Silent in light the ghost regards him; in silence he regards the ghost, smelling in the heat and disorder of the bedroom another smell unpresent, a smell hotter still and not of death; but only the moment that precedes it. And in that moment, itself composed of light, it is again as if he rides in the spectator’s seat, with helplessly opened eyes to see the Whitechapel streets, the rowdy shine of the taverns emptying into the larger darknesses: the sallow defeated drunkenness of the prostitute, in her ears one of the tavern songs, on her lips the base quartet of its refrain and: his hand, her breast: his smile, her stare: his motion, her transfixion – like the stare that greets the true emergence of art, the eyes that see clearly, the ears spoiled now and forever for the cheap grind of tavern songs, popular tunes no longer able to enter these ears now ringing to the muffled song of screams: and ripped skirts and spooling guts and that faint whicker of breath as the busy hands stay busy and the night becomes one music in this last and greatest collaboration: she is music and its consummation, it is her song which will live forever: and he her conductor, her accompanist, her instrument as well: and Sullivan behind those eyes sees everything, everything, with the immediacy with which he viewed the death of Gilbert but none of the attending bitterness or satisfaction.
Watching the specter emerge from its portrait, Sullivan had had a sudden, flickering apprehension of his father, the bandmaster, and the professors at the Leipzig Institute, a solemn and portentous bunch like his father, all of them clustered toward him, filled with ideas of what should be done, of what constituted form. He had given them a symphony, then the music for The Tempest in response to their urgings and what had he gotten in return? An easy success which went nowhere, then after the travels with Grove, the triumph of the recovered Schubert manuscripts, they had gotten him Cox and Box and later Trial by Jury and the rest and the – well, then what? What had he become, what had Gilbert been? Dealers in magic and spells and blessings and curses and all kinds of verses, they had lived so that Gilbert – Sullivan had seen with such perfect clarity – would drown and he now would be taunted by the perceived ghost of a madman in Whitechapel who had carved out the bowels of prostitutes in the effort, the solemn and serious effort to produce the light of the world. No less than Sullivan himself, Jack had sought the Light of the World.
Sullivan lay back on the bed, sensing with a sudden and terrible apprehension, the full circularity of his life. So be it then, he said though not aloud. Worthless lover, despoiler of women (but never their eviscerator!), sacker and pillager of his own talent, he lay on the bed, facing the taunting mask of the specter, and said in reply nothing at all, passing at last into some apprehension of a future which neither included nor excluded but simply accommodated him: as Jack was accommodated: as the women in their bloody silence and defeat were accommodated, and preserved.
A week later, Jack, the ghost of past and future as well, came with enormous and clever hands in the early dawn. “Not my kidneys, not that now but my heart!” Sullivan screamed desperately and banged the bell beside him with the heel of his hand, banged and banged the bell, but when his nephew came he could see it was already too late; the dead face of the composer arched against the escaping hands of the assassin seeking the Light of the World, trying to find the Lost Chord while the dusty, unheard choirs urged him indolently to his destiny.
THOMAS LIGOTTI
The Tsalal
THOMAS LIGOTTI has been described as “the most startling and unexpected discovery since Clive Barker”, and his distinctive fiction has appeared in such anthologies as The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Prime Evil, Fine Frights, A Whisper of Blood, The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and each of the previous volumes of The Best New Horror.
His stories have been collected in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe: His Lives and Works and, more recently, Noctuary from Robinson/Carroll & Graf, and The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Others published by Silver Salamander Press.
“ ‘The Tsalal’ is just another instance demonstrating my fondness for really crummy small towns,” reveals the author. “I’d love to see a photography book devoted to these wonderfully dispirited places that run the length of the United States.”
We doubt that any photographer could capture the bizarre nature of Moxton and its strange inhabitants as well as Ligotti does with the following novella . . .
1 Moxton’s leavetaking
None of them could say how it was they had returned to the skeleton town. Some had reached the central cross streets, where a single traffic light, long dead, hung down like a dark lantern. There they paused and stood dumbstruck, scarecrows standing out of place, their clothes lying loose and worn about scrawny bodies. Others slowly joined them, drifting in from the outskirts or disembarking from vehicles weighted down with transportable possessions. Then all of them gathered silently together on that vast, gray afternoon.
They seemed too exhausted to speak and for some time appeared not to recognize their location among the surrounding forms and spaces. Their eyes were fixed with an insomniac’s stare, the stigma of both monumental fatigue and painful attentiveness to everything in sight. Their faces were narrow and ashen, a few specks mingling with the dusty surface of that day and seeking to hide themselves within its pale hours. Opposing them was the place they had abandoned and to which they had somehow returned. Only one had not gone with them. He had stayed in the skeleton town, and now they had come back to it, though none of them could say how or why this had happened.
A tall, bearded man who wore a flat-brimmed hat looked up at the sky. Within the clouds was a great seeping darkness, the overflow of the coming night and of a blackness no one had ever seen. After a moment the man said, “It will be dark soon.” His words were almost whispered and the effort of speaking appeared to take the last of his strength. But it was not simply a depleted vigor that kept him and the others from turning about and making a second exodus from the town.
