The Collected Short Fiction by Thomas Ligotti Part 36

'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 d.a.m.ned,' 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n hole!'

They dragged the body into the closet and dropped it into the bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt.

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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, I felt my mind and senses being pulled back into the dark region of Candy's bas.e.m.e.nt. 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.

Everything around me was in pieces. It looked as if my father had taken an ax and hacked up the whole apparatus on which he had once placed all his hopes of accomplishing some task that only he cared to envision. Wires and cords hung from the ceiling, all of them chopped through and dangling like vines in a jungle. A greasy, greenish liquid was running across the floor and sluicing into the bas.e.m.e.nt drain. I waded through an undergrowth of broken gla.s.s and torn papers. I reached down and picked up some of the pages savagely ripped from my father's voluminous notebooks. Meticulous diagrams and graphs were obscured by words and phrases written with a thick, black marker. Page after page had the word 'IMPURE' scrawled over them like graffiti on the walls of a public toilet. Other recurring exclamations were: 'NOTHING BUT IMPURITIES,''IMPURE HEADS,''NOTHING REVEALED,''NO PURE CONCEPTION,''IMPOSSIBLE IMPURITIES,' and, finally, 'THE FORCES OF AN IMPURE UNIVERSE.'

At the far end of the bas.e.m.e.nt I saw a hybrid contraption that looked as if it were a cross between a monarch's throne and an electric chair. Bound to this device by straps confining his arms and legs and head was the young man in a second-hand suit. His eyes were open, but they had no focus in them. I noticed that the greasy, greenish liquid had its source in a container the size of a water-cooler bottle that was upended next to the big chair. There was a label on the container, written on masking tape, that read SIPHONAGE. Whatever spooks or spirits or other ent.i.ties had inhabited the young man's head-and my father appeared to have drained off a sizeable quant.i.ty of this stuff-were now making their way into the sewer system. They must have lost something, perhaps grown stale, once released from their container, because I felt no aura of the spectral-either malignant or benign-emanating from this residual substance. I was unable to tell if the young man was still alive in any conventional sense of the word. He may have been. In any case, his condition was such that my family would once again need to find another house in which in live.

'What happened down here?' said my sister from the other side of the bas.e.m.e.nt. She was sitting on the stairs. 'Looks like another one of dad's projects took a bad turn.'

'That's the way it looks,' I said, walking back toward the stairs.

'Do you think that guy was carrying much money on him?'

'I don't know. Probably. He was here collecting for some kind of organization.'

'Good, because mom and I came back broke. And it's not as if we spent all that much.'

'Where did you go?' I said, taking a seat beside my sister.

'You know I can't talk about that.'

'I had to ask.'

After a pause, my sister whispered, 'Daniel, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?'

I tried my best to conceal any reaction to my sister's question, even though it had caused a cyclone of images and emotions to arise within me. That was what had confused me about the police detective's body. In my imagination, I had always pictured a neat separation of parts. But it was nothing like that, as I have already pointed out. Everything was all mixed together. Thank you, Elisa. Despite her adherence to my mother's strict rule of silence, my sister always managed to give away something of what they had been up to.

'Why do ask that?' I said, also whispering. 'Did you meet someone like that when you were with mom?'

'Absolutely not,' she said.

'You have to tell me, Elisa. Did mom... did she talk about me... did she talk about me to this person?'

'I wouldn't know. I really wouldn't,' said Elisa as she rose to her feet and walked back upstairs. When she reached the top step, she turned around and said, 'How's this thing between you and mom going to end? Every time I mention your name, she just clams up. It doesn't make any sense.'

'The forces of an impure universe,' I said rhetorically.

'What?' said my sister.

'Nothing that drives anybody makes any sense, if you haven't noticed that by now. It's just our heads, like dad's always saying.'

'Whatever that means. Anyway, you better keep your mouth shut about what I said. I'm never telling you anything ever again,' she finished and then went upstairs.

