The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  And they welcomed him, for they could see the ordeals he had undergone, the powers he had gained. He, on the other hand, felt nothing; but he easily devoured all the honors held out to him: these were the only sustenance left which satisfied his hunger for mockery. And when they presented him with the accoutrements of high priest, he could not suppress a smile as he gazed upon the wide, dead sky.

  Now his are the crimson hands which hold aloft the golden blade, his the face behind the mask with seven eyes. And he is the one who stands in shining robes before the massive idol of moons, trembling the while with wonder.

  Alice’s Last Adventure (1985)

  First published in Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, 1985

  Also published in: The Nightmare Factory, The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World.

  Preston, stop laughing. They ate the whole backyard. They ate your mother's favorite flowers! It's not funny, Preston."

  "Aaaaa ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Aaaaa ha-ha-ha-ha-ha."

  —PRESTON AND THE STARVING SHADOWS

  A long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half-world between childhood and adolescence. He would not give up the bold satisfaction of eating insects (crispy flies and crunchy beetles are his favorites), nor that peculiar drunkenness of a child's brain, induplicable once grown-up sobriety has set perniciously in. The result was that Preston successfully negotiated several decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty; he lived unchanged throughout many a perverse adventure in the forties and fifties and even into the sixties. He lived long after I ceased writing about him.

  Did he have a prototype? I should say so. One doesn't just invent a character like Preston using only the pitiful powers of imagination. He was very much a concoction of reality, later adapted for my popular series of children's books.

  Preston's status in both reality and imagination has always had a great fascination for me. In the past year, however, this issue has especially demanded my attention, not without some personal annoyance and even anxiety.

  Then again, perhaps I'm just getting senile.

  My age is no secret, since it can be looked up in a number of literary reference sources (see Children's Authors of Today) whose information is only a few years off—I won't tell you in which direction. Over two decades ago, when the last Preston book appeared (Preston and the Upside-Down Face), one reviewer rather snootily referred to me as the “Grande Damned of a particular sort of children's literature.” What sort you can imagine if you don't otherwise know, if you didn't grow up—or not grow up, as it were—reading Preston's adventures with the Dead Mask, the Starving Shadows, or the Lonely Mirror.

  Even as a little girl, I knew I wanted to be an author; and I also knew just the kinds of things I would write. Let someone else give the preadolescents their literary introductions to life and love, guiding them through those volatile years when anything might go wrong, and landing them safely on the shores of incipient maturity. That was never my destiny. I would write about my adventures with Preston—my real-life childhood playmate, as everybody knew. Preston would then initiate others into the mysteries of an upside-down, inside-out, sinistral, always faintly askew (if not entirely reversed) universe. A true avatar of topsy-turveydom, Preston gave himself body and soul to the search—in common places such as pools of rainwater, tarnished ornaments, November afternoons—for zones of fractured numinosity, usually with the purpose of fracturing in turn the bizarre icons of his foul and bloated twin, the adult world. He became a conjurer of stylish nightmares, and what he could do with mirrors gave the grown-ups fits and sleepless nights. No dilettante of the extraordinary, but its embodiment. Such is the spiritual biography of Preston Penn.

  But I suppose it was my father, as much as Preston's original, who inspired the stories I've written. To put it briefly, Father had the blood of a child coursing through his big adult body, nourishing the over-sophisticated brain of Foxborough College's associate professor of philosophy. Typical of his character was a love for the books of Lewis Carroll, and thus the genesis of my name, if not my subsequent career. (My mother told me that while she was pregnant, Father willed me into a little Alice.) Father thought of Carroll not merely as a clever storyteller but more as an inhumanly jaded aesthete of the imagination, no doubt projecting some of his own private values onto poor Mr. Dodgson. To him the author of the Alice books was, I think, a personal symbol of power, the strange ideal of an unstructured mind manipulating reality to its whim and gaining a kind of objective force through the minds of others.

