“I am.”
The floor cracked at the thunder of the god’s charge. He still maintained some semblance of the folklorist, stretching the dead man’s body across his monstrous spirit, in the process outlining the wickedness that was his unwholesome essence. He may have been taking lives long before the advent of hands, but he certainly hadn’t been doing it with his own. The monstrous creature swung his oversized claws with all the grace of a blindfolded bull, telegraphing each attack long before it was delivered. However, I may have underestimated his alternative resources, for the very moment he noticed me smiling at his combat prowess, he gave me a look that carried the weight of a hammer. I found myself on the receiving end of a psychic blow that shattered my nose and both my collar bones.
My father was all too glad to return the attack with one of his own, crashing into the twisted flesh of the god with such force, he brought Tom to a knee. Returning the blow with another glare from his eyes, the god blistered much of my skin and set my hair on fire. Again, my father returned rage with rage, the blade of the axe sizzling deeper into the Lord of Secrets, calling up flames from the wound. The god roared, from pain or outrage or both, and moved to tear the axe from where it sat wedged into his chest. I continued to push my luck, using the moment to bury my remaining sister into Tom’s face. Unlike most organisms born upon the earth, he seemed largely unbothered by the cleaving of his brain. The monster glared from above my sister’s smile, the heat nearly evaporating the flesh of my right arm, strands of muscle tissue peeling back across areas of exposed bone.
The dream preserved me somewhat from the flames, which seemed hotter than most I’d known. I decided to ignore the fire as long as I could and double down on my attack. I tightened my grip upon my two family members, using all the strength I could muster to lift Tom from the ground, hoping gravity might assist my relatives at achieving a killing depth. Again, Tom seemed less than impressed.
“You call these simple antics coming prepared?” The god seemed almost bored by my efforts. I realized that stopping Tom would not be a matter of finding his weakest point, but the unwrapping of his soul from the stolen flesh of the folklorist.
Changing my strategy, I tore my father free and sent him roaring down upon Tom’s knee, nearly severing his leg. Tom deduced my new strategy easily enough and affected his own.
Lightning split the ceiling and lashed my arm, exploding skin from bone and evaporating blood into smoke. The pain was unexpectedly bearable, but my arm was largely useless. I fell to the floor beneath the thunder and smoke and smell of ozone. Tom laughed from his mangled maw. “You creatures are always so impressed by lightning. It’s just a toy, really.”
Another blazing lash from the sky licked my body as thunder shook the entire building. My chest bubbled beneath the blinding touch of the storm. Within seconds, the swelling erupted into smoke and charred skin. The Red Dream that enfolded me was buckling, and I could feel death waiting impatiently.
“Humans are merely domesticated birds flying beneath ceilinged skies,” Tom said, “looking out dirty windows and declaring the spaces beyond themselves to be infinite. You have no idea. You couldn’t, really. Why the Shepherd thought you and yours could interrupt me, I have no idea. If not for my amusement with your affairs, you would be nothing but smoke and a terrible echo by now.” I tried to pull the darkness over me, to allow myself the luxury of a temporary withdrawal. But the shadows had already chosen a side, and it wasn’t mine.
It was after the third lightning bolt that I noticed much of Tom’s torso was missing, a growing number of large, smoking holes remarking upon its departure. The secret-eater’s face deteriorated as well, including the glaring eyes that had caused me so much pain.
My second sister stood in the doorway of the chapel, feeding fire to the smoldering god through two automatic rifles. She had returned, wearing the body of a heavily armed officer. What a splendid thing, she was! Tom’s folklorist rapidly flew apart, and the antlered god began to lose his grip upon the corpse of this world. Searching for a new handhold, I could feel Tom reaching into me again, hoping my secret might anchor him better than Joshua Link’s rapidly deteriorating skin. As his power closed around me, something unexpected came loose in his grip—something that did not want to be touched.
