There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man

by There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man (retail) (epub)

  It was long ere he was restored to a measure of health; and indeed he never rightly recovered the use of his limbs; the doctor held that he had suffered some stroke of palsy; at which Anthony smiled a little, and made not answer.

  When he was well enough to creep to and fro, he went sadly to the dark room, and with much pain and weakness carried the furniture out of it. The picture he cut in pieces and burnt; and the candles and dishes, with the book, he cast into a deep pool in the stream; the bones he buried in the earth; the hangings he stored away for his own funeral.

  Anthony never entered his workroom again; but day after day he sate in his chair, and read a little, but mostly in the Bible; he made a friend of a very wise old priest, to whom he opened all his heart, and to whom he conveyed much money to be bestowed on the poor; there was a great calm in his spirit, which was soon written in his face, in spite of his pain, for he often suffered sorely; but he told the priest that something, he knew not certainly what, seemed to dwell by him, waiting patiently for his coming; and so Anthony awaited his end.

  The Small People

  Thomas Ligotti

  Coming of age in this world has always been a strange process. I'm sure you understand, Doctor. There are so many adjustments that need to be made before we are presentable in company. One doesn't understand all the workings, all the stages of development in the process of becoming who we are and what we are. It can be so difficult. Others expected me to be complete at a certain age, ready to jump up and take my place when called to do so. “Time to wake up,” they said. “Time to do this or time to do that,” they said. “It's show time,” they said. And I had better be willing and able when the time came.

  Please excuse my outburst, Doctor. I'm doing my best. I know my lines. I've told this story before, as you know. And I do want to be good this time. My parents were always scolding me to be good about one thing or another. “You came from a good family,” they frequently said to me, as if saying I was biologically their own could make it so. Now, I cannot deny that their criticism of certain attitudes I held was unmerited. My mother and father resorted to using the words shameful little bigot quite a bit. “How could we have raised such a shameful little bigot?” she would say to him or he would say to her. “He doesn't get it from my side of the family,” one of them would shout. And then the other, right on cue, would respond, “Well, he doesn't get it from mine either.” There it was again—the genetic issue, which might have upset me had I been older and wise to the fact that my status in the family was but a legal fiction. In light of later events, of course, biology was the least of our differences. This is a very delicate topic for me, as you know.

  Moving on, my parents would then fight, if only for the sake of appearances, speaking the same lines they'd spoken before. Back and forth, back and forth they'd go at each other. Then finally they'd come back around to their little boy, who was such a shameful little bigot. Obviously, it wasn't in their interest to acknowledge the truth—that foremost I was afraid, not bigoted. Calling me bigoted was simply a tactic for confusing the issue. But any hatred I displayed was epiphenomenal to my fear. Every child has his fears, and the worst of mine was a fear of them. Not my mother and father. Well, I was afraid of them, too—that's not unusual. But as a child I didn't hate them. I hated those others— the small people.

  One time my parents and I were on vacation. My father was at the wheel. He was smiling slightly and staring with concentration. That was how he always looked, even when he wasn't driving— always smiling slightly and always staring with concentration. Next to him my mother sat quietly. The sun was shining on her smooth face. She had such a smooth face, Doctor, and big eyes. I was sitting in the middle of the back seat, minding my own business and taking in the wide spaces of the scenery, not focusing on anything in particular. Then I saw the sign just off the right side of the road. It had one of those simple faces on it, and written below were the words: SMALL COUNTRY. My whole body tightened, as it always did when I saw one of those road signs. The arrow at the bottom of the sign pointed straight up, so that drivers would know they were in range of small country.

  I slid over to the right side of the car and began to survey the landscape. A short distance from the road we were on was another road, a smaller road. It meandered through an open plain slightly below us. I shifted my eyes toward the front seat and saw my father looking in the rearview mirror at me. But I didn't care. This was the closest I had ever been to small country, and I wanted to see all I could, which for a long while wasn't anything except that empty plain with that small road passing through it. Such is the perversity born of fear. At the same time that I wanted to see something, I was terrified of what I might see. I felt as if I were having one of those dreams where you're alone but still feel the presence of something unimaginably awful that might appear all of a sudden. It was at the height of this nightmarish sensation that I saw the little car turning a bend in the small road. About the same time, our road—the big road—started curving toward the other. The closer the little car came to us, the more I felt the urge to dive to the floor of our car. But then I would have missed seeing them.

  Their car, the little car, looked like a toy. It wasn't exactly its size that demoted it from a properly motorized conveyance to a plaything, because the pretend car wasn't so near our real car that I could compare the two. It was the flagrant actuality that everything about it was toy-like, as if it were made of molded plastic and rolling along on teetering wheels. And it bore none of the details on it of a real car, at least that I could tell. Structurally, it had a simple square body painted bright red. That had to be the color, of course, just so that it would stand out in the scene, and I could be all the more afraid than if its color had been white or yellow or some shade of blue. But I stopped attending to the car once I saw what was inside.