  It was very important that I share these books, and many other things, in the same spirit. “See, honey,” he would say while rereading Through the Looking Glass to me, “see how smart little Alice right away notices that the room on the other side of the mirror is not as 'tidy' as the one she just came from. Not as tidy,” he repeated with professorial emphasis but chuckling like a child, a strange little laugh that I inherited from him. “Not tidy. We know what that means, don't we?” I would look up at him and nod with all the solemnity that my six, seven, eight years could muster.

  And I did know what that meant. I felt intimations of a thousand discrete and misshapen marvels: of things going wrong in curious ways, of the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continued into space by itself, of a universe handed over to new gods. Father would gaze at my round little face, squinting his eyes as if I were giving off light. “Moon face,” he called me. When I got older, my features became more angular, an involuntary betrayal of my father's conception of his little Alice, among all the other betrayals once I'd broken the barrier of maturity. I suppose it was a blessing that he did not live to see me grow up and change, saved from disappointment by a sudden explosion in his brain while he was giving a lecture at the college.

  But perhaps he would have perceived, as I did not for many years, that my “change” was illusory, that I merely picked up the conventional gestures of an aging soul (nervous breakdown, divorce, remarriage, alcoholism, widowhood, stoic tolerance of a second-rate reality) without destroying the Alice he loved. She was always kept very much alive, though relegated to the role of an author for children. Obviously she endured, because it was she who wrote all those books about her soul mate Preston, even if she has not written one for many years now.

  Not too many, I hope. Oh, those years, those years.

  So much for the past.

  At present I would like to deal with just a single year, the one ending today—about an hour from now, judging by the clock that five minutes ago chimed eleven p.m. from the shadows on the other side of this study. During the past three hundred and sixty-five days I have noticed, sometimes just barely, an accumulation of peculiar episodes in my life. A lack of tidiness, you might say. (As a result, I've been drinking heavily again; and loneliness is getting to me in ways it never did in the past. Ah, the past.)

  Some of these episodes are so elusive and insubstantial that it would be impossible to talk about them sensibly, except perhaps in the moods they leave behind like fingerprints, and which I've learned to read like divinatory signs. My task will be much easier if I confine myself to recounting but a few of the incidents, thereby giving them a certain form and structure I so badly need just now. A tidying up, so to speak.

  I should start by identifying tonight as that sacred eve which Preston always devotedly observed, celebrating it most intensely in Preston and the Ghost of the Gourd. (At least there should be a few minutes remaining of this immovable feast, according to the clock ticking at my back; though from the look of things, the hands seem stuck on the time I reported a couple of paragraphs ago. Perhaps I misjudged it before.)

  For the past several years I've made an appearance at the local suburban library on this night to give a reading from one of my books as the main event of an annual Hallowe'en fest. Tonight I managed to show up once again for the reading, even if I hesitate to say everything went as usual. Last year, h
owever, I did not make it at all to the costume party. This brings me to what I think is the first in a yearlong series of disruptions unknown to a biography previously marked by nothing more than episodes of conventional chaos. My apologies for taking two steps backward before one step forward. As an old hand at storytelling, I realize this is always a risky approach when bidding for a reader's attention. But here goes.

  Around this time last year I attended the funeral of someone from my past, long past. This was none other than that sprite of special genius whose exploits served as the prima materia for my Preston Penn books. The gesture was one of pure nostalgia, for I hadn't actually seen this person since my twelfth birthday party. It was soon afterward that my father died, and my mother and I moved out of our house in North Sable, Mass, (see Childhood Homes of Children's Authors for a photo of the old two-story frame job), heading for the big city and away from sad reminders. A local teacher who knew of my work, and its beginnings in North S, sent me a newspaper clipping from the Sable Sentinel, that reported the demise of my former playmate and even mentioned his secondhand literary fame.

