The Collected Short Fiction by Thomas Ligotti Part 33

The street that I saw beyond the narrow opening between the two buildings was now entirely empty. The only thing I could glimpse was a blur of high and low structures which appeared to quiver slightly as the noise became louder and louder, the parade closing in, though from which direction I did not know. The formless clamor seemed to envelop everything around me, and then suddenly I could see a pa.s.sing figure in the street. Dressed in loose white garments, it had an egg-shaped head that was completely hairless and as white as paste, a clown of some kind who moved in a way that was both casual and laborious, as if it were strolling underwater or against a strong wind, tracing strange patterns in the air with billowed arms and pale hands. It seemed to take forever for this apparition to pa.s.s from view, but just before doing so it turned to peer into the narrow pa.s.sage where I had secreted myself, and its greasy white face was wearing an expression of bland malevolence.

Others followed the lead figure, including a team of ragged men who were harnessed like beasts and pulled long bristling ropes. They also moved out of sight, leaving the ropes to waver slackly behind them. The vehicle to which these ropes were attached a by means of enormous hooks a rolled into the scene, its great wooden wheels audibly grinding the pavement of the street beneath them. It was a sort of platform with huge wooden stakes rising from its perimeter to form the bars of a cage. There was nothing to secure the wooden bars at the top, and so they wobbled with the movement of the parade.

Hanging from the bars, and rattling against them, was an array of objects haphazardly tethered by cords and wires and straps of various kinds. I saw masks and shoes, household utensils and naked dolls, large bleached bones and the skeletons of small animals, bottles of colored gla.s.s, the head of a dog with a rusty chain wrapped several times around its neck, and sundry sc.r.a.ps of debris and other things I could not name, all knocking together in a wild percussion. I watched and listened as that ludicrous vehicle pa.s.sed by in the street. Nothing else followed it, and the enigmatic parade seemed to be at an end, now only a delirious noise fading into the distance. Then a voice called out behind me.

"What are you doing back here?"

I turned around and saw a fat old woman moving toward me from the shadows of that narrow pa.s.sageway between the two high buildings. She was wearing a highly decorated hat that was almost as wide as she was, and her already ample form was augmented by numerous layers of colorful scarves and shawls. Her body was further weighted down by several necklaces which hung like a noose around her neck and many bracelets about both of her chubby wrists. On the thick fingers of either hand were a variety of large gaudy rings.

"I was watching the parade," I said to her. "But I couldn't see what was inside the cage, or whatever it was. It seemed to be empty."

The woman simply stared at me for some time, as if contemplating my face and perhaps surmising that I had only recently arrived in the northern border town. Then she introduced herself as Mrs. Glimm and said that she ran a lodging house. "Do you have a place to stay?" she asked in an aggressively demanding tone. "It should be dark soon," she said, glancing slightly upwards. "The days are getting shorter and shorter."

I agreed to follow her back to the lodging house. On the way I asked her about the parade. "It's all just some nonsense," she said as we walked through the darkening streets of the town. "Have you seen one of these?" she asked, handing me a crumpled piece of paper that she had stuffed among her scarves and shawls.

Smoothing out the page Mrs. Glimm had placed in my hands, I tried to read in the dimming twilight what was printed upon it.

At the top of the page, in capital letters, was a t.i.tle: METAPHYSICAL LECTURE I. Below these words was a brief text which I read to myself as I walked with Mrs. Glimm. "It has been said," the text began, "that after undergoing certain ordeals- whether ecstatic or abysmal-we should be obliged to change our names, as we are no longer who we once were. Instead the opposite rule is applied: our names linger long after anything resembling what we were, or thought we were, has disappeared entirely. Not that there was ever much to begin with-only a few questionable memories and impulses drifting about like snowflakes in a gray and endless winter. But each soon floats down and settles into a cold and nameless void."

After reading this brief "metaphysical lecture," I asked Mrs. Glimm where it came from. "They were all over town," she replied. "Just some nonsense, like the rest of it. Personally I think this sort of thing is bad for business. Why should I have to go around picking up customers in the street? But as long as someone's paying my price I will accommodate them in whatever style they wish. In addition to operating a lodging house or two, I am also licensed to act as an undertaker's a.s.sistant and a cabaret stage manager. Well, here we are. You can go inside-someone will be there to take care of you. At the moment I have an appointment elsewhere." With these concluding words, Mrs. Glimm walked off, her jewelry rattling with every step she took.