No one could say how far they had gone before they reversed their course and turned back toward the place which they believed themselves to have abandoned forever. They could not remember what juncture or dead end they had reached that aborted the evacuation. Part of that day was lost to them, certain images and experiences hidden away. They could feel these things closeted somewhere in their minds, even if they could not call them to memory. They were sure they had seen something they should not remember. And so no one suggested that they set out again on the road that would take them from the town. Yet they could not accept staying in that place.
A paralysis had seized them, that state of soul known to those who dwell on the highest plane of madness, aristocrats of insanity whose nightmares confront them on either side of sleep. Soon enough the wrenching effect of this psychic immobility became far less tolerable than the prospect of simply giving up and staying in the town. Such was the case with at least one of these cataleptic puppets, a sticklike woman who said, “We have no choice. He has stayed in his house.” Then another voice among them shouted, “He has stayed too long.”
A sudden wind moved through the streets, flapping the garments of the weary homecomers and swinging the traffic light that hung over their heads. For a moment all the signals lit up in every direction, disturbing the deep gray twilight. The colors drenched the bricks of buildings and reflected in windows with a strange intensity. Then the traffic light was dark once more, its fit of transformation done.
The man wearing a flat-brimmed hat spoke again, straining his whispery voice. “We must meet together after we have rested.”
As the crowd of thin bodies sluggishly dispersed there was almost nothing spoken among them. An old woman shuffling along the sidewalk did not address anyone in particular when she said, “Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.”
Someone who had heard these words looked at the old woman and asked, “Missus, what did you say?” But the old woman appeared genuinely confused to learn she had s
aid anything at all.
2 The one who stayed behind
In the house where a man named Ray Starns and a succession of others before him once resided, Andrew Maness ascended the stairway leading to the uppermost floor, and there entered a small room that he had converted to a study and a chamber of meditation. The window in this room looked out over the rooftops in the neighborhood to offer a fair view of Moxton’s main street. He watched as everyone abandoned the town, and he watched them when they returned. Now far into the night, he was still watching after they had all retreated to their homes. And every one of these homes was brightly illuminated throughout the night, while Main Street was in darkness. Even the traffic light was extinguished.
He looked away from the window and fixed his eyes on a large book that lay open on his desk a few steps across the room. The pages of the book were brown and brittle as fallen leaves. “Your wild words were true,” he said to the book. “My friends did not go far before they were sent trudging back. You know what made them come home, but I can only guess. So many things you have devoutly embellished, yet you offer nothing on this point. As you say, ‘The last vision dies with him who beholds it. Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.’ But the seed that has been planted still grows.”
Andrew Maness closed the book. Written in dark ink upon its cover was the word TSALAL.
3 The power of a place
Before long everyone in Moxton had shut themselves in their houses, and the streets at the center of town were deserted. A few streetlights shone on the dull facades of buildings: small shops, a modest restaurant, a church of indefinite denomination, and even a movie theater, which no one had patronized for some weeks. Surrounding this area were clusters of houses that in the usual manner collect about the periphery of skeleton towns. These were structures of serene desolation that had settled into the orbit of a dead star. They were simple pinewood coffins, full of stillness, leaning upright against a silent sky. Yet it was this silence that allowed sounds from a fantastic distance to be carried into it. And the stillness of these houses and their narrow streets led the eye to places astonishingly remote. There were even moments when the entire veil of desolate serenity began to tremble with the tumbling colors of chaos.
Everything seems so unusual in the plainness of these neighborhoods that clutter the margins of a skeleton town. Often no mention is made of the peculiar virtues of such places by their residents. Even so, there may be a house that does not stand along one of those narrow streets but at its end. This house may even be somewhat different from the others in the neighborhood. Possibly it is taller than the other houses or displays a weathervane that spins in the wind of storms. Perhaps its sole distinguishing quality is that it has been long unoccupied, making it available as an empty vessel in which much of that magical desolation of narrow streets and coffin-shaped houses comes to settle and distill like an essence of the old alchemists. It seems part of a design – some great inevitability – that this house should exist among the other houses that clutch at the edges of a skeleton town. And the sense of this vast, all-encompassing design in fact arises within the spindly residents of the area when one day, unexpectedly, there arrives a red-headed man with the key to this particular house.
4 Memories of a Moxton childhood
Andrew Maness closed the book named TSALAL. His eyes then looked around the room, which had not seemed so small to him in the days when he and his father occupied the house, days too long ago for anyone else to recall with clarity. He alone was able to review those times with a sure memory, and he summoned the image of a small bed in the far corner of the room.
As a child he would lie awake deep into the night, his eyes wandering about the moonlit room that seemed so great to his doll-like self. How the shadows enlarged that room, opening certain sections of it to the black abyss beyond the house and beyond the blackness of night, reaching into a blackness no one had ever seen. During these moments things seemed to be changing all around him, and it felt as if he had something to do with this changing. The shadows on the pale walls began to curl about like smoke, creating a swirling murkiness that at times approached sensible shapes – the imperfect zoology of cloud-forms – but soon drifted into hazy nonsense. Smoky shadows gathered everywhere in the room.
