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Ultimately, I wished to tear out the eyes of this Shepherd for
revealing things about myself I may have been much better
not knowing. Mysteries should be let alone, for all our sakes.
Jack was speaking to me from the shadows of the
September Woods, sunken to near invisibility within the
crowding thickets and flowing gullies of twilight. I was
prone, upon the floor of my own dream—of the ring of
lunatics I’d left behind in Willard, a manifestation of my
alternative to all the Shepherd’s foolishness. The image
was not lost upon Jack, who immediately fixed his orange
gaze upon the madness of skin and dream. “Well, isn’t that
a wonder? One of your pieces, I presume?” Jack’s curiosity
was aflame. Our dream allowed his eyes to take on the
appearance of shivering candle flames.
“In a way, perhaps,” was all I said, my mind still anchored
to matters outside the dream.
“Poor, poor Mister Hide. He could have been such a
wonderful ally to the New Halloween, that eternal holiday
of hiding and tricking. No friend to the machines, that one.”
Jack was shaking his head in genuine grief.
While I was not sure what a New Halloween was, though
I had a decent idea, Mister Hide would indeed be sorely
missed. “He was, to the last, one of the greatest dreamers
I’ve ever encountered,” I said, nodding in agreement. But
as I continued to look upon the last work of the great skin-
switcher, I saw the mad angel rise from beneath the aggregate
skins of the death-frozen, un-fleshed White Wigs. Deleriael
wrapped the sewn skins around himself as if a shawl, his
mismatched wings thrust out, dripping flame and insects,
both scuttling and creeping across the floor in turns of titter
and hiss. Jack seemed not to notice. A dream, or perhaps
a hallucination, inside a shared dream—by the gods, this
Game!
Deleriael bowed low, to demonstrate the fit of his form-
flattering article of insanity. “A perfect fit,” said the deranged
angel, winking his reference to some of Hide’s final words to
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