I followed my sister into the living room. My father was now sitting up on the sofa next to my mother, who was opening boxes and pulling things out of bags, presumably showing what she had bought on her latest trip with Elisa. I sat down in a chair across from them.

'Hi, baby,' said my mother.

'Hi, Mom,' I said, then turned to my father. 'Hey, Dad, can I ask you something?' He still seemed a bit delirious. 'Dad?'

'Your father's very tired, honey.'

'I know. I'm sorry. I just want to ask him one thing. Dad, when you were talking to that guy, you said something about three... you called them principles.'

'Countries, deities,' said my father from a deep well of depression. 'Obstacles to pure conception.'

'Yeah, but what was the third principle? You never said anything about that.'

But my father had faded out and was now gazing disconsolately at the floor. My mother, however, was smiling. No doubt she had heard all of my father's talk many times over.

'The third principle?' she said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke in my direction. 'Why, it's families, sweetheart.'

Sideshow, And Other Stories (2003).

First published in Sideshow, And Other Stories, 2003.

Also published in: Teatro Grottesco.

At the time I met the man who auth.o.r.ed the stories that follow, I had reached a crisis point in my own work as a writer of fiction. This gentleman, who was considerably older than I, was several steps ahead of me along the same path. 'I have always desired to escape,' he said, 'from the grip of show business.' He said these words to me across the table in a corner booth of the coffee shop where all our meetings took place in the late hours of the night.

We had been first introduced by a waitress working the night shift who noticed we were both insomniacs who came into the coffee shop and sat for many hours smoking cigarettes (the same brand), drinking the terrible decaffeinated coffee they served in that place, and every so often jotting something in the respective notebooks which we both kept at hand. 'All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by-whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans-all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires-show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there-' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep?' I told him his point was well taken and withdrew my challenge, having only half-heartedly advanced it in the first place. The conversation nevertheless proceeded along the same course-he submitting one example after another of show business phenomena; I attempting to propose plausible exceptions to the idiosyncratic doctrine with which he seemed hopelessly obsessed-until we went our separate ways just before dawn.

That first meeting set the tone and fixed the subject matter of my subsequent encounters in the coffee shop with the gentleman I would come to regard as my lost literary father. I should say that I deliberately encouraged the gentleman's mania and did all I could to keep our conversations focused on it, since I felt that his show-business obsession related in the most intimate way with my own quandary, or crisis, as a writer of fiction. What exactly did he mean by 'show business'? Why did he find the 'essentially show-business nature' of all phenomena to be problematic? How did his work as an author coincide with, or perhaps oppose, what he called the 'show-business world'?

'I make no claims for my writing, nor have any hopes for it as a means for escaping the grip of show business,' he said. 'Writing is simply another action I perform on cue. I order this terrible coffee because I'm in a second-rate coffee shop. I smoke another cigarette because my body tells me it's time to do so. Likewise, I write because I'm prompted to write, nothing more.'

Seeing an entrance to a matter more closely related to my own immediate interest, or quandary or crisis, I asked him about his writing and specifically about what focus it might be said to have, what 'center of interest,' as I put it.

'My focus, or center of interest,' he said, 'has always been the wretched show business of my own life-an autobiographical wretchedness that is not even first-rate show business but more like a series of sideshows, senseless episodes without continuity or coherence except that which, by virtue of my being the ringmaster of this miserable circus of sideshows, I a.s.sign to it in the most bogus and show-businesslike fashion, which of course fails to maintain any genuine effect of continuity or coherence, inevitably so. But this, I've found, is the very essence of show business, all of which in fact is no more than sideshow business. The unexpected mutations, the sheer baselessness of beings, the volatility of things... By necessity we live in a world, a sideshow world, where everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.'

'By what standard?' I interjected before his words-which had arrived at the very heart of the crisis, quandary, and suffocating cul-de-sac of my existence as a writer of fiction-veered away. 'I said by what standard,' I repeated, 'do you consider everything peculiar and ridiculous?'

