for, again and again. I would slay the Shepherd himself and rip the dreams from his blackened guts if I thought them imprisoned there. Yet, if winning his game meant seeing dreams past the threshold, then I would win. Tonight, I became stronger for having died. My chances were improving all the time.
I turned to the fading presence behind the dead white trees, where sallow eyes hung like skinned fruits, naked and gathering flies. “A mother is God in the eyes of a child,” I said, spitting upon the crumpled corpse of her rotting son.
The night was calling to me. I slipped into the shadows as my extended family welcomed me back.
It was horrible, coming back to the Deadworld. It wasn’t merely that I’d been exposed to the utter cancelation of dream, washed away beneath a wave of boiling black pavement. Or that I’d been made solid and soulless, an idle statue abandoned to a forgotten basement. It was the thoroughly sickening revelation upon my return that I was grateful for having been renewed within the lands of the dead. I was relieved to see the acrid smoke of industry, the grey pitch of ash blowing across eons, the unchanging ugliness. The realization nearly killed me all over again.
I was fortunate, however, that my next destination was one of the more dream-haunted locations of the world, playing to the calm timbre of forfeited confidences in solidity and sanity. Willard, a place of glittering madness, a jewel tucked into the throat of a corpse. It would be my temporary reprieve, and hopefully, my redemption.
Cutting in half my swelling disgust at my reincarnation was the most recent entry into my journal, the words of my greatest adversary—Jack Lantern. There was a guiding light to his logic, if only the dim foxfire of a darkened swamp, doubtful and misleading. But at the very least, his paradigm was cogent and internally consistent, if ultimately incorrect—despite the alleged scrutiny leveled at my exposed dreams. There was value in delusion, especially if it should have absolutely no part in logic or material truth—a waking dream in many respects.
The Soul Carver had peered too long into the eyes of the White Mother, convincing himself of the bottomlessness of her kingdom, that only masks could make the world suitable for living. I am not a mask, Jack—I am fire. I will set this corpse-world aflame upon the pyre of my art, or I will die trying, very likely at the glimmering edges of your own exquisite knives.
But first, there was the wonderful Mister Hide, that connoisseur of swapped skins, reflector of inner truths via the display of their more honest exteriors. Again, and to import a fraction of my criticism of poor Jack Lantern—there is little use for truth in graveyards. The only truths that lurk there c
onsist of the certainty of death and the displacement of dream. All else, as they say, is mere window dressing. Even if that dressing were made from the most skilled fashioning of once-living tissue.
Despite a certain contempt of self, I was grateful for having dealt a decisive blow against the Mistress of Corpses, felling her miserable son. But there was much more work to be done before I could completely smother her in dream. And I would be a fool to count Mister Hide among the tombstones.
The road to Willard was a long one, and nicely decorated. Shade trees lined the trampled paths that looped around thick stands of thorns, and the sun fell in honeyed pools which made the day mercifully tolerable. Granted, the Deadworld expresses no pure, unfiltered beauty, yet the woods—these woods in particular—hung close to bygone dreams, for reasons I would not care to fathom for fear of spoiling their secrets.
I’d forged my bones from mystery, and so the suspense of my journey was especially revitalizing, growing wonder as potent as the hemlock I crushed underfoot. I made stops, of course, at places hewn from the shrouded wisdom of the Darkness, when men and woman existed without pretense or pride—our great meditation of the shadow within us all.
One location was especially handsome, shaped as much from forbidden imagination as from stone—The Grey Crowd. Unfortunately, due to society’s custom of burying the dead, the skins that once dressed the thousands of limestone statues were removed and placed into the earth. But even without their clothing, the statues still lurched purposelessly through the woods, which I took as a criticism of life before the Darkness—rock-solid souls weighting down dead skins, men and women stumbling through the world like listless corpses. Despite the statues’ current state of undress, I was glad to know that a tradition had sprung up shortly after the close of the Darkness. On the eve of that grand day’s anniversary, the statues had been found year after year once again repossessed of their skins, if only those of animals. And despite certain constabulary efforts to quell the practice of this new ritual, it had persisted. There was once an idea to demolish the statues, ridding the world of their biting reproach once and for all. But when the skins of those persons most vocal about supporting the effort were found decorating a number of the grey lurchers, the public seemed to lose all interest in the proposal.
It took my chance meeting with the shambling figures to reflect a moment on my next adversary, to truly appreciate his art for what it was. While I found the rearrangement of skins to be a rather wasted enterprise, as Hide’s efforts seemed less about revealing truth than merely fine-tuning it, I began to see the dream in it. The Skin Switcher’s vision wasn’t necessarily expressed within his product, but rather through his process. It was my opponent’s ability to reshape the humors of nature to match his dreams that truly intoned the man’s creative power—a force that stitched morality to flesh, simultaneously cultivating the lies and truths of his subjects. In a way, the giant killer was like myself, if only on the basic level of intent. We both would see the world dressed in our dreams—but that was as far as the comparison went. While his vision was fulfilled by sculpting flesh to reflect scruples, my art was a tireless invocation of dream—to unmake facts—moral or otherwise—and replace them with the seamless wonder of lost worlds. So, I suppose you might distinguish our dreams by their respective extents. Mine tripped beyond the world, while Hide’s remained trapped within it. Now, I’m certainly not fond of the qualification of dreams, but I must admit—some dreams are better than others.