Tom howled like never he had, tumbling backward into his own idols, the relics crashing down around him. “I had no idea!” He laughed as a new fire washed over him, consuming what was left of his folklorist. “I bet they don’t even know! How could they! What a game this will be, indeed! And for all the bother they’ve caused me, I’ll be keeping the secret to myself!”
I had no inkling what the god was carrying on about, but my chance would not wait long. Still aflame and bubbling, I rose and slowly made my way to the burning, bullet-ridden deity. Just before my father destroyed what remained of the god, Tom whispered through the smoke, hurting me more than his lightning ever could. “And as for you, child. She’s your mother in the same way that I am a professor of folklore. She’ll show you to hell before she’s done. You’re like the lightning, Vincent. Just a toy.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My past has always been like a dimly recalled dream. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve preferred it that way. I feel it’s the way things ought to be—to have no solid starting point, no fixed center, no clear definition. This way, one is not beholden to pattern or circumstance, the trajectory of the mind is free to wander. Patterns over time lead us to become machines—action starved of thought, repetition deprived of meaning. As soon as the doldrums become automatic, we die into the process of living. Given this rationale, one would think I’d forget about my mysterious past and occupy myself only with the business of repairing dreams, as I always had. But secrets have power, as Tom Hush had well demonstrated. And this secret, whether I liked it or not, was affecting me. Specifically, it was causing me to doubt myself. Perhaps the greatest killer of art, besides cold reality, is doubt. Tom opened an artery in me, and I was bleeding out. I needed to close the wound.
The role my mother played in all of this seemed significant, as it appeared my actions were somehow scripted by her, intending more from me than I was aware. Whatever the case, the signpost to understanding my mother’s agenda clearly pointed in a single apocalyptic direction—Marvin the man-monster.
After a few days of regaining my strength within the ample shadows of Nighthead, I began the task of finding him. As I traveled channels of forgotten darkness throughout the sprawling city, the echoes of painful light still rang within my ears and burned beneath my seared skin. The antlered god’s half-finished meal of dark secrets still lay upon the floor of my mind, spoiling.
I confined my wanderings to those streets caught in the melting ocher of twilight. As one who had tasted some small flavor of my dreams, Marvin could reasonably expect to find me in such places. At one point, I found myself on a stretch of street that seemed impossibly narrow, capable of admitting only the slimmest cars and thinnest crowds. It seemed oddly comforting, however, like warm blankets pulled thick and close on a cold winter’s night. I gazed upward, and the gestating night sky appeared pinched by the closely crowded rooftops, resembling a star-flecked creek pouring infinitely overhead.
There were others walking the street as well, barely perceptible beneath the ripening darkness. They conducted themselves like cold draughts of wind, drifting aloofly, slaves to their darkest selves. Nighthead had always been a darling of the dark, sheltering more shadows than sunset, and I was almost overwhelmed by my swelling curiosity to know even one of the stranger’s stories.
It was sometime after midnight when I detected a familiar whisper, wandering lonely and soft across a thickly trash-lined lane. “Hello,” came the little whisper, almost lost to the rustling wind and the crackle of urban decay.
“Hello, Marvin,” I said. “I’m pleased to see you again. I was hoping we might suspend our obligations to the Game, if on
ly for a moment, so that we might chat.”
“Actually,” said the whisper, “he’s of no mind to hurt you, and we’re happy to see you, too. We’d love to chat, but I’m afraid that we’re both very, very hurt. Since there’s no longer a chance for him to win the contest, he wanted me to find you and wish you luck. It seems likely that you and he share some history, or at least a relative. He knows what you saw in that dream from so many nights back.”
“Who hurt you, Marvin?” I asked, finding myself strangely concerned for the poor man-monster’s well-being. After my question evaporated, a thick, bloody finger issued forth from between the bars of a nearby sewer grate, conducting my view to somewhere above and behind me.
“He did,” the whisper replied.
Stretching my vision up into the night, I detected someone standing amid the metal cables of a radio tower that roamed high above the surrounding buildings, waiting like a patient spider gazing at a crippled fly.
It was Jack Lantern, The Son of Halloween.