Mrs. Glimm's lodging house was one of several great structures along the street, each of them sharing similar features and all of them, I later discovered, in some way under the proprietors.h.i.+p or authority of the same person-that is, Mrs. Glimm. Nearly flush with the street stood a series of high and almost styleless houses with inst.i.tutional facades of pale gray mortar and enormous dark roofs. Although the street was rather wide, the sidewalks in front of the houses were so narrow that the roofs of these edifices slightly overhung the pavement below, creating a sense of tunnel-like enclosure. All of the houses might have been siblings of my childhood residence, which I once heard someone describe as an "architectural moan." I thought of this phrase as I went through the process of renting a room in Mrs. Glimm's lodging house, insisting that I be placed in one that faced the street. Once I was settled into my apartment, which was actually a single, quite expansive bedroom, I stood at the window gazing up and down the street of gray houses, which together seemed to form a procession of some kind, a frozen funeral parade. I repeated the words "architectural moan" over and over to myself until exhaustion forced me away from the window and under the musty blankets of the bed. Before I fell asleep I remembered that it was Dr. Zirk who used this phrase to describe my childhood home, a place that he had visited so often.

So it was of Dr. Zirk that I was thinking as I fell asleep in that expansive bedroom in Mrs. Glimm's lodging house. And I was thinking of him not only because he used the phrase "architectural moan" to describe the appearance of my childhood home, which so closely resembled those high-roofed structures along that street of gray houses in the northern border town, but also, and even primarily, because the words of the brief metaphysical lecture I had read some hours earlier reminded me so much of the words, those fragments and mutterings, that the doctor spoke as he sat upon my bed and attended to the life-draining infirmities from which everyone expected I would die at a very young age. Lying under the musty blankets of my bed in that strange lodging house, with a little moonlight s.h.i.+ning through the window to illuminate the dreamlike vastness of the room around me, I once again felt the weight of someone sitting upon my bed and bending over my apparently sleeping body, ministering to it with unseen gestures and a soft voice. It was then, while pretending to be asleep as I used to do in my childhood, that I heard the words of a second "metaphysical lecture." They were whispered in a slow and resonant monotone.

"We should give thanks," the voice said to me, "that a poverty of knowledge has so narrowed our vision of things as to allow the possibility of feeling something about them. How could we find a pretext to react to anything if we understood... everything? None but an absent mind was ever victimized by the adventure of intense emotional feeling. And without the suspense that is generated by our benighted state-our status as beings possessed by our own bodies and the madness that goes along with them-who could take enough interest in the universal spectacle to bring forth even the feeblest yawn, let alone exhibit the more dramatic manifestations which lend such unwonted color to a world that is essentially composed of shades of gray upon a background of blackness. Hope and horror, to repeat merely two of the innumerable conditions dependent on a faulty insight, would be much the worse for an ultimate revelation that would expose their lack of necessity. At the other extreme, both our most dire and most exalted emotions are well served every time we take some ray of knowledge, isolate it from the spectrum of illumination, and then forget it completely. All our ecstasies, whether sacred or from the slime, depend on our refusal to be schooled in even the most superficial truths and our maddening will to follow the path of forgetfulness. Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence. To know, to understand in the fullest sense, is to plunge into an enlightenment of inanity, a wintry landscape of memory whose substance is all shadows and a profound awareness of the infinite s.p.a.ces surrounding us on all sides. Within this s.p.a.ce we remain suspended only with the aid of strings that quiver with our hopes and our horrors, and which keep us dangling over the gray void. How is it that we can defend such puppetry, condemning any efforts to strip us of these strings? The reason, one must suppose, is that nothing is more enticing, nothing more vitally idiotic, than our desire to have a name-even if it is the name of a stupid little puppet-and to hold on to this name throughout the long ordeal of our lives as if we could hold on to it forever. If only we could keep those precious strings from growing frayed and tangled, if only we could keep from falling into an empty sky, we might continue to pa.s.s ourselves off under our a.s.sumed names and perpetuate our puppet's dance throughout all eternity."

The voice whispered more words than this, more than I can recall, as if it would deliver its lecture without end. But at some point I drifted off to sleep as I had never slept before, calm and gray and dreamless.

The next morning I was awakened by some noise down in the street outside my window. It was the same delirious cacophony I had heard the day before when I first arrived in the northern border town and witnessed the pa.s.sing of that unique parade. But when I got up from my bed and went to the window, I saw no sign of the uproarious procession. Then I noticed the house directly opposite the one in which I had spent the night. One of the highest windows of that house across the street was fully open, and slightly below the ledge of the window, lying against the gray facade of the house, was the body of a man hanging by his neck from a thick white rope. The cord was stretched taut and led back through the window and into the house. For some reason this sight did not seem in any way unexpected or out of place, even as the noisy thrumming of the unseen parade grew increasingly louder and even when I recognized the figure of the hanged man, who was extremely slight of build, almost like a child in physical stature. Although many years older than when I had last seen him, his hair and beard now radiantly white, clearly the body was that of my old physician, Dr. Zirk.

