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 never-ending 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.