  Until then, I scarcely had a glimpse of any small people. My strange fear of them originated mostly from the simple face on the road signs that alerted people, real people, of their impending entry into small country. The mere idea of the smalls was enough to make me anxious about something I couldn't name. And after looking into that red plastic toy, I was sorry I hadn't thrown myself down onto the floor of our car, even knowing that my parents would have called me a shameful little bigot for the rest of the vacation.

  After our cars passed each other, my father looked in the rearview mirror and said to me, “So, did you see them?” I didn't say anything. I was defiantly silent.

  “Your father asked you a question,” said my mother. “You should answer him.” But I maintained my silence. And if I had spoken, I wouldn't have said anything about what I saw in that car. I wasn't even afraid at that point. I was bitter and resentful that my father could have asked me in such a bland tone of voice if I saw them. I wanted to scream at both my parents, scream murderously and also with some puzzlement, a plea for understanding. How could people, big people, have such a complacent attitude toward the smalls? How could they give certain presents to children for their birthday or any time presents were in order when those presents might look like that little car and the small people inside it? They were travesties of real people, that's all they were—two older small people, like a father and mother, in the front seat, and two young small people, whose gender I couldn't tell at a distance, sitting rigidly in the back. How could there even exist certain toys, for instance an imitation baking oven—a play version of the real thing, yet one that quite probably replicated the actual baking ovens used by the small people? Even if the resemblance wasn't one-to-one between the two miniature ovens, the thought could still enter a child's head, “This oven must be something like those the small people have in their kitchens.” Who could be so stupid or malicious that they could ignore the possibility of such a thing— that an object some children might have in front of them, or even in their little hands, could have a counterpart in small country? It was too monstrous to contemplate that at a certain age children can and do become cognizant of th
e likeness of their toys to entities in the small country world, including the small people who live there, if they are even alive. Why didn't they react, as I had, with fear and hatred once they came of a certain age?

  Naturally, I knew that for practical reasons the world of the smalls and the real world were securely set apart, just as borders between many places of divergent laws and customs were partitioned and even guarded with powerful weapons against each other. But it wasn't the same between the smalls and everyone else. This was something I felt deep inside me, though I risked being stigmatized as a shameful little bigot not only by my parents but also by most anyone wherever I went.

  For the rest of our vacation that year, I was miserably anxious as well as miserably hateful. From the moment my father asked me if I saw what was in that little toy car, my hatred for the small people that grew out of my fear of them reached its zenith and held there. Of course, I had seen them, idiot father of mine. Why did he ridicule me, taking their side? At one point, all of the occupants of the little car suddenly swiveled their heads toward us, then abruptly swiveled them back to their previously fixed positions. To my mind, they did this as if to say, “We know you are looking at us. Now we are looking at you. Now you know that we knew you were looking at us. And henceforth there will be no escaping this mutual knowledge.” Those damn swivel-heads, I thought, even though I could only imagine what went on in their heads, because in fact they appeared to have nothing going on inside them. They were just hollow, empty things.

  Not long after this encounter, my father pointed out the window. By the side of the road was another sign with one of those simple faces on it. Below that face were the words: LEAVING SMALL COUNTRY.

  “All clear,” my father said with a vexing condescension in his voice and a slight smile on his face.

  “Oh, leave the boy alone,” my mother said, but only as a sort of warning that my father was taking things too far. Right then, I could have thrown a fit the likes of which my parents had never seen or suspected of me. Nor was it wholly improbable that I might have leapt into the front seat and steered our car into the roadside ditch, which was of some depth. I might have killed us all, or perhaps only my father and mother. But then, in a flash of mentation, it occurred to me that with the demise of my parents I would likely fall under the care of another couple whose attitude toward my fear and hatred of the small people probably would not have differed from theirs. Certainly my disposition was not in line with that of the larger share of humanity. In good faith, I have to admit as much, Doctor. I know you must be aware of the torment an individual suffers when he begins to wonder if he is the one on the wrong side of reality. Perhaps it was a defensive tactic of my mind, then, that though I was still afflicted by fright and hatred when it came to the small people, I also felt for the first time a curiosity about them. Surely that signaled a healthier perspective, and I welcomed it.

  My newfound curiosity waxed and waned for about a year or so. It either intensified or abated depending on how often I awoke sweating with sick horror after dreaming about the small people. I finally acted on my curiosity only after I had a dream in which real people, including myself, were somehow changed either into small people or half-small people. The latter particularly disturbed me. Yes, I thought, now is the time. And so I began my quest to get to the bottom of the mystery that, at least for me, surrounded the small people.

  The library seemed the natural starting point to research my subject. In no time at all, it seemed, I could find out all I needed to know about the small people. And possibly what I learned would terminate, or at least temper, my fear of them, and even alleviate, or dissolve entirely, my hatred of their kind. But I was only a child with a rudimentary conception of how things truly were in this world at its deepest level. I found out soon enough, though, that I had misled myself.