Now I could see the parade approaching. From the far end of the gray, tunnel-like street, the clown creature strolled in its loose white garments, his egg-shaped head scanning the high houses on either side. As the creature pa.s.sed beneath my window it looked up at me for a moment with that same expression of bland malevolence, and then pa.s.sed on. Following this figure was the formation of ragged men harnessed by ropes to a cagelike vehicle that rolled along on wooden wheels. Countless objects, many more than I saw the previous day, clattered against the bars of the cage. The grotesque inventory now included bottles of pills that rattled with the contents inside them, s.h.i.+ning scalpels and instruments for cutting through bones, needles and syringes strung together and hung like ornaments on a Christmas tree, and a stethoscope that had been looped about the decapitated dog's head.

The wooden stakes of the caged platform wobbled to the point of breaking with the additional weight of this cast-off clutter. Because there was no roof covering this cage, I could see down into it from my window. But there was nothing inside, at least for the moment. As the vehicle pa.s.sed directly below, I looked across the street at the hanged man and the thick rope from which he dangled like a puppet. From the shadows inside the open window of the house, a hand appeared that was holding a polished steel straight razor. The fingers of that hand were thick and wore many gaudy rings. After the razor had worked at the cord for a few moments, the body of Dr. Zirk fell from the heights of the gray house and landed in the open vehicle just as it pa.s.sed by. The procession which was so lethargic in its every aspect now seemed to disappear quickly from view, its m.u.f.fled riot of sounds fading into the distance.

To make an end of it, I thought to myselfato make an end of it in whatever style you wish.

I looked at the house across the street. The window that was once open was now closed, and the curtains behind it were drawn. The tunnel-like street of gray houses was absolutely quiet and absolutely still. Then, as if in answer to my own deepest wish, a spa.r.s.e showering of snowflakes began to descend from the gray morning sky, each one of them a soft whispering voice. For the longest time I continued to stare out from my window, gazing upon the street and the town that I knew was my home.

When You Hear The Singing, You Will Know It Is Time (1997).

First published in In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land, 1997.

Also published in: Teatro Grottesco.

I had lived in the town near the northern border long enough so that, with the occult pa.s.sing of time, I had begun to a.s.sume that I would never leave there, at least not while I was alive.

I would die by my own hand, I might have believed, or possibly by the more usual means of some violent misadventure or some wasting disease. But certainly I had begun to a.s.sume that my life's end, as if by right, would take place either within the town itself or in close proximity to its outskirts, where the dense streets and structures of the town started to thin out and eventually dissolved into a desolate and seemingly endless countryside. Following my death, I thought, or had begun unwittingly to a.s.sume, I would be buried in the hilltop graveyard outside the town. I had no idea that there were others who might have told me that it was just as likely I would not die in the town and therefore would not be buried, or interred in any way whatsoever, within the hilltop graveyard. Such persons might have been regarded as hysterics of some kind, or possibly some type of impostor, since everyone who was a permanent resident of the northern border town seemed to be either one or the other and often both of them at once. These individuals might have suggested to me that it was also entirely possible neither to die in the town nor ever to leave it. I began to learn how such a thing might happen during the time I was living in a small backstairs apartment on the ground floor of a large rooming house located in one of the oldest parts of town.

It was the middle of the night, and I had just awakened in my bed. More precisely, I had started into wakefulness, much as I had done throughout my life. This habit of starting into wakefulness in the middle of the night enabled me to become aware, on that particular night, of a soft droning sound which filled my small, one-room apartment and which I might not have heard had I been the sort of person who remains asleep all night long. The sound was emanating from under the floorboards and rose up to reverberate in the moonlit darkness of the entire room. After a few moments sitting up in my bed, and then getting out of bed to step quietly around my small apartment, it seemed to me that the soft droning sound I heard was made by a voice, a very deep voice, which spoke as if it were delivering a lecture of some kind or addressing an audience with the self-a.s.sured inflections of authority. Yet I could not discern a single word of what the voice was saying, only its droning intonations and its deeply reverberant quality as it rose up from beneath the floorboards of my small backstairs apartment.

