Someone was coming up the stairs outside the door of the studio. So he hid behind that door, and, when that someone came in, he, without looking back, went out. Tip-toeing down the stairs, running down the street in the rain.
He was walking now, and the rain was sluicing vigorously in the gutters. And something else that he saw was in there too. It looked like the tail of an animal, but a very intricate tail. It was being dragged slowly along by the run-off in the gutter, and it made weird wriggling movements. When it was farther away, the intricacies of the object—those involved patterns in which he thought he saw a face smiling so peacefully—were no longer discernible, and he felt relieved.
But the rain was coming down even harder now, so he retreated into a shelter along the street. It was just a little room with a wooden bench, open on one side and rain running off its roof, long watery ropes of rain that were swinging a little in the wind. Very damp in there, and the frayed edges of shadows waving on the three walls. Damp smell, with something else too, some unsavory enigma about the place, something in its very outlines, its contours. What was it that happened in here, and could that be a little blood over there?
The bench where he had sat down was now gleaming with dampness under moonlight. At the other end, almost entirely absorbed into the dark little corner, was a bent figure, almost folded in half. It groaned and moved a little. Finally it straightened up, and its intricately tangled hair came tumbling down into the moonlight. Along the slick bench it slid, dragging itself and its rags slowly to his side. He, on the other hand, could not move an inch, not a hair.
Then, from somewhere within all that intricacy, a pair of eyes opened, and a pair of lips. And they said to him: "Let me tell you what my name is."
But when the figure leaned over, smiling so placidly, those shapeless lips had to whisper their words into the cold damp ear of a corpse.
Nightmare Horror
No one knows how entrance is made; no one recalls by what route such scenes are arrived at. There might be a soft tunnel of blackness, possibly one without arching walls or solid flooring, a vague streamlined enclosure down which one floats toward a shadowy terminus. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, a light flares up and spreads, props appear all around, the scenario is laid out and learned in an instant, while that ingress of blackness—that dull old tunnel—is unmemorized. On the other hand, perhaps there is no front door to the dream, no first act to the drama: a gallery of mannikins abruptly wakes and they all take up their roles in mid-speech, without a beginning to go back to.
But the significant thing is not to begin but to continue, not to arrive but to stay. This is the founding condition, the one on which all others are grounded and raised: restriction, incarceration are the laws of the structure. And this structure, an actual building now, is a strange one; complete in itself, it is not known to be part of a larger landscape, as if perfectly painted mountains had been left without a lake or sky on a wide white canvass. Is it a hospital? Museum? Drab labyrinth of offices? Or just some nameless... institution? Whatever it may be outside, inside—for those who have important business there—it is very late, and the time has somehow slipped by for a crucial appointment.
In which room was it supposed to take place? Is this even the right section of the building, the correct floor? All the hallways look the same—without proper lighting or helpful passersby—and none of the rooms is numbered. But numbers are of no assistance, going from empty room to empty room is futile. That vital meeting has already been missed and nothing in the world can make up for this loss.
Finally, a kind of climax is reached in the shadows beneath a stairway, where one has taken refuge from the consequences of failure.
And within this apparent haven there is an entirely new development: multitudes of huge spiders hang ill drooping webs above and around you. Your presence has disturbed them and they begin to move, their unusual bodies maneuvering about. But however horrible they may be, you know that you need them.
For they are the ones who show you the way out; it is their touch which guides you and reminds you how to take leave of this torture. Everyone recalls this final flight from the nightmare; everyone knows how to scream.
Occult Horror
Gruesome fate.
And five candles burned the whole time, at the five points of the star. They never went out. The man standing in the middle was tall, his forehead taut. His shirt was once white but had yellowed to reflect the moon in the dark sky above the twisted trees outside the window. Inside there was only that great empty room with the single star, the five candles, and the man.
Also there was the book, which the man knelt to read at the center of the star. Book of the Damned. It told of other worlds, and the man summoned them. He had visions, visions in the smoke of the candles, in the light of the moon which shone on the dull dark floor of the room. The patterns on the walls swirled in the candlelight and in the moonlight.
Worlds bloomed and withered, spun and stopped, flourished and decayed. In the smoke of the candles. But they were all the same. All of them had different colors, just as the one he knew, and different seasons: each beat like a hunted heart.
"No more blood," he cried, choking. "These worlds merely mimic my own." And again: "No more blood!"
The candles, the moon, the patterns on the wall, and the howling wind heard; and all agreed to welcome him to this other world, which was already theirs.
Now it would be his.
The flames barely fluttered as he collapsed into the star, his face so white above his yellow shirt and beneath the yellow moon. A beautiful, bloodless white.
How foolish they were who thought he was dead: who buried him in that sticky earth, so moist and warm in summer. And dark as blood.
Dreamworld Horror
Illusions struggle with illusions.
