Page 306 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

Suddenly, it were as if the library, the journals, and the
Angel of Madness had never been. I was standing next to a
window within the lunatic tower, a beam of moonlight laying
cool across my face. My hands were still open, holding only
darkness where once a red journal had been. This was the
madness of the crowds, the hand that wrought the City of
Willard. But was it truth? Had I been . . . designed? Was I
merely my mother’s art?
Was I but the corpse of a dream?
The night carried no poetry within its blackening
shadows—only the absence of certainty of my cause, and
the dream which served as my lone guiding light. I wandered
beneath my mother’s mystery, debating the specter of its
implication. Yet what was certainty or even doubt in such a
place as this, where lunacy slept with truth to create loping
chimeras of fact and fiction? My family was silent on the
matter, ignoring anything that did not require their refined
attentions. They preferred dreams of endless savagery,
where their appetites were given no limit, and their prey
was endless and sundry. To them, the matters of cause and
consequence were tasteless fare, things that neither screamed
nor died.
Of course, their simplicity could be taken as sublime.
Their path through life, and now undeath, was metered only
by the purest distillation of their ultimate purpose—killing.
They were free to be what they wanted to be, consolidated
beyond the surplus of life and limb, perfected to the
execution of their truest desire. They had become art. It’s
what they chose for themselves, and as an artist, I obliged
them. Theirs was an enviable, if completely insular, state of
unyielding contentment. Yet such a state was not enough for
me. I never wanted to be the colors that stained the canvas,
nor even the brush that danced across the void—I wanted to
be the hand that moved the brush.
I walked without care, dead voices guiding me where
they would. There were ghosts everywhere, tethered in death
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