Until that night I had not suspected that there was a cellar below the rooming house where I lived on the ground floor. I was even less prepared to discover, as I eventually did, that hidden under a small, worn-down carpet, which was the only floor covering in my room, was a trap door-an access, it seemed, to whatever bas.e.m.e.nt or cellar might have existed (beyond all my suspicions) below the large rooming house. But there was something else unusual about this trap door, aside from its very presence in my small apartment room and the fact that it implied the existence of some type of rooming-house cellar. Although the trap door was somehow set into the floorboards of my room, it did not in any way appear to be of a piece with them. The trap door, as I thought of it, did not at all seem to be constructed of wood but of something that was more of a leathery consistency, all withered and warped and cracked in places as though it did not fit in with the roughly parallel lines of the floorboards in my room but clearly opposed them both in its shape and its angles, which were highly irregular by any standards that might conceivably apply to a rooming-house trap door. I could not even say if this leathery trap door had four sides to it or possibly five sides or more, so elusive and misshapen was its crude and shriveled construction, at least as I saw it in the moonlight after starting into wakefulness in my small backstairs apartment. Yet I was absolutely certain that the deeply reverberant voice which continued to drone on and on as I inspected the trap door was in fact emanating from a place, a cellar or bas.e.m.e.nt of some kind, directly below my room. I knew this to be true because I placed my hand, very briefly, on the trap door's leathery and irregular surface, and in that moment I could feel that it was pulsing in a way that corresponded to the force and rhythms of the voice which echoed its indecipherable words throughout the rest of that night, fading only moments before daylight.

Having remained awake for most of the night, I left my backstairs apartment and began to wander the streets of the northern border town on a cold and overcast morning in late autumn. Throughout the whole of that day I saw the town, where I had already lived for some time, under an aspect I had not known before. I have stated that this town near the northern border was a place where I had a.s.sumed I would one day die, and I may even say it was a place where I actually desired to make an end of it, or such was the intention or wish that I entertained at certain times and in certain places, including my residence in one of the oldest sections of the town. But as I wandered the streets on that overcast morning in late autumn, and throughout the day, my entire sense of my surroundings, as well as my intuition that my existence would be terminated within those surroundings, had become altered in a completely unexpected manner. The town had, of course, always displayed certain peculiar and often profoundly surprising qualities and features. Sooner or later everyone who was a permanent resident there was confronted with something of a nearly insupportable oddity or corruption.

As I wandered along one byway or another throughout that morning and into late afternoon, I recalled a specific street near the edge of town, a dead-end street where all the houses and other buildings seemed to have grown into one another, melding their diverse materials into a bizarre and jagged conglomerate of ma.s.sive architectural proportions, with peaked roofs and soaring chimneys or towers visibly swaying and audibly moaning even in the calm of an early summer twilight. I had thought that this was the absolute limit, only to find out at exactly the moment of having this thought that there was something further involved with this street, something that caused persons living in the area to repeat a special slogan or incantation to whomever would listen. When you hear the singing, they said, you will know it is time. These words were spoken, and I heard them myself, as if the persons uttering them were attempting to absolve or protect themselves in some way that was beyond any further explication. And whether or not one heard the singing or had ever heard what was called the singing, and whether or not that obscure and unspeakable time ever came, or would ever come to those who arrived in that street with its houses and other buildings all mingled together and tumbling into the sky, there nevertheless remained within you the feeling that this was still the place-the town near the northern border-where you came to live and where you might believe you would be a permanent resident until either you chose to leave it or until you died, possibly by violent misadventure or some wasting disease, if not by your own hand. Yet on that overcast morning in late autumn I could no longer maintain this feeling, not after having started into wakefulness the night before, not after having heard that droning voice which delivered some incomprehensible sermon for hours on end, and not after having seen that leathery trap door which I placed my hand upon for only a brief moment and thereafter retreated to the furthest corner of my small apartment until daylight.

And I was not the only one to notice a change within the town, as I discovered when twilight drew on and more of us began to collect on street corners or in back alleys, as well as in abandoned storefront rooms or old office buildings where most of the furniture was badly broken and out-of-date calendars hung crooked on the walls. It was difficult for some persons to refrain from observing that there seemed to be fewer of us as the shadows of twilight gathered that day. Even Mrs Glimm, whose lodging house-plus-brothel was as populous as ever with its out-of-town clientele, said that among the permanent residents of the northern border town there was a 'noticeably diminished' number of persons.

