At the end of the passage I raced through was a massive pit, a small carven-stone staircase leading downward circling the wide mouth. Punctuating the length of stairs, set out at equidistant intervals, were stone reliefs—nothing but shallow backgrounds, entirely unpopulated. Around and around I went, corkscrewing through faceless, subjectless space. The footsteps continued, undaunted for their navigation of uneven stairs, and at a brisk space, at that.
Somehow, I found myself beneath the ancient stone of a cave, clammier and smaller than the one beneath the house. In addition to all the space I’d cleared, I also felt I’d descended more than my suitable share of time. The air was primal, the stone unscarred. I rounded a large promontory of youthful stone and arrived into a tall space with damp walls. A small fire knelt in the middle of the room, illuminating some manner of painting upon the wall. Here was one of the first attempts at art, where hairy knuckled fingers plied stone walls with whatever would stick to them, to record their dreams, their fears, their gods. At least, that’s what should have populated the crude, stone canvases, smeared only with the crudest attempts at scenery. But as before, the occupants of the art were nowhere to be seen. I reached out to touch the stone, but instantly recalled the photo pinned to the hanging wire and thought better of it.
When I turned the next corner, the cave opened to an incredible degree, basaltic pillars lifting the ceiling into utter, incomprehensible nothingness. But it was the floor, or lack thereof, that ripped breath from my lungs—as far as the eye could see, nothing but crisscrossing, rusted iron bars that made a prison from the spaces under the girding. More striking was the endless sea of clawed fingers stretching desperately from the spaces under and between the bars. Submerged beneath my astonishment lurked legions of pleading whispers—all the murmuring sibilance was piled atop the same frantic need—to see the pictures the Photographer tossed into air above the prison.
He threw them away like one might toss bread at pigeons. “Feed our eyes!” they screamed in voices shaped from hisses and hunger. The photographs went into the air, one by one, the souls of the photographed howling out their fear. And when at last they came into range of the waves of straining fingers, they were tossed from one clawing cluster after the next, like tiny rafts thrown about by the restless sea. Eventually, when one of the pictures was taken beneath the bars, the howling intensified, reaching an incredible, horrific crescendo before abruptly vanishing. Apparently, for the creatures pent beneath the landscape of prison bars, seeing was eating. But then a photograph was withdrawn from the man’s pocket that did not scream, but only fumed with unkempt rage, seething with a talent for killing. It was the photograph of the Wolf. I stepped into view, my father in my hands.
I nodded to the picture in the photographer’s hand. “That does not belong to you,” I said. “Or them.” The man did not seem surprised to see me. In fact, his expression never shifted, only his eyes moved, burrowing into mine.
There was a long silence as the sea of claws evaporated, the unseen things withdrawing their fingers from the spaces betwixt the iron slats. Finally, he lifted the lethal snapshot in an expression meant to taunt me. I could feel a power welling up within him, an old power—the worst kind. He took a step toward me, the air thickening, becoming coarse. But I was prepared. I shifted the head of my father, revealing a view of the photographer’s vintage camera, which had been left leaning against the wall behind me. I looked down at my father and back to the man, smiling.
The cameraman’s expression finally changed, and a hissing chorus from under the endless bars begged me to spare the device. Slowly, with visibly restrained resentment, the photographer reached out his hand and offered me the picture.
The second the picture was in hand, the scene vanished from sight. But the eyes of the photographer—the Spirit Photographer—stayed with me long after, a pleasantly haunting recollection. When the world reappeared, I found myself next to the rock where the theft had occurred, the black and bleached remains still present.
The Wolf was the albino, Edith Suggz, otherwise known as the Salt Witch. She earned the name due to her many victims having been discovered in a particular salt marsh, and the presence of strange sing-song lights whenever she was about her terrible work. A celebrated monster, her exploits were given to much fear and wonder, cementing her invitation to the Game. And here she was, the sum of her life’s presence and purpose, small and delicate in my hand, one merciful gesture from oblivion. It seemed a poor end for one so wonderfully wicked.
