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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I admired Autumn City. It pressed harder against the taut
skin of the Deadworld more than any other place I had ever
been, revealing visions more often left to dreams than to the
waking senses. I walked down streets thickly lined with the
city’s unique trees, whose leaves always burned orange and
yellow, disavowing their place in the order of the seasons,
gathering ghosts as surely as heathen bonfires. Everywhere
I went, there whispered a wind that carried the perfume of
autumn decay, and I wondered if Jack Lantern hadn’t been
partially successful in his bid against banality. The city was
most visible—revealed—during the smolder of twilight.
It seemed to fume along with the sun, a brother wrapped
in autumnal fire, burning spectral and silent, standing
sentinel over the Eternal Fall. The spectacle was staggering.
Everywhere dreams afire, yearning to burn down the sky,
desperate to sear through the heavy rot of a dead world. And
yet, each time the forest was set ablaze, it would inevitably
replace back into banished dream to rage in silence, isolated
and impotent.
Jack Lantern certainly didn’t want to die by my hand, but
neither did he wish to kill me by his. I could feel the conflict
burning him as brightly as any smile he had ever set aflame.
Yet regardless of those feelings, he was busy preparing a
magnificent stage upon which we would soon perform—I
simply waited for him to finish. I sat for some time in an
untended pumpkin patch behind a barn that looked on the

372 | Mark Anzalone