“The two of them were drivin’ through the city on their way to somewhere or other. I guess Jackie’s younger brother had been asleep awhile, and didn’t even know they was goin’ through the place. But just when the car left the city, the sleeping brother starts screamin’ like some kinda maniac. I still remember exactly how Jackie described it. Said it was like the screams was gettin’ further and further away, like they was fallin’ way down into some big bottomless hole—but the whole time, his brother hadn’t moved an inch from where he was sleepin’ in the passenger’s seat. But that ain’t even the scariest bit. Ya see, when the screamin’ disappeared, like it finally fell too far away ta be heard anymore, Jackie’s brother sits up, smiles, opens the door and jumps out into the street.
“‘Course, Jackie slams the brakes and gets out to look for his brother. At first, he doesn’t notice anything, just some noise in the tree branches over his head, like somethin’ was moving higher into the tree. So then Jackie walks a bit further down the road, lookin’ high and low for any sign of his brother, when he sees what looks like a floatin’ man breakin’ through the top of the woods, bobbing along in the air, sound asleep. Well, Jackie realizes it’s his brother and starts yellin’ at him to come back. Don’t ya know, his floatin’ brother just smiles and gives a little wave goodbye, and then off he goes, up into the clouds over New Vic.”
It was stories like that one that had sent me to New Victoria the first time. However, I’m one of the few men to have slept in that dreadful city and awakened in the comfort of their own body. Despite it all, I could not repress a growing desire to revisit the place, and the living nightmares that stood under the deathly light of darkest sleep, casting their molten shadows.
The din of the storm had only grown since Mr. Grimes and I had begun to speak, so I had almost failed to notice the mechanical rumbling that was slowly growing beneath the thunder, drawing closer. When the noise finally dawned on Mr. Grimes, and the headlamps of multiple vehicles pushed through the darkness of the bus, a long snaking grin slithered across his face. A once-banished confidence returned to his tiny eyes. “Looks like you might not be goin’ to New Vic after all, big guy.”
His speed greatly belied his size, as he nearly disappeared from the driver’s seat of the bus only to reappear amid the brutish crowd lumbering out from behind the obnoxiously bright headlights. Clearly, Mr. Grimes wasn’t the only predator using the back roads for hunting grounds, and it appeared that he had cultivated alliances among his fellow monsters.
As they milled around my former driver, I heard the signature sound of firearms—the small metallic clicking that spoke of tiny steel gun parts moving against one another, like the chitinous mandibles of a hungry insect. Eventually, the unsavory group surrounded the bus, hurling threats and challenges from behind the storm of wind, rain, and electric light. One of them fired a round into the air, and I almost laughed when a clap of thunder annihilated the weapon’s report.
With the grace of a blind crowd, a detachment of gun-wielders entered the bus. Of course, I was no longer in it. I heard Mr. Grimes instructing them to take care, as I was a “big fucker, with some huge weapon on his back.” One of the intruders started up the engine, hoping the internal lights might reveal my hiding place. I was glad that Mr. Grimes had chosen to stay outside while his allies invaded the vehicle, otherwise I might not have done what I did.
I could hear the high-pitched whine of Mr. Grimes’s secret machinery coming to life as I reconnected certain wires. The noise was soon replaced by the sounds of flesh tearing, bones snapping, screams being chopped into small bits of groans and gasps, and finally the wet sounds of inanimate flesh being worked by busy, mindless steel. I wasn’t sure what to think when I saw all the whirring blades and strange devices rushing in and out of my would-be killers. While Mr. Grimes was a monster, his wasn’t a pedigree worthy of such machinations. I had to assume the bus some relic of the Darkness, something he’d found in forgotten woods, waiting for a master who matched its evil, if not its engineering. Whatever its origins, the men who remained outside seemed frozen by the antics of the bus-turned-devourer. Within seconds, the silence took me from beneath the bus and placed me behind Mr. Grimes’ few remaining allies. One of my sisters awoke into my hand, giggling.