A man named Mr Pell (sometimes Doctor Pell) was to my knowledge the first to use the word 'disappearances' in order to illuminate, during the course of one of our twilight gatherings, the cause of the town's slightly reduced population. He was sitting in the shadows on the other side of an overturned desk or bookcase, so his words were not entirely audible as he whispered them in the direction of a darkened doorway, perhaps speaking to someone who was standing, or possibly lying down, in the darkness beyond the aperture. But once this concept-of 'disappearances,' that is-had been introduced, it seemed that quite a few persons had something to say on the subject, especially those who had lived in the town longer than most of us or who had lived in the oldest parts of the town for more years than I had. It was from one of the latter, a veteran of all kinds of hysteria, that I learned about the demonic preacher Reverend Cork, whose sermonizing I had apparently heard during the previous night as it reverberated through the leathery trap door in my apartment room. 'You didn't happen to open that trap door, did you?' the old hysteric asked in a somewhat coy tone of voice. We were sitting, just the two of us, on some wooden crates we had found in the opening to a narrow alley. 'Tell me,' he urged as the light from a streetlamp shone upon his thin face in the darkening twilight. 'Tell me that you didn't just take a little peek inside that trap door.' I then told him I had done nothing of the sort. Suddenly he began to laugh hysterically in a voice that was both high-pitched and extremely coa.r.s.e. 'Of course you didn't take a little peek inside the trap door,' he said when he finally settled down. 'If you had, then you wouldn't be here with me, you would be there with him.'

The antics and coy tone of the old hysteric notwithstanding, there was a meaning in his words that resonated with my experience in my apartment room and also with my perception that day of a profound change in the town near the northern border. At first I tended to conceive of the figure of Reverend Cork as a spirit of the dead, someone who had 'disappeared' by wholly natural means. In these terms I was able to think of myself as having been the victim of a haunting at the large rooming house where, no doubt, many persons had ended their lives in one way or another. This metaphysical framework seemed to apply nicely to my recent experiences and did not conflict with what I had been told in that narrow alley as twilight turned into evening. I was indeed here, in the northern border town with the old hysteric, and not there, in the land of the dead with Reverend Cork the demonic preacher.

But as the night wore on, and I moved among other residents of the town who had lived there far longer than I, it became evident that Reverend Cork, whose voice I had heard 'preaching' the night before, was neither dead, in the usual sense of the word, nor among those who had only recently 'disappeared,' many of whom, I learned, had not disappeared in any mysterious way at all but had simply abandoned the northern border town without notifying anyone. They had made this hasty exodus, according to several hysterics or impostors I spoke with that night, because they had 'seen the signs,' even as I had seen that leathery trap door whose existence in my apartment room was previously and entirely unsuspected.

Although I had not recognized it as such, this trap door, which appeared to lead to a cellar beneath the rooming house where I lived, was among the most typical of the so-called 'signs.' All of them, as numerous persons hysterically avowed, were indications of some type of threshold-doorways or pa.s.sages that one should be cautious not to enter, or even to approach. Most of these signs, in fact, took the form of doors of various types, particularly those which might be found in odd, out-of-the-way places, such as a miniature door at the back of a broom closet or a door appearing on the inner wall of a fireplace, and even doors that might not seem to lead to any sensible s.p.a.ce, as would be the case with a trap door in an apartment on the ground floor of a rooming house that did not have a cellar, nor had ever had one that could be accessed in such a way. I did hear about other such 'threshold-signs,' including window frames in the most queer locations, stairways that spiraled downward into depths beneath a common bas.e.m.e.nt or led below ground level along lonely sidewalks, and even entrances to streets that were not formerly known to exist, with perhaps a narrow gate swinging open in temptation.

Yet all of these signs or thresholds gave themselves away by their distinctive appearance, which, according to many of those knowledgeable of such things, was very much like that withered and leathery appearance of the trap door in my apartment room, not to mention displaying the same kind of shapes and angles that were strikingly at odds with their surroundings.

Nevertheless, there were still those who, for one reason or another, chose to ignore the signs or were unable to resist the enticements of thresholds that simply cropped up overnight in the most unforeseen places around the northern border town. To all appearances, at that point, the demonic preacher Reverend Cork had been one of the persons who had 'disappeared' in this way. I now became aware, as the evening progressed into a brilliantly star-filled night, that I had not been the victim of a haunting, as I had earlier supposed, but had actually witnessed a phenomenon of quite a different sort.

