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structure, looking down into the hallway outside. The ruined
hunter I abandoned to the heating vent was slowly expiring
to the rasp of his own fading breath, and the wheezing had
the pleasant effect of concentrating the attention of the other
hunters. They were gathering like shadows at dusk, lurking
the hidey holes about the hallway. I sought out the fat
knot of electrical organs that supplied the hallway with its
grubby effulgence. When the hunters discovered each other
and began to emerge from the shadows, my sister severed
the lights, and I retired from the ceiling to the blacked-out
spaces beneath me.
An infant silence was born into the spaces left behind
by the din of our violence, revealing a gory chimera, spread
wide and red upon the floor, made from the severed forms of
a dozen victims. I moved beyond the coagulating hallway,
covered in the paints and clays of my craft, hoping to
discover even greater bounties of murder and men.
I was additionally excited over the discovery I’d made
while piecing together my latest art piece. I realized not a
one of them were Wolves. These crazed knife-wielders and
gunfighters were something altogether different and equally
wonderful—White Wigs, or just Wigs, as I’d heard them
called. They were of course the unfortunate survivors of
attempts to recover memories of the Great Darkness using
hypnosis. Generally, such persons died during the process,
the strain of recalling such unmitigated madness causing their
hair to turn winter white and producing a facial expression
that outlined a fear incapable of being halted by human
heads. Yet there had been cases, however infrequently,
of individuals surviving the hypnotical process, if not the
general aesthetic changes that were so often associated with
it. These persons were invariably raving lunatics, loudly
expressing the side effects of senselessness as they ran naked
and bleached through the world. To find one such creature
was rare, but to find so many as had attacked me—and
working together, besides—was completely unheard of. Yet
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