Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Ligotti, Thomas

  “Where do you think you’re going?” says Voke, now liberated from the disabling effects of his rage.

  Cheev is trying to reach something on the floor that is the approximate size and shape of a coffin. Only one corner of the long black box sticks out of the shadows into the bluish green glare of the loft. A thick strip of gleaming silver edges the object and is secured to it with silvery bolts.

  “Get away from there,” shouts Voke as Cheev stoops over the box, fingering its lid.

  But before he can open it, before he can make another move, Voke makes his.

  “I’ve done my best for you, Mr. Veech, and you’ve given me nothing but grief. I’ve tried to deliver you from the fate of your friends... but now I deliver you to it. Join them, Cheev.”

  At these words, Cheev’s body begins to rise in a puppet’s hunch, then soars up into the tenebrous rafters and beyond, transported by unseen wires. His arms and legs twitch uncontrollably during the elevation, and his screams... fade.

  But Voke pays no attention to his victim’s progress. His baggy clothes flapping hysterically, he rushes to the object so recently threatened with violation. He drags it toward an open spot on the floor. The light from the walls, ghastly and oceanic, shines on the coffin’s silky black surface. Voke is on his knees before the coffin, tenderly testing its security with his fingertips. As if each accumulated moment of deliberation were a blasphemy, he suddenly lifts back the lid.

  Laid out inside is a young woman whose beauty has been unnaturally perpetuated by a fanatic of her form. Voke gazes for some time at the corpse, then finally says: “Always the best thing, my dear. Always the best thing.”

  He is still kneeling before the coffin as his features begin to undergo the ravages of various, obviously conflicting, phases of feeling. Eyes, mouth, the whole facial structure is called upon to perform gruesome acrobatics of expression. Ultimately an impossible task is relieved or avoided by laughter: the liberating laughter of an innocent derangement, of a virgin madness. Voke rises to his feet by the powers of his idiotic hilarity. He begins to move about in a weird dance—hopping and bouncing and bobbing. His laughter grows worse as he gyres aimlessly, and his gestures become more convulsive. Through complete lack of attention, or perhaps by momentarily regaining it, Voke makes his way out of the loft and is now laughing into the dark abyss beyond the precarious railing at the top of the crooked stairway. His final laugh seems to stick in his throat; he goes over the railing and falls without a sound, his baggy clothes flapping uselessly.

  Thus the screams you now hear are not those of the plummeting Voke. Neither are they the screams of Cheev, who is long gone, nor the supernatural echoes of Prena and Lamm’s cries of horror. These screams, the ones from beyond the door at the top of the stairs, belong only to a dummy who now feels warm drops of blood sliding thickly over his lacquered cheeks, and who has been left—alone and alive—in the shadows of an abandoned loft. And his eyes are rolling like mad marbles.

  Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror

  One Whole Night in a Haunted World

  MIST ON a lake, fog in a wood, streetlights shining on wet pavement—such sights make it all very easy. Something lives in the lake and hides in the woods, stalks upon the pavement or dwells under it. Whatever it may be, this something lies just out of sight... but not out of vision. In certain surroundings our entire being is made of eyes, every atom dilates to witness the haunting of the universe. Even the dullest find this easily done.

  Now take a crowded room, such as this one: the door is shut; the clock on the wall is sweeping aside the seconds with its thin red finger; the window blinds deliver slices of light from the outside world and shuffle them with shadows; someone coughs, there, like that. And suddenly the hollows of routine begin to buzz a bit. Did someone leave a friend out in the hallway? I see a pair of squinting eyes looking in... but never mind, they went away. You see, even here it’s not so very hard.

  And if here, then everywhere and at every time. Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes, one by one, will open to the world, will see its horror as it has never been seen before. Then: no belief or body of laws will guard you; no friend, no counselor, no appointed personage will save you; no crowded schoolroom, no locked bedroom, no private office will hide you. Not even the solar brilliance of spring is protection against the horror. For the horror eats light and digests it into darkness.

  And in darkness we open our eyes, briefly, and in darkness we close them.

  Thank you, that will be all for today.

  On Morbidity

  Isolation, mental derangement, strange emotional states, visions, well-tended fevers, neglected well-being: only a few of the many techniques cultivated by the virtuoso of morbidity. Just as vital to his development is a real feeling for supernatural horror. Retreating from a world of “health” and “sanity,” or at least one that daily invests in such commodities, the morbid man seeks the shadows behind the scenes of life. He backs himself into a corner alive with cool drafts and fragrant with centuries of must. The flowers he finds on the wallpaper seem half-real and cause him to dream of vampire gardens and dwarfish creatures with flesh of thorns. There, in that corner, he builds a world of ruins out of the battered stones of his imagination.

