Noctuary

by Thomas Ligotti

  After making their way far into the dark catacombs of the Emerson house, they arrived at a remote room which seemed to have been left unfinished when the house had been erected so long ago. There were no lighting fixtures (except the one recently improvised by Graff), the stone walls were unplastered and unpainted, and the floor was of hard, bare earth. Graff pointed downward, and his crooked finger wandered in an arc through the sepulchral dimness of the room. Arthur Emerson now saw that the place had been turned into a charnel house for the remains of small animals: mice, rats, birds, squirrels, even a few young possums and raccoons. He already knew the cat to be an obsessive hunter, but it seemed strange that these carcasses had all been brought to this room, as if it were a kind of sanctum of mutilation and death.

  While contemplating this macabre chamber, Arthur Emerson noticed peripherally that Graff was fidgeting with some object concealed in his pocket. How strange indeed the old servant had become.

  "What have you got there?" Arthur Emerson asked.

  "Sir?" Graff replied, as though his manual gyrations had proceeded without his awareness. "Oh, this," he said, revealing a metal gardening implement with four clawlike prongs. "I was doing some work outdoors; that is, I was intending to do so, if there was time."

  "Time? On a day like this?"

  Obviously embarrassed and at a loss to explain himself, Graff pointed the taloned tool at the decomposing carcasses. "None of the animals actually seem to have been eaten," he quietly observed, and that curious piping in his throat sounded almost louder than his words.

  "No," Arthur Emerson agreed with some bewilderment. He then reached up to grasp a thick black extension cord which Graff had slung over the rafters; at the end of the cord was a light bulb which he tried to maneuver to more fully illuminate the room. Incautiously, perhaps, Arthur Emerson was thinking that there existed some method to the way the bodies of the slaughtered creatures were positioned across the entire floor. Graff's next remark approximated the unformed perception of his employer: "Like a trail of dominos winding round and round. But no true sense to it."

  Arthur Emerson readily granted the apt analogy to a maze of dominos, but concerning the second of Graff's statements there suddenly appeared to be some doubt. For at that moment Arthur Emerson looked up and saw a queerly shaped stain, as if made by mold or moisture, upon the far wall.

  "Shall I clean the place out?" asked Graff, raising the metal claw.

  "What? No," decided Arthur Emerson as he gazed at the shapeless, groping horror that appeared to have crawled from his own dream and stained itself into the stone before him.

  "Leave everything exactly as it is," he ordered the old whistling servant.

  Arthur Emerson returned to the library, and there he began to explore a certain shelf of books. This shelf comprised his private archives of handsomely bound travel diaries he had kept over the years. He withdrew one after another, paged through each volume, and then replaced it. Finally he found the one he wanted, which was the record of a visit to central and southern Italy made when he was a young man. Settling down,at his desk, he leaned into the words before him. After reading only a few sentences he began to wonder who this strange lyrical creature, this ghost, might be. No doubt himself, but in some previous incarnation, some bizarre anterior life.

  Spoleto (Ides of October)

  What wonders dwell within the vicoli! How often can I celebrate those fabulous little thoroughfares which form a maze of magic and dreams, and how often can I praise the medieval hill towns of Umbria which are woven of such streets? Guiding one into courtyards, they are snug roads invented for the meanderings of sleepwalkers. One is embraced by the gray walls of high houses, one is nestled beneath their wood-beamed roofs and beneath innumerable arches which cut the monotonous day into a wealth of shadows and frame the stars at night within random curves and angles. Nightfall in the vicoli! Pale yellow lanterns awake like apparitions in the last moments of twilight, claiming the dark narrow lanes for their own, granting an enchanted but somewhat uneasy passage to those who would walk there. And last evening I found myself among these spirits.

