The Spectral Link

by Thomas Ligotti

  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 parceled 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.”

  I smiled and said, “I call them swivel-heads. And I hate them, too.”

  Immediately we became friends and began spending time together every day after school, that is, until it was time for us to go home for dinner and then go through all the other times there were. We played games the way young people do, or are supposed to do at that stage of development. We wrestled quite a bit, but there wasn’t anything mean or crazy about it. We also talked a lot about the small people. One theme of conversation to which we often returned involved catching one of the smalls and what we’d do when we did.

  “I’d twist its arms until they were backwards.” To me, that seemed like something you could actually do to the small people, even if my only basis for this conviction was a brief sighting of them while on vacation a few years before. “Then it would have to do everything turned around, like eating with its back to the dinner table, if they even eat. It would have to reach for its food without being able to see it,” my friend speculated, warming to his vision. I pictured the scene for a moment.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We laughed quite a bit about small people whose arms and also legs we had twisted backwards, as well as other things we would do if we caught one of them. Eventually, we became so exhausted from laughing that we were out of breath and had to sit quietly for a while. That was when my friend smiled at me in a certain way. Not smiling slightly like my father did, but smiling as if he was thinking something very particular, looking at me with a questioning expression on his face. And right then I had the feeling I could read his mind and he could read mine. From that moment, we became more serious in our talks about the swivel-headed dummy-things. My friend also shared with me a secret. What he told me was that his father—maybe his mother, too—also hated the small people. “My grandfather hated them even more. He thought all sorts of things about them and what he called their powers.” Then my friend confided that his father always knew the location of small country, and their family moved every so often to avoid it. “We’re going to be moving again pretty soon. Dad says that the smalls are too close already…and they’re getting closer every day. He even let me know where new small country is going up, so I won’t get too near it.”

  Not long after that day, I asked my parents if I could sleep over at my friend’s house. He did the same, asking his parents if he could sleep over at my house. Our ruse worked, and on the night we were supposed to sleep over at each other’s houses we instead met at a pre-arranged location—the lavatory hut in the old park on the edge of town. When I entered the small wooden building, my friend was already studying a wrinkled piece of notebook paper on which he had drawn a map. “Here’s where the small country is going to be,” he said, pointing to a place a few miles outside the town’s limits. “It’s secluded right now, my dad said.” According to my friend, however, it wouldn’t be long before the signs were put up and everyone would know it was there. “Not that they could do anything about it,” my friend said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, knowing that whoever complained would be called a shameful bigot or some roughly equivalent term of reproach. As my friend and I sat cross-legged on the floor of the lavatory hut, it became increasingly apparent that neither of us was entirely dedicated to our plan of stealing
our way into the presently secluded region of small country and capturing one of its residents. And the longer we waited, the more our project deteriorated into something ill-conceived and probably unfeasible. Ultimately, though, our doubts were overcome by our hatred.

  “The small people,” my friend said. That was all—just three words spoken in a tense, quiet voice. Yet those words gave vent to a rage at something that had seized his life. I looked at him and saw all second thoughts written on his face transform into a spirit of determination. No doubt he saw my own features overtaken by the same spirit.

  ***

  We entered the secluded small country by way of a little road that was in the process of construction. Some small children were loitering in the area. Construction sites are always a temptation for children, though these small children weren’t behaving in the usually rambunctious manner one might expect if they had been real children. They didn’t see us, or so we assumed. But it wasn’t long before they started to walk away from the hidden spot where my friend and I were observing them. It was probably time for them to be somewhere, I thought—time to do whatever the smalls did at that hour, for by then it was almost full evening. They moved with rigid, mechanical motions, and we shadowed them easily. We could have caught up to them and grabbed one, pulled it back over into big country—normal country, I mean, the real world where real people live. But I don’t think I could have brought myself to do that, as much as my friend and I had talked about it. I looked at him, and he shook his head, so I knew he felt the same. At that point, I’m not sure that either of us knew what we wanted to do. Again, our plans were coming apart.

  We kept following the smalls, though. I noticed that even if they weren’t moving very fast, they did seem to be moving as fast as they could, as if they were hurrying to get somewhere. Their arms and legs shifted around in the manner of prosthetic limbs, making them look almost crippled, though not crippled so that you felt sorry for them, I should say, but maimed in a way that made you want to keep your distance, as if they could infect you with some dreadful condition. Eventually, we saw lights ahead. With an artificial radiance, they flooded the darkness on the other side of a hill that the small children were approaching. And when they got to the top of the hill, they paused for a moment, their silhouettes outlined against the sky by the lights shining on them from below. For a moment, it was a rather picturesque tableau. But soon the small children did something with their heads, raising them up with a slow mechanical motion by elongating their necks, like a telescope sliding open a little. Then they swiveled those heads around without moving their bodies—turning them just enough so that it seemed they were looking at me and my friend. Both of us dropped to the ground as if we had been shot. In the darkness, I heard my friend whisper, “Those rotten, horrible smalls. You can never know what they’re going to do. I hate them so much.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured in soft response.

  When we looked up from the ground, the small children were gone, no doubt having moved down the other side of the hill. It couldn’t have been a very steep incline there, or so I calculated. Otherwise, the smalls—with their awkward, practically disabled bodies—wouldn’t have been able to negotiate the descent. But when my friend and I ran up to the hilltop, moving in a crouched position, we saw that it was almost a straight drop over the edge. And the small children were now walking like broken robots down below us. Their destination looked like a little toy town that was evidently under construction. “See,” my friend said. “My dad knew it. Pretty soon all of this land around here will be small country.”