After staring at me in a way that suggested he was not only considering my question, but was also evaluating me and my entire world, he replied: 'By the standard of that unnameable, unknowable, and no doubt nonexistent order that is not show business.'

Without speaking another word he slid out of the corner booth, paid his check at the counter cash register, and walked out of the coffee shop.

That was the last occasion on which I spoke with this gentleman and fellow writer. The next time I visited the coffee shop and sat in the corner booth, the waitress who worked the night shift presented me with a small sheaf of pages. 'He said to give these to you and that he wouldn'tbe back for them.'

'That's all he said?' I asked.

'That's all,' she answered.

I thanked her, ordered a decaffeinated coffee, lit a cigarette, and began to read the tales that follow.

I. THE MALIGNANT MATRIX.

For years I had been privileged to receive frequent and detailed communications regarding the most advanced scientific and metaphysical studies. This information was of a highly specialized nature that seemed to be unknown to the common run of scientists and metaphysicians, yet was nevertheless attainable by such avid non-specialists as myself, providing of course that one possessed a receptive temperament and willingly opened oneself to certain channels of thought and experience.

One day I received a very special communication whereby I learned that an astounding and quite unexpected breakthrough had been achieved-the culmination, it appeared, of many years of intense scientific and metaphysical study. This breakthrough, the communication informed me, concerned nothing less than the discovery of the true origins of all existential phenomena, both physical and metaphysical-the very source, as I understood the claims being made, of existence in the broadest possible sense. This special communication also told me that I had been selected to be among those who would be allowed a privileged view of everything involved in this startling breakthrough discovery, and therefore would be guaranteed a rare insight into the true origins of all existential phenomena. Since I was an individual who was highly receptive in temperament to the matter at hand, I need only present myself at the particular location where this incredible advance in scientific and metaphysical knowledge had occurred.

Scrupulously I followed the directions communicated to me, even though, for reasons that were not explained, I was not fully apprised of the specifics of my actual destination. Nevertheless, I could not help imagining that I would ultimately find myself a visitor at a sophisticated research facility of some kind, a shining labyrinth of the most innovative devices and apparatus of extraordinary complexity. The place where I finally arrived, however, in no way conformed to my simple-minded and deplorably conventional expectations. This scientific and metaphysical installation, as I thought of it, was located in a large building, but one that was very old. I entered it, according to my instructions, through a small door that I found at the end of a dark and narrow alley that ran along the side of the old building. I opened the door and stepped inside, barely able to see two paces in front of me, for by now it was the middle of the night. There was a faint click as the door closed behind my back, and all I could do was wait for my eyesight to adjust to the darkness.

Moonlight shone down through a window somewhere above me and spread dimly across a dirty concrete floor. I could see that I was standing at the bottom of an empty stairwell. I heard faint sounds of something dragging itself directly toward me. Then I saw what it was that emerged from a shadowy area of that empty stairwell. It was a head supported by a short length of neck on which it pulled itself along like a snail, moving by inches upon the concrete floor. Its features were indistinct yet nonetheless seemed deformed or mutilated, and it was making sounds whose meaning I could not comprehend, its angular jaw opening and closing mechanically. Before the head moved very close to me I noticed there was something else in another, even more shadowy corner of that bleak, moonlit stairwell. Not much larger than the head that was approaching me across the floor, this other object was to my eyes an almost wholly shapeless ma.s.s, quite pale, which I was able to identify as animated tissue only because, every so often, it opened itself up like a giant bivalved mollusk found at great suboceanic depths. And it made the same sound as the crawling head was making, both of them crying out at the bottom of that dim and empty stairwell, the place, I had been informed, where I might confront the source of all existential phenomena.

I thought that I might have been misled, as I stood there listening to the cries of those creatures at the bottom of that empty stairwell, and I left that place through the door by which I had entered it. But just as that door was closing behind me I realized how much those sounds I heard reminded me of the tiny voices of things which, however imperfect their form, have been newly thrust into the world of phenomenal existence.

