Noctuary (18 page)

I cannot imagine how this voice invaded the dream, yet did not belong to it.

"
O intelligent life of a fool's future," it said, "hear this song. If only you could gaze with me from this mere rock, this dull slab which is yet a throne to roiling seas and to the mist which veils a rustling paradise. And beneath those churning waters - the slow fierce music of a dim world of monsters. And upon the unpatterned lands - chaotic undulations amidst vines and greenish vapor, the flickering dance of innumerable tails and tongues. And above in the skies smeared over with ashen clouds — leathery wings flapping. O fallen beast, if only you could see all this through my lidless eyes, this sacred world innocent of hope, how willingly you would then follow the death of all your empty dreams."

"Innocent of hope, perhaps," I thought upon waking in the darkness. "And yet, O wide-eyed lizard, I would hear you sing something of your pain and your panic. A paradise of prehistory, indeed. How finely spoken. But a lyric of life all the same - of slime itself, of ooze as such.

"I scorn your eloquence and your world, the poetry of a
living
oblivion, and now seek a simpler style of annihilation. My hopes remain intact. Your split-tongued words were merely a boorish intrusion on a dream of much deeper things — the Incomparably Remote.

"And now let me close my eyes once again to follow in dreams the backward path far beyond
all
noise and numbers, falling into that world where I am the brother of silence and share a single face with the void."

But the reptile's voice continues to mock me, night after night. It will laugh and rave throughout all the humid nights of history. Until that perfect lid of darkness falls over this world once more.

The place was an old studio. To him it seemed abandoned, yet who knows? Certainly nothing there was in its place — not the broken odds and ends lying about, not the scattered papers, not even the dust. The panes of the skylight were caked with it. Yet who can be sure? Perhaps there was some imperceptible interval between occupation and abandonment, some fine phase of things which he was simply unable to detect at the moment. He stooped and picked up a few of the wrinkled papers, which appeared to be drawings. Now a little rain began drooling down the panes of the skylight.

The drawings. He shuffled a stack of them page after page before his eyes. So intricate, everything in them was made of tiny, tiny hairs or little veins, insect veins. There were shapes: he could not tell what they were supposed to be, but something about the shape of the shapes, their twistings and the way they flared around, was so horrible. A little rain seeped in through some fine cracks in the windowpanes above; it dripped down and made strange marks on the dusty floor of the old studio.

Someone was coming up the stairs outside the door of the studio. So he hid behind that door, and, when that someone came in, he, without looking back, went out.

Tip-toeing down the stairs, running down the street in the rain.

He was walking now, and the rain was sluicing vigorously in the gutters. And something else that he saw was in there too. It looked like the tail of an animal, but a very intricate tail. It was being dragged slowly along by the run-off in the gutter, and it made weird wriggling movements. When it was farther away, the intricacies of the object - those involved patterns in which he thought he saw a face smiling so peacefully - were no longer discernible, and he felt relieved.

But the rain was coming down even harder now, so he retreated into a shelter along the street. It was just a little room with a wooden bench, open on one side and rain running off its roof, long watery ropes of rain that were swinging a little in the wind. Very damp in there, and the frayed edges of shadows waving on the three walls. Damp smell, with something else too, some unsavory enigma about the place, something in its very outlines, its contours. What was it that happened in here, and could that be a little blood over there?

The bench where he had sat down was now gleaming with dampness under moonlight. At the other end, almost entirely absorbed into the dark little corner, was a bent figure, almost folded in half. It groaned and moved a little. Finally it straightened up, and its intricately tangled hair came tumbling down into the moonlight. Along the bench it slid, dragging itself and its rags slowly to his side. He, on the other hand, could not move an inch, not a hair.

Then, from somewhere within all that tangled intricacy, a pair of eyes opened, and a pair of lips. And they said to him: "Let me tell you what my name is."

But when the figure leaned over, smiling so placidly, those shapeless lips had to whisper their words into the cold damp ear of a corpse.