  But this world is not one of pure romance, not all a dazzling music hall of lyrical mania. So let us condemn it for a moment, this deep end of dreams. Though there is no name for the morbid man’s sin, it still seems in violation of some law or other, perhaps many laws, probably all of them. He does not appear to be doing any good, either for himself or others. And while we all know that the macabre and uncanny are quite palatable as side-dishes of existence, he has turned them into a hideous specialty of the house! Ultimately, however, he may meet these charges of wrongdoing with a simple “What of it?”

  Now, such a response assumes morbidity to be a certain class of vice, one to be pursued without apology, and one whose advantages and disadvantages must be enjoyed or endured outside the law. But as a sower of vice, if only in his own soul, the morbid man incurs this criticism: that he is a symptom or a cause of decay within various individual and social spheres of being. And decay, like every other process of becoming, hurts everybody. “Good!” shouts the morbid man. “Not good!” counters the crowd. Born of extremely narrow and personal feelings, both positions betray inadmirable origins: the one in resentment, the other in fear. And when the ethical debate on this issue eventually reaches an impasse or becomes too tangled for truth, then the psychiatric one can begin. Later on we will find other angles from which this problem may be attacked, enough to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives.

  Meanwhile, the morbid man keeps putting his time to no good use, until in the end—amidst mad winds, moonlight, and craving specters—he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.

  Thank you, don’t forget to read the assignment.

  Pessimism and Supernatural Horror—Lecture One

  Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page. Fiction, unable to compete with the world for vividness of pain and lasting effects of fear, compensates in its own way. How? By inventing more tortuous and excruciatingly bizarre means to surprising ends. Among these means, of course, is the supernatural. In transforming natural ordeals into supernatural ones, we find the strength to affirm and deny their horror simultaneously, to savor and suffer them at the same time. Nevertheless, the most endearing thing about the supernatural is not that its horrors are real or unreal, but that, in some paradoxical way, they are both. Indeed, the imagination makes no such distinctions, for it is the dreaming star around which the poor pictures of “reality” pallidly circle.

  A case in point is the vampire. Is he merely a human aspiration extended beyond natural logic by the logic of hope and desire? Or is he... a vampire? Changing shape at will, sink
ing teeth into flesh, gorging himself on that warm and lovely blood, and—unless someone is decent enough to stop him—anticipating this nightly regimen far into eternity: such activities, in their proper realm of dreams, are living truths and a legitimate source of terror. Only when we awake, from stories or from sleep, does the vampire die, and, as a “concept,” become a parasite of our flesh. But both of these worlds, real and unreal, are contained within us—and between them our souls are doomed to wander.

  So supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not the pastime of even our closest relations in the wholly natural world; we gained it, as part of our gloomy inheritance, when we became what we are. Once awareness of the human predicament was achieved, our consciousness immediately had to split: one half went the way of apologetics, even celebration, of this new toy of conscious existence; the other half took to condemning and occasionally launching direct assaults on this “gift”. The first merely provides justification for the unavoidable facts of life, which need to be justified if they are to be tolerated at all. The second, a perverse and gratuitous twin, keeps us from being absolute victims, allows us to struggle against our doom while all the time cheering on its despicable agents and their sleazy ways. All the things that victimize us in natural life can become the very stuff of demonic delight in the make-believe world of supernatural horror.

  In the end, of course, we remain puppets and our smiles are still painted ones. But now at least we have moistened them with our own blood.

  Thank you, we’ll pick this up at our next meeting.

  Pessimism and Supernatural Horror—Lecture Two

  Dead bodies that walk in the night, living bodies suddenly possessed by new owners and deadly aspirations, a community ravaged by beings that obey alien laws, and a whole world at the mercy of unknown laws which authorize chaotic upheavals of the natural order—some examples of the logic of supernatural horror. It is a logic that is founded on fear; it is a logic whose sole principle states: “Existence equals Nightmare.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure. A few more examples: someone catches the night in a bad mood and must pay a dreadful price; someone opens the wrong door, sees something he should not have, and suffers the consequences; someone walks down an unfamiliar street... and is lost forever.

  That these unfortunates deserve their fate is obvious. To be an accomplice, however involuntarily, in a reasonless non-reality is grounds for the harshest sentencing. And, come to think of it, none of this could happen in a real world; that is, one of reasonable order and proportion. But could there ever be such a world, and could we abide it? The evidence is not encouraging. Where pain and pleasure form a corrupt alliance against us, paradise and hell are merely different departments in the same monstrous bureaucracy. And between these two poles exists everything we now know or can ever know. No one has yet succeeded in even imagining a utopia, earthly or otherwise, that can stand up under the mildest criticism. But one must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. Afterward, nothing comes as a surprise.