II. PREMATURE COMMUNICATION.

Early one winter morning during my childhood, while I was still lying in bed upstairs, watching a few snowflakes floating outside my bedroom window, I heard a voice from downstairs say these words: 'The ice is breaking up on the river.' This voice was like no other that was familiar to me. It was very harsh and yet very quiet at the same time, as though a heap of rusted machinery had whispered something from the shadows of an old factory. Nothing else was said by this voice.

When I left my room and went downstairs, I found my parents in the kitchen as they usually were at that time on winter mornings, my father reading the newspaper and my mother preparing breakfast while the same snowflakes which were floating outside the window of my room upstairs were now floating so slowly outside the kitchen window. Before I could say anything to either of my parents, my mother suddenly told me that I would have to stay inside the house for the rest of the day, offering no reason for making this demand. In reaction I asked, in the words of a child, if my confinement to the house that day had anything to do with the words that the voice had spoken, that 'the ice was breaking up on the river.' From across the kitchen my father looked up at my mother, neither of them saying a word. In that moment I realized for the first time how many things in the world were entirely unknown to me, how reticent, often wholly silent, were the people and places of my small childhood world.

I have no memory of the explanation my mother or my father might have offered me as the reason why I had to stay in the house the rest of that day. Actually I had no desire to go outdoors that winter morning, not while that voice, whose mystery remained undispelled by my mother or my father, continued to speak to me in its harsh and quietly distant tone from all the dim corners of the house, as the snowflakes floated outside every window, repeating over and over that the ice was breaking up on the river.

It was not many days afterward that my parents placed me in a hospital where I was administered several potent medications and other forms of treatment. On the way to the hospital my father restrained me in the back seat of the car while my mother served as driver, and I calmed down only during those brief moments when we pa.s.sed across an old bridge that was built over a fairly wide river which I had never before seen.

During my stay in the hospital I found that it was the medications I was given, rather than the other forms of treatment, that allowed me to grasp the nature of the voice which I had heard on a particular winter morning. I knew that my parents would be crossing that old bridge whenever they came to visit me at the hospital, so on the day when my doctor and a close relative of mine appeared in my room to explain to me the details of a certain 'tragic event,' I was the first one to speak. Before they could tell me of my mother and father's fate, and the way in which it had all happened, I said to them: 'The ice has broken up on the river.'

And the voice speaking these words was not the voice of a child but a harsh yet whispery voice emanating from the depths of that great and ancient machinery which powered, according to its own faulty and unknown mechanisms, the most infinitesimal movements of the world as I knew it. Thus, as my doctor and a close relative of mine explained further what had happened to my parents, I only stared out the window, watching the machinery (into which I had now been a.s.similated) as it produced each snowflake that fell one by one outside the window of my hospital room.

III. THE ASTRONOMIC BLUR.

Along a street of very old houses there was a building that was not a house at all but a little store which kept itself open for business at all hours of the day and night, every single day of the year. At first the store appeared to me as merely primitive, a throwback to some earlier time when a place of business might be allowed to operate in an otherwise residential district, however decayed the houses of the neighborhood may have been. But it was much more than primitive in the usual sense, for the little store declared no name for itself, offered no outward sign to give an indication of its place in the world around it. It was only the local residents who called it 'the little store,' when they spoke of it at all.

There was a small window beside the dark wooden door of the building, but if one tried to peer through the foggy gla.s.s of this window, nothing recognizable could ever be seen-only a swirling blur of indefinite shapes. And although the building's interior lights were always left on, even in the middle of the night, it was not the bright steady illumination of electricity that seemed to shine through the window of the place but a dim, vaguely flickering glow. Neither was anyone spied who might have been regarded as the proprietor of the little store, and no one was ever seen either going into or coming out of it, least of all the people in the surrounding neighborhood. Even if a pa.s.sing car stopped in front and someone got out of the vehicle with the apparent intention of entering the store, they would never get farther than the sidewalk before turning around, getting back inside their car, and driving away. The children in the area always crossed to the opposite side of the street when walking by the little store.

