But the dream offered another detail which possibly related to the mode of communication among these whispering figures who sat in stagnant moonlight. For projecting out of the bulky sleeves dangling at each figure’s side were delicate appendages that appeared to be withered, wilted claws bearing numerous talons that tapered off into drooping tentacles. And all of these stringy digits seemed to be working together with lively and unceasing agitation.
At first sight of these gruesome gestures I felt myself about to awaken, to carry back into the world a sense of terrible enlightenment without sure meaning or possibility of expression in any language except the whispered vows of this eerie sect. But I remained longer in this dream, far longer than was natural. I witnessed further the fidgeting of those shriveled claws, a hyperactive gesticulating which seemed to communicate an intolerable knowledge, some ultimate disclosure concerning the order of things. Such movements suggested an array of repulsive analogies: the spinning legs of spiders, the greedy rubbing of a fly’s spindly feelers, the darting tongues of snakes. But my cumulative sensation in the dream was only partially involved with what I would call the triumph of the grotesque. This sensation—in keeping with the style of certain dreams—was complicated and exact, allowing no ambiguities or confusions to comfort the dreamer. And what was imparted to my witnessing mind was the vision of a world in a trance—a hypnotized parade of beings sleepwalking to the odious manipulations of their whispering masters, those hooded freaks who were themselves among the hypnotized. For there was a power superseding theirs, a power which they served and from which they merely emanated, something which was beyond the universal hypnosis by virtue of its very mindlessness, its awesome idiocy. These cloaked masters, in turn, partook in some measure of godhood, passively presiding as enlightened zombies over the multitudes of the entranced, that frenetic domain of the human.
And it was at this place in my dream that I came to believe that there obtained a terrible intimacy between myself and those whispering effigies of chaos whose existence I dreaded for its very remoteness from mine. Had these beings, for some grim purpose comprehensible only to themselves, allowed me to intrude upon their infernal wisdom? Or was my access to such putrid arcana merely the outcome of some fluke in the universe of atoms, a chance intersection among the demonic elements of which all creation is composed? But the truth was notwithstanding in the face of these insanities; whether by calculation or accident, I was the victim of the unknown. And I succumbed to an ecstatic horror at this insight.
On waking, it seemed that I had carried back with me a tiny, jewel-like particle of this horrific ecstasy, and, by some alchemy of association, this darkly crystalline substance infused its magic into my image of the old town.
Though I formerly believed myself to be the consummate knower of the town’s secrets, the following day was one of unforeseen discovery. The streets that I looked upon that motionless morning were filled with new secrets and seemed to lead me to the very essence of the extraordinary. A previously unknown element appeared to have emerged in the composition of the town, one that must have been hidden within its most obscure quarters. I mean to say that while these quaint, archaic façades still put on all the appearance of a dreamlike repose, there presently existed, in my sight, evil stirrings beneath this surface. The town had more wonders than I knew, a cache of unwonted offerings stored out of sight. Yet somehow this formula of deception, of corruption in disguise, served to intensify the town’s most attractive aspects: a wealth of unsuspected sensations was now provoked by a few slanting rooftops, a low doorway, or a narrow backstreet. And the mist spreading evenly through the town early that morning was luminous with dreams.
The whole day I wandered in a fevered exaltation throughout the old town, seeing it as if for the first time. I scarcely stopped a moment to rest, and I am sure I did not pause to eat. By late afternoon I might also have been suffering from a strain on my nerves, for I had spent many hours nurturing a rare state of mind in which the purest euphoria was invaded and enriched by currents of fear. Each time I rounded a streetcorner or turned my head to catch some beckoning sight, dark tremors were inspired by the hybrid spectacle I witnessed—splendid scenes broken with malign shadows, the lurid and the lovely forever lost in each other’s embrace. And when I passed under the arch of an old street and gazed up at the towering structure before me, I was nearly overwhelmed.
My recognition of the place was immediate, though I had never viewed it from my present perspective. Suddenly it seemed I was no longer outside in the street and staring upwards, but was looking down from the room just beneath that peaked roof. It was the highest room on the street, and no window from any of the other houses could see into it. The building itself, like some of those surrounding it, seemed to be empty, perhaps abandoned. I assessed several ways by which I could force entry, but none of these methods was needed: the front door, contrary to my initial observation, was slightly ajar.
The place was indeed abandoned, stripped of wall-hangings and fixtures, its desolate, tunnel-like hallways visible only in the sickly light that shone through unwashed, curtainless windows. Identical windows also appeared on the landing of each section of the staircase that climbed up through the central part of the edifice like a crooked spine. I stood in a near cataleptic awe of the world I had wandered into, this decayed paradise. It was a venue of strange atmospherics of infinite melancholy and unease, the everlasting residue of some cosmic misfortune. I ascended the stairs of the building with a solemn, mechanical intentness, stopping only when I had reached the top and found the door to a certain room.
