The Nightmare Factory

by Thomas Ligotti

  At the moment he was working on a new collaboration, but all he had as yet was its barest beginnings: a sickle-shaped scar of moon, a common enough image which Alb Indys wanted to remove from one black sky and fix in another. Its relocation could have provided him with a way to waste the rest of the afternoon. However, the commotion outside the window earlier had upset the pace of his day and given it a new rhythm. Almost any event could do this to an insomniac’s delicate routine, so as yet there was no reason to contemplate the exceptional. An appearance by his landlord, whether rent-hungry or merely casual, sometimes altered his course for weeks to come. Before, his thoughts were of nothing, genuinely; but now old preoccupations had become stirred up and sharpened in his awareness. Was there anything special about this doctor, this Thoss? Alb Indys could not help wondering. Was he like the others, or was he a doctor who would hear, really hear you? Not one had yet heard him, not one had offered him a remedy worth the name.

  If there was a new doctor who had set up practice in the seaside town, Alb Indys could encounter none of the man’s cures, either real or pretended, by staying at home. He needed to find some things out for himself, make inquiries, get out into the world. When was the last time he had had a good meal? Perhaps that would be a way to begin, and afterward he could take it from there. One could always get acceptable food at the place right around the corner, no reason to fear they were going to give him poison! Good, he thought. And after he ate he might have a nice walk for himself, gain some advantage from the fresh air and scenery of this town. After all, many people came here for vaguely therapeutic reasons, believing there were medicines dispensed by the very mood of the town’s quaint streets and its sea-licked landscape. It might even happen that his maladies would disappear of their own accord, leaving him with no need for this doctor, this Thoss.

  He dressed himself in dark, heavy clothes and made sure to lock the door behind him. But he had forgot to shut the window properly and a breeze edged in, disturbing the pages of the drawing book on his bed, fluttering them against that lump in the blankets.

  At the restaurant Alb Indys found a small table in a quiet, comfortable corner, where he sat facing the rear wall and an empty chair. He ordered something to eat from a large board, nicely lettered, which was propped up on an easel at the front of the room. Because of his distance from this board, and a certain atmospheric dimness of the place, only a single word in bold letters was easily readable.

  “Fish,” he had said.

  “Fish of the day?”

  “Yes,” he had answered, mechanically and without a trace of the anticipation he thought he might feel.

  But despite his enduring lack of interest in daily meals, he did not regret this outing. A little lamp attached to the wall next to him, its light muffled by a grayish shade of some coarse fabric, created a slightly nocturnal ambiance. If he kept his gaze fixed upon a certain knotty plank in the wall, at a point just above the empty chair opposite him, everything peripheral to his left eye’s vision faded into a dark fog, while the little lamp to his right cast an island of illumination upon the table before him, instilling the illusion that he was lost in some glowing and isolated corner of an endless night. But he could not sustain the illusion: the state of mild delight into which he fooled himself faded, while shapes around him sharpened.

  Yet without this sharpening would he have noticed the newspaper someone had left behind on the seat of that empty chair? Messily bunched and repeatedly creased, it was still a welcome sight to his eyes. At this point he needed something of this kind, something to peruse in the rich glow of the lamp that was guiding him through an artificial night, preparing him for the authentic one in which he would have to face the unpredictable verdict which either terminated or terribly elongated his wakefulness. He reached for the pages, rustled them, unfolded and refolded them like an arrangement of bedcovers. His eyes followed dark letters across ruddy paper, and at last his mind was out of its terrible school for a while. When the food arrived he made way for the plate, building a nest of print and pictures around it: advertisements for the town’s shops and businesses, weather forecasts, happenings on the west shore, and a feature article entitled “THE REAL STORY OF DR. THOSS—Local Legend Revived.” A brief note explained that the article, written some years ago, was periodically reprinted when interest in the subject seemed, for one reason or another, newly aroused. Alb Indys paused over his meal for a moment and smiled, feeling disappointed and slightly relieved at the same time. It now appeared that he had been inspired by a misunderstanding, by imaginary consultations with a legendary doctor and his fictitious cures.

