The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  I felt a powerful, almost cyclonic gust sweep past me on all sides, even moving through me as it soared out the broken window and blended into the yellowish haze beyond, leaving behind it a room charged with the residue of vicious and violent impulses.

  After that night, the Golden City was rechristened as Murder Town. Early the next morning, the streetlights still shining through the yellowish haze, brutally mauled bodies were discovered lying in every street of the city and far into the vast, decaying neighborhoods surrounding it. For a time news reports broadcasted by radio and television and printed in newspapers with a dignified image as well as tabloid rags like the Metro Herald—where I once worked as a reporter myself—were concerned with nothing but these murders, which they called 'Murders of Mystery' or 'Mysterious Mass Murders'.

  However, it was not long before serious consideration was given to the possibility that these were not murders at all but the consequences of what the Metro Herald designated the 'Yellow Plague', because the bodies of the victims all displayed jaundiced blotches that overworked hospital personnel, police investigators, and morgue attendants had at first assumed to be bruises caused by violent attacks. For a day or so city officials had the opportunity to present the cause of these astonishingly lurid and numerous deaths as, quite possibly, an instance of a mysterious disease rather than of mysterious murder. With the cooperation of local law enforcement and medical officials, along with the services of a sophisticated public relations campaign, the issue of how such an incredible number of corpses might have been produced during a single night could have been confused long enough for the city to waver between its old reputation as a place of murder and an entirely new identity as a place of disease. Of course, given the alternative of henceforth being known to the world as the 'City of the Yellow Plague', on the one hand, or as 'Murder Town', on the other, the latter appellative seemed the preferable choice.

  Apparently unrelated to the Mystery Murders, according to news reports disseminated by all the local media, was the discovery of the body of a middle-aged man dressed in a worn business suit in a suburb just outside the city limits. Eventually identified as U G Blaine, the corpse was found lying in the parking lot of a small outdoor shopping center. Investigators uncovered no signs that might have connected Blaine's death to those which took place the night before in Murder Town. To all appearances the man had simply collapsed and died in a place where the yellowish haze of what was once known as the Golden City dissolved altogether, giving way to the lucid atmosphere of an upper-class suburb contiguous with the city's outlying neighborhoods.

  On that same morning that Blaine's body was found, I walked through the deserted streets of a city where others were still afraid to walk, strolling calmly through the stillness and the yellowish haze. For a moment I felt that I had finally driven myself to my limit, and I was content as errant pages from local newspapers flapped idiotically along the sidewalk and streetlights glared down upon me.

  But before the morning had passed I was ready to move on—to relocate once more. My purpose, for a time, had exhausted itself. But now I could see there were other cities, other people and places. I could see all the world as if it loomed only a few feet in front of me—its every aspect so clear to my eyes that I would never be able to drive it from my mind until the last of my violent thoughts and fantasies had been fulfilled. Even though I knew in the depths of myself that it was all just another preposterous ambition, a false front propped up by baseless purposes and dreams, I could not help thinking to myself –'I have a special plan for this world.'

  May this document, unmanipulated, stand as my declaration of purpose.

  My Work Is Not Yet Done (2001)

  First published in My Work Is Not Yet Done, 2002

  I had always been afraid. However, as self-serving as this may sound, I never believed this to be a cause for shame or regret, even though an intolerable suffering may ensue from such a trait. It seemed to me that the finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic. On the other hand, someone must have a considerable dose of the swine in their make-up to get through even a single day unafflicted by trepidations of one sort or another, not to mention those who go out of their way to court dangerous encounters, fearlessly calling attention to themselves, figuratively waving their arms and declaring to everyone within range, 'Hey, look at me. I'm up here. See what I can do. I'm the one you have to knock down. I'm the one.'

  Of course there is a measure of beast's blood in anyone who aspires to maintain a place in the world, anyone who lacks that ultimate decency to remove themselves from the herd either by violence to themselves or total capitulation to their dread. It's simply a matter of degree.

  At the company where I had been a longtime employee, the purest breed of swine was represented by the seven persons with whom I met in a conference room according to a weekly schedule. I had risen, somewhat reluctantly but with a definite touch of swinishness, to the position of a supervisor in my division of a company in which there were countless other divisions. This made it necessary to attend these meetings along with six others of my kind and a seventh who was our superior by virtue of his having outswined the rest of us.

  During a meeting of my own staff, someone whose mind was not fixated, as was mine, on the swine analogy, referred to these persons with whom I met, according to a weekly schedule, as The Seven Dwarfs.

  'So what does that make me, Dave—Snow White?'

  'No, Frank,' interjected Lisa, 'that would make you Prince, uh, what's-his-name.'

  'Charming,' said Lois.

  'Pardon me?' replied Lisa.

  'Prince Charming. Didn't you at least see the movie?'

  This remark caused a hurt look to cross Lisa's face. It was a good one, very realistic.

  'Hey, I was just kidding,' said Lois, who wasn't easily taken in by false or exaggerated phenomena.

