The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  "David, you said you had an 'overlong chat' with that John Doe. Not that I'm morbidly curious or anything, but did you ever get him to reveal very much about himself?"

  "Sure," Dr. Munck replied, rolling an ice cube around in his mouth. His voice was now more relaxed.

  "He told me everything about himself, and on the surface all of it was nonsense. I asked him in a casually interested sort of way where he was from.

  "'No place,' he replied like a psychotic simpleton.

  "'No place?' I probed.

  "'Yes, precisely there, Herr Doktor.'

  "'Where were you born?' I asked in another brilliant alternate form of the question.

  "Which time do you mean, you meany?' he said back to me, and so forth. I could go on with this dialogue—"

  "You do a pretty good John Doe imitation, I must say."

  "Thank you, but I couldn't keep it up for very long. It wouldn't be easy to imitate all his different voices and levels of articulateness. He may be something akin to a multiple personality, I'm not sure. I'd have to go over the tape of the interview to see if any patterns of coherency turn up, possibly something the detectives would use to establish the man's identity, if he has one left. The tragic part is that this is all, of course, totally useless information as far as the victims of Doe's crimes are concerned… and as far as I'm concerned it really is too. I'm no aesthete of pathology. It's never been my ambition to study disease merely for its own sake, without effecting some kind of improvement, trying to help someone who would just as soon see me dead, or worse. I used to believe in rehabilitation, maybe with too much naiveté and idealism. But those people, those things at the prison are only an ugly stain on existence. The hell with them," he concluded, draining his glass until the ice cubes rattled.

  "Want another?" Leslie asked with a smooth therapeutic tone to her voice.

  David smiled now, the previous outburst having purged him somewhat. "Let's get drunk, shall we?"

  Leslie collected his glass for a refill. Now there was reason to celebrate, she thought. Her husband was not giving up his work from a sense of ineffectual failure but from anger. The anger would turn into resignation, the resignation into indifference, and then everything would be as it had been before; they could leave the prison town and move back home. In fact, they would move anywhere they liked, maybe take a long vacation first, treat Norleen to some sunny place. Leslie thought of all this as she made the drinks in the quiet of that beautiful room. This quiet was no longer an indication of soundless stagnancy but a delicious lulling prelude to the promising days to come. The indistinct happiness of the future glowed inside her along with the alcohol; she was gravid with pleasant prophecies. Perhaps the time was now right to have another child, a little brother for Norleen. But that could wait just a while longer… a lifetime of possibilities lay ahead, awaiting her wishes like a distinguished and fatherly genie.

  Before returning with the drinks, Leslie went into the kitchen. She had something she wanted to give her husband, and this was the perfect time to do it. A little token to show David that although his job had proved a sad waste of his worthy efforts, she had nevertheless supported his work in her own way. With a drink in each hand, she held under her left elbow the small box she had got from the kitchen.

  "What's that?" asked David, taking his drink.

  "Something for you, art lover. I bought it at that little shop where they sell things the inmates at the penitentiary make—belts, jewelry, ashtrays, you know."

  "I know," David said with an unusual lack of enthusiasm. "I didn't think anyone actually bought that stuff."

  "I, for one, did. I thought it would help to support those prisoners who are doing something creative, instead of… well, instead of destructive things."

  "Creativity isn't always an index of niceness, Leslie," David admonished.

  "Wait'll you see it before passing judgment," she said, opening the flap of the box. "There—isn't that nice work?" She set the piece on the coffee table.

  Dr. Munck now plunged into that depth of sobriety which can only be reached by falling from a prior alcoholic height. He looked at the object. Of course he had seen it before, watched it being tenderly molded and caressed by creative hands, until he sickened and could watch no more. It was the head of a young boy, discovered in gray formless clay and glossily glazed in blue. The work radiated an extraordinary and intense beauty, the subject's face expressing a kind of ecstatic serenity, the labyrinthine simplicity of a visionary's gaze.

  "Well, what do you think of it?" asked Leslie.

  David looked at his wife and said solemnly: "Please put it back in the box. And then get rid of it."

  "Get rid of it? Why?"

  "Why? Because I know which of the inmates did this work. He was very proud of it, and I even forced a grudging compliment for the craftsmanship of the thing. It's obviously remarkable. But then he told me who the boy was. That expression of sky-blue peacefulness wasn't on the boy's face when they found him lying in a field about six months ago."

  "No, David," said Leslie as a premature denial of what she was expecting her husband to reveal.

  "This was his last, and according to him most memorable, 'frolic'."

  "Oh my God," Leslie murmured softly, placing her right hand to her cheek. Then with both hands she gently placed the boy of blue back in his box. "I'll return it to the shop," she said quietly.

  "Do it soon, Leslie. I don't know how much longer we'll be residing at this address."

  In the moody silence that followed, Leslie briefly contemplated the new openly expressed, and definite reality of their departure from the town of Nolgate, their escape. Then she said: "David, did he actually talk about the things he did. I mean about—"

  "I know what you mean. Yes, he did," answered Dr. Munck with a professional seriousness.

  "Poor David," Leslie sympathized.

