Oh my storybook town, how privileged I have been to suffer a few brief chapters in your sumptuous history of decay. I have studied your most obscure passages and found them as dark as the waters of your canals.
My town, my storybook, myself—how long we have held on! But it seems we will have to make up for this endurance and each, in our turn, must disappear. Every brick of yours, every bone of mine, every word in our book…everything gone forever. Everything, perhaps, except the sound of those bells haunting an empty mist through an eternal twilight.
Vastarien
Within the blackness of his sleep a few lights began to glow like candles in a cloistered cell. Their illumination was unsteady and dim, issuing from no definite source. Nonetheless, he now discovered many shapes beneath the shadows: tall buildings whose rooftops nodded groundward, wide buildings whose façades followed the curve of a street, dark buildings whose windows and doorways tilted like badly hung paintings. And even if he found himself unable to fix his own location in this scene, he knew where his dreams had delivered him once more.
Even as the warped structures multiplied in his vision, crowding the lost distance, he possessed a sense of intimacy with each of them, a special knowledge of the spaces inside them and of the streets which coiled themselves around their mass. Once again he knew the depths of their foundations, where an obscure life seemed to establish itself, a sequestered civilization of echoes flourishing among groaning walls. Yet upon his probing more extensively into such interiors, certain difficulties presented themselves: stairways that wandered off-course into useless places; caged elevators that urged unwanted stops on their passengers; thin ladders ascending into a maze of shafts and conduits, the dark valves and arteries of a petrified and monstrous organism.
And he knew that every corner of this corroded world was prolific with choices, even if they had to be made blindly in a place where clear consequences and a hierarchy of possibilities were lacking. For there might be a room whose decor exuded a desolate serenity which at first attracts the visitor, who then discovers certain figures enveloped in plush furniture, figures that do not move or speak but only stare; and, concluding that these weary manikins have exercised a bizarre indulgence in repose, the visitor must ponder the alternatives: to linger or to leave?
Eluding the claustral enchantments of such rooms, his gaze now roamed the streets of this dream and scanned the altitudes beyond high sloping roofs. The stars seemed to be no more than silvery cinders which showered up from the mouths of great chimneys and clung to something dark and dense heaving above, a material presence that slouched and slumped, nearly lowering over the horizon. It appeared to him that certain high towers nearly breached this sagging blackness, stretching themselves nightward to attain the farthest possible remove from the world below. And toward the peak of one of the highest towers he spied vague silhouettes that moved hectically in a bright window, twisting and leaning upon the glass like shadow-puppets in the fever of some mad dispute.
Through the mazy streets his vision slowly glided, as if carried along by a sluggish draft. Darkened windows reflected the beams of grotesquely configured streetlamps, and lighted windows betrayed strange scenes which were left behind long before their full mystery could overwhelm the dreaming traveler. Wandering into thoroughfares more remote, he soared past cluttered gardens and crooked gates, drifted alongside a fence of rotted palings that seemed to teeter into an abyss, and floated over bridges that arched above the purling waters of black canals.
Near a certain streetcorner, a place of supernatural clarity and stillness, he saw two figures standing beneath the crystalline glaze of a lantern ensconced high upon a wall of carved stone. Their shadows were perfect columns of blackness upon the livid pavement; their faces were a pair of faded masks concealing profound schemes. And they appeared to have lives of their own, with no awareness of their dreaming observer, who wished only to live with these specters and know their dreams, to remain in this place that owed nothing to corporeal existence.
Never, it seemed, could he be forced to abandon this domain of wayward wonders. Never.
Victor Keirion awoke with a brief convulsion of his limbs, as if he had been chaotically scrambling to break his fall from an imaginary height. For a moment he held his eyes closed, hoping to preserve the dissipating euphoria of the dream. Finally he blinked once or twice. Moonlight through a curtainless window allowed him the image of his outstretched arms and his somewhat twisted hands. Releasing his awkward hold on the edge of the sheeted mattress, he rolled onto his back. Then he groped around until his fingers found the cord dangling from the light above the bed. A small, barely furnished room appeared.
He pushed himself up and reached toward the painted metal nightstand. Through the spaces between his fingers he saw the pale gray binding of a book and some of the dark letters tooled upon its cover: V, S, R, N. Suddenly he withdrew his hand without touching the book, for the magical intoxication of the dream had died, and he feared that he would not be able to revive it.
Freeing himself from coarse bedcovers, he planted his feet on the cold floor, elbows resting on his legs and hands loosely folded. His hair and eyes were pale and his complexion rather grayish, suggesting the color of certain clouds or that of long confinement. The only window in the room was just a few steps away, but he kept himself from approaching it, from even glancing in its direction. He knew exactly what he would see at that time of night: tall buildings, wide buildings, dark buildings, a scattering of stars and lights, and some lethargic movement in the streets below.
