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  THE RED SON

  Mark Anzalone

  WildBluePress.com

  THE RED SON published by:

  WILDBLUE PRESS

  P.O. Box 102440

  Denver, Colorado 80250

  Publisher Disclaimer: Any opinions, statements of fact or fiction, descriptions, dialogue, and citations found in this book were provided by the author, and are solely those of the author. The publisher makes no claim as to their veracity or accuracy, and assumes no liability for the content.

  Copyright 2019 by Mark Anzalone

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  WILDBLUE PRESS is registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Offices.

  ISBN 978-1-948239-42-4 Trade Paperback

  ISBN 978-1-948239-41-7 eBook

  Cover Art: Guillaume Ducos

  Interior Formatting by Elijah Toten

  www.totencreative.com

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Dedication

  For Stephanie and Max, my Sea and Sky.

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not exist but for the unstinting efforts of Steven J. Anzalone, my brother and keeper; Walker Kornfeld, my editor and literary surgeon; and Craig Carda, enabler to us all.

  PROLOGUE

  The retreat of the Great Darkness made a funeral of the sky, a bittersweet separation of past and present, fading memories filling the spaces between. I was more aware of the sky than myself. I never would have guessed it had been an entire year since my last waking recollection. It would take me some time to learn that the rest of the world shared my amnesia—what remained of the world, anyway.

  I was already on my feet as the night lifted in earnest, tumbling upward, clutching tightly the time it had stolen from the world. A wailing moved in tandem with the vanishing dark, a collective caterwaul signaling the end of something familiar, if not altogether dear.

  I was pleased when I realized my sisters were already in my hands, their curving metal smiles balancing the gathering dawn. Even stained with so much blood, they retained their cold beauty, rivaling the iciest brook that ever babbled through the apex of Autumn. Their pommels were calm and steady, and their laughter at my awakening sparkled through the air. My smile was automatic. They were my darlings.

  I did not wonder if my father still slept upon my back. I could feel his seething dreams surging through me as surely as my own blood. The newborn light laid his shadow upon the forest, his massive axe-head showing monstrous and lethal, looming over me as ever he had. I was careful not to rouse him without the promise of killing. His anger demanded an awful price.

  With my family accounted for, I examined my surroundings. The Darkness had all but evaporated, and the woods lay awash in the morning rays, scrubbing away the shadows with sunlight. But for all its polish, the world could no longer glitter.

  I remember quite clearly my first look at what learned men would later term an Obscurra—a relic of the Great Darkness, some bizarre industry performed by madmen or monsters, for purposes unknown, if not entirely unknowable. I had awoken in its shadow—a rambling mansion made from uncountable human bones. The rough calcium of its construction all but ignored the strongest beams of direct light, begrudging the day only its sallow eastern face—a glaring prominence of squinting windows pinched dark and narrow by overhanging gables made from interlocking ribs. Its Victorian and Gothic flourishes summoned the image of a cemetery city of smoldering ivory, the dead wandering its cold lanes in a blind stupor. The structure’s collective bearing of close-packed bones spoke to a preoccupation with performing the additional work of skin, closing off its innards to sun and strangers, barring entrance to the hallowed halls of its bleached body. I could not repress my want to glimpse beyond the nearest window. Skins—likely the wrappers for all the smartly placed bones—lined its interior. It was a bio-architectural inversion of the human body.

  I was fixated by the place, its apparent violation of common sense a vulgar confirmation of a dream’s ability to overcome waking, to stand defiant and solid beneath the sun. Yet, I would learn soon enough, I was wrong to think the manse of bones an exception to a conventional world. Such desecrations of the commonplace, though varying wildly in scale and scope and theme, had invaded the Earth like an army of alien eidolons marched out from the mists of the missing year, elbowing their way into cities, streets, caves, ballrooms, bedrooms—anywhere space and madness would allow.

  I walked awestruck for days afterward, through cities broken by raw, violent revelation. Diffusing like smoke, the dead, dying, sick, and insane choked streets and alleyways, filled skyscrapers repurposed to madhouses, and tumbled into graves as deep and wide as canyons. I wandered for weeks through the fallout of the global nightmare, my family and I marveling at the new-world absurdities, living beneath a sky that had indeed proven capable of falling. I only watched—approvingly, I confess—as mankind, on a scale never known, collapsed beneath the combined weight of truth and mystery.

  Religions burned to the ground almost overnight, as neither gods nor their books could ever again be trusted. Science fell to the gutters, wasted to bones, starved thin and wan for lack of sustaining facts and figures. Collective man was naked beneath the moon once more. To be sure, it was many years before mankind recovered some measure of its former contrivances and doldrums, but even then it walked a doubtful path between the tombstones of that lost year, the year of the Great Darkness.

