The Collected Short Fiction by Thomas Ligotti Part 7

Aunt T. poured the last of her drink down her throat and a little drop she wasn't aware of dripped from the corner of her mouth, shining in the crepuscular radiance like a pearl.

"When your mother didn't come home one evening-I should say morning-everyone knew what had happened, but no one said anything. Contrary to your ideas about their superst.i.tiousness, they actually could not bring themselves to believe the truth for some time."

"It was good of all of you to let me go on developing for a while, even as you were deciding how to best hunt my mother down."

"I will ignore that remark."

"I'm sure you will."

"We did not hunt her down, as you well know. That's another of your persecution fantasies. She came to us, now didn't she? Scratching at the windows in the night-"

"You can skip this part, I already-"

"-swelling full as the fullest moon. And that was strange, because you would actually have been considered a dangerously premature birth according to normal schedules; but when we followed your mother back to the mausoleum of the local church, where she lay during the daylight hours, she was carrying the full weight of her pregnancy. The priest was shocked to find what he had living, so to speak, in his own backyard. It was actually he, and not so much any of your mother's family, who thought we should not allow you to be brought into the world. And it was his hand that ultimately released your mother from the life of her new friends, and immediately afterward she began to deliver, right in the coffin in which she lay. The blood was terrible. If we did-"

"It's not necessary to-"

"-hunt down your mother, you should be thankful that I was among that party. I had to get you out of the country that very night, back to America. I-"

At that point she could see that I was no longer listening, was gazing with a distracted intensity on the pleasanter anecdotes of the setting sun. When she stopped talking and joined in the view, I said: "Thank you, Aunt T., for that little bedtime story. I never tire of hearing it."

"I'm sorry, Andre, but I wanted to remind you of the truth."

"What can I say? I realize I owe you my life, such as it is."

"That's not what I mean. I mean the truth of what your mother became and what you now are."

"I am nothing. Completely harmless."

"That's why we must let the Duvals come and stay with us. To show them the world has nothing to fear from you, because that's what I believe they're actually coming to see. That's the message they'll carry back to your family in France."

"You really think that's why they're coming."

"I do. They could make quite a bit of trouble for you, for us."

I rose from my chair as the shadows of the failing twilight deepened. I went and stood next to Aunt T. against the stone bal.u.s.trade of the terrace, and whispered: "Then let them come."

I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the ill.u.s.trious mult.i.tudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written with embalming fluid in the book of death. A n.o.ble name is mine.

In the immediate family, the first to meet his maker was my own maker: he rests in the tomb of the unknown father. But while the man did manage to sire me, he breathed his last breath in this world before I drew my first. He was felled by a single stroke, his first and last. In those final moments, so I'm told, his erratic and subtle brainwaves made strange designs across the big green eye of an EEG monitor. The same doctor who told my mother that her husband was no longer among the living also informed her, on the very same day, that she was pregnant. Nor was this the only poignant coincidence in the lives of my parents. Both of them belonged to wealthy families from Aix-en-Provence in southern France. However, their first meeting took place not in the old country but in the new, at the American university they each happened to be attending. And so two neighbors crossed a cold ocean to come together in a mandatory science course. When they compared notes on their common backgrounds, they knew it was destiny at work. They fell in love with each other and with their new homeland. The couple later moved into a rich and prestigious suburb (which I will decline to mention by name or state, since I still reside there and, for reasons that will eventually become apparent, must do so discreetly). For years the couple lived in contentment, and then my immediate male forbear died just in time for fatherhood, becoming the appropriate parent for his son-to-be.

Offspring of the dead.

But surely, one might protest, I was born of a living mother; surely upon arrival in this world I turned and gazed into a pair of glossy maternal eyes. Not so, as I think is evident from my earlier conversation with dear Aunt T. Widowed and pregnant, my mother had fled back to Aix, to the comfort of family estates and secluded living. But more on this in a moment. Meanwhile I can no longer suppress the urge to say a few things about my ancestral hometown.

