The Nightmare Factory

by Thomas Ligotti

  As might be imagined, I had worked myself into quite a state even before the night of the showing (of the Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum). But it was more than my frenzy of dreams and anticipation that affected my experiences that night and now affects my ability to relate what occurred at the tumble-down shack on the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh. My delirious episodes previous to that night were nothing (that is, they were the perfection of lucidity) when compared to the delirium that overtakes me every time I attempt to sort out what happened at the marshland shack, my thoughts disintegrating little by little until I pass into a kind of sleeptalking of my own. I saw things with my own eyes and other things with other eyes. And everywhere there were voices…

  It was all weedy shadows and frogs croaking in the blackness as I walked along the narrow path that, according to the directions given to me, led to Severini’s place. I left my car parked alongside the road where I saw the vehicles of the others. They had all arrived before me, although I was not in the least bit late for this scheduled artistic event. But they had always been anxious, I had long before noticed, whenever a Severini visit was planned, all that day fidgeting with some restless impulse until nightfall would come and they could leave the city and go out to St. Alban’s Marsh.

  I expected to see a light ahead as I walked along that narrow path, but all I heard were frogs croaking in the blackness. The full moon in a cloudless sky revealed to me where I should next step along the path leading to the shack at the edge of the marsh. But even before I reached the clearing where the old shack supposedly stood, my sense of everything around me began to change. A warm mist drifted in from either side of the path like a curtain closing in front of my eyes, and I felt something touch my mind with images and concepts that were from elsewhere. “We are sympathetic organisms,” I heard from the mist. “Draw closer.” But that narrow path seemed to have no end to it, like those passages in my delirious episodes which extended such great distances in the misty darkness of a tropical landscape, where on every side of me there were exotic forms of life spawning and seething without restraint. I must go to that place, I thought as if these were my own words and not the words of another voice altogether, a voice full of desperate intensity and confused aspirations. “Calm yourself, Mr. Severini, if you insist I still address you by that name. As your therapist I cannot advise you to pursue this route…chasing miracles, if that is what you imagine…this ‘temple,’ as you call it, is an escape from any authentic confrontation with…”

  But he did find his way to freedom, although without properly being discharged from the institution, and he went to that place. “Documentes. Passportas!” Looking around at those yellow-brown faces, you were finally there. You went to that jungle island, that tropical sewer, a great temple looming out of the misty darkness in your dreams. It rained in every town, the streets streaming like sewers. “Disentaría,” pronounced the attending physician. But he was not like any of the doctors whom you sought in that place. Amoebic dysentery—there it was, the nightmare continued, so many forms it could take. The way into the nightmare is the way out. And you were willing to follow that nightmare as far as you needed in order to find your way out, just as I was following that narrow path toward your shack on the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh to enter that same nightmare you had brought back with you. The Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum. Your shack was now a gallery of the nightmares you had inspired in the others with your sleeptalking and the fluctuations of your form, those outrageous miracles which had not outraged anyone. Only when I was alone in my apartment, imaginatively recreating what the others had told me, could I see those miracles as the nightmares they were. I knew this because of my delirious episodes, which none of the others had known. They were the sympathetic organisms, not I. I was antagonistic to you, not sympathetic. Because I would not go into the nightmare, as you had gone. The Temple of Tantric Medicine, this is what you dreamed you would find in that tropical sewer—a place where miracles took place, where that sect of “doctors” could minister with the most esoteric procedures and could carry out their illicit practices. But what did you find instead? “Disentaría” pronounced the attending physician. Then a small group of those yellow-brown faces told you, told us, about that other temple which had no name. “For the belly sickness,” they said. Amoebic dysentery, simply another version of the nightmare of the organism from which none of the doctors you had seen in the past could deliver you. “How can the disease be cured of itself?” you asked them. “My body—a tumor that was once delivered from the body of another tumor, a lump of disease that is always boiling with its own disease. And my mind—another disease, the disease of a disease. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism. Where are you taking me!” you screamed (we screamed) at the yellow-brown faces. “Fix the belly sickness. We know, we know.” They chanted these words along the way, it seemed, as the town disappeared behind the trees and the vines, behind the giant flowers that smelled like rotting meat, and the fungus and muck of that tropical sewer. They knew the disease and the nightmare because they lived in that place where the organism flourished without restraint, its forms so varied and exotic, its fate inescapable. “Disentaría” pronounced the attending physician. They knew the way through the stonework passages, the walls seeping with slime and soft with mold as they coiled toward the central chamber of the temple without a name. Inside the ruined heart of the temple there were candles burning everywhere; their flickering light revealed an array of temple art and ornamentation. Intricate murals appeared along the walls, mingling with the slime and the mold of that tropical sewer. Sculptures of every size and all shapes projected out of the damp, viscous shadows. At the center of the chamber was a large circular altar, an enormous mandala composed of countless jewels, precious stones, or simply bits of glass that gleamed in the candlelight like a pool of multi-colored slime molds.