In so many ways the city outside the window was a semblance of that other place, which now seemed impossibly far off and inaccessible. But the likeness was evident only to his inner vision, only in the recollected images he formed when his eyes were closed or out of focus. It would be difficult to conceive of a creature for whom this world—its bare form seen with open eyes—represented a coveted paradise.
Now standing before the window, his hands deep in the pockets of a papery bathrobe, he saw that something was missing from the view, some crucial property that was denied to the stars above and the streets below, some unearthly essence needed to save them. Though unspoken, the word unearthly reverberated in the room. In that place and at that hour, the paradoxical absence, the missing quality, became clear to him: it was the element of unreality, or perhaps of a reality so saturated with its own presence that it had made a leap into the unreal.
Such was the secret sanctuary of Victor Keirion, a votary of that wretched sect of souls who believe that the only value of this world lies in its power—at certain times—to suggest another. Nevertheless, the place he now surveyed through the high window could never be anything but the most gauzy phantom of that other place, nothing save a shadowy mimic of the anatomy of that great dream. And though there were indeed times when one might be deceived, isolated moments when a gift for disguise triumphed, the impersonation could never be perfect or lasting. No true challenge to the rich unreality of Vastarien, where every formation suggested a thousand others, every sound disseminated everlasting echoes, every word founded a world. No horror, no joy was the equal of the abysmally vibrant sensations known in this place that was elsewhere, this spellbinding retreat where all experiences were interwoven to compose fantastic textures of feeling, a fine and dark tracery of limitless patterns. For everything in the unreal points to the infinite, and everything in Vastarien was unreal, unbounded by the strictures of existing. Even its most humble aspects proclaimed this truth: was there anything or anywhere in tedious actuality that could conjure the abundant and strange imaginings in the dream?
Then, as he focused his eyes upon a distant part of the city, he recalled the place that had opened the door to his long-sought abode of exquisite disfigurations.
Nothing of what lay within was intimated by its modest entranceway: a rectangle of smudged glass within another rectangle of scuffed wood, a battered thing lodged within a brick wall at the bottom of a stairway lead
ing down from a crumbling street. And it pushed easily inward, merely a delicate formality between the underground shop and the outside world. Inside was an open room of vaguely circular shape that seemed more like the lobby of an old hotel than a bookstore. The circumference of the room was composed of crowded shelves whose separate sections were joined to one another to create a polygon of eleven sides, with a long desk standing where a twelfth would have been. Beyond the desk stood more bookshelves, their considerable length leading into shadows. At the furthest point from this part of the shop, Victor Keirion began his circuit of the shelves, which appeared so promising in their array of ruddy bindings, like remnants of a luxuriant autumn.
Very soon, however, he felt betrayed as the mystique of the Librairie de Grimoires was stripped away to reveal, in his eyes, a sideshow of charlatanry. For this disillusionment he had only himself to blame. It was his own fault that he continually subjected himself to the discrepancy between what he hoped to find and what he actually found in such establishments. In truth, there was little basis for his belief that there existed some arcana of a different kind altogether from that tendered by the books before him, all of which were sodden with an obscene reality. The other worlds portrayed in these books served only as annexes of this one; they were impostors of the authentic unreality which was the only redemption for Victor Keirion. And it was this terminal point that he sought, not those guidebooks of the “way” to useless destinations, heavens or hells that were mere pretexts for circumnavigating the real and reveling in it. For he dreamed of shadowed volumes that preached no earthly catechisms but delineated only a tenebrous liturgy of the spectral and rites of salvation by way of meticulous derangement. His absolute: to dwell among the ruins of reality.
And it seemed to surpass all probability that there existed no bibliographic representation of this dream, no elaboration of this vision in a delirious bible that would be the blight of all others—a scripture that would begin with portents of apocalypse and end with the wreck of all creation.
He had, in fact, come upon passages in certain books that approached this ideal, hinting to the reader—almost admonishing him—that the pages before his eyes were about to offer a view from the abyss and cast a wavering light on desolate hallucinations. To become the wind in the dead of winter and howl the undoing of all that would abide in warmth and light. So might begin an enticing verse in a volume of esoterica. But soon the bemazed visionary would falter, retracting the promised flight to emaciated landscapes of unbeing, perhaps offering an apologetics for this lapse into the unreal. The work would then take up the timeworn theme, disclosing its true purpose in belaboring the most futile and profane of all ambitions: the dream of attaining some untainted good, with mystic knowledge as its drudge. The vision of a disastrous enlightenment was conjured up in passing and then cast aside. What remained was invariably a metaphysics as systematically trivial and debased as the world it purported to transcend, a manual outlining the path to some hypothetical state of pure glory. What remained lost was the revelation that nothing ever known has ended in glory; that all which ends does so in exhaustion, confusion, and debris.
All the same, a book that contained even a deceitful gesture toward Victor Keirion’s truly eccentric absolute might indeed serve his purpose. Directing the attention of a bookseller to selected contents of such books, he would say: “I have an interest in a certain subject area, perhaps you will see…that is, I wonder, do you know of other, what should I say, sources that you would be able to recommend to assist me in my research, by which I mean…”
Sometimes he was referred to another bookseller or to the owner of a private collection. Occasionally it happened that he had been ludicrously misunderstood when he found himself on the fringe of a society devoted to some strictly demonic enterprise.