  Who, then? What? When and why? His name, according to the article, may indeed have been that of a real doctor, one who lived either in the distant past or whose renown was imported, by recollection and rumor, from a distant place. A number of people associated him with the following vague but poignant tragedy: an excellent physician, and a most respected figure in the community, was psychically deranged one night by some incident of indefinite character; afterward he continued to make use of his training in physic but in a wholly new fashion, in a different key altogether from that of his former practice. This went on for some time before, violently, he was stopped. Decapitation, drowning in the nearby sea, or both were the prevailing conclusions to the real doctor’s legend. Of course, the particulars vary, as do those of a second, and more widely circulated, version.

  This variant Dr. Thoss was a recluse of the witch-days, less a doctor of medicine than one deeply schooled at forbidden universities of the supernatural. Or was he naturally a very wise man who was simply misunderstood? Histories of the period are unhelpful in resolving such questions. No definite misbehavior is attributed to him, except perhaps that of keeping an unpleasant little companion. The creature, according to most who know this Thossian legend, is said to possess the following traits: it is smallish, “no bigger than a man’s head”; shriveled and rotting, as if with disease or decomposition; speaks in a rough voice; and moves about by means of numerous appendages of special qualities, called “miracle claws” by some. There was good reason, the article went on, to put this abbreviated marvel at the center of this legend, for the creature may not have been merely a diabolical companion of Dr. Thoss but the mysterious doctor himself. Was his tale, then, a cautionary one, illustrating what happened to those who, either from evil or benevolent motives, got “into trouble” with the supernatural? Or was Dr. Thoss itself intended to serve as no more than an agent of spectral hideousness, a bogie for children and the secluded campfire? Ultimately the point of the legend is unclear, the article asserted, beyond evoking a certain uneasiness in those of superactive imagination.

  But an even greater obscurity surrounded one last morsel of lore concerning who the doctor was and what he was about. It related to the way his name had come to be employed by certain people and under certain circumstances. Not the place for a scholarly inquest into regional expressions, the article merely cited an example, one that no doubt was already familiar to many of the newspaper’s readers. This particular usage was based on the idea—and the following verb must be stressed—of “feeding one’s troubles to the sea (or ‘wind’) and Dr. Thoss,” as if this figure—whatever its anatomical or metaphysical identity—were some kind of eater of others’ suffering. A concluding note invited readers to submit whatever smatterings they could to enlarge upon this tiny daub of local color.

  End of the real story of Dr. Thoss.

  Alb Indys had read the article with interest and appetite, more than he ever hoped to have, and he now pushed both crumpled newspaper and decimated meal away from him, sitting for a moment in blurry reflection on both. The surface of the old table, jaundiced by the little lamp above it, somehow seemed to be decaying in its grain, dissolving into a putrid haze. Possibly his attention had simply wandered too far when he heard, or thought he heard, a strange utterance. And it was delivered in a distorted, dry-throated voice, as though transmitted by garbled shortwave.
“Yes, my name is Thoss,” the voice had said. “I am a doctor.”

  “Excuse me, will there be anything else you’d like to order?”

  Shaken back to life, Alb Indys declined further service, paid his bill, and left. On his way out, for no defensible reason, he scrutinized every face in the room. But none of them could have said it, he assured himself.

  In any case, the doctor was now exposed as only a phantasm of local superstition. Or was he? To be perfectly honest about it, Alb Indys had to credit the nonexistent healer with some part of his present well-being. How he had eaten, and every bit! True, it was not much of a day—the town was a tomb and the sky its vault—but for him a secret sun was glowing somewhere, he could feel it. And there were hours remaining before it had to set, hours. He walked to the end of the street where it dipped down a steep hill and the sidewalk ended in a flight of old stone stairs that had curving grins sliced into them. He continued walking to the edge of town, and then down a narrow road which led to one of the few places he could abide outside his own room.