  There is darkness in everything, I have since concluded. The explicit variety that falls from the sky at night may be perhaps a sort of externalized counterpart of the more metaphysical brand that lurks the other side of our skin. I believe it was the joining of these two types, indeed their fusion, which led to the Great Darkness of 1999. This union resulted in nothing less than the construction of a Dream—where mind and matter conspire to supplant reality. And while no one remembers precisely what happened during our year-long blackout (forgetfulness has always been the bane of dreams), its echo still plays out across the world, tolling a dissonance of broken faiths—in solid worlds, and even the prospect of certain spiritual enterprises.

  It was this metaphysical darkness—the kind slinking just out of sight, more wondrous than its traditional counterpart—that I’d always shared a special kinship. Along with its equally useful cousin, silence, they’d long accompanied me on many an excursion. At my beck and call, they provided me with certain advantages that made me especially good at my work.

  But now, I could sense that they too had emerged from the Great Darkness altered. Whereas mankind was now broken, a mad fraction of its former self, darkness and silence were decidedly . . . more robust. Still hidden from the waking world, still forces beyond the understanding of the average person, but more prominent, more alive—mor
e comfortable in this brand new world.

  On balance, the Darkness should have made things better. But the world persisted as a graveyard, a landscape where dreams festered for want of realization. Despite the lakes of bile, the towers of teeth, the underground theatres, and countless other Obscurra, there was still an incompleteness to our existence—we woke up, and our lives were made worse by the fact that we now had some idea of what we were missing.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am often misconstrued as a monster. One that has gruesomely repurposed the corpses of his family into killing instruments. While that description is somewhat faithful in a purely material sense, it misses the forest for the trees. Most conspicuously absent is that I am, first and foremost, an artist. The murders are but provision.

  As for my family—another entirely misinterpreted subject—they persist as my best works to date. Together, we have created some splendid pieces, which have warranted no small amount of attention, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The proper study of the nature of my work, apart from its necessary departures from societal norms, would reveal a specific meditation concerning both the nature of my canvas and the secret dream I attempt to sculpt from its death. Flesh and blood may be the clays and paints of my medium, but dreams are the purpose for their contribution.

  Despite my countless attempts, I have yet to achieve a true masterwork. I have always failed to properly conjure my true subject—the dream. While each of my pieces is its own truth, its own attempt at dream, they are all ultimately dead, stillborn. The fact is, nothing can live here, and nothing ever will. Sadly, this may be the only aspect of my work that is indeed properly understood.

  This gets to the current futility of my undertaking, to what my skills can only, truly reveal. Despite all I’ve accomplished, despite the many galleries and exhibits of shadows and skin, I know only one truth best of all—art is merely the corpse of a dream.

  Art attempts to change the world, enlarge its lonely box of living and dying. Nothing new can happen here, not yet. The Deadworld—the solid, banal, and ultimately inferior world of which we must all take part—would have it no other way. It is the obligation of every artist—every true artist, that is—to improve the universe, but because our canvases and brushes and paints are all dead, we can only outline life in ashes—never reveal it. My art, even for its vast departures from convention, is no different. For the first time, however, I may have stumbled across something that can change all that.

  Not long ago, in the bowels of an abandoned chemical factory lost to the woods, during a particularly rambling art tour, my sisters and I were busy unpacking an individual who had momentarily focused my artistic senses. I was in the process of coaxing my subject’s bowels to the floor to make room for the waxen statue that would replace them. The name of the piece—A View of The Soul, The Curtains Parted. I’d just pulled the body into the air, using a makeshift complex of rope and pulley, and was eager to begin molding the wax figure, a deliberately vague thing intended to demonstrate the soul’s volatility. But to my surprise, something other than the traditional fillings of a riven body drifted out, caught upon a thermal of dead air. It was a piece of yellowed paper, old and covered in dried blood.

  The paper was unremarkable but for five names written upon it, all of them stacked neatly atop one another—a list. Strangely, it wasn’t even wet for its placement within the recently disemboweled body. Apart from its resistance to blood, there was nothing explicitly unusual about it, yet I think my life changed the moment I held it, felt the heft of its mystery. Beneath the list was a promise, as there is beneath all things—but this one was close to the surface, in no need of knives to be revealed. All it required was sleep. And so, without another thought, I slept, naked upon the steaming floor, a smile snatched from hope lining my lips.

  ***

  I dreamed I was one of countless wolves, breathing fog into a cold, black sky. We were ravenous. Something else came among us, in us. It entered through the gates of our hunger, drawing us together, building a single ravening void out of individual starving spaces, until all shared the same endless hunger. Its memories raced through us like lightning, its mind emerging from our collective bottomless guts. Composing our thoughts, it wove them together into a single and terrible awareness. All but lost within the crush of this new, coalescing existence, I glimpsed, if only for a moment, the thing I was becoming. I was old as reflection, taller than fear, colder than death. My voice a sudden interrupted breath, my name the silence of conscience. I rose from the earth as the sum of wolves, and the world trembled beneath my gaze.