I absolutely needed to speak with Marvin. The only way I could do that was to keep him alive, which meant fending off the world’s most notorious living serial killer. With a single effort, I tore away the sewer grate and slipped down into the rank darkness. Marvin was indeed sorely wounded, which impressed me much. Jack Lantern was not one to fail at killing.
“Run, Marvin!” I shouted. “I will find you once I’ve dealt with your attacker.” My words made assertions I felt difficult to evidence. In my forbidden quest for a lost past, I had stupidly slipped myself into the path of proven death. Although I had recently defeated a god—if only a relatively minor one, and only his weakened vessel, at that—Jack Lantern was something far more challenging. He was the state of the art, the pinnacle of modern murdercraft. Clearly, I knew that winning the Shepherd’s Game would have me facing off with him at some point—I knew of no other killer who could hope to defeat the Scourge of Autumn City—but I’d hoped for more time to heal and prepare. Despite my recuperative powers, I was far from peak capacity.
With my sisters glittering their deadly promises, I prepared for the pumpkin-masked killer. A fragrant wind blew past me, carrying the scent of fall. Staring into the spaces the wind had come, the filthy sewer seemed almost filled with the ever-dying trees of the September Woods, whose leaves forever burned orange, red, and yellow against the bleeding sky. I watched a single crimson leaf cartwheel across the surface of the murky water, leaving tiny expanding rings wherever it tumbled. I could hear something pushing through piles of fallen leaves, drawing closer.
Suddenly, Marvin’s mad whispers filled my mind as he seized me from behind and pulled my ear to his bloodied lips. “She’s the mother of many, Vincent. But you’re her favorite child, by far. She came to us all, searching, but in the end, there was only you. I hate you for taking her away from us! But now, after I’ve seen something of your dreams, I understand why she left. She chose you! She chose you over the rest of us!” As he disappeared into the darkness, I heard him hiss, “Damn you, brother! But good luck!”
My last memory was of exploding light and the sound of leaves blowing across darkened fields. When I awoke, my sisters were still in my hands, apparently exhausted from the effort of conducting my unconscious body away from my would-be killer.
Sometime later, after limping through miles of sewer tunnel, I saw the glowing lights of a displaced Halloween. Marvin’s carved head swung from a piece of red yarn tied around a steam pipe, its bloody hollows lit by several black candles placed within his skull. A chunk of concrete lay upon the headless body, the words Happy Halloween scribbled across it in colored chalk. A bag of dirty candy lay stuffed into Marvin’s dead, knotted hand. I gazed into triangular holes that had once been partially stitched-up eyes, and offered one last whisper to the whisperer. “Good night, brother.”
I made the sewers my home for a time, healing and ruminating. Eventually, and as is often the case, it was darkness that led me to my next step. The principle of darkness, if one can forgive the possible misappropriation of the word principle, is to reveal that which is hidden. Now, this may seem a bit ironic, but for the realization that light simply settles upon the surface of things, surrounding them, sealing them off. Thus, light offers only superficial insights, the outside of things. Or, put another way, light is only skin deep. By contrast, darkness is the absence of the apparent, it is the inner quality of things, the deepest truth. It is what’s left after all obstacles to understanding are removed, what lies behind or under the light. From this, I realized, there was but one place to go for the answers I sought.
The door was hardly visible beneath the heaping desolation of the unclean alley, and seemed unlikely to lead to anything but the lowliest accommodations. Once beyond the door, I encountered a species of darkness I had come to expect from the forgotten corners of the metropolis, having some portion of its construction owing to an elder blackness that could, should it choose, stand firmly against even the brightest light. However, these shadows were not to be trusted, as they answered only to the lords of Nighthead.
The tunnel beyond the door was winding, remarking upon the basest kind of usage, sporting litter and dampness as a chameleon puts on the colors of its surroundings, tempting one to put aside curiosity and accept illusion. Only after I’d traveled further than any casual observer, did the passageway offer hints to its ultimate destination, and to those who might walk its lengths. Granted, normal eyes would never have seen past the alien dark—even with the assistance of artificial light, trespassers would only confront darkling illusion, tricking all but the most through inquiries. But I spoke some portion of the shadow’s lexicon, and so was admitted a sliver of insight.
