The Collected Short Fiction by Thomas Ligotti Part 1

The Collected Short Fiction of Thomas Ligotti.

An ambitious t.i.tle. It is intended that, one day, this collection will contain the complete short fiction of Thomas Ligotti.

The stories are presented in chronological order. An index in alphabetical order, replete with strike-throughs to show missing stories, is available here for those who have a t.i.tle in mind but cannot quite place the year it appeared. 'The' and 'A/An' are ignored for alphabetical ordering purposes, i.e. The Medusa is to be found, quite rightly, amongst Mad Night Of Atonement and The Mystics Of Muelenburg.

The introduction to each story shows where each tale was first published, with best attempts at accuracy-the history of Ligotti's work is harder to clarify the further one regresses towards the early eighties, particularly given his tendency to rewrite for newer collections. Owning Ligotti originals is expensive: my own collection doesn't allow me to provide different versions of revised pieces. I do give details of Thomas Ligotti collections which contain the piece but do not include other anthologies or appearances. Consequently www.ifsdb.org is recommended for full details of where any given story may be tracked down.

1.0 Initial Public Release-3rd June, 2012 Contains most commonly-available Ligotti stories, and a number of rarities. Stories from Crypt of Cthulhu and My Work Is Not Yet Done due in next version. With thanks to Duat.

Les Fleurs (1981).

April 17th.

Flowers sent out today in the a.m.

May 1st.

Today-and I thought it would never happen again-I have met someone about whom, I think, I can be hopeful. Her name is Daisy. She works in a florist shop! The florist shop, I might add, where I quietly paid a visit to gather some sorrowful flowers for Clare, who to the rest of the world is still a missing person. At first, of course, Daisy was politely reserved when I asked about some lilting blossoms for a loved one's memorial. I soon cured her, however, of this unnecessarily detached manner. In my deeply shy and friendly tone of voice I asked about some of the other flowers in the shop, ones having nothing to do with loss, if not everything to do with gain. She was quite glad to take me on a trumped up tour of hyacinths and hibiscuses. I confessed to knowing next to nothing about commercial plants and things, and remarked on her enthusiasm for the study, hoping all the while that at least part of her animation was on account of me.

"Oh, I love working with flowers," she said. "I think they're real interesting." Then she asked that did I know there were plants having flowers which opened only at night, and that certain types of violets bloomed only in darkness underground. My inner flow of thoughts and sensations paused briefly. Though I had already sensed she was a girl of special imagination this, I think, was the first overt hint I received of just how special it was. I judged my efforts to know her better would not be wasted, as they have been before.

"That's real interesting about those flowers," I said, smiling a hothouse warm smile. There was a pause which I filled in with my name. She then told me hers.

"Now what kind of flowers would you like," she asked. I sedately requested an arrangement suitable for the grave of a long late grandmother. Before leaving the shop I told Daisy I might need to stop by again to satisfy some future floral needs. She seemed to have no objection to this. With the vegetation nestled in my arm I songfully walked out of the store. I then proceeded directly to Chapel Gardens cemetary. For a while I sincerely made the effort to find a headstone that might by coincidence display my lost one's name. And any dates would just have to do. I thought she deserved this much at least. As things transpired however, the recipient of my floral memorial had to be someone named Clarence.

May 16th Daisy visited my apartment for the first time and fell in love with its quaint refurbishments. "I adore well-preserved old places," she said. It seemed to me she really did. I thought she would. She remarked what decorative wonders a few plants, hanging and otherwise, would do for the ancient rooms. She was obviously sensitive to the absence of natural adornments in my bachelor quarters.

"Night-blooming cereuses?" I asked, trying not to mean too much by this and give myself away. A mild grin appeared on her face, but it was not an issue I thought I could press at the time, and even now I only delicately press it within these sc.r.a.pbook pages. She wandered about the apartment some more. I watched her, seeing the place with new eyes. Then suddenly I realised I had regrettably overlooked something. She looked it over. The object was positioned on a low table before a high window and between its voluminous curtains. It seemed so vulgarly prominent to me then, especially since I hadn't intended to ler her see anything of that kind so early in our friendship.

