Noctuary

by Thomas Ligotti

  "Perhaps only that," replied the tall man.

  "No," said Mrs Spikes. "It was something he did. It was like everything else that's been happening since he came here and stayed so long. All the little changes in things that kept getting worse. It's something that's been moving in like a storm. People have seen that it's in the town now, hanging over that house of his. And the changes in things are worse than ever. Pretty soon it's us that'll be changing."

  Then there arose a chorus of voices among the congregation, all of them composing a conflict between "we must do something" and "what can be done?"

  While the people of Moxton murmured and fretted in the light of lamps and candles, there was a gradual darkening outside the windows of the church. An unnatural blackness was overtaking the gray afternoon. And the words of these people also began to change, just as so many things had changed in that town. Within the same voices there mingled both keening outcries of fear and a low, muttering invocation. Soon the higher pitched notes in these voices diminished and then wholly disappeared as the deeper tones of incantation prevailed. Now they were all chanting a single word in hypnotic harmony: Tsalal, Tsalal, Tsalal. And standing at the pulpit was the one who was leading the chant, the man whose strangely shaded hair shone in the light of candles and oil lamps. At last he had come from his house where he had stayed too long. The bell in the tower began to ring, sounding in shattered echoes. The resonant cacophony of voices swelled within the church. For these were the voices of people who had lived so long in the wrong place. These were people of a skeleton town.

  The figure at the pulpit lifted up his hands before his congregation, and they grew quiet. When he focused his eyes on an old woman sitting alone in the last row, she rose from her seat and walked to the double doors at the rear of the church. The man at the pulpit spread his arms wider, and the old woman pushed back each of the doors.

  Through the open doorway was the main street of Moxton, but it was not as it had been. An encompassing blackness had descended and only the lights of the town could be seen. But these lights were now as endless as the blackness itself. The rows of yellowish streetlamps extended to infinity along an avenue of the abyss. Fragments of neon signs were visible, the vibrant magenta letters of the movie theater recurring again and again, as though reflected in a multitude of black mirrors. In the midst of the other lights hovered an endless succession of traffic signals that filled the blackness like multi-colored stars. All these bright remnants of the town, its broken pieces in transformation, were becoming increasingly dim and distorted, bleeding their radiance into the blackness that was consuming them, even as it freakishly multiplied the shattered images of the world, collecting them within its kaleidoscope of colors so dense and so varied that they lost themselves within a black unity.

  The man who had built the church in which the people of Moxton were gathered had spoken of the ultimate point. This was now imminent. And as the moment approached, the gathering within the church moved toward the figure at the pulpit, who descended to meet them. They were far beyond their old fears, these skeleton people. They had attained the stripped bone of being, the last layer of an existence without name or description, without nature or essence: the nothingness of the blackness no one had ever seen... or would ever see. For no one had ever lived except as a shadow of the blackness of the Tsalal.

  And their eyes looked to the one who was the incarnation of the blackness, and who had come to them to seal his bond with that other one. They looked to him for some word or gesture in order to bring to fulfilment that day which had turned into night. They looked to him for the thing that would bind them to the blackness and join them within the apocalypse of the unreal.

  Finally, as if guided by some whim of the moment, he told them how to do what must be done.

  12 What is remembered

  The story that circulated in later years among the people of Moxton told how everyone had gathered in the church one afternoon during a big storm that lasted into the night. Unused for decades before this event, the church was strongly constructed and proved a suitable shelter. There were some who recalled that for weeks prior to this cataclysm a variety of uncommon effects had resulted from what they described as a season of strange weather in the vicinity of the town.

