The Collected Short Fiction

by Thomas Ligotti

  They say: today is

  the birthday of someone

  who would have been

  so many years old.

  So just in case you’re

  not around next year:

  happy birthday.

  Hospital

  People go in

  who then come out.

  People go in

  who never come out.

  In, out, in, out.

  It makes you wonder,

  “Will this place be

  the last for me?”

  But you don’t really

  want the answer

  to the question about

  those ins and outs.

  Still

  Whoever you are

  or think you are,

  whatever you’ve done

  or imagine you’ve done…

  A tubercular poet

  a syphilitic musician,

  a mad philosopher,

  and many others…

  Whose voices were

  always only echoes,

  echoes that are

  still reaching you…

  Who are still thinking

  and still imagining

  who you are

  and what you’ve done.

  Closing Time

  It doesn’t matter

  if you were a hundred

  or sixty-three

  or seven and a half.

  However old you

  might have been,

  whatever mark you made

  will be erased.

  Things don’t last.

  When you’re gone

  you are gone

  and that is that.

  It might seem

  that something stays,

  that some part of you

  still casts a shadow.

  It might seem a lot

  of lunatic things,

  anything except

  the actual case…

  The world closing up

  that tiny space

  where you used to be.

  It closes so fast.

  Calculation

  The number of people

  who have been born

  is the same number

  of people who have died

  (or will someday die).

  The equation is perfect

  and must remain so.

  Because if the balance

  of the born to the dead

  should ever be off…

  If even a single person

  who has been born

  shirks the common destiny,

  how could you stand to live

  with such monstrous figures?

  Memento

  You meant to take care

  and put your affairs in order.

  But the unexpected occured

  and there wasn’t time.

  Later, the loved ones came

  and gave away some things,

  while putting aside some others:

  keepsakes or valuables.

  They cried over an old comb

  that still had some hairs

  twirling through its teeth.

  Yet they laughed a little too.

  Then someone uncovered

  what you left in the attic.

  “Oh, dear,” they said softly

  and went home to forget you.

  De Facto

  In order to get things done,

  it’s essential to have pain:

  without it, nothing could be.

  But we’re so easily fooled:

  no one praises hunger,

  yet everyone likes to eat.

  Little pains and big pains:

  they keep you living,

  however much it may hurt.

  But when it comes to dying,

  you want your epitaph to read:

  “He never knew what hit him.”

  You Dream You Die

  You wake up so frightened

  because in the dream you

  knew it was all over, the end.

  Even if you aren’t bothered

  by this idea when you’re awake,

  it’s still there in your mind.

  And so you dream it’s all over,

  no more, the end of you forever.

  You wake up so frightened.

  When it finally does happen,

  it probably won’t be like a dream.

  At least you sincerely hope not.

  The thought of oneself dying

  and never waking up again

  can drive a person to suicide.

  Complexity

  Whatever events may lead

  to that last moment,

  the finale is always the same:

  Simple heart failure.

  And all the time you thought

  that life was so complex.

  It’s just the beat of a drum:

  Thump-thump.

  The Conclusion

  It was always your

  sincere intention

  to understand it all

  before it all ended.

  But your intention

  was thwarted:

  so many things

  took your time away.

  You can only wonder

  what a few years

  of focused reflection

  might have gotten you.

  Maybe they could have

  helped ease the panic

  before it all ended.

  And maybe they wouldn’t.

  The Taste

  They said it could be over.

  You were sure the end was near.

  The dread of being so sure.

  Yet they turned out to be wrong.

  It wasn’t going to be over,

  not with that kind of certainty.

  But you had tasted how it felt

  to be so sure that it was all over.

  Now the dread of uncertainty.

  If only you hadn ‘t listened to them.

  If only you had no ears to hear,

  and no mouth with which to taste.

  Impossibility

  You descend

  the staircase

  in the darkness

  alone

  and pause

  before taking

  the last step.

  Behind you

  in a room

  upstairs

  your own

  voice cries out,

  an impossible

  sound.

  Lights turn on

  and people

  rush about

  the house

  without seeing

  you there

  on the last step.

  Your Evacuation

  The excrement

  of life.

  The purgative

  of death.

  Why not

  relief?

  Why only

  Pain?

  Pity.

  Knowing

  Before you existed,

  before anything existed,

  nobody knows what existed.

  This was a long time ago.

