Teatro Grottesco

by Thomas Ligotti

  ‘Hey, you. Hey, boy. You got any money on you?’

  ‘Some,’ I replied to that powerful voice.

  ‘Then would you do something for me?’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Would you go up to the store and get me some salami sticks? The long ones, not those little ones. I’ll pay you when you come back.’

  When I returned from the store, the woman again called out to me through the glowing bedsheets. ‘Step careful on those porch stairs,’ she said. ‘The door’s open.’

  The only light inside the house emanated from a small television on a metal stand. The television faced a sofa that seemed to be occupied from end to end by a black woman of indefinite age. In her left hand was a jar of mayonnaise, and in her right hand was an uncooked hot dog, the last one from an empty package lying on the bare floor of the house. She submerged the hot dog into the mayonnaise, then pulled it out and finished it off without taking her eyes from the television. After licking away some mayonnaise from her fingers, she screwed the lid back on the jar and set it to one side on the sofa, which appeared to be the only piece of furniture in the room. I held out the salami sticks to her, and she put some money in my hand. It was the exact amount I had paid, plus one dollar.

  I could hardly believe that I was actually standing inside one of the houses I had been admiring since my family moved into the neighborhood. It was a cold night, and the house was unheated. The television must have operated on batteries, because it had no electrical cord trailing behind it. I felt as if I had crossed a great barrier to enter an outpost that had been long abandoned by the world, a place cut off from reality itself. I wanted to ask the woman if I might be allowed to curl up in some corner of that house and never again leave it. Instead, I asked if I could use the bathroom.

  She stared at me silently for a moment and then reached down behind the cushions of the sofa. What she brought forth was a flashlight. She handed it to me and said, ‘Use this and watch yourself. It’s the second door down that hall. Not the first door – the second door. And don’t fall in.’

  As I walked down the hall I kept the flashlight focused on the gouged and filthy wooden floor just a few feet ahead of me. I opened the second door, not the first, then closed it behind me. The room in which I found myself was not a toilet but a large closet. Toward the back of the closet there was a hole in the floor. I shone the flashlight into the hole and saw that it led straight into the basement of the house. Down there were the pieces of a porcelain sink and commode, which must have fallen through the floor of the bathroom that was once behind the first door I had passed in the hallway. Because it was a cold night, and the house was unheated, the smell was not terribly strong. I knelt at the edge of the hole and shone the flashlight into it as far its thin beam would reach. But the only other objects I could see were some broken bottles stuck within the strata of human waste. I thought about what other things might be in that basement . . . and I became lost in those thoughts.

  ‘Hey, boy,’ I heard the woman call out. ‘Are you all right?’

  When I returned to the front of the house, I saw that the woman had other visitors. When they held up their hands in front of their faces, I realized that I still had the shining flashlight in my hand. I switched it off and handed it back to the woman on the sofa.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said as I maneuvered my way past the others and toward the front door. Before leaving I turned to the woman and asked if I might come back to the house.

  ‘If you like,’ she said. ‘Just make sure you bring me some of those salami sticks.’

  That was how I came to know my friend Candy, whose house I visited many times since our first meeting on that thrilling night. On some visits, which were not always at night, she would be occupied with her business, and I would keep out of her way as a steady succession of people young and old, black and white, came and went. Other times, when Candy was not so busy, I squeezed next to her on the sofa, and we watched television together. Occasionally we talked, although our conversations were usually fairly brief and superficial, stalling out as soon as we arrived at some chasm that divided our respective lives and could not be bridged by either of us. When I told her about my mother’s putrid European cigarettes, for instance, Candy had a difficult time with the idea of ‘European,’ or perhaps with the very word itself. Similarly, I would often be unable to supply a context from my own life that would allow me to comprehend something that Candy would casually interject as we sat watching television together. I had been visiting her house for at least a month when, out of nowhere, Candy said to me, ‘You know, I had a little boy that was just about your age.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he got killed,’ she said, as if such an answer explained itself and warranted no further elaboration. I never urged Candy to expand upon this subject, but neither could I forget her words or the resigned and distant voice in which she had spoken them.

  Later I found out that quite a few children had been killed in Candy’s neighborhood, some of whom appeared to have been the victims of a child-murderer who had been active throughout the worst neighborhoods of the city for a number of years before my family moved there. (It was, in fact, my mother who, with outrageous insincerity, warned me about ‘some dangerous pervert’ stealthily engaged in cutting kids’ throats right and left in what she called ‘that terrible neighborhood where your friend lives.’) On the night that I left our rented house after my father had gone into the basement with the young man who was wearing a secondhand suit, I thought about this child-murderer as I walked the streets leading to Candy’s house. These streets gained a more intense hold upon me after I learned about the child killings, like a nightmare that exercises a hypnotic power forcing your mind to review its images and events over and over no matter how much you want to forget them. While I was not interested in actually falling victim to a child-murderer, the threat of such a thing happening to me only deepened my fascination with those crowded houses and the narrow spaces between them, casting another shadow over the ones in which that neighborhood was already enveloped.

