Shadows Out of Time

The Moth in the Dark DARRELL SCHWEITZER

I

So we begin innocently enough with two brothers, aged fourteen and twelve, tramping up a wooded hillside behind a motel on the coast of Maine, where their family vacations every year. The ostensible purpose of this expedition is scientific, the collection of insect specimens, so that both are equipped with cheesecloth butterfly nets and rattling knapsacks in which they carry killing jars and specimen containers. Admittedly most of the rattling actually comes from the older brother, Clifford, who is obsessed with anything that’s got wings and/or six legs, and who tends to babble on about moths like a radio commentator you can’t switch off.

The younger boy, Thomas, is silent. He is beginning to lose interest in this hobby, but he likes the woods and he tends to follow his brother.

Suddenly Clifford’s “broadcast” is interrupted by crashing underbrush and the terrifying apparition of a wild-eyed, wildhaired, and wildly bearded old man in a torn black robe who grabs hold of Thomas by the front of his jacket, lifts him off the ground, shakes him, and screams incoherently, saliva flying, so that Thomas can only make out a few words, something like “I’ve seen! Don’t! Don’t let it start! No! Don’t begin!” Thomas is screaming himself and struggling, too, but Clifford, for all his self-absorbed pedantry, does not panic. He hits the stranger over the head and shoulders several times with a heavy branch until there is an audible crunch, which must be wood breaking because the black-robed figure disappears down the hillside, still shouting, arms waving, not visibly impaired.

After that, the two boys sit side by side on a large boulder, breathing hard. Thomas whimpers softly. Clifford, who is too embarrassed to admit he’s peed in his pants, can hardly berate Thomas for being a sissy. After all, he, Clifford, is supposed to be the hero of the day.

What they finally decide to do, or at least Clifford decides and Thomas goes along with it, is not to tell their parents, for fear that they might never be allowed into these woods again. The danger is, after all, past. The “fucking lunatic” (Clifford’s term) must have been a random drunk, bum, hobo, or whatever, who continued down the hill, ran out into the highway, and either got hit by a truck or taken away by the police, and, in any case, would not be coming back.

So it is that a few days later, after the usual round of vacation activities, a trip to the local lake, to the beach, to the art museum in Rockland, lots of stops at roadside antique shops, etc. Clifford and Thomas find themselves again decked out for insect collection, ascending the same hills, minus the lunatic this time, and their explorations really hit the jackpot.

They come upon an enormous house in the woods, a mansion, a castle, like something out of an impossible dream, a pile of gables and turrets and towers and gaping, dark windows that seems to cover the entire ridge line and extend beyond it — definitely not what you expect to find in the Maine woods. Oh, crumbling farmhouses are common enough, abandoned by dirt-poor farmers a century ago who broke their backs hauling stones out of their fields to build stone fences along the edges (commoner than even the farmhouses), only to die of exhaustion or give up in despair when the wretchedly thin soil yielded nothing. The boys’ mother actually encouraged them to enter such houses to look for antiques. The prize find so far was a Revolutionary cut-tin lantern. Runner-up was a crate of magazines from the eighteen hundreds. Sometimes there were bottles or dishes.

But this is on a whole different order of magnitude, a massive combination of mountainside and edifice and ruin, covered with vines, with trees growing through the roof in places, so that it sometimes looks more like a natural formation than a building; or, in Thomas’s fancy at least, like an enormous monster sleeping there, waiting, very possibly, for him.

Clifford, for once in his life, is almost speechless, and can only say, “Holy shit…”

But to Thomas, the place is calling out. It is like something out of a dream, something vast and thunderous, arising, breaching like a leviathan from the depths and darkness of lost memory, something he is already a part of, so that climbing the cracked and leaf-strewn steps and pushing open the heavy front door is like yielding, allowing himself to sink without resistance into that black abyss where leviathans lurk, and it seems the right thing to do, something inevitable, even as, far away, he hears his brother yelling, “Hey! I wouldn’t do that if I were you!”