Aix-en-Provence, where I was born but never lived, has many personal, though necessarily second-hand, a.s.sociations for me. However, it is not just a connection between Aix and my own life that maintains such a powerful grip on my imagination and memory, a lifelong fascination which actually has more to do with a few unrelated facts in the history of the region. Two pieces of historical data, to be exact. Separate centuries, indeed epochs, play host to these data, and they likewise exist in entirely different realms of mood, worlds apart in implication. Nevertheless, from a certain point of view they can impress one as inseparable opposites. The first datum is as follows: In the seventeenth century there occurred the spiritual possession by divers demons of the nuns belonging to the Ursuline convent at Aix. And excommunication was soon in coming for the tragic sisters, who had been seduced into a.s.sorted blasphemies by the likes of Gresil, Sonnillon, and Verin. De Plancy's Dictionnaire infernal respectively characterizes these demons, in the words of an unknown translator, as "the one who glistens horribly like a rainbow of insects; the one who quivers in a horrible manner; and the one who moves with a particular creeping motion." There also exist engravings of these kinetically and chromatically weird beings, unfortunately static and in black and white. Can you believe it? What people are these-so stupid and profound-that they could devote themselves to such nonsense? Who can fathom the science of superst.i.tion? (For, as an evil poet once scribbled, superst.i.tion is the reservoir of all truths.) This, then, is one side of my imaginary Aix. The other side, and the second historical datum I offer, is simply the birth in 1839 of Aix's most prominent citizen: Cezanne. His figure haunts the Aix of my brain, wandering about the beautiful countryside in search of his pretty pictures.

Together these aspects fuse into a single image, as grotesque and coherent as a pantheon of gargoyles amid the splendor of a medieval church.

Such was the world to which my mother reemigrated some decades ago, this Notre Dame world of horror and beauty. It's no wonder that she was seduced into the society of those beautiful strangers, who promised her an escape from the world of mortality where shock and suffering had taken over, driving her into exile. I understood from Aunt T. that it all began at a summer party on the estate grounds of Ambroise and Paulette Valraux. The Enchanted Wood, as this place was known to the haut monde in the vicinity. The evening of the party was as perfectly temperate as the atmosphere of dreams, which one never notices to be either sultry or frigid. Lanterns were hung high up in the lindens, guide-lights leading to a heard-about heaven. A band played.

It was a mixed crowd at the party. And as usual there were present a few persons whom n.o.body seemed to know, exotic strangers whose elegance was their invitation. Aunt T. did not pay much attention to them at the time, and her account is rather sketchy. One of them danced with my mother, having no trouble coaxing the widow out of social retirement. Another with labyrinthine eyes whispered to her by the trees. Alliances were formed that night, promises made. Afterward my mother began going out on her own to rendezvous after sundown. Then she stopped coming home. Therese-nurse, confidante, and personal maid whom my mother had brought back with her from America-was hurt and confused by the cold snubs she had lately received from her mistress. My mother's family was elaborately reticent about the meaning of her recent behavior. ("And in her condition, mon Dieu!") n.o.body knew what measures to take. Then some of the servants reported seeing a pale, pregnant woman lurking outside the house after dark.

Finally a priest was taken into the family's confidence. He suggested a course of action which no one questioned, not even Therese. They lay in wait for my mother, righteous soul-hunters. They followed her drifting form as it returned to the mausoleum when daybreak was imminent. They removed the great stone lid of the sarcophagus and found her inside. "Diabolique," someone exclaimed. There was some question about how many times and in what places she should be impaled. In the end they pinned her heart with a single spike to the velvet bed on which she lay. But what to do about the child? What would it be like? A holy soldier of the living or a monster of the dead? (Neither, you fools!) Fortunately or unfortunately, I've never been sure which, Therese was with them and rendered their speculations academic. Reaching into the bloodied matrix, she helped me to be born. I was now heir to the family fortune, and Therese took me back to America. She was extremely resourceful in this regard, arranging with a sympathetic and avaricious lawyer to become the trustee of my estate. This required a little magic act with ident.i.ties. It required that Therese, for reasons of her own which I've never questioned, be promoted from my mother's maid to her posthumous sister. And so my Aunt T. was christened, born in the same year as I.

Naturally all this leads to the story of my life, which has no more life in it than story. It's not for the cinema, it is not for novels; it wouldn't even fill out a single lyric of modest length. It might make a piece of modern music: a slow, throbbing drone like the lethargic pumping of a premature heart. Best of all, though, would be the depiction of my life story as an abstract painting: a twilight world, indistinct around the edges and without center or focus; a bridge without banks, tunnels without openings; a crepuscular existence pure and simple. No heaven or h.e.l.l, only a quiet haven between life's hysteria and death's tenacious darkness. (And you know, what I most loved about Twilight is the sense, as one looks down the dimming west, not that it is some fleeting transitional moment, but that there's actually nothing before or after it: that that's all there is.) My life never had a beginning, so naturally I thought it would never end. Naturally, I was wrong.