  ***

  When I awoke, I had the distinct impression something vast and monstrous had moved over me while I slept, the portentous echo of its passage still shrinking into the distance. Compelled to scan my surroundings, I detected nothing amiss. But I couldn’t deny the change now daring to be discovered. The matter took only a moment to resolve—the world had become lighter, slight but appreciable, alleviated perhaps only by the removal of a layer of finest dust. What it signified I was unsure. But one thing was indeed certain—the dream of wolves was the cause. There was something else as well, confided to me through sleep’s last breath—a whispered promise of changes yet to come. The intimation was vast despite the smallness of its conveyance—the potential to change the world wrapped in a moment’s Red Dream.

  I left the factory at nightfall, during the coldest rainstorm of the season. My senses prickled, agitated by the ceaseless touch of icy rain. This was by design. I wanted every nuance of my journey fortified against forgetting. This was a special time—the beginning. Of life’s phases, it was most powerful, mystical. It was the seed from which all things emerged, the point against which they would be measured. All my ironies, truths, failures, and victories would be balanced against the moment it all began—during the coldest September rain I could remember.

  My father was asleep upon my back, his ever-present rage a soothing warmth. Only the loudest shocks of thunder moved his spirit, sounding so much like his own terrible laughter. Night owls to the last, my sisters were tucked into their beds, but not asleep. I could hear them giggling as they caught the lightning when it flashed, balancing its blaze across their serrated smiles. It was fall, and we were all together, at the beginning of something special. I smiled at the thought of having received autumn’s orange blessing. Whatever inscrutable thing moves behind the amber fires of summer’s death, I do not know. But if not a god, what then?

  The calling behind the list seemed obvious to me, even without the blood and its insertion within a corpse. The names must be stricken from the list, and by that action, instigate some wider, perhaps cosmic process. The world seemed lifted from my shoulders as I walked the darkness. It revealed, possibly for the first time, a combination of elements that not often occupied the same space, their natures incompatible—will and wonder.

  I wanted to set aside the practical considerations of my craft, to be exclusively guided by the weightless drift of dreams. But such practicalities are unfortunately required. This world is no fan of my work, and it makes every effort to see my art struck entirely from existence, if not just the headlines. Disguises and stealth and all the other maneuverings of common murder must occasionally intrude upon my artistic reverie. These distractions, in direct proportion to their exercise, diminishes the quality of my final creation. Or, in sum, too much applied reality can damage—weigh-down—a would-be work of transcendent art. Given this, I was thrilled the calling behind the list required a significant departure from my usual catalogue of considerations. Some measure of self-awareness and strategy would be required, but I was largely flying blind, only a sheaf of paper for a rudder in uncertain skies.

  I floated through thickets and meadows, the shadows of dead trees falling across me, their appreciably colder shadows making gooseflesh of my exposed skin. The further into the woods I pushed, the more treetops and brambles converged, exuding the shelter of g
igantic, enclosed places. Like a carrot strung before a goat, I chased the specter of the Red Dream, the wolves, and the thing that became them.

  After weeks, something finally stirred within the mystery I walked, something coming into focus, if not clarity. It was dusk, so I could still see through the growing darkness, even as the shadows quickly gnawed at the periphery of my vision. While the night was closing off the world, the pull of an invisible force kept me one step ahead of the advancing blackness. Soon, the night was all around me, framing me within a single blot of dying amber. The dim light drifted beyond me, letting the darkness crawl across my body, soft and silent. The shrinking twilight managed to survive only a few seconds longer before melting around a small wooden cabin, leaving behind a ghost of warmth the cold breeze quickly exorcised. The tugging became the slightest cobweb, persuading me in the direction of the crumbling shack. I entered through a hole that had once been a door and strode into its blackened innards.

  The first room was meticulously arranged with all manner of bones and stolen funerary fetishes, ranging from gravestones to whittled bones. A black carpet stitched from funeral attire lay unfurled across the floor, flowing patchwork and dust-covered beyond an archway fashioned from sculpted human jawbones. Throughout was scattered and heaped the dried remains of lilies.

  This was clearly an echo of the Great Darkness of 1999. It was pleasing to imagine the madness that once filled the space I now occupied. Of course, imagination was all anyone could use to envision that lost year. Even I, a man who was no stranger to the bizarre, was left with no memory, nothing but the aftermath. I assume that fact also owes to the reach of the Deadworld, plucking out the precious memories of the only true freedom mankind has ever enjoyed—in this life, at least. But the wonderful aftermath, when the world woke from nightmare . . . Towers made from teeth, lakes of glowing bile, underground theatres of strange intent, houses built to the scale of monsters, and on and on. By the gods, what a fallout!