The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

by Thomas Ligotti

  “Then the changes will proceed toward the ultimate point. So long as you can bear to watch the appearances of things become degraded and confused, so long as you can bear to watch the people in that place wither in their bodies and minds, the changes will proceed toward their ultimate point—the disintegration of all apparent order, the birth of the Tsalal. Before that happens you must submit to the ritual of the ultimate point.”

  But Andrew Maness only laughed at his father’s scheme, and the sound of this laughter almost shattered the reverend entirely. In a deliberately serious voice, Andrew said: “Do you really believe you will gain the participation of others?”

  “The people of this town will do the work of the ritual,” his father replied.

  “When they have seen certain things, they will do what must be done. Their hunger to preserve the illusions of their world will surpass their horror at what must be done to save it. But it will be your decision whether or not you will submit to the ritual which will determine the course of so many things in this world.”

  11. A meeting in Moxton

  Everyone in the town gathered in the church that the Reverend Maness had built so many years ago. No others had succeeded the reverend, and no services had been held since the time of his pastorate. The structure had never been outfitted with electricity, but the illumination of numerous candles and oil lamps the congregation had brought supplemented the light of a grayish afternoon that penetrated the two rows of plain, peaked windows along either side of the church. In the corner of one of those windows a spider fumbled about in its web, struggling awkwardly with appendages that resembled less the nimble legs of the arachnid than they did an octet of limp tentacles. After several thrusts the creature reached the surface of a window pane and passed into the glass itself, where it began to move about freely in its new element.

  The people of Moxton had tried to rest themselves before this meeting, but their haggard look spoke of a failure to do so. The entire population of the town barely filled a half dozen pews at the front of the church, although some were collapsed upon the floor and others shuffled restlessly along the center aisle.

  All of them appeared even more emaciated than the day before, when they had attempted to escape the town and unaccountably found themselves driven back to it.

  “Everything has gotten worse since we returned,” said one man, as if to initiate the meeting which had no obvious hope or purpose beyond collecting in a single place the nightmares of the people of Moxton. A murmur of voices rose up and echoed throughout the church. Several people spoke of what they had witnessed the night before, reciting a litany of grotesque phenomena that had prohibited sleep.

  There was a bedroom wall which changed colors, turning from its normal rosy tint that was calm and pale in the moonlight to a quivering and luminescent green that rippled like the flesh of a great reptile. There was a little doll whose neck began to elongate until it was writhing through the air like a serpent, while its tiny doll’s head whispered words that had no sense in them yet conveyed a profoundly hideous meaning. There were things no one had seen that made noises of a deeply troubling nature in the darkness of cellars or behind the doors of closets and cupboards. And then there was something that people saw when they looked through the windows of their houses toward the house where a man named Andrew Maness now lived. But when anyone began to describe what it was they saw in the vicinity of that house, which they called the McQuister house, their words became confused. They did see something and yet they saw nothing.

  “I also saw what you speak of,” whispered the tall, bearded man who wore a flat-brimmed hat. “It was a blackness, but it was not the blackness of the night or of shadows. It was hovering over the old McQuister place, or around it. This was something I had not seen in Moxton even since the changes.”

  “No, not in Moxton, not in the town. But you have seen it before. We have all seen it,” said a man’s voice that sounded as if it came from elsewhere in the church.

  “Yes,” answered the tall man, as if confessing a thing that had formerly been denied. “But we are not seeing it the way it might be seen, the way we had seen it when we were outside the town, when we tried to leave and could not.”

  “That was not blackness we saw then,” said one of the younger women who seemed to be wresting an image from her memory. “It was something … something that wasn’t blackness at all.”

  “There were different things,” shouted an old man who suddenly stood up from one of the pews, his eyes fixed in a gaze of revelation. A moment later this vision appeared to dissolve, and he sat down again. But the eyes of others followed this vision, surveying the empty spaces of the church and watching the flickering lights of the many lamps and candles.

  “There were different things,” someone started to say, and then someone else completed the thought: “But they were all spinning and confused, all swirling together.”

  “Until all we could see was a great blackness,” said the tall man, gaining his voice again.

  A silence now overcame the congregation, and the words they had spoken seemed to be disappearing into this silence, once more drawing the people of Moxton back to the refuge of their former amnesia. But before their minds lost all clarity of recollection a woman named Mrs. Spikes rose to her feet and from the last row of the church, where she sat alone, cried out, “Everything started with him, the one in the McQuister house.”

  “How long has it been?” one voice asked.

  “Too long,” answered Mrs. Spikes. “I remember him. He’s older than I am, but he doesn’t look older. His hair is a strange color.”

  “Reddish like pale blood,” said one.

  “Green like mold,” said another. “Or yellow and orange like a candleflame.”

  “He lived in that house, that same house, a long time ago,” continued Mrs.

  Spikes. “Before the McQuisters. He lived with his father. But I can only remember the stories. I didn’t see anything myself. Something happened one night. Something happened to the whole town. Their name was Maness.”

  “That is the name of the man who built this church,” said the tall man. “He was the first clergyman this town had seen. And there were no others after him. What happened, Mrs. Spikes?”