And even at the time, I asked myself: could I have entered this room with such unhesitant resolve if I truly expected to find something extraordinary within it? Was it ever my intention to confront the madness of the universe, or at least my own? I had to confess that though I had accepted the benefits of my dreams and fancies, I did not profoundly believe in them. At the deepest level I was their doubter, a thorough skeptic who had indulged a too-free imagination, and perhaps a self-made lunatic.
To all appearances the room was unoccupied. I noted this fact without the disappointment born of real expectancy, but also with a strange relief. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the artificial twilight of the room, I saw the circle of chairs.
They were as strange as I had dreamed, more closely resembling devices of torture than any type of practical or decorative object. Their tall backs were slightly bowed and covered with a coarse hide unlike anything I had ever beheld; their arms were like blades and each had four semicircular grooves cut into them that were spaced evenly across their length; and below were six jointed legs jutting outwards, a feature which transformed each piece into some crablike thing with the apparent ability to scuttle across the floor. If, for a stunned moment, I felt the idiotic desire to install myself in one of these bizarre thrones, this impulse was extinguished upon my observing that the seat of each chair, which at first appeared to be composed of a smooth and solid cube of black glass, was in fact only an open cubicle filled with a murky liquid which quivered strangely when I passed my hand over its surface. As I did this I could feel my entire arm tingle in a way which sent me stumbling backward to the door of that horrible room and which made me loathe every atom of flesh gripping the bones of that limb.
I turned around to exit but was stopped by a figure standing in the doorway. Though I had previously met the man, he now seemed to be someone quite different, someone openly sinister rather than merely enigmatic. When he had disturbed me the day before, I could not have suspected his alliances. His manner had been idiosyncratic but very polite, and he had offered no reason to question his sanity. Now he appeared to be no more that a malignant puppet of madness. From the twisted stance he assumed in the doorway to the vicious and imbecilic expression that possessed the features of his face, he was a thing of strange degeneracy. Before I could back away from him, he took my trembling hand. “Thank you for coming to visit,” he said in a voice that was a pa
rody of his former politeness. He pulled me close to him; his eyelids lowered and his mouth widely grinned, as if he were enjoying a pleasant breeze on a warm day.
Then he said to me: “They want you with them on their return. They want their chosen ones.”
Nothing can describe what I felt on hearing these words which could only have meaning in a nightmare. Their implications were a quintessence of hellish delirium, and at that instant all the world’s wonder suddenly turned to dread. I tried to free myself from the madman’s grasp, shouting at him to let go of my hand. “Your hand?” he shouted back at me. Then he began to repeat the phrase over and over, laughing as if some sardonic joke had reached a conclusion within the depths of his lunacy. In his foul merriment he weakened, and I escaped. As I rapidly descended the many stairs of the old building, his laughter pursued me as hollow reverberations that echoed far beyond the shadowy spaces of that place.
And that freakish, echoing laughter remained with me as I wandered dazed in darkness, trying to flee my own thoughts and sensations. Gradually the terrible sounds that filled my brain subsided, but they were soon replaced by a new terror—the whispering of strangers whom I passed on the streets of the old town. And no matter how low they spoke or how quickly they silenced one another with embarrassed throat-clearings or reproving looks, their words reached my ears in fragments that I was able to reconstruct because of their frequent repetition. The most common terms were deformity and disfigurement. If I had not been so distraught I might have approached these persons with a semblance of civility, cleared my own throat, and said, “I beg your pardon, but I could not help overhearing… And what exactly did you mean, if I may ask, when you said…” But I discovered for myself what those words meant—how terrible, poor man—when I returned to my room and stood before the mirror on the wall, holding my head in balance with a supporting hand on either side.
For only one of those hands was mine.
The other belonged to them.
Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real. And to suffer a solitary madness seems the joy of paradise when compared to the extraordinary condition in which one’s own madness merely emulates that of the world. I have been lured away by dreams; all is nonsense now.
Let me write, while I still am able, that the transformation has not limited itself. I now find it difficult to continue this manuscript with either hand. These twitching tentacles are not suited for writing in a human manner, and I am losing the will to push my pen across this page. While I have put myself at a great distance from the old town, its influence is undiminished. In these matters there is a terrifying freedom from the recognized laws of space and time. New laws of entity have come to their work as I look helplessly on.
In the interest of others, I have taken precautions to conceal my identity and the precise location of a horror which cannot be helped. Yet I have also taken pains to reveal, as if with malicious intent, the existence and nature of those same horrors. Be that as it may, neither my motives nor my actions matter in the least. They are both well known to the things that whisper in the highest room of an old town. They know what I write and why I am writing it. Perhaps they are even guiding my pen by means of a hand that is an extension of their own. And if I ever wished to see what lay beneath those dark robes, I will soon be able to satisfy this curiosity with only a glance in my mirror.
I must return to the old town, for now my home can be nowhere else. But my manner of passage to that place cannot be the same, and when I enter again that world of dreams it will be by way of a threshold which no human being has ever crossed…nor ever shall.
