The Nightmare Factory (72 page)

After a painfully reflective pause, the reverend said: “There are none remaining who will come. They would be required to relive the events following your birth, the first time you were born.”

“And my mother?” Andrew asked.

“She did not survive.”

“But how did she die?”

“By the ritual,” the Reverend Maness confessed. “At the ritual of your birth it became necessary to perform the ritual of death.”

“Her death.”

“As I told you before. This ritual had never been performed, or even conceived, prior to that night on which you were born. We did not know what to expect. But after a certain point, after seeing certain things, we acted in the correct manner, as if we had always known what needed to be done.”

“And what needed to be done, Father?”

“It is all in this book.”

“You have the book, but you’re still lacking for those others. A congregation, so to speak.”

“I have my congregation in this very town. They will do what needs to be done. To this you must submit yourself. To the end of your existence you must consent.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Soon,” the Reverend Maness began, “the bond will be sealed between you and the other, that one which is all nightmare of grotesque metamorphoses behind the dream of earthly forms, that one which is the center of so-called entity and so-called essence. To the living illusions of the world of light will come a blackness no one has ever seen, a dawn of darkness. What you yourself have known of these things is only a passing glimpse, a flickering candleflame beside the conflagration which is to come. You have found yourself fascinated by those moments after you have been asleep, and awake to see how the things around you are affected in their form. You look on as they change in every freakish manner, feeling the power that changes them to be connected to your own being, conveying to you its magic through a delicate cord. Then the cord grows too thin to hold, your mind returns to you, and the little performance you were watching comes to an end. But you have already stayed long enough in this place to have begun a second birth under the sign of the Tsalal. The cord between you and that one is strong. Wherever you go, you will be found. Wherever you stay, there the changes will begin.
For you are the seed of that one
. You are just as the
luz
, the bone-seed of rabbinic prophecy: that sliver of every mortal self from which the whole body may be reconstructed and stand for judgment at the end of time. Wherever you stay, there the resurrection will begin. You are a fragment of the one that is without law or reason. The body that will grow out of you is the true body of all things. The changes themselves are the body of the Tsalal. The changes are the truth of all bodies, which we believe have a face and a substance only because we cannot see that they are always changing, that they are only fragile forms which are forever being shattered in the violent whirlpool of truth.

“This is how it will be for all your days: you will be drawn to a place that reveals the sign of the Tsalal—an aspect of the unreal, a forlorn glamor in things—and with your coming the changes will begin. These may go unnoticed for a time, affecting only very small things or greater things in subtle ways, a disruption of forms that you very well know. But other people will sense that something is wrong in that place, which may be a certain house or street or even an entire town. They will go about with uneasy eyes and become emaciated in their flesh, their very bones growing thin with worry, becoming worn down and warped just as the world around them is slowly stripped of whatever seemed real, leaving them famished for the sustenance of old illusions. Rumors will begin to pass among them about unpleasant things they believe they have seen or felt and yet cannot explain—a confusion among the lower creatures, perhaps, or a stone that seems to throb with a faint life. For these are the modest beginnings of the chaos that will ultimately consume the stars themselves, which may be left to crawl within that great blackness no one has ever seen. And by their proximity to your being they will know that you are the source of these changes, that
through your being
these changes radiate into the world. The longer you stay in a place, the worse it will become. If you leave such a place in time, then the changes can have no lasting power—the ultimate point will not have been reached, and it will be as the little performances of grotesquerie you have witnessed in your own room.”

“And if I do stay in such a place?” asked Andrew.

“Then the changes will proceed toward the ultimate point. So long as you can bear to watch the appearances of things become degraded and confused, so long as you can bear to watch the people in that place wither in their bodies and minds, the changes will proceed toward their ultimate point—the disintegration of all apparent order, the birth of the Tsalal. Before that happens you must submit to the ritual of the ultimate point.”

But Andrew Maness only laughed at his father’s scheme, and the sound of this laughter almost shattered the reverend entirely. In a deliberately serious voice, Andrew said: “Do you really believe you will gain the participation of others?”

“The people of this town will do the work of the ritual,” his father replied. “When they have seen certain things, they will do what must be done. Their hunger to preserve the illusions of their world will surpass their horror at what must be done to save it. But it will be your decision whether or not you will submit to the ritual which will determine the course of so many things in this world.”

11 A meeting in Moxton

Everyone in the town gathered in the church that the Reverend Maness had built so many years ago. No others had succeeded the reverend, and no services had been held since the time of his pastorate. The structure had never been outfitted with electricity, but the illumination of numerous candles and oil lamps the congregation had brought supplemented the light of a grayish afternoon that penetrated the two rows of plain, peaked windows along either side of the church. In the corner of one of those windows a spider fumbled about in its web, struggling awkwardly with appendages that resembled less the nimble legs of the arachnid than they did an octet of limp tentacles. After several thrusts the creature reached the surface of a window pane and passed into the glass itself, where it began to move about freely in its new element.

The people of Moxton had tried to rest themselves before this meeting, but their haggard look spoke of a failure to do so. The entire population of the town barely filled a half dozen pews at the front of the church, although some were collapsed upon the floor and others shuffled restlessly along the center aisle. All of them appeared even more emaciated than the day before, when they had attempted to escape the town and unaccountably found themselves driven back to it.

“Everything has gotten worse since we returned,” said one man, as if to initiate the meeting which had no obvious hope or purpose beyond collecting in a single place the nightmares of the people of Moxton. A murmur of voices rose up and echoed throughout the church. Several people spoke of what they had witnessed the night before, reciting a litany of grotesque phenomena that had prohibited sleep.