Apart from the boundaries of his vision, the products of Mister Hide’s process were marvels to behold, and would dignify any nightmare in which you might encounter them. It was perhaps the intrinsic limitations of his calling that allowed for Hide to so completely encompass its nuances and elevate its character, lifting the art of skin-swapping to the level of visual philosophy. Skin should be so lucky as to come under his knife.
Again, and likely not for the last time, the Shepherd’s game would force me to destroy a kindred spirit, and my heart was heavy for it. But wolves must be wolves—even those who would rather be artists.
It had been too long since I had the opportunity to put on my dreams. It was like slipping into a brook at the height of summer, renewing and cool. I was pleased to see that the collective dream was still in place, still populated by the players of the Shepherd’s game. The dream was an almost seamless whole now, having coagulated from time and persistence and many, many deaths. I wandered careworn and filthy warrens, urban hidey holes, attics heaped with old bones, and extravagant murder chambers fit for mad kings. I sensed many eyes upon me, peering out from secret killing places. I wondered if any of them belonged to a certain pumpkin-faced killer.
Although the dream had been designed for the Shepherd’s hungry flock, it had clearly attracted the dreams of other killers, who for whatever reason had not been invited to play. I watched the pitchy waters of an ancient lake retreat behind a toothsome shoreline, where were stacked the blazing forms of countless dead—all of which had briefly come to know the wicked hands of the killer known only as Pyre.
I even made the mistake of stumbling into a very singular dream filled with dying screams and frenetic, pain-inducing machines, all of them housed within a gigantic inhabitable torture chamber—or Tortuary, to those familiar with the legend of Agatha Pain. I saw her staring back at me from the blackened dream. Her wickedly hooked and bladed armor, her steel gloves bristling like a thicket of knives—she was a true vision. She was indeed a Wolf in the Shepherd’s Game. In fact, her dream was a dismal recollection of what she had done to the last Wolf on her list. He was bound and lowered into a glass tank of slow-acting acid, naked but for an oxygen mask and goggles. She looked on as her victim felt himself slowly dissolve into an opaque broth, her smile as sharp as any worn by my sisters. When she discovered me looking on, her hungry smile lowered to a grin. She only gestured to her melting tank, as if offering me a place within it. Her dream quickly disappeared behind a rush of dark new visions, and I loosened my grip on my sleeping sisters.
I came upon the blacked-out dreams of the recently murdered Wolves still caught in a web of nightmares, mindlessly replaying forgotten shadows. I could detect a tilted silence emanating from the dead places, where a strange nullity upended simple emptiness. These dreams were not merely dead, but were something else entirely—something more than dead, perhaps.
With some searching, I found the den of the Skin Switcher. I felt him waiting somewhere among the neat lines of hanging hides, each skin a symbol for a sin that had once been hidden, but now stood revealed and properly affixed to the appropriate sinner. I entered the chamber slowly, the uninvited guest of an exclusive gallery. More so than could be appreciated outside of a dream, Hide’s creations nearly shined with moral relevance—it was as if each creature had been merged together with its exact form of original sin, exemplifying and overcoming the distance between Eden and present day. Sin and skin married with such delicacy and precision as to have been combined by a song. These were not merely revelatory symbols, but whole and entire archetypes.
I knew Hide was aware of my swelling admiration for his work, smiling quietly from somewhere within a sea of stolen skins. “I came to offer my apologies for the delay,” I said. “I hate to keep my appointments waiting. I hope you can see past my indiscretion, but rest assured, Mister Hide—I am coming for you soon.” There was only silence in response, as I knew there would be. Yet my rudeness needed accounting for. My detour from purpose could not be interpreted as a sign of frightful hesitation. My father would not allow it.
The night was soft and kind, and I was thankful for the gentle delivery from sleep. My awareness soon seeped into my recollection. The abandoned cabin where I rested was mostly destroyed but for the single room I occupied. A modest storm moved across the sky just above me, weeping rain upon the forest. My family slept quietly beside me. I had forgotten how much I had missed them, how much the separation had hurt me. I
gathered them up and departed into darkness and silence.
The city of Willard would soon be upon me, and I relished the thought of seeing it for the first time. It had come by its insanity many years prior to the Great Darkness. Some believed it was a dry run for the greater madness to come, a staging ground of sorts. Whatever the source of the city’s malady, it was undeniably host to a uniquely binding madness, restraining the common sense of thousands of people—and as history had documented well, these were not idle lunatics. Not in the slightest.
There were signs my destination was not far. I began to encounter the country dwellings that prefaced the formal portions of the city, dwellings that had clearly known the ridiculous clutch and titter of madness. I saw chimney stones stacked into the shapes of great yawning mouths, exhaling thick smoke into the dull sky. They crested slightly above the treetops, and at first I took their exhaust to be a stronger vein of storm, descended low over the forest, angry and black. How those fires continued to burn with no one to tend them was just another mystery I had no intention of ruining.
I came upon a vast swath of forest that had been cleared to make way for a man-made lake, beneath which lurked monstrous shapes hewn from yet unidentified species of crystal and glass. I wondered if glassblowing facilities comprised the throats of those spewing chimney-mouths. Some of the creations broke the placid surface of the water, peeking out from the depths, blending their translucent bodies with the mist, holding ephemeral shapes as potent as any dream. Beneath the water they dwelt, meandering and serrated, nearly invisible due to their faint composition. Their silhouettes had more than once been revealed by the swirling blood of those who dared enter the water. This was Willard’s infamous Lake of a Thousand Spirits. So much beauty, and I had yet to even enter the city.
The Red Son Page 29