  As I walked toward Candy’s house, I kept one of my hands in the pocket of my coat where I carried something that my father had constructed to be used in the event that, to paraphrase my irrepressibly inventive parent, anyone ever tried to inflict personal harm upon me. My sister was given an identical gadget, which looked something like a fountain pen. (Father told us not to say anything about these devices to anyone, including my mother, who for her part had long ago equipped herself with self-protection in the form of a small-caliber automatic pistol.) On several occasions I had been tempted to show this instrument to Candy, but ultimately I did not break the vow of secrecy on which my father had insisted. Nevertheless, there was something else my father had given me, which I carried in a small paper bag swinging at my side, that I was excited to show Candy that night. No restrictions had been placed on disclosing this to anyone, although it probably never occurred to my father that I would ever desire to do so.

  What I carried with me, contained in a squat little jar inside the paper bag, was a by-product, one might say, of the first-phase experiment in which I had assisted my father not long after we moved into our rented house. I have already mentioned that, like so many of the houses where my family lived during my childhood years, our current residence was imbued with a certain haunted aspect, however mild it may have been in this instance. Specifically, this haunting was manifested in a definite presence I sensed in the attic of the house, where I spent a great deal of time before I became a regular visitant at Candy’s. As such things go, in my experience, there was nothing especially noteworthy about this presence. It seemed to be concentrated near the wooden beams which crossed the length of the attic and from which, I imagined, some former inhabitant of the house may once have committed suicide by hanging. Such speculation, however, was of no interest to my father, who strongly objected to the possibility of spooks or spirits of any kin
d or even the use of these terms. ‘There is nothing in the attic,’ he explained to me. ‘It’s only the way that your head is interacting with the space of that attic. There are certain fields of forces that are everywhere. And these forces, for reasons unknown to me as yet, are potentiated in some places more than others. Do you understand? The attic is not haunting your head – your head is haunting the attic. Some heads are more haunted than others, whether they are haunted by ghosts or by gods or by creatures from outer space. These are not real things. Nonetheless, they are indicative of real forces, animating and even creative forces, which your head only conceives to be some kind of spook or who knows what. You are going to help me prove this by allowing me to use my apparatus in the basement to siphon from your head that thing which you believe is haunting the attic. This siphoning will take place in a very tiny part of your head, because if I siphoned your whole head . . . well, never mind about that. Believe me, you won’t feel a thing.’

  After it was over, I no longer sensed the presence in the attic. My father had siphoned it away and contained it in a small jar, which he gave to me once he was through with it as an object of research, his first phase of experimentation in a field in which, unknown to other scientists who have since performed similar work, my father was the true Copernicus or Galileo or whomever one might care to name. However, as may be obvious by now, I did not share my father’s scientific temperament. And although I no longer felt the presence in the attic, I was entirely resistant to abandoning the image of someone hanging himself from the wooden beams crossing the length of a lonely attic and leaving behind him an unseen guideline to another world. Therefore, I was delighted to find that the sense of this presence was restored to me in the portable form of a small jar, which, when I cupped it tightly in my hands, conveyed into my system an even more potent sense of the supernatural than I had previously experienced in the attic. This was what I was bringing to Candy on that night in late autumn.

  When I entered Candy’s house, there was no business going on that might distract us from what I had to show her. There were in fact two figures slumped against the wall on the opposite side of the front room of the house, but they seemed inattentive, if not completely oblivious, to what was happening around them.

  ‘What did you bring for Candy?’ she said, looking at the paper bag I held in my hand. I sat down on the sofa beside her, and she leaned close to me.

  ‘This is something . . .’ I started to say as I removed the jar from the bag, holding it by its lid. Then I realized that I had no way to communicate to her what it was I had brought. It was not my intention to distress her in any way, but there was nothing I could say to prepare her. ‘Now don’t open it,’ I said. ‘Just hold it.’

  ‘It looks like jelly,’ she said as I placed the jar in her meaty hands.

  Fortunately, the contents of the jar presented no disturbing images, and in the glowing light of the television they took on a rather soothing appearance. She gently closed her grip on the little glass container as if she were aware of the precious nature of what was inside. She seemed completely unafraid, even relaxed. I had no idea what her reaction would be. I knew only that I wanted to share with her something that she could not otherwise have known in this life, just as she had shared the wonders of her house with me.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she softly exclaimed. ‘I knew it. I knew that he wasn’t gone from me. I knew that I wasn’t alone.’

  Afterward, it occurred to me that what I had witnessed was in accord with my father’s assertions. Just as my head had been haunting the attic with the presence of someone who had hanged himself, Candy’s head was now haunting the jar with a presence of her own design, one which was wholly unlike my own. It seemed that she wished to hold on to that jar forever. Typically, forever was about to end. A nondescript car had just pulled up and stopped in front of Candy’s house. The driver quickly exited the vehicle and slammed its door behind him.

  ‘Candy,’ I said, ‘There’s some business coming.’

