Through the mist, which hovers thick and stagnant, the city projects the features of its true face. Drab, crumpled buildings appear along streets which twist without pattern like cracks between the pieces of a puzzle. Dark houses bulge; neither stone nor wood, their surface might be of decaying flesh, breaking away at the slightest touch.
Some of these structures are mere facades propped up by a void. Others falsify their interiors with crude scenes painted where windows should be. And where a true window appears there is likely to be an arm hanging out of it, a stuffed and dangling arm with a hand whose fingers are too many or too few.
Here and there scraps of debris hop about with no wind to guide them. These are the only things that seem to move in these streets, though there is a constant scraping noise that follows one's steps. If one pauses for a moment to look into a narrow space between buildings, something may be seen dragging itself along the ground, or perhaps it has already laid itself across the street, obstructing the way that leads out of the city. This figure is only that of a dead-eyed dummy; yet, when someone tries to step over the thing, its mouth suddenly drops open. At the time this is the best the city can do—a sham of menace that has no life and deceives no one.
Only later—when, in disgust, one has left behind this place of feeble impostures—will the true menace make itself known. And it begins when familiar surroundings inspire, on occasion, moments of doubt. Then places must verify themselves, objects are asked to prove their solidity, a searching hand makes inquiries upon the surface of a window.
Afterward there are intense seizures of suspicion that will not abate. Everything seems to be on the verge of disclosing its unreality and drifting off into the shadows. And the shadows themselves collapse and slide down rooftops, trickle down walls and into the streets like black rain. One's own eyes stare absently in the mirror; one's mouth drops open in horror.
One May Be Dreaming (1994)
First published in Noctuary, 1994.
Beyond the windows a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps along an empty street. Night is softly beginning. Within the window are narrow bars, both vertical and horizontal, which divide it into several smaller windows. At their intersections, these bars form crosses which have their own reflections, not far beyond the windowpanes, in those other crosses jutting out of the earth-hugging fog in the graveyard. To all appearances, it is a burial-ground in the clouds that I contemplate through the window.
Upon the window ledge is an old pipe that seems to have been mine in another life. The pipe's dark bowl must have brightened to a reddish-gold as I smoked and gazed beyond the window at the graveyard. When the tobacco had burned to the bottom, perhaps I gently knocked the pipe against the inside wall of the fireplace, showering the logs and stones with warm ashes. The fireplace is framed within the wall perpendicular to the window. Across the room is a large desk and a high-backed chair. The lamp positioned in the far right corner of the desk must serve as illumination for the entire room, a modest supplement to those pale beacons beyond the window. Some old books, pens, and writing paper are spread across the top of the desk. In the dim depths of the room, against the fourth wall, is a towering clock that ticks quietly.
These, then, are the main features of the room in which I find myself: window, fireplace, desk, and clock. There is no door.
I never dreamed that dying in one's sleep would encompass dreaming itself. Perhaps I often dreamed of this room and now, near the point of death, have become its prisoner. And here my bloodless form is held while my other body somewhere lies still and without hope. There can be no doubt that my present state is without reality. If nothing else, I know what it is like to dream. And although a universe of strange sensation is inspired by those lights beyond the window, by the fog and the graveyard, they are no more real than I am. I know there is nothing beyond those lights and that the obscured ground outside could never sustain my steps. Should I venture there I would fall straight into an absolute darkness, rather than approaching it by the degrees of my dying dreams.
For other dreams came before this one—dreams in which I saw lights more brilliant, a fog even more dense, and gravestones with names I could almost read from the distance of this room. But everything is dimming, dissolving, and growing dark. The next dream will be darker still, everything a little more confused, my thoughts... wandering. And objects that are now part of the scene may soon be missing; perhaps even my pipe—if it was ever mine—will be gone forever.
Those lights flickering in the fog seem the very face of infinity, the spare features of an empty mask. The clock begins to sound within the room and for a moment the silent void has found an echoing voice. Everything is dimming, dissolving... the next dream will be darker still. And when I awake the room will be darker, dissipating like a fog around me, a black fog in which everything will drown and all my thoughts will be gone forever.
But for the moment I am safe in my dream, this dream.
Beyond the window a dense fog spreads across the graveyard, and a few lights beam within hazy depths, glowing like old lamps along an empty street. Night is softly beginning.
Death Without End (1994)
First published in its original form in Crypt Of Cthulhu #68, 1989 as 'Macabre Horror', a section of Studies In Horror.
