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mind—it was a message from the antlered lord himself.
’Twas merely a breath that defeated you, child. Imagine if I
had chosen to enunciate, or if I had reached out to you. Now,
away with you. And tell the rest of the Shepherd’s dogs of the
calamity that is my displeasure.
I looked to the molten spaces that once held Tom’s
dream—or more likely, Joshua Link’s dream. Ancient things
like Tom Hush have no need for such things. They exist
entirely at the pleasure of their own will. No, the Eater of
Secrets was likely amusing himself using the body and soul
of the poor man. The nightmare of the primal woodland and
brooding idols were just a medium for Tom to work through.
Finally, the spaces where once thundered a god went still—
the red wake of a killer shark—as if the monster had never
been.
Marvin and my father were buried in rage and bloodlust,
having nearly smashed the remaining dreams to splinters,
allowing me to make my way into Marvin’s dream unhindered.
When I drew upon the hallway door by which Marvin had
entered, I heard the most pathetic wailing imaginable—it
was the cry of a child. I opened the door into what appeared
to be a tiny, squalid apartment. Trash and debris lay heaped
as high as the corpses. The bodies were in varying states of
decomposition, the people seemingly killed in a variety of
unrelated yet horrific ways. The dream was mostly memory,
containing only the slightest specks of fantasy. Thin layers
of cardboard had been crudely taped over the windows to
prevent sunlight and unwanted attention. Occasionally, the
shapes of monstrous things pressed their silhouettes against
the covered windows, and a bit of rain fell from the shadows
that stained the ceiling.
I followed the cries that now vacillated between the voice
of a child and an adult, sometimes transitioning within the
middle of a spoken, if indecipherable, word. While the
words themselves were indistinct, they were intelligible in
the broader terms of pain and suffering. As I closed on the
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