The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

'Yeah, I know,' replied his partner. 'His file doesn't exactly paint a picture of the ideal employee. And the stigma of a forced resignation can really irk some people.'

  'Sounds like you're speaking from personal experience.'

  'I say it in confidence,' said Detective White.

  'A guy would have to be incredibly irked to do this thing,' said Detective Black, producing a manila envelope that he had folded up in the pocket of his overcoat.

  'I guess it depends on the guy.'

  But the Young Supervisor with whom the homicide detectives spoke had nothing of interest to add to Frank Dominio's dossier, not wittingly anyway. Mr Dominio hadn't worked very long in the Young Supervisor's department before he handed in his resignation. 'You should talk to someone who worked with Domino longer than I did. I've only been with the company about a year.'

  'I thought his name was DoMINio,' said Detective Black.

  'Didn't I say that?' replied the Young Supervisor, lying arrogantly.

  'No, you said Domino,' confirmed Detective White.

  'Well, I didn't mean to say that,' said the Young Supervisor, suddenly repentant. 'So what did Frank do?'

  'Thank you for your time, Mr Chipmunk,' said Detective Black.

  'It's Chipman.'

  'My mistake.'

  Then the homicide detectives turned and walked to their next, and best, subject of interrogation.

  'Twelfth floor. Richard Somebody,' said Detective White, glancing at his notes.

  'Mind if we make a pit stop first?'

  'I was about to suggest the same thing.'

  In the men's room, which was located outside of company space and still had most of the original fixtures from the time of the building's pre-Depression-era construction, the homicide detectives relieved themselves in surroundings of massive marble walls, heavy wooden doors fronting spacious toilet stalls, and deep porcelain sinks with separate handles for hot and cold water. The first to zip up, Detective Black strode over to the sink and pulled both handles toward him, cupping his hands under the single spigot. But no water came rushing into his waiting palms, only a great groaning sound that rumbled inside the walls and made the porcelain basin shake before his eyes. He backed away from the sink as his partner looked on. What ultimately emerged from the goose-necked metal spigot was a thick oily fluid, as if the lavatory's plumbing had tapped into a black river of sewage.

  'It is an old building,' shouted Detective White over the loud rumbling inside the walls, which by now had modulated into a beastlike growl.

  'Yeah,' said Detective Black as he cautiously pushed back both the hot and cold handles on the sink, bringing the room back to its former state of weighty silence.

  'Come on,' said Detective White. 'We have to see a man about a murder.'

  When they arrived at Richard's office it was obvious that he was expecting them. He rose from his desk and vigorously shook hands with the homicide detectives, introducing himself, and then closed the door. He invited his two visitors to seat themselves in the chairs positioned before his desk, and then returned to his own chair behind it.

  'What terrible news you bring us,' Richard said. 'I can't believe it. But why wasn't there anything in the media about it?'

  'The body was discovered just this morning,' explained Detective Black. 'We kept the news people out of the loop a little longer than usual on this one because the circumstances of Mr Stokowski's death were somewhat unusual.'

  'Unusual? In what way?'

  'From the files we examined, you were Mr Stokowski's immediate superior for a period of some years,' said Detective White. 'We were hoping that you or some of the others who worked more closely with the victim might be able to help us in a way that the others we've spoken with have not.'

  'I don't understand,' said Richard.

  Detective Black opened the manila envelope he'd been carrying around and pulled out some photographs, handing them across the desk to Richard. 'These are photos taken at the crime scene. What they reveal has not been made known to the media.'

  Richard leafed through the photographs without any change of facial expression, which must have been difficult even for him, considering the images now passing before his eyes. Detective Black placed these images in context for the benefit of Mr Stokowski's former boss.

  'Mr Stokowski's car was found by two officers patrolling the area around the abandoned warehouse you see in the photos. Considering that it was a relatively expensive vehicle and in good condition, they phoned in the license tags to see if it had been reported as stolen.'

  'And had it?' asked Richard.