It appeared to him that he could see what was making these shadows which moved so slowly and smoothly. He could see that simple objects around him were changing their shapes and making strange shadows. In the moonlight he could see the candle in its tarnished holder resting on the bedstand. The candle had burned quite low when he blew out its flame hours before. Now it was shooting upwards like a flower growing too fast, and it sprouted outward with tallowy vines and blossoms, waxy wings and limbs, pale hands with wriggling fingers and other parts he could not name. When he looked across the room he saw that something was moving back and forth upon the windowsill with a staggered motion. This was a wooden soldier which suddenly stretched out the claws of a crab and began clicking them against the windowpanes. Other things that he could barely see were also changing in the room; he saw shadows twisting about in strange ways. Everything was changing, and he knew that he was doing something to make things change. But this time he could not stop the changes. It seemed the end of everything, the infernal apocalypse . . .
Only when he felt his father shaking him did he become aware that he had been screaming. Soon he grew quiet. The candle on his bedstand now burned brightly and was not as it had been a few moments before. He quickly surveyed the room to verify that nothing else remained changed. The wooden soldier was lying on the floor, and its two arms were fixed by its sides.
He looked at his father, who was sitting on the bed and still had on the same dark clothes he had worn when he held church services earlier that day. Sometimes he would see his father asleep in one of the chairs in the parlor or nodding at his desk where he was working on his next sermon. But he had never known his father to sleep during the night.
The Reverend Maness spoke his son’s name, and the younger Andrew Maness focused on his father’s narrow face, recognizing the crown of white hair, which yet retained a hint of red, and the oval-shaped spectacles reflecting the candle flame. The old man whispered to the boy, as if they were not alone in the house or were engaged in some conspiracy.
“Has it happened again, Andrew?” he asked.
“I did not want to make it happen,” Andrew protested. “I was not by myself.”
The Reverend Maness held up an open hand of silence and understanding. The glare of the candlelight on his spectacles concealed his eyes, which now turned toward the window beside his sons’s bed. “The mystery of lawlessness doth already work,” he said.
“The Epistles,” Andrew swiftly responded, as if the quote had been a question.
“Can you finish the passage?”
“Yes, I think I can,” answered Andrew, who then assumed a solemn voice and recited: “Now there is one that restraineth, until he be taken out of the way; and then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord will slay and bring to nought.”
“You know it well, that book.”
“The Holy Bible,” said Andrew, for it sounded strange to him not to name the book in the proper way.
“Yes, the Holy Bible. You should know its words better than you know anything else on earth. You should always have its words in mind like a magical formula.”
“I do, Father. You have always told me that I should.”
The Reverend Maness suddenly stood up from the bed and towering over his son shouted: “Liar! You did not have the words in your mind on this night. You could not have. You allowed the lawless one to do its work. You are the lawless one, but you must not be. You must become the other one, the katechon, the one who restrains.”
“I’m sorry, Father,” Andrew cried out. “Please don’t be angry with me.”
The Reverend Maness recovered his temper and again held up his open hand, the fingers of which interlocked and separ
ated several times in what appeared to be a deliberate sequence of subtle gesticulations. He turned away from his son and slowly walked the length of the room. When he reached the window on the opposite side he stared out at the blackness that covered the town of Moxton, where he and his son had first arrived some years before. On the main street of the town the reverend had built a church; nearby, he had built a house. The silhouette of the church bell-tower was outlined against moonlit clouds. From across the room the Reverend Maness said to his son, “I built the church in town so that it would be seen. I made the church of brick so that it would endure.”
Now he paced the floor in an attitude of meditation while his son looked on in silence. After some time he stood at the foot of his son’s bed, glaring down as though he stood at the pulpit of his church. “In the Bible there is a beast,” he said. “You know this, Andrew. But did you know that the beast is also within you? It lives in a place that can never see light. Yes, it is housed here, inside the skull, the habitation of the Great Beast. It is a thing so wonderful in form that its existence might be attributed to the fantastic conjurings of a sorcerer or to a visitation from a far, dark place which no one has ever seen. It is a nightmare that would stop our hearts should we ever behold it gleaming in some shadowy corner of our home, or should we ever – by terrible mischance – lay our hands upon the slime of its flesh. This must never happen, the beast must be kept within its lair. But the beast is a great power that reaches out into the world, a great maker of worlds that are as nothing we can know. And it may work changes on this world. Darkness and light, shape and color, the heavens and the earth – all may be changed by the beast, the great reviser of things seen and unseen, known and unknown. For all that we see and know are but empty vessels in which the beast shall pour a new tincture, therewith changing the aspect of the land, altering the shadows themselves, giving a strange color to our days and our nights, making the day into night, so that we dream while awake and can never sleep again. There is nothing more awful and nothing more sinful than such changes in things. Nothing is more grotesque than these changes. All changes in things are grotesque. The very possibility of changes in things is grotesque. And the beast is the author of all changes. You must never again consort with the beast!”
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