  Alb Indys approached the old church from the graveyard side and, as he closed in, only the great hexagonal peak, hornlike, could be seen projecting above the brown-leafed trees. Surrounding the graveyard was a barrier of thin black bars, with a thicker bar connecting them through the middle, spinelike. There was no gate, and the road he was on freely entered the church grounds. To his left and right were headstones and monuments, little marble slabs and golden plaques. They formed a forest of memorials, clumps of crosses and groves of gravestones. Some of them were very small and oddly shaped, and so loosened by time that they almost seemed to rock back and forth in the wind. But could one of them have just now fallen down entirely? Something was missing that had been there before, seemingly had sunk or slid away. Alb Indys watched for a moment, then proceeded toward the church. When he reached the edge of the graveyard he turned around, surveying not only the stones themselves but also the spaces between them. And the wind was pulling at his fine pale locks.

  Standing in full view of the church, Alb Indys could not resist elevating his gaze to the height of that spire which rose from a square central tower whose four corners put out four lesser points. This great structure—with its dark, cowl-shaped windows and broken roman-numeraled clock—was buttressed by two low-roofed transepts which squatted and slanted on either side of it. Beneath the cloud-filled sky the church was an even shade of grayish white, unblemished by shadows. And from behind the church, where pale scrubby grasses edged toward a steep descent into sand and sea, came the sound of tossing waves, a hissing sound which Alb Indys perceived as somehow dry and electronic.

  As always, there was no one else in the church at this time of day (and with hours remaining of it). Everything was very simple inside, very solemn and quiet and serenely lighted. The dark-paned windows along either wall confused all time, bending dawns into twilights, suspending minutes in eternity. Alb Indys slid into a pew at the back and rested his hands at his sides. His eyes were fixed on the distant apse, where everything—pillars, pictures, pulpit—appeared as an unfocused fragment of itself, folded within shadows that seemed to be the creation of dark hours. But his insomnia was not at issue here: suffering and transgressions alike were reprieved in this place that shut out time. He followed each moment as it tried to move past him: each was smothered by the stillness, and he watched them die. “But trouble feeds in the wind and hides in the window,” he drowsily said to himself from somewhere inside his now dreaming brain.

  Suddenly everything seemed wrong and he wanted to leave, but he could not leave because someone was speaking from the pulpit. Yes, a pulpit in such a large, such an enormous, church would be equipped with its microphone, but then why whisper in such confused language and so rapidly, like a single voice trying to be more? What were the voices saying now? No, he would rather not hear, because now everything was happening that he wished would not happen, and it was so late at night, and with so many hours left to sleep, finally to sleep for hours and hours, he would not be able to get away in time. If he could only move, just turn his head a little. And if he could only get his eyes to open and see what was wrong. The voices kept repeating without fading, multiplying in the fantastically spacious church. Then, with an effort sufficient to move the earth itself, he managed to turn his head just enough to look out a window in the east transept. And without even opening his tightly closed eyelids, he saw what was in the window. But he suddenly awoke for an entirely different reason, because finally he understood what the voices were saying. They said they were a doctor, and their name was—

  Alb Indys had to get home, even if all the way there the sound of the sea was hissing behind him like a broken radio, and even if the wind rushed by his ears like breaking waves of air. There was not much daylight left and tonight, of all nights, he did not want to catch anything, did not want to be caught, that is, in the damp and chill of an off-season sundown. What misjudgments he had made that day, what mistakes, there was no question about it. And what a doctor to call upon to treat one’s troubles…

  An eternity of sleeplessness was to be preferred, if those were the dreams sleep had in waiting. Gratefully he would hold on to his old troubles, with the permission of the world, the wind, and the legendary Dr. Thoss.

  And when Alb Indys reached his room, he was thinking about a gleaming crescent moon ready to be placed in a new scene, and he was thankful to have some project, any project, to fill the hours of that night. Exhausted, he threw his dark coat in a heap on the floor, then sat down on the bed to remove his shoes. He was holding the second one in his hand when he turned and, for some reason, began to contemplate that lump he had left in the bedcovers. Without reasoning why, he elevated the shoe directly above this shapeless swelling, held it aloft for a few moments, then let it drop straight down. The lump collapsed with a little poof, as if it had been an old hat with no head inside, or a magician’s silk scarf that only seemed to have a plump white dove hidden under it. Enough of this for one day, Alb Indys thought sleepily, there was work he could be doing.

