The Nightmare Factory

  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 son’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 separated 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!”

  “Don’t say that, Father!” Andrew screamed, the palms of his hands pressed to his ears in order to obstruct further words of judgment. Yet he heard them all the same.

  “You are repentant, but still you do not read the book.”

  “I do read the book.”

  “But you do not have the words of the book always in your mind, because you are always reading other books that are forbidden to you. I have seen you looking at my books, and I know that you take them from my shelves like a thief. Those are books that should not be read.”

  “Then why do you keep them?” Andrew shouted back, knowing that it was evil to question his father and feeling a great joy in having done so. The Reverend Maness stepped around to the side of the bed, his spectacles flashing in the candlelight.

  “I keep them,” he said, “so that you may learn by your own will to renounce what is forbidden in whatever shape it may appear.”

  But how wonderful he found those books that were forbidden to him. He remembered seeing them for the first time cloistered on high shelves in his father’s library, that small and windowless room at the very heart of the house the Reverend Maness had built. Andrew knew these books on sight, not only by the titles which had such words in them as Mystery, Haunted, Secret, and Shadow, but also by the characters that formed these words—a jagged script closely resembling the letters of his own Bible—and by the shades of their cloth bindings, the faded vestments of autumn twilights. He somehow knew these books were forbidden to him, even before the reverend had made this fact explicit to his son and caused the boy to feel ashamed of his desire to hold these books and to know their matter. He became bound to the worlds he imagined were revealed in the books, obsessed with what he conceived to be a cosmology of nightmares. And after he had wrongfully admitted himself to his father’s library, he began to plot in detail the map of a mysterious universe—a place where the sun had passed from view, where towns were cold and dark, where mountains trembled with the monstrosities they concealed, woods rattled with secret winds, and all the seas were horribly calm. In his dreams of this universe, which far surpassed the darkest visions of any of the books he had read, a neverending night had fallen upon every imaginable landscape.

  In sleep he might thus find himself standing at the rim of a great gorge filled with pointed evergreens, and in the distance were the peaks of hills appearing in black silhouette under a sky chaotic with stars. Sublime scenery of this type often recurred in those books forbidden to him, sometimes providing the subject for one of the engraved illustrations accompanying a narrative. But he had never read in any book what his dream showed him in the sky above the gorge and above the hills. For each of the bright, bristling stars would begin to loosen in the places where the blackness held them. They wobbled at first, and then they rolled over in their bed of night. Now it was the other side of the stars that he saw, which was unlike anything ever displayed to the eyes of the earth. What he could see resembled not stars but something more like the underside of large stones one might overturn deep in damp woods.
They had changed in the strangest way, changed because everything in the universe was changing and could no longer be protected from the changes being worked upon them by something that had been awakened in the blackness, something that desired to remold everything it could see…and had the power to see all things. Now the faces of the stars were crawling with things that made them gleam in a way that stars had never gleamed before. And then these things he saw in his dream began to drip from the stars toward the earth, streaking the night with their gleaming trails.

  In those nights of dreaming, all things were subject to forces that knew nothing of law or reason, and nothing possessed its own nature or essence but was only a mask upon the face of absolute darkness, a blackness no one had ever seen.

  Even as a child he realized that his dreams did not follow the creation taught to him by his father and by that book. It was another creation he pursued, a counter-creation, and the books on the shelves of his father’s library could not reveal to him what he desired to know of this other genesis. While denying it to his father, and often to himself, he dreamed of reading the book that was truly forbidden, the scripture of a deadly creation, one that would tell the tale of the universe in its purest sense.

  But where could he find such a book? On what shelf of what library would it appear before his eyes? Would he recognize it when fortune allowed it to fall into his hands? Over time he became certain he would know the book, so often did he dream of it. For in the most unlikely visions he found himself in possession of the book, as though it belonged to him as a legacy. But while he held the book in dreams, and even saw its words with miraculous clarity, he could not comprehend the substance of a script whose meaning seemed to dissolve into nonsense. Never was he granted in these dreams an understanding of what the book had to tell him. Only as the most obscure and strangest sensations did it communicate with his mind, only as a kind of presence that invaded and possessed his sleep. On waking, all that remained was a euphoric terror. And it was then that objects around him would begin their transformations, for his soul had been made lawless by dreams and his mind was filled with the words of the wrong book.

  5 The author of the 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 marveling 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.”

  6 The white-haired woman

  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 words 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.

  7 Revelations of a unique being

  For Andrew Maness, the world had always been divided into two separate realms defined by what he could only describe as a 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 ce
rtain 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.