Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

  Perhaps we expected Mr. Locrian to voice opposition to our project, but he did not do so. Though no one to my knowledge suspected him of preserving any morbid sentiment for the old asylum, it was difficult to forget that his grandfather had been the director of the Shire County Sanitarium during its declining years and that his father had closed down the place under circumstances that remained an obscure episode in the town’s history. If we spoke very little about the asylum and its burial ground, Mr. Locrian spoke of them not at all. This reticence, no doubt, served only to strengthen in our minds the intangible bond which seemed to exist between him and the awful ruin that sealed the horizon. Even I, who knew the old man better than anyone else in the town, regarded him with a degree of circumspection. Outwardly, of course, I was courteous to him, even friendly; he was, after all, the oldest and most reliable patron of my business. And not long after the demolition of the asylum was concluded, and the last of its former residents’ remains had been exhumed and hastily cremated, Mr. Locrian paid me a visit.

  At the very moment he entered the shop, I was examining some volumes of curiosa which had just arrived for him by special order. But even if I had grown jaded to such coincidences following years of dealing in books, which have a quality about them that seems to breed events of this nature, there was something unpleasant about this particular freak of timing.

  “Afternoon,” I said. “You know, I was just looking over—”

  “So I see.”

  Mr. Locrian approached the counter where tiers of books left very little open space. As he glanced at these new arrivals—hardly interested, it seemed—he slowly unbuttoned his overcoat, a bulky thing which made his head appear somewhat small for his body. How easily I can envision him on that day. And even now his voice sounds clear in my memory, a voice that was far too quiet for the old man’s harshly brilliant eyes. After a few moments he turned and casually began to wander about the shop, as if seeking out others who might be secluded among its stacks. He rounded a corner and momentarily left my view. “So at last it’s done,” he said. “Something of a feat, I would say. A deed worthy of record.”

  “I suppose it is,” I replied, watching as Mr. Locrian traversed the rear aisle of the shop, appearing and disappearing as he passed by several rows of shelves.

  “Without doubt it is,” he said, proceeding straight down the aisle in front of me. Finally reaching the counter behind which I stood, he placed his hands upon it, leaned forward, and said: “But what has been achieved, what has really changed?”

  The tone of voice in which he posed this question was both sardonic and morose, carrying undesirable connotations that echoed in all the remote places where truth had been shut up and abandoned like a howling imbecile. Nonetheless, I held to the lie.

  “If you mean that there’s very little difference now, I would have to agree. Only the removal of an eyesore. That was all we intended to do. Simply that.”

  Then I tried to draw his attention to the books that had arrived for him that day. But I was coldly interrupted when he said: “We must be walking different streets, Mr. Crane, and seeing quite different faces, hearing different voices in this town.” He paused, as if waiting for me to contradict him. His face took on a sly look. “Tell me, Mr. Crane, did you ever hear those stories about the sanitarium? What some people saw in its windows? Perhaps you yourself were one of them.”

  I said nothing, which he might have accepted as a confirmation that I was one of those people. He continued:

  “And isn’t there now the same sense of consternation, here in this town, as those stories inspired in anyone who heard them? Can you admit that the days and nights are much worse now than they were before? Of course, you may tell me that it’s just the moodiness of the season, the chill, the dour afternoons you observe through your shop window. On my way here, I actually heard some people saying such things. They also said other things which they didn’t think I could hear. Somehow everyone seems to know about these books of mine, Mr. Crane.”

  He did not look at me while delivering this last remark, but began to pace slowly between one end of the counter and the other.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Locrian, if you feel that I’ve violated some trust. I never imagined it would mean anything.”

  He paused in his pacing and now gazed at me with an expression of almost paternal forgiveness.

  “Of course,” he said. “But things are now very different, will you allow that?”

  “Yes,” I finally conceded.

  “But no one is exactly sure in what way things are different.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Did you know that my grandfather, Doctor Harkness Locrian, was buried in that cemetery you ravaged?”

  Feeling a sudden surprise and embarrassment, I replied: “I’m sure if you had said something.” But he ignored my words as if I had said nothing at all, or at least nothing that would deter him from imposing his confidences on me.

  “Is this safe to sit in?” he asked, pointing to an old chair by the front window. And beyond the window, unobstructed, the pale autumn sun was sinking down.

  “Yes, help yourself,” I said, noticing some passersby who had noticed Mr. Locrian and looked oddly at him.

  “My grandfather,” Mr. Locrian continued, “felt at home with his lunatics. You may be startled to hear such a thing. Though the house that is now mine was once his, he did not spend any time there, not even to sleep. It was only after they closed down the sanitarium that he actually became a resident of his own home, which by then had become the residence where I lived with my parents, who now had charge of the old man.

  “My grandfather passed his final years in a small upstairs room overlooking the outskirts of town, and I recall seeing him day after day gazing through his window at the sanitarium.”