I could feel the frigidity of her hateful soul through the slight contact my fingers exercised upon her laminated spirit. Unsurprisingly—and in keeping with the nature of the Game—just when I’d resigned myself to committing only one last kill, the Shepherd called upon me to end yet another Wolf. This time, I would kill without the pageantry or ceremony of a proper confrontation. I knew I had only to tear the photo in half. There was no other way. Apparently, the Shepherd required a player of his Game to perform the deed, however unfairly. I did not want to dwell on the reason why. I softly whispered my apologies and tore the picture in two.
There was a brilliant flash of cold white light and the sound of stone cracking, followed by a scream, wet and painful, and perhaps a small growl of outrage at the tail end. When I looked back to the rock that once held the outline of a stolen soul, I spied sundered stone and the ragged, bleeding remains of a dead white witch. It was, I believe, the Shepherd who actually killed Edith. Her name had already been struck from his rolls, so to speak, and that could mean only one thing. Yet, when I looked back over my shoulder into the thick swaths of forest I’d left behind for the road, I might have glimpsed strange lights moving in the distant thickets.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I admired Autumn City. It pressed harder against the taut skin of the Deadworld more than any other place I had ever been, revealing visions more often left to dreams than to the waking senses. I walked down streets thickly lined with the city’s unique trees, whose leaves always burned orange and yellow, disavowing their place in the order of the seasons, gathering ghosts as surely as heathen bonfires. Everywhere I went, there whispered a wind that carried the perfume of autumn decay, and I wondered if Jack Lantern hadn’t been partially successful in his bid against banality. The city was most visible—revealed—during the smolder of twilight. It seemed to fume along with the sun, a brother wrapped in autumnal fire, burning spectral and silent, standing sentinel over the Eternal Fall. The spectacle was staggering. Everywhere dreams afire, yearning to burn down the sky, desperate to sear through the heavy rot of a dead world. And yet, each time the forest was set ablaze, it would inevitably replace back into banished dream to rage in silence, isolated and impotent.
Jack Lantern certainly didn’t want to die by my hand, but neither did he wish to kill me by his. I could feel the conflict burning him as brightly as any smile he had ever set aflame. Yet regardless of those feelings, he was busy preparing a magnificent stage upon which we would soon perform—I simply waited for him to finish. I sat for some time in an untended pumpkin patch behind a barn that looked on the verge of collapse, sharpening my sister’s beaming grins and basking in the undimmed wonder of things to come.
The twilight worked on the eternally autumnal trees of the September Woods like a bellows upon fire, scarlet and shadow creeping out of the surrounding woods, pooling dim and deep all around. Finally, I rose and walked beneath the burning ceiling of the forest, as I knew the time for waiting had ended.
But for the characteristic heaviness that betrays the waking world, I might have thought I was in a dream. The forest was otherworldly, breeching almost completely out of death. It was difficult to imagine, but necessary to realize, that the September Woods was not my friend, but quite the opposite—it was my sworn enemy. Perhaps more opposed than even Jack himself, for my opponent served the Woods, loved it, and was loved in return. It would not be kind to me, and it would not give up its hero e
asily.
Somewhere deep in the Woods, I saw what seemed like a bit of twilight caught within the tree branches, incapable of descending with the sun, bobbing in the ink. The closer I drew to the spot, the more of these lights I saw. Eventually, they spread out wide before me, like the glowing, beating heart of the September Woods. I was so taken by the lights, I’d failed to notice that the wind had picked up, increasing in strength by the moment. Before I had time to properly react, great squalls of wind bearing dead leaves that felt like razor blades held me aloft in the air. I was nearly immobilized. The wind thickened the faster it gusted, until I felt as if I were being crushed within a gigantic hand in addition to being torn to bloody shreds by the whipping, serrated leaves.