Of course I was curious about this building from the time I first moved into one of the old houses in the neighborhood. I immediately noticed what I then considered the primitive, virtually primal nature of the little store, and I would at great length observe this darkly luminous structure whenever I went out walking, as I often did, in the late hours of the night. I followed this practice for some time, never noticing any change in the little store, never seeing anything that I had not seen the first night I began observing the place.

Then one night something did change in the little store, and something also changed in the neighborhood around it. It was only for a moment that the dim glow burning within the little store seemed to flare up before returning to its usual state of a dull, smoldering flicker. This was all that I saw. Nevertheless, that night I did not return to my home, because it was now glowing with the same primordial light as that within the little store. All the old houses in the neighborhood were lit up in the same way, all of their little windows glowing dimly at that late hour. No one will ever again emerge from those houses, I thought as I abandoned the streets of that neighborhood. Nor will anyone ever desire to enter them.

Perhaps I had seen too deeply into the nature of the little store, and it was simply warning me to look no further. On the other hand, perhaps I had been an accidental witness to something else altogether, some plan or process whose ultimate stage is impossible to foresee, although there still comes to me, on certain nights, the dream or mental image of a dark sky in which the stars themselves burn low with a dim, flickering light that illuminates an indefinite swirling blur wherein it is not possible to observe any definite shapes or signs.

IV. THE ABYSS OF ORGANIC FORMS.

For years I lived with my half-brother, who had been confined to a wheelchair since childhood due to a congenital disease of the spine. Although placid much of the time, my brother, or rather half-brother, would frequently gaze upon me with a bitter and somehow brutish stare. His eyes were such a strange shade of gray, so pale and yet so luminous, that they were the first thing one noticed upon approaching him, and the fact that he inhabited a wheelchair always took second place to the unusual, the truly demonic character of his eyes, in which there was something that I could never bring myself to name.

It was only on rare occasions that my half-brother left the house in which he and I lived together, and these were almost exclusively those times when, at his insistence, I took him to a local racecourse where horses ran most afternoons during the racing season. There we watched the animals come parading out onto the track and run every race from first to last on a given day, never placing a single wager on any of them, although we always brought home a racing program which contained the names and performance statistics relating to all the horses we had seen. For years I observed my brother, as he sat in his wheelchair just behind the fence that bordered the racetrack, and I noticed how intensely he gazed upon those horses, his gray eyes displaying a different aspect altogether from the bitter and brutish quality they always a.s.sumed when we were at home. On days when we did not visit the racecourse, he would pore over the old racing programs containing the names of countless horses and the complex statistics relating to their compet.i.tive performance, as well as information regarding their physical nature, including the age of the horses and their various colors, whether brown or bay, roan or gray.

One day I returned to the house where I had lived for many years with my half-brother and found his wheelchair empty in the middle of our living room. Surrounding it in a circle were pieces of paper torn from the old racing programs that my brother collected. A rather considerable mound of these sc.r.a.ps of paper were heaped around my brother's, my half-brother's, wheelchair, and on each of them was printed the name of one of the many horses we had seen on our visits to the racecourse. I myself was quite familiar with these names: Avatara, Royal Troubadour, Hallview Spirit, Mechanical Harry T, and so on. Then I noticed that there was a trail of these torn pieces of paper which seemed to lead away from the wheelchair and toward the front door. I followed them outside the house, where I found a few more fragments of old racing programs out on the porch. But the trail ended even before I reached the sidewalk, the small sc.r.a.ps of paper having been dispersed by the brisk winds of a cold September day. After investigating for some time, I could find nothing to indicate what had become of my brother-that is, my half-brother-and nor could anyone else. No explanation by any agency or person ever sufficiently illuminated the reason for or method of his disappearance.