  “I had no idea,” I interjected. “That seems rather—”

  “Please, before you are led to think that his was merely a sentimental attachment, however perverse, let me say that it was no such thing. His feelings with respect to the sanitarium were in fact quite incredible by reason of the manner in which he had used his authority at that place. I found out about this when I was still very young, but not so young that I could not understand the profound conflict that existed between my father and grandfather. I disregarded my parents’ admonitions that I not spend too much time with the old man, succumbing to the mystery of his presence. And one afternoon he revealed himself.

  “He was gazing through the window and never once turned to face me. But after we had sat in silence for some time, he started to whisper something. ‘They questioned,’ he said. ‘They accused. They complained that no one in that place ever became well.’ Then he smiled and began to elaborate. ‘What things had they seen,’ he hissed, ‘to give them such . . . wisdom? They did not look into the faces,’ no, he did not say ‘faces’ but ‘eyes.’ Yes, he said, ‘. . . did not look into the eyes of those beings, the eyes that reflected the lifeless beauty of the silent, staring universe itself.’

  “Those were his words. And then he talked about the voices of the patients under his care. He whispered, and I quote, that ‘the wonderful music of those voices spoke the supreme delirium of the planets as they go round and round like bright puppets dancing in the blackness.’ In the wandering words of those lunatics, he told me, the ancient mysteries were restored.

  “Like all true mysteriarchs,” Mr. Locrian went on, “my grandfather aspired to a knowledge that was unspoken and unspeakable. And every volume of the strange library he left to his heirs attests to this aspiration. As you know, I have added to this collection in my own way, as did my father. But our reasons were not those of the old doctor. At his sanitarium, Dr. Locrian had done something very strange, something that perhaps only he possessed both the knowledge and the impulse to do. It was not until many years later that my father attempted to explain everything to me, as I now am attempt
ing to explain it to you.

  “I have said that my grandfather was and always had been a mysteriarch, never a philanthropist of the mind, not a restorer of wounded psyches. In no way did he take a therapeutic approach with the inmates at the sanitarium. He did not view them as souls that were possessed, either by demons or by their own painful histories, but as beings who held a strange alliance with other orders of existence, who contained within themselves a particle of something eternal, a golden speck of magic which he thought might be enlarged. Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients’ madness, but to exasperate it—to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his ‘proper treatment,’ which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the ‘silent, staring universe’ where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal. And somehow, in his last days, my grandfather used this same procedure on himself, reaching into spaces beyond death.

  “I know this to be true, because one night late into my childhood, I awoke and witnessed the proof. Leaving my bed, I walked down the hallway toward the closed door of my grandfather’s room. Stopping in front of that door, I turned its cold handle and peeked timidly into the room, where I saw my grandfather sitting before the window in the moonlight. My curiosity must have overcome my horror, for I actually spoke to this specter. ‘What are you doing here, Grandfather?’ I asked. And without turning away from the window, he replied: ‘We are doing just what you see.’ Of course, what I saw was an old man who belonged in his grave, but who was now staring out his window across to the windows of the sanitarium, where others who were not human stared back.

  “When I fearfully alerted my parents to what I had seen, I was stunned that my father responded not with disbelief but with anger. I had disobeyed his warnings about my grandfather’s room. Then he revealed the truth just as I now reveal it to you, and year after year he reiterated and expanded upon this enigmatic learning: why that room must always be kept shut and why the sanitarium must never be disturbed. You may not be aware that an earlier effort to destroy the sanitarium was aborted through my father’s intervention. He was far more attached than I could ever be to this town, which ceased to have a future long ago. How long has it been since a new building was erected here? This place would have crumbled in time. The natural course of things would have dismantled it, just as the asylum would have disappeared had it been left alone. But when all of you rose up and marched toward the old ruin, I felt no impulse to interfere. You have brought it on yourselves,” he complacently ended.

  “And what is it we have done?” I asked in a cold voice, now suppressing a mysterious outrage.

  “You are only trying to preserve what remains of your mind’s peace. You know that something is very wrong in this town, that you should never have done what you did. But still you cannot draw any conclusion from what I have told you.”

  “With all respect, Mr. Locrian, how can you expect me to believe what you’ve told me?”

  He laughed weakly. “Actually, I don’t. But in time you will come to know. And then I will tell you more things, things you will not be able to keep yourself from believing.”

  As he pushed himself up from the chair by the window, I asked: “Why tell me anything? Why did you come here today?”

  “Why? Because I thought that perhaps my books had arrived. And also because everything is finished now. The others,” he shrugged, “. . . hopeless. You are the only one who could understand. Not now, but in time.”

  And now I do understand what the old man told me as I never could on that autumn day some forty years ago.