I needed a moment of clarity, a space to operate. My father delivered me into such a space. It took all my strength to reach him, and when my hands wrapped around familiar bones, a great rage came into me. The resulting blow from the axe upon the thick wind was as deafening as it was alien. A shriek rose from the Woods itself, lifting into the sky, howling and climbing, gaining volume. The injured—or perhaps merely offended, it was impossible to tell—wind was fast becoming a swirling storm as lightning flashing through the fiery canopy.
I withdrew the seeds I’d hidden in the lining of my coat—seeds cut from the apple I’d stolen from the Black Orchard—and threw them into the night. The effect was immediate, just as I’d hoped. The lightless Garden of Unduur came into the shadows, spreading searching tendrils, flinching at the lightning, leaping across the darkness. All around me, a great war raged between the incipient alien darkness of Unduur and the Orange god of the September Woods. Glory everywhere, and I was damned to leave it behind.
I wandered for some time, drawing closer to the pervious globes of lost twilight, listening to the din of war. Within moments, the hanging blots of amber materialized—an incredible portion of the forest was strung with human Jack-o’-lanterns, cloaking the night beneath the waft of stolen twilight, glowing mouths grinning night back into dusk. And then came music, from where I do not know. But it was my music, from my dream, from my memory, melodies made from my soul. Somewhere, a magic lantern show spun into life, no doubt cast from hollowed-out eyes. The shapes equally pilfered from my dreams, all of them moving to the music, outlining my life in undying autumn . . .
I was a fool. I’d failed to reckon my opponent, for Jack proved more prepared than I could have ever imagined. He would overwhelm me utilizing every one of my dreams he could conjure. He threw wonder at me as a squid throws black clouds of ink. I could barely see for all the reverie stuffed beneath the ceiling of the forest—even my own trick with the seeds had served to bolster his attack. Gods of fall and darkness warring beneath eternal trees of smoldering twilight, the forest of endless Halloween strung with the sights and sounds of my own spirit, the finale to a cosmic contest of infinite death—all of it falling beneath the watchful eye of a god of murder. It was all too much!
Jack Lantern was nowhere to be seen, but his words were loud and clear. “Happy Halloween, Vincent!”
I was almost too stunned to answer. “Jack, my God. What you’ve done . . .”
Jack’s somber words came from everywhere around me. “I’m afraid, in the end, you’re only a machine, Vincent. Just like the rest of us. Machines can be understood, inside and out. To defeat a machine, you need only know what it’s made of, how it works. And while your construction is nearly pure chaos, I at last found your dreams—the numbers that define you, make you who you are, deny the possibility of real life. For that, more than anything else, I am sorry. For both of us.”
Jack was crying. It refocused me, but for how long I couldn’t say. “I know what you’re feeling,” I said. “I’ve felt it all my life, Jack. It’s the beating of a void-shaped heart, the nothingness at the center of all things. But I can quiet it for everyone, even you. The machine is nothing but a stiffened corpse, moving for movement’s sake, kinetic banality. But all machines have makers, my friend. There is a dream behind the machine. I can show you. But first, you must sleep.”
I quickly plunged into the shadows, using my sadness, my imminent grief and regret, to shield me from the paralyzing spectacle. My sisters smiled silence into my shadow, my father stoked his cataclysmic rage. I needed this to end. I couldn’t take much more.
Despite my best efforts, Jack discovered me easily enough, as he knew the shadowed woods as well as his carving knives, and he went to impressive lengths to demonstrate both facts. His movements were like polished jewels beneath the moon, glittering into life, and just as quickly, dying back into the darkness. I couldn’t focus my mind, lost as it was to the forest of dreams. My every move was foreshadowed by the sights and sounds of my own soul.