And in the expansive silence of that landscape nothing is settled or certain, not excepting the image of infinity presented by the stars and blackness that seem to spread immensely above. For below, one may vow, extends another blackness, an endless ebony plateau whose surface is like polished stone. There the sky would appear to have thrown down stars, setting them within the shining darkness of the lower world so that it might contemplate from afar these glittering relics, scintillant cast-offs from its ancient treasure, the brilliant debris of its dreams.
Thus, both above and below one may see the flickering of these luminous motes, quivering bodies held captive in the unbroken web of blackness. And the abysmal web itself seems to tremble; for nothing there is at peace or secure in its nature. Even the emptiness that separates the starlight from its reflection upon the great glassy plain is an imitation void. For, having made the level land its mirror, the sky has gazed too long and too deeply, reaching into itself and embracing its own visions, saturating the distance between the thing and its simulacrum. All space is virtual; the infinite is illusory. There, in that landscape, a dimension has died, annihilating depth and leaving behind only a lustrous image which seems to float far and wide upon the infinite surface of a black ocean.
And it is said that this ocean is itself merely a starry phantasm glimpsed in certain eyes... eyes that may be seen as one wanders the streets of strange cities... eyes that are like two stars laid deep in a black mirror.
Nihilistic Horror
After tabulating our number of days on this earth, we would still have to multiply this sum several times in order to take into account our dreams—those days inside our nights. Several more lifetimes must therefore be added, including those in which the dead continue to live and those in which the living are dead; those in which such trivial occurrences as an innocent laugh acquire a profound meaning and those in which the most awesome events have none at all; those which are made very strange by supernatural powers and those in which magic itself seems commonplace; those in which we play ourselves and those in which we seem to be someone else; those in which everything appears frightening and harmful and those in which indifference is
the single note that sounds throughout the dream.
These contradictions make our dreams seem negligible, and this is what enables them to be ignored in the tabulation of our days.
But there are still those dreams which are waiting for others to come along, whose terms and conditions will cancel them out. These are the leftover dreams, our dark days, which have yet to fall victim to mathematics, and they are the only ones that count for anything. And it is the same with our waking days. Only a few of those escape nullification by contradiction, that process of cancellation which is going on all the time.
In any case, neither dreams nor days ever survive long before their counterparts step up and annihilate them. It is quite possible that, in our last moments, there will be nothing left which we might look back on as a lifetime.
But will this nothingness itself endure, or will it too be cancelled out by some inviolable and unsuspected form of being, terminating at last in a kind of double oblivion?
The Strange Design Of Master Rignolo (1989)
First published in Grue Magazine #10, 1989
Also published in: Noctuary, The Nightmare Factory, The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World.
It was well into evening and for some time Nolon had been been seated at a small table in a kind of park. This was a long, thin stretch of land—vaguely triangular in shape, like a piece of broken glass—bordered by three streets of varying breadth, varying evenness of surface, and of varying stages of disintegration as each thoroughfare succumbed in its own way and in its own time to the subtle but continuous movements of the slumbering earth below. From the far end of the park a figure in a dark overcoat was approaching Nolon's table, and it appeared there was going to be a meeting of some sort.
There were other tables here and there, all of them unoccupied, but most of the park was unused ground covered with a plush, fuzzy kind of turf. In the moonlight this densely woven pile of vegetation turned a soft shade of aquamarine, almost radiant. Beyond the thinning trees, stars were bright but without luster, as if they were made of luminous paper. Around the park, a jagged line of high roofs, black and featureless, crossed the sky like the uneven teeth of an old saw.
Nolon was resting his hands at the edge of the small, nearly circular table. In the middle of the table a piece of candle flickered inside a misshapen bubble of green glass, and Nolon's face was bathed in a restless green glare. He too was wearing a dark overcoat, unbuttoned at the top to reveal a scarf of lighter shade stuffed inside it. The scarf was wrapped about Nolon's neck right to the base of his chin. Every so often Nolon glanced up, not to look at Grissul as he proceeded across the park, but to try and catch sight of something in that lighted window across the street: a silhouette which at irregular intervals slipped in and out of view. Above the window was a long, low roof surmounted by a board which appeared to be a sign or marquee. The lettering on this board was entirely unreadable, perhaps corroded by the elements or even deliberately effaced. But the image of two tall, thin bottles could still be seen, their slender necks angled festively this way and that.
Grissul sat down, facing Nolon at eye level.
"Have you been here long?" he asked.
Nolon calmly pulled out a watch from deep inside his coat. He stared at it for a few moments, tapped the glass once or twice, then gently pushed it back inside his coat.
"Someone must have known I was thinking about seeing you," Grissul continued, "because I've got a little story I could tell."
Nolon again glanced toward the lighted window across the street. Grissul noticed this and twisted his head around, saying, "Well, someone's there after all. Do you think tonight we could get, you know, a little service of some kind?"
"Maybe you could go over there yourself and see what our chances are," Nolon replied.