  They laid your body upon the altar; they knew what to do with you (us)—the words to say, the songs to sing, and the esoteric procedures to follow. It was almost as if I could understand the things that they chanted in voices of tortured solemnity. Deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know. There are two faces which must never confront each other. There is only one body which must struggle to contain them both. And the phantom clutch of that sickness, that amoebic dysentery, seemed to reach me as I walked along that narrow path leading to Severini’s shack at the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh. Inside the shack were all the Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum, the paintings lining the damp wood of the walls and the sculptures projecting out of the shadows cast by the candles which always lighted the single room of that ruined hovel. I had imaginatively recreated the interior of Severini’s shack many times according to the accounts related to me by the others about this place and its incredible inhabitant. I imagined how you could forget yourself in such a place, how you could be delivered from the nightmares and delirious episodes that tortured you in other places, even becoming someone else (or something else) as you gave yourself up entirely to the fluctuations of the organism at the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh. You needed that marsh because it helped you to imaginatively recreate that tropical sewer (where you were taken into the nightmare), and you needed those artworks in order to make your shack into that temple (where you were supposed to find your way out of the nightmare). But most of all you needed them, the others, because they were sympathetic organisms. I, on the other hand, was now an antagonistic organism who wanted nothing more to do with your esoteric procedures and illicit practices. Deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know. The two faces…the one body. You wanted them to enter the nightmare, who did not even know the nightmare as we knew it. You needed them and their artworks to go into the nightmare of the organism to its very end so that you could find your way out of the nightmare. But you could not go to the very end of the nightmare unless I w
as with you, I who was now an antagonistic organism without any hope that there was a way out of the nightmare. We were forever divided, one face from the other, struggling within the body—the organism—which we shared.

  I never arrived at the shack that night; I never entered it. As I walked along that narrow path in the mist I became feverish. (“Amoebic dysentery,” pronounced the doctor whom I visited the following day.) The face of Severini appeared at the shack that night, not mine. It was always his face that the others saw on such nights when they came to visit. But I was not there with them; that is, my face was not there. His face was the one they saw as they sat among all the Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum. But it was my face which returned to the city; it was my body which I now fully possessed as an organism that belonged to my face alone. But the others never returned from the shack on the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh. I never saw them again after that night, because on that night he took them with him into the nightmare, with the candle flames flickering upon those artworks and the fluctuations of form which to the others appeared as a pool of twisting snakes or a mass of spiderlings newly hatched. He showed them the way into the nightmare, but he could not show them the way out. There is no way out of the nightmare once you have gone so far into its depths. That is where he is lost forever, he and the others he has taken with him.

  But he did not take me into the marsh with him to exist as a fungus exists or as a foam of multi-colored slime mold exists. That is how I see it in my new delirious episodes. Only at these times when I suffer from a physical disease or excessive psychic turmoil do I see how he exists now, he and the others. Because I never looked directly into the pools of oozing life when I stopped at the shack on the edge of St. Alban’s Marsh. I was on my way out of the city the night I stopped, and I was only there long enough to douse the place in gasoline and set it ablaze. It burned with all the brilliance of the nightmares that were still exhibited inside, casting its illumination upon the marsh and leaving the most obscure image of what was back there—a vast and vague impression of that great black life from which we have all emerged and of which we all are made.

  GAS STATION CARNIVALS

  Outside the walls of the Crimson Cabaret was a world of rain and darkness. At intervals, whenever someone entered or exited through the front door of the club, one could actually see the steady rain and was allowed a brief glimpse of the darkness. Inside it was all amber light, tobacco smoke, and the sound of the raindrops hitting the windows, which were all painted black. On such nights, as I sat at one of the tables in that drab little place, I was always filled with an infernal merriment, as if I were waiting out the apocalypse and could not care less about it. I also liked to imagine that I was in the cabin of an old ship during a really vicious storm at sea or in the club car of a luxury passenger train that was being rocked on its rails by ferocious winds and hammered by a demonic rain. Sometimes, when I was sitting in the Crimson Cabaret on a rainy night, I thought of myself as occupying a waiting room for the abyss (which of course was exactly what I was doing) and between sips from my glass of wine or cup of coffee I smiled sadly and touched the front pocket of my coat where I kept my imaginary ticket to oblivion.

