Noctuary (16 page)

Beyond the windows a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps along an empty street. Night is softly beginning. Within the window are narrow bars, both vertical and horizontal, which divide it into several smaller windows. At their intersections, these bars form crosses which have their own reflections, not far beyond the windowpanes, in those other crosses jutting out of the earth-hugging fog in the graveyard. To all appearances, it is a burial-ground in the clouds that I contemplate through the window.

Upon the window ledge is an old pipe that seems to have been mine in another life. The pipe's dark bowl must have brightened to a reddish-gold as I smoked and gazed beyond the window at the graveyard. When the tobacco had burned to the bottom, perhaps I gently knocked the pipe against the inside wall of the fireplace, showering the logs and stones with warm ashes. The fireplace is framed within the wall perpendicular to the window. Across the room is a large desk and a high-backed chair. The lamp positioned in the far right corner of the desk must serve as illumination for the entire room, a modest supplement to those pale beacons beyond the window. Some old books, pens, and writing paper are spread across the top of the desk. In the dim depths of the room, against the fourth wall, is a towering clock that ticks quietly.

These, then, are the main features of the room in which I find myself: window, fireplace, desk, and clock. There is no door.

I never dreamed that dying in one's sleep would encompass dreaming itself. Perhaps I often dreamed of this room and now, near the point of death, have become its prisoner. And here my bloodless form is held while my other body somewhere lies still and without hope. There can be no doubt that my present state is without reality. If nothing else, I know what it is like to dream. And although a universe of strange sensation is inspired by those lights beyond the window, by the fog and the graveyard, they are no more real than I am. I know there is nothing beyond those lights and that the obscured ground outside could never sustain my steps. Should I venture there I would fall straight into an absolute darkness, rather than approaching it by the degrees of my dying dreams.

For other dreams came before this one - dreams in which I saw lights more brilliant, a fog even more dense, and gravestones with names I could almost read from the distance of this room. But everything is dimming, dissolving, and growing dark. The next dream will be darker still, everything a little more confused, my thoughts... wandering. And objects that are now part of the scene may soon be missing; perhaps even my pipe - if it was ever mine - will be gone forever.

Those lights flickering in the fog seem the very face of infinity, the spare features of an empty mask. The clock begins to sound within the room and for a moment the silent void has found an echoing voice. Everything is dimming, dissolving... the next dream will be darker still. And when I awake the room will be darker, dissipating like a fog around me, a black fog in which everything will drown and all my thoughts will be gone forever.

But for the moment I am safe in my dream, this dream.

Beyond the window a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps along an empty street. Night is softly beginning.

To others he always tried to convey the impression that he lived in a better place than he actually did, one far more comfortable and far less decayed. "If they could only see what things are really like, rotting all around me."

Feeling somewhat morose, he closed his eyes and sank down into gloomy reflections. He was sitting in a plump, stuffed chair which was sprouting in several places through the worn upholstery.

"Would you like to know how it feels to be dead?" he imagined a voice asking him. "Yes, I would," he imagined answering. A rickety but rather proud-looking gentleman - this is how he imagined the voice - led him past the graveyard gates. (And they were flaking with age and squeaking in the wind, just as he always imagined they would.) The quaintly tilting headstones, the surrounding grove of vaguely stirring trees, the soft gray sky overhead, the cool air faintly fragrant with decay: "Is this how it is?" he asked hopefully. "Late afternoon in a perpetual autumn?"

"Not exactly," the gentleman answered. "Please keep watching." The gentleman's instruction was intended ironically, for there was no longer anything to behold: no headstones, no trees or sky, nor was there a fragrance of any kind to be blindly sensed.

"Is this how it is, then?" he asked once more. "A body frozen in blackness, a perpetual night in winter?"

"Not precisely," the gentleman replied. "Allow your vision to become used to the darkness."

Then it began to appear ,to him, glowing with a glacial illumination, a subterranean or extrastellar phosphorescence. Initially, the radiant corpse he saw seemed to be in a stiffly upright position; but he had no way of calculating his angle of perspective, which may actually have been somewhere directly above the full length of the body, rather than frontally facing its height. No less than its mold-spotted clothes, the flesh of the cadaver was in gauzy tatters, lips shrivelled to a powdery smudge on a pale shroud of a face, eyes dried up in the shells of their sockets, hair a mere sprinkling of dust. And now he imagined the feeling of death as one previously beyond his imagination. This feeling was simply that of an eternally prolonged itching sensation.

"Yes, of course," he thought, "this is how it really must be, an incredible itch when all the fluids are gone and ragged flesh chafes in ragged clothes. A terrible itching and nothing else, nothing worse." Then, out loud, he asked the old gentleman: "Is this, then, how it truly feels to be-dead? Only this and not the altogether unimaginable horror I've always feared it would be?"

"Is that what you would now have, this true knowledge?" asked a voice, though it was not the voice of the rickety and proud-looking old man he had first imagined. This was another voice altogether, a strange voice which promised: "The true knowledge shall be yours."

A long time passed before his body was found, its bony fingers digging into the tattered material of a plump, stuffed armchair, its skin already crumbling and covered with the room's dust. His discoverers were some acquaintances who wondered what had become of him. And as they stood for a few numbed moments around the site of his seated corpse, a few of them absent-mindedly gave their collared necks or shirt-sleeved arms a little scratch.