The very bookshop in which Victor Keirion was now browsing represented only the most recent digression in a search without progress. But he had learned to be cautious and would try to waste as little time as possible in determining whether or not there was anything for him here. Thus, he intently flipped through the pages of one book after another.
Absorbed as he was in perusing so much verbiage, he was startled when someone with a voice like that of a child spoke to him.
“Have you seen our friend?” asked a nearby voice, startling him somewhat. Victor Keirion turned to face the stranger. The man was rather small and wore a black overcoat; his hair was also black and fell loosely across his forehead. Besides his general appearance, there was also something about his presence that made one think of a crow, a scavenging creature in wait. “Has he come out of his sanctum?” the man asked, gesturing toward the empty desk and the dark area behind it.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t seen anyone,” Keirion replied. “I only now noticed you.”
“I can’t help being quiet. Look at these little feet,” the man said, indicating his highly polished pair of black shoes. Without thinking, Keirion looked down; then, feeling duped, he looked up again at the smiling stranger.
“You look very bored,” said the human crow.
“I’m sorry?”
“Never mind. I can see that I’m bothering you.” Then the man walked away, his coat flapping slightly, and began scanning some distant bookshelves. “I’ve never seen you in here before,” he said from across the room.
“I’ve never been in here before,” Keirion answered.
“Have you ever read this?” the stranger asked, pulling down a book and holding up its wordless black cover.
“Never,” Keirion replied without so much as glancing at the book. Somehow this seemed the best action to take with this character, who appeared to be foreign in some indefinable way.
“Well, you must be looking for something special,” continued the other man, replacing the black book on its shelf. “And I know what that’s like, when you’re looking for something very special. Have you ever heard of a book, an extremely special book, that is not…yes, that is not about something, but actually is that something?”
For the first time the obnoxious stranger had managed to intrigue Keirion rather than annoy him. “That sounds…” he started to say, but then the other man exclaimed:
“There he is, there he is. Excuse me.”
It seemed that the proprietor—that mutual friend—had finally made his appearance and was now standing behind the desk, looking toward his two customers. “My friend,” said the crow-man as he stepped with outstretched hand over to the smoothly bald and softly fat gentleman. The two of them shook hands. For a few moments they chatted quietly, much too quietly for Victor Keirion to hear what they were saying. Then the crow-man was invited behind the desk, and—led by the corpulent bookseller—made his way into the darkness at the back of the shop. In a distant corner of that darkness the brilliant rectangle of a doorway suddenly flashed into outline, admitting through its frame a large, two-headed shadow.
Left alone among the worthless volumes of that shop, Victor Keirion felt the sad frustration of the uninvited, the abandoned. More than ever he had become infected with hopes and curiosities of an indeterminable kind. And he soon found it impossible to remain outside that radiant little room the other two had entered, and at whose door he presently stood in silence.
The room was a cramped cubicle within which stood another cubicle formed by free-standing bookcases, creating four very narrow aisleways in the space between them. From the doorway he could not see how the inner cubicle might be entered, but he heard the voices of the others whispering within. Stepping quietly, he began making his way along the perimeter of the room, his eyes surveying a wealth of odd-looking volumes.
Immediately he sensed that something of a special nature awaited his discovery, and the evidence for this intuition began to build. Each book that he examined served as a clue in this delirious investigation, a cryptic sign which engaged his powers of interpretation and imparted the faith to proceed. Many of the works were written in foreign languages he did not rea
d; some appeared to be composed in ciphers based on familiar characters and others seemed to be transcribed in a wholly artificial cryptography. But in every one of these books he found an oblique guidance, some feature of more or less indirect significance: a strangeness in the typeface, pages and bindings of uncommon texture, abstract diagrams suggesting no orthodox ritual or occult system. Even greater anticipation was inspired by certain illustrated plates, mysterious drawings and engravings that depicted scenes and situations unlike anything he could name. And such works as Cynothoglys or The Noctuary of Tine conveyed schemes so bizarre, so remote from known texts and treatises of the esoteric tradition, that he felt assured of the sense of his quest.
The whispering grew louder, though no more distinct, as he edged around a corner of that inner cubicle and anxiously noted the opening at its far end. At the same time he was distracted, for no apparent reason, by a small grayish volume leaning within a gap created by oversized tomes on either side. The little book had been set upon the highest shelf, making it necessary for him to stretch himself, as if on an upright torture rack, to reach it. Trying not to give away his presence by the sounds of his pain, he finally secured the ashen-colored object—as pale as his own coloring—between the tips of his first two fingers. Mutely he strained to slide it quietly from its place. This act accomplished, he slowly shrunk down to his original stature and looked into the book’s brittle pages.
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