  Lisa perked up again on cue and continued. 'That's right, Prince Charming.'

  'Well, thanks for saying that, Lisa,' I said. But I wasn't quick enough to head off Christine.

  'We usually talk nice about Frank behind his back. But it's okay, you've only been here a week.'

  'I'm sorry if it sounded like I was trying to score points or something,' said Lisa, actually sounding quite sincere this time. 'The department where I used to work—'

  'You're not there any more,' I said. 'You're here. And everyone here used to work somewhere else in the company.'

  'Except you, Frank,' said Elias. 'You've been in this department forever.'

  'True enough,' I replied.

  After the meeting with my staff ended I proceeded immediately to the other meeting, where I intended to play the swine in a way I had never tried before. I had a new idea to present to my colleagues, which of course would involve a considerable amount of arm-waving and look-at-me behavior. It had been some time since I had reaccredited myself with my peers, and I was beginning to suffer from an uncomfortable sense that my standing with these persons was in question.

  This is the paradox of always being afraid: while the pangs of apprehension and self-consciousness may allow you to imagine yourself as a being created of finer materials than most, a certain level of such agony necessarily drives you to grovel for the reassurances and approval of swine, or dwarfs if you like, who function as conductors of a fear from which they themselves do not appear to suffer. And how well they're able to control this fear, turning it in your direction at will and causing its dreadful current to flow just long enough to send you running to them so that you may be allowed to make a case for your own swinehood, hoping to prove that you are an even bigger swine, or a smaller dwarf, than they. This is the only thing that can bring some relief from that most pernicious form of being afraid—the anxiety provoked by other people and what they may do to you, either collectively or as individual agents.

  Tragically, the same fear that allows you to believe yourself a better specimen of the human
species than those around you can only be tolerated for so long. Anything beyond that point, any excess of anxiety, and you begin to imagine yourself closeted in a little room somewhere under heavy sedation or to consider an act of slaughter against yourself (or perhaps against others). Thus I was aching with hopes for my new idea, my special plan to increase the prosperity of the company—that institutional manifestation of the swine. I longed for it to receive the snuffling high-sign of my fellow wallowers in filth, the low-voiced sanction (or so I hoped) of the seven other dwarfs. Needless to say, I was terror-stricken.

  2

  As usual I was the first to arrive in the conference room where I met with the six other supervisors in the division and with Richard, our manager. This room was located outside the modernized office space wherein most of the company carried out its activities and was a place that still exhibited, unharmed by refurbishing, the pre-Depression style of the building in which the company occupied several floors. I was never sure what purpose the room was originally intended to serve, but it was disproportionately large and lofty for the small talk of business that echoed within its realm. Furthermore, it was quite dimly lighted by the rows of ornately sconced fixtures that jutted out at intervals from faded and intricate wallpaper which had peeled away in spots. One could barely see the crumbled moldings interposed between the upper edges of the walls and the shadowy ceiling.

  The table at which I and the others met seemed to have been imported from the banquet hall of an earlier century, while the enormous leather chairs in which our bodies truly appeared of dwarfish size had become brittle over the years and creaked like old floorboards whenever we shifted within them. There was a row of tall paned windows along one of the walls, each of them still valanced but without curtains. I liked to look out of these windows because they offered a view of the river as well as a fine panorama of several other old office buildings.

  However, on that particular morning a heavy spring fog had lingered long enough to obstruct any view of the river and had turned the other buildings in the downtown area into specters of themselves, only the nearest of which could be seen to cast their illumination through the fog like strange lighthouses. And I was grateful to the aging monuments of the city for providing me, by no means for the first time, with a calming perspective that only a vision of degeneration and decline can bestow.

  Soon enough, though, the others arrived and took their places, setting down upon the already scarred finish of the table their outsized mugs of coffee or towering containers of bottled water. I never failed to wonder how they were able to consume such incredible quantities of coffee, water, fruit juice, and what have you during these meetings, which always went on for at least an hour. I myself made a point of not taking in unaccustomed amounts of liquid prior to these weekly convocations, just so that I might avoid the necessity of disrupting the proceedings by bursting out of the room in search of the nearest lavatory.

  But none of the others appeared to have the least problem in this area, however closely I scrutinized them for tell-tale signs of stress. Least of all did Richard seem bothered by such bodily strain, since he always showed up with not only the largest container of coffee but also a huge thermos from which he would at least twice refill his great barrel of a cup on which was emblazoned the company logo. Just watching them gulp mouthful after mouthful of their various liquids sometimes brought fantasies of a gleaming row of urinals to my mind. Perhaps they all wore special undergarments, I once considered, and freely relieved themselves as we spoke about budgets and headcounts, speed to market and outsourcing.

  All of which is simply to say that my co-functionaries within the division, along with Richard, were a complete mystery to me on every level. They seemed to me as fantastic beings who well deserved the fairy-tale designation of The Seven Dwarfs, even though there was a more mundane and obvious reason for calling them such. This reason, I should point out, did not derive from any shared qualities between Dopey, Grumpy, Sleepy, and the rest of that cute and hard-working crew, and the seven persons, not including myself, now seated at that nicely decrepit table.