  They were moving around like mad in a kind of pit. Stretching out for about a mile was a half-built town that was almost a double of the town where my friend and I lived. The smalls were hopping around in a frenzy to finish it, as if they were on a tight schedule. “Maybe they have to complete the place before a certain time,” my friend conjectured. “Why else would they be working at night?” Or maybe that’s just the way they are, I thought. All kinds of small building machinery were positioned along the town’s main street, though none of it was in motion. Small people who looked as if they were directing operations stood with their stubby arms outstretched, pointing in all directions or inspecting unrolled building plans held tightly by their tiny digits. Everyone seemed busy with some project—putting up storefronts that had little detail or identifying features, working on skeletal frameworks that maybe were going to be houses, or carrying around what appeared to be prefabricated parts that would ultimately be integrated into the toy town. On several street corners small people were yelling through staticky bull horns. But they didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular, and what they were shouting wasn’t distinguishable as anything but gibberish. As a matter of fact—just pure, natural fact—when I considered the scene before me from its smallest to its most prominent features, the whole enterprise of the small people’s town-building seemed to be nothing but an act. They weren’t building anything with point and purpose at its core, anything that was more than a spectral illusion—they were putting on a show. Whether or not this was intentional on their part intrigued me for some reason.

  Once I had thrown off the strangeness of the spectacle, I could see how rickety, how shoddy everything was. All the buildings were crooked or unevenly sized with respect to the town as a whole. The windows were more trapezoidal than square or rectangular, and the shutters attached to some windows hung loosely, flapping against the walls behind them. A light breeze could have caused the town to collapse and blow away, which may have accounted for the disappearance and emergence of so much small country within real landscapes. I knew that all towns, and even cities, in the big world would eventually go to ruin in time, however sturdy they might appear for however long a period. Thousands of years of towns and cities in the past had proven that. And thousands or millions of years awaited the dissolution of the world as it now stood. But this town was not made to last. It was as if the small people knew there was no point in bothering with permanence. As I said, that explained a lot to me about small country—how it was always moving from one location to another, as my friend’s father was aware so that he could move his family away from wherever it rose up after a period of seclusion. But there was also something more. They sought no permanent standing in the world. For them, existence was all chaos, nonsense, and emptiness. I knew the same had been written about our world, the supposedly real world. But that was opinion, speculation. And only very few had claimed as much. Yet the small people as a lot seemed to embrace these objectionable qualities as truths. Now it became more explicable to me that they should be passed over in the archives of human thought. Theirs was not a lone voice speaking out of time. Theirs was a society subsisting, even thriving, on the brink of nonexistence—an enigma that repulsed wholesome deliberation by real people. And their habitats were all but ruins upon inauguration.

  No one in the big world, or very few, mentioned that the fully extinct leavings of towns like this remained after the smalls relocated, because once a place had become small country it was left alone, as if it was not fit to be reclaimed by real humans, as if the earth in these places had been polluted by an alien occupancy, and only pestilence abided there. You know this as well as I do, Doctor. But nobody writes about this fact, and its corollary that one day there will be no room left for a real world to be built—the unreal was moving in. I believe I realized this truth at a deep level within me during the one brave day I spent at a middling library. And now I was shaken by it to my marrow.

  Maybe there are grubby pamphlets passed around among people like my friend’s father, crumpled pages whose possession would cause someone to be branded as a shameful little bigot, you might say—an outcast. So anything that appears in print or otherwise about the small people is labeled as pernicious ravings and propaganda. There are means for hushing up what people would prefer not to delve into. But I’ve already gone into that.

  Gazing at the new small town going up, such as
it was, was to witness the intrusion of an unnatural colony of beings into the anatomy of our world—not a different race or group, but something that did not belong, neither here nor anywhere conceivable by human senses or cognition. It was something unknown that had taken form, or was in the process of taking form, coming of age in a world it was displacing. That night with my friend brought so many things home to me. A new phase in my sentiment toward the smalls had begun fermenting within my being. “None of it is real,” my friend said. “I don’t know what it is.” A creeping sense of something hitherto concealed overcame me, as I’m sure it did him. Fear had now gotten the better of both hatred and curiosity. Beside me, my friend whispered: “Let’s get out of here.” In sync, we jumped to our feet. When we turned about, though, I almost lost consciousness. For behind us was a regiment of small people standing in a semi-circle. How long had they been there? To me, that was more frightening than discovering their presence—being watched without knowing it by a group of smalls.

  They didn’t speak a word—neither to us nor among one another. Nothing shocked me about that, but it did add to the disorienting unreality of the situation. For a time, they stayed in place. Paradoxically, they appeared gigantic, that is, gigantic for toys, given their toy-like aspect. For instance, their clothes seemed to be painted on them, not worn by them. And their faces were so smooth, gleaming in the moonlight without any of the characteristic qualities of flesh. Despite their masculine semblance, their faces were beardless. They were also unwrinkled, unworn by time and somehow immortal. This was how they had always been, created somehow but not developed in stages from birth to their present age. There had been no process of coming of age for them, I thought later—no birth or death or all the things in between that trouble our own existence, or at least troubled us when we attended to them. There was only going through the motions, a pretense of life. In a way, they were a mirror of us—of what we wanted for ourselves. They marked time and nothing else. Time to do this. Time to do that. Time to make another town. Time to relocate, having poisoned a new landscape with small country.