Teatro Grottesco
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Praise for Thomas Ligotti
About the Author
Teatro Grottesco
Derangements
Purity
The Town Manager
Sideshow, and Other Stories
The Clown Puppet
The Red Tower
Deformations
My Case for Retributive Action
Our Temporary Supervisor
In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
The Damaged and the Diseased
Teatro Grottesco
Gas Station Carnivals
The Bungalow House
Severini
The Shadow, the Darkness
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Copyright © Thomas Ligotti 2008
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PRAISE FOR THOMAS LIGOTTI
‘Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and is a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I’d say he might just be a genius.’ Ramsey Campbell
‘Ligotti is wonderfully original; he has a dark vision of a new and special kind, a vision that no one had before him.’ Interzone
‘[Ligotti’s] is a unique voice, which speaks with a profound elegance – and a precious seriousness – of matters which few other literary voices have ever touched – Ligotti is old-fashioned in the very best sense of the term and there is nothing dated about his work, which is unmistakably contemporary.’ Brian Stableford in Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers
‘Ligotti gave me the first genuine frisson – in the literal sense of the term – that I had received in years. His work made me realize why I had become a student of weird fiction to begin with – it was to experience that indescribable sensation of being unnerved.’ S. T. Joshi, author of The Modern Weird Tale, in Horror: Another 100 Best Books
‘Ligotti is arguably the pre-eminent living writer of horror fiction.’ Matt Cardin (in The Thomas Ligotti Reader)
‘Songs of a Dead Dreamer is full of inexplicable and alarming delights . . . Put this volume on the shelf right between H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Where it belongs.’ Michael Swanwick, The Washington Post
‘Grimscribe confirms [Ligotti] as an accomplished conjuror of nightmares in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft.’ The Times
‘In Grimscribe Ligotti manages to write that secret book, presenting us with stories that are paradoxically beautiful and horrific.’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘The most disturbing terror comes from within, springs unexpectedly from bland or half-formed memories of the past. This is the terror that Ligotti cultivates in the richly evocative tales of Noctuary.’ Booklist
‘My Work Is Not Yet Done displays a Thomas Ligotti at the height of his form – in imaginative range, in verve of style and precision of language, and in cumulative power and intensity.’ S. T. Joshi, Necrofile
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Ligotti was born in Detroit in 1953 and grew up in the nearby suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods. He graduated from Wayne State University in 1978. From 1979 to 2001, Ligotti worked for a reference book publisher in the Detroit area, serving as an editor on such titles as Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism and Contemporary Authors. His first collection of stories, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, was published in 1986, with an expanded version issued three years later. Other collections include Grim-scribe (1991), Noctuary (1994), and My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002).
Ligotti is the recipient of several awards, including the Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker award for his omnibus collection The Nightmare Factory (1996) and short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done. He has also written a nonfiction book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Short Life of Horror, which comprises an excursion through the darker byways of literature, philosophy and psychology. A short film of Ligotti’s story The Frolic was completed in 2006 and is scheduled to appear as a DVD. In addition, through an agreement with Fox Studios’ subsidiary Fox Atomic, a graphic novel based on his works was released in 2007. For more information visit: http://www.ligotti.net
CONTENTS
Derangements
Purity
The Town Manager
Sideshow, and Other Stories
The Clown Puppet
The Red Tower
Deformations
My Case for Retributive Action
Our Temporary Supervisor
In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land
The Damaged and the Diseased
Teatro Grottesco
Gas Station Carnivals
The Bungalow House
Severini
The Shadow, the Darkness
DERANGEMENTS
PURITY
We were living in a rented house, neither the first nor the last of a long succession of such places that the family inhabited throughout my childhood years. It was shortly after we had moved into this particular house that my father preached to us his philosophy of ‘rented living.’ He explained that it was not possible to live in any other way and that attempting to do so was the worst form of delusion. ‘We must actively embrace the reality of non-ownership,’ he told my mother, my sister and me, towering over us and gesturing with his heavy arms as we sat together on a rented sofa in our rented house. ‘Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next. Wherever your thoughts finally settle is the same place that the thoughts of countless other persons have settled and have left their impression, just as the backsides of other persons have left their impression on that sofa where you are now s
itting. We live in a world where every surface, every opinion or passion, everything altogether is tainted by the bodies and minds of strangers. Cooties – intellectual cooties and physical cooties from other people – are crawling all around us and all over us at all times. There is no escaping this fact.’
