Werk heard the heavy oak door, bound in iron, close with that deadening finality that ever brought him back too these disturbing nears. The temple of mourning that was his mind echoed from the pillars of the dead.

Banes and Moreno had been delivered to the habitation of the Good Barrister, their earthly advocate. He had returned to his dismal rental—as if something rented could ever to a man belong, but rather he to it—according to instructions.

The guise had been set aside; the teenage street punk attire of another age that had served so long as his disguise. The shower with the lava soap, preparatory to the warm bath in amber resin and then the cold shower had been prescribed by Barrister O’Connell, their Master at Arms, such as a society of Odd Fellows could afford. The world had been quickening, the Powers building, gathering clouds with seeming rain, thundering and dryly dissipating…

She sang distant and forlorn beyond that oaken door, awakening him with a yawn. There before him he saw the form he rued, rough-hewn from some bitter Alpine root. The face was handsome, the jaw too covered with stubble for his severe taste. His greatest fear—his only one besides the dread that he might fail to smite some enemy once revealed—was that he might one night wake wearing a beard, like some monkey cast down from heaven as a caricature of Higher Perfection.

The eyes were steely gray, as they should be in honor of the returning Ray. The shoulders were broad enough for their intended work, too wide though, to fit comfortably in any suit that might permit him to fit in with the elvish kin that with such deviltry ruled these crooked sapiens.

The man in the mirror snarled.

“To be a bit taller would be nice—but would not the perfect pilot make,” he addressed the reflection from long habit.

The body was barrel broad and hard, but not rounded—covered as it was with coarse curl of black hair—those bitter Alpine roots curling worldward like vines made of soot.

The human form, so lacking in grace, roused disgust in him anew. When he saw his bitter strand housed in such apish form, with pretense of mind, but of the mere erected in haste, he wished for the world entire to be scorched to a howling waste.

“I hate you, Werk!”

The accursed region was bracketed with monstrous wide hips; a good thing he was a dedicated driver—running on such legs would gal him like a ball and chain.

The hands and feet were too small for his practical taste—a curse of this fidgeting world.

He snarled at the very walls that bound his hated form—imperfection cast down to sorrowfully recall the better angels he mourned.

“I am Mourn, not Werk—why do you trap me here?” he addressed The Maker.

He had been tall once, and cloaked, poling the bier boat, content for two mere coins per a retiring shade.

“Enough griping.”

The case next to him, as instructed, he lifted, placed on the unused dinning room table, before the mirror that was not, and sneered at the surrounding walls, “Your paint shall peel, your fake panels crumble to dust, your quick pine beams sag and snap—deer and their weeds, rabbits and coyote should replace your fallen world!”

Hate seethed in him as he cracked open the suit case. Within was, stacked in the order to be donned, a gray iron pendent in a chain the same, worked in the image of a sun wheel. This, his Goad Stone, must be placed on his breast first…

Then, all of gray, a pleasing, anonymous, slate gray: socks, wife beater, dress shirt, briefs, slacks, belt—that gray too, buckled in iron in the image of a raven’s head—jacket, hard leather dress shoes—no tie, thank Heaven—a leather cap with visor, and The Gloves, the gloves he so missed, the gloves that like two denizens of a doomed garden yawned, the fingers flexing there in the bottom of the case, the wrist buckles working openly, suggesting a drive.

“Yes!”

Finally he slipped on the gloves, vexed that they were two big, loose, his modern hands having shrunken from ages of sloth, his ancestors betrayed, in the grave, having barely giving him the least of what had been lost, the rest squandered with ease.

“He said not to go out for a drive until you buckle them. Buckle up, Werk!” he snarled.

The suit itself was loose too, he could feel that, two sizes too big, the cuffs of shirt and jacket hanging down to the base of his hands, making the buckling an exercise in irritation. The boots even, had been too easily stepped into, the slacks loose in the legs, the only snug portion around the gut.

“Come on!” he ground his teeth between twitching lips, “Little girl hands, get it done!”

At last both gloves were buckled about the wrist, over the shirt, which had no wrist button or snap, and under the cuff of that slipping and sliding jacket.

“Cool suit,” he admitted, as he looked into the mirror, then turned to his normal critical assessment, “Should be worn by a better man—is too good for this stinking world! I hate this place and the people in it. All is left for me is to mourn. Everything good has been ruined, all the best souls taken. Ligoti is right; we are an abomination, a stain upon the universe!”

A severe pain shot through his every joint, vibrated in each and every bone, tore at every strong muscle like the fibers were too weak to resist mere gravity!

“Agh!” he snarled in the mirror, his neck widening, his suit growing tight, his waist seeming smaller as the shoulders, arms, legs all filled out. His feet were in agony, each of the many bones screaming until the ankles and toes pressed against snug boots formerly loose.

“The hands, the hands,” he spoke, long so accustomed to lonely traverse of this realm so perverse and as yet unpunished, that internal dialogue had crept into the external. He had not realized until now, that he had grown so angry with this world that his critical eye spoke out loud. His hands were huge, tightly stretching the gray silicone mesh uppers, the wrist bones pressing out against the leather cuffs and slate iron buckles, mounted like wrist watches under the silken sleeve of his jacket.

“Or, am I the vehicle and the suit the driver?”

The visor of the hat seemed to wink. That did illicit a grim, sardonic grin, “Time for a drive!”

The heavy oak door opened, unseen behind him. In wafted a cold, stone-borne wind that had the effect of further hardening that grin above the stubble-grown chin.

His heart seemed to move into the center of his chest, to focus under that Iron, sun-wheel pendent. Upon the high road within he heard the clatter of brazen hooves on hand-laid cobbles, and new, that those creatures traversing the low road had for too long avoided their well-earned recompense.