  "Actually, it wasn't that much of an ordeal. The conversation we had could even be called stimulating in a clinical sort of way. He described his 'frolicking' in a kind of unreal and highly imaginative manner that wasn't always hideous to listen to. The strange beauty of this thing in the box here—disturbing as it is—somewhat parallels the language he used when talking about those poor kids. At times I couldn't help being fascinated, though maybe I was shielding my feelings with a psychologist's detachment. Sometimes you just have to distance yourself, even if it means becoming a little less human.

  "Anyway, nothing that he said was sickeningly graphic in the way you might imagine. When he told me about his last and 'most memorable frolic,' it was with a powerful sense of wonder and nostalgia, shocking as that sounds to me now. It seemed to be a kind of homesickness, though his 'home' is a ramshackle ruin of his decaying mind. His psychosis had bred this blasphemous fairyland which exists in a powerful way for him, and despite the demented grandeur of his thousand names, he actually sees himself as only a minor figure in this world—a mediocre courtier in a broken-down kingdom of horror. This is really interesting when you consider the egoistical magnificence that a lot of psychopaths would attribute to themselves given a limitless imaginary realm in which they could play any imaginary role. But not John Doe. He's a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a place, a No Place, where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic's universe.

  "There's actually quite a poetic geography to his interior dreamland as he describes it. He talked about a place that sounded like the back alleys of some cosmic slum, an inner-dimensional dead end. Which might be an indication of a ghetto upbringing in Doe's past. And if so, his insanity has transformed these ghetto memories into a realm that cross-breeds a banal streetcorner reality with a psychopath's paradise. This is where he does his 'frolicking', with what he calls his 'awe-struck company,' the place possibly being an abandoned building, or even an accommodating sewer. I say this based on his repeated mentioning of 'the jolly river of r
efuse' and 'the jagged heaps in shadows,' which are certainly mad transmutations of a literal wasteland. Less fathomable are his memories of a moonlit corridor where mirrors scream and laugh, dark peaks of some kind that won't remain still, a stairway that's 'broken' in a very strange way, though this last one fits with the background of a dilapidated slum.

  "But despite all these dreamy backdrops in Doe's imagination, the mundane evidence of his frolics still points to a crime of very familiar, down-to-earth horrors. A run-of-the-mill atrocity. Consistently enough, Doe says he made the evidence look that way as a deliberate afterthought, that what he really means by 'frolicking' is a type of activity quite different from, even opposed to, the crime for which he was convicted. This term probably has some private associations rooted in his past."

  Dr. Munck paused and rattled around the ice cubes in his empty glass. Leslie seemed to have drifted into herself while he was speaking. She had lit a cigarette and was now leaning on the arm of the sofa with her legs up on its cushions, so that her knees pointed at her husband.

  "You should really quit smoking someday," he said.

  Leslie lowered her eyes like a child mildly chastised. "I promise that as soon as we move—I'll quit. Is that a deal?"

  "Deal," said David. "And I have another proposal for you. First let me tell you that I've definitely decided to hand my resignation no later than tomorrow morning."

  "Isn't that a little soon?" asked Leslie, hoping it wasn't.

  "Believe me, no one will be surprised. I don't think anyone will even care. Anyway, my proposal is that tomorrow we take Norleen and rent a place up north for a few days or so. We could go horseback riding. Remember she loved it last summer? What do you say?"

  "That sounds nice," Leslie agreed with a deep glow of enthusiasm. "Very nice, in fact."

  "And on the way back we can drop off Norleen at your parents'. She can stay there while we take care of the business of moving out of this house, maybe find an apartment temporarily. I don't think they'll mind having her for a week or so, do you?"

  "No, of course not, they'll love it. But what's the great rush? Norleen's still in school, you know. Maybe we should wait till she gets out. It's just a month away."

  David sat in silence for a moment, apparently ordering his thoughts.

  "What's wrong?" asked Leslie with just a slight quiver of anxiety in her voice.

  "Nothing is actually wrong, nothing at all. But—"

  "But what?"

  "Well, it has to do with the prison. I know I sounded very smug in telling you how safe we are from prison escapes, and I still maintain that we are. But the one prisoner I've told you about is also very strange, as I'm sure you've gathered. He is positively criminally psychotic… and then again he's something else."

  Leslie quizzed her husband with her eyes. "I thought you said he just bounces off walls, not—"

  "Yes, much of the time he's like that. But sometimes, well…"

  "What are you trying to say, David?" asked an uneasy Leslie.

  "It's something that Doe said when I was talking with him today. Nothing really definite. But I'd feel infinitely more comfortable about the whole thing if Norleen stayed with your parents until we can organize ourselves."

  Leslie lit another cigarette. "Tell me what he said that bothers you so much," she said firmly. "I should know too."

  "When I tell you, you'll probably just think I'm a little crazy myself. You didn't talk to him, though, and I did. The tone, or rather the many different tones of his voice; the shifting expressions on that lean face. Much of the time I talked to him I had the feeling he was beyond me in some way, I don't know exactly how. I'm it was just the customary behavior of the psychopath—trying to shock the doctor. It gives them a sense of power."

  "Tell me what he said," Leslie insisted.