Nevertheless, it was precisely this fact that my father seemed most intent on escaping during the time we spent in that house. It was an especially cootie-ridden residence in a bad neighborhood that bordered on an even worse neighborhood. The place was also slightly haunted, which was more or less the norm for the habitations my father chose to rent. Several times a year, in fact, we packed up at one place and settled into another, always keeping a considerable distance between our locations, or relocations. And every time we entered one of our newly rented houses for the first time, my father would declaim that this was a place where he could ‘really get something accomplished.’ Soon afterward, he would begin spending more and more time in the basement of the house, sometimes living down there for weeks on end. The rest of us were banned from any intrusion on my father’s lower territories unless we had been explicitly invited to participate in some project of his. Most of the time I was the only available subject, since my mother and sister were often away on one of their ‘trips,’ the nature of which I was never informed of and seldom heard anything about upon their return. My father referred to these absences on the part of my mother and sister as ‘unknown sabbaticals’ by way of disguising his ignorance or complete lack of interest in their jaunts. None of this is to protest that I minded being left so much to myself. (Least of all did I miss my mother and her European cigarettes fouling the atmosphere around the house.) Like the rest of the family, I was adept at finding ways to occupy myself in some wholly passionate direction, never mind whether or not my passion was a rented one.
One evening in late autumn I was upstairs in my bedroom preparing myself for just such an escapade when the doorbell rang. This was, to say the least, an uncommon event for our household. At the time, my mother and sister were away on one of their sabbaticals, and my father had not emerged from his basement for many days. Thus, it seemed up to me to answer the startling sound of the doorbell, which I had not heard since we had moved into the house and could not remember hearing in any of the other rented houses in which I spent my childhood. (For some reason I had always believed that my father disconnected all the doorbells as soon as we relocated to a newly rented house.) I moved hesitantly, hoping the intruder or intruders would be gone by the time I arrived at the door. The doorbell rang again. Fortunately, and incredibly, my father had come up from the basement. I was standing in the shadows at the top of the stairs when I saw his massive form moving across the living room, stripping himself of a dirty lab coat and throwing it into a corner before he reached the front door. Naturally I thought that my father was expecting this visitor, who perhaps had something to do with his work in the basement. However, this was obviously not the case, at least as far as I could tell from my eavesdropping at the top of the stairs.
By the sound of his voice, the visitor was a young man. My father invited him into the house, speaking in a straightforward and amiable fashion that I knew was entirely forced. I wondered how long he would be able to maintain this uncharacteristic tone in conversation, for he bid the young man to have a seat in the living room where the two of them could talk ‘at leisure,’ a locution that sounded absolutely bizarre as spoken by my father.
‘As I said at the door, sir,’ the young man said, ‘I’m going around the neighborhood telling people about a very worthy organization.’
‘Citizens for Faith,’ my father cut in.
‘You’ve heard of our group?’
‘I can read the button pinned to the lapel of your jacket. This is sufficient to allow me to comprehend your general principles.’
‘Then perhaps you might be interested in making a donation,’ said the young man.
‘I would indeed.’
‘That’s wonderful, sir.’
‘But only on the condition that you allow me to challenge these absurd principles of yours – to really put them to the test. I’ve actually been hoping that you, or someone like you, would come along. It’s almost as if a fortuitous element of intervention brought you to this house, if I were to believe in something so preposterous.’
So ended my father’s short-lived capitulation to straightforwardness and amiability.
‘Sir?’ said the young man, his brow creasing a bit with incomprehension.
