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remembering. The precise state that had been overthrown in
favor of an enduring order to things, now only the occasional
and wholly unstable nexus for the hidden and secret. I was
caught in the pull of a thousand currents, red games and
scheming mothers and dead families, old and new. It was
almost, pleasantly, too much for me to bear. But revelation
was not yet through with me, for when I opened my eyes, it
seemed as if dreams had yet again invaded the earth.

***

While I was reasonably certain I had awoken below the
city of Willard, within the strange device Doctor Coldglow
had placed me within, there was a strange overlap with a
previous and skin-strewn dream. I seemed to occupy a
bizarre hybrid of the Willard reality and the Skin-swapper’s
nightmare. While the room was of its previous size and
shape, it had been filled with the skinned bodies of White
Wigs, all of them made to appear dancing around the most
bizarre and unintelligible shape, a shape slightly intimated
from the negative space outlined by the sewn-together skins
of the denuded towheads. No doubt, this was the symbol for
the insanity the lunatics were beholden to, forever orbiting
a thing barely hinted at, even by the sum of their many
stolen skins. It was majestic. I even felt a pang of jealousy.
Here was some of the finest art I’d ever had the pleasure
of witnessing—at the cost of appearing braggadocios,
it was certainly worthy of standing alongside any of my
own pieces. It even seemed like something I would create.
Unfortunately, as is the case within the solid world, there
was a good reason for the similarity.
A voice from the shadows, husky and proud, came
at me from the back of the room. “I can tell you approve
of my work. Or, is it our work?” It was Mister Hyde, but
that was the least of my realizations. The pain that came

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