'The reverend has been gone since the last disappearances,' said an old woman whose face I could barely see in the candlelight that illuminated the enormous, echoing lobby of a defunct hotel where some of us had gathered after midnight. But someone took issue with the old woman, or 'idiot-hag,' as this person called her. The preacher, this other person contended in exactly the following words, was old town. This was my first exposure to the phrase 'old town,' but before I could take in its full meaning or implications it began to undergo a metamorphosis among those gathered after midnight in the lobby of that defunct hotel. While the person who called the old woman an idiot-hag continued to speak of the 'old town,' where he said Reverend Cork resided or was originally from, the old woman and a few of those who sided with her spoke only about the other town. 'No one is from the other town,' the woman said to the person who was calling her an idiot-hag. 'There are only those who disappear into the other town, among them the demonic preacher Reverend Cork, who may have been a ludicrous impostor but was never what anyone would call demonic until he disappeared into that trap door in the room where this gentleman,' she said, referring to me, 'heard him preaching only last night.'

'You idiot-hag,' said the other person, 'the old town existed on the very spot where this northern border town now exists... until the day when it disappeared, along with everyone who lived in it, including the demonic preacher Reverend Cork.'

Then someone else, who was lying deep in the cus.h.i.+ons of an old divan in the lobby, added the following words: 'It was a demon town and was inhabited by demonic ent.i.ties of all sorts who made the whole thing invisible. Now they throw out these thresholds as a way to lure another group of us who only want to live in this town near the northern border and not in some intolerable demon town.'

Nonetheless, the old woman and the few others who sided with her persisted in speaking not about an old town or an invisible demon town, but about the other town, which, they all agreed, never had any concrete existence to speak of, but was simply a metaphysical backdrop to the northern border town that we all knew and that was a place where many of us fervently desired to make an end of our lives. Whatever the facts in this matter, one point was hammered into my brain over and over again: there was simply no peace to be had no matter where you hid yourself away. Even in a northern border town of such intensely chaotic oddity and corruption there was still some greater chaos, some deeper insanity, than one had counted on, or could ever be taken into account-wherever there was anything, there would be chaos and insanity to such a degree that one could never come to terms with it, and it was only a matter of time before your world, whatever you thought it to be, was undermined, if not completely overrun, by another world.

Throughout the late hours of that night the debates and theories and fine qualifications continued regarding the spectral towns and the tangible thresholds that served to reduce the number of permanent residents of the northern border town, either by causing them to disappear through some out-of-the-way door or window or down a spiraling stairway or phantom street, or by forcing them to abandon the town because, for whatever reason, it had become, or seemed to become, something quite different from the place they had known it to be, or believed it to be, for so long. Whether or not they arrived at a resolution of their conflicting views I will never know, since I left the defunct hotel while the discussion was still going strong. But I did not go back to my small apartment in one of the oldest parts of town. Instead I wandered out to the hilltop graveyard outside of town and stood among the graves until the following morning, which was as cold and overcast as the one before it. I knew then that I would not die in the northern border town, either by means of a violent misadventure or a wasting disease, or even by my own hand, and therefore I would not be buried in the hilltop graveyard where I stood that morning looking down on the place where I had lived for so long. I had already wandered the streets of the northern border town for the last time and found, for whatever reason, that they had become something different from what they had been, or had once seemed to be. This was the only thing that was now certain in my mind. For a moment I considered returning to the town and seeking out one of the newly appeared thresholds in order to enter it before all of them mysteriously disappeared again, so that I might disappear along with them into the other town, or the old town, where perhaps I might find once more what I seemed to have lost in the northern border town. Possibly there might have been something there-on the other side of the town-that was like the dead-end street where, it was said, 'When you hear the singing, you will know it is time.' And while I might never be able to die in the town near the northern border, neither would I ever have to leave it. To have such thoughts was, of course, only more chaos and insanity. But I had not slept for two nights. I was tired and felt the ache of every broken dream I had ever carried within me. Perhaps I would one day seek out another town in another land where I could make an end of it, or at least where I could wait in a fatalistic delirium for the end to come. Now it was time to just walk away in silence.

Years later I learned there was a movement to 'clean up' the northern border town of what was elsewhere perceived to be its 'contaminated' elements. On arriving in the town, however, the investigators a.s.signed to this task discovered a place that was all but deserted, the only remaining residents being a few hysterics or impostors who muttered endlessly about 'other towns' or 'demon towns,' and even of an 'old town.' Among these individuals was a large and gaudily attired old woman who styled herself as the owner of a lodging house and several other properties. These venues, she said, along with many others throughout the town, had been rendered uninhabitable and useless for any practical purpose. This statement seemed to capsulize the findings of the investigators, who ultimately composed a report that was dismissive of any threat that might be posed by the town near the northern border, which, whatever else it may have been, or seemed to be, was always a genius of the most insidious illusions.

My Case For Retributive Action (2001).

First published in Weird Tales, Summer 2001.

Also published in: Teatro Grottesco.