  Then something happened

  that started other things happening

  and later on you happened.

  This was not so long ago.

  Someday it all may all just stop

  or it may never ever stop.

  Start, stop, start, stop.

  Nobody knows how long.

  Counting the Ways

  Millions of years,

  billions of bodies.

  Some are where

  they last fell.

  Some are where

  they were put.

  Some are buried,

  some were burned.

  Some are scattered

  in little pieces.

  Billions of bodies,

  and then yours…

  Fallen, burned, buried,

  or in little pieces.

  Odyssey

 
; All sorts of paths

  can lead to

  all sorts of places.

  Yet every place

  ends up

  as the same place.

  This is the place

  where the

  paths are feeding you.

  It’s not the path

  but the place it goes,

  if you didn ‘t know.

  Request

  You lie in the bed,

  an arm full of tubes,

  a mind full of drugs,

  but still thinking.

  You see the figure

  enter the quiet room

  and you lift your arm

  and focus your mind.

  You ask the doctor,

  if it can be arranged,

  that your last day

  not be your worst day.

  Thoughtful

  When you’re on your last legs,

  whether you ‘re confined to a bed

  or screaming in a crashed-up car,

  many things may occur to you.

  Something that won’t occur to you,

  either confined to a bed or screaming,

  is that it doesn’t matter what you

  did or didn’t do during your existence.

  You won’t think, “That’s done with,

  so why get excited at this last stage?”

  Perhaps there are a few who may think

  this way, but they are rare exceptions.

  If only we could all think in this manner,

  it might make up for what went before:

  canceling out the chaos of our lives

  and steadying us upon our last legs.

  Carpe Diem?

  Perhaps once in a while,

  or possibly quite often,

  it may strike you that

  you are not yet dying,

  not in any serious sense:

  you can “seize the day”,

  as has often been advised.

  No reason not to follow

  this bit of poetic wisdom

  and to think of being alive

  much as you might regard

  some time off from work

  or a vacation from school:

  a carefree period of play.

  This may be a simple view

  but what else can you do

  as you wait for the approach

  of that awful Sunday night

  before returning to the job

  or the last day of summer

  before the school bell rings?

  Absolved of Debt

  Possibly you’re the kind

  of person who’s doesn’t

  save up for a rainy day

  or worry about a bill left

  unpaid for a month or two,

  or even one long past due.

  It’s not that you’re dumb

  or lazy, anything like that,

  but you believe in things

  known by heart not head,

  and these are what make

  tomorrow easier to take.

  This is how it is for you:

  all the years of your life,

  you’ve been assured

  that nothing will happen,

  when you’re on the brink,

  to prompt you to think.

  Unthinkable

  The thought unthinkable:

  things will still be there

  after you’re not here.

  All of the trees, the traffic:

  Those scenes from a play

  for which you didn’t stay.

  It makes much more sense

  that when you are gone

  the show won’t go on.

  Still, you leave things behind

  pretty much as you found

  them, but never mind—

  you won’t be around.

  Night Voices

  Why should you have to live?

  We don’t.

  Why should you have to suffer?

  We don’t.

  Why shouldn’t you have to die?

  We did.

  The Unholy City (2003)

  The following a transcript of the spoken word CD The Unholy City, released in 2003 with the screenplay Crampton in a limited edition of 510 copies. The poems are recited by Ligotti over a minimal guitar accompaniment.

  The Player Who Takes No Chances

  There is a greater blackness than many would wish to see. There is a greater blackness than most would care to contemplate. Those who have tried to tell of the blackness have always found their words turned into nonsense. Those who have tried to tell of the blackness have always found their memories lost or transformed into doctrines and philosophies they never intended; or possibly their bodies and minds, as they conceive such things, lost forever in the blackness that few would wish to see and most would not dare to contemplate.

  Perhaps in their final moments they may realize, or be shown, that they were, after all, only unknowing players in a nameless, endless game. And after these souls have been thrown screaming into oblivion, no voice remains to tell the score—save the howling voice of the blackness.

  There is a greater blackness. No voice remains.

  You Do Not Own Your Head

  There are so many heads in the world. Wherever you go there are heads. Every day there are more of them sprouting up in the darkness.

  At one time there was nothing at all, only blackness. And then, within the infinite spaces of that blackness, things started to develop. But as soon as those heads came along, nothing much has happened, or nothing worthy of note. The whole world reached its peak and turned into an enormous head factory.