  The details of this period remain unclear, as do memories of a man who briefly occupied the old McQuister place around the time of the storm. No one had ever spoken with him except Mrs Spikes, who barely recollected their conversation and who died of cancer not long after the biggest storm of the year. The house in which the man had lived was previously owned by relatives of Ray Starns, but the Starns people were no longer residents of Moxton. In any case, the old McQuister place was not the only untenanted house in the skeleton town, and there was no reason for people to concern themselves with it. Nor did anyone in Moxton give serious thought to the church once the storm had passed. The doors were once again secured against intruders, but no one ever tested these old locks which had been first put in place after the Reverend Maness hung himself in the church tower.

  Had the people of the town of Moxton ventured beyond the doors of the church they might have found what they left behind following the abatement of the storm. Lying twisted at the foot of the pulpit was the skeleton of a man whose name no one would have been able to remember. The bones were clean. No bit of their flesh could be discovered either in the church or anywhere else in the town. Because the flesh was that of one who had stayed in a certain place too long. It was the seed, and now it had been planted in a dark place where it would not grow. They had buried his flesh deep in the barren ground of their meager bodies. Only a few strands of hair of an unusual color lay scattered upon the floor, mingling with the dust of the church.

  Mad Night Of Atonement

  A Future Tale

  Once more from the beginning; once more until the end. You know who Dr Francis Haxhausen was and how his disappearance affected the scientific world. There was dismay and confusion when one of the leading scientists on earth withdrew from an active life of research. And there was doubt, even anxiety, when he could no longer be reached for consultation on this or that question of urgent relevance to his former colleagues, if not to the vast body of the human race. Ah, the human race. Pacing the floors of gleaming labs, the geniuses in their long white smocks fretted about the missing man of science: they bore the stigmata of worry upon their faces and their voices grew quiet, like voices heard in the shadows of a lonely church. Rumors multiplied, panicky speculations were the order of the day. But however troubled certain people had become in the absence of Dr Haxhausen, they were no less bothered by his sudden return from a strange retirement.

  He was now quite a different man, shaking the hands of old friends and smiling with a warmth that was entirely out of character. "I've been travelling here and there," he explained, though he avoided elaborating on this statement. For a time everyone kept an eye on Dr Haxhausen, eager to witness a revelation of some kind, or at least some clue to suggest what had happened to him. And how nerve-wracking vigilance can be. It was not long, however, before the inevitable conclusion had to be drawn: the unfortunate man had lost his reason, gone mad from years of overwork in the service of his calling. But perhaps there still remained some pretext for hoping that the scientist would recover. After all, he managed to avoid the constraints, which some, including members of his own family, attempted to place upon his movements. And certainly this was an achievement that hinted at the survival of some measure of his old genius. Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it — freedom, not reason - to pursue his plans for the future.

  For almost a year he worked secretly, and alone, in an old, empty factory building located in an open field many miles from the nearest city. And into this building he brought a motley array of equipment - objects, devices, and machinery that belonged to quite different times and places, diverse worlds of human creation. There were of
course the most modern machines and instruments of science, some of which had only come into being since Dr Haxhausen's disappearance. But there were also items of far earlier historical periods- and a few imported from cultures that would not be considered very far along the path of technological progress. Thus, Dr Haxhausen unpacked several oddly shaped vessels decorated with strange glyphs and primitive images. And these clumsy vessels he rested upon a table among elegant containers of nearly invisible glass. Then he pieced together something that resembled a dirty drainspout or an old stovepipe. And he placed it, for the moment, upon the immaculate metal surface of a computer, which was the color and texture of an eggshell.