"What is this?" she asked, her voice expressing a kind of outraged curiosity bordering on plain outrage.

"It's just a sculpture. I told you I do things like that. It's not very good. Kinda dumb."

She examined the piece more closely. "Watch that," I warned. She let out a tiny, unserious "Ow."

"Is it supposed to be a kind of cactus or something?" she inquired. For a moment, a hopeful one on my part, she seemed to express a genuine interest. "It has little teeth," she observed, "on those big tongue things."

They do look like tongues; I'd never thought of that. Rather ingenious comparison, considering. I hoped her imagination had found fertile earth and would grow, but instead she next revealed a kind of moribund disgust. "It looks more like some kind of animal than a sculpture of a plant. It's got a velvety kind of fur and looks like it might crawl away."

I felt like crawling away myself at that point. I asked her, as a quasi-botanist, if there were not plants resembling birds and other animal life. This was my feeble attempt to exculpate my creation from any charges of unnaturalness. It's strange how you're sometimes forced to take a different point of view through borrowed eyes. Finally I mixed some drinks and we went on to the other things. I put on some music.

Soon afterward, however, the bland harmony of the music was undermined by another unfortunate dissonance. The detective (Briceberg, I think) arrived for an unexpected second interview with me. Fortunately I was able to keep him and his questions out in the hallway the entire time. We reviewed the previous dialogue we'd had. I reiterated to him that Clare was just someone I worked with and with whom I was professionally friendly. It appeared that some of my co-workers, unidentified, suspected that Clare and I were romantically involved.

"Office gossip," I countered, knowing she was one girl who knew how to keep certain secrets, even if she could not be trusted with others. She was not much else, though. No, I said, I definitely had no idea where she could have disappeared to. I did manage to subversively hint, however, that I would not be overly surprised if in a sudden flight of neurotic despair she had finally set out for her secret dreamland. I myself had despaired to find within Clare's dark and promisingly moody borders lay a disappointing dreamland of white picket fences and flower-printed curtains. No, I didn't tell that to the detective. Besides, I further argued, it was well known in the office that Clare had begun dating someone approximately seven to ten days (my personal estimation of the span of her disloyalty) before her disappearance. So why bother me? This, I found out, was the reason: he had also been informed, he informed me, of my belonging to a certain offbeat organisation. I replied that there was nothing offbeat in serious philosophical study; furthermore, I was an artist, as he well knew, and as anybody knows, artistic personalities have a perfectly natural tendency toward such things. I thought he would understand if I put it that way. He did. The man appeared satisfied with my every statement. Indeed, I suspect he was predisposed to be satisfied with almost anything I might have said, short of outright confession of the foulest kind of play.

"Was that about the girl in your office?" Daisy asked me afterward.

"Mm-hm," I noised. I was brooding and silent for a while, hoping she would attribute this to my inward lament for that strange girl at the office and not to the lamentably imperfect evening we'd had.

"Maybe I'd better go," she said, and very soon did. There was not much to salvage of the evening anyway. After that I got very drunk on a liqueur tasting of flowers from open fields, or so it seems. I also took this opportunity to re-read a story about some men who visit the white waste wonderlands of the polar regions. I don't expect to dream tonight, having had all I need in my frigidly dreaming wakefulness. Brotherhood of Paradise offbeat indeed!

May 21st Day came up to the office of Glacy Regan Advertising Agency to meet me for lunch. I introduced her around the department to the few people I get along with, and definitely not to those who spread rumors about me. I showed her my little corner of commercial artistry and what I was working on.