The door swings open in absolute silence and the darkness swallows Thomas up, and that is the last we shall hear of Clifford other than to say that when Thomas Brooks, an ordinary boy with an ordinary name, vanishes from human ken forever, his brother cannot account for what happened. When the story of the “tramp” slips out bit by sobbing bit, the conclusion is that maybe it was Clifford who was hit on the head a few times and got mixed up. Nevertheless, Thomas is gone. Milkcarton photos, reporters, tabloids, all are without result except to generate publicity for professional psychics, who can’t find Thomas any more than the police can.

The hilltop is searched, of course. There is no mansion, castle, palace, or even a ruined farmhouse. So the family never vacations in Maine again and Clifford grows up to be a particularly obsessed entomologist.

The end.

II

But that was not the end. It’s not that simple.

For a long time, still under some kind of spell, as if in a dream, Thomas groped around in the dark. He entered several rooms, some of them empty, some cluttered with furniture or piled high with boxes. The place was dry, with an old-wood smell, like old houses are expected to have. He had been expecting dampness, mud. If there were trees growing through the floor or roof anywhere, he did not find them.

He knocked his knuckles on the walls. Solid.

At first he was afraid he was trespassing, but then, after passing through dozens of rooms, still in absolute darkness, and aware that he was lost, there was nothing he could do but call out.

He heard his voice echoing, but the house only responded with subtle creaking, the way old houses do.

Hours seemed to pass and he was hungry and tired and scared. It was as if, in a dream, he had fallen into a deep pit, or a grave, and now he had awakened, not in his own bedroom, but in a strange place, still in the dream.

But he knew he was awake. Things were just too solid. He bruised himself painfully when he stumbled over a staircase in the dark. Feeling his way, crawling, he made his way to the top and rested there, sitting on the last step, leaning on the smooth floor above it, and he fell asleep — a dream within a dream within a dream, or maybe not — and it seemed to him that he had been carried off in the belly of a winged monster that only looked like a house when it was resting in the forest. It opened its eyes, and starlight flooded in. He saw two tall, arched windows (which had been eyes) and the night sky outside, and he watched the full moon rise, bright and huge and closer than he had ever seen it before, even though (through a recently developed interest in astronomy) he knew that the full moon was not due for another two weeks. (Thomas had a bit of his brother’s pedantic streak.)

Then someone put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Hello Thomas.”

He yelped, and jumped away from the window. This wasn’t a dream.

“Hello,” he said softly.

The other replied with the most unlikely announcement imaginable. “Welcome to Hell” or “You know you’re dead now, don’t you?” would have made sense, but, no, the other person merely said, “Come and get your breakfast. It’s ready.” He could only follow the other into the next room, where, indeed, a breakfast of bacon and eggs and juice had been laid out on a polished table. This room was dimly lit, by candles in holders along the walls.

He sat down at the table. He was able to see the person seated opposite him now, a man clad in a black robe, much younger and better groomed than the lunatic in the woods; but if they had been monks, they would have been of the same order. This one had jet black hair, as Thomas did, and a pointed beard, which of course Thomas did not.

“My name is Thomas also,” the other said. “Maybe you should call me Big Thomas to avoid confusion. You will be Small Thomas.” He smiled, but Small Thomas took little comfort in that.

“Am I being kidnapped?”

The other laughed softly. “You have a lot to learn. Eat your breakfast.”

He started eating, then paused again. “Then do I get to go home afterwards?”

Big Thomas did not answer. Instead he placed on the table one of the killing jars from Small Thomas’s knapsack. He held it up to the candlelight. Inside was a prize catch, which had been the highlight of the day before things got weird, a perfect specimen of a white underwing moth. The upper wings look exactly like white birch bark. The hind wings and underside, with their pattern of curving dark and light stripes, create a kaleidoscope effect to confuse predators. You only find these creatures in northern woods, in New England, and not in Philadelphia where Thomas was actually from.

