Suddenly, it were as if the library, the journals, and the Angel of Madness had never been. I was standing next to a window within the lunatic tower, a beam of moonlight laying cool across my face. My hands were still open, holding only darkness where once a red journal had been. This was the madness of the crowds, the hand that wrought the City of Willard. But was it truth? Had I been . . . designed? Was I merely my mother’s art?
Was I but the corpse of a dream?
The night carried no poetry within its blackening shadows—only the absence of certainty of my cause, and the dream which served as my lone guiding light. I wandered beneath my mother’s mystery, debating the specter of its implication. Yet what was certainty or even doubt in such a place as this, where lunacy slept with truth to create loping chimeras of fact and fiction? My family was silent on the matter, ignoring anything that did not require their refined attentions. They preferred dreams of endless savagery, where their appetites were given no limit, and their prey was endless and sundry. To them, the matters of cause and consequence were tasteless fare, things that neither screamed nor died.
Of course, their simplicity could be taken as sublime. Their path through life, and now undeath, was metered only by the purest distillation of their ultimate purpose—killing. They were free to be what they wanted to be, consolidated beyond the surplus of life and limb, perfected to the execution of their truest desire. They had become art. It’s what they chose for themselves, and as an artist, I obliged them. Theirs was an enviable, if completely insular, state of unyielding contentment. Yet such a state was not enough for me. I never wanted to be the colors that stained the canvas, nor even the brush that danced across the void—I wanted to be the hand that moved the brush.
I walked without care, dead voices guiding me where they would. There were ghosts everywhere, tethered in death as much by ethereal chains as by the earthly trappings that caused their passing. While not directly visible or detectable in any conventional sense, I could feel them with me beneath the shadows, their silence as distinct as a lone rose in a vase of orchids. There was something else as well, deep beneath the place, teeming with a combined number of ululations, calling out from the blind spot of my silence and shade.
There was also the other, a behemoth beyond the stillness of abandoned cities, gliding just on the other side of sanity, its protean outline pressing against my steadier thoughts, displacing them. I rather disliked the idea of it being an angel, as it implied a rigid order to the numbering of things and an exchange of freedom for compliance. However, I was confident the title was cursory, merely the name it assumed within a particularly dry moment of wit and whimsy. Their goal—the madmen under the darkness and the lunatic angel lurking the other side of sensibility—was to rid me of the girding dream that held me together, caused me to resist the world before my eyes on behalf of the one behind them. No mean feat, by any standard.
I had only just begun to test the emptiness of a nearby hallway when strange yellow light drizzled down from above. Small corroded bulbs recessed into the ceiling struggled to stay lit, some desperately trying to fizzle out while others blazed with an otherworldly radiance. The obnoxious chirp of an intercom system filled the silence, its crackling static mixing with the stillness and shadow. Words splattered like blood from the speaker system. “Vincent, here’s a thought. What if the banality and artifice of this life is reflected, even intensified, within death? I’m not speaking of some spiritual Hell, mind you, but a mindless provisioning for reality’s pointless reproduction and continuance—where the doldrums of daylight and dogcatchers hum along like Amish butter churns, holding up the universe within their respectively drab and dour turns.
“All the while, the appearance of a life that can be lived is the real dream. The only dream. A single solitary mercy, however unintentional, whispered into the machine. A secret without anyone to tell. And to wake from that kindhearted hallucination is to tumble into the gears of the dullard machine that makes the world. But it isn’t even a machine, is it? No, a machine needs a creator and a purpose. This place has been here forever, eternally meaningless in all directions. Perhaps that’s why she told you such beautiful lies, Vincent—to keep you from looking down, so you could do all her dirty work without reluctance or reflection. God only knows what she’s really using you for. You should thank her, though. She armed you with far better fabrications than most humans receive. Regrettably, when you finally open to that dream of yours, that lie she told you, and its mechanical guts spill out all over the place . . .
“Of course, there’s one way out, a loose thread in the tapestry of nuts and bolts—go mad with us, Vincent. It’ll keep you off the conveyer belt. Once we let you in on the joke, you’ll never stop laughing. My goodness, you’ll laugh, Vincent. At life and death and pain and suffering and dreams and dread and that terrible liar you once considered your mother. Go on, pull the string and watch the world come undone. Perhaps if enough of us lose our marbles, the world will stop spinning altogether. That’s not so different from what you want, now is it, Vincent?”
I would have been happy to respond to that feat of verbal contortion with a well-articulated rebuttal, but the angel wasn’t interested in my response, only my attention. Attention that should have been spent far more wisely, watching where I was going.
Abandoned towers, however reinforced by the smoldering bones of ageless insanity, do not get any sturdier with time and neglect. And my being a rather large individual didn’t help things when I placed my foot upon a section of the floor that could nary support a draught, let alone my weight. Granted, the moment was entirely scripted—the fall, the jagged bones of the dead lining the pit of my descent—a wonderful bit of flourish, that—and my being partially flayed by them as I tumbled.