Along with the trauma this unexpected discovery imposed, there was the lesser shock of the dead man's run-down home, which was not at all the place his acquaintances imagined they would find. But somehow it continued to be the better place of their imagination when - on autumn afternoons or winter nights - they recollected the thing they found in the chair, or simply reflected on the phenomenon of death itself. Often these musings would be accompanied by a tiny scratch or two just behind the ears or at the base of the neck.

He had lost his guide — or else had been abandoned by this seething, wiry native of the city — and now he was wandering through strange streets alone. The experience was not entirely an unwelcome one. From the first instant he became aware of the separation, things became more... interesting. Perhaps this transformation had begun even in the moments preceding a full awareness of his situation: the narrow entranceway of a certain street or the shadowed spires of a certain structure appeared as mildly menacing to the prophetic edges of his vision, pleasantly threatening. Now his eyes were filled with the sight of an infinitely more ominous scene, and a truly foreign one.

It was near sundown and all the higher architectures -the oddly curving roofs, the almost tilting peaks - were turned into anonymous forms with razor-sharp outlines by the low brilliance in the west. And these angular monuments, blocking the sun, covered the streets below with a thick layer of shadows, so that even though a radiant blue sky continued to burn above, down here it was already evening.

The torpid confusion of the streets, the crudely musical clatter of alien sounds, became far more mysterious without the daylight and without his guide. It was as if the city had annexed the shadows and expanded under the cover of darkness, as if it were celebrating incredible things there, setting up all sorts of fabulous attractions. Golden lights began to fill windows and to fall against the crumbling mortar of old walls.

His attention was now drawn to a low building at the end of the street, and, avoiding any thought which might diminish his sense of freedom, he entered its lamplit doorway.

The place was one of indefinite character. Stepping inside, he received a not unwelcoming glance from a man who was adjusting some objects on a shelf across the room, and who turned briefly to look over his shoulder at the foreign visitor. At first this man, who must have been the proprietor, was barely noticeable, for the color and texture of his attire somehow caused him to blend, chameleon-like, into the surrounding decor. The man became apparent only after showing his face, but after he turned away he retreated back into the anonymity from which he had been momentarily summoned by the intrusion of a customer. Otherwise there was no one else in the shop, and, left unbothered by its invisible proprietor, he browsed freely among the shelves.

What merchandise they held. True curiosities in a thousand twisting shapes were huddled together on the lower shelves, met one's gaze at eye level, and leered down from dim and dusty heights. Some of them, particularly the very small ones, but also the very largest ones crouched in corners, could not be linked to anything he had ever seen. They might have been trinkets for strange gods, toys for monsters. His sense of freedom intensified. Now he was nearly overcome with the feeling that something unheard of could very possibly enter his life, something which otherwise might have passed him by. His sensation was one of fear, but fear that was charged with the blackest passion. He now felt himself as the victim of some vast conspiracy that involved the remotest quarters of the cosmos, countless plots all converging upon him. Hidden portents were everywhere and his head was now spinning: first with vague images and possibilities, then with... darkness.

What place he later occupied is impossible to say. Underground, perhaps, beneath the shop with the peculiar merchandise. Thenceforward it was always dark, except on those occasions when his keepers would come down and shine a light across the full length of his monstrous form.
 (
The victim of a horrible magic,
the guide would whisper.) But the shining light never disturbed his dreams, since his present shape was equipped with nothing that functioned as eyes.

Afterward money would be collected from the visiting spectators, who were sworn to secrecy before they were allowed to witness this marvel. Still later they would be assassinated to insure the inviolable condition of their vow. But how much more fortunate were they, meeting their deaths with a fresh sense of that exotic wonder which they had travelled so far to experience, than he, for whom all distances and alien charm had long ago ceased to exist in the cramped and nameless incarceration in which he had found a horrible home.

No one knows how entrance is made; no one recalls by what route such scenes are arrived at. There might be a soft tunnel of blackness, possibly one without arching
 walls or solid flooring, a vague streamlined enclosure down which one floats toward a shadowy terminus. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, a light flares up and spreads, props appear all around, the scenario is laid out and learned in an instant, while that ingress of blackness - that dull old tunnel - is unmemorized. On the other hand, perhaps there is no front door to the dream, no first act to the drama: a gallery of mannikins abruptly wakes and they all take up their roles in mid-speech, without a beginning to go back to.

But the significant thing is not to begin but to continue, not to arrive but to stay. This is the founding condition, the one on which all others are grounded and raised: restriction, incarceration is the law of the structure. And
this
structure, an actual building now, is a strange one; complete in itself, it is not known to be part of a larger landscape, as if perfectly painted mountains had been left without a lake or sky on a wide white canvass. Is it a hospital? Museum? Drab labyrinth of offices? Or just some nameless... institution? Whatever it may be outside, inside... for those who have important business there - it is very late, and the time has somehow slipped by for a crucial appointment.

In which room was it supposed to take place. Is this even the right section of the building, the correct floor? All the hallways look the same - without proper lighting or helpful passersby - and none of the rooms is numbered. But numbers are of no assistance, going from empty room to empty room is futile. That vital meeting has already been missed and nothing in the world can make up for this loss.

Finally, a kind of climax is reached in the shadows beneath a stairway, where one has taken refuge from the consequences of failure.

And within this apparent haven there is an entirely new development: multitudes of huge spiders hang ill drooping webs above and around you. Your presence has disturbed them and they begin to move, their unusual bodies maneuvering about. But however horrible they may be, you know that you need them.

For they are the ones who show you the way out; it is their touch which guides you and reminds you how to take leave of this torture. Everyone recalls this final flight from the nightmare; everyone knows how to scream.