The chill autumn breeze became the cold sting of Jack Lantern’s knives. His blades moved through my body with an impossible swiftness, and with my mind so displaced, my sisters could only manage to deny them a killing depth. I required the few blows I could land to matter, and so my father rose into my hands. He needed to strike but once. The massive axe crashed through saplings, brambles, and even felled several Eternal trees. But my opponent was ever beyond my father’s reach, always just a streaking mask and the dim fade of reddened knives. He was like a scream in the night – everywhere and nowhere.
It soon became apparent that I was losing. While I had resisted most of his attacks, the sum of his lesser gains had relieved me of much blood. I had all but fallen when I finally saw the Carver of Souls clearly. He was standing only inches from me, floating in the darkness, wearing his true face—in his madness, he’d mistaken it for a mask. I had perhaps a second to act.
My sister flew, hissing through the space once occupied by the Carver as I tumbled into a cleverly hidden hole. Twilight turned to night as the blackness swallowed me into its cramped belly. I soon realized I’d become the contents of a small cage of steel bars. I was too weakened to attempt a leap from the trap before the lid was slammed shut and sealed. I wrapped my hands around the bars, channeling the Red Dream as much as I was able, but the cage was bound by the will of the Woods. I could not break free.
Finally, I looked up to see Jack standing above me, just a pale wisp dissolving into the night. “You can’t kill me, Vincent,” he said, “and I won’t kill you. The only way to properly put a stop to this foolishness, I’m afraid, is to keep you locked up tight, like a dirty secret. This way, Halloween won’t end. You must be my monkey wrench in the works, I’m afraid.” His words were almost too heavy for him. This was not how he wanted things to end between us.
“You should have asked me, Vincent,” he said, the holes of his eyes wet and regretful. “I would have said yes.”
“I know,” was all I could muster.
The view from between the bars brought me into the gravity of forsaken memories—my sins. Here was irony, karma, fate, and perhaps, should there be such a thing, justice. Vincent Alexander Graves, left to the cold and dark of a small cage, forever. Yet this could not be my ending. I recalled my mother’s words to me, so long ago. “All that ever was, or could ever be, whispers its soul into the sound of silence—and the only thing you will ever need to do, to know anything at all, is listen to it.”
And so, I listened as never I had, to the silence of it all, to the spaces between the trees, the rocks, granules of dirt, atoms, cause and effect. I not only listened, but conjured as well. And with silence came her sister—shadow. I pulled the night down all around me, its soundless silks falling across my shoulders. I became the secret the universe keeps to itself. The story that dies in the telling. I became freedom.
Before Jack knew how, I was upon him, using a trick I had learned from a certain magician, the son of a witch. He tried to melt back into the night, but I had to be faster, just this once. My sisters were already within him, making merry with the red, wet toys of his body. Yet, just as they drew upon the doors to his heart, they were swept away, tu
mbling through thickets lit by dead orange smiles.
After his blades disarmed me, they went for my eyes. Sight is the least potent of my senses, but certainly among the most valued. Jack had a way with eyes, a practiced dexterity that could turn them to triangles of bleeding amber candlelight. I grabbed his wrist and snapped it, the carving knife falling away just as it grazed my cornea. With his other knife, he tore my father from my back, sending him spinning into the branches beyond, his path outlined in the fire of his rage.
With my naked hand, I seized the remaining blade, moving down its length until what was left of my grip closed over his wrist. I snapped that one as well. Wasting no time, I used my weight to crush him against the trunk of a tree, holding his arms outstretched. I couldn’t allow him to slip free. His speed was many times my better, and even with broken wrists, his knives could find their way back to my eyes, and then some. Face-to-face, I could feel our mutual sadness at what needed to happen. He was about to speak, the smallest sound leaving his lips, but I couldn’t listen to any more.
I sank my teeth into both of his faces, shattering plastic and enamel. His hand managed to slip free in the collision, the blade it barely held sank deeply across my neck. I only pushed my broken teeth deeper, splitting his mask and tearing his flesh. I swallowed, feeling the chunks fall from the gaping hole he’d opened in my throat. As I had with all my family, I merely closed my eyes and devoured him.
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