The Nightmare Factory

by Thomas Ligotti

  “What does he look like?” I had to ask at that moment.

  “It was late at night and I was drunk,” Dalha replied, somehow evasively it seemed to me.

  “Was he a younger man, an older man?”

  “An older man, yes. Not very tall, with bushy white hair like a professor of some kind. And he said that he wanted to have an artwork of his delivered to my gallery. I explained to him my usual terms as best I could, since I was so drunk. He agreed and then walked off down the street. And that’s not the best part of town to be walking around all by yourself. Well, the next day a package arrived with the tape-recording machine and so forth. There were also some instructions which explained that I should destroy each of the audio tapes before I leave the art gallery at the end of the day, and that a new tape would arrive the following day and each day thereafter. There was no return address on the packages.”

  “And did you destroy the bungalow house tape?” I asked.

  “Of course,” said Dalha with some exasperation, but also with insistence. “What do I care about some crazy artist’s work or how he conducts his career. Besides, he guaranteed I would make some money on the deal, and here I am already with seventy-five dollars.”

  “So why not sell me this dream monologue about the derelict factory? I won’t say anything.”

  Dalha was quiet for a moment, and then said, “He told me that if I didn’t destroy the tapes each day he would know about it and that he would do something. I’ve forgotten exactly what he said, I was so drunk that night.”

  “But how could he know?” I asked, and in reply Dalha just stared at me in silence. “All right, all right,” I said. “But I still want you to make an arrangement. You have his money for the bungalow house tape and the tape about the derelict factory. If he’s any kind of artist, he’ll want to be paid. When he gets in touch with you, that’s when you make the arrangement for me. I won’t cheat you out of your percentage. I give you my word on that.”

  “Whatever that’s worth,” Dalha said bitterly.

  But she did agree that she would try to arrange something between myself and the tape-recording artist. I left the art gallery immediately after these negotiations, before Dalha could have any second thoughts. That afternoon, while I was working in the Language and Literature department of the library, I could think about nothing but the derelict factory that was so enticingly pictured on the new audio tape. The bus that takes me to and from the library each day of the working week always passes such a structure, which stands isolated in the distance just as the artist described it in his dream monologue.

  That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times I had the feeling there was someone else in my bedroom who was talking to me, but of course I could not deal with this perception in any realistic way, since I was half-asleep and half-awake, and thus, for all practical purposes, I was out of my mind.

  Around three o’clock in the morning the telephone rang. In the darkness I reached for my eyeglasses, which were on the nightstand next to the telephone, and noted the luminous face of my alarm clock. I cleared my throat and said hello. The voice on the other end said hello back to me. It was Dalha.

  “I talked to him,” she said.

  “Where did you talk to him?” I asked. “On the street?”

  “No, no, not on the street,” she said, giggling a little. I think she must have been drunk. “He called me on the telephone.”

  “He called you on the telephone?” I repeated, imagining for a moment what it would be like to have the voice of that artist speak to me over the telephone and not merely on a recorded audio tape.

  “Yes, he called me on the telephone.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, I could tell you if you would stop asking so many questions.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was only a few minutes ago that he called. He said that he would meet you tomorrow at the library where you work.”

  “You told him about me?” I asked, and then there was a long silence. “Dalha?” I prompted.

  “Yes, I told him about you. But I never knew what you did for a living. How long have you worked at the library?”

  “Fifteen years. Did he say anything else to you?” I asked Dalha.

  “No, nothing.”

  “Maybe it was only a coincidence that he said he would meet me at the library and that I also work at the library,” I said. “People meet all the time at the library. I see them meeting there every day.”

  “Of course they do,” said Dalha, a little patronizing it seemed for someone who was so drunk at three o’clock in the morning. Then she said good-bye and hung up before I could say good-bye back to her.

  After talking to Dalha I found it impossible to sleep anymore that night, even if it was only a state of half-sleeping and half-waking. All I could think about was meeting the artist of the dream monologues. So I got myself ready to go to work, rushing as if I were late, and walked up to the corner of my street to wait for the bus.

  It was very cold as I sat waiting in the bus shelter. There was a sliver of moon high in the blackness above, with several hours remaining before sunrise. Somehow I felt that I was waiting for the bus on the first day of a new schoolyear, since after all the month was September, and I was so filled with both fear and excitement. When the bus finally arrived I saw that there were only a few other early risers headed for downtown. I took one of the back seats and stared out the window, my own face staring back at me in black reflection.

  At the next shelter we approached I noticed that another lone bus rider was seated on the bench waiting to be picked up. His clothes were dark colored (including a long loose overcoat and hat), and he sat up very straight, his arms held close to the body and his hands resting on his lap. His head was slightly bowed, and I could not see the face beneath his hat. His physical attitude, I thought to myself as we approached the lighted bus shelter, was one of disciplined repose. I was surprised that he did not stand up as the bus came nearer to the shelter, and ultimately we passed him by. I wanted to say something to the driver of the bus but a strong feeling of both fear and excitement made me keep my silence.