  It was toward the end of that same sullen day, in the course of a bleak twilight, that they began to appear. Like figures quietly emerging from the depths of memory, they struggled in the shadows and slowly became visible. But even if the transition had been subtle, insidiously graduated, it did not long go unnoticed. By nightfall they were distractingly conspicuous throughout the town, always framed in some high window of the structures they occupied: the living quarters above the shops in the heart of the town, the highest story of the old hotel, the empty towers of civic buildings, the lofty turrets and grand gables of the most distinguished houses, and the attics of the humblest homes.

  Their forms were as softly lustrous as the autumn constellations in the black sky above, their faces glowing with the same fixed expression of placid vacuity. And the habiliments of these apparitions were grotesquely suited to their surroundings. Buried many years before in antiquated clothes of a formal cut, they seemed to belong to the dying town in a manner its living members could not emulate. For the streets of the town now lost what life was left in them and became the dark corridors of a museum where these waxen nightmares had been put on exhibition.

  In daylight, when viewed at street level, the figures in the windows took on a dull wooden appearance. Somehow that was less maddening. It was then that some of us ventured into those high rooms. But nothing was ever found on the other side of what were now their windows—nothing save a tenantless room which no light would illuminate and which sooner or later drove us away in seizures of uncanny dread. By night, when it seemed we could hear them erratically tapping on the floors above us, their presence in our homes drove us out into the streets. Day and night we became sleepless vagrants, strangers in our own town. As I remember, we eventually ceased to recognize one another. But one name, one face was still known to all—that of Mr. Harkness Locrian, whose gaze haunted every one of us.

  It was undoubtedly in his house that the fire began which consumed every corner of the town. There were attempts made to oppose its path, but they were half-hearted and soon abandoned. For the most part we stood in silence, vacantly staring as the flames burned their way up to the high windows where spectral figures posed like portraits in their frames.

  Ultimately these demons were exorcised, their windows left empty. But only after the town had been annulled by the holocaust.

  Nothing more than charred wreckage remained. Afterward it got around that one of our citizens perished in the conflagration, though none of us inquired into the exact circumstances under which old Mr. Locrian met his fiery death.

  No effort was made by anyone to recover the town we had lost. When the first snow fell that year, it fell upon unclaimed ruins. But now, after the passing of so many years, it is not the ashen rubble of that town which haunts each of my hours; it is that one great ruin in whose shadow my mind has been interned.

  And if they have kept me in this room because I speak to a charred face that appears at my window, then let them protect this same room from violations after I am gone. For Mr. Locrian has been true to his promise; he has told me of certain things when I was ready to hear them. And he has other things to tell me, secrets surpassing all insanity. Commending me to an absolute cure, he will have immured another soul within the black and boundless walls of that eternal asylum where stars dance forever like bright puppets in the silent, staring void.

  THE SECT OF THE IDIOT

  The primal chaos, Lord of All . . . the blind idiot god—Azathoth.

  —NECRONOMICON

  The extraordinary is a province of the solitary soul. Lost the very moment the crowd comes into view, it remains within the great hollows of dreams, an infinitely secluded place that prepares itself for your arrival, and for mine. Extraordinary joy, extraordinary pain—the fearful poles of a world that both menaces and surpasses this one. It is
a miraculous hell towards which one unknowingly wanders. And its gate, in my case, was an old town whose allegiance to the unreal inspired my soul with a holy madness long before my body had come to dwell in that incomparable place.

  Soon after arriving in the town—whose identity, along with my own, it is best not to bring to light—I was settled in a high room overlooking the ideal of my dreams through diamond panes. How many times had I already lingered in mind before these windows and roamed in reverie the streets I now gazed upon below.

  I discovered an infinite stillness on foggy mornings, miracles of silence on indolent afternoons, and the strangely flickering tableau of neverending nights. A sense of serene enclosure was conveyed by every aspect of the old town. There were balconies, railed porches, and jutting upper stories of shops and houses that created intermittent arcades over sidewalks. Colossal roofs overhung entire streets and transformed them into the corridors of a single structure containing an uncanny multitude of rooms. And these fantastic crowns were echoed below by lesser roofs that drooped above windows like half-closed eyelids and turned each narrow doorway into a magician’s cabinet harboring deceptive depths of shadow.

  It is difficult to explain, then, how the old town also conveyed an impression of endlessness, of proliferating unseen dimensions, at the same time that it served as the very image of a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Even the nights above the great roofs of the town seemed merely the uppermost level of an earthbound estate, at most an old attic in which the stars were useless heirlooms and the moon a dusty trunk of dreams. And this paradox was precisely the source of the town’s enchantment. I imagined the heavens themselves as part of an essentially interior decor. By day: heaps of clouds like dust balls floated across the empty rooms of the sky. By night: a fluorescent map of the cosmos was painted upon a great black ceiling. How I ached to live forever in this province of medieval autumns and mute winters, serving out my sentence of life among all the visible and invisible wonders I had only dreamed about from so far away.