The Nightmare Factory (66 page)

Later he became a student of the imaginary lands hypothesized by legends and theologies, and he had sojourned in places which concealed or suggested unknown orders of existence. Among the volumes in his library were several of his own authorship, bibliographical shadows of his lifetime obsessions. His body of works included such titles as:
In the Margins of Paradise
,
The Forgotten Universe of the Vicoli
, and
The Secret Gods and Other Studies
. For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin.

Arthur Emerson pulled a rather large book down from its high shelf and ambled toward a cluttered desk to make some notes for a work which would very likely be his last. Its tentative title:
Dynasties of Dust
.

Toward nightfall he suspended his labors. With much stiffness, he walked to the window ledge where the cat lay sleeping in the fading light of dusk. But its body seemed to rise and fall a little too vigorously for sleep, and it made a strange whistling sound rather than the usual murmuring purr. The cat opened its eyes and rolled sideways, as it often did when inviting a hand to stroke its glossy black fur. But as soon as Arthur Emerson laid his palm upon that smooth coat, his fingers were rapidly gnawed. The animal then leaped to the floor and ran out of the room, while Arthur Emerson watched his own blood trickling over his hand in a shapeless stain.

All that evening he felt restless, profoundly at odds with the atmosphere of each room he entered and then soon abandoned. He wandered the house, telling himself that he was in search of his ebony pet, in order to establish the terms of their misunderstanding. But this pretext would every so often dissolve, and it then became clear to Arthur Emerson that he searched for something less tangible than a runaway cat. These rooms, however high their ceilings, suffocated him with shadowy questions; his footsteps, echoing sharply down long gleaming corridors, sounded like clacking bones. The house had become a museum of mystery.

He finally gave up the search and allowed fatigue to guide him to his bedroom, where immediately he opened a window in the hope that something without a name would fly from the house. But he now discovered that it was not only the house which was swollen with mysteries; it was the very night itself. A nocturnal breeze began lifting the curtains, mingling with the air inside the room. Shapeless clumps of clouds floated with mechanical complacency across a stone gray sky, a sky which itself seemed shapeless rather than evenly infinite. To his left he saw that the inner surface of the open window reflected a strange face, his face, and he pushed the fear-stricken thing out into the darkness.

Arthur Emerson eventually slept that night, but he also dreamed. His dreams were without definite form, a realm of mist where twisted shadows glided, their dark mass shifting fluently. Then, through the queerly gathered and drifting clouds of mist, he saw a shadow whose dark monstrosity made the others seem shapely and radiant. It was a deformed colossus, a disfigured monument carved from the absolute density of the blackest abyss. And now the lesser shadows, the pale and meager shadows, seemed to join in a squealing chorus of praise to the greater one. He gazed at the cyclopean thing in a trance of horror, until its mountainous mass began to move, slowly stretching out some part of itself, flexing what might have been a misshapen arm. And when he awoke, scattering the bedcovers, he felt a warm breeze wafting in through a window which he could not remember having left open.

The next morning it became apparent that there would be no relief from the uncanny influences which still seemed to be lingering from the day before. All about the Emerson estate a terrific fog had formed, blinding the inhabitants of the house to most of the world beyond it. What few shapes remained visible—the closest and darkest trees, some rose bushes pressing against the windows—seemed drained of all earthly substance, creating a landscape both infinite and imprisoning, an estate of dream. Unseen in the fog, the swans were calling out like banshees down by the lake. And even Graff, when he appeared in the library attired in a bulky groundskeeper’s jacket and soiled trousers, looked less like a man than like a specter of ill prophecy.

“Are you certain,” said Arthur Emerson, who was seated at his desk, “that you have nothing to report about those creatures?”

“No sir,” replied Graff. “Nothing.”

There was, however, something else Graff had discovered, something which he thought the master of the house should see for himself. Together they traveled down several stairways leading to the various cellars and storage chambers beneath the house. On the way Graff explained that, as also ordered, he had searched for the cat, which had not been seen since last evening. Arthur Emerson only gazed at his man and nodded in silence, while inwardly muttering to himself about some strangeness he perceived in the old retainer. Between every few phrases the man would begin humming, or rather singing at the back of his throat in an entirely peculiar manner.

After making their way far into the dark catacombs of the Emerson house, they arrived at a remote room which seemed to have been left unfinished when the house had been erected so long ago. There were no lighting fixtures (except the one recently improvised by Graff), the stone walls were unplastered and unpainted, and the floor was of hard, bare earth. Graff pointed downward, and his crooked finger wandered in an arc through the sepulchral dimness of the room. Arthur Emerson now saw that the place had been turned into a charnel house for the remains of small animals: mice, rats, birds, squirrels, even a few young possums and raccoons. He already knew the cat to be an obsessive hunter, but it seemed strange that these carcasses had all been brought to this room, as if it were a kind of sanctum of mutilation and death.

While contemplating this macabre chamber, Arthur Emerson noticed peripherally that Graff was fidgeting with some object concealed in his pocket. How strange indeed the old servant had become.

“What have you got there?” Arthur Emerson asked.

“Sir?” Graff replied, as though his manual gyrations had proceeded without his awareness. “Oh, this,” he said, revealing a metal gardening implement with four clawlike prongs. “I was doing some work outdoors; that is, I was intending to do so, if there was time.”

“Time? On a day like this?”

Obviously embarrassed and at a loss to explain himself, Graff pointed the taloned tool at the decomposing carcasses. “None of the animals actually seem to have been eaten,” he quietly observed, and that curious piping in his throat sounded almost louder than his words.