It was my first day working as a processor of forms in a storefront office. As soon as I entered the place-before I had a chance to close the door behind me or take a single step inside-this rachitic individual wearing mismatched clothes and eyegla.s.ses with frames far too small for his balding head came hopping around his desk to greet me. He spoke excitedly, his words tumbling over themselves, saying, 'Welcome, welcome. I'm Ribello. Allow me, if you will, to help you get your bearings around here. Sorry there's no coat rack or anything. You can just use that empty desk.'

Now, I think you've known me long enough, my friend, to realize that I'm anything but a sn.o.b or someone who by temperament carries around a superior att.i.tude toward others, if for no other reason than that I simply lack the surplus energy required for that sort of behavior. So I smiled and tried to introduce myself. But Ribello continued to inundate me with his patter. 'Did you bring what they told you?' he asked, glancing down at the briefcase hanging from my right hand. 'We have to provide our own supplies around here, I'm sure you were told that much,' he continued before I could get a word in. Then he turned his head slightly to sneak a glance around the storefront office, which consisted of eight desks, only half of them occupied, surrounded by towering rows of filing cabinets that came within a few feet of the ceiling. 'And don't make any plans for lunch,' he said. 'I'm going to take you someplace. There are some things you might want to know. Information, anecdotes. There's one particular anecdote... but we'll let that wait. You'll need to get your bearings around here.'

Ribello then made sure I knew which desk I'd been a.s.signed, pointing out the one closest to the window of the storefront office. 'That used to be my desk. Now that you're with us I can move to one of the desks farther back.' Antic.i.p.ating Ribello's next query, I told him that I had already received instructions regarding my tasks, which consisted entirely of processing various forms for the Quine Organization, a company whose interests and activities penetrate into every enterprise, both public and private, on this side of the border. Its headquarters are located far from the town where I secured a job working for them, a drab outpost, one might call it, that's even quite distant from any of the company's regional centers of operation. In such a place, and many others like it, the Quine Organization also maintains offices, even if they are just dingy storefront affairs permeated by a sour, briny odor. This smell could not be ignored and led me to speculate that before this building had been taken over as a facility for processing various forms relating to the monopolist Q. Org, as it is often called for shorthand, it had long been occupied by a pickle shop. You might be interested to know that this speculation was later confirmed by Ribello, who had taken it upon himself to help me get my bearings in my new job, which was also my first job since arriving in this little two-street town.

As I sat down at my desk, where a lofty stack of forms stood waiting to be processed, I tried to put my encounter with Ribello out of my head. I was very much on edge for reasons that you well know (my nervous condition and so forth), but in addition I was suffering from a lack of proper rest. A large part of the blame for my deprivation of sleep could be attributed to the woman who ran the apartment house where I lived in a single room on the top floor. For weeks I'd been pleading with her to do something about the noises that came from the s.p.a.ce underneath the roof of the building, which was directly above the ceiling of my room. This was a quite small room made that much smaller because one side of it was steeply slanted in parallel to the slanted roof above. I didn't want to come out and say to the woman that there were mice or some other kind of vermin living under the roof of the building which she ran, but that was my implication when I told her about the 'noises.' In fact, these noises suggested something far more sizeable, and somehow less identifiable, than a pack of run-of-the-mill vermin. She kept telling me that the problem would be seen to, although it never was. Finally, on the morning which was supposed to be the first day of my new job-after several weeks of struggling with inadequate sleep in addition to the agitations deriving from my nervous condition-I thought I would just make an end of it right there in that one-room apartment on the top floor of a building in a two-street town on the opposite side of the border from the place where I had lived my whole life and to where it seemed I would never be able to return. For the longest time I sat on the edge of my bed holding a bottle of nerve medicine, s.h.i.+fting it from one hand to the other and thinking, 'When I stop s.h.i.+fting this bottle back and forth-an action that seemed to be occurring without the intervention or control of my own mind-if I find myself holding it in my left hand I'll swallow the entire contents and make an end of it, and if I find myself holding it in my right hand I'll go and start working in a storefront office for the Quine Organization.'

I don't actually recall in which hand the bottle ended up, or whether I dropped it on the floor in pa.s.sing it from hand to hand, or what in the world happened. All I know is that I turned up at that storefront office, and, as soon as I stepped inside, Ribello was all over me with his nonsense about how he would help me get my bearings. And now, while I was processing forms one after another like a machine, I also had to antic.i.p.ate going to lunch with this individual. None of the other three persons in the office-two middle-aged men and an elderly woman who sat in the far corner-had exercised the least presumption toward me, as had Ribello, whom I already regarded as an unendurable person. I credited the others for their consideration and sensitivity, but of course there might have been any number of reasons why they left me alone that morning. I remember that the doctor who was treating both you and me, and whom I take it you are still seeing, was fond of saying, as if in wise counsel, 'However much you may believe otherwise, nothing in this world is unendurable-nothing.' If he hadn't gotten me to believe that, I might have been more circ.u.mspect about him and wouldn't be in the position I am today, exiled on this side of the border where fogs configure themselves with an astonis.h.i.+ng regularity. These fogs are thick and gray; they crawl down my throat and all but cut off my breathing.