There exist some wonders that even I never want to see again, assuming one can ever truly see the same thing twice. What I saw, after my fall was cushioned by a surprisingly soft mattress, was the complete and utter cancelation of stolid sanity. I was upon what appeared to be an endless bed stained with the blood, urine, and vomit that prolonged madness oft evokes from its hosts. I was not alone—punctuating the infinite length and breadth of this bed were lunatics of all stripes, one no less insane than another for their differences.
Some were strapped down, others held by chains, still others the prisoners of torture devices—these were only a fraction of the means by which they were held fast. Each of the crazed were inhumanly contorted. Their muscles, through ceaseless attempts to express the inexpressible, had completely reshaped the landscape of their physiques and faces, creating madness in body as well as mind. Unique to each was the sound they emitted, representing their specific species of infirmity—laughing, crying, screaming, squealing, begging. It was an ungodly din—I’d never heard anything remotely like it.
Rising from the center of the bed, should it have had one, lunacy sprang eternal and incarnate—the Angel of Madness itself, Deleriael. It was a cyclone of pure consolidated contradiction, a prowling paradox that uttered insanity through each pore of its fluctuating body. It physically resolved each statistic of known psychology into an eruption of volcanic nonsense, a form beyond my mind’s immediate ability to understand or accept, let alone appreciate.
The angelic master of the bed was also strapped to the mattress. However, many of its manacles had already been broken, and a great number of leather straps seemed poised on the cusp of snapping. All of this I took to be a physical metaphor concerning the creature’s progress at returning to the world, each chain and buckle a symbol for the intervening layers of reality that had already fallen to the master of madcaps.
I was about to try my luck at finding the edge of the bed when Deleriael freed another of its many limbs from a stout chain, howling at me, “I’m tired of asking you, Vincent! So now I’m telling you! Go mad with us!”
I was instantly made flush with the bed as legions of viperous straps wrapped tightly
around me, pulling me into its stained folds. I heard the awful memory of my mother’s confession creeping closer to recollection, her once distant words growing like feral tumors. Implications like monsters began to snicker and harrow my every thought. I needed to escape.
Then I saw it, the door out—the escape from damning revelation, and beside it the Angel of Madness, politely holding it open.
My sisters called out in unison, the sting of steel playing small and sharp within their shrill singsong speech. Oh, my dear brother, might we stay and play here for a while, where the madness is raw and tender? What a feast two small girls with bottomless appetites could have here, among the mad and the undying! Before I could answer them, the twisting and crooked thing that was Deleriael’s hand attempted to close around my much-restrained body. A foolish move, even for an angel of madness.
In a blur of steel and teeth, my sisters freed me and stabbed themselves into the delicate spaces underneath the angel’s outstretched claws. Deleriael yelped like a gigantic dog struck by a rolled newspaper, recoiling from the pain. My sisters’ voices rose to a screech as they called out to the angel, Withdraw, you wicked thing! Lest we slide beneath your skin as we once slid beneath our sheets when the monsters of midnight came for us! Their words were accompanied by a deafening chorus—whether it was laughter or screaming I couldn’t say, but it was glorious. You stand the same miserable chance as they!
I rose to my feet upon the stained and shifting mattress, shedding the last vestiges of bondage. The angel reared back, spreading several pairs of strange wings impossibly wide, their tips disappearing into the distance. The many shackles and irons holding it fast clinked and rattled in protest, making for a rolling dissonance like an army of tormented ghosts tethered by the chains of past sins. “Why, you careless little beasts! You’ll get your comeuppance for that! I’ll have you praying for the safety of your beds!”
Oh please, big brother, my sisters begged, let us play with the soft wet toys that lay behind those big funny eyes of his! Please, we’ll make such a beautiful mess! You’ll love us for it, we promise!
I was never one to refuse my sisters their fun and fancy. “My sweetest sisters, I could love you no more than absolutely, beautiful mess or no. Please, have your sport with him.” They smiled like serrated blood moons as they plunged into the bulbous eyes of the mad-maker, bursting them like overripe fruits. The angel shrieked as blood poured from them like a draining pig at slaughter.
While my sisters explored the cavities of madness reposed behind the angel’s excavated eyes, I took up my impatient father. What sisters you have, whelp! See how they thrill in the blood and death? You could learn from their wild abandon! All your cleverness is but foreplay afore the agony! Now boy, feed me blood! Feed me death!
My father’s unchecked rage became my own, and I bellowed with such fury, my throat bled from the strain. I leapt over the stricken, restrained creatures of the endless bed, my father held high like a killing sun, my rage hewn of solid fire.
The insane angel was busy desperately digging my sisters from the depths of its skull when my father crashed like a thunderclap into its sternum. The blow landed with such force that some of the creature’s straps and manacles snapped like twine. The momentum sent us flying over the heads of the lesser creatures, my father and I drenched in Deleriael’s blood as the three of us sailed through the air, connected at the spurting chest wound. The angel landed on its back with a crash, despite the mattress. I stood towering over Deleriael, dripping blood and panting with rage.
Suddenly, I understood. As my family and I committed ourselves to the madness of killing, so too did we sever the bonds that imprisoned the angel. A clever creature, indeed. “You’ll sup no more madness from us, angel!” I yelled.
