Page 297 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

the darkening sky. I could almost hear the din of battle
unfolding between the concluding rays of the day and the
mad city’s refusal to be revealed by something so paltry
as light. Standing so close to Willard, I could appreciate a
palpable undercurrent of residual madness, sweeping those
with appropriate sensitivities into the gravity of secret worlds,
inviting them to take on the burden of forgotten lunatics, to
convey a flourish upon the monument to madness. Yet brick
and mortar was not my medium of choice, so I declined the
invitation, at least for the moment. I rounded a final bend
and at last, Willard came into focus.
The city was a material outline of a lunatic’s thought
process. It seemed desperate to capture within stone and
wood the quicksilver shapes of a madman’s fancy. Houses,
gardens, fountains, clock towers and churches rose and fell
into and around each other, forming metropolitan entities
that seemed to stir—as if the momentum of insanity had yet
to exhaust itself, despite the absence of the broken minds that
had once called it down from the sky as truly as lightning
rods.
The road I followed into the city ended at many an
empty residence. The remains of kitchens, bedrooms, and
living rooms punctuated the distance of my paved path as
it transformed into other, more secret paths—tendrils that
slithered around thickets and beneath graveyards, through
black tunnels and silent crypts. Willard, to be certain, was
a great sloughed-off skin that madness had once worn with
such pride and glory, rendering even the sun dim by means
of its terrible brilliance.
I entered the city in darkness, as was necessary from a
hunter’s perspective, to say nothing of that of an outré artist.
It was a notoriously strange place filled with the material
and quite possibly immaterial articulations of insanity—of
men and women who went from raising the walls of their
city to being imprisoned by them. Due to the immensity
of the population of lunatics, it was determined that their
300 | Mark Anzalone