reflected images from someplace else.
Entire establishments might have been dumped off in Moxton, where buildings stood along the street like odd objects forgotten on a cellar shelf.
It was less a real town than the semblance of a town, a pasteboard backdrop to an old stage show, its outlines crudely stroked with an antique paintbrush unconcerned with the details of character and identity, lettering the names of streets and shops with senseless scribbles no one was ever meant to read.
Everything that might have been real about the town had somehow become thwarted.
Nothing flourished there, nothing made a difference by its presence or absence.
No business could do more than anonymously survive in Moxton. Even larger enterprises such as a dimestore or a comfortable hotel could not assert themselves but were forced to assume the same air of unreality possessed by lesser establishments: the shoe store whose tiny front window displayed merchandise long out of style, the clothes store where dust collected in the folds of garments worn by headless mannikins, the repair shop at which a good number of the items brought in were left unclaimed and lay corroding in every cranny of the place.
Many years ago a movie theater opened on the prominent corner of Webster and Main, decades before a traffic light had been hung over the intersection of these streets. A large neon sign with letters stacked in a vertical file spelled out the word RIVIERA. For a moment this word appeared in searing magenta against the Moxton twilight, calling up and down the street to everyone in the town. But by nightfall the glowing letters had been subdued, their glamor suffocating in a rarefied atmosphere where sights and sounds were drained of reality. The new movie theater now burned no more brightly than McQuister’s Pharmacy across the street. Both of them were allotted a steady and modest patronage in a skeleton town that was no more enchanted with the one than the other.
Thus was the extent of Moxton’s compromise with any manifestation of the real.
For there are certain places that exist on the wayside of the real: a house, a street, even entire towns which have claims upon them by virtue of some nameless affinity with the most remote orders of being. They are, these places, fertile ground for the unreal and retain the minimum of immunity against exotic disorders and aberrations. Their concessions to a given fashion of reality are only placating gestures, a way of stifling it through limited acceptance. It was unnecessary, even perverse, to resist construction of the movie theater or the new church (founded in 1893 by the Rev. Andrew Maness). Such an action might imbue these things with an unwarranted measure of substance or power, and in a skeleton town there is little substance, while all power resides only in the unreal. The citizens of such a place are custodians of a rare property, a precious estate whose true owners are momentarily absent. All that remains before full proprietorship of the land may be assumed is the planting of a single seed and its nurturing over a sufficient period of time, an interval that has nothing to do with the hours and days of the world.
As Andrew Maness grew older in the town of Moxton he watched his father submit to the despair and the wonder that he could not unmake the thing that he and those others had incarnated. On several occasions the reverend entered his son’s room as the boy slept. With knife and ax and long-handled scythe he attempted to break the growing bond between his son and the Tsalal. In the morning young Andrew’s bedroom would reek like a slaughterhouse. But his limbs and organs were again made whole and a new blood flowed within them, proving the reality of what had been brought into the world by his father and those other enthusiasts of that one.
There were times when the Reverend Maness, in a state of awe and desperation, awoke his son from dreams and made his appeal to the boy, informing him that he was reaching a perilous juncture in his development and begging him to submit to a peculiar ritual that would be consummated by Andrew’s ruin.
“What ritual is this?” Andrew asked with a novitiate’s excitation. But the reverend’s powers of speech became paralyzed at this question and many nights would pass before he again broached the subject.
At last the Reverend Maness came into his son’s room carrying a book. He opened the book to its final pages and began to read. And the words he read laid out a scheme for his son’s destruction. These words were his own, the ultimate chapter in a great work he had composed documenting a wealth of revelations concerning the force or entity called the Tsalal.
Andrew could not take his eyes off the book and strained to hear every resonance of his father’s reading from it, even if the ritual the old man spelled out dictated the atrocious manner of Andrew’s death— the obliteration of the seed of the apocalypse which was called the Tsalal.
“Your formula for cancelling my existence calls for the participation of others,” Andrew observed. “The elect of… that one.”
“Tsalal,” the Reverend Maness intoned, still captivated by an occult nomenclature.
“Tsalal,” Andrew echoed. “My protector, my guardian of the black void.”
“You are not yet wholly the creature of that one. I have tried to change what I could not. But you have stayed too long in this place, which was the wrong place for a being such as you. You are undergoing a second birth under the sign of the Tsalal. But there is still enough time if you will submit yourself to the ritual.”
“I must ask you, Father: who will carry it out? Will there be a convocation of strangers in this town?”
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 judgement 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