  However, on that particular rainy November night I was not feeling very well. My stomach was slightly queasy, as if signaling the onset of a virus or even food poisoning. Another source for my malaise, I thought to myself, might well have been my longstanding nervous condition, which fluctuated from day to day but was always with me in some form and manifested itself in a variety of symptoms both physical and psychic. I was in fact experiencing a faint sensation of panic, although this in no way ruled out the possibility that the queasiness of my stomach was due to a strictly physical cause, either viral or toxic. Neither did it rule out a third possibility which I was trying to ignore at that point in the evening. Whatever the etiology of my stomach disorder, I felt the need to be in a public place that night, so that if I should collapse—an eventuality I often feared—there would be people around who might attend to me, or at least shuttle my body off to the hospital. At the same time I was not seeking close contact with any of these people, and I would have been bad company in any case, sitting there in the corner of the club drinking mint tea and smoking mild cigarettes out of respect for my ailing stomach. For all these reasons I brought my notebook with me that night and had it lying open on the table before me, as if to say that I wanted to be left alone to mull over some literary matters. But when Stuart Quisser entered the club at approximately ten o’clock, the sight of me sitting at a corner table with my open notebook, drinking mint tea and smoking mild cigarettes so that I might stay on top of the situation with my queasy stomach, did not in the least discourage him from walking directly to my table and taking the seat across from me. A waitress came over to us. Quisser ordered some kind of white wine, while I asked for another cup of mint tea.

  “So now it’s mint tea,” Quisser said as the girl left us.

  “I’m surprised you’re showing your face around here,” I said by way of reply.

  “I thought I might try to make up with the old crimson woman.”

  “Make up? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Nevertheless, have you seen her tonight?”

  “No, I haven’t. You humiliated her at that party. I haven’t seen her since, not even in her own club. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but she’s not someone you want to have as an enemy.”

  “Meaning what?” he asked.

  “Meaning that she has connections you know absolutely nothing about.”

  “And of course you know all about it. I’ve read your stories. You’re a confessed paranoid, so what’s your point?”

  “My point,” I said, “is that there’s hell in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.”

  “I had too much to drink, that’s all.”

  “You called her a deluded no-talent.”

  Quisser looked up at the waitress as she approached with our drinks, and he made a hasty hand-signal for silence. When she was gone he said, “I happen to know that our waitress is very loyal to the crimson woman. She will very probably inform her about my visiting the club tonight. I wonder if she would be willing to act as a go-between with her boss and deliver a second-hand apology from me.”

  “Look around at the walls,” I said.

  Quisser set down his glass of wine and scanned the room. “Hmm,” he said when he finished looking. “This is more serious than I thought. She’s taken down all her old paintings. And the new ones don’t look like her work at all.”

  “They’re not. You humiliated her.”

  “And yet she seems to have done up the stage since I last saw it. New paint job or something.”

  The so-called stage to which Quisser referred was a small platform in the opposite corner of the club. This area was entirely framed by four long panels, each of them painted with black and gold sigils against a glossy red background. Various events occurred on this stage: poetry readings, tableaux vivants, playlets of sundry types, puppet shows, artistic slideshows, musical performances, and so on. That night, which was a Tuesday, the stage was dark. I observed nothing different about it and asked Quisser what he imagined he thought was new.

  “I can’t say exactly, but something seems to have been done. Maybe it’s those black and gold ideographs or whatever they’re supposed to be. The whole thing looks like the cover of a menu in a Chinese restaurant.”

  “You’re quoting yourself,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Chinese menu remark. You used that in your review of the Marsha Corker exhibit last month.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember.”

  “Are you just saying you don’t remember, or do you really not remember?” I asked this question in the spirit of trivial curiosity, my queasy stomach discouraging the strain of any real antagonism on my part.

  “I remember, all right? Which reminds me, there’s something I w
anted to talk to you about. It came to me the other day, and I immediately thought of you and your…stuff,” he said, gesturing toward my notebook of writings open on the table between us. “I can’t believe it’s never come up before. You of all people should know about them. No one else seems to. It was years ago, but you’re old enough to remember them. You’ve got to remember them.”

  “Remember what?” I asked, and after the briefest pause he replied:

  “The gas station carnivals.”

  And he said these words as if he were someone delivering a punchline to a joke, the proud bringer of a surprising and profound hilarity. I was supposed to express an astonished recognition, that much I knew. It was not a phenomenon of which I was entirely ignorant, and memory is such a tricky thing. This, at least, is what I told Quisser. But as Quisser told me his memories, trying to arouse mine, I gradually realized the true nature and purpose of the so-called gas station carnivals. During this time it was all I could do to conceal how badly my stomach was acting up on me, queasy and burning. I kept telling myself, as Quisser was talking about his memories of the gas station carnivals, that I was certainly experiencing the onset of a virus, if in fact I had not been the victim of food poisoning. Quisser, nevertheless, was so caught up in his story that he seemed not to notice my agony.