book.
“You knew it was hopeless,” said Andrew Maness as he stood over the book that lay on the desk, glaring at the pages of old handwriting in black ink. “You told me to always read the right words and to always have them in my mind, but you knew I would read the wrong words. You knew what I was. You knew that such a being existed only to read the wrong words and to want to see those words written across the sky in a black script. Because you yourself were the author of the book. And you brought your son to the place where he would read your words. This town was the wrong place, and you knew it was the wrong place. But you told yourself it was the only place where what you had done… might be undone. Because you became afraid of what you and those others had done. For years you were intrigued by the greatest madness, the most atrocious secrets and schemes, and then you became afraid. What did you discover that could make you so afraid, you and the others who were always intrigued by the monstrous things you told of, that you sang of, in the book? You preached to me that all change is grotesque, that the very possibility of change is evil. Yet in the book you declare ‘transformation as the only truth’—the only truth of the Tsalal, that one who is without law or reason. ‘There is no nature to things,’ you wrote in the book. ‘There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.’ You wrote that there is not true growth or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such, nothing exists to be saved—everything, everyone exists only to be drawn into the slow and endless swirling of mutations that we may see every second of our lives if we simply gaze through the eyes of the Tsalal.
“Yet these truths of yours that you kept writing in your book cannot be the reason you became afraid, for even while your voice is somber or trembling to speak of these things, your phrases are burdened with fascination and you are always marvelling at the grand mockery of the universal masquerade, the ‘hallucination of lies that obscures the vision of all but the elect of the Tsalal.’ It is something of which you will not speak or cannot speak that caused you to become afraid. What did you discover that you could not face without renouncing what you and those others had done, without running to this town to hide yourself in the doctrines of a church that you did not truly uphold? Did this knowledge, this discovery remain within you, at once alive and annihilated to your memory? Was it this that allowed you to prophesy that the people of Moxton would return to their town, yet prevented you from telling what phenomenon could be more terrible than the nightmare they had fled, those grotesque changes which had overtaken the streets and houses of this place?
“You knew this was the wrong place when you brought me here as a child. And I knew that this was the wrong place when I came home to this town and stayed here, until everyone knew that I had stayed too long in this place.”
Not long after Andrew Maness moved back to the town of Moxton, an old woman came up to him late one afternoon on the street. He was staring into the window of a repair shop that closed early. Corroded pieces of machinery were strewn before him, as if on display: the guts and bones of a defunct motor of some kind. His reverie was disturbed when the old woman said, “I’ve seen you before.”
“That is possible, ma’am,” he replied. “I moved into a house on Oakman a few weeks ago.”
“No, I mean that I’ve seen you before that.”
He smiled very slightly at the old woman and said, “I lived here for a time, but I didn’t think anyone would remember.”
“I remember the hair. It’s red but kind of greenish too, yellow maybe.”
“Discolored through the years,” he explained.
“I remember it the way it was. And it’s not much different now. My hair’s white as salt.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I told those damn fools I remembered. No one listens to me. What’s your name?”
“My name, Mrs. …”
“Spikes,” she snapped.
“My name, Mrs. Spikes, is Andrew Maness.”
“Maness, Maness,” she chanted to herself. “No, I don’t think I know Maness.
You’re in the Starns house.”
“It was in fact purchased from one of Mr. Starns’ family who inherited the house after he died.”
“Used to be the Waterses lived there. Before them the Wellses. And before them the McQuisters. But that’s getting to be before my time. Before the McQuisters is just too damn long to remember. Too damn long.” She was repeating these w ords as she charged off down the street. Andrew Maness watched her thin form and salt-white hair recede and lose all color in the drab surroundings of the skeleton town.
For Andrew Maness, the world had always been divided into two separate realms defined by what he could only describe as prejudice of soul. Accordingly he was provided with a dual set of responses that he would have to a given locale, so that he would know if it was a place that was right for him, or one that was wrong. In places of the former type there was a separation between his self and the world around him, an enveloping absence. These were the great empty spaces which comprised nearly the whole of the world. There was no threat presented by such places. But there were other places where it seemed a presence of some dreadful kind was allowed to enter, a force that did not belong to these places yet moved freely within them… and within him. It was precisely such places as this, and the presence within them, which came to preside over his life and determine its course. He had no choice, for this was the scheme of the elect persons who had generated him, and he was compelled to fall in with their design. He was in fact the very substance of their design.
His father knew that there were certain places in the world to which he must respond, even in his childhood, and which would cause him to undergo a second birth under the sign of the Tsalal. The Reverend Maness knew that the town of Moxton was among such places—outposts on the desolate borderlands of the real.
He said that he had brought his son to this town so that the boy would learn to resist the presence he would feel here and elsewhere in the world. He said that he had brought his son to the right place, but he had in fact brought him to a place that was entirely wrong for the being that he was. And he said that his son should always fill his mind with the words of that book. But these words were easily silenced and usurped by those other words in those other books. His father seemed to entice him into reading the very books he should not have read.
Soon these books provoked in Andrew Maness the sense of that power and that presence which may manifest itself in a place such as the town of Moxton. And there were other places where he felt that same presence. Following intuitions that grew stronger as he grew older, Andrew Maness would find such places by hazard or design.
Perhaps he would come upon an abandoned house standing shattered and bent in an isolated landscape—a raw skeleton in a boneyard. But this dilapidated structure would seem to him a temple, a wayside shrine to that dark presence with which he sought union, and also a doorway to the dark world in which it dwelled. Nothing can convey those sensations, the countless nuances of trembling excitement, as he approached such a decomposed edifice whose skewed and ragged outline suggested another order of existence, the truest order of existence, as though such places as this house were only wavering shadows cast down to earth by a distant, unseen realm of entity. There he would experience the touch of something outside himself, something whose will was confused with his own, as in a dream wherein one feels possessed of a fantastic power to determine what events will transpire and yet also feels helpless to control that power, which, through oneself, may produce the chaos of nightmare. This mingling of mastery and helplessness overwhelmed him with a black intoxication and suggested his life’s goal: to work the great wheel that turns in darkness, and to be broken upon it.
Yet Andrew Maness had always known that his ambition was an echo of that conceived by his father many years before, and that the pursuit of this ambition had been consummated in his own birth.
“As a young man,” the Reverend Maness explained to his son, who was now a young man himself, “I thought myself an adept in the magic of the old gods, a communicant of entities both demonic and divine. I did not comprehend for years that I was merely a curator in the museum where the old gods were on display, their replicas