“No,” Arthur Emerson agreed with some bewilderment. He then reached up to grasp a thick black extension cord which Graff had slung over the rafters; at the end of the cord was a light bulb which he tried to maneuver to more fully illuminate the room. Incautiously, perhaps, Arthur Emerson was thinking that there existed some method to the way the bodies of the slaughtered creatures were positioned across the entire floor. Graff’s next remark approximated the unformed perception of his employer: “Like a trail of dominos winding round and round. But no true sense to it.”

Arthur Emerson readily granted the apt analogy to a maze of dominos, but concerning the second of Graff’s statements there suddenly appeared to be some doubt. For at that moment Arthur Emerson looked up and saw a queerly shaped stain, as if made by mold or moisture, upon the far wall.

“Shall I clean the place out?” asked Graff, raising the metal claw.

“What? No,” decided Arthur Emerson as he gazed at the shapeless, groping horror that appeared to have crawled from his own dream and stained itself into the stone before him. “Leave everything exactly as it is,” he ordered the old whistling servant.

Arthur Emerson returned to the library, and there he began to explore a certain shelf of books. This shelf comprised his private archives of handsomely bound travel diaries he had kept over the years. He withdrew one after another, paged through each volume, and then replaced it. Finally he found the one he wanted, which was the record of a visit to central and southern Italy made when he was a young man. Settling down at his desk, he leaned into the words before him. After reading only a few sentences he began to wonder who this strange lyrical creature, this ghost, might be. No doubt himself, but in some previous incarnation, some bizarre anterior life.

Spoleto
(Ides of October)

What wonders dwell within the vicoli! How often can I celebrate those fabulous little thoroughfares which form a maze of magic and dreams, and how often can I praise the medieval hill towns of Umbria which are woven of such streets? Guiding one into courtyards, they are snug roads invented for the meanderings of sleepwalkers. One is embraced by the gray walls of high houses, one is nestled beneath their wood-beamed roofs and beneath innumerable arches which cut the monotonous day into a wealth of shadows and frame the stars at night within random curves and angles. Nightfall in the vicoli! Pale yellow lanterns awake like apparitions in the last moments of twilight, claiming the dark narrow lanes for their own, granting an enchanted but somewhat uneasy passage to those who would walk there. And last evening I found myself among these spirits.

Intoxicated as much by the Via Porta Fuga as by the wine I had drunk at dinner, I wandered across bridges, beneath arches and overhanging roofs, up and down battered stairways, past ivy-hung walls and black windows masked with iron grillwork. I turned a corner and glimpsed a small open doorway ahead. Without thinking, I looked inside as I passed, seeing only a tiny niche, not even a room, which must have been constructed in the space between two buildings. All I could clearly discern were two small candles which were the source and focus of a confusion of shadows. From inside a man’s voice spoke to me in English: “A survival of the ancient world,” said the voice, which carried the accent of a cultivated Englishman, sounding very bored and mechanical and very out of place in the circumstances. And I also must note a strange whistling quality in his words, as if his naturally low speaking voice were resonating with faintly high-pitched overtones. “Yes, sir, I am speaking to you,” he continued. “A fragment of antiquity, a survival of the ancient world. Nothing to fear, there is no fee demanded.”

He now appeared in the doorway, a balding and flabby middle-aged gentleman in a tattered, tieless suit—the image of his own weary voice, the voice of an exhausted fairgrounds huckster. His face, as it reflected the pale yellow light of the lantern beside the open doorway, was a calm face; but its calmness seemed to derive from a total despair of soul rather than from a serenity of mind. “I am referring to the altar of the god,” he said. “However extensive your learning and your travels, that
one
is not among those deities you will have heard about; that one is not among those divinities you may have laughed about. It could be distantly related, perhaps, to those numina of Roman cesspools and sewage systems. But it is not a mere Cloacina, not a Mephitis or Robigo. In name, the god is known as Cynothoglys: the god without shape, the god of changes and confusion, the god of decompositions, the mortician god of both gods and men, the metamortician of all things. There is no fee demanded.”

I remained where I stood, and then the man stepped out into the little vicolo in order to allow me a better view through the open doorway, into the candlelit room beyond. I could now see that the candles were shining on either side of a low slab, cheap candles that sent out a quivering haze of smoke. Between these tapers was an object which I could not define, some poor shapeless thing, perhaps the molten relic of a volcanic eruption at some distant time, but certainly not the image of an ancient deity. There seemed to be nothing and no one else inhabiting that sinister little nook.

I may now contend that, given the unusual circumstances described above, the wisest course of action would have been to mumble a few polite excuses and move on. But I have also described the spell which is cast by the vicoli, by their dimly glowing and twisted depths. Entranced by these dreamlike surroundings, I was thus prepared to accept the strange gentleman’s offer, if only to enhance my feeling of intoxication with all the formless mysteries whose name was now Cynothoglys.

“But be solemn, sir. I warn you to be solemn.” I stared at the man for a brief moment, and in that moment this urging of my solemnity seemed connected in some way to his own slavish and impoverished state, which I found it difficult to believe had always been his condition. “The god will not mock your devotions, your prayers,” he whispered and whistled. “Nor will it be mocked.”

Then, stepping through the little doorway, I approached the primitive altar. Occupying its center was a dark, monolithic object whose twisting shapelessness has placed it beyond simple analogies in my imagination. Yet there was something in its contours—a certain dynamism, like that of great crablike roots springing forth from the ground—which suggested more than mere chaos or random creation. Perhaps the following statement could be more sensibly attributed to the mood of the moment, but there seemed a definite power somehow linked to this gnarled effigy, a gloomy force which was disguised by its monumentally static appearance. Toward the summit of the mutilated sculpture, a crooked armlike appendage extended outward in a frozen grasp, as if it had held this position for unknown eons and at any time might resume, and conclude, its movement.