Well, and what was the answer to those questions hastily put by the monsters who stalked my mother? Was my nature to be souled humanness or soulless vampirism? The answer: neither. I existed between two worlds and had little claim upon the a.s.sets or liabilities of either. Neither living nor dead, unalive or undead, not having anything crucial to do with such tedious polarities, such tiresome opposites, which ultimately are no more different from each other than a pair of imbecilic monozygotes. I said no to life and death. No, Mr. Springbud. No, Mr. Worm. Without ever saying h.e.l.lo or goodbye, I merely avoided their company, scorned their gaudy invitations.

Of course, in the beginning Aunt T. tried to care for me as if I were a normal child. (Incidentally, I can perfectly recall every moment of my life from birth, for my existence took the form of one seamless moment, without forgettable yesterdays or expectant tomorrows.) She tried to give me normal food, which I always regurgitated. Later Aunt T. prepared for me a sort of pureed meat, which I ingested and digested, though it never became a habit. And I never asked her what was actually in that preparation, for Aunt T. wasn't afraid to use money, and I knew what money could buy in the way of unusual food for an unusual infant. I suppose I did become accustomed to similar nourishment while growing within my mother's womb, feeding on a potpourri of blood types contributed by the citizens of Aix. But my appet.i.te was never very strong for physical food.

Stronger by far was my hunger for a kind of transcendental fare, a feasting of the mind and soul: the astral banquet of Art. There I fed. And I had quite a few master chefs to plan the menu. Though we lived in exile from the world, Aunt T. did not overlook my education. For purposes of appearance and legality, I have earned diplomas from some of the finest private schools in the world. (These, too, money can buy.) But my real education was even more private than that. Tutorial geniuses were well paid to visit our home, only too glad to teach an invalid child of nonetheless exceptional promise.

Through personal instruction I scanned the arts and sciences. Yes, I learned to quote my French poets, Lean immortality, all crepe and gold, Laurelled consoler frightening to behold, Death is a womb, a mother's breast, you feign- The fine illusion, oh the pious trick!

but mostly in translation, for something kept me from ever attaining more than a beginner's facility in that foreign tongue. I did master, however, the complete grammar, every dialect and idiom of the French eye. I could read the inner world of Redon (who was almost born an American)-his grand isole paradise of black. I could effortlessly comprehend the outer world of Manet and the Impressionists-that secret language of light. And I could decipher the impossible worlds of the surrealists-those twisted arcades where brilliant shadows are sewn to the rotting flesh of rainbows.

I remember in particular a man by the name of Raymond, who taught me the rudimentary skills of the artist in oils. I recollect vividly showing him a study I had done of that sacred phenomenon I witnessed each sundown. Most of all I recall the look of his eyes, as if they beheld the rising of a curtain upon some terribly involved outrage. He abstractedly adjusted his delicate spectacles, wobbling them around on the bridge of his nose. His gaze shifted from the canvas to my face and back again. I'm not sure whether my face helped him understand something in the picture or vice versa. His only comment was: "The shapes, the colors are not supposed to lose themselves that way. Something... No, too much-" Then he asked to be permitted use of the bathroom facilities. At first I thought this gesture was means as a symbolic appraisal of my work. But he was quite in earnest and all I could do was give him directions to the nearest chamber of convenience in a voice of equal seriousness. He walked out of the room with the first two fingers of his right hand pressing upon the pulsing wrist of his left. And he never came back.

Such is a thumbnail sketch of my half-toned existence: twilight after twilight after twilight. And in all that blur of time I but occasionally, and then briefly, wondered if I too possessed the same potential for immortality as my undead mother before her life was aborted and I was born. It is not a question that really bothers one who exists beyond, below, above, between-triumphantly outside-the clashing worlds of human fathers and enchanted mothers.

I did wonder, though, how I would explain, that is conceal, my unnatural mode of being from those people arriving from France. Despite the hostility I showed toward them in front of Aunt T., I actually desired that they should take a good report of me back to the real world, if only to keep it away from my own world in the future. For days previous to their arrival, I came to think of myself as a certain stock character in Gothic stories: the stranger in a strange castle of a house, that shadowy figure whom the hero travels over long distances to encounter, a dark soul hiding his horrors. In short, a medieval geek perpetrating strange deeds in secret sanctums. I expected they would soon have the proper image of me as all impotence and no impetus. And that would be that.