There were batteries filled with darkness at every turn—objects that had set for miniature eternities beyond even the weakest touch of light, filling with a pitch that defied the stars. Everything here had been infused with the oldest shades. The stone of the floor had been inlaid with grave-dust. Alien bones that had lain under the earth longer than mankind had walked upon it scattered the floor. The walls were lined with some of the oldest funerary idols ever offered to the grinding bowels of the world. These ancient artifacts magnified the common darkness into otherworldly bastions for the Walking Dark—the true high priests of the Order of Nox.
When I reached the end of the tunnel, I encountered a large cavern, the entire back wall of which was carved in the image of a great fanged maw. Before the wall sat a man upon a large seat hewn from a great protrusion of onyx. Initially, I assumed him part of the cavern itself—then his eyes opened. I could feel him looking upon me from every pore of gloom that haunted the chamber. His voice was the sound of nightfall and the spaces beneath beds and the unknown depths of the earth.
“Stand there,” he said, gesturing to a small platform to his left. I said nothing and did as instructed. When I assumed a place upon the dais, the man rose from his seat and pulled a lever extending from the wall. Within seconds, I was descending deeper into the earth. How long I traveled or how deeply I descended, I cannot say precisely, save only that I was lowered to a depth that made the caverns beneath Lastrygone seem like divots in the soil.
At some point, the walls around me disappeared, giving way to a vastness that, like the titan ghost of some long-dead prehistoric sky, opened dark and primal, offering black heavens to the dead and damned. There was movement all around me—I was reminded of sharks gliding casually around their intended prey. Regardless of how much I strained, even my eyes failed to pluck shapes from the surging void. I was hesitant to summon my sisters, despite their pleading. I had been invited to this place, and a show of arms could be poorly received.
The platform settled atop something solid, the sound echoing within a great emptiness. I was unsure how to proceed, as there was only oblivion. Suddenly, cold words floated up to me from below. “I shouldn’t be impressed that you chose to come, being who and what you are. But I am.
” The voice seemed inhuman, though not for a different arrangement of vocal mechanisms, but rather the odd modulations affected to the speaker’s tone by way of what seemed an intervening mechanical filter. I could feel something drawing closer to me from somewhere below, and I could hear the careful and repeated contact of metal meeting stone.
“No,” I said, “you certainly shouldn’t be,” I offered with a slight bow. “I thank you for meeting with me.” I could still hear the metallic stride in the wide silence around me, suggesting the approach of something rather large. I muted my family’s howls for blood and felt their soundless and searing reproach.
The speaker’s words now drifted down from a height well above me. “I assume we both know, to some extent, who it is we’re dealing with. This is to the good, I would wager. As far as your reason for coming to us—yes, we do know something of the entity you mentioned, this Shepherd of Wolves. Let us sit and talk.” The darkness shifted into intelligible shapes and discernible distances. Not through the ordinary medium of light, but rather by some alien wavelength of darkness—it didn’t expand on what could be seen, but only revealed what my mind was allowed to know.
The darkness showed me my host—a large mechanized thing that stood well over eight feet tall. Great lengths of black cable tumbled from its back and slithered down a great stone stairwell, both unravelling into oblivion. It looked something like a vintage deep-diving suit, complete with the round iron helmet.
The creature noticed my curiosity and offered an explanation of its attire. “The dark, even at this depth, is far too bright for the likes of my kind. We must channel what we require through the mechanical apparatus you now admire. But let us discuss the matter at hand, shall we?”
I hadn’t at that point adequately absorbed my surroundings within the underground world. As I seated myself at a small nearby table, I realized we were situated atop a great sable skyscraper carved from the dullest anthracite. It was but a single structure amid an endless cityscape, stretching beyond the dark horizon in every direction. This place was made to the specific comforts of living shadows. I was at last in the darkly fabled city of Unduur.
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