  Every day there are more and more of them, sprouting up in the blackness, which was there at the beginning; the blackness that, perhaps by chance, began to produce all these heads and continues to produce them, always calling out for more heads to carry out the business it wants done, its black voice roaring across the infinite black spaces of its head factory.

  But none of the heads has any idea about the blackness that surrounds them, or the blackness that hides itself inside each one of them.

  No One Knows The Big News

  For all practical purposes almost no one is concerned with The Big News. They have other things, more urgent matters, inscribed within their skulls, and all kinds of business to carry out. Their heads are just too heavy with so many plans and schemes, thousands of tasks that will not allow them to focus on anything that is so strange, anything that is so uncertain. They have no time to confront some ultimate revelation. They have no desire to find out so incredibly Big News. Such a thing would take everything they know and arrange it in another way altogether, telling a story so different from the one that is already familiar to them.

  Yet The Big News is always there. Like a tiny voice on a radio it chatters away through heavy static in a darkened room where people are trying to sleep, filling their heads with plans and schemes, inscribing thousands of tasks and urgent matters inside of their skulls, all kinds of business to carry out—little errands, odd jobs, atrocities both great and small—all of which, when taken together, arrange things a different way that compose a secret story that no one cares to make their concern, yet The Big News is always there.

  And so few will ever seek to discover, and none of them will ever be allowed to tell, that we ourselves are the dark language in which The Big News is forever being written.

  Welcome to the Unholy City

  In some form or another, everyone must pay a visit to the Unholy City. There is simply no avoiding it since everything has been designed to lead you to this place. Any road may present a detour that unexpectedly sends you on your way into a great barren landscape where only a sliver of horizon wavers in the empty distance and no road signs exist to hint at your destination. Any hospital may be equipped with the special elevator where someone wheels you inside and then quickly abandons you. As the doors clamp tightly closed you finally notice that there are no buttons to
push, no controls of any kind. This is when the elevator begins to move, dipping and twisting like a carnival ride, taking you toward the Unholy City.

  After enduring such episodes, or others of a similar sort, you may only wake up screaming, vowing to never again close your eyes in sleep. Or you may fall into a fever that no thermometer is able to indicate and from which there is no recovery. In more extreme cases you begin to glimpse a blackness like none you have ever seen, and wonder for a time whether this blackness is inside your head or outside, which makes no difference once it begins to compose the outline of the Unholy City you're about to enter.

  The Name Is Nothing

  "The Unholy City" is a convenient misnomer. For one thing, it has none of the usual features which define a city of any size, and might be better described as a small town or village; an out-of- the-way place long gone to see. Unlike cities both ancient and modern, the unholy city has never been marked on a map. It is merely an ever changing name without a location, and is far more likely to find it's way to you, than you are to find your way to it—unless of course, you have been provided with special instructions that lead to an infinite barren landscape and end in the heart of nowhere.

  As for the quality or characteristic of unholiness, this is also misleading, a nominal facade designed to make things interesting for a world born out of blackness, where nothing holy or unholy has ever existed, where nothing exists at all except dreams and fevers and names for nothing, the creations, so to speak, of that original blackness which pulls itself over every world like a hangman's hood over a condemned man's head.

  Nobody Is Anybody

  Those of us who reside in The Unholy City, who sprouted out of the blackness of an old root cellar, or sprayed forth like dark ashes from an uncleaned chimney—those of us who are permanent citizens of The Unholy City are neither angels nor demons. Although, we are sometimes called upon to play such parts for the purpose of some game that has been going on since the world began; acting out our roles in a drawn-out and intricate stageshow that we will never understand, nor ever care to understand.

  Nevertheless, we are really not so different from the tourists who sometimes visit our little town—and sometimes stay with us forever—who were also born of the same blackness as we were, as everything was.

  Still, there is one respect in which we, the inhabitants of The Unholy City, diverge from all others in this world—who are so caught up in the game that is going on, who identify so completely with the parts they have been given to play in the stageshow universe, that they actually believe themselves to be somebody, or something. We, on the other hand, suffer from no such delusion. We are nobodies. We are nothings. And even to speak in such terms may be claiming too much for ourselves. Which is to say, we are just like everyone else, while they, without ever knowing or suspecting the true facts, are just like us.

  Three Things They Will Never Tell You