But never did I antic.i.p.ate being called upon to face the almost forgotten realities of vampirism-the taint beneath the paint of the family portrait.

The Duval family, and unmarried sister, were arriving on a night flight, which we would meet at the local international airport. Aunt T. thought this would suit me fine, considering my tendency to sleep most of the day away and arise with the setting sun. But at the last minute I suffered an acute seizure of stage fright. "The crowds," I appealed to Aunt T. She knew that crowds were the world's most powerful talisman against me, as if it had needed any at all. She understood that I would not be able to serve on the welcoming committee, and Rops's younger brother Gerald (a good seventy-five if he was a day) drove her to the airport alone. Yes, I promised Aunt T. that I would be sociable and come out to meet everyone as soon as I saw the lights of the big black car floating up our private drive.

But I wasn't and I didn't. I took to my room and drowsed before a television with the sound turned off. As the colors danced in the dark, I submitted more and more to an anti-social sleepiness. Finally I instructed Rops, by way of the estate-wide intercom, to inform Aunt T. and company that I wasn't feeling very well, needed to rest. This, I figured, would be in keeping with the facade of a harmless valetudinarian, and a perfectly normal one at that. A night-sleeper. Very good, I could hear them saying to their souls. And then, I swear, I actually turned off the television and slept real sleep in real darkness.

But things became less real at some point deep in the night. I must have left the intercom open, for I heard little metal voices emanating from that little metal square on my bedroom wall. In my state of quasi-somnolence it never occurred to me that I could simply get out of bed and make the voices go away by switching off that terrible box. And terrible it indeed seemed. The voices spoke a foreign language, but it wasn't French, as one might have suspected. Something more foreign than that. Perhaps a cross between a madman talking in his sleep and the sonar screech of a bat. The voices chittered and chattered with each other in my dreams when I finally fell completely asleep. And they ceased entirely long before I awoke, for the first time in my life, to the bright eyes of morning.

The house was quiet. Even the servants seemed to have duties that kept them soundless and invisible. I took advantage of my wakefulness at that early hour and prowled unnoticed about the floors of the house, figuring everyone else was still in bed after their long and somewhat noisy night. The four rooms Aunt T. had set aside for our guests all had their big panelled doors closed: a room for the mama and papa, two others close by for the kids, and a chilly chamber at the end of the hall for the maiden sister. I paused a moment outside each room and listened for the revealing songs of slumber, hoping to know my relations better by their snores and whistles and monosyllables grunted between breaths. But they made none of the usual racket. They hardly made any sounds at all, though they echoed one another in making a certain noise that seemed to issue from the same cavity. It was a kind of weird wheeze, an open mouth panting from the back of the throat, the hacking of a tubercular demon. Or a very faint grating sound, as if some heavy object were being dragged across bare wooden floors in a distant part of the house; a muted cacophony. Thus, I soon abandoned my eavesdropping without regret.

I spent the day in the library, whose high windows I noticed were designed to allow a maximum of natural reading light. However, I drew the drapes on them and kept to the shadows, finding morning sunshine not everything it was said to be. But it was difficult to get much reading done. Any moment I expected to hear foreign footsteps descending the double-winged staircase, crossing the black-and-white marble chessboard of the front hall, taking over the house. Nevertheless, despite my expectations, and to my increasing uneasiness, the family never appeared.

Twilight came and still no mama and papa, no sleepy-eyed son or daughter, no demure sister remarking with astonishment at the inordinate length of her beauty sleep. And no Aunt T., either. They must've had quite a time the night before, I thought. But I didn't mind being alone with the twilight. I undraped the three west windows, each of them a canvas depicting the same scene in the sky. My private salon d'Automne.

It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums. At the same time, patches of brilliance engaged in a territorial dispute with the oncoming onyx of the storm. Light and darkness mingled in strange ways both above and below. Shadows and sunshine washed together, streaking the landscape in an unearthly study of glare and gloom. Bright clouds and black folded into each other in a no-man's land of the sky. The autumn trees turned in accordance with a strange season as their leaden-colored trunks and branches, along with their iron-red leaves, took on the appearance of sculptures formed in a dream, locked into an infinite and unliving moment, unnaturally timeless. The gray lake slowly tossed and tumbled in a deep sleep, nudging unconsciously against its breakwall of numb stone. A scene of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomedic haze over all. A land of perfect twilight.