  I had to tug at the jar to free it from her grasp, but she finally let it go and turned toward the door. As usual, I wandered off to one of the back rooms of the house, an empty bedroom where I liked to huddle in a corner and think about all the sleeping bodies that had dreamed there throughout innumerable nights. But on this occasion I did not huddle in a corner. Instead, I kept watch on what was happening in the front room of the house. The car outside had come to a stop too aggressively, too conspicuously, and the man in the long coat who walked toward the house moved in a way that was also too aggressive, too conspicuous. He pushed open the door of Candy’s house and left it open after he stepped inside.

  ‘Where’s the white kid?’ said the man in the long coat.

  ‘No white people in here,’ said Candy, who held her eyes on the television. ‘Not including you.’

  The man walked over to the two figures across the room and gave each of them a nudge with his foot.

  ‘If you didn’t know, I’m the one who lets you do business.’

  ‘I know who you are, Mr Police Detective. You’re the one who took my boy. You took other ones too, I know that.’

  ‘Shut up, fat lady. I’m here for the white kid.’

  I took the pen out of my pocket and pulled off the top, revealing a short, thick needle like the point of a pushpin. Holding the pen at my side and out of sight, I walked back down the hallway.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said to the man in the long coat.

  ‘I’m here to take you home, kid.’

  If there was anything I had ever known in my life as a cold, abstract certainty, it was this: if I went with this man, I would not be going home.

  ‘Catch,’ I said as I threw the little jar at him.

  He caught the jar with both hands, and for a moment his face flashed a smile. I have never seen a smile die so quickly or so completely. If I had blinked, I would have missed the distressed transition. The jar then seemed to jump out of his hands and onto the floor. Recovering himself, he took a step forward and grabbed me. I have no reason to think that Candy or the others in the room saw me jab the pen into his leg. What they saw was the man in the long coat releasing me and then crumbling into a motionless pile. Evidently the effect was immediate. One of the two figures stepped out of the shadows and gave the fallen man the same kind of contemptuous nudge that had been given to him.

  ‘He’s dead, Candy,’ said the one figure.

  ‘You sure?’

  The other figure rose to his feet and mule-kicked the head of the man on the floor. ‘Seems so,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ said Candy, looking my way. ‘He’s all yours. I don’t want no part of him.’

  I found the jar, which fortunately was unbroken, and went to sit on the sofa next to Candy. In a matter of minutes, the two figures had stripped the other man down to his boxer shorts. Then one of them pulled off the boxer shorts, saying, ‘They look practically new.’ However, he stopped pulling soon enough when he saw what was under them. We all saw what was there, no doubt about that. But I wondered if the others were as confused by it as I was. I had always thought about such things in an ideal sense, a mythic conception handed down over the centuries. But it was nothing like that.

  ‘Put him in the hole!’ shouted Candy, who had stood up from the sofa and was pointing toward the hallway. ‘Put him in the goddamn hole!’

  They dragged the body into the closet and dropped it into the basement. There was a slapping sound made by the unclothed form as it hit the floor down there. When the two figures came out of the closet, Candy said, ‘Now get rid of the rest of this stuff and get rid of the car and get rid of yourselves.’

  Before exiting the house, one of the figures turned back. ‘There’s a big hunk of cash here, Candy. You’re going to need some traveling money. You can’t stay here.’

  To my relief, Candy took part of the money. I got up from the sofa and set the jar on the cushion beside my friend.

  ‘Where will you go?’
I asked.

  ‘There are plenty of places like this one in the city. No heat, no electricity, no plumbing. And no rent. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘I won’t say anything.’

  ‘I know you won’t. Good-bye, boy.’

  I said good-bye and wandered slowly home, dreaming all the while about what was now in Candy’s basement.

  By the time I arrived at the house it was after midnight. My mother and sister must have also returned because I could smell the stench from my mother’s European cigarettes as soon as I took two steps inside. My father was lying on the living-room sofa, clearly exhausted after so many days of working in the basement. He also seemed quite agitated, his eyes wide open and staring upward, his head moving back and forth in disgust or negation or both, and his voice repeatedly chanting, ‘Hopeless impurities, hopeless impurities.’ Hearing these words helped to release my thoughts from what I had seen at Candy’s. They also reminded me that I wanted to ask my father about something he had said to the young man in the second-hand suit who had visited the house earlier that night. But my father’s condition at the moment did not appear to lend itself to such talk. In fact, he betrayed no awareness whatever of my presence. Since I did not yet feel up to confronting my mother and sister, who I could now hear were moving about upstairs (probably still unpacking from their trip), I decided to take this opportunity to violate my father’s sanctions against entering the basement without his explicit authorization. This, I believed, would provide me with something to take my mind off the troubling events of that night.

  However, as I descended the stairs into my father’s basement, I felt my mind and senses being pulled back into the dark region of Candy’s basement. Even before I reached the bottom of the stairs, that underground place imposed upon me its atmosphere of ruin and wreckage and of an abysmal chaos that, I was thankful to discover, I still found captivating. And when I saw the state of things down there, I was overcome with a trembling awe that I had never experienced before.