"Oh, that's lovely," she said when she spied a picture of a nymph with flowers in her freshly-shampooed hair. "That's really nice." That "nice" remark almost spoiled my day. I asked her to look closely at the flowers mingling freshly in the fresh locks of the nymph. It was barely noticeable that one of the flower stems was growing out of, or perhaps into, the creature's head. Day didn't seem to appreciate the craftiness of my craft very much. And I thought we were making such progress along "offbeat" paths. (d.a.m.n that Briceberg!) Perhaps I should wait until we return from out trip before showing her any of my paintings. I want her to be prepared. Everything is all prepared for our vacation, at least; Day finally found someone to take care of the cat living at her flat.

June 10th Good-bye diary. See you when I get back.

September 1st I remember, with pleasure and anxiety, a particular episode from Day's an my tropical sojourn. Before too many more estranging weeks have pa.s.sed, I would like to take the opportunity to record this adventure. I'm not sure whether the circ.u.mstances here represent an impa.s.se or a turning point. Perhaps there is some point that I have still to entirely get. As yet I am, not surprisingly, in the dark. Here, nevertheless, is a fragment from our vacation interlude.

A Hawaiian paradise; at night. Actually we were just gazing upon the beachside luxuriance from out hotel veranda. Day was benighted by several exotic drinks that wore flowers on their foamy heads. I was in a similar condition to hers. A few moments of heady silence pa.s.sed, punctuated by an occasional sigh from Day. We heard the flapping of invisible wings whipping the warm air in darkness. We listened closely to the sounds of black orchids growing, even if there were none.

"Mmmmm," hummed Day. We were ripe for a whim. I had one, not knowing yet if I could pull it thoroughly off.

"Can you smell the mysterious cereus?" I asked, placing one hand on her far shoulder and dramatically pa.s.sing the other in a horizontal arc before the jungle beyond. "Can you?" I hypnotically repeated.

"I can," said a game Day.

"But can we find them, Day, and watch them open in the moonlight?"

"We can, we can," she chanted giddily. We could. Suddenly the smooth-skinned leaves of the night garden were brushing against our smooth-skinned selves. Day paused to touch a flower that was orange or red but smelled of a deep violet. I encouraged us to press on across the flower-bedded earth. We plunged deeper into the dream garden. Faster, faster, faster the sounds and smells rushed at us. It was easier than I thought. As some point, with almost no effort at all, I successfully managed our full departure from known geography, and our transition from a sub- into a superlunary realm.

"Day, Day," I shouted in the initial confusion and excitement. "We're here. I've never shown this to anyone. It's been such a hard secret, Day. I've wanted to tell you for so long, and show you, show you. No, don't speak. Look, look." The thrill, the thrill of seeing this dark paradise with new eyes. With doubled intensity would I now see my world. My world. She was somewhere near me in the darkness. I waited, seeing her a thousand ways in my mind before actually gazing at the real Day. I looked.

"What's wrong with the stars, the sky?" was all she said. she was trembling.

At breakfast the next morning I subtly probed her thoughts for impressions and judgements of the night before. She was badly hung over and had only a chaotic recall of this wacky expedition we made the previous night through somebody's backyard. Oh, well.

Since our return I have been working on a painting ent.i.tled "Sanctum Obscurum". Though I have done this kind of work many times before I am including in this one elements that I hope will stir Day's memory and precipitate a conscious recollection of not only a very particular night in the islands but of all the subtle and not so subtle hints and suggestions I have put to her in various ways throughout our friendship. I only pray she will understand.

September 14th.

Stars of disaster! Earthly and not unearthly asters are all that fill Day's heart with gladness. She is too much a lover of natural flora to be anything else. I know this now. I showed her the painting, and even imagined she antic.i.p.ated seeing it with some excitement. But I think she was just restless over what kind of fool I would make of myself next. She sat on the sofa, sc.r.a.ping her lower lip with a nervous forefinger. Opposite her I let a little cloth drop. She looked up as if there had been a startling noise. I was not wholly satisfied with the painting myself, but this exhibition was designed to serve an extra-aesthetic purpose. I searched her eyes for a reflection of understanding, a ripple of empathetic insight.