"All the same to me," Grissul insisted, twisting his head back to face Nolon. "I've still got my news."
"Is that specifically why this meeting is taking place?"
To this query Grissul returned a blank expression. "Not that I know of," he asserted. "As far as I'm concerned, we just met by chance."
"Of course," Nolon agreed, smiling a little. Grissul smiled back but with much less subtlety.
"So I was going to tell you," Grissul began, "that I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there's a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don't know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?"
"I now have a good idea," Nolon replied, a trifle bored or at least pretending to be.
"This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn't planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks of some kind, skinny as your finger but with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked, I don't know, when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. I'm telling you, Mr Nolon, it was right in the ground. It appeared to be a part of it, like—"
"Mr Grissul, what appeared?"
Grissul remembered himself and found a tone of voice not so exhausting of his own strength, nor so wearing on his listener's patience.
"The face," he said, leaning back in his chair. "It was right there, about the size of, I don't know, a window or a picture hanging on a wall, except that it was in the ground and it was a big oval, not rectangular in any way. Just as if someone had partly buried a giant, or better yet, a giant's mask. Only the edges of the face seemed not so much buried as, well, woven I guess you would say, right into the ground. The eyes were closed, not shut closed—it didn't seem to be dead—but relaxed. The same with the lips, very heavy lips rubbing up against each other. Even complexion, ashy gray, and soft cheeks. They looked soft, I mean, because I didn't actually touch them in any way. I think it was asleep."
Nolon shifted slightly in his chair and looked straight into Grissul's eyes.
"Then come and see for yourself," Grissul insisted. "The moon's bright enough."
"That's not the problem. I'm perfectly willing to go along with you, whatever might be there. But for once I have other plans."
"Oh, other plans," repeated Grissul as if some deeply hidden secret had been revealed. "And what other plans would those be, Mr Nolon?"
"Plans of relatively long standing and not altered since made, if you can conceive of such a thing these days. Are you listening? Oh, I thought you nodded off. Well, Rignolo, that mysterious little creature, has made a rare move. He's asked if I would like to have a look around his studio. No one's ever been there that I know of. And no one's actually seen what he paints."
"No one that you know of," added Grissul.
"Of course. Until tonight, that is, a little while from now unless a change of plans is necessary. Otherwise I shall be the first to see what all that talk of his is about. It should really be worth the trouble, and I could invite you to come along."
Grissul's lower lip pushed forward a little. "Thank you, Mr Nolon," he said, "but that's more in your line. I thought when I told you about my observation this evening—"
"Of course, your observation is very interesting, extraordinary, Mr Grissul. But I think that that sort of thing can wait, don't you? Besides, I haven't told you anything of Rignolo's work."
"You can tell me."
"Landscapes, Mr Grissul. Nothing but landscapes. Exclusively his subject, a point he even brags about."
"That's very interesting, too."
"I thought you would say something like that. And you might be even more interested if you had ever heard Rignolo discourse on his canvasses. But... well, you can see and hear for yourself. What do you say, then? First Rignolo's studio and then straigh
t out to see if we can find that old field again?"
They agreed that these activities, in this sequence, would not be the worst way to fill an evening.
As they got up from the table, Nolon had a last look at the window across the street. The light that once brightened it must have been put out during his conversation with Grissul. So there was no way of knowing whether or not someone was now observing them. Buttoning their overcoats as far as their scarfed necks, the two men walked in silence across the park upon which countless stars stared down like the dead eyes of sculptured faces.
"Don't just walk stepping everywhere," Rignolo told his visitors as they all entered the studio. He was a little out of breath from the climb up the stairs, wheezing his words, quietly muttering to himself, "This place, oh, this place." There was hardly a patch of floor that was not in some way cluttered over, so he need not have warned Nolon, or even Grissul. Rignolo was of lesser stature than his guests, virtually a dwarf, and so moved with greater freedom through that cramped space. "You see," he said, "how this isn't really a room up here, just a little closet that tried to grow into one, bulging out every which way and making all these odd niches and alcoves surrounding us, this shapeless gallery of nooks. There's a window around here, I suppose, under some of these canvasses. But those are what you're here for, not to look out some window that who knows where it is. Nothing to see out there, even so."
Rignolo then ushered his visitors through the shrunken maze composed of recesses of one sort or another, indicating to them a canvass here or there. Each somehow held itself to a wall or was leaning against one, as if with exhaustion. Having brought their attention to this or that picture, he would step a little to the side and allow them to admire his work, standing there like a polite but slightly bored curator of some seldom-visited museum, a pathetic figure attired in over-sized clothes of woven... dust. His small ovoid face was as lifeless as a mask: his skin had the same faded complexion as his clothes and was just as slack, flabby; his lips were the same color as his skin but more full and taut; his hair shot out in tufts from his head, uncontrolled, weedy; and his eyes showed too much white, having to all appearances rolled up halfway into his forehead, as if they were trying to peek under it.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 43