I was in exaltation: finally the twilight had come down to earth, and to me. I had to go out into this rare atmosphere, I had no choice. I left the house and walked to the lake and stood on the slope of stiff gra.s.s which led down to it. I gazed up through the trees at the opposing tones of the sky. I kept my hands in my pockets and touched nothing, except with my eyes.

Not until an hour or more had elapsed did I think of returning home. It was dark by then, though I don't recall the pa.s.sing of the twilight into evening, for twilight has no edges. There were no stars anywhere, the storm clouds having moved in and wrapped up the sky. They began sending out tentative drops of rain. Thunder mumbled above and I was forced back to the house, cheated once again by the night. But I'll always remember savoring that particular twilight, unaware that there would be no others after it.

In the front hall of the house I called out names in the form of questions. "Aunt T.? Rops? Gerald? M. Duval? Madame?" Everything was silence. Where was everyone, I wondered. They couldn't still be asleep. I pa.s.sed from room to room and found no signs of occupation. A day of dust was upon all surfaces. Where were the domestics? At last I opened the double doors to the dining room. Was I late for the supper Aunt T. had planned to honor our visiting family?

It appeared so. But if Aunt T. sometimes had me consume the forbidden fruit of flesh and blood, it was never directly from the branches, never the sap taken warm from the tree of life itself. But here in fact were spread the remains of such a feast. It was the ravaged body of Aunt T. herself, though they'd barely left enough on her bones for identification. The thick white linen was clotted like an unwrapped bandage. "Rops!" I shouted. "Gerald, somebody!" But I knew the servants were no longer in the house, that I was alone.

Not quite alone, of course. This soon became apparent to my twilight brain as it dipped its way into total darkness. I was in the company of five black shapes which stuck to the walls and soon began flowing along their surface. One of them detached itself and moved toward me, a weightless ma.s.s which felt icy when I tried to sweep it away and put my hand right through the thing. Another followed, unhinging itself from a doorway where it hung down. A third left a blanched scar upon the wallpaper where it clung like a slug, pushing itself off to join the attack. Then came the others descending from the ceiling, dropping onto me as I stumbled in circles and flailed my arms. I ran from the room but the things had me closely surrounded. They guided my flight, heading me down hallways and up staircases. Finally they cornered me in a small room, a dusty little place I had not been in for years. Colored animals frolicked upon the walls, blue bears and yellow rabbits. Miniature furniture was draped with graying sheets. I hid beneath a tiny, elevated crib with ivory bars. But they found me and closed in.

They were not driven by hunger, for they had already feasted. They were not frenzied with a murderer's bloodl.u.s.t, for they were cautious and methodical. This was simply a family reunion, a sentimental gathering. Now I understood how the Duvals could afford to be sans prejuge. They were worse than I, who was only a half-breed, hybrid, a mere mulatto of the soul: neither a blood-warm human nor a blood-drawing devil. But they-who came from an Aix on the map-were the purebreds of the family.

And they drained my body dry.

When I regained awareness once more, it was still dark and there was a great deal of dust in my throat. Not actually dust, of course, but a strange dryness I had never before experienced. And there was another new experience: hunger. I felt as if there were a chasm of infinite depth within me, a great abyss which needed to be filled-flooded with oceans of blood. I was one of them now, reborn into a hungry death. Everything I had shunned in my impossible, blasphemous ambition to avoid living and dying, I had now become. A sallow, ravenous thing. A beast with a hundred stirring hungers. Andre of the graveyards.

The five of them had each drunk from my body by way of five separate fountains. But the wounds had nearly sealed by the time I awoke in the blackness, owing to the miraculous healing capabilities of the dead. The upper floors were all in shadow now, and I made my way toward the light coming from downstairs. An impressionistic glow illuminating the wooden banister at the top of the stairway, where I emerged from the darkness of the second floor, inspired in me a terrible ache of emotion I'd never known before. A feeling of loss, though of nothing I could specifically name, as if somehow the deprivation lay in my future.