I made sure Mr. Grimes was a safe distance from me when my sister softly sorted through the thoughts of one of my harassers, reaching deeply into the convolutions of his brain. The man at my left swung a heavy chain at me, but his attack was so slow, I wondered if he intended for me to grab the inbound weapon. If so, I obliged, seizing it and pulling its wielder from the ground. My sister entered the hidden places of his body, dancing like a happy child from one red room to the next. After she had exhausted her enthusiasm, I hurled her ruined playmate at the last of Mister Grimes’ associates. The flying body struck the man full in the chest, blasting him backwards into the side of the bus.
My sister was about to play with the stunned man when the thunderous voice of my father commanded her to stop. He wished for Mr. Grimes to see him and the wonderful work for which he was infamous. In an instant, he was revealed, awake and aglow with a fury to match the storm overhead. The man shuddered beneath my patron’s terrible gaze, pleading for mercy, but my father had none to give. I was pleasantly surprised when the shadow decided to attack rather than die quietly. Like a cornered beast, he howled his last breath, launching from the ground, knives out like bared fangs. While his feral madness may have served him well against other foes, it failed him in the face of my father. The thunder roared as the axe collided with the man. My great benefactor seemed to channel the fury of the tempest, creating a second storm of blood, brains, and bone. My father turned toward Mr. Grimes, dripping what was left of the last interloper. The killer bus driver promptly collapsed to the wet earth.
“Holy shit!” he shouted, beady eyes wide. “I know who you are!”
“Then we understand each other,” I said. With my father spent, I returned him to his sleep. I extended my hand to help the trembling killer to his feet.
“W-what are you gonna do to me?” Mr. Grimes stammered. “You gonna make me into some fucked up art exhibit?”
“Nothing has changed, Mr. Grimes,” I assured him. “We are simply back where we began—you are taking me to New Victoria.”
“And then what?” he asked.
“I will release you back into your natural habitat,” I said. Mr. Grimes seemed relieved, exhaling what he surely thought was his final breath. Behind us, the vehicles of the dead still cast their yellowed light into the darkness, revealing my work, if not my art. The killer bus driver surveyed his losses.
“I can’t believe you killed my guys!” he said, running thick fingers through his dripping hair. “I was friends with some of ‘em, and they wasn’t no pushovers, neither!”
“Friends, Mr. Grimes, are no substitute for family.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Deadworld is a prison. However, people tend to misunderstand those moments when it seems to defy its most hideous, despicable features. Forests, by way of example, are often romanticized for their beauty—but they are merely cracks in the dirty prison walls that keep us from the dream we came from, and exist as nothing more than fleeting reminders—symbols—for our freedoms lost beyond all this dying flesh. Granted, a dark forest is one of the thinner barriers separating us from whence we came—and thus why some confuse it for the beauty it imprisons—but a barrier nonetheless. Obviously, the same can be said for basements filled with the moldering dead, attics containing chests of burned toys and faded photographs, forgotten graveyards steeped in twilight, and all other places where the darkness endures beyond the day.
Undoubtedly, all these prisons contain boundless wonders vigorously testing the locks to their cells, but to my knowledge, none have ever escaped—though I can’t remember a single thing that happened during the Great Darkness, so I could be wrong on this point. This i
sn’t to suggest that the Deadworld is without limits. Its prison walls can be scaled, even demolished, as was demonstrated by the rise of New Victoria. However, the relevant distinction between New Victoria and the dreams that strain behind even this world’s darkest environs is that the nightmare city was never a prisoner. It came here from deepest sleep, from an entirely different dream of existence. As strange as it sounds, the malefic metropolis actually chose to invade this wretched world.
As we approached the city, its ruined flesh was already peeling back, exposing overturned military vehicles filled with old bones and crusted blood, mass graveyards, sour winds stitched together from countless last breaths, and wandering patches of strange, sweet-smelling twilight—the Deadworld was hemorrhaging nightmare. Here was no symbol for dream, only dream itself, open and free. However, New Victoria held no hope for mankind. Its dreams were its own.
“I can’t fuckin’ believe you really want to be here,” Mr. Grimes said.