  Intoxicated as much by the Via Porta Fuga as by the wine I had drunk at dinner, I wandered across bridges, beneath arches and overhanging roofs, up and down battered stairways, past ivy-hung walls and black windows masked with iron grillwork. I turned a corner and glimpsed a small open doorway ahead. Without thinking, I looked inside as I passed, seeing only a tiny niche, not even a room, which must have been constructed in the space between two buildings. All I could clearly discern were two small candles which were the source and focus of a confusion of shadows. From inside a man's voice spoke to me in English: "A survival of the ancient world," said the voice, which carried the accent of a cultivated Englishman, sounding very bored and mechanical and very out of place in the circumstances. And I also must note a strange whistling quality in his words, as if his naturally low speaking voice were resonating with faintly high-pitched overtones. "Yes, sir, I am speaking to you," he continued. "A fragment of antiquity, a survival of the ancient world. Nothing to fear, there is no fee demanded."

  He now appeared in the doorway, a balding and flabby middle-aged gentleman in a tattered, tieless suit - the image of his own weary voice, the voice of an exhausted fairgrounds huckster. His face, as it reflected the pale yellow light of the lantern beside the open doorway, was a calm face; but its calmness seemed to derive from a total despair of soul rather than from a serenity of mind. "I am referring to the altar of the god," he said. "However extensive your learning and your travels, that one is not among those deities you will have heard about; that one is not among those divinities you may have laughed about. It could be distantly related, perhaps, to those numina of Roman cesspools and sewage systems. But it is not a mere Cloacina, not a Mephitis or Robigo. In name, the god is known as Cynothoglys: the god without shape, the god of changes and confusion, the god of decompositions, the mortician god of both gods and men, the metamortician of all things. There is no fee demanded."

  I remained where I stood, and then the man stepped out into the little vicolo in order to allow me a better view through the open doorway, into the candlelit room beyond. I could now see that the candles were shining on either side of a low slab, cheap candles that sent out a quivering haze of smoke. Between these tapers was an object which I could not define, some poor shapeless thing, perhaps the molten relic of a volcanic eruption at some distant time, but certainly not the image of an ancient deity. There seemed to be nothing and no one else inhabiting that sinister little nook.

  I may now contend that, given the unusual circumstances described above, the wisest course of action would have been to mumble a few polite excuses and move on. But I have also described the spell which is cast by the vicoli, by their dimly glowing and twisted depths. Entranced by these dreamlike surroundings, I was thus prepared to accept the strange gentleman's offer, if only to enhance my feeling of intoxication with all the formless mysteries whose name was now Cynothoglys.

  "But be solemn, sir. I warn you to be solemn."

  I stared at the man for a brief moment, and in that moment this urging of my solemnity seemed connected in some way to his own slavish and impoverished state, which I found it difficult to believe had always been his condition. "The god will not mock your devotions, your prayers," he whispered and whistled. "Nor will it be mocked."

  Then, stepping through the little doorway, I approached the primitive altar. Occupying its center was a dark, monolithic object whose twisting shapelessness has placed it beyond simple analogies in my imagination. Yet there was something in its contours - a certain dynamism, like that of great crablike roots springing forth from the ground - which suggested more than mere chaos or random creation. Perhaps the following statement could be more sensibly attributed to the mood of the moment, but there seemed a definite power somehow linked to this gnarled effigy, a gloomy force which was disguised by its monumentally static appearance. Toward the summit of the mutilated sc
ulpture, a crooked armlike appendage extended outward in a frozen grasp, as if it had held this position for unknown eons and at any time might resume, and conclude, its movement.

  I drew closer to the contorted idol, remaining in its presence far longer than I intended. That I actually found myself mentally composing a kind of supplication tells more than I am presently able about my psychological and spiritual state last evening. Was it this beast of writhing stone or the spell of the vicoli which inspired my prayer and determined its form? It was, I think, something which they shared, a suggestion of great things: great secrets and great sorrows, great wonders and catastrophes, great destinies, great doom. and a single great death. My own. Drugged by this inspiration, I conceived my ideal leavetaking from this earth - a drama prepared by strange portents, swiftly developed by dreams and visions nurtured in an atmosphere of sublime dread, growing overnight like some gaudy fungus in a forgotten cellar, and always with the awful hand of the mortician god working the machinery behind the scenes. Beasts and men would form an alliance with great Cynothoglys, the elements themselves would enter into the conspiracy, a muted vortex of strange forces all culminating in a spectral denouement, all converging to deliver me to the inevitable, but deliver me in a manner worthy of the most expansive and unearthly sensations of my life. I conceived the primal salvation of tearing flesh, of seizure by the god and the ecstatic rending of the frail envelope of skin and sinew. And as others only sink into their deaths - into mine I would soar.