"Well?" I asked, the necessity of the word tolling doom. Her gaze told me all I needed to know, and the clarity of the message was reminiscent of another girl I knew once. She gave me a second chance, looking at the picture with a heavily theatrical scrutiny. The picture itself? An inner refuge, cozily crowding about the periphery of a central window of leaded gla.s.s. The interior beams with a honeyed haze, as of light glowing evenly through a patterned tapestry. Beyond the window too is a sanctuary of sorts, but not of man or terrestrial nature. Outside is an over-opulent kingdom of glittering, velvety jungle-shapes. Their hyper-radiant colours are calmed by the gla.s.s, so that this strange radiance contrasts with but does not threaten the chromatic integrity of the orderly world inside. Some stars, coloured from an even more spectral edge of the spectrum, blossom in the high darkness. The outer world glistens in stellar light and also gleams from within. And there is the back view of a lone figure more distinctly reflected than anything else upon the window's surface.

"Of course, it's very good. Very realistic."

Not at all, Daisy Day. Not realistic in the least. Some uncomfortable moments after that I found out she had to be leaving. It seemed she had made girl plans with a girlfriend of hers to do some things girls do when they get together with others of their kind. I said I understood, and I did. There was no doubt in my mind of the gender of Day's companion tonight. But it was for a different reason that I was distressed to see Day go off this evening. This is the first time, and this I could read in her every move and expression, that she has truly possessed an idea of my secrets. Of course, she always knew about the meetings I go to and all such things. I've even paraphrased and abridged for her the discussion which goes on at these gatherings, always disguising their real nature in progressively thinner guises, hoping one day to show her the naked truth. Well, tonight I think, the secret was stripped bare. Whether she believes them or not, which doesn't make any difference, she has as clear a notion as Clare ever did of all the secrets about me and the others. She has thoroughly gotten the picture now.

September 16th.

Tonight was our meeting, though it was not of the regularly scheduled sort. The others feel there's a problem, and of course I know they're right. Ever since I met here I could sense a growing uneasiness, which was their prerogative. Now, however, all has changed; my stupid, romantic misjudgement has seen to that. They expressed absolute horror that an outsider should know so much. I feel it myself. Day is a stranger now, and I wonder what her loquacious self has to say about her former friend, not to mention his present ones. Many others could find out. Eventually we would have no peace. The secretness we need for our lives would be lost, and with it would go the possible keys to a poignantly hard sought kingdom. We can all feel the horror of that estrangement. We've been through this before, and I'm glad to say not only with me (Harley and his "lads", for instance). We, of course, have no secrets from each other. The others know everything about me, and I about them. They knew every step of the way my relationship with Daisy. Some of them even predicted the outcome. And though I thought I was right in taking the extravagant chance that they were wrong, I must now defer to their prophecy. Those lonely names, mes freres.

"Do you want us to see it through," they said in so many words. I nodded, finally, in a score of ambiguous, half-hesitant ways. Then they sent me home. I'll never do this again, I thought, even though I've though this before. At home I stared at the razory dentes of my furry sculpture for a perilously long while. What she saw as tongue-like floral appendages were, of course, silent: the preservation of that silence is their whole and soulless purpose. I remember that she jokingly asked me once on what I modelled my art...

September 17th.

To Eden with me you will not leave..

To live in a cottage of crazy crooked eaves.

In your own happy home you take care these nights, When you let your cat in, turn on the lights!.

Something scurries behind and finds

a cozy place to stare,

Something sent to you from paradise,

paradisically so rare:

Tongues flowering; they leap out

laughing, lapping. Disappear!

I do this to pa.s.s the hours. Only to pa.s.s the hours.

September 17th 12:00am.

Flowers.

Dream Of A Mannikin (1982).

First published in Eldritch Tales #9, 1983.

Also published in: Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, The Nightmare Factory.

