The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  I spent most of my days in a world devoted to turning this fable into a reality, I knew that. I also knew that the Metro Diner did not exist in that world, that somehow it was located in another place altogether, a zone where the daylight really had been saved, even if it was fast running out. That was why I liked Lillian; that was why I lived in the apartment above her diner. And that, alas, was why I began dreaming about The Doctor who reached with his puffy, four-fingered gloves into the cages and tanks of animals, of living merchandise, in a dimestore pet shop.

  Monday morning I awoke before dawn, shaking from the effects of another of these dreams.

  'He has special gloves for fixing them,' I mumbled with dream-horror. 'He can go inside with his gloves.'

  Even then he was already inside me, just as he had been inside so many others before... fixing them, fixing and fixing, fixing until—in one way or another—they broke.

  7

  All right, then!

  But I didn't have the opportunity to hear Richard speak these words that Monday. When I entered the room where I and The Seven gathered according to a weekly schedule, where we sat in the dried-up leather of enormous chairs at a scarred-up banquet table, our little voices droning amid great dim spaces decorated in a Victorian Gothic style, I saw that the meeting was already in progress.

  'Look who decided to join us,' Richard bellowed as I closed the heavy and intricately carved door of the room behind me. 'Glad you could make it, Mr Domino.'

  I glanced at my watch, which I had had the habit of obsessively monitoring for as long as I could remember. I had not arrived late to the meeting. 'I didn't know the time of the meeting had been pushed back,' I said as I took my seat, everyone else staring at me in silence.

  'Is it "pushed back" or "moved forward"?' Richard asked rhetorically... and disingenuously. 'I can never keep those straight.'

  'It's pushed back, I'm pretty sure,' said Sherry, giving the answer to a question that she didn't realize needed none.

  'Well, in plain English, the time of the meeting was changed,' said Richard, shifting back to his usual voice of bland authority. 'You should read your messages, Domino.'

  'I did. There was no message about—'

  'Actually, Richard,' interrupted Kerrie, 'I didn't want to risk someone not showing up on time because they didn't read their messages promptly, so I went around and personally told everyone... including Frank.'

  It made sense that Kerrie the Framer of Innocent Persons for Stealing Her Lousy Stamps would have the job of insuring that I arrived late to the meeting. There was no point in contradicting her. She could lie far better than I could tell the truth. But that wasn't what worried me at the moment. The greater issue was that The Seven had held a secret meeting before the real meeting. And I would never know what was on that other meeting's agenda.

  'Well, never mind that now,' said Richard as though he were giving me a reprieve. 'We've wasted enough time on this already. Let's just move on to the usual reports and rigmarole. I'll bring Frank up to speed on the rest of it later.'

  It was another full hour before the meeting ended. By that time everyone had drained to the dregs their two-liter-sized bottles of water, their waxy containers of fruit juice, and their volcano-shaped cups of coffee, tea, or who knows what. (I could still feel the single cup of decaf I'd consumed with breakfast at the Metro Diner sloshing around inside me.) Even Richard had upended his tall thermos of coffee, shaking it over his mug to get at those refractory few drops at the bottom. That was something I had never seen before, which led me to wonder how long the rest of them had been in conference before I arrived. Of course no mention was made of my new product idea, my special plan. That whole matter had entered a realm of gamesmanship that now concerned only Richard and me, and had nothing at all to do with the company... or with my original intentions to reaffirm my unity with The Seven Swine.

  After the meeting concluded, the other six supervisors gathered up their ringed scheduling books along with their cups, bottles, and waxy boxes, and filed out of the room in total silence, leaving me and Richard sitting some distance away from each other at that long banquet table. Richard was still shuffling some papers around and scribbling in his own scheduling book, or rather books, plural, while I waited anxiously for him to 'bring me up to speed'. He reigned supreme when it came to the art of the torturous stall, creating the sense of a waiting period that might just trail off into eternity. Then, suddenly, he arranged his papers in a neat stack, slammed both of his notebooks closed, and looked down the table at Domino, who was rolling his pencil back and forth in an attempt to appear calm and casual, even bored. But I botched it, because as soon as Richard was ready to talk I brought that pencil-rolling to an instant halt and jerked my neck around to face the man at the head of the table.

  'This is how it is, Frank,' he began. 'There's going to be a few changes, sort of a shifting around. Barry's going to be leaving our little group in order to head up a committee to come up with a proposal for the new restructuring of the company, which we all knew was coming. It's Barry's wish that you also serve on this committee—quite a compliment, I would say, considering the source. Now this is only a temporary arrangement, but it's going to be a full-time job. You, Barry, and several others to be named later will need to fully draft your proposal by midsummer. This timetable comes straight from the crowd upstairs. They want to see the new restructuring in place by year's end.'

  'Can I ask the purpose of the new restructuring?'

  'You know. It's the same theme as the last restructuring. I mean, sweet Jesus, how many variations can there be on cheaper, faster, and... that other thing?' Richard was as skilled as ever in privately sharing his very genuine cynicism in order to create the false sense that he was really on your side. 'But if I were you, I wouldn't bring up questions like that in front of the others on the committee. Just follow Barry's lead. He knows what's what with these things.'