Also published in this revised form in: Noctuary
To others he always tried to convey the impression that he lived in a better place than he actually did, one far more comfortable and far less decayed. "If they could only see what things are really like, rotting all around me."
Feeling somewhat morose, he closed his eyes and sank down into gloomy reflections. He was sitting in a plump, stuffed chair which was sprouting in several places through the worn upholstery.
"Would you like to know how it feels to be dead?" he imagined a voice asking him. "Yes, I would," he imagined answering. A rickety but rather proud-looking gentleman—this is how he imagined the voice—led him past the graveyard gates. (And they were flaking with age and squeaking in the wind, just as he always imagined they would.) The quaintly tilting headstones, the surrounding grove of vaguely stirring trees, the soft gray sky overhead, the cool air faintly fragrant with decay: "Is this how it is?" he asked hopefully. "Late afternoon in a perpetual autumn?"
"Not exactly," the gentleman answered. "Please keep watching." The gentleman's instruction was intended ironically, for there was no longer anything to behold: no headstones, no trees or sky, nor was there a fragrance of any kind to be blindly sensed.
"Is this how it is, then?" he asked once more. "A body frozen in blackness, a perpetual night in winter?"
"Not precisely," the gentleman replied. "Allow your vision to become used to the darkness."
Then it began to appear to him, glowing with a glacial illumination, a subterranean or extrastellar phosphorescence. Initially, the radiant corpse he saw seemed to be in a stiffly upright position; but he had no way of calculating his angle of perspective, which may actually have been somewhere directly above the full length of the body, rather than frontally facing its height. No less than its mold-spotted clothes, the flesh of the cadaver was in gauzy tatters, lips shrivelled to a powdery smudge on a pale shroud of a face, eyes dried up in the shells of their sockets, hair a mere sprinkling of dust. And now he imagined the feeling of death as one previously beyond his imagination. This feeling was simply that of an eternally prolonged itching sensation.
"Yes, of course," he thought, "this is how it really must be, an incredible itch when all the fluids are gone and ragged flesh chafes in ragged clothes. A terrible itching and nothing else, nothing worse." Then, out loud, he asked the old gentleman: "Is this, then, how it truly feels to be dead? Only this and not the altogether unimaginable horror I've always feared it would be?"
"Is that what you would now have, this true knowledge?" asked a voice, though it was not the voice of the rickety and proud-looking old man he had first imagined. This was another vo
ice altogether, a strange voice which promised: "The true knowledge shall be yours."
A long time passed before his body was found, its bony fingers digging into the tattered material of a plump, stuffed armchair, its skin already crumbling and covered with the room's dust. His discoverers were some acquaintances who wondered what had become of him. And as they stood for a few numbed moments around the site of his seated corpse, a few of them absent-mindedly gave their collared necks or shirt-sleeved arms a little scratch.
Along with the trauma this unexpected discovery imposed, there was the lesser shock of the dead man's run-down home, which was not at all the place his acquaintances imagined they would find. But somehow it continued to be the better place of their imagination when—on autumn afternoons or winter nights—they recollected the thing they found in the chair, or simply reflected on the phenomenon of death itself. Often these musings would be accompanied by a tiny scratch or two just behind the ears or at the base of the neck.
Primordial Loathing (1994)
First published in its original form in Crypt Of Cthulhu #68, 1989 as 'Prehistoric Horror', a section of Studies In Horror.
Also published in this revised form in: Noctuary
I cannot imagine how this voice invaded the dream, yet did not belong to it.
"O intelligent life of a fool's future," it said, "hear this song. If only you could gaze with me from this mere rock, this dull slab which is yet a throne to roiling seas and to the mist which veils a rustling paradise. And beneath those churning waters—the slow fierce music of a dim world of monsters. And upon the unpatterned lands—chaotic undulations amidst vines and greenish vapor, the flickering dance of innumerable tails and tongues. And above in the skies smeared over with ashen clouds—leathery wings flapping. O fallen beast, if only you could see all this through my lidless eyes, this sacred world innocent of hope, how willingly you would then follow the death of all your empty dreams."
"Innocent of hope, perhaps," I thought upon waking in the darkness. "And yet, O wide-eyed lizard, I would hear you sing something of your pain and your panic. A paradise of prehistory, indeed. How finely spoken. But a lyric of life all the same—of slime itself, of ooze as such.
"I scorn your eloquence and your world, the poetry of a living oblivion, and now seek a simpler style of annihilation. My hopes remain intact. Your split-tongued words were merely a boorish intrusion on a dream of much deeper things—the Incomparably Remote.