As I descended the stairs I saw that they were already waiting to meet me, standing silently upon the black and white squares of the front hall. Papa the king, mama the queen, the boy a knight, the girl a dark little p.a.w.n, and a b.i.t.c.hy maiden bishop standing behind. And now they had my house, my castle, to complete the pieces on their side. On mine there was nothing.

"Devils," I screamed, leaning hard on the staircase rail. "Devils," I repeated, but they still appeared horribly undistressed, perhaps uncomprehending of my outburst. "Diables," I reiterated in their own loathsome tongue.

But neither was French their true language, as I found out when they began speaking among themselves. I covered my ears, trying to smother their voices. They had a language all their own, a style of speech well-suited to dead vocal organs. The words were breathless, shapeless rattlings in the backs of their throats, parched sc.r.a.pings at the mausoleum portal. Arid gasps and dry gurgles were their dialects. These crackling noises were especially disturbing as they emanated from the mouths of things that had at least the form of human beings. But worst of all was my realization that I understood perfectly well what they were saying.

The boy stepped forward, pointing at me while looking back and speaking to his father. It was the opinion of this wine-eyed and rose-lipped youth that I should have suffered the same end as Aunt T. With an authoritative impatience the father told the boy that I was to serve as a sort of tour guide through this strange new land, a native who could keep them out of such difficulties as foreign visitors sometimes get into. Besides, he grotesquely concluded, I was one of the family. The boy was incensed and coughed out an incredibly foul characterization of his father. The things he said could only have been conveyed by that queer hacking patois, which suggested feelings and relationships of a nature incomprehensible outside of that particular world it mirrors with disgusting perfection. It is the discourse of h.e.l.l on the subject of sin.

An argument ensued, the father's composure turning to an infernal rage and finally subduing the son with bizarre threats that have no counterparts in the language of ordinary malevolence. Monstrous possibilities were implied.

Finally the boy was silenced and turned to his aunt, seemingly for comfort. This woman of chalky cheeks and sunken eyes touched the boy's shoulder and easily drew him toward her with a single finger, guiding his body as if it were a balloon, weightless and toy-like. They spoke in sullen whispers, using a personal form of address that hinted at a long-standing and unthinkable allegiance between them.

Apparently encouraged by this scene, the daughter now stepped forward and used this same mode of address to get my attention. Her mother abruptly gagged out a single syllable at her. What she called her daughter might possibly be imagined, but only with reference to the lowliest sectors of the human world. Their own words, their choking rasps, carried all the dissonant overtones of a demonic orchestra in bad tune. Each perverse utterance was a rioting opera of evil, a choir shrieking pious psalms of intricate blasphemy and devout songs of enigmatic l.u.s.t.

"I will not become one of you," I thought I screamed at them. But the sound of my voice was already so much like theirs that the words had exactly the opposite meaning I intended. The family suddenly ceased bickering among themselves. My outburst had consolidated them. Each mouth, cluttered with uneven teeth like a village cemetery overcrowded with battered gravestones, opened and smiled. The expression on their faces told me of something in my own. They could see my growing hunger, see deep down into the dusty catacomb of my throat which cried out to be anointed with b.l.o.o.d.y nourishment. They knew my weakness.

Yes, they could stay in my house. (Famished.) Yes, I could make arrangements to cover up the disappearance of the servants, for I am a wealthy man and know what money can buy. (Please, my family, I'm famished.) Yes, their safety could be insured and their permanent asylum perfectly feasible. (Please, I'm famishing to dust.) Yes, yes, yes. I agreed to everything; everything would be taken care of. (To dust!) But first I begged them, for heaven's sake, to let me go out into the night.

Night, night, night, night. Night, night, night.

Now twilight is an alarm, a noxious tocsin which rouses me to an endless eve. There is a sound in my new language for that transitory time of day just before the dark hours. The sound cl.u.s.ters together curious shades of meaning and shadowy impressions, none of which belong to my former conception of an abstract paradise: the true garden of unearthy delights. The new twilight is a violator, desecrator, stealthy graverobber; death-bell, life-knell, curtain-riser; banshee, siren, howling she-wolf. And the old twilight is dead. I am even learning to despise it, just as I am learning to love my eternal life and eternal death. Nevertheless, I wish them well who would attempt to destroy my precarious immortality, for just as my rebirth has taught me the importance of beginnings, the idea of endings has also taken on a painfully tranquil significance. And I cannot deny those who would avenge all those exsanguinated souls of my past and future. Yes, past and future. Endings and beginnings. In brief, Time now exists, measured like a perpetual holiday consisting only of midnight revels. I once had an old family from an old world, and now I have new ones. A new life, a new world. And this world is no longer one where I can languidly gaze upon rosy sunsets, but another in which I must fiercely draw a full-bodied blood from the night.