Five candles burned the whole time, at the five points of the star. They never went out. The man standing in the middle was tall, his forehead taut. His shirt was once white but had yellowed to reflect the moon in the dark sky above the twisted trees outside the window. Inside there was only that great empty room with the single star, the five candles, and the man.

Also there was the book, which the man knelt to read at the center of the star. Book of the Damned. It told of other worlds, and the man summoned them. He had visions, visions in the smoke of the candles, in the light of the moon which shone on the dull dark floor of the room. The patterns on the walls swirled in the candlelight and in the moonlight.

Worlds bloomed and withered, spun and stopped, flourished and decayed. In the smoke of the candles. But they were all the same. All of them had different colors, just as the one he knew, and different seasons: each beat like a hunted heart. "No more blood," he cried, choking. "These worlds merely mimic my own." And again: "No more blood!"

The candles, the moon, the patterns on the wall, and the howling wind heard; and all agreed to welcome him to this other world, which was already theirs.

Now it would be his.

The flames barely fluttered as he collapsed into the star, his face so white above his yellow shirt and beneath the yellow moon. A beautiful, bloodless white.

How foolish they were who thought he was dead: who buried him in that sticky earth, so moist and warm in summer. And dark as blood.

Where ultimate knowledge is denied, mystery must rule. Every enterprise is instigated by it; every word is founded upon it. Above all does it live in the ruins of certain cities, where everything has been denied and even the shadows suffocate in the dense ether of mystery.

A type of worship may even be devoted to the ruined state, consecrating earthly objects that in their decrepitude have attained a divine status. Crumbling pillars shake off their burden, forsake their function, and stand serenely above the rubble of old pediments. And what domes and spires may still be held aloft release their grasp upon the gray heights of a barren horizon. Below, carven images of gods and beasts all abandon themselves to shattered confusion, their once perfect likenesses now heaped and corroded, their significance lost. Skeletons eased of all flesh openly consort with stones and dust, liberated from the duties of life.

Indeed, the ideal of the necropolis appears to be annihilation. Everywhere things are effacing or disguising their existence, seeking a mask of shadows or a veil of pale light wavering across their disfigured surfaces. But their struggle for obscurity nonetheless remains only a matter of form - an invasion of vitality still threatens the ruins of certain cities.

And though it may arrive in different guises, the outcome will be the same: a new genesis.

Preceding the moment of revivification there may be a sudden darkness which embraces the dead city, and within the darkness great flashes of light create the appearance that things are in motion. There may only be a frail mist which drifts among the ruins and slithers into their every fracture. Or there may be nothing at all, or nothing that may be witnessed. Yet all the same it will happen that something begins to stir where, for so long, everything had been at rest. Then it will seem that skeletons have broken the silence with moans of life and the stones themselves have emerged from sleep. And other things join in the awakening, as old dreams sink into the ocean of unmemory and the ruins are recreated in a new semblance.

The source of this resurrection-to-come may remain unknown, its purposes secreted in the remotest parts of the creation. Yet no force ever withstands the way of this mysterious maker of new worlds, just as no world is ever allowed to endure in its greatness. For nothing is allowed a face but that it may be only a mask without a constant soul; nothing is allowed a mask but that it may wither and finally be torn from its face. And upon these truths will all things thrive in the great chains of that strange and endless dream, and flourish - let it be said - in the mysterious atmosphere of ruination.

For wherever mystery serves as a foundation, only ruins may be erected. There, every structure is secretly ravaged as it rises, for beneath lie the wavering substrata and a strange life that will not share itself with any other. Yet more strangely, neither will it long tolerate the dignity of a picturesque decay, and thus is forever creeping into the desolate ruins of certain cities to violate their sleep. Then will the wreckage be resurrected in new shapes, the scenery pulled up on another stage, lively faces painted upon dead players, their twisted limbs restrung with wires.