The girl who came into my office Wednesday for a session at two o'clock said her name was Amy Locher. (And didn't you once tell me that long ago you had a doll with this same first name?) Under the present circ.u.mstances I don't think it too gross a violation of professional ethics to use the subject's real name in describing her case to you. Certainly there's something more than simple ethics between us, ma chere amie. Besides, I understood from Miss Locher that you recommended me to her. This didn't seem necessarily ominous at first; perhaps, I speculated, your relationship with the girl was such that made it awkward for you to take her on as one of your own patients. Actually it's still not clear to me, my love, just how deeply you can be implicated in the overall experience I had with the pet.i.te Miss L. So you'll have to forgive any stupidities of mine, which may crudely crop up in the body of this correspondence.

My first impression of Miss Locher, as she positioned herself almost sidesaddle in a leather chair before me, was that of a tense and disturbed but basically efficient and self-seeking young woman. She was dressed and accessorized, I noticed, in much the cla.s.sic style, which you normally favor. I won't go into our first-visit preliminaries here (though we can discuss these and other matters at dinner this Sat.u.r.day if only you are willing). After a brief while we zeroed in on the girl's immediate impetus for consulting me. This involved, as you may or may not know, a distressing dream she had recently suffered. What will follow, as I have composed them from my tape of the September 10th session, are the events of that dream.

In the dream our subject has entered into a new life, at least to the extent that she holds down a different job from her waking one. She had already informed me that for some five years she'd worked as a secretary for a tool and die firm. (And could this possibly be your delicate touch? Tooling into oblivion.) However, her working day in the dream finds her as a long-time employee of a fashionable clothes shop. Like those state witnesses the government wishes to hide with new ident.i.ties, she has been outfitted by the dream with what seems to be a mostly tacit but somehow complete biography; a marvelous trick of the mind, this. It appears that the duties of her new job require her to change the clothes of the mannikins in the front window, this according to some mysterious and unfathomable schedule. She in fact feels as if her entire existence is slavishly given over to doing nothing but dressing and undressing these dummies. She is profoundly dissatisfied with her lot, and the mannikins become the focus of her animus.

Such is the general background presupposed by the dream, which now begins in proper. On a particularly gloomy day in her era of thralldom, our dummy dresser approaches her work. She is resentful and frightened, the latter emotion an irrational "given" at this point in the dream. An awesome load of new clothes is waiting to attire a window full of naked mannikins. Their unwarm, uncold bodies repel her touch. (Note this rare awareness of temperature in a dream, albeit neutral.) She bitterly surveys the ranks of crayon-like faces and then says: "Time to stop dancing and get dressed, sleeping beauties." These words are spoken without spontaneity, as if ritually used to inaugurate each dressing session. But the dream changes before the dresser is able to put one st.i.tch on the dummies, who stare at nothing with "antic.i.p.ating" eyes.

The working day is now finished. She has returned to her small apartment, where she retires to bed... and has a dream. (This dream is that of the mannikin dresser and not hers, she emphatically pointed out!) The mannikin dresser dreams she is in her bedroom. But what she now thinks of as her "bedroom" is from all appearances actually an archaically furnished hall with the dimensions of a small theater. The room is dimly lit by some jeweled lamps along the walls, the lights shining "with a strange glaziness" upon an intricately patterned carpet and upon the ma.s.sive pieces of antique and highly varnished furniture around the room. She perceives the objects of the scene more as pure ideas than physical things, for details are blurry and there are many shadows. One thing, though, she visualizes quite clearly as the dominant feature of the room: there is a wall that from the floor to the lofty ceiling is completely missing. In place of the absent wall is a view of star-cl.u.s.tered blackness, which she sees either through a great window or irrationally in the depths of an equally great mirror. In any case, this maze of stars and blackness appears as an enormous mural and suggests an uncertain location for a room formerly thought to be nestled at the cozy crossroads of well-known coordinates. Now it is truly just a lost point within an unknown universe of sleep.