  More exotic or antiquated paraphernalia were revealed slumbering in crates and boxes: cauldrons, retorts, masks with wide-open mouths, alembics, bellows of different sizes, crusted bells that rang with dead voices, and rusted tongs that squeaked when manipulated; a large hourglass, a small telescope, shining swords and dull knives, a long wooden pitchfork with two hornlike prongs, and a tall staff with marvelously embellished headpiece; miniature bottles of very thick glass plugged with stoppers in the shape of human or animal heads, candles in ivory holders with curious carvings, bright beads, beautiful convex mirrors of perfect silver, golden chalices engraved with intricate designs and powerful phrases; huge books with brittle pages, a skull and some bones; doll-like figures made of dried vegetables, puppet-like figures made of wax and wood, and various little dummies composed of obscure materials. Finally, there was a shallow crate from which Dr Haxhausen removed a vaguely circular object that seemed to be a flat stone, but a stone that was translucent and mottled like an opal with a spectrum of soft hues. And all these things the scientist brought together within his dim and drafty laboratory: each, in his mind, would play its part in his design. Clearly his ideas about the practice of science had taken an incredible leap, though whether the direction was forward or backward remained to be seen.

  For months he worked with a mechanical industriousness and without worry or doubt, as though following some foreordained plan of assured success. Slowly his invention began to take form out of the chaos of materials he had united in his experiment, a miscegenation that would give birth to a revolutionary artifact, a cross-bred assemblage of freakish novelty. And the result of his labors at last stood before him upon the cold and dusty floor of that factory, and he was pleased by the sight of it.

  To the average eye, granted, Dr Haxhausen's invention might have appeared as no more than a bizarre scrapheap, a hybrid of some inscrutable fancy. Dense and unbeautiful, it branched out wildly in every direction, a mad foliage of ragged metal. And it seemed just barely, or not all, integrated into a whole. Through dark hollows within the chaotic tangle of the apparatus, the faces of dolls and puppets peeked out like malicious children in hiding. Incorporated into the body of the invention, their dwarfish forms mingled with its circuitry; these figures alone, by their very presence, might have bred doubts as to the validity of the scientist's creation. And, as must already be apparent, the eccentricities of the machine did not end with a few idiotic faces.

  Nevertheless, there was a certain feature of the invention that did appear to suggest some definite purpose. This was the long bjack tube projecting from the midst of the debris, rising from it in the manner of a cobra set for the attack. But in place of the cobra's pair of fascinating eyes, this artificial serpent was equipped with a single cyclopean socket in which was fixed a smooth disc of beautifully blended colors. When Dr Haxhausen turned a dial on the remote control unit resting in his palm, the dark metallic beast reared back its head and, with a sinister grinding sound, directed its gaze up toward a grimy skylight. For years this window on the heavens had remained sealed. But that night, through the efforts of the inexhaustible scientist, it was opened. And the spectral light of a full moon shone down into the old factory, pouring its beams into the opalescent eye of Dr Haxhausen's machine. Later, when it seemed the beast was sated with its lunar nourishment, Dr Haxhausen confidently flicked a switch on the remote control unit. And the moonlight, which had been digested and transmuted in the bowels of the beast, was now given back to its source, spewing forth as a stream of lurid colors into the blackness, a harsh spectrum which one witness later described to authorities as an "awful rainbow quivering across the night." In the doctor's own description, this was called his Sacred Ray.

  With the first stage of his project successfully completed, Dr Haxhausen moved out of his secluded laboratory. His machine, along with other things, was loaded on a truck by some hired laborers. Thus, it could easily be transported from one place to another, to be exhibited before the eyes of any who would come to see it. And this is exactly what the scientist had in mind. Abandoning obscurity and breaking his silence, he once again allowed himself to be known to the world. Naturally there was a great deal of publicity, none of which was complimentary to the worth of the scientist's revelations, though some of which paid sad homage to the former glory of his delicate mind. But public reaction was of no concern to him. His task would in any case be carried out: the world was to be given notice, the annunciation made. So he continued to travel here and there: in rented halls and auditoriums of many cities, he demonstrated the powers of his machine and spread the word to those who would hear it.

  "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," he began a typical performance in a typically out-of-date movie theater in a typical town. Standing alone on stage, Dr Haxhausen was wearing an old dark suit; as if to simulate formal attire, he added a new bow tie. His hair was greased and combed but had been allowed to grow far too long to convey a well-groomed image. And his black-framed eyeglasses now seemed far too large on the face of a man who had lost so much weight in the past year or so. Their thick lenses glinted in the glare of the footlights, which cast Dr Haxhausen's gigantic and twisted shadow upon the threadbare curtain behind him.