  My fellow supervisors, plus Richard, were neither conspicuously cute (with one exception) nor hard-working. But their names were, no kidding, Barry, Harry, Perry, Mary, Kerrie, Sherry, and, of course, Richard, whom I had heard referred to as 'The Doctor', although the origin of this nickname, which was a matter of both credible anecdote and curious imaginings, in no way linked him with the dwarfish Doc of the fairy tale.

  Richard finally cleared his throat with a forced, rattling sound that was his way of bringing the meeting to order. Everyone stopped chatting and turned toward the head of the table, where sat the only one of us whose chair didn't appear too big for his body. But Richard's stature was more than that of someone who purchased his suits at clothes stores catering to large-bodied men. His physical conformation, straight and solid from head to toe, was imposingly athletic, the anatomy of an erstwhile ball-player of some kind who had kept his shape into middle age. In all probability Richard had garnered his share of shining trophies for the glory of Self and School. He wouldn't be the first member of middle-to-upper-level corporate management with a background in the world of sport, with all the playing-field metaphors they borrowed from that milieu, chief among them being all that puke-inducing nonsense about teams (the characterization of someone as a 'team player' was at the top of my line-up of emetic expressions of this sort).

  'All right, then, let's get started,' barked Richard as he stared down at a page on the table that listed the agenda items for that week's meeting. 'Looks like you're first up, Domino. Something to do with New Product.'

  For the record: my last name is not Domino; it's Dominio, with two 'i's.

  For the record: I had attempted to correct Richard both publicly and privately regarding the accurate form of my surname.

  For the record: I could never be absolutely sure that it wasn't pure indifference rather than a taste for malicious mockery that accounted for his persistently calling me Domino, although this sly mangling of my name never failed to draw a few muted snickers from the others, and Richard could not have been oblivious to that.

  Like a dealer at a poker game, I quickly passed around to my colleagues the two-page proposal I had distilled from a much longer document. This hand-out was composed with wide margins and a large font for speedy absorption into the systems of busy middle-management types. I tried not to look around the table as they all glanced it over, turning from page one to page two almost simultaneously. When Richard was finished he laid the document on the table before him and gazed upon it as if he were looking at a bowl of cereal in which he thought he might have spotted something unsavory... or possibly peering into a riverbed in which he glimpsed a shiny nugget in the shallows of clear water.

  'Forgive me, Frank,' said Richard, 'but I'm not sure I understand what this is supposed to be?'

  I sat up as high as I could in my giant's chair.

  'At the last meeting you said that New Product was putting out one of their rare calls for suggestions for, well, new product ideas. This is a proposal for a new product, possibly an entire line of new product.'

  'That much I comprehend, thank you. It's just, um, this is a little far afield from what I think anyone had in mind.'

  'I realize how it might seem that way. This is why I thought I would bring it up initially at this meeting. I'd consider whatever feedback anyone might have to be of value before I submitted my proposal in full.'

  'There's more to this?' asked Richard.

  'Quite a bit, yes,' I said.

  'Hmm. That's really something. I can only wonder where you found the time, given that the rest of us have been frantically trying to dig our way out of one landslide or another that's threatening to bury us around here.'

  'I did almost all of it on my own time, if that's your concern,' I said.

  'My only concern,' replied Richard as he slowly looked around the table at the other supervisors, 'my pr
imary concern, I should say, is that the New Product idea you're proposing doesn't look like the sort of thing we do around here. I mean, I'm all for being risky and innovative and all that, but this is... hoo boy.'

  'But we could do it,' I argued. 'We have the people, the know-how, all the processes in place already.'

  'True enough,' admitted Richard. 'But I don't know. Does anyone else have any thoughts about this?'

  'It is different,' said Perry.

  'Definitely different,' said Harry.

  'I'm not sure we do in fact have the staff needed to take on something like this,' said Mary.

  'I've got fewer people taking on more projects all the time,' said Kerrie.

  'Systemically,' Barry began, instantly losing the attention of his auditors. At one juncture in his jargon-polluted soliloquy of a business analyst he used the words 'data vamping,' which I believe was a neologism of his own devising. Ultimately, of course, he sided with Richard, concluding that my idea, which Barry explained had built into it at least two, perhaps two and a half 'facets', was not 'leverage focused', nor was it 'customerly', in Barry's opinion.

  Sherry was at a characteristic loss to add anything to the litany of negation already recited by the others, although she did manage to come up with 'faster, better, cheaper', which on this occasion might be construed to mean that my proposal was not quite in line with this triple-headed ideal.

  By this point I was writhing within the creaking depths of my chair, shaking my head in a slight palsy of horror and forming phrases in my mind that refused to come together into coherent sentences. Then, for a brief moment, the words congealed.

  'I know that the company has traditionally produced only that which looks like what it has previously produced—in other words, recycled impersonations of what we've been doing for the past two decades.'