  But when he picked up the drawing book of stiff clean pages from where he had earlier abandoned it on the bed, he saw that the work he intended to do had, by some miracle, already been done. He looked at the drawing of the window, the drawing he had finished off earlier that day with his meticulous signature. Was it only because he was so tired that he could not recall darkening those window panes and carving that curved scar of moon behind them? Could he have forgotten about scoring that bone-white cicatrix into the flesh of night? But he was holding that particular moon in reserve for one of his “collaborations” and this was not one of those. This belonged to that other type of drawing: he only penned, in these, what was enclosed within the four-walled frame of his room, never anything outside it. Then why did he ink in this night and this moon, and with the collaboration of what other artistic hand? If only he were not so drained by chronic insomnia, all those lost dreams hissing in his head, perhaps he could have thought more clearly about it. His dozing brain might even have noticed another change in the picture, for something now squatted in the chair which formerly had been unoccupied. But there was too much sleep to catch up on, and, as the sun went out in the window, Alb Indys shut his eyes languorously and lay down upon his bed.

  And he never would have wakened that night, which seemed as white as winter, if it had not been for the noise. The window was lit up by a silvery blade of moon. It brightened the chair, whose two thin arms had other arms overhanging each of them, flexing slowly in the room’s stillness. White night, white noise. As if speaking in static, the parched, crackling voice repeatedly said: I am a doctor. Then the occupant of the chair hopped gracefully onto the bed with a single thrust of its roundish body, and its claws began their work, delivering the sleeper to his miraculous remedy…

  It was the landlord who eventually found him, though there was considerable difficulty identifying what lay on the bed. A rumor spread throughout the seaside
town about a swift and terrible disease, something that perhaps one of the vacationers had brought in. But no other trouble was reported. Much later, the entire incident was confused by preposterous elaborations, which had the effect of relegating all of its horrors to the doubtful realm of regional legend.

  MASQUERADE OF A DEAD SWORD: A TRAGEDIE

  When the world uncovers some dark disguise

  Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

  Psalms of the Silent

  I Faliol’s Rescue

  No doubt the confusions of carnival night were to blame, in some measure, for many unforeseen incidents. Every violation of routine order was being perpetrated by the carousing mob, their cries of celebration providing the upper voices to a strange droning pedal point which seemed to be sustained by the night itself. Having declared their town an enemy of silence, the citizens of Soldori took to the streets; there they conspired against solitude and, to accompanying gyrations of squealing abandon, sabotaged monotony. Even the duke, a cautious man and one not normally given to those gaudy agendas of his counterparts in Lynnese or Daranzella, was now holding an extravagant masquerade, if only as a strategic concession to the little patch of world under his rule. Of all the inhabitants of the Three Towns, the subjects of the Duke of Soldori—occasionally to the duke’s own dismay—were the most loving of amusement. In every quarter of this principality, frolicking celebrants combed the night for a new paradise, and were as likely to find it in a blood-match as in a song. All seemed anxious, even frantic to follow blindly the entire spectrum of diversion, to dawdle about the lines between pain and pleasure, to obscure their vision of both past and future.

  So perhaps three well-drunk and boar-faced men seated in a roisterous hostelry could be excused for not recognizing Faliol, whose colors were always red and black. But this man, who had just entered the thickish gloom of that drinking house, was attired in a craze of colors, none of them construed to a pointed effect. One might have described this outfit as motley gone mad. Indeed, perhaps what lay beneath this fool’s patchwork were the familiar blacks and reds that no other of the Three Towns—neither those who were dandies, nor those who were sword-whores (however golden their hearts), nor even those who, like Faliol himself, were both—would have dared to parody. But these notorious colors were now buried deep within a rainbow of rags which were tied about the man’s arms, legs, and at every other point of his person, seeming to hold him together like tom strips hurriedly applied to the storm-fractured joists of a sagging roof. Before he had closed the door of that cave-like room behind him, the draft rushing in from the street made his ragged livery come alive like a mass of tattered flags flapping in a calamitous wind.