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appearance of being either scribbled out or partially erased
from the paper of time and space. I stopped momentarily,
listening to church bells sound out the hour. They cushioned
my thoughts with their overstuffed notes, lifting my mind
from the sonic monotony of an ordinary day.
As I voyaged through the corpse-town, my fascination
with Hayden Trill began to swell. What weird and wonderful
things might result from killing him? I wouldn’t normally
work on a subject lest the outcome was—in that spectacular
but fleeting moment—the embodiment of a forgotten dream,
but my feeling was that I’d been invited to work on a much
grander piece, in which Mr. Trill was merely a single,
masterful brushstroke.
Pausing within the rippling shadows of a weeping willow,
I reexamined the mystery of Suttercraft. Suddenly, I was
quite curious as to the number of times I might be required
to put down this mysterious Mr. Trill—and whether I should
acquire a shovel to expedite the process.
I found Mr. Trill’s residence easily enough, as it was
listed in a phone book I found in an empty library. The
subject of my next piece lived in an apartment building
strangled by thick ivies, which no doubt conducted the last
of its metropolitan juices through its hungry green tubers.
The overall result was nothing less than a house half-eaten.
A wide, cracked balcony sat high within the concrete crown
of the dwelling, waving its massive arms above it, a living
canopy of shifting green. A single lantern dangled from an
overhanging branch, whispering amber light at the pooling
shadows. I knew the balcony coupled to the room of my
quarry—why else would it be there?
I kept well out of sight, moving behind the town’s beautiful
curtain of decay, allowing the germinating emptiness to erase
all traces of my passage. The shadows barely reckoned my
presence until I was well past the building’s foyer. A warm
breeze wandered the overlarge room, gently disturbing the
billowing curtains that fell like filthy fabric waterfalls from
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