"And now let me close my eyes once again to follow in dreams the backward path far beyond all noise and numbers, falling into that world where I am the brother of silence and share a single face with the void."
But the reptile's voice continues to mock me, night after night. It will laugh and rave throughout all the humid nights of history. Until that perfect lid of darkness falls over this world once more.
Salvation by Doom (1994)
First published in its original form in Crypt Of Cthulhu #68, 1989 as 'Gothic Horror', a section of Studies In Horror.
Also published in this revised form in: Noctuary
The room in the tower seemed to have closed in upon him while he slept, so he measured it off again and found its dimensions to be unchanged. His mind still uneasy, he measured it a second time, and then a third. Then he awoke and measured it off a fourth time, pacing between the walls of the room in the tower. "I am measuring my own coffin," he whispered to himself while staring intently at the splotched stones of the floor.
Once again he examined every corner of his bare cell. Then he wandered over to the low, handleless door and, laying his cheek against the heavy, splintered wood, he squinted through the tiny openings in the iron grill, surveying the circular corridor of the tower. First he gazed in one direction and then, shifting over to the opposite side of the grill, in the other. Both directions offered the same view: cell door after cell door, each with an armed guard beside it, each progressively shrinking in the circular perspective of the corridor. It was the uppermost level of the castle's highest tower, a quiet place when all the prisoners were at rest. Then a tight-lipped moan broke the silence, waking him a second time from a second sleep. He measured off the dimensions of his cell once more, examining every corner, then surveyed the circular corridor through the tiny openings of the iron grill.
Once again he wandered over to the arch-shaped window of his prison cell. This aperture, the only means of escape aside from the low door, was constructed to include four pairs of sharp metal spikes: two pairs projecting from the right and left sides, two closing in from its top and bottom, and all forming a kind of cross whose parts did not quite join together. But these pointed impediments notwithstanding, there remained a perilous descent groundward. No means for securing either grip or foothold crucial for such a climb were offered by the castle's outer walls, nor was there any possibility of concealment, even during the darkest of the castle's watchful nights. Beyond the window was a view of sunlit mountains, blue sky, and rustling forest, a seemingly endless tableau of nature which in other circumstances might have been considered sublime. In the present circumstances the mountains and forests, perhaps the sky itself, seemed thick with human enemies and natural obstacles, making the mere dream of escape an impossibility.
Someone was now shaking him, and he awoke. It was the dead of night. Outside the window a bright crescent moon was fixed in the blackness. Within the room were two guards and a hooded figure holding a lamp. One of the guards pinned the dreamer to the floor, while the other reached underneath his ragged shirt, relieving him of a hidden weapon he had recently formed out of a fragment from one of the stone walls in the tower room. "Don't worry," the guard said, "we've been watching you." Then the hooded figure waved the lamp toward the doorway and the prisoner was carried out, his feet dragging over the dark stones of the floor.
From the room in the tower they descended—by means of countless stone staircases and long, torchlit passages—to the deepest part of the castle far underground. This area was a complex of vast chambers, each outfitted from its cold, earthen floor to its lofty, almost indiscernible ceiling with a formidable array of devices. In addition to the incessant echoes of an icy seepage dripping from above, the only other distinguishable sound was the creaking of this incredible system of machinery, with the refrain now and then of an open-mouthed groan.
His body was put in harness and hoisted so that the tips of his toes barely grazed the floor. The hooded figure, through a sequence of signals, directed the proceedings. During a lull in his agony, the prisoner once again tried to explain to his persecutors their error—that he was not who they thought he was, that he was suffering another man's punishment.
"Are you certain of that?" asked the hooded figure, speaking in an almost kindly tone of voice which he had never used before.
At these words a look of profound confusion appeared on the prisoner's face, one quite distinct from previous expressions of mere physical torment. And although no new manipulations had been employed, his entire body became grotesquely arched in agony as he emitted a single unbroken scream before collapsing into unconsciousness.
"Waken him," ordered the hooded figure.
They tried, but his body still hung motionless from the ropes, hunched and twisting in its harness. He had already been revived for the last time, and his dreams of measurements and precise dimensions would no longer be disturbed, lost as they now were in a formless nonsense of nothingness.
The Career of Nightmares (1994)
First published in its original form in Crypt Of Cthulhu #68, 1989 as 'Nightmare Horror', a section of Studies In Horror.
Also published in this revised form in: Noctuary
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 sc
enario 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 is the law 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.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 68