The dreamer is positioned almost on the opposite side of the room from the brink of the starry abyss. Sitting on the edge of an armless, backless couch of complex brocade, she stares and waits "without breath or heartbeat," these functions being quite unnecessary to her dream self. Everything is in silence. This silence, however, is somehow charged with strange currents of force, which she can't really explain, an insane physics electrifying the atmosphere with demonic powers lurking just beyond the threshold of sensory perception. All is perceived with elusive dream senses.

Then a new feeling enters the dream, one slightly more tangible. There seems to be an iciness drifting in from the area of the great mirror or window, perhaps now merely a windowless aperture looking out on the chilly void. Suddenly our dreamer experiences a c.u.mulative terror of everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen to her. Without moving from her place on that uncomfortable couch, she visually searches the room for clues to the source of her terror. Many areas are inaccessible to her sight-like a picture that has been scribbled out in places-but she sees nothing specifically frightening and is relieved for a moment. Then her horror begins anew when she realizes for the first time that she hasn't looked behind her, and indeed she seems physically unable to do so now.

Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia she cannot articulate any words or clear ideas to herself. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that "she is dreaming," for some reason thinking of herself in the third person.

The words "she is dreaming" somehow form a ubiquitous motif for the present situation: as a legend written somewhere at the bottom of the dream, as echoing voices bouncing here and there around the room, as a motto printed upon fortune cookie-like strips of paper and hidden in bureau drawers, and as a broken record repeating itself on an ancient Victrola inside the dreamer's head. Then all the words of this monotonous slogan gather from their diverse places and like an alighting flock of birds settle in the area behind the dreamer's back. There they twitter for a moment, as upon the frozen shoulders of a statue in a park. This is actually the way it seems to the dreamer, including the statue comparison. Something of a statuesque nature is back there.

Approaching her. Something that is radiating a searing field of tension, coming closer, its great shadow falling across and enlarging her own there upon the floor. Still she cannot turn around, cannot move her body, which is stiff-jointed and rigid. Perhaps she can scream, she thinks, and makes an attempt to do so. But this fails, because by then there is already a firm and tepid hand that has covered her mouth from behind. The fingers on her lips feel like thick, naked crayons. Then she sees a long slim arm extending itself out over her left shoulder, and a hand that is holding some filthy rags before her eyes and shaking them, "making them dance." And at that moment a dry sibilant voice whispers into her ear: "It's time to get dressed, little dolling."

She tries to look away, her eyes being the only things she can still move. Now, for the first time, she notices that all around me room-in the shadowed places-are people dressed as dolls. Their forms are collapsed, their mourns opened wide. They do not look as if they are still alive. Some of them have actually become dolls, their flesh no longer supple and their eyes having lost the appearance of moistness. Others are at various intermediate stages between humanness and dollhood. With horror, the dreamer now becomes aware that her own mouth is opened wide and will not close.

But at last, through the power of her fear, she is able to turn around and face her menacer. At this crescendo of the dream she awakes. She does not, however, awake in the bed of the mannikin dresser in her first and outer dream, but instead finds herself directly transported into the tangled, though real, bedcovers of her secretary self. Not exactly sure where or who she is for a moment, her first impulse on awaking is to complete the movement she began in the dream-that is, turning around to look behind her. The hypnopompic hallucination that followed she claims as a "strong motivating factor" in her seeking the powers of a psychiatrist. For when she turned around in her bed, there was more to see than a dumb headboard with a blank wall above. Projecting out of that moon-whitened wall was the anterior half of a head, the face upon it that of a female mannikin. And what particularly disturbed her about this illusion (and here we go deeper into already dubious realms) was that the head didn't melt away into the background of the wall the way other post-dream projections she'd seen in the past had done; but instead, this protruding head, in one smooth movement, withdrew back into the wall. Her screams summoned a few unsympathetic eavesdroppers from neighboring apartments.

End of dream and related experiences.