Night... after night... after night.

The Prodigy Of Dreams (1986).

First published in All The Devils Are Here, 1986.

Also published in: Noctuary, The Nightmare Factory.

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...-The Travel Diaries of Arthur Emerson It seemed to Arthur Emerson that the swans, those perennial guests of the estate, had somehow become strange. Yet his knowledge of their natural behavior was vague, providing him with little idea of precisely how they had departed from habit or instinct. But he strongly sensed that there had indeed been such a departure, an imperceptible drifting into the peculiar. Suddenly these creatures, which had become as tedious to him as everything else, filled him with an astonishment he had not known in many years.

That morning they were gathered at the center of the lake, barely visible within a milky haze which hovered above still waters. For as long as he observed them, they did not allow themselves the slightest motion toward the gra.s.sy sh.o.r.es circling the lake. Each of them-there were four-faced a separate direction, as though some antagonism existed within their order. Then their sleek, ghostly forms revolved with a mechanical ease and came to huddle around an imaginary point of focus. For a moment their heads nodded slightly toward one another, bowing in wordless prayer; but soon they stretched their snaking necks in unison, elevated their orange and black bills toward the thick mist above, and gazed into its depths. There followed a series of haunting cries unlike anything ever heard on the vast grounds of that isolated estate.

Arthur Emerson now wondered if something he could not see was disturbing the swans. As he stood at the tall windows which faced the lake, he made a mental note to have Graff go down there and find out what he could. Possibly some unwelcome animal was now living in the dense woods nearby. And as he further considered the matter, it appeared that the numerous wild ducks, those brownish goblins that were always either visible or audible somewhere in the vicinity of the lake, had already vacated the area. Or perhaps they were only obscured by the unusually heavy mist of that singular morning.

Arthur Emerson spent the rest of the day in the library. At intervals he was visited by a very black cat, an aloof and somewhat phantasmal member of the small Emerson household. Eventually it fell asleep on a sunny window ledge, while its master wandered among the countless uncatalogued volumes he had acc.u.mulated over the past fifty years or so.

During his childhood, the collection which filled the library's dark shelves was a common one, and much of it he had given away or destroyed in order to provide room for other works. He was the only scholar in a lengthy succession of businessmen of one kind or another, the last living member of the old family; at his death, the estate would probably pa.s.s into the hands of a distant relative whose name and face he did not know. But this was not of any great concern to Arthur Emerson: resignation to his own inconsequence, along with that of all things of the earth, was a philosophy he had nurtured for some time, and with considerable success.

In his younger years he had travelled a great deal, these excursions often relating to his studies, which could be approximately described as ethnological bordering on the esoteric. Throughout various quarters of what now seemed to him a shrunken, almost claustrophobic world, he had attempted to satisfy an inborn craving to comprehend what then seemed to him an astonishing, even shocking existence. Arthur Emerson recalled that while still a child the world around him suggested strange expanses not subject to common view. This sense of the invisible often exerted itself in moments when he witnessed nothing more than a patch of pink sky above leafless trees in twilight or an abandoned room where dust settled on portraits and old furniture. To him, however, these appearances disguised realms of an entirely different nature. For within these imagined or divined spheres there existed a certain... confusion, a swirling, fluttering motion that was belied by the relative order of the seen.

Only on rare occasions could he enter these unseen s.p.a.ces, and always unexpectedly. A striking experience of this kind took place in his childhood years and involved a previous generation of swans which he had paused one summer afternoon to contemplate from a knoll by the lake. Perhaps their smooth drifting and gliding upon the water had induced in him something like a hypnotic state. The ultimate effect, however, was not the serene catatonia of hypnosis, but a whirling flight through a glittering threshold which opened within the air itself, propelling him into a kaleidoscopic universe where s.p.a.ce consisted only of multi-colored and ever-changing currents, as of wind or water, and where time did not exist.