But mystery itself remains guarded, its life sealed far away from its creation. And in a world that merely seems to possess a life of its own, figures parade in a state of terror which is immortal, unchanging, and which endures, through all the phases of a fateful ordeal, as their only inviolable birthright.

After tabulating our number of days on this earth, we would still have to multiply this sum several times in order to take into account our dreams
 — 
those days
inside
our nights. Several more lifetimes
 
must therefore be added, including those in which the dead continue to live and those in which the living are dead; those in which such trivial occurrences as an innocent laugh acquire a profound meaning and those in which the most awesome events have none at all; those which are made very strange by supernatural powers and those in which magic itself seems commonplace; those in which we play ourselves and those in which we seem to be someone else; those in which everything appears frightening and harmful and those in which indifference is the single note that sounds throughout.

These contradictions make our dreams seem negligible, and this is what enables them to be ignored in the tabulation of our days.

But there are still those dreams which are waiting for others to come along whose terms and conditions will cancel them out. These are the leftover dreams, our dark days, which have yet to fall victim to mathematics, and they are the only ones that count for anything. And it is the same with our waking days. Only a few of those escape nullification by contradiction, that process of cancellation which is going on all the time.

In any case, neither dreams nor days ever survive long before their counterparts annihilate them. It is quite possible that, in our last moments, there will be nothing left which we might look back on as a lifetime.

But will this nothingness itself endure, or will it too be cancelled out by some inviolable and unsuspected form of being, terminating at last in a kind of double oblivion?

Illusions struggle with illusions.

And in the expansive silence of that landscape nothing is settled or certain, not excepting the image of infinity presented by the stars and blackness that seem to spread immensely above. For below, one may vow, extends another blackness, an endless ebony plateau whose surface is like polished stone. There the sky would appear to have thrown down stars, setting them within the shining darkness of the lower world so that it might contemplate from afar these glittering relics, scintillant cast-offs from its ancient treasure, the brilliant debris of its dreams.

Thus, both above and below one may see the flickering of these luminous motes, quivering bodies held captive in the unbroken web of blackness. And the abysmal web itself seems to tremble; for nothing there is at peace or secure in its nature. Even the emptiness that separates the starlight from its reflection upon the great glassy plain is an imitation void. For, having made the level land its mirror, the sky has gazed too long and too deeply, reaching into itself and embracing its own visions, saturating the distance between the thing and its simulacrum. All space is virtual; the infinite is illusory. There, in that landscape, a dimension has died, annihilating depth and leaving behind only a lustrous image which seems to float far and wide upon the infinite surface of a black ocean.

And it is said that this ocean is itself merely a starry phantasm glimpsed in certain eyes... eyes that may be seen as one wanders the streets of strange cities... eyes that are like two stars laid deep in a black mirror.

It seemed to him that the old mysteries had been made for another universe, and not the one he came to know. Yet there was no doubt that they had once deeply impressed him. Intoxicated by their wonder, by raw wonder itself, he might never have turned away from the golden blade held aloft by crimson hands, from the mask with seven eyes, the idol of moons, from the ceremony called the Night of the Night, along with other rites of illumination and all the ageless doctrines which derived from their frenzies. How was it they failed him? When was the first moment he found himself growing impatient with their music and their gyrations, when the first moment he witnessed these mysteries and descended into another kind of wonder?

Before his disillusion was discovered, he walked out on his old sect. He did not waste any time, however, in casting about for a new one. Unfortunately the same problems arose with each of them: they all, in his view, were nullified by their own profoundness and by a collection of mysteries that failed to break the surface of the bottomless soul, failed to place themselves at eye level with things. These mysteries thus condemned all that lay outside of them to triviality, whether deserving of this fate or not. Injustice was their essence and their power. Had these routines of enlightenment actually been intended for a universe not undermined by mockery and confusion? But to bother even with the dream of such a place was useless, especially when he could conceive a plan more to his purpose. This entailed nothing less than the invention of a cult, a solitary one to be sure, better suited to his profane vision.

