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World, who continued avoiding the axe that hung upon his
every move as if it were his own hateful, serrated shadow.
The tethered man’s eyes fixed upon a small path that
disappeared into the forest as a storm of shadows took shape
just beyond the brambles. The man’s fear was drawing the
thing from the forest as surely as corpses catch flies.
When I reached the man, he was pleading at the
encroaching presence to be spared. “Who are you?” I asked,
looking down upon the trembling man. But my words
were pulled into the woods, absorbed into the silence of
prehistoric secrets. I seized the man by the leather straps so
tightly binding him, drawing him close, so that my words
might reach him. The enemy silence was nearly upon me,
and the entire world—molded from dream though it might
have been—began to fade into whispers as the night paled
into the quiet of forgotten places and half-remembered
names. I began to feel my own persona washing away,
leaving behind only the uncovered bones of my wonder.
The man was screaming now, trying desperately to convey
something to me. I could almost hear what he said, but
before I could make out his screams, the world died into the
raging silence of unguessed secrets—and something stepped
from the woods.
Standing atop cloven hooves, casting a horned and hateful
shadow that caused the grass it fell upon to twist and curl
like spasming insects, stood the inimitable Tom Hush.
The creature was dressed in the finery of a child’s
unfettered imagination—claws, antlers, and a death-mask
of palest bone displaying a grin colder than winter. And
when his shadow crawled across my body, I could feel the
claustrophobia of buried bodies and the rhythm of countless
dead hearts soaking into my skin.
“So, the Shepherd has sent another of his ‘Wolves’ to the
slaughter, eh?” The dreamworld had become the creature’s
voice—the singular and fearsome sound of deepest secrets.

162 | Mark Anzalone