Later he became a student of the imaginary lands hypothesized by legends and theologies, and he had sojourned in places which concealed or suggested unknown orders of existence. Among the volumes in his library were several of his own authorship, bibliographical shadows of his lifetime obsessions. His body of works included such t.i.tles as: In the Margins of Paradise, The Forgotten Universe of the Vicoli, and The Secret G.o.ds and Other Studies. For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years pa.s.sed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin.

Arthur Emerson pulled a rather large book down from its high shelf and ambled toward a cluttered desk to make some notes for a work which would very likely be his last. Its tentative t.i.tle: Dynasties of Dust.

Toward nightfall he suspended his labors. With much stiffness, he walked to the window ledge where the cat lay sleeping in the fading light of dusk. But its body seemed to rise and fall a little too vigorously for sleep, and it made a strange whistling sound rather than the usual murmuring purr. The cat opened its eyes and rolled sideways, as it often did when inviting a hand to stroke its glossy black fur. But as soon as Arthur Emerson laid his palm upon that smooth coat, his fingers were rapidly gnawed. The animal then leaped to the floor and ran out of the room, while Arthur Emerson watched his own blood trickling over his hand in a shapeless stain.

All that evening he felt restless, profoundly at odds with the atmosphere of each room he entered and then soon abandoned. He wandered the house, telling himself that he was in search of his ebony pet, in order to establish the terms of their misunderstanding. But this pretext would every so often dissolve, and it then became clear to Arthur Emerson that he searched for something less tangible than a runaway cat.

These rooms, however high their ceilings, suffocated him with shadowy questions; his footsteps, echoing sharply down long gleaming corridors, sounded like clacking bones. The house had become a museum of mystery.

He finally gave up the search and allowed fatigue to guide him to his bedroom, where immediately he opened a window in the hope that something without a name would fly from the house. But he now discovered that it was not only the house which was swollen with mysteries; it was the very night itself. A nocturnal breeze began lifting the curtains, mingling with the air inside the room. Shapeless clumps of clouds floated with mechanical complacency across a stone gray sky, a sky which itself seemed shapeless rather than evenly infinite. To his left he saw that the inner surface of the open window reflected a strange face, his face, and he pushed the fear-stricken thing out into the darkness.

Arthur Emerson eventually slept that night, but he also dreamed. His dreams were without definite form, a realm of mist where twisted shadows glided, their dark ma.s.s shifting fluently. Then, through the queerly gathered and drifting clouds of mist, he saw a shadow whose dark monstrosity made the others seem shapely and radiant. It was a deformed colossus, a disfigured monument carved from the absolute density of the blackest abyss. And now the lesser shadows, the pale and meager shadows, seemed to join in a squealing chorus of praise to the greater one. He gazed at the cyclopean thing in a trance of horror, until its mountainous ma.s.s began to move, slowly stretching out some part of itself, flexing what might have been a misshapen arm. And when he awoke, scattering the bedcovers, he felt a warm breeze wafting in through a window which he could not remember having left open.

The next morning it became apparent that there would be no relief from the uncanny influences which still seemed to be lingering from the day before. All about the Emerson estate a terrific fog had formed, blinding the inhabitants of the house to most of the world beyond it. What few shapes remained visible-the closest and darkest trees, some rose bushes pressing against the windows-seemed drained of all earthly substance, creating a landscape both infinite and imprisoning, an estate of dream. Unseen in the fog, the swans were calling out like banshees down by the lake. And even Graff, when he appeared in the library attired in a bulky groundskeeper's jacket and soiled trousers, looked less like a man than like a specter of ill prophecy.

"Are you certain," said Arthur Emerson, who was seated at his, desk, "that you have nothing to report about those creatures?"

"No sir," replied Graff. "Nothing."

There was, however, something else Graff had discovered, something which he thought the master of the house should see for himself. Together they travelled down several stairways leading to the various cellars and storage chambers beneath the house. On the way Graff explained that, as also ordered, he had searched for the cat, which had not been seen since last evening. Arthur Emerson only gazed at his man and nodded in silence, while inwardly muttering to himself about some strangeness he perceived in the old retainer. Between every few phrases the man would begin humming, or rather singing at the back of his throat in an entirely peculiar manner.

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 racc.o.o.ns. He already knew the cat to be an obsessive hunter, but it seemed strange that these carca.s.ses 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 p.r.o.ngs. "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 embarra.s.sed and at a loss to explain himself, Graff pointed the taloned tool at the decomposing carca.s.ses. "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 a.n.a.logy 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.