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disappeared, a voice managed to slip free. It was no more
than a sound, really, too weak to intimate words or meanings.
I was surprised when it resonated with something deep
within me, eliciting a reaction I thought all but conquered—
fear. I quickly turned my attention back to the outside world,
replacing the unwanted emotion to its place within the
fading memory.
The rest of the room was unspectacular, decorated with an
assortment of squirming mildew, whirling dust, and creeping
shadow—nothing one wouldn’t expect to find in a haunted
morgue. With nothing else to command my attention, I
reversed my course. Wrapping the newly liberated shadows
tightly around myself and stepping into a dense fog of
silence, I withdrew up the stairs, possessed of more wisdom
than when I had descended.
The solitude of the first floor had come alive with a
tangible vigilance, and I could hear the breathing of countless
sleeping victims of the dream plague, all of them tucked away
into the strangest places—heating vents, under floorboards,
and all the smallest places one would never think to find
a body. The massive collection of sleeping minds likely
merged their dreams to form a great passage projecting
beyond the strained limits of human sleep, emptying into
lands where the oldest earthy darkness constitutes only the
freshest topsoil.
Having satisfied my curiosity—as much as was healthy—I
put aside my search for the impregnated women and renewed
my quest for insight into my wolf-haunted dreams. I decided
to move by rooftop, and so made my way to the top of the
hospital.
Along the way, I snatched small glimpses into the hospital
rooms on either side of the hallway. Each space succored the
pain of its former occupants as a mother nurses her child,
and nowhere was there an inch of wall, floor, or ceiling that
had not known fluids better kept within the human body. As
I neared the top of the building, I foolishly loosed a smile,
The Red Son | 51