  'No,' answered Detective White, picking up the narrative. 'The officers then investigated the warehouse. Almost immediately they came across the victim tied to an old office chair and pushed up against that wall in the pictures.'

  'It looks like there's something wrong with his hands,' said Richard.

  'They're not hands,' said Detective White. 'Well, they're not real hands. They're from a mannikin—two left hands. Somebody very strong cut off Mr Stokowski's hands—we're still looking for those—and somehow fused the ends of his wrists to those, uh, artificial hands.'

  'It's fairly obvious that the killer wasn't trying to hide his work,' said Detective Black. 'He very much wanted the body to be found in that condition and on that exact spot—undisturbed. Do you see the writing on the wall just above the victim's head?'

  'Yes,' said Richard.

  'The letters,' said Detective White, 'seem to have been burned right into the wall, possibly with an acetylene torch. Can you see what it says?'

  'It looks like "Work" or "Word". "Word Note Gone?" ' said Richard.

  'WORK NOT DONE,' corrected Detective Black. 'All capital letters. It's written very clearly if you look close.'

  'All right, I see it now,' admitted Richard. 'But I still don't understand why you would think that I might be able to shed any light on this... atrocity.'

  'We were hoping that the words, the hands, anything you see here, might mean something to you,' said Detective White. '"Work Not Done" seems a natural enough phrase to be used in one's workplace. Or maybe you recognize the handwriting, although I know that's a long shot.'

  'It surely is. Everything written in all caps looks the same to me,' said Richard as he arranged the photos into a neat pile and placed them on his desk at a distance from himself. 'No, I'm sorry—none of it means anything to me.'

  'Well, perhaps you could bring this up—as discreetly as possible—with some of Mr Stokowski's coworkers,' said one of the homicide detectives as they got up from their seats. 'See if they can think of something. Just the part about the writing, you understand. We'd like to keep the rest of it out of the media as long as we can.'

  Detective Black then collected the photographs and replaced them in the manila envelope. Detective White left a card on Richard's desk with a phone number and a—gack!—email address where the homicide detectives could be reached. Richard began to open the door for the two men, but then pushed it closed again.

  'If I might ask,' Richard said. 'You never specified what was the cause of death. I suppose it was the hands. The trauma, the bleeding.'

  Detective White smiled and said, 'The verdict's not in on that one. Most likely it was the hands.'

  'Most likely,' repeated Detective Black.

  Then, for just a moment, Richard became as still as stone. He knew they were lying to him, but all he could do was express his sincere hope that they would soon apprehend the killer, adding, almost in a whisper, 'Perry was a very well-liked employee at this company.'

  'I'm sure he was,' said Detective Black, who then casually flipped through a few pages in his notebook. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, 'And this Domino guy—I gather that he wasn't one of the most popular people around here.'

  'Excuse me?' said Richard the Innocent.

  'Frank Dominio,' said Detective White, just to clarify the identity of the employee in question.

  'Oh, yes,' responded Richard withou
t a hint of commitment to any knowledge regarding Mr Dominio.

  'We understand that he wasn't exactly a model employee,' said Detective Black. 'Mr Chipman said that you were the person to talk to about this guy. He resigned from the company yesterday?'

  'I didn't know that,' said Richard. 'Well, as you already seem to know, he wasn't the sort who was going to be named employee of the month. It's true that he worked under me for some time, but... you know how it is. Some people don't make much of an impression on you. And I've seen so many come and go.'

  'So Mr Dominio was just another guy who went,' said Detective Black.

  'As far as I know,' said my old boss.

  Now it was Richard's turn to see his interrogators turn into rock-solid doubters of his word. So how did it feel, Richard—to be left standing there as Detectives White and Black left your office knowing—knowing—that you had lied to them? Lied, Richard, and not to just somebody around the office, but to a couple of homicide detectives.

  How well you must have known that they knew there was something wrong about you. So how did it feel?