The creature’s faux caterwauling turned to laughter as it brought its bloody hands away from its ruined eyes. “You can’t blame me for trying, can you, Family Man?” Deleriael lifted its head from the bed, proffering the gory pits my sisters had made of its eyes. I plucked my now frowning siblings from their wet burrows. Crouching down, I placed my father’s pommel on my shoulder and ground my boot into the angel’s midsection. Pushing up and forward, I wrenched my father free of Deleriael’s chest, the creature unperturbed by the sickly sounds of sucking meat and cracking bones. Stepping down from its chest and placing my father upon my back, I waited for the creature to right itself upon the bed.
After settling cross-legged upon the filthy mattress, its legions of lunatics gibbering madly from all directions, the angel chastised me anew. “You continue to make the wrong choices, little artist. You endeavor to fight in a contest you might lose for only the slightest chance at ruining reality. Yet all I ask is that you sever a few straps!
“Think of it, Vincent—thoughts would cast chartreuse shadows, gophers could sneeze out the sun, the stars of space would glitter like ice chips from a fish’s scale. I would erase the laws of physics and replace them all with show tunes! Could you imagine her wretched face, that shambling mass of rotting pale pudding who rules this worthless world, when I stroll out from the blackened basement of the universe, spreading madness like a plague? But you would deny us both that pleasure, and for what? The promise of a Murder God that—well, he hasn’t even specified what you’d win, has he? But so long as she wishes you to play along, off you go, like some blind idiot dog, tail wagging behind you. I was forced to trick you, as you’d rather be an obedient pup than a proper Wolf.”
What foolishness, these tricks and games! I would have seen you freed, angel, had you but asked! What mayhem and death you might have wrought! But now may you rot forever upon your stinking mattress! My father was clearly embarrassed by the creature’s act of being felled by his blow, but we should have known that such a being would be resilient to an easy butchering. As for myself, I was somewhat ashamed for having stopped short of freeing Deleriael, but I was now uncertain that insanity was the kin to dreams, as I had once believed.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, great big talking axe,” Deleriael replied wryly, “but madness is never a straightforward affair. It’s certainly farther afield than your no-nonsense approach of destroying everything. But should either of you have a change of heart, all you have to do to find me is lose your mind!” The angel and his endless bed of lunatics laughed mindlessly as they began to fade into twilight’s confusion of light and darkness. Deleriael’s grinning maw was the last to disappear, a Cheshire cat to the very last.
I laid my weeping sisters back to sleep, assuring them as I placed kisses upon their foreheads that they would soon meet Mister Hide, from whom they might elicit a more authentic murder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The great skin-switcher was nearby, I could feel it. The shrinking catalogue of names on my kill list seemed to make for a power in and of itself—a gravity field that affected only a select group of wolves, drawing us all together despite a world of obstacles and seeming alternatives. Generally, I wandered without destination or fortune, passenger of the wind, bound for anywhere, hailing only from the dust. Yet now I possessed direction, compelled to follow the delicate strand of spider’s web that was slowly and certainly pulling me in a specific direction for a singular purpose.
My next designated adversary was palpably irritated by my rambling and time-consuming path to our first and final meeting. I could feel his impatience like a growing heat as I tread in the direction of his lair. It felt as though I were closing on a great fire, which was both advantageous and troubling. While advantages are wonderful things to discover within the heat of battle—a momentary revelation of strategy or the discovery of personal reserves of killing energy—this advantage originated from mere intolerance. Mister Hide was too irritable, and was thus more likely to make a mistake while in such a state. This was disheartening.
I enjoyed only those victories which were mine entirely, not owing to tricks or calculations of weakness. I confronted only my en
emy’s greatest strength, so that their failings may be made plain upon their defeat. It must be made clear that their utmost powers failed to overcome my own. Anything short of such a victory was pale glory indeed, an insult to my truest gifts and those of my adversary. I could only hope that Hide’s wild anger would render into a leaner and more capable presence of mind—one that would furnish his inevitable defeat some measure of respect, and convey to me a reasonable sense of satisfaction for having felled such a pleasing opponent.
It was no secret as to why Hide chose Willard as his sanctum. No sane manifestation of the law would dare come near the mad city, let alone cross into its deeply despised and thoroughly haunted interior. Had it not been for his inclusion within the Shepherd’s Game—and subsequent paring with myself—Mister Hide would have lasted until his bones could no longer bear the weight of his borrowed skins, killing and skin-switching his way into darkest infamy. Yet all good things must end, the saying goes. Ironically, it was just such a sentiment that Hide’s death would serve to contradict—good things would be made to last forever.
Perhaps the current defect in Hide’s temperament would be offset by my obsession with Willard’s rambling aesthetic. Even if the insanity that informed it was not as closely related to dreams as I had always assumed, it was still a marvel to behold. Of course, in keeping with the justification I have previously supplied, Hide had chosen the most horrific monument in the city as his home—or at least the most horrific monument fit for mortal habitation. Deleriael would likely have asked a terrible rent for his delightfully morbid tower—a price greater than any mortal boarder, even a skin-switching one, was likely to afford. Though, for being merely the second greatest source of architectural absurdity, the structure commanded only a slightly smaller share of awe.
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