The Greater Festival of Masks
There are only a few houses in the part of town where Noss begins his excursion. Nonetheless, they are spaced in such a way that suggests there had once been a greater number of them that filled out the landscape, like a garden that seems sparse merely because certain growths have withered and others have not yet been planted to replace them. It even occurs to Noss that these hypothetical houses, counterfactual at present, may at some point change places with those which now exist, in order to bestow on the visible a well-earned repose within nullity. For by then they will have served their purpose as features that gave the town an identity. And now is just the season for so many things to pass into emptiness and make way for other entities and modes of being. Such are the declining days of the festival, when the old and the new, the real and the imaginary, truth and deception, all join in the masquerade.
But even at this stage of the festival some have yet to take a large enough interest in tradition to visit one of the shops of costumes and masks. Until recently Noss was among this group. Finally, though, he has decided to visit an establishment whose shelves spill over with costumes and masks, even at this late stage of the festival.
In the course of his little journey, Noss keeps watch as buildings become more numerous, enough to make a street, many narrow streets, a town. He also observes manifold indications of the festival season. These are sometimes baffling, sometimes blatant in nature. For instance, not a few doors have been left ajar, even throughout the night, as if to challenge callers or intruders to discover what waits within. And dim lights are left to burn in empty rooms, or rooms that appear empty if one does not approach their windows with an incautious curiosity and look inside. Less dire are those piles of filthy rags deposited in the middle of certain streets, shredded rags that are easily disturbed by the wind and twist gaily about. At every turn, it seems, Noss comes upon some gesture of festive abandonment: a hat, all style mangled out of it, has been jammed into the space where a board is missing in a high fence; a poster stuck to a crumbling wall has been diagonally torn in half, leaving a scrap of face fluttering at its edges; and into strange pathways of caprice revelers will go, but to have shorn themselves just anywhere, to have littered the shadows of doorways and alleys with wiry clippings and tumbling fluff. Reliquiae of the hatless, the faceless, the impetuously groomed. As Noss walks on, he takes only a desultory interest in the sportive occasion he is witnessing for the first time since he settled in this place.
But he becomes more interested as he approaches the center of town, where the houses, the shops, the fences, the walls are more, much more…close. There seems barely enough space for a few stars to squeeze their bristling light between the roofs and towers above, and the outsized moon—not a familiar face in this neighborhood—must suffer to be seen only as a fuzzy anonymous glow mirrored in silvery windows. The streets are more tightly strung here, and a single one may have several names compressed into it from end to end. Some of the names may be credited less to deliberate planning, or even the quirks of local history, than to an apparent need for the superfluous. Perhaps a similar need may explain why the buildings in this district exhibit so many pointless embellishments: doors which are elaborately decorated yet will not budge in their frames; massive shutters covering blank walls behind them; enticing balconies, well-railed and promising in their views, but without any means of entrance; stairways that enter dark niches…and a dead end. These structural adornments are mysterious indulgences in an area so pressed for room that even shadows must be shared. And so must other things. Backyards, for example, where a few fires still burn, the last of the festival pyres. For in this part of town the season is still at its peak, or at least the signs of its termination have yet to appear. Perhaps celebrants hereabouts are still nudging each other provocatively, still engaging in preposterous escapades they would not ordinarily dare to imagine, and, in general, indulging themselves as if there were no tomorrow. Here the festival is not dead. For the delirium of this celebration does not radiate out from the center of things, but seeps inward from remote margins. Thus, the festival may have begun in an isolated hovel at the edge of town, if not in some forlorn residence in the woods beyond. In any case, its agitations have now reached the heart of this dim region where Noss is about to visit one of the many shops of costumes and masks.
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A steep stairway leads him to a shrunken platform of a porch, and a thin door puts him inside the shop whose shelves indeed spill over with costumes and masks. To Noss, these shelves also seem reticent in a way hard to pinpoint, stuffed into silence by wardrobes and faces of dreams. Warily, he pulls at a mask that is over-hanging a high shelf. A heap of them fall down on his head. Backing away from the avalanche of false faces, he looks at the sardonically grinning one in his hand.
“Brilliant choice,” says the shopkeeper, who steps out from behind a counter at the back of the shop. “Put it on and let’s see. Yes, my gracious, this is excellent. You see how your entire face is well-covered, from the hairline to just beneath the chin and no farther. And at the sides it clings snugly. It doesn’t pinch, am I right?” The mask nods in agreement. “Good, that’s how it should be. Your ears are unobstructed—you have very nice ones, by the way—in case someone calls out to you while your face is concealed by the mask. It is comfortable, yet secure enough to stay put and not fall off in the heat of activity. You’ll see, after a while you won’t even know you’re wearing it! The holes for the eyes, nostrils, and mouth are perfectly placed for your features. No natural function is inhibited, that is a must. And it looks so good on you, especially up close, though I’m sure also at a distance. Go stand over there in the moonlight. Yes, it was made for you, what do you say? I’m sorry, what?”
Noss walks back toward the shopkeeper and removes the mask.
“I said all right. I suppose I’ll take this one.”