  But how could I have desired this to be? I now wonder, fully sober following my debauch of dreams. Perhaps I am too repentant of my prayer and try to reassure myself by my very inability to give it a rational place in the history of the world. The mere memory of my adventure and my delirium, I expect, will serve to carry me through many of the barren days ahead, though only to abandon me in the end to a pathetic demise of meaningless pain. By then I may have forgotten the god I encountered, along with the one who served him like a slave. Both seem to have disappeared from the vicoli, their temple standing empty and abandoned. And now I am free to imagine that it was not I who came to the vicoli to meet the god, but the god who came to meet me.

  After reading these old words, Arthur Emerson sat silent and solemn at his desk. Was it over for him, then? All the portents had appeared and all the functionaries of his doom were now assembled, both outside the library door - where the footfall of man and beast sounded — and beyond the library windows, where a horrible thing without shape had begun to loom out of the fog, reaching through the walls and windows as if they too were merely mist. Were a thousand thoughts of outrage and dread now supposed to rise within him at the prospect of this occult extermination? After all, he was about to have forced upon him that dream of death, that whim of some young adventurer who could not resist being granted a wish or two by a tourist attraction.

  And now the crying of the swans had begun to sound from the lake and through the fog and into the house. Their shrieks were echoing everywhere, and he might have predicted as much. Would he soon be required to add his own shrieks to theirs, was it now time to be overcome by the wonder of the unknown and the majesty of fate; was this how it was done in the world of doom?

  Risking an accusation of bad manners, Arthur Emerson failed to rise from his chair to greet the guest he had invited so long ago. "You are too late," he said in a dry voice. "But since you have taken the trouble..." And the god, like some obedient slave, descended upon its victim.

  It was only at the very end that Arthur Emerson's attitude of incuriosity abandoned him. As he had guessed, perhaps even wished, his voice indeed became confused with the screaming of the swans, soaring high into the muffling fog.

  Mrs Rinaldi's Angel

  From time to time during my childhood, the striking dreams that I nightly experienced would become brutally vivid, causing me to awake screaming. The shouting done, I sank back into my bed in a state of super-enervation resulting from the bodiless adventures imposed upon my slumbering self. Yet my body was surely affected by this nocturnal regimen, exercised harshly by visions both crystalline and confused. This activity, however immaterial, only served to drain my reserves of strength and in a few moments stole from me the benefits of a full night's sleep. Nevertheless, while I was deprived of the privilege of a natural rest, there may also have been some profit gained: the awful opulence of the dream, a rich and swollen world nourished by the exhaustion of the flesh. The world, in fact, as such. Any other realm seemed an absence by comparison, at best a chasm in the fertile graveyard of life.

  Of course my parents did not share my feelings on this subject. "What is wrong with him," I heard my father bellow from far down the hallway, his voice full of reproach. Shortly afterward my mother was by my side. "They seem to be getting worse," she would say. Then on one occasion she whispered, "I think it's time we did something about this problem."

  The tone of her voice told me that what she had in mind was not the doctor's appointment so often urged by my father. Hers was a more dubious quest for a curative, though one which no doubt also seemed more appropriate to my "suffering." My mother was always prone to the enticements of superstition, and my troubled dreams appeared to justify an indulgence in unorthodox measures. Her shining and solemn gaze betrayed her own dreams of trafficking with esoteric forces, of being on familiar terms with specialists in a secret universe, entrepreneurs of the intangible.

  "Tomorrow your father is leaving early on business. You stay home from school, and then we'll go and visit a woman I know."