  "Some of you," he continued, "are perhaps aware of who I am and may have an idea of why I am here tonight. Others of you may be curious to discover the meaning of those handbills which have lately appeared around your town or possibly were intrigued by the marquee outside this theater which touts the 'World Famous Dr Haxhausen.' Like many important events in human history, my exhibition has been somewhat accurately reported as far as its superficial aspects are concerned, yet remains sadly misrepresented in its substance. Allow me at this point to disabuse you of a few false conceptions which may have affected your powers of judgment.

  "First, I do not claim to be either the Almighty Himself or His incarnation come down to earth; nor, in fact, am I one or the other of these things. Second, I nevertheless do claim that in the course of my recent travels, what the world has called my 'disappearance’ I was granted certain revelations directly from the Creator and in no uncertain terms received an itinerary of action from this same source. Third, and last, I am indeed the scientist known as Francis Henry Haxhausen and not, as can be conclusively proved, an imposter. As an appendix to my previous statements, I should say that my exhibition is not the absurd extravaganza of scientific farce some have portrayed it to be, but a simple agenda consisting of a brief lecture followed by a practical demonstration of a device I have recently constructed. At no point do I attempt, either as an illusion or in fact, to work permanent damage on the body or soul of any member of my audience. That would be contrary to the Creator's law and the truth of His nature. And that is all I have to state in the way of a preamble to what I hope you will find an entertaining and enlightening attraction.

  "I would like to open my lecture with the following anecdote. There is a legend, and I hasten to underline the word legend, that I learned while I was travelling here and there. It seems there was a sorcerer, or an alchemist or something along those lines, who dreamed of transforming the world through the creation of an artificial man. This man, the sorcerer dreamed, would not be subject to the flaws and limitations of the former type, but would instead live through many lifetimes, accumulating the knowledge and wisdom it
would one day use to serve and improve the human race. The sorcerer, like all dreamers of this kind, was intent upon his vision and not particularly concerned with its ramifications in a larger scheme of things. Thus, he set about employing all his thaumaturgical arts in the creation of his 'new man.' First, a physical form was made out of the simple materials of wood and wax, resulting in a grotesque thing rather like a gigantic ventriloquist's dummy. Next, the sorcerer practiced a secret chemistry and a hermetic linguistics to elevate this lifeless effigy into a rather admirable semblance of human life - fatefully admirable, I might add. Without wasting a moment glorying in his own achievement, uttering not a single word of self-praise, the sorcerer engaged his creature in a course of learning that would enable it to function and evolve toward its destiny after the sorcerer's death. However, it was not long after this regimen had begun that the Omnipotent One realized what the sorcerer was intending to do. And so it happened that the creature, strong and well-coordinated but still a child in its mind, was awakened in the dead of night by a voice that cursed it as a blasphemy and an abomination. The voice bid the creature to go to its foul maker in the attic where he had sequestered himself among evil books and impure devices. Confused and terrified, the creature ascended several stairways and entered the attic. And there he found the sorcerer, motionless and hung upon the wall like something in a puppet-maker's workshop, his dark robe grazing the dusty floor and his head drooping down. Acting on a mechanical impulse beyond dread or despair, the creature raised up his master's head and saw that it was now no more than wood and wax. The sight was a maddening one, and it did not take long for the creature to find the rope with which it hung itself from the rafters of the attic. Thus was concluded the judgment passed upon the house of the sorcerer."

  There was a pause in the scientist's flow of words. Calmly, he pulled a handkerchief from the inner pocket of his coat and wiped his face, which was perspiring in the heat of the footlights. Then he briefly scanned the faces of his audience, many of which bore dumbfounded expressions, before resuming his lecture.