  I arrived in town very quietly and was immediately overwhelmed by the lack of change in the place, as if it had existed all those years in a state of suspended animation and had been only recently reanimated for my benefit. It almost seemed that I might run into my old neighbours, schoolmates, and even Mr. So and So who ran the ice cream shop, which I was surprised to see still in operation. On the other side of the window, a big man with a walrus mustache was digging ice cream from large cardboard cylinders, while two chubby kids pressed their bellies against the counter. The man hadn't changed in the least over the years. He looked up and saw me staring into the shop, and there really seemed to be a twinkle of recognition in his puffy eyes. But that was impossible. He could have never perceived behind my ancient mask the child's face he once knew, even if he had been Mr. So and So and not his look-alike (son? grandson?). Two complete strangers gawking at each other through a window smeared with the sticky handprints of sloppy patrons. The scene depressed me more than I can say.

  Unfortunately, an even more depressing reunion waited a few steps down the street. G. V. Ness and Sons, Funeral Directors. For all the years I'd lived in North Sable, this was only my second visit (“Good-bye, Daddy”) to that cold colonial building. But such places always seem familiar, having that perfectly vacant, neutral atmosphere common to all funeral homes, the same in my hometown as in the suburb outside New York (“Good riddance, Hubby”) where I'm now secluded.

  I strolled into the proper room unnoticed, another anonymous mourner who was a bit shy about approaching the casket. Although I drew a couple of small-town stares, the elderly, elegant author from New York did not stand out as much as she thought she would. But with or without distinction, it remained my intention to introduce myself to the widow as a childhood friend of her deceased husband. This intention, however, was shot all to hell by two ox-like men who rose from their seats on either side of the grieving lady and lumbered my way. For some reason I panicked.

  “You must be Dad's Cousin Winnie from Boston. The family's heard so much about you over the years,” they said.

  I smiled widely and gulped deeply, which must have looked like a nod of affirmation to them. In any case, they led me over to “Mom” and introduced me under my inadvertent pseudonym to the red-eyed, half-delirious old woman. (Why, I wonder, did I allow this goof to go on?)

  “Nice to finally meet you, and thank you for the lovely card you sent,” she said, sniffing loudly and working on her eyes with a grotesquely soiled handkerchief. “I'm Elsie.”

  Elsie Chester, I thought immediately, though I wasn't entirely sure that this was the same person who was rumored to have sold kisses and other things to the boys at North Sable Elementary. So he had married her, whaddaya know? Possibly they had to get married, I speculated cattily. At least one of her sons looked old enough to have been the consequence of teenage impatience. Oh, well. So much for Preston's vow to wed no one less than the Queen of Nightmares.

  But even greater disappointments awaited my notice. After chatting emptily with the widow for a few more moments, I excused myself to pay my respects at the coffinside of the deceased. Until then I'd deliberately averted my gaze from that flower-crazed area at the front of the room, where a shiny, pearl-gray casket held its occupant in much the same position as the “Traveling Tomb” racer he'd once constructed. This part of the mortuary ritual never fails to put me in mind of those corpse-viewing sessions to which children in the nineteenth century were subjected in order to acquaint them with their own mortality. At my age this was unnecessary, so allow me to skip quickly over this scene with a few tragic and inevitable words.

  Bald and blemished, that was unconsciously expected. Totally unfamiliar, that wasn't. The mosquito-faced child I once knew had had his features smushed and spread by the years—bloated, not with death but with having overfed himself at the turgid banquet of life, lethargically pushing away from the table just prior to explosion. A portrait of lazy indulgence. Defunct. Used up. The eternal adult. (But perhaps in death, I consoled myself, a truer self was even now ripping off the false face of the thing before me. This must be so, for the idea of an afterworld populated with a preponderance of old, withered souls is too hideous to contemplate.)

  After paying homage to the remains of a memory, I slipped out of that room with a stealth my Preston would have been proud of. I'd left behind an envelope with a modest contribution to the widow's fund. I had half a mind to send a batch of gaping black orchids to the funeral home with a note signed by Laetitia Simpson, Preston's dwarfish girlfriend. But this was something that the other Alice would have done, the one who wrote those strange books.