He started to protest when Big Thomas opened the jar. Even from across the table there was a strong whiff of carbon tetrachloride, the killing agent, which the boys could get because their father was a chemist at DuPont. Big Thomas carefully removed the moth and held it in the palm of his hand. He didn’t breathe on the moth or say any magic words, but to Small Thomas’s amazement, it began to stir. Then it crawled to the tip of Big Thomas’s finger and vibrated its wings. He tossed it into the air, and the moth took off, soaring up, up among the dark rafters overhead.

“But, it was dead…” said Small Thomas.

The other held his hands about a foot apart. “Within a certain interval in time,” he said, “the moth was alive. Go before that interval”—he waved his left hand—“and it does not yet exist. After it”—he waved his right—“it is indeed dead. In between, it is alive. Move it back into that interval of living, and it is alive.”

“Was that…a miracle?”

“No, it is your lesson for today. Now finish your breakfast.”

III

And Little Thomas grew to be a man.

But it’s not so simple. I don’t want to give the impression that this is some goddamn fairy story about how a boy blundered into a realm of enchantment where he found a mysterious mentor and they became good buddies, master and student, father and stepson or something like that, and their lives were filled with wonder until the time came for the boy to go out on a quest and confront the Big Bad Big Bad and save the universe. It wasn’t like that. Thomas, Tommy Brooks, had read stories like that, but he knew that they were crap.

He never stopped being afraid. He was afraid when, right after breakfast, Big Thomas took him back to the twin windows through which he had observed the full moon, but now it was day, only the trees were bare of any leaves and there was snow on the ground.

“But it’s July,” he objected.

“It was July and will be again,” said Big Thomas, “but never the same July.”

That didn’t explain anything. Too many of the answers were like that. Like fortune-cookie fortunes, he decided. They sounded wise and profound but they didn’t say anything, not really.

He was afraid when he realized that he and Big Thomas were not alone in the house, that there were others. Once, in a room full of ticking clocks of all descriptions, he came face to face with a dark-haired, bearded man in a black robe who should have been Big Thomas and looked very much like him, but somehow wasn’t, and he turned and fled.

Once he looked out a window over a blasted landscape, where there was only mud and burning vapors, and the sky itself was red and seemed on fire. He could feel the heat of the burning as he touched the glass.

He had his lessons. There was a great deal of study. He would find Big Thomas seated at a table, with books open before him, and it would be time to begin or resume. First, languages. Now in the seventh grade, he’d had beginner’s Spanish, and was fairly good at it, but this was harder, a lot harder: Latin, Greek, and languages he hadn’t even known existed. But somehow they came to him, as if he’d already known them and was remembering. These enabled him to read at least a few passages from the strange books in the vast library that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes a shelf would seem empty, but Big Thomas would reach up and there would be the book he wanted. Or sometimes a book was just on the table before them. Sometimes Big Thomas would lead him into vast rooms filled with books, tier upon tier of galleries disappearing into the gloom above. Later, he wouldn’t be able to find such rooms by himself.

By candlelight, or by the light of an oil lamp, they would read together, and Big Thomas explained much to him, particularly about the nature of time, which he said flowed backwards and forwards at equal rates, so that the future could spill into the past or the past into the future, blending together, like paint mixing. The house itself, he said, was like a pendulum, swinging through thousands of centuries, back and forth, back and forth. Indeed, sometimes he took Small Thomas to the window and showed him a jungle filled with dinosaurs, where black stone cities rose in the distance. Another time, there was a bare, ashen landscape with the sun grown huge and red. Here a race of gigantic beetles rode across the world on machines like enormous spiders that spat out fire.

At times they were not alone with their studies, when others seemed to gather around them, black-robed figures emerging partially from the shadows, looking on expectantly.

Small Thomas considered the possibility that he had gone insane, or that he was dead, or that he had been abducted by aliens.

There was nothing to do but go on.