“I have need to be here,” I replied, “and despite everything I know—I want to be here. These things are clearly not our dreams, and must be nothing but the predatory nightmares of things that dwell beyond the shallows of human sleep. However, regardless of their malevolence, beauty is beauty.” Strangely, I found myself enjoying my conversation with Mr. Grimes. Words are so often nothing more than thoughts hidden behind masks of noise, but when speaking with the killer, I found my words pleasingly free of disguise.
“Uh, yeah,” Mr. Grimes said, “Well, I’m only here cuz I hafta be. You gotta be crazy to think there’s anything beautiful about this freak-zone.”
I hadn’t considered it before, but I wondered if that invisible force—the one that draws people to abandoned places and gifts them with dreams pressed into yellowed paper—was still aiding in my journey. Surely, those things that dwelt in the City Beyond Sleep wouldn’t see me coming—the deathly bus, now festooned with the ornaments of a butcher’s red holiday, couldn’t be taken for anything less than a conveyance for pilgrims of nightmare. Perhaps Mr. Grimes was sent to assist me.
“By the way,” Mr. Grimes said, “I know you got some weird thing about beauty and art. The newspapers is always sayin’ somethin’ about you thinkin’ of yerself as an artist. But do you really think those fucked up corpses you leave behind is some kinda artwork?”
I wasn’t sure if Mr. Grimes was supposed to understand my work. Should a dream know it’s a dream? Might that have been what caused us to wake up in the first place? I imagine a true dream, free and wandering, should know precisely nothing about itself—should it be so greedy as to possess a self. Humanity’s true calling is to exchange all of its pointless knowledge for wonder, and Mr. Grimes followed his dark curiosity wherever it lead him—even when it caused him to be temporarily hijacked for a higher purpose. No, the daemon bus driver was far too busy chasing his darkest visions to grasp the purpose behind my work. He could only see its spectacle.
“Pearls before swine, Mr. Grimes,” I said, not wanting my host to think me unaware of his jabs.
“Actually,” Mr. Grimes added, “I got a kick out of those guys you made into the big snake swallowin’ itself. That was some funny—” he stopped, straining his small eyes at something close to the road.
Moving through the nearby trees, sketched in fog, were four wisps of women. They were clad only in nightclothes, loping through rough thickets, helping one another along, exuding a despair that seemed to roil the fog outlining them. Their collective gaze fixed upon the nearby wakeless city, and I could hear secrets whispering them onward. Soon they were gone, swallowed by the forest. It was clear where they were headed.
“What do ya think they’re up to?” Mr. Grimes retracted his gaze, bringing something warm and wicked back with it. I could feel his hunger burning deep within the secret killing machines of the bus. Whatever the killer’s dark curiosity would have done to the women, I was certain it would’ve been a pleasure compared to what was waiting for them in New Victoria. I knew something of the endless horrors that preyed upon sleeping men, but I’d heard only rumors of the hell awaiting women foolish enough to rest their heads within the nightmare-fashioned city. Now my own dark curiosity was beginning to take hold.
“I’m not entirely certain,” I replied. “But it would be a terrible waste of mystery not to find out.”
“Yeah, well, I’m willing to skip the mystery, if ya don’t mind. Y’know, on account of the whole dying in a nightmare city thing.”
I simply nodded at Grimes, feeling no need to contribute more to the topic. For the next few minutes, we both sat silently in the bus, watching the dread city materialize from the fog of distance and dust. Finally, the military barricades and piles of soaring wreckage all but blocked our forward passage, and I could feel the vehicle’s momentum drain away.
“So, yer really goin’ in there, huh?” Mr. Grimes asked, throwing the bus in park and flinging open the swinging doors. We disembarked, looking clearly for the first time on the Victorian reimagining of bygone Boston, darkened by dreams blacker than pitch.
“Indeed I am,” I said.
“Before ya take off, I gotta know,” Mr. Grimes said. “Why didn’t you kill me? You coulda just driven the bus on yer own. You didn’t need me.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer him, as the question required a galaxy of nuance. “I dislike driving standard transmissions,” I offered.
“Huh,” Mr. Grimes said with a smile, not believing a word. “Fair enough, I guess. One more thing—those weapons really made of yer own family?”