  'And what happens in the meantime, while Barry and I are serving full-time on this committee?'

  'Mary's going to take over the day-to-day supervision of Barry's department, in addition to her own. And Kerrie will do the same thing with respect to your people. She knows quite a bit about that new software being tested in your department. It's only a temporary arrangement. I don't foresee any bumps along the way. Do you?'

  'None at all,' I agreed, not bothering to bring up Kerrie's militaristic style of management, her burgeoning psychosis, and her all-round demonic nature.

  For the next few months I served—under Barry—on the restructuring committee, trying to make sense of his concepts for a company-wide reorganization and wearily accepting the successive editions of what he called The Master Chart, which even in its earliest stages resembled a more densely wrought and diabolical version of Dante's map of Hell. Barry handed out these revised charts to the rest of us almost on a daily basis. Each one contained some infinitesimal modification or addition to the one before it, until the pages outlining his brainchild of restructuralization were almost black with boxes filled with tiny letters that had arrows pointing upward, downward, and sideways to other boxes filled with tiny letters. I never read any of the words—at least I assumed they were words—formed by those tiny letters, which grew tinier and tinier as the boxes became increasingly more numerous and the arrows (the arrows!) ultimately pointed in every direction. Finally the deadline arrived for the committee to turn over its proposal to the greater powers whose offices occupied the twentieth (twenty-first?) floor of the pre-Depression-era building in which the company was located... until the time would come for it to relocate to a suburban locale far from the taxes of the city's downtown area. Now I could return to my old job as a department supervisor—right?

  Wrong: Because under Kerrie's management two of my old staff had transferred to another division, two had left the company, and two had been fired.

  Wrong: Because Kerrie had her staff, 'Kerrie's Special Forces' she called them, doing all the work once done by b
oth my staff and hers.

  (Barry didn't return as the supervisor of his old department either, but that was the way things were supposed to work out. He would start working on Phase Two of the company-wide restructuring, while his staff was integrated with Kerrie's Special Forces. Two understaffed departments were now doing the work of three that had been fully staffed. If I had only paid closer attention to Barry's charts I might have noticed that this merging of 'work cells' was part of the company's restructuring.)

  And wrong again: Because I had been given a new role in the company's puppet show, and Richard was pulling the strings with the four, surgically dexterous, fingers of his great gloved hands.

  8

  By the end of the summer I was sitting in one of Barry's tiny square boxes in a corner of the company far removed from where I had been just a few months before. My coworkers were now temporary help, college co-ops, and persons who possessed the ability to spend every workday with their eyes positioned eighteen inches from a glaring ________ screen, their fingertips in constant motion across their keyboards, a never-diminishing pile of pages stacked on the desk counter beside them.

  On the rare occasions that I ran into one of The Seven—perhaps in a lavatory, perhaps in a hallway—they never failed to greet me with the sweetest smiles and concerned inquiries into 'how I was doing'.

  'Just fine,' I replied, although my unsmiling face and dead voice gave me away to The Victorious Seven, who were on the side of righteousness, the rule of corporate law, and Richard. Speaking of whom, I should record the fact that every so often I still received messages from him asking about my new-product idea and suggesting that perhaps the time was nigh for the company to make some riskier moves. Was he serious? I didn't know. Did he want to use the complete documentation of my idea, my special plan, to undermine my status in the company even further than he already had? Or was there some other reason altogether that he kept up communications with me on this subject? I didn't know, I didn't know. But I did know one thing: no good could come of giving Richard what he wanted from me. He would never, ever see the full documentation of my idea, because it was now in a very safe place. And withholding what Richard wanted did give me some minuscule satisfaction that mitigated, however slightly, what I had endured at the hands of The Seven.

  So why did I stand for such treatment? Why didn't I leave the company? Why didn't I do any of a dozen things that I had contemplated doing for many years?

  At the time there was only one answer to these questions. The Doctor had gone inside me, and with his gloved hands he had fixed me and fixed me good. Did I mention that I suffered from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

  Even for a person of average emotional stability the lust for revenge can be quite a time-consuming affair. For me it was all-consuming. It shoved aside every other thought that got in its way, every fantasy and feeling that might have led me back to my former self, every memory of who or what I had ever been. My nights and weekends were now taken over by a set of constantly recycled scenarios in which Domino had his day. And that day was soaked in bathtubs of blood, a day of judgment overseen by a never-setting sun that burned madly red against a black sky.

  But I had always been weak, and, as I think I might also have mentioned, I had always been afraid. So Domino would tough it out, Domino would hang in there, Domino would lay low until... until... until what I had no idea. Until...

  One night I was preparing to leave work, putting away my ID badge, shutting down that staring square of the __________, etc. And, obsessive-compulsive that I am, I had gotten into the habit of placing a page from a legal pad on top of my pile of unentered data, a page on which I had written 'WORK NOT DONE', just in the unlikely event, just on the remotest chance, that someone from the cleaning staff, or who-knows-who, might see this pile of data as the wastepaper which, in fact, it could justly be mistaken for. No one else among my coworkers, it goes without saying, ever took such precautions. I, on the other hand, could not maintain that puny part of serenity that I still enjoyed without doing so.

