Page 7 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

With my family accounted for, I examined my
surroundings. The Darkness had all but evaporated, and the
woods lay awash in the morning rays, scrubbing away the
shadows with sunlight. But for all its polish, the world could
no longer glitter.
I remember quite clearly my first look at what learned
men would later term an Obscurra—a relic of the Great
Darkness, some bizarre industry performed by madmen or
monsters, for purposes unknown, if not entirely unknowable.
I had awoken in its shadow—a rambling mansion made
from uncountable human bones. The rough calcium of its
construction all but ignored the strongest beams of direct
light, begrudging the day only its sallow eastern face—a
glaring prominence of squinting windows pinched dark and
narrow by overhanging gables made from interlocking ribs.
Its Victorian and Gothic flourishes summoned the image of
a cemetery city of smoldering ivory, the dead wandering
its cold lanes in a blind stupor. The structure’s collective
bearing of close-packed bones spoke to a preoccupation with
performing the additional work of skin, closing off its innards
to sun and strangers, barring entrance to the hallowed halls
of its bleached body. I could not repress my want to glimpse
beyond the nearest window. Skins—likely the wrappers for
all the smartly placed bones—lined its interior. It was a bio-
architectural inversion of the human body.
I was fixated by the place, its apparent violation of
common sense a vulgar confirmation of a dream’s ability
to overcome waking, to stand defiant and solid beneath the
sun. Yet, I would learn soon enough, I was wrong to think
the manse of bones an exception to a conventional world.
Such desecrations of the commonplace, though varying
wildly in scale and scope and theme, had invaded the Earth
like an army of alien eidolons marched out from the mists
of the missing year, elbowing their way into cities, streets,
caves, ballrooms, bedrooms—anywhere space and madness
would allow.
10 | Mark Anzalone