“Of course,” I replied.
“Yeah, kinda figured they were,” he said, eyeing the protruding head of my father warily. “Well, I doubt yer gonna get outta there alive, but good luck tryin’ . . . Family Man.”
With that, we took our leave of each other. I watched as the hunter of dark roads disappeared into the dust that had first unveiled him—a corpulent killer who feasted through the terrible machines lurking his corroded shadow.
I stood upon a street severed by a portion of the massive steel and concrete wall that surrounded the entire city—a futile effort to contain what sleep would only free. Its length was punctuated by gaping holes, torn open by a storm that blew out from beneath beds and beyond sleep. I entered through one of these massive breaches, lined with an amalgam of encrusted human remains, warped together into a frustration of biology and nightmare.
The city rose before me, denuded of all earthly obstruction and covered in the blood of twilight, defiling the cold reality that lay in shambles at its feet. New Victoria was almost beyond 0at, the city seemed dead, at first. Its skyscrapers and minarets looked no less than the crooked, chitinous limbs of toppled insects, all of them frozen in an architectural rictus of death. The Victorian skin of the place had rotted away in places, revealing a nightmare of warped and fused innards beneath, the thin veneer merely paper wrapped around a fire. No single structure rose wholesomely to form the city’s skyline, but only bent and skittered and crawled into and across the sky. And despite its stillness, the metropolis exuded a sense of movement—the unclean motion of a corpse being eaten from the inside.
It took no time for the preliminary powers of the city to test me, emerging without the corrupted ether, eager to infest a fresh mind with endless nightmare, their alien outlines manifest on this side of sleep as common shadows.
When they finally converged upon me, I could feel the gossamer touch of unseen hands playing across my mind, eager to find a door. Meanwhile, the invisible intrusion into my thoughts caused one of my sisters to rise from her warm dreams, deep within my own darkness. So long as she dwelt in that city of living nightmares, her words carried beyond her radiant smile, and I was pleased to hear them slice through the open air.
So many greedy hands and old hungers. What wonderful gifts have you brought me, sweet brother? I could feel the heat of her delight. Her blazing smile burned the da
rkness around me, searing shadows too foolish to run from fire.
Oh, you silly shades! Shouldn’t you know what grinning terrors can await you behind closed doors? My dearest brother’s mind has shadows of its own, and we’ll suffer none besides. Now, now, there’ll be time enough for playing, and I’ll be more than thrilled to savor your screams as they pass betwixt my glittering metal teeth. But now is the time for hiding, I’m afraid. At my sister’s prompting, my hunter’s silence poured forth, drowning what remained of the alien whispers calling out from undead dreams. I slipped from beneath the scattering pack of shades to find shelter beyond the gaze of the wicked city.
I quickly found the darkness of an abandoned hospital and blended into its isolation. Careful not to linger in any one shadow for too long, I made my way toward the oldest calm. I could feel the currents of quiet rushing out a stairwell that descended deep into the innards of the structure. As I moved to the top of the stairs, I noticed four sets of small, delicate footprints descending the dust. Clearly, they belonged to the quartet of women I’d glimpsed earlier.
As I followed the prints, I realized they seemed to progressively sink further into the dust and grime that lay heavy and thick upon the steps—as if they had suddenly become burdened by something heavy. I waded into the densest currents of gloom, discovering the footprints had been joined by four sets of handprints. The women had crawled down the last few steps into the darkness, and then seemingly disappeared altogether.
I stopped to examine the anomaly, and while the dust and filth betrayed nothing useful, the silence showed signs of having been broken. Moving beyond the stairs, I encountered a set of wide double doors. The word above them plainly stated: Morgue.
An old darkness can be the deadliest of poisons—soaking up shadows unbroken by purifying daylight, mixing with the ghosts of unseeing eyes, and filling up with fears that cannot abide the light. It was just such a darkness that spilled from behind the morgue door, proving my sisters correct for the second time. After the molten void had thoroughly flooded the room, creating the ideal habitat for nightmares, I began to hear the toothsome glide of horrible things—deep-diving horrors called up from the sunless depths of sleep.
The Red Son Page 4