  The bus finally dropped me off in front of the library, and I ran up the tiered stairway that led to the main entrance. Through the thick glass doors I could see that only a few lights illuminated the spacious interior of the library. After rapping on the glass for a few moments I saw a figure dressed in a maintenance man’s uniform appear in the shadowy distance inside the building. I rapped some more and the man slowly proceeded down the library’s vaulted central hallway.

  “Good morning, Henry,” I said as the door opened.

  “Hello, sir,” he replied without standing aside to allow my entrance to the library. “You know I’m not supposed to open these doors before it’s time for them to be open.”

  “I’m a little early, I realize, but I’m sure it will be all right to let me inside. I work here, after all.”

  “I know you do, sir. But a few days ago I got talked to about these doors being open when they shouldn’t be. It’s because of the stolen property.”

  “What property is that, Henry? Books?”

  “No, sir. I think it was something from the media department. Maybe a video camera or a tape recorder, I don’t know exactly.”

  “Well, you have my word—just let me through the door and I’ll go right upstairs to my desk. I’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

  Henry eventually obliged my request, and I did as I told him I would do.

  The library was a great building as a whole, but the Language and Literature department (second floor) was located in a relatively small area—narrow and long with a high ceiling and a row of tall, paned windows along one wall. The other walls were lined with books, and most of the floor space was devoted to long study tables. For the most part, though, the room in which I worked was fairly open from end to end. Two large archways led to other parts of
the library, and a normal-sized doorway led to the stacks where most of the bibliographic holdings were stored, millions of volumes standing silent and out of sight along endless rows of shelves. In the pre-dawn darkness the true dimensions of the Language and Literature department were now obscure. Only the moon shining high in the blackness through those tall windows revealed to me the location of my desk, which was in the middle of the long narrow room.

  I found my way over to my desk and switched on the small lamp that years ago I had brought from home. (Not that I required the added illumination as I worked at my desk at the library, but I did enjoy the bleakly old-fashioned appearance of this object.) For a moment I thought of the bungalow house where none of the lamps were equipped with lightbulbs and moonlight shone through the windows upon a carpet littered with vermin. Somehow I was unable to call up the special sensations and mental state that I associated with this dream monologue, even though my present situation of being alone in the Language and Literature department some hours before dawn was intensely dreamlike.

  Not knowing what else to do, I sat down at my desk as if I were beginning my normal workday. It was then that I noticed a large envelope lying on top of my desk, although I could not recall its being there when I left the library the day before. The envelope looked old and faded under the dim light of the desk lamp. There was no writing on either side of the envelope, which was bulging slightly and had been sealed.

  “Who’s there?” a voice called out that barely sounded like my own. I had seen something out of the corner of my eye while examining the envelope at my desk. I cleared my throat. “Henry?” I asked the darkness without looking up from my desk or turning to either side. No answer was offered in reply, but I could feel that someone else had joined me in the Language and Literature department of the library.

  I slowly turned my head to the right and focused on the archway some distance across the room. At the center of this aperture, which led to another room where moonlight shone through high, paned windows, stood a figure in silhouette. I could not see his face but immediately recognized the long, loose overcoat and hat. It was indeed the one whom I saw in the bus shelter as I rode to the library in the pre-dawn darkness. Now he was there to meet me that day in the library, as he had told Dalha he would do. At that moment it seemed beside the point to ask how he had gotten into the library or even to bother about introductions. I simply launched into a monologue that I had been constantly rehearsing since Dalha telephoned me earlier that morning.

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you,” I started. “Your dream monologues, which is what I call them, have impressed me very much. That is to say, your artworks are like nothing else I have ever experienced, either artistically or extra-artistically. It seems incredible to me how well you have expressed subject matter with which I myself am intimately familiar. Of course, I am not referring to the subject matter as such—the bungalow houses and so on—except as it calls forth your underlying vision of things. When—in your tape-recorded monologues—your voice speaks such phrases as ‘infinite terror and dreariness’ or ‘ceaseless negation of color and life,’ I believe that my response is exactly that which you intend for those who experience your artworks, perhaps even that which you yourself have experienced that gives you the inspiration for your artworks.”

  I continued in this vein for a while longer, speaking to the silhouette of someone who betrayed no sign that he heard anything I said. At some point, however, my monologue veered off in a direction I had not intended it to take. Suddenly I began to say things that had nothing to do with what I had said before and that even contradicted my former statements.