  "All right, I'll tell you. As I said, it's probably nothing. But toward the end of the interview today, when we were talking about those kids, and actually kids in general, he said something I didn't like at all. He said it with an affected accent, Scottish this time with a little German flavor thrown in. He said: 'You wouldn't be havin' a misbehavin' laddie nor a little colleen of your own, now would you, Professor von Muck?' Then he grinned at me silently.

  "Now, I'm sure he was deliberately trying to upset me without, however, having any purpose in mind other than that."

  "But what he said, David: 'nor a little colleen.'"

  "Grammatically, of course, it should have been 'or' not 'nor', but I'm sure it wasn't anything except a case of bad grammar."

  "You didn't mention anything about Norleen, did you?"

  "Of course I didn't. That's not the kind of thing I would talk about with these… people."

  "Then why did he say it like that?"

  "I have no idea. He possesses a very weird sort of cleverness, speaking much of the time with vague suggestions, even subtle jokes. He could have heard things about me from someone on the staff, I suppose. Then again, it might be just an innocent coincidence." He looked to this wife for comment.

  "You're probably right," Leslie agreed with an ambivalent eagerness to believe in this conclusion. "All the same, I think I understand why you want Norleen to stay with my parents. Not that anything might happen—"

  "Not at all. There's no reason to think anything would happen. Maybe this is a case of the doctor being out-psyched by his patient, but I don't really care anymore. Any reasonable person would be a little spooked after spending day after day in the chaos and physical danger of that place… the murderers, the rapists, the dregs of the dregs. It's impossible to lead a normal family life while working under those conditions. You saw how I was on Norleen's birthday."

  "I know. Not the best surroundings in which to bring up a child."

  David nodded slowly. "When I think of how she looked when I went to check on her a little while ago, hugging one of those stuffed security blankets of her." He took a sip of his drink. "It was a new one, I noticed. Did you buy it when you were out shopping today?"

  Leslie gazed blankly. "The only thing I bought was that," she said, pointing at the box on the coffee table. "What 'new one' do you mean?"

  "The stuffed Bambi. Maybe she had it before and I just never noticed it," he said, partially dismissing the issue.

  "Well, if she had it before, it didn't come from me," Leslie said quite resolutely.

  "Nor me."

  "I don't remember her having it when I put her to bed," said Leslie.

  "Well, she had it when I looked in on her after hearing…"

  David paused with a look on his face of intense thought, an indication of some frantic rummaging search within.

  "What's the matter, David?" Leslie asked, her voice weakening.

  "I'm not sure exactly. It's as if I know something and don't know it at the same time."

  But Dr. Munck was beginning to know. With his left hand he covered the back of his neck, warming it. Was there a draft coming from somewhere, another part of the house? This was not the kind of house to be drafty, not a broken-down place where the win gets in through ancient attic boards and warped window-frames. There actually was quite a wind blowing now, he could hear it hunting around outside and could see the restless trees through the window behind the Aphrodite sculpture. The goddess posed languidly with her flawless head leaning back, her eyes contemplating the ceiling and beyond. But beyond the ceiling? Beyond the hollow snoozing of the wind, cold and dead? And the draft?

  What?

  "David, do you feel a draft?" asked his wife.

  "Yes," he replied very loudly and with unusual force.

  "Yes," he repeated, rising out of the chair, walking across the room, his steps quickening toward the stairs, up the three segments, then running down the second-floor hallway. "Norleen, Norleen," he chanted before reaching the half-closed door of her room. He could feel the breeze coming from there.

  He knew and did not know.

  He groped for the light switch. It was low, the height of a
child. He turned on the light. The child was gone. Across the room the window was wide open, the white translucent curtains flapping upwards on the invading wind. Alone on the bed was the stuffed animal, torn, its soft entrails littering the mattress. Now stuffed inside, blooming out like a flower, was a piece of paper, and Dr. Munck could discern within its folds a fragment of the prison's letterhead. But the note was not a typed message of official business: the handwriting varied from a neat italic script to a child's scrawl. He desperately stared at the words for what seemed an infinite interval without comprehending their message. Then, finally, the meaning sank heavily in.

  Dr. Monk, read the note from inside the animal, We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some galactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums… my awe-struck little deer and I have gone frolicking. See you anon. Jonathan Doe.

  "David?" he heard his wife's voice inquire from the bottom of the stairs. "Is everything all right?"

  Then the beautiful house was no longer quiet, for there rang a bright freezing scream of laughter, the perfect sound to accompany a passing anecdote from some obscure hell.

  Sardonic Mundane (1982)

  Written under the pseudonym 'Charles Miguel Riaz'

  First published in Grimoire #2, 1982.

  The marvelous... is an imposition, concluded the gentleman seated over by the window, his head buried in a newspaper. Imagine the night sky turning out to be the skin of a cobra all along, only with its usual evenly distributed glistening concentrated into an infinite number of discrete and widely- spaced points. Who cares! What really affects a person are things like that loudmouthed infant disturbing the atmosphere of an otherwise tolerable restaurant.

  Not exceptional, just tolerable, he concluded. His second conclusion that day, but it was still only lunchtime.