  I was ahead of my class in school and knew my way around a library better than most children my age. Thus, you can imagine my devastation when I failed to unearth any substantive information about the small people. How could there be such a gap in what would seem a vital realm of study—what conspiracy of silence, what code of secrecy was in effect that I could find hardly a mention of these creatures, not even in the form of records or statistics relating to them? Yet ultimately I was forced to conclude that nothing was being hidden from me as well as the rest of the world on the subject I attempted to investigate. At least, it wasn't being hidden deliberately, consciously. That would have been an impossible task. Some blabbermouth is always around who is unable to keep what he knows to himself—chatterboxes without whom the details of humanity's most lurid episodes would be lost, let alone something as conspicuous as the small people. No, Doctor, only one thing could keep them out of the limelight—pure neglect, a protective disinterest, as the old philosophers of the human psyche might have seen it: the mind's looking away when unsettling facts come into view, facts that one would rather not focus on for long. Where the small people were concerned, there was nearly a blackout of intelligence.

  I'm not saying that no one has ever ruminated on the phenomenon of the small people. No doubt everyone has pondered their existence at some time or another. But such considerations have never been sustained long enough to create a body of inquiry and knowledge. Before pen could be put to paper or an expedition launched, some negating incuriosity set in that dissipated any spur to action, or any action that resulted in authoritative books and peer-reviewed essays in specialized journals—all that might comprise a modest shelf even in the middling libraries of our world. If you should say that even highly arcane matters, not to mention anything right before our eyes, have evaded the closest research, I would have to respond, perhaps a bit vigorously—false. Question: How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things truly are in this world at its deepest level? Answer: Because we have done it before. Do I really need to give particulars? And many continue the charade long after some voice indicates beyond credible doubt what is true and what is not. The time has not come yet, I thought. And perhaps it never would.

  In point of fact, though, I must admit to having heard vague mutterings about the small people when I was at the library that day. For instance, I came across a history book—that is, a book concerned with our history—and in its index there was a reference to a footnote in which the author alluded to the small people. In that footnote were written the words: “Of course they have no recorded history of their own.” Naturally, this scrupulous scholar adduced his source for this assertion in the usual style, and it made me so happy to read the arid citation “See Paulson,” or maybe it was “Hayworth,” possibly “Heywood.” Whomever I was told to see, I sought out. But nothing was contained there—nothing to corroborate that the small people had no recorded history of their own. Why would a scholar of any standing slip up that way, leading the reader to a source that did not support what he had written? Mistakes do happen, no doubt about that. But how could it be that they happened whenever someone wrote something about the small people, as I discovered they always did? All day long, one book led me to another and each left me empty-handed. Was I being diverted here and there by falsehoods, or were bits of truth being parcelled out in such a way that no complete picture formed of the small people, or none that could be placed beside the one we had of ourselves in the great photo-album of humankind—a portrait that itself began to seem incomplete to a child who believed until then that we knew everything that had anything to do with our world? The big world, that is.

  During the hours I spent that day in the library, I went from basement to belfry, only to find myself cornered by the walls of one dead end after another. With studious intent I walked into a repository of learning with the light of a beautiful morning shining upon me and my self-appointed mission. But great clouds rolled in, thunder shook the walls, rain tapped louder and louder against the windows and lightning flashed outside them. By degrees, the neat hallways of the library I had entered turned to dank and
dripping stonework corridors of a Gothic castle through which I wandered in search of a way out. I trembled as if trapped in one of those dreams of mine where I feel surrounded by unseen horrors. At last, all I wanted was to wake up. But I couldn't awake, not until I had some answers. Abandoning the library in disgust, I returned home and moped about for weeks in a stupor of desperation and nervous suspicion.

  Not long after that inauspicious day of wasted labor, something happened that helped me come back to myself, such as I was, while also advancing my obsession with the swivel-heads. Until then, I was no expert at making friends. How unexpected it was, then, that I should make a friend when I needed one most. I was so surprised because nothing in my life had ever worked out that way. For once, I actually gained an advantage over my circumstances.

  It was after school, after the time between leaving home to go to school in the morning and leaving school in the afternoon to go back home, where I waited for it to be time for dinner, time for doing homework, and then other times until it was time to go to bed before it was time to wake up again and face another round of times to do things. In any case, on the day in question I made friends with this other boy. The reason for this fortuitous bond was that he spoke the following words: “Damn those small people.” I asked him why he said that. I also asked if he was afraid of the small people as I was afraid of them. He said he wasn't afraid of the small people, but I didn't believe him because of the way he said this. His eyes looked away from me, and he started to fidget. His voice became very quiet, too, until he stopped talking altogether and just stared at the ground. Then he looked up at me, shaking off the fear that possessed him, and said in a boisterous voice, “I'm not afraid of those dummy-things. I just hate them.”