  As for me, I got into my car and drove out of town to a nice big Holiday Inn near the interstate, where I found a nice suite—spoils of a successful literary career—and a bar. And as it turned out, this overnight layover must take us down another side road (or back road, if you like) of my narrative. Please stand by.

  A late-afternoon crowd had settled into the hotel's barroom, relieving me of the necessity of drinking in total solitude, which at the time I was quite prepared to do. After a couple of Scotches on the rocks, I noticed a young man looking my way from the other side of that greenish room. At least he appeared young, extremely so, from a distance. But as I walked over to sit at his table, with a boldness I've never attributed to alcohol, he seemed to gain a few years with every step I took. He was now only relatively young—from an old dowager's point of view, that is. His name was Hank De Vere, and he worked for a distributor of gardening tools and other such products, in Maine. But let's not pretend to care about the details. Later we had dinner together, after which I invited him to my suite.

  It was the next morning, by the way, that inaugurated that yearlong succession of experiences which I'm methodically trying to sort out with a few select examples. Half step forward coming up: pawn to king three.

  I awoke in the darkness peculiar to hotel bedrooms, abnormally heavy curtains masking the morning light. Immediately it became apparent that I was alone. My new acquaintance seemed to have a more developed sense of tact and timing than I had given him credit for. At least I thought so at first. But then I looked through the open doorway into the other room, where I could see a convex mirror in an artificial wood frame on the wall.

  The bulging eye of the mirror reflected almost the entire next room in convexed perspective, and I noticed someone moving around in there. In the mirror, that is. A tiny, misshapen figure seemed to be gyring about, leaping almost, in a way that should have been audible to me. But it wasn't.

  I called out a name I barely remembered from the night before. There came no answer from the next room, but the movement in the mirror stopped, and the tiny figure (whatever it was) disappeared. Very cautiously I got up from the bed, robed myself, and peeked around the corner of the doorway like a curious child on Christmas morning. A strange combination of r
elief and confusion arose in me when I saw that there was no one else in the suite.

  I approached the mirror, perhaps to search its surface for the little something that might have caused the illusion. My memory is vague on this point, since at the time I was a bit hung over. But I can recall with spectacular vividness what I finally saw after gazing into the mirror for a few moments. Suddenly the sphered glass before me became clouded with a mysterious fog, from the depths of which appeared the waxy face of a corpse. It was the visage of that old cadaver I'd seen at the funeral home, now with eyes open and staring reproachfully into mine…

  Of course I really saw nothing of the kind. I did not even imagine it, except just now. But somehow this imaginary manifestation seems more fitting and conclusive than what I actually found in the mirror, which was only my old and haggard face… a corpselike countenance if ever there was one.

  But there was another conclusion, let's say encore, to this episode with the mirror. A short while later I was checking out, and as the desk clerk was fiddling with my bill, I happened to look out of a nearby window, beyond which two children were romping on the lawn in front of the hotel: an arm-swinging, leaping mime show. After a few seconds the kids caught me watching them. They stopped and stared back at me, standing perfectly still, side by side… then suddenly they were running away. The room took a little spin that only I seemed to notice, while others went calmly about their business. Possibly this experience can be attributed to my failure to employ the usual post-debauch remedies that morning. The old nerves were somewhat shot, and my stomach was giving me no peace. Still, I've remained in pretty fair health over the years, all things considered, and I drove back home without further incident.

  That was a year ago. (Get ready for one giant step forward: the old queen is now in play.)

  In the succeeding months I noted a number of similar happenings, though they occurred with varying degrees of clarity. Most of them approached the fleeting nature of deja-vu phenomena. A few could be pegged as self-manufactured, while others lacked a definite source. I might see a phrase or the fragment of an image that would make my heart flip over (not a healthy thing at my age), while my mind searched for some correspondence that triggered this powerful sense of repetition and familiarity: the sound of a delayed echo with oblique origins. I delved into dreams, half-conscious perceptions, and the distortions of memory, but all that remained was a chain of occurrences with links as weak as smoke rings.