  But when I arrived at my desk the next morning, my WORK NOT DONE note, along with the whole pile of unentered data it covered, was gone, nowhere to be found, disappeared. I reported the missing materials to my supervisor, who, strangely enough, did not seem in the least concerned with its whereabouts.

  'What really concerns me, Frank,' said this boy who a year before had not even heard of the company in which he now held the post of supervisor, 'that is, my primary concern, is your overall performance, both in this department and in the company as a whole. You're the least productive employee in the department, for one thing. And I've been looking at your file from Human Resources. It's kind of ugly, if you want to know the truth. Forget that you've never really been a team player, at least according to the evaluations you've gotten from your former manager. There's also stuff here about theft from other employees, mismanaging your department when you were a supervisor, not carrying your weight when you served on the restructuring committee, sexual harassment, an overall lacksa—lackadais—a bad attitude. It's your whole profile that's the problem. I've tried to cut you some slack around here because I know you've been with the company for a long time. But you're just dead weight these days. This so-called disappearance of your work—I don't know what to make of that. Someone's going to have to go to a lot of trouble to regenerate that data. I'm thinking that maybe that's what you wanted.'

  After continuing in this vein for a while longer, my punk of a supervisor gave me the option of resigning from the company, which I did immediately. I didn't want to, I really didn't. But there was no other choice. I knew who was behind this business, and I didn't stand a chance against him.

  Before I cleaned out my desk—which was not a big deal since the only personal possessions I now kept at work were some packages of cookies—and before I turned in my letter of resignation (Why letter? Why not statement... or declaration?), I stopped by the men's room and simply stood before the large mirror, staring at the image of someone who was staring back at me.

  He was of average height and build, average weight, average age, with hair neither long nor short. He was clean-shaven. He wore corrective lenses with a slight amber tint. His eyes were brown.

  'All right, then,' he said to the image in the mirror. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

  9

  Cheap clothes stores, cheap electronics stores, liquor-lotto-and-checks-cashed-here stores, wig shops, pawn shops, gun shops... gun shops... gun shops.

  There was a particular gun shop that I walked by every day on my route to and from my job. It was a small building and never appeared to be open for business. I had never been in a gun shop before, but I walked into this one as if I were a regular customer. Looking around I felt the same excitement I'd known as a kid when I visited the local dimestore to run my eyes over the colorful boxes of model cars, the battery-operated robots, the squirt guns, the cap guns, the cowboy guns, the tommy guns.

  'What can I do for you?' asked the bearded little man, almost a dwarf, who emerged from a back room. I must not have answered him, because he repeated his question. Then he said, 'Are you looking to buy a firearm?'

  'Yes, sir,' I said emphatically. 'Indeed I am.'

  'Something for personal protection?' asked the bearded little man.

  'Actually,' I said, 'I'm here for a dual purpose. Personal protection is in fact an issue. You see, the neighborhood where I live isn't as safe as it might be.'

  'I hear you,' interjected the bearded man who seemed to have lost about an inch in height since he first appeared.

  'Yes, well, that's the first part of my mission. The second is that I'm here to do some early Christmas shopping. I have some friends, seven of them to be exact. And this year I'd like to present them with the gift, as you say, of personal protection.'

  'I've done the same myself.'

  'Really,' I said, noticing that the gun-shop dwarf had definitely shrunk another half inch or so. 'Now I have to ad
mit that I'm not very familiar with all the varieties of handguns—you have quite a lot of them here.'

  'Best selection in the downtown area.'

  'That's terrific. Then show me what you've got. I'm very much open to suggestions.'

  But the dwarf had disappeared entirely from sight. Then I saw that he had only been squatting down with his head inside the glass counter that stood between us. When he stood up—no bigger than before and perhaps even a bit more shrunken—he held out a handgun that looked absolutely gargantuan in his puny palm.

  'Go ahead—hold it.'

  I did.

  'It's a Glock,' he said.

  'I've heard of these from television shows,' I said, amazed at how wonderful it felt in my hand. I pointed it toward the wall and looked down the barrel. Tears almost came to my eyes. In the background of my elation the dwarf spoke of the weapon's reliability... its accuracy... its magazine capacity!

  'I'm sold. I'll take two of these—one for myself and one for my friend Barry. What else have you got?'

  The dwarf began rushing around. He was now so close to the floor that I had to look over the counter to see him. He showed me Rugers, he showed me Mausers, he showed me Smiths, Brownings, and Berettas. And then he showed me a Firestar.

  'Compact, nice weight. You could carry it around in your jacket and not even know it was there. Has a seven-round capacity.'

  'Seven,' I repeated. And in the next breath put it on my shopping list for Sherry. 'It should fit perfectly into a woman's purse, wouldn't you say?'

  'I suppose. If the purse wasn't one of those tiny things.'

  After seeing a few more makes and models of handguns on which I had to pass, feeling myself an expert at this stage, the dwarf brought forth a USP Tactical.