Once he came to a round room high in a tower. On every side, round windows like portholes revealed only stars. In one, a pair of brilliant stars, one green, one a bloody red, burned so brightly that it was hard to look on them. There was something strange about the gravity in the room. His body felt heavy. He struggled to breathe the thick air. Nevertheless he turned his back to block out the light of the too-bright stars and made his way to the center of the room. There, in a glass coffin set on a pedestal, lay a boy in a black robe, who looked very much like himself only maybe a little older, and who, he came to understand as he became that boy, was dreaming the house, the whole situation, his life and memories and predicament into existence. His mind could not sort that all out, but somehow he knew that it began here, with the boy in the glass coffin, who dreamed that the house swung back in time to a hillside in Maine in 1964, where it picked up Tommy Brooks, who became the boy dreaming, and so on and so on until he became Big Thomas too, and all the others, each of them gradually getting older, like looking at himself in an infinite hall of mirrors into the future.

Sometimes he dreamed of the white underwing moth, fluttering in the dark.

And then he awoke, and said out loud, “I want to go home.”

He awoke, not in the coffin, but in his own bed, not at home of course, but in his quarters near the dining room and the top of the great staircase. He got up, and put on his black robe and slippers, which he always wore now. He had been here long enough that he had definitely outgrown the blue jeans and flannel shirt and jacket he had been wearing when he first arrived.

Acting on no more than a hunch, he made his way downstairs, through the main hall there, and he found, very much to his surprise, that the front door was open.

He felt a sense of urgency. He had to get out quickly. Was Big Thomas perhaps asleep on the job and getting careless? Had he actually awakened from a long nightmare and shed the last few months or years like a heavy coat? If he dawdled, would he fall back into that dream, that nightmare, that otherness?

He hurried down the front steps, which were cracked and leaf-strewn as he remembered them. He knew where he was. He was in the woods, in Maine. He looked back at the house, and saw that it was covered in shadow, indistinct, almost like a thing of smoke. But the white birch trees were solid enough, as was the ground beneath his feet. He hurried down the hillside. He noticed after a few minutes that the leaves were turning colors. Here and there in there in clearings he saw goldenrod. So it couldn’t be July. He didn’t care. He kept on going, and after tripping and falling a few times realized that it was difficult to scramble down a slope through underbrush in an ankle-length robe, so he had to bunch it up around his waist, which left his legs exposed and caused him to be scratched considerably on briars.

Nevertheless, he emerged from the woods into the back yard of the very familiar motel. He made his way across the lawn. The grass hadn’t been cut. The place was closed, the driveway empty.

So, it might have been off-season, but he knew where he was and that was a tremendous relief. Route One was right in front of him. A tractor trailer went by. Across the road was a field where he and his brother had chased butterflies many times. Beyond that, Penobscot Bay. There were sail boats on the water.

To his left, downhill, was Lincolnville. A beach. The Lobster Trap restaurant. The ferry dock. In the other direction, Camden, which was a bigger town, perhaps three miles away. He headed uphill, toward Camden. Cars and trucks raced by, the wash of their passage tugging at his robe. Before long he realized that his thin slippers were not really suited for this sort of hiking, and he was footsore and limping by the time he got to town. But it was a tremendous thrill to see all the familiar places.

Some of it was familiar, some not. But he knew it and that was enough.

Where the road turned sharply left in front of the library, he sat down on a bench, exhausted. He was startled when a woman passing by said “Good morning, Father” to him as if she’d mistaken him for a monk or a priest because of his robe. But then she drew away, obviously realizing her error.

Maybe she thought he was just a weirdo. He didn’t care.

It took him a while to notice that the cars all looked slightly strange.

But still he lurched to his feet and made his way past the shops, some of which he recognized, some he didn’t. He turned down a familiar alley and emerged onto the docks, where schooners were tied up. For all it might have been late in the season, there were still tourists.

After a while he realized that people were staring at him. So he retreated and made his way up a flight of stairs he knew onto Bay View Street, which branched off Main Street and went almost all the way down to the water. There was a used-book shop on Bay View, where he’d spent many hours. His parents were friends with the owner, Mrs. Lowell.