  3

  I had always been easily moved to feel affection or admiration for people whom I viewed only from afar. And this is how I felt toward Detectives White and Black as I spied on them from the remote observatory of my apartment, tuning in their voices and images on my personal airwaves, keeping myself at a spectral distance from the eyes and ears of these law enforcement veterans. They seemed very good at what they did, very dedicated and phlegmatic in a way that suited men of their age who had seen the things they must have seen in their professional lives—the corpse of Perry Stokowski for instance—and who knew what to say and what not to say to the people, or swine, they were forced to deal with on a daily basis. I almost felt guilty that they had no hope of achieving a successful conclusion to the case they were presently working.

  But how I appreciated Detective White's memory of those hot-fudge sundaes he had enjoyed in the building where I once worked, not to mention the way Detective Black handled Supervisor Chipman when that little crumb knowingly corrupted my surname. But that one little word, Domino, wasn't going to help those admirable and affection-worthy homicide detectives. They would still be looking at it from a thousand angles when they ultimately declared the case, still in its infancy, unsolved.

  And best of all was Richard's stony look of visibly repressed frustration when Detectives White and Black had so transparently lied to him in claiming that the cause of Mr Stokowski's death was unknown at the present time. I thought I even saw a genuine flinch of fear in Richard's face. (As sweet to me as one of those hot-fudge sundaes of Detective White's childhood.) Of course it would not have been possible, and certainly not desirable, to reveal the bizarre truth of this aspect of the case. Then they would really be taken for liars, or possibly lunatics.

  In the photos they had shown Richard, Perry's head was slumped crookedly downward in fine corpse-like fashion. Anyone could see that he was still wearing his eyeglasses, I made sure of that. But what couldn't be seen was that the red-tinted lenses were almost entirely gone. Little trace of them was found at the crime scene—only a broken sliver of the left lens that remained in those thick black frames. It wasn't until an autopsy had been performed, a show that I attended 'in person', that the coroner found the pulverized pieces of Perry's lenses jaggedly embedded throughout the cadaver's system. The redly tinted shrapnel had torn up the victim's veins and arteries, were jammed jaggedly into the inner walls of his intestines, and had collected into a tough little cluster—like a glass raspberry—in his aorta. 'I don't get it. How did this stuff get in here?' queried the coroner. 'It's as if someone injected it into his system.'

  Close enough, doctor. I deliberately left that sliver of red lens in Perry's glasses so that the comparison could be made with the splinters that flowed along the red river inside him and ripped him apart from within. Red goes into red. It made sense to me. Then again, I was insane, a monster, an inhuman malefactor with no good excuse for its abominable actions.

  One would think, as you are probably thinking, that someone who was no longer among the living might have risen above his earthly rage, might have gained enough perspective to withdraw from the petty games that had once pinned his body to the world. But there was really no way to be sure that in fact I was no longer among the living. Even though I did not 'live' in the usual sense of the word—example: I no longer suffered from bodily needs such as hunger, thirst, or sleep—there remained a definite material aspect to my existence.

  Perry certainly considered me a physical threat when he first saw me in the rearview mirror of his car as he drove away from the Straight Ahead jazz club that night. When I put my Buck Skinner Hunting Knife to his throat he felt the blade... he started begging and sniveling... and he heard my voice instruct him where to steer his jazzy little vehicle. And afterward I walked out of that derelict warehouse, alone, the way I had come in with Perry, which was the same entrance I had used on that day I visited the abandoned structure and discovered those mannikin hands and cartoon-character gloves. I wiped Perry's blood off the knife and onto the right leg of my black denim pants. I noted with annoyance that it was darker than it ought to have been at that hour of the morning due to the 'daylight savings' time-change.

  Indeed, following my execution of Perry it appeared to be far darker than it ought to have been, even considering that hour which was annually excised for several months from the time zone I inhabited. It looked to me, as I stood in the moonlight of the empty field beside the warehouse, that there was a blackness behind the blackness of the black sky, some constellation of 'black spots', like stars in negative photographic exposure, which collected above me and which I felt only I could see. But although this blackness, in my perception, did seem to describe a kind of constellation far off in the galaxy overhead, I also sensed in the most intimate way that it was connected to that fearsome presence I had encountered so recently.