There was a bedroom wall which changed colors, turning from its normal rosy tint that was calm and pale in the moonlight to a quivering and luminescent green that rippled like the flesh of a great reptile. There was a little doll whose neck began to elongate until it was writhing through the air like a serpent, while its tiny doll’s head whispered words that had no sense in them yet conveyed a profoundly hideous meaning. There were things no one had seen that made noises of a deeply troubling nature in the darkness of cellars or behind the doors of closets and cupboards. And then there was something that people saw when they looked through the windows of their houses toward the house where a man named Andrew Maness now lived. But when anyone began to describe what it was they saw in the vicinity of that house, which they called the McQuister house, their words became confused. They did see something and yet they saw nothing.

“I also saw what you speak of,” whispered the tall, bearded man who wore a flat-brimmed hat. “It was a blackness, but it was not the blackness of the night or of shadows. It was hovering over the old McQuister place, or around it. This was something I had not seen in Moxton even since the changes.”

“No, not in Moxton, not
in the town
. But you
have
seen it before. We have all seen it,” said a man’s voice that sounded as if it came from elsewhere in the church.

“Yes,” answered the tall man, as if confessing a thing that had formerly been denied. “But we are not seeing it the way it might be seen, the way we had seen it when we were outside the town, when we tried to leave and could not.”

“That was not blackness we saw then,” said one of the younger women who seemed to be wresting an image from her memory. “It was something…something that wasn’t blackness at all.”

“There were different things,” shouted an old man who suddenly stood up from one of the pews, his eyes fixed in a gaze of revelation. A moment later this vision appeared to dissolve, and he sat down again. But the eyes of others followed this vision, surveying the empty spaces of the church and watching the flickering lights of the many lamps and candles.

“There
were
different things,” someone started to say, and then someone else completed the thought: “But they were all spinning and confused, all swirling together.”

“Until all we could see was a great blackness,” said the tall man, gaining his voice again.

A silence now overcame the congregation, and the words they had spoken seemed to be disappearing into this silence, once more drawing the people of Moxton back to the refuge of their former amnesia. But before their minds lost all clarity of recollection a woman named Mrs Spikes rose to her feet and from the last row of the church, where she sat alone, cried out, “Everything started with him, the one in the McQuister house.”

“How long has it been?” one voice asked.

“Too long,” answered Mrs Spikes. “I remember him. He’s older than I am, but he doesn’t look older. His hair is a strange color.”

“Reddish like pale blood,” said one.

“Green like mold,” said another. “Or yellow and orange like a candleflame.”

“He lived in that house, that same house, a long time ago,” continued Mrs Spikes. “Before the McQuisters. He lived with his father. But I can only remember the stories. I didn’t see anything myself. Something happened one night. Something happened to the whole town. Their name was Maness.”

“That is the name of the man who built this church,” said the tall man. “He was the first clergyman this town had seen. And there were no others after him. What happened, Mrs Spikes?”

“It was too long ago for anyone to remember. I only know the stories. The reverend said things about his son, said the boy was going to do something and how people had to keep it from happening.”

“What happened, Mrs Spikes? Try to remember.”

“I’m trying. It was only yesterday that I started to remember. It was when we got back to town. I remembered something that the reverend said in the stories about that night.”

“I heard you,” said another woman. “You said, ‘Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.’”

Mrs Spikes stared straight ahead and lightly pounded the top of the pew with her right hand, as though she were calling up memories in this manner. Then she said: “That’s what he was supposed to have been saying that night, ‘Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.’ And he said that people had to do something, but the stories I heard when I was growing up don’t say what he wanted people to do. It was about his son. It was something queer, something no one understood. But no one did anything that he wanted them to do. When they took him home, his son wasn’t there, and no one saw that young man again. The stories say that the ones who brought the reverend to his house saw things there, but no one could explain what they saw. What everyone did remember was that late the same night the bells started ringing up in the tower of this church. That’s where they found the reverend. He’d hung himself. It wasn’t until the McQuisters moved into town that anyone would go near the reverend’s house. Then it seemed no one could remember anything about the place.”

“Just as we could not remember what happened only yesterday,” said the tall man. “Why we came back to this place when it was the last place we wanted to be. The blackness we saw that was a blackness no one had ever seen. That blackness which was not a blackness but was all the colors and shapes of things darkening the sky.”

“A vision!” said one old man who for many years had been the proprietor of McQuister’s Pharmacy.

“Perhaps only that,” replied the tall man.

“No,” said Mrs Spikes. “It was something
he
did. It was like everything else that’s been happening since he came here and stayed so long. All the little changes in things that kept getting worse. It’s something that’s been moving in like a storm. People have seen that it’s in the town now, hanging over that house of his. And the changes in things are worse than ever. Pretty soon it’s us that’ll be changing.”

Then there arose a chorus of voices among the congregation, all of them composing a conflict between “we must do something” and “what can be done?”

While the people of Moxton murmured and fretted in the light of lamps and candles, there was a gradual darkening outside the windows of the church. An unnatural blackness was overtaking the gray afternoon. And the words of these people also began to change, just as so many things had changed in that town. Within the same voices there mingled both keening outcries of fear and a low, muttering invocation. Soon the higher pitched notes in these voices diminished and then wholly disappeared as the deeper tones of incantation prevailed. Now they were all chanting a single word in hypnotic harmony:
Tsalal, Tsalal, Tsalal.
And standing at the pulpit was the one who was leading the chant, the man whose strangely shaded hair shone in the light of candles and oil lamps. At last he had come from his house where he had stayed too long. The bell in the tower began to ring, sounding in shattered echoes. The resonant cacophony of voices swelled within the church. For these were the voices of people who had lived so long in the wrong place. These were people of a skeleton town.