The Spectral Link

by Thomas Ligotti

  “What did he say?”

  “When someone’s standing in your living room blinking off and on like a defective light bulb, it shorts out your brain.”

  “Unless you’re a degenerate swamp dweller, or one of their descendants. A metaphysical mutant.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. What did he say?”

  “All I remember was that he told me things that nobody could know. It was as if he plugged his brain into mine and pumped into me everything in the world, everything in the whole universe. And other stuff I can’t even explain. First I thought I was going to explode. Then anything that I thought was my life as I knew it, that I thought was real, just being alive—it all drained out of me until there was nothing left. And I dropped in a dead faint to the floor. When I came to he was gone.”

  “And now you’ve become me.”

  “That’s how it seems. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to what you said to me on all those visits. But I had to keep up appearances.”

  “It wouldn’t have done any good. You know that now.”

  “Sure I do. However I run it through my head, I keep coming up with the same conclusion, the same way out.”

  “What about my suggestion, then? It would be elegant. It would be effective.”

  “I know. I have what I need. What we need. I was only waiting for you to show up, as you always do. You know, it’s really all your fault that I’ve come to this.”

  “You’re the fraud. You invited it on yourself.”

  “That’s how I ended up thinking about it. Funny almost. A small-time fraud stumbling onto…I don’t even know what to call it.”

  “Schemes of immense repercussions. Or demoralization in all its facets and aspects. Terminal demoralization. We’re a dime a dozen.”

  “I’m going to make it up to you.”

  “I know. The Dealer said you’d fix me up.”

  Olan left the room. It was not long before he returned bearing two filled and capped syringes. One of them was placed in a sealed plastic bag, which he handed to me. Rightly assuming I had never intravenously injected myself, he pushed up one of my shirt sleeves. With two fingers he tapped the veins on the inner side of my arm.

  “This one,” he said. “First drink a couple glasses of water to raise it up. Then you just slide it in and push the plunger. Can you do that?”

  “I’m sure of it. Thank you.”

  I had it now. It was all I ever wanted.

  ***

  When I was back in my one-bedroom apartment, I sat quiet and motionless in a reupholstered chair, the syringe on the table beside me. There were sounds from outside the walls and windows around me—cars, people talking, music from an ice cream truck. None of it meant anything. The world was mutating, its every organism trending toward an ultimate derangement. It was not an all-new context, just the way things always had been. Death was guaranteed, as the Dealer put it. Harm was guaranteed. It was not as if what was happening had not been in the works for millennia. I imagined everything I had dreamed as being the truth without question. Maybe something became impatient with earthly evolution, something that was not good or evil, not moral or immoral, something that was just in motion. It was in front of us all the time, but no one saw it, no one wanted to see it. I found that annoying. I had been demoralized for so long, and all I ever wanted was to get on with the inevitable. Moreover, I wanted to do it in my own good time and with respect and understanding, not hindered and hated because I was not for this world. Hence, I feel it my moral right—real or irreal—to leave a suicide note expressing my ire to the unwitting doomed, the ones who, as has ever been their wont, will spurn and decry such a document. Better still, let the following be known as my Suicide Declaration.

  Those who contest demoralization as the inexorable way of universal deliverance have failed to see what is before them. They have lagged behind in the evolutionary ideal of our species. That ideal is a beneficial mutation. If nothing else, the demoralized are fortuitous mutants. From the day that marked our kind’s awakening to life, such mutants have borne the common task of attaining for the world its true status and to announce its arrival in a time to come. Now it has fallen to demoralized mutants to enunciate their closed-off future. Of all others, they have been assigned with the venture of depressing the inhabitants of the earth, so that the horrors of existence may perish by an entropic process of moral deterioration culminating in a psychically pristine posterity. Into their tremulous hands has been passed an urgency to have these horrors die along with the vessels that contain them, and until then to edify those who endorse in action or a complicity of silence the horrors that flourish in daylight and dark. Any who doubt that the foregoing is truly the case only indict themselves of a willing blindness and depraved ignorance. Those who accept the lines herein are already in good standing with the mutations of a redemptive demoralization. As for the ones who still practice and profit from horrors, they must be condemned not because they are wickedly content with dozing in sick dreams, which their benighted state renders them helpless to disjoin themselves, but because they are not on the path of a saving self-mutation. They are obstacles to the future and what it wants. The consummate invention of our species’ mutants, the future longs for peace and freedom from suffering toward which demoralization points the way; that is, it seeks wholeheartedly an eliminative attitude against all manifestations throughout the universe. Such has been the stance of all mutant liberators by demoralization who have ever lived. As one, their voices have spoken of an end-point to the organic horror. None has ever been fully heard or impeccably followed. They have merely shown the way. This way has always been implicit in their ideal. Closer it draws with the appearance of the demoralized greater in number and more clear-eyed in purpose. This is the way of the future. All who do not know the way, or who refuse it, will be denied the faintest glimpse of the absolute of an anesthetized future. They are reprobate losers waiting only to be declared as such by tomorrow’s demoralized mutants. So it will be. We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell.

  The Small People

  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. We don’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 claim 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. Obviou
sly, 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. 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 seats, 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 the 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 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 w
elcomed 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 or 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.