  “It was too long ago for anyone to remember. I only know the stories. The reverend said things about his son, said the boy was going to do something and how people had to keep it from happening.”

  “What happened, Mrs. Spikes? Try to remember.”

  “I’m trying. It was only yesterday that I started to remember. It was when we got back to town. I remembered something that the reverend said in the stories about that night.”

  “I heard you,” said another woman. “You said, ‘Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.’”

  Mrs. Spikes stared straight ahead and lightly pounded the top of the pew with her right hand, as though she were calling up memories in this manner. Then she said: “That’s what he was supposed to have been saying that night, ‘Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.’ And he said that people had to do something, but the stories I heard when I was growing up don’t say what he wanted people to do. It was about his son. It was something queer, something no one understood. But no one did anything that he wanted them to do. When they took him home, his son wasn’t there, and no one saw that young man again. The stories say that the ones who brought the reverend to his house saw things there, but no one could explain what they saw. What everyone did remember was that late the same night the bells started ringing up in the tower of this church. That’s where they found the reverend. He’d hung himself. It wasn’t until the McQuisters moved into town that anyone would go near the reverend’s house.

  Then it seemed no one could remember anything about the place.”

  “Just as we could not remember what happened only yesterday,” said the tall man.

  “Why we came back to this place when it was the last place we wanted to b
e. The blackness we saw that was a blackness no one had ever seen. That blackness which was not a blackness but was all the colors and shapes of things darkening the sky.”

  “A vision!” said one old man who for many years had been the proprietor of McQuister’s Pharmacy.

  “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 multicolored 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.

  The Bungalow House

  Early Last September I discovered among the exhibits in a local art gallery a sort of performance piece in the form of an audiotape. This, I later learned, was the first of a series of tape-recorded dream monologues by an unknown artist. The following is a brief and highly typical excerpt from the opening section of this work. I recall that after a few seconds of hissing tape noise, the voice began speaking: “There was far more to deal with in the bungalow house than simply an infestation of vermin,” it said, “although that too had its questionable aspects.” Then the voice went on: “I could see only a few of the bodies where the moonlight shone through the open blinds of the living room windows and fell upon the carpet. Only one of the bodies seemed to be moving, and that very slowly, but there may have been more that were not yet dead. Aside from the chair in which I sat in the darkness there was very little furniture in the room, or elsewhere in the bungalow house for that matter. But a number of lamps were positioned around me, floor lamps and table lamps and even two tiny lamps on the mantel above the fireplace.”

  A brief pause occurred here in the opening section of the tape-recorded dream monologue, as I remember it, after which the voice continued: ‘“The bungalow house was built with a fireplace,’ I said to myself in the darkness, thinking how long it had been since anyone had made use of this fireplace, or anything else in the bungalow. Then my attention returned to the lamps, and I began trying each of them one by one, twisting their little grooved switches in the darkness. The moonlight fell upon the lampshades without shining through them, so I could not see that none of the lamps was equipped with a lightbulb, and each time I turned the switch of a floor lamp or a table lamp or one of the tiny lamps on the mantel, nothing changed in the dark living room of the bungalow house: the moonlight shone through the dusty blinds and revealed the bodies of insects and other vermin on the pale carpet.”

  “The cha
llenges and obstacles facing me in that bungalow house were becoming more and more oppressive,” whispered the voice on the tape. “There was something so desolate about being in that place in the dead of night, even if I did not know precisely what time it was. And to see upon the pale, threadbare carpet those verminous bodies, some of which were still barely alive; then to try each of the lamps and find that none of them was in working order—everything, it seemed, was in opposition to my efforts, everything aligned against my taking care of the problems I faced in the bungalow house. For the first time I noticed that the bodies lying for the most part in total stillness on the moonlit carpet were not like any species of vermin I had ever seen,” the voice on the tape recording said. “Some of them seemed to be deformed, their naturally revolting forms altered in ways I could not discern. I knew that I would require specialized implements for dealing with these creatures, an arsenal of advanced tools of extermination. It was the idea of poisons—the toxic solutions and vapors I would need to use in my assault, upon the bungalow hordes—that caused me to become overwhelmed by the complexities of the task before me and the paucity of my resources for dealing with them.”

  At this point, and many others on the tape (as I recall), the voice became nearly inaudible. “The bungalow house,” it said, “was such a bleak environment in which to make a stand: the moonlight through the dusty blinds, the bodies on the carpet, the lamps without any lightbulbs. And the incredible silence. It was not the absence of sounds that I sensed, but the stifling of innumerable sounds and even voices, the muffling of all the noises one might expect to hear in an old bungalow house in the dead of night, as well as countless other sounds and voices. The forces required to accomplish this silence filled me with awe. The infinite terror and dreariness of an infested bungalow house, I whispered to myself. A bungalow universe, I then thought without speaking aloud. Suddenly I was overcome by a feeling of euphoric hopelessness which passed through my body like a powerful drug and held all my thoughts and all my movements in a dreamy, floating suspension. In the moonlight that shone through the blinds of that bungalow house I was now as still and as silent as everything else.”