He stood in front of the window of that shop and looked in at the familiar shelves. But he also noticed his own reflection in the window and stared at it realizing that the face he saw there wasn’t quite that of Tommy Brooks, aged twelve, soon to be retired butterfly collector. This boy was a bit older. He had the beginnings of a dark moustache.

Then there was an old lady staring back out at him. It couldn’t be Mrs. Lowell. Maybe it was Mrs. Lowell’s mother. The look on her face was one of astonishment and even a little fear, to use a familiar phrase, as if she had seen a ghost.

He turned and ran back uphill toward Main Street, past the shops, toward the library. One of the stores was a walk-in newsstand. There was a pile of newspapers on the sidewalk. He stopped to look at the date on one of them: September 8, 1997.

Now he understood why the cars had looked strange. Now he understood why the plan forming in his mind wasn’t going to work. The idea was to find a pay phone and call home. For one thing, he didn’t have any money. In the pocket of that pair of jeans he couldn’t wear anymore, back at the house, was a certain amount of 1964 change, which he supposed would still work, if he had it. Without it, he might still convince the operator to let him make a collect call…what then? Were his parents still alive? His brother Clifford would be forty-seven.

By the time he got back to the house, after another long and painful hike, he was sobbing and bedraggled. He’d lost his slippers somewhere, probably climbing the hill, and his feet were bleeding. Big Thomas was waiting for him at the top of the stairs and took him gently into his arms. But he did not offer comfort. He merely held him firmly and the look on his face was one of satisfaction, as if an important lesson had been completed.

IV

Now I have to take over the narrative. I told you this isn’t some cute-kid story, no magical coming-of-age sort of crap. Not so simple.

First person from now on. No sense pretending this happened afar, to someone else.

Some while after the aforesaid, I was looking at myself in a mirror in the bathroom — yes, the house had that sort of convenience, albeit the toilet worked with a chain and an overhead tank and the bathtub had clawed feet — but I digress. I stared into the mirror and saw that I was beginning to grow a dark beard, just like…you are ahead of me. I am ahead of me. I am he and he is we and we are I and all of us are the same, and my name is not Tommy or Thomas or even Big Thomas, but Legion, for we are many.

It was I who found the boy in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, still equipped with knapsack and butterfly net, asleep at the top of the stairs. I took him to breakfast. I knew how he felt because I remembered feeling it. I amazed him with the resurrected moth because I remembered being amazed. I knew that he would dream of that moth, and identify with it, and imagine himself flying up, up through the dark house forever, in terror and growing despair, but never quite giving up on the hope that he might find a speck of light and a way out.

My task was to educate him, and show him many wonders, because I had been through all this before.

Meanwhile, I saw myself in enough mirrors that I learned to trim my beard properly as it filled in.

But even if I was Big Thomas I was still a junior member of our brotherhood, fit only to teach the boy, fit only to place him in the glass coffin where he would sleep and dream us all and the house into being.

I remembered all that, and the others, who came out of the shadows, remembered me, because time does indeed play tricks, and is indeed like a house of mirrors, and I/we/they looked on with expectation as the whole cycle turned on itself, like a worm swallowing its tail, or like a Moebius strip going on and on forever…

But for what purpose? You may well ask. I tell you that I learned this much, from the others, from my older selves, that the purpose of this magical, half-living house with infinite rooms, which swung through eternity like a watch on a chain…watch the watch, watch the watch…have you gone under yet? You are in my power…

Not exploration, not any quest for scientific knowledge, or even conquest, but, in a word, worship.

Now the house was always filled with spirits and presences, with things that fluttered like moths in the darkness between the stars. Now my otherselves educated me, and took me up into endless towers that even I had never known existed, through rooms of strange gravities, where universes intersected, past windows that looked out on unfamiliar suns or worlds. Sometimes we conversed with monstrosities we had summoned up out of the abyss. Sometimes, either as their allies or their foes, we fought in strange wars.