  Late the following morning, my mother and I went to a house in one of the outlying neighborhoods of town and were graciously invited to be seated in the parlor of the long-widowed Mrs Rinaldi. Perhaps it was only the fatigue my dreams had inflicted on me that made it so difficult to consolidate any lucid thoughts or feelings about the old woman and her remote house. Although the well-ordered room we occupied was flush with sunlight, this illumination somehow acted in the way of a wash over a watercolor painting, blurring the outline of things and subduing the clarity of surfaces. This obscurity was not dispersed even by the large and thickly shaded lamp Mrs Rinaldi kept lighted beside the small divan on which she and my mother sat. I was close to them in an old but respectably upholstered armchair, and yet their forms refused to come into focus, just as everything else in that room resisted definition. How well I knew such surroundings, those deep interiors of dream where everything is saturated with unreality and more or less dissolves under a direct gaze. I could tell how neatly this particular interior was arranged - pictures perfectly straight and tight against the walls, well-dusted figurines arranged along open shelves, lace-fringed tablecovers set precisely in place, and delicate silk flowers in slim vases of colored glass. Yet there was something so fragile about the balance of these things, as if they were all susceptible to sudden derangement should there be some upset, no matter how subtle, in the secret system which held them together. This volatility seemed to extend to Mrs Rinaldi herself, though in fact she may have been its source.

  Casually examined, she appeared to present only the usual mysteries of old women who might be expected to speak with a heavy accent, whether or not they actually did so. She wore the carnal bulk and simple attire of a peasant race, and her calm manner indeed epitomized the peasant quietude of popular conception: her hands folded without tremor upon a wide lap and her eyes mildly attentive. But those eyes were so pale, as was her complexion and gauzy hair. It was as if some great strain had depleted her, and was continually depleting her, of the strong coloring she once possessed, draining her powers and leaving her vulnerable to some tenuous onslaught. At any moment during the time my mother was explaining the reason why we sought her help, Mrs Rinaldi might have degenerated before our eyes, might have finally succumbed to spectral afflictions she had spent so many years fending off, both for her own sake and for the sake of others. And still she might have easily been mistaken for just another old woman whose tidy parlor displayed no obj
ect or image that would betray her most questionable and perilous occupation.

  "Missus," she said to my mother, though her eyes were on me, "I would like to take your son into another room in this house. There I believe I may begin to help him."

  My mother assented and Mrs Rinaldi escorted me down a hallway to a room at the back of the house. The room reminded me of a little shop of some kind, one that kept its merchandise hidden in dark cabinets along the walls, in great chests upon the floor, boxes and cases of every sort piled here and there. Nothing except these receptacles, this array of multiform exteriors, was exposed to view. The only window was tightly shuttered and a bare light bulb hanging overhead served as the only illumination.

  There was nowhere to sit, only empty floor space; Mrs Rinaldi took my hand and stood me at the center of the room. After gazing rather sternly down at me for some moments, she proceeded to pace slowly around me.

  "Do you know what dreams are?" she asked quietly, and then immediately began to answer her own question. "They are parasites - maggots of the mind and soul, feeding on the mind and soul as ordinary maggots feed on the body. And their feeding on the mind and soul in turn gnaws away at the body, which in turn again affects the mind and the soul, and so on until death. These things cannot be separated, nor can anything else. Because everything is terribly inseparable and affects every other thing. Even the most alien things are connected together with every other thing. And so if these dreams have no world of their own to nourish them, they may come into yours and possess it, exhaust it little by little each night. They use your world and use it up. They wear your face and the faces of things you know: things that are yours they use in ways that are theirs. And some persons are so easy for them to use, and they use them so hard. But they use everyone and have always used everyone, because they are from the old time, the time before all the worlds awoke from a long and helpless night. And these dreams, these things that are called dreams, are still working to throw us back into that great mad darkness, to exhaust each one of us in our lonely sleep and to use up everyone until death. Little by little, night after night, they take us away from ourselves and from the truth of things. I myself know very well what this can be like and what the dreams can do to us. They make us dance to their strange illusions until we are too exhausted to live. And they have found in you, child, an easy partner for their horrible dancing."