  Then again, perhaps we ourselves are being unreasonable in asking that the world be real; perhaps it is only a demon of some kind who put this thought in our heads, this wish in our hearts. Why not be content that we are allowed to perform in this gruesome circus of shadows? And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot quite be sure that it couldn’t exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our awareness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, both at the individual and the collective levels, horror operates with an eerie autonomy. Generating specters, ghouls, and grisly dooms, it is a loathsome foam upon which our lives merely float.

  And, ultimately, we must admit it: horror is more real than we are.

  Thank you, no class tomorrow due to the holiday.

  Sardonic Harmony

  A sense of beauty and order, compassion for human hurt, offering others the benefit rather than the disadvantages of our doubts, nurturing a rich respect for gestures of decency and nobility—all our best attributes are also our most troublesome, serving to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one’s rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The so-called affirmations of life—all based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, religion in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.

  By means of supernatural horror we may evade, momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Each one of us, out of the blackness of nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world. Well, here we are... looking down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weirdly fantastic scenario! So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool’s fate which deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe.

  Supernatural horror, in all its bizarre constructions, enables a reader to taste a selection of treats at odds with his well-being. Admittedly, this is not an indulgence likely to find universal favor. True macabrists are as rare as poets and form a secret society unto themselves, if only because their memberships elsewhere were cancelled, some of them from the moment of birth. But those who have sampled these joys marginal to stable existence, once they have gotten a good whiff of other worlds, will not be able to stay away for long. They will loiter in moonlight, eyeing the entranceways to cemeteries, waiting for some terribly propitious moment to crash the gates.

  Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: “We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb... and find them to our liking.”

  Thank you, you’ve been an attentive class. Good luck on the final.

  DREAMS FOR

  THE DEAD

  Dr. Locrian’s Asylum

  YEARS PASSED and no one in our town, no one I could name, allotted a single word to that great ruin which marred the evenness of the horizon. Nor was mention made of that darkly gated patch of ground closer to the town’s edge. Even in days more remote, few things were said about these sites. Perhaps someone would propose tearing down the old asylum and razing the burial-ground where no inmate had been interred for a generation or more; and perhaps a few others, swept along by the moment, would nod their heart’s assent. But the resolution always remained poorly formed, very soon losing its shape entirely, its impetus dying a gentle death in the gentle old streets of our town.

  Then how can I explain that sudden turn of events, that overnight conversion which set our steps toward that hulking and decayed edifice, trampling its graveyard along the way? In answer, I propose the existence of a secret movement, one conducted in the souls of the town’s citizens, and in their dreams. Conceived thus, the mysterious conversion loses some of its mystery: one need only accept that we were all haunted by the same revenant, that certain images began to establish themselves deep within each of us and became part of our hidden lives. Finally, we resolved that we could no longer live as we had been.

  When the idea of positive action first arose, the residents of the humble west end of town were the most zealous and impatient. For it was they who had suffered the severest unease, living as they did in close view of the wild plots and crooked headstones of that crowded strip of earth where mad minds had come to be shut away for eternity. But we all shared the burden of the cr
umbling asylum itself, which seemed to be visible from every corner of town—from the high rooms of the old hotel, from the quiet rooms of our houses, from streets obscured by morning mist or twilight haze, and from my own shop whenever I looked out its front window. The setting sun would always be half-hidden by that massive silhouette, that huge broken headstone of some unspeakable grave. But more disturbing than our own view of the asylum was the idiotic gaze that it seemed to cast back at us, and through the years certain shamefully superstitious persons actually claimed to have seen mad-eyed and immobile figures staring out from the asylum’s windows on nights when the moon shone with unusual brightness and the dark sky above the town appeared to contain more than its usual share of stars. Although few people spoke of such experiences, almost everyone had seen other sights at the asylum that no one could deny. And what strange things were brought to mind because of them; all over town vague scenes were inwardly envisioned.

  As children, most of us had paid a visit at some time to that forbidden place, and later we carried with us memories of our somber adventures. Over the years we came to compare what we experienced, compiling this knowledge of the asylum until it became unseemly to augment it further.

  By all accounts that old institution was a chamber of horrors, if not in its entirety then at least in certain isolated corners. It was not simply that a particular room attracted notice for its atmosphere of desolation: the gray walls pocked like sponges, the floor filthied by the years entering freely through broken windows, and the shallow bed withered after supporting so many nights of futile tears and screaming. There was something more.