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why you’ve chosen to ignore it. Yet it can’t happen that way,
it ought not. This one can’t fit into your hand. You saw the
Wolves, just like I did.
It brought us all together. It means to turn us all into
lovely little stepping-stones, to ascend and strut out of its
old, dusty darkness—but only one of us will be the door.
There’s only a handful of Wolves left, now. Just you and me
and a few others, that’s it. No more stygian art and no more
happy Halloweens. Is that what you really want? Or do you
really, really want to be an artist from another world?
Sure, this world is just a dull face, but you and I are masks.
Masks are so much more fun than faces, and Halloween is
the biggest, funnest mask of all. I mean to fit it over the
empty-eyed face of the whole wide world before I’m done.
You can’t honestly want me to stop, can you? The real world
has to be masked—it’s more bearable that way. Everyone
will have so much more fun, you’ll see. And yes, our art is
death, but it’s not FOR death—it’s just for us. Just for fun.
Masks are no good without faces. What will happen when
you run out of faces? Then all you’ll be is another empty-
eyed face, and what fun is that?
There are no living dreams, my friend. Dreams are simply
the hopelessly scared pictures in our heads, and all we can
do is hold them up in front of this ugly world, blocking it
out, stuffing our mind with wishful thinking. You see, we’re
all caged little children, used and then discarded. Or worse,
we think the machines are family. But in truth, we’re just the
victims of horribly mean things.
Speaking of mean things, that fine and wondrous force
that’s been driving us to kill each other is just some long-
forgotten, horrible engineer of our mechanical world. That’s
all it could be. No doubt, while it was busy raising this cold
mechanical playground, it must have accidentally gotten
itself buried under the gears and guts of its own garden. If
you free it, it will only adjust the settings. It won’t really
change anything. The only way for us all to be happy is to
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