Green stood in front of an entrance to an impossible forest, an arched gateway made of two bowed trees the color of bleached bone. The way beyond was as black as midnight water and in the center hung the skull of the horned wolf.
In a sense,the wolf answered.
Green looked up at the skull and felt only anger.
“A heart attack,” Green said. “A city bus. Cancer creeping like mildew. Old bones wrapped in night. Each as petty as the next. There is nothing impressive about bringing death. What you’re doing is empty. Purposeless. Do you kill for sport? The sport of what? How is serving decay sport? Decay doesn’t need any help. Entropy doesn’t need servants.”
It was Green’s own voice, but he felt he was speaking with Valentina’s words, her strange formality.
The skull said nothing.
“Answer me!”
Green thought his regret at the creature, projecting his empathy, his numbing compassion for the lives of people he did not know. He thought of his old neighbor, Mr. Reynard. He felt the old ice-dagger pain of his absence and watched that pain sprout and climb like ivy, winding like clockwork, clinging to the loss of Kyle Cartwright, the loss of the campers at Kinkaid Cabins. His remorse grew and stretched, a thorny hedge of pain, hung with the corpses of songbirds and the dusky shine of acorns like polished brown agate reflecting the starlight.
He thought the skull dipped a fraction of an inch.
Annoyance? Acknowledgment?
You have grown. Stop calling my thoughts here, not-man. I have work to do.
Then, it was gone.
The hedge of pain snapped into grayscale and shattered, drifting off like smoke, like the dusty scales from a moth’s wing.
The darkness melted away and Green was looking down a tunnel of gray boughs like the rib-lined gut of an endless serpent.
There in the distance, he could just see the thin light of dawn pooling beneath the cabin door.
He awoke.
Great. Dreaming about work again.
He shook his head.
Nightmare creatures and haunted forests. Arguments with a murderous skull. Work.
He could tell by the birdsongs it was dawn.
A knock at the door.
“Come in.”
Valentina entered, carrying the same toast and coffee as the mornings before. The knock was new.
“Good morning, Mr. Green. Breakfast.”
“Morning. Thank you again, but please don’t feel like you need to bring me food every morning. It’s kinda embarrassing. And I can guess what Dancer would say about it.”
He stretched and swung his bare feet onto the cold dirt floor. With a pang of self-consciousness, he glanced down at himself, noting that his T-shirt and sweatpants were grubby, but not indecent.
“I’m a very early riser and feeding one’s apprentice is an old tradition,” Valentina said. “It kindles my nostalgia. Humor me.”
He rose and went to the table to eat. He would forever think of that table as the rag moth’s table. The association made him think of the word “wake,” bringing to mind the parents of the Kinkaid Cabins victims. Would they have been called to the area to identify their children in some windowless basement of a county building?
“I don’t really feel like arguing with you,” he said. “I’ll never get sick of this bread.”
“We’ll add bread baking to the curriculum.”