I learned the secrets of the black worlds, which roll sunless in the eternal dark, where sentient fungi dream in glowing gardens, and know the secret name of Chaos.

Now the great powers gathered around us. To them, Earth was but a speck. To them, I was but a speck, but to them too I was like a tiny cog in a vast machine, which may seem too small to notice, but which, for the time being, is necessary.

We came together for a kind of sabbat, there, in the upper rooms of the house; and there was among us one from outside, whose skin was like flowing, living, black metal, and whose eyes and face were terrible to look upon. He was the mighty and dreadful messenger of our lord and master.

Yes. If the house-which-is-not-a-house swings through all of eternity like a watch on a chain, then what hand holds the chain? That is the primal potency at the center of time, whose true name cannot be spoken or written, but which is hidden behind the name of Azathoth.

That which we worshipped. That by whose whim we — and the entire universe — had been brought into existence, for all he might blow our dust away in another instant, should another whim come upon him.

Now after many transformations and transfigurations and changes, there was one among us, at the ultimate end of the chain of being of ourselves, who might perhaps be worthy to make his way up the chain on which our pendulum was suspended, and finally emerge at the center of Chaos, and there fall down in obeisance before the ultimate, mindless god.

So the Black Man of our sabbat, the mighty messenger, fetched one of our number, an old, wild-haired, wild-eyed fellow, and took him by the hand, and led him up that infinite spiral staircase to the ultimate portal, a round glass eye, there to draw back the curtain that covers it and gaze directly into the face of Azathoth on his demon throne.

We all cried out in awe, and spoke the secret words of praise in languages never spoken upon the Earth.

But that’s not what happened. They didn’t go up, at least not all the way. Maybe our fellow was not ready, despite all his learning and power. Maybe he had not entirely sloughed off his humanity, and so was burdened by hope or conscience. Or maybe his mind just snapped like a weak reed.

In any case, it was he who broke away and ran down through the house, screaming like a madman, out the front door and onto a hillside in 1964 where he tried unsuccessfully to dissuade a certain twelve-year-old boy from continuing the direction in which he and his brother had been going. When this happened, all of us scattered in terror and consternation, certain that the wrath of the Messenger would fall upon us. But we needn’t have worried, for those who were able to look say the expression on his face was one of satisfaction, as if he knew an important lesson had been completed.

V

I have spent some time in this madhouse, yes. When I ran screaming down the hillside, after the older boy hit me over the head several times with a branch, after I ran out into the highway in a frenzy and was clipped by a truck, I was taken to a hospital first, then elsewhere when I tried to tell them that I was Thomas Brooks, who had vanished so long ago on that hillside. But of course it wasn’t a long time ago. It was 1964 and Tommy Brooks, aged twelve, wasn’t even missing yet, though he would be in a few days. When he disappeared the police became very interested in what I had to say, but they and the doctors got nothing out of me that they could understand or believe.

I have not drawn back the ultimate curtain. I have not looked upon the face of Azathoth. But I know how it ends. Memory moves both ways in time too. So I, and my other selves, remember both what was and what is to come. I remember that, much bedraggled, my feet bleeding because I’d lost my slippers in the underbrush, I made my way back to the place of that uncompleted sabbat, and I climbed the tower, up the turning staircase through the worlds and universes. I stood before the ultimate portal, though I did not draw back the curtain. The time was not yet. But soon. I know how it all ends because I found there on the floor the corpse of a wild-haired old man in a tattered robe. His eyes had been seared, as if he had been blasted by what he had looked upon, but I recognized his face and it was my own.

Might I, like the moth which is trapped between two points in time in that brief interval in which it is alive, turn back from my own terminal point, before the curtains are drawn back and my eyes are blasted?

I don’t think so.

But what if I do not worship? What if instead I hurl defiance and curses into the face of Idiot Chaos. What then?

It’s probably not that simple.