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He called out to me through broken teeth and a stream of
blood that poured from his left eye. “You know why I turned
my talent to the stage, both in front and beyond the eyes
of the world, Family Man? Because I wanted to flaunt the
power that had been derided and shamed into magic hats and
storybooks and myths. I wanted to show my audience the
world, the better one, they themselves had destroyed—the
world they mocked when they told their snot-nosed kids that
nothing but hollow imagination lurked the spaces beneath
beds and behind closet doors. I wanted to see their faces
when they realized too late it was not all a clever illusion.
That is why I’ve let you live this long—because you know
what I know. I can see it in your eyes.”
Of course, he was right. I had an intimate awareness of the
powers of which he spoke, and a nearly boundless wonder
for what that awareness could never hope to comprehend.
What little I might have understood only suggested an
infinity of mysteries that lay beyond me, never to be resolved
into solidity, and I was glad for that ignorance.
Yet I still desired to plunge deeper into the darkness of
that wonder—by winning a game set by a god. And now,
as so many times before, I would be forced to kill a kindred
spirit. But unlike the majority of previous killings, this one
I would enjoy.
“I’ve dedicated my life to that spectral world, Family
Man,” the Prince continued. “I’ve become its vengeance, I
suppose you might say. And like any good avenger, I must
show my victims the error of their ways before I dispatch
them. Yet that justification can hardly contain my actions
tonight, can it? Tonight, I kill to invite the lost world back
into our midst, to realize my own Red Dream. On that count,
you and I might be brothers, I feel. It is with this in mind that
I offer my thanks—and my apologies for the dirty tricks that
must take place.”

260 | Mark Anzalone