‘I will explain. You have these two principles in your head, and possibly they are the only principles that are holding your head together. The first is the principle of nations, countries, the whole hullabaloo of mother lands and father lands. The second is the principle of deities. Neither of these principles has anything real about them. They are merely impurities poisoning your head. In a single phrase – Citizens for Faith – you have incorporated two of the three major principles – or impurities – that must be eliminated, completely eradicated, before our species can begin an approach to a pure conception of existence. Without pure conception, or something approaching pure conception, everything is a disaster and will continue to be a disaster.’
‘I understand if you’re not interested in making a donation, sir,’ said the young man, at which point my father dug his hand into the right pocket of his trousers and pulled out a wad of cash that was rolled into a tube and secured with a thick rubber band. He held it up before the young man’s eyes.
‘This is for you, but only if you will give me a chance to take those heinous principles of yours and clean them out of your head.’
‘I don’t believe my faith to be something that’s just in my head.’
Until this point, I thought that my father was taunting the young man for pure diversion, perhaps as a means of distracting himself from the labors in which he had been engaged so intensely over the past few days. Then I heard what to my ears was an ominous shift in my father’s words, signifying his movement from the old-school iconoclast he had been playing to something desperate and unprincipled with respect to the young man.
‘Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to suggest that anything like that was only in your head. How could such a thing be true when I know quite well that something of the kind inhabits this very house?’
‘He is in every house,’ said the young man. ‘He is in all places.’
‘Indeed, indeed. But something like that is very much in this particular house.’
My suspicion was now that my father made reference to the haunted condition – although it barely deserved the description – of our rented house. I myself had already assisted him in a small project relevant to this condition and what its actual meaning might be, at least insofar as my father chose to explain such things. He even allowed me to keep a memento of this ‘phase-one experiment,’ as he called it. I was all but sure that this was the case when my father alluded to his basement.
‘Basement?’ said the young man.
‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘I could show you.’
‘Not in my head but in your basement,’ said the young man as he attempted to clarify what my father was claiming.
‘Yes, yes. Let me show you. And afterward I will make a generous donation to your group. What do you say?’
The young man did not immediately say anything, and perhaps this was the reason that my father quickly shouted out my name. I backed up a few steps and waited, then descended the stairway as if I had not been eavesdropping all along.
‘This is my son,’ my father said to the young man, who stood up to shake my hand. He was thin and wore a second-hand suit, just as I imagined him while I was eavesdropping at the top of the stairs. ‘Daniel, this gentleman and I have some business to conduct. I want you to see that we’re not disturbed.’ I simply stood there as if I had every intention of obediently following these instructions. My father then turned to the young man, indicating the way to the basement. ‘We w
on’t be long.’
No doubt my presence – that is, the normality of my presence – was a factor in the young man’s decision to go into the basement. My father would have known that. He would not know, nor would he have cared, that I quietly left the house as soon as he had closed the basement door behind him and his guest. I did consider lingering for a time at the house, if only to gain some idea of what phase my father’s experimentation had now entered, given that I was a participant in its early stages. However, that night I was eager to see a friend of mine who lived in the neighborhood.
To be precise, my friend did not live in the bad neighborhood where my family had rented a house but in the worse neighborhood nearby. It was only a few streets away, but this was the difference between a neighborhood where some of the houses had bars across their doors and windows and one in which there was nothing left to protect or to save or to care about in any way. It was another world altogether . . . a twisted paradise of danger and derangement . . . of crumbling houses packed extremely close together . . . of burned-out houses leaning toward utter extinction . . . of houses with black openings where once there had been doors and windows . . . and of empty fields over which shone a moon that was somehow different from the one seen elsewhere on this earth.
Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass. And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling into a pit of black mysteries. Upon closer approach, one might observe thin, tattered bedsheets in place of curtains. Finally, after prolonged contemplation, the miracle of a soft and wavering glow would be revealed inside the house.
Not long after my family moved into a vicinity where such places were not uncommon, I found one particular house that was nothing less than the ideal of the type of residence, so to speak, I have just described. My eyes became fixed upon it, held as if they were witnessing some miraculous vision. Then one of the bedsheets that covered the front window moved slightly, and the voice of a woman called out to me as I stood teetering on the broken remnants of a sidewalk.