  “For as long as I can remember,” I said, continuing to speak to the figure standing in the archway, “I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it. All such heartbreaking sentiment, as usually considered, would seem to be on its knees before artworks such as yours, which so powerfully express what I have called the icy bleakness of things, submerging or devastating all sentiment in an atmosphere potent with desolate truths, permeated throughout with a visionary stagnation and lifelessness. Yet I must observe that the effect, as I now consider it, has been just the opposite. If it was your intent to evoke the icy bleakness of things with your dream monologues, then you have totally failed on both an artistic and an extra-artistic level. You have failed your art, you have failed yourself, and you have also failed me. If your artworks had really evoked the bleakness of things, then I would not have felt this need to know who you are, this killing sadness that there was actually someone who experienced the same sensations and mental states that I did and who could share them with me in the form of tape-recorded dream monologues. Who are you that I should feel this need to go to work hours before the sun comes up, that I should feel this was something I had to do and that you were someone that I had to know? This behavior violates every principle by which I have lived for as long as I can remember. Who are you to cause me to violate these long-lived principles? I think it’s all becoming clear to me now. Dalha put you up to this. You and Dalha are in a conspiracy against me and against my principles. Every day Dalha is on the telephone making all kinds of arrangements for profit, and she cannot stand the idea that all I do is sit there in peace, eating my lunch in her hideous art gallery. She feels that I’m cheating her somehow because she’s not making a profit from me, because I never paid her to make an arrangement for me. Don’t try to deny what I now know is true. But you could say something, in any case. Just a few words spoken with that voice of yours. Or at least let me see your face. And you could take off that ridiculous hat. It’s like something Dalha would wear.”

  By this time I was on my feet and walking (staggering, in fact) toward the figure that stood in the archway. All the while I was walking, or staggering, toward the figure I was also demanding that he answer my accusations. But as I walked forward between the long study tables toward the archway, the figure standing there receded backward into the darkness of the next room, where moonlight shone through high, paned windows. The closer I came to him the farther he receded into the darkness. And he did not recede into the darkness by taking steps backward, as I was taking steps forward, but moved in some other way that even now I cannot specify, as though he were floating.

  Just before the figure disappeared completely into the darkness he finally spoke to me. His voice was the same one that I had heard over those enormous headphones in Dalha’s art gallery, except now there was no interference, no distortion in the words that it spoke. These words, which resounded in my brain as they resounded in the high-ceilinged rooms of the library, were such that I should have welcomed them, for they echoed my very own, deeply private, principles. Yet I took no comfort in hearing another voice tell me that there was nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know.

  The next voice I heard was that of Henry, who shouted up the wide stone staircase from the ground floor of the library. “Is everything all right, sir?” he asked. I composed myself and was able to answer that everything was all right. I asked him to turn the lights on for the second floor of the library. In a minute the lights were on, but by then the man in the hat and long, loose overcoat was gone.

  When I confronted Dalha at her art gallery later that day, she was not in the least forthcoming with respect to my questions and accusations. “You are crazy,” she screamed at me. “I want nothing more to do with you.”

  When I asked Dalha what she was talking about, she said, “You really don’t know, do you? You really are a crazy man. You don’t remember that night you came up to me on the street while I was waiting for a cab to show up.”

  When I told her I recalled doing nothing of the kind, she continued her anecd
ote of that night, and also subsequent events. “I’m so drunk I can hardly understand what you are saying to me about some little game you are playing. Then you send me the tapes. Then you come in and pay to listen to the tapes, exactly as you said you would. Just in time I remember that I am supposed to lie to you that the tapes are the work of a white-haired old man, when in fact you are the one who is making the tapes. I knew you were crazy, but this was the only money I ever made off you, even though day after day you come and eat your pathetic lunch in my gallery. When I saw you that night, I couldn’t tell at first who it was walking up to me on the street. You did look different, and you were wearing that stupid hat. Soon enough, though, I can see that it’s you. And you’re pretending to be someone else, but not really pretending, I don’t know. And then you tell me that I must destroy the tapes, and if I don’t destroy them something will happen. Well, let me tell you, crazy man,” Dalha said, “I did not destroy those tape recordings. I let all my friends hear them. We sat around getting drunk and laughing our heads off at your stupid dream monologues. Here, another one of your artworks arrived in the mail today,” she said while walking across the floor of the art gallery to the tape machine that was positioned on the small plastic table. “Why don’t you listen to it and pay me the money you promised? This looks like a good one,” she said, picking up the little card that bore the title of the work. “The Bus Shelter, it says. That should be very exciting for you—a bus shelter. Pay up!”

  “Dalha,” I said in a laboriously calm voice, “please listen to me. You have to make another arrangement. I need to have another meeting with the tape-recording artist. You are the only one who can arrange for this to happen. Dalha, I’m afraid for both of us if you don’t agree to make this arrangement. I need to speak with him again.”

  “Then why don’t you just go talk into a mirror. There,” she said, pointing to the curtain that separated the front section from the back section of the art gallery. “Go into the bathroom like you did the other day and talk to yourself in the mirror.”