He set out to locate a site of worship, a place abandoned, old, isolated, and decayed. Actually there were many such places to choose from, and, by a completely arbitrary means of selection, he soon managed to settle on one of them. This numinous structure — bashed in roof and battered walls — he cluttered with the fetishes of his new creed. These consisted of anything he could find which had a divine aura of disuse, of unfulfillment, hopelessness, disintegration, of grotesque imbecility and senselessness. Dolls with broken faces he put on display in corners and upon crumbling pedestals. Thin, lifeless trees he dug up whole from their natural graves and transplanted into the cracked tiles of the floor's mosaic; then he hung lamps of thick green glass by corroded chains from the ceiling, and the withered branches of the trees were bathed in hues of livid mold. As were the faces of the dolls and those of various mummified creatures, including two human abortions which were set floating in jars at opposite ends of an altar draped with rags. His vestments were also of rags, their frayed edges fluttering like dead leaves about to fall. Standing before the altar, he raised his arms over something that smoldered, which was his own dried excrement upon a tarnished plate. He glanced about at the defunct forest of which he was king, at the brittle twisting branches (some of which were adorned with hanging dolls and other things), at all the various objects of refuse he had added to his collection, finally at the green waters of those two occupied jars glowing upon the rags of the altar, and he widened his mouth to speak, and he said... nothing. So distracted was he with a gruesome contentment: his old wonder had been ravaged and his hunger for mockery fulfilled.

But this contentment did not last; how could it? Illusion throws its invisible shimmer over all things, no matter what level of debasement they have struggled to win. Whatever may appear, sooner or later, will appear in greatness. Thus, gradually, the pathetic, lusterless world he had made, and labored to make low, had rebelliously elevated itself beyond its surface decrepitude and assumed a kind of grandeur in his eyes. The naked limbs of what had once been trees and now were empty objects, hollow abstractions mocked by the sarcastic verdure of the green lamps, underwent transfiguration to inherit the suppleness of all symbols and the dignity of a dream. Each of the disfigured dolls, vile and insane mimics of the human nightmare, gave up their evil and revealed themselves as the protectors of countless inexpressible mysteries and myriad secret enchantments. And the precocious corpses upon the altar no longer drifted about pointlessly, embalmed in their wombs of foggy glass, but hovered serenely in becalmed fathoms of infinite wonder.

His effort to strip away the finery of objects and events, and to exist only in the balm of desolation, was a failure. The experiment had only resulted in the discovery of a deeper stratum of preciousness in things. And having revealed this substratum, his eyes began to attack its treasures with all their savage wondering. Everything became newly subject to a mockery that was not of his own making, and to an onslaught of confusion that threatened to violate his precious world of death and dolls. But was there perhaps a more profound source of mockery and confusion that could be excavated beneath the deceptive wealth which he had so quickly exhausted? If there was, he did not possess the ambition, at this point, to seek it out. Dropping to the shattered mosaic of the floor, collapsing under the now lovely doll-hung trees, he lay abject in ragged robes of despair throughout a full day and late into the night.

But toward the latest hour of evening he was disturbed by distant sounds. He had been away from his old sect so long that at first he did not recognize the peculiar clamor of the ceremony called the Night of the Night. When he walked out into the cold air outside his solitary temple, he saw the gyration of shadows upon the summit of the hills. How could they persist in their madness, he wondered. Nevertheless, for reasons beyond explanation, he joined them.

And they welcomed him, for they could see the ordeals he had undergone, the powers he had gained. He, on the other hand, felt nothing; but he easily devoured all the honors held out to him: these were the only sustenance left which satisfied his hunger for mockery. And when they presented him with the accoutrements of high priest, he could not suppress a smile as he gazed upon the wide, dead sky.

Now his are the crimson hands which hold aloft the golden blade, his the face behind the mask with seven eyes. And he is the one who stands in shining robes before the massive idol of moons, trembling the while with wonder.