  On the way back to my apartment this formation of dark stars, along with the fear that accompanied them, faded away to a large extent. Yet even as morning broke there still remained some residue, in my peculiar vision, of those dark spots... leaving a kind of stain upon the sky, a dirty smear that never entirely dissipated. No mention was made of this phenomenon by the local weather reports, which I was able to check and recheck quite thoroughly using my newly gained powers of surveillance. Somehow I knew that these dark spots of the night, these stains upon the daytime sky, were not visible to any living persons.

  Yet I still did not believe myself to be dead. This conviction didn't merely derive from the fact that I had been a lifelong non-believer in an afterlife—I was always willing to concede my errors of opinion when sufficient evidence arose to the contrary. But no evidence of the kind presented itself, no matter how hard I searched for it. No newspaper obituary—those little boxes with tiny letters inside—had reported the death of Francis Vincent Dominio. My name appeared nowhere in any of the official records that I scanned in my own fashion. Thus, I had to conclude that I was not dead, even if I was obviously no longer among the living.

  This situation might have been a great problem for me if I had not been so preoccupied with other business. I still had some special plans to make. And I also knew that it wouldn't be long before Detectives White and Black followed up on their information concerning a bad apple who had 'hereby resign[ed] effective immediately' from the company where Mr Stokowski had until recently been employed and who, now that the homicide detectives finally noticed it, had worked closely with the deceased for a number of years.

  White and Black would soon be asking Lillian about the tenant in the apartment above the Metro Diner. Before that happened, I needed to get some of my affairs in order.

  4

  'Hello, idiot.'

  The voice was Richard's and the person addressed was Supervisor Chipman.

  'What did you say to them?' Richard asked.

  'Nothing,' said Chipman like
a child who was trying to cover up some misdeed.

  'You called him Domino.'

  'So what?' said Chipman.

  An expression of sly calm suddenly appeared on Richard's face. 'So what, indeed,' Richard seemed to be thinking as he eased his weight against Chipman's cubicle counter and complacently crossed his arms, cheerfully chastising himself for having overreacted. Some people are obsessive-compulsives. Richard merely had an instinct for devious caution, for hyper-vigilance in the cause of self-interested wile.

  'Hey, I didn't show this to anybody, if that's what's worrying you.'

  As Chipman spoke these words he simultaneously slid open the bottom drawer of his desk. Inside was a stack of papers on top of which was a page from a yellow legal pad that, in my handwriting, read: WORK NOT DONE.

  'Oh, Christ,' said Richard, kicking the drawer closed with his huge wing-tipped foot. Then he gingerly pulled out the desk drawer just enough to slide in his fingers and remove the piece of paper with the handwriting on it, crumpling it into a little paper ball that disappeared inside his right hand just before his hand disappeared within the pin-striped pocket of his trousers. 'Now get rid of the rest of it, pinhead.'

  'I didn't know I was supposed to,' said Chipman the Clueless.

  'What you don't know is going to seriously affect your advancement around here. Understood?'

  'Yeah,' said Chipman.

  'Yeah?' mocked Richard.

  'Yes, I understand.'

  'Good. And no more talk about anybody called Domino.'

  'Yes, I understand,' Chipman mocked back. This was somewhat unwise because now he was on Richard's list as well as on mine. I wondered who would get to him first.

  5

  That same afternoon, Richard called an emergency 'lunch meeting' of The Seven—excuse me, Six. I didn't exactly need this distraction at the moment, since I was scrambling against the clock (darn that lost hour!) and was forced to divide my attention between the work at hand in my apartment and the lunchtime scene at the company.

  Sidebar: Anthropologists who once held that all human activity could be reduced to the three F's—Feeding, Fighting, and, in the present instance, a little Fondling—would have been pleased to see how closely their hypothesis was enacted at the banquet table in that Gothic Gallery where I used to assemble with this contemptibly familiar cast of characters and where their lunch-meeting was now in progress.