Throughout that morning I tried to process as many forms as possible, if only to keep my mind off the whole state of affairs that made up my existence, added to which was having to go to lunch with Ribello. I had brought along something to eat, something that would keep in my briefcase without going rotten too soon. And for some hours the need to consume these few items I had stored in my briefcase was acutely affecting me, yet Ribello gave no sign that he was ready to take me to this eating place he had in mind. I didn't know exactly what time it was, since there wasn't a clock in the office and none of the others seemed to have taken a break for lunch, or anything else for that matter. But I was beginning to feel light-headed and anxious. Even more than food, I needed the medication that I had left behind in my one-room apartment.

Outside the front window I couldn't see what was going on in the street due to an especially dense fog that formed sometime around mid-morning and hung about the town for the rest of the day. I had almost finished processing all the forms that were on my desk, which was far more work than I had initially calculated I would be able to accomplish in a single day. When there were only a few forms left, the elderly woman who sat in the corner shuffled over to me with a new stack that was twice the size of the first, letting them fall on my desk with a thump. I watched her limp back to her place in the corner, her breath now audibly labored from the effort of carrying such a weighty pile of forms. While I was turned in my seat, I saw Ribello smiling and nodding at me as he pointed at his wrist.w.a.tch. Then he pulled out a coat from underneath his desk. It seemed that it was finally time for us to go to lunch, although none of the others budged or blinked as we walked past them and left the office through a back door that Ribello pointed me toward.

Outside was a narrow alley which ran behind the storefront office and adjacent structures. As soon as we were out of the building I asked Ribello the time, but his only reply was, 'We'll have to hurry if we want to get there before closing.' Eventually I found that it was almost the end of the working day, or what I would have considered to be such. 'The hours are irregular,' Ribello informed me as we rushed down the alley. There the back walls of various structures stood on one side and high wooden fences on the other, the fog hugging close to both of them.

'What do you mean, irregular?' I said.

'Did I say irregular? I meant to say indefinite,' he replied. 'There's always a great deal of work to be done. I'm sure the others were as glad to see you arrive this morning as I was, even if they didn't show it. We're perpetually shorthanded. All right, here we are,' said Ribello as he guided me toward an alley door with a light dimly glowing above it.

It was a small place, not much larger than my apartment, with only a few tables. There were no customers other than ourselves, and most of the lights had been turned off. 'You're still open, aren't you?' said Ribello to a man in a dirty ap.r.o.n who looked as if he hadn't shaved for several days.

'Soon we close,' the man said. 'You sit there.'

We sat where we were told to sit, and in short order a woman brought two cups of coffee, slamming them in front of us on the table. I looked at Ribello and saw him pulling a sandwich wrapped in wax paper out of his coat pocket. 'Didn't you bring your lunch?' he said. I told him that I thought we were going to a place that served food. 'No, it's just a coffeehouse,' Ribello said as he bit into his sandwich. 'But that's all right. The coffee here is very strong. After drinking a cup you won't have any appet.i.te at all. And you'll be ready to face all those forms that Erma hauled over to your desk. I thought she was going to drop dead for sure.'

'I don't drink coffee,' I said. 'It makes me-' I didn't want to say that coffee made me terribly nervous, you understand. So I just said that it didn't agree with me.

Ribello set down his sandwich for a moment and stared at me. 'Oh dear,' he said, running a hand over his balding head.

'What's wrong?'

'Hatcher didn't drink coffee.'

'Who is Hatcher?'

Taking up his sandwich once again, Ribello continued eating while he spoke. 'Hatcher was the employee you were hired to replace. That's the anecdote I wanted to relate to you in private. About him. Now it seems I might be doing more harm than good. I really did want to help you get your bearings.'

'Nevertheless,' I said as I watched Ribello finish off his sandwich.

Ribello wiped his hands together to shake free the crumbs clinging to them. He adjusted the undersized eyegla.s.ses which seemed as if they might slip off his face at any moment. Then he took out a pack of cigarettes. Although he didn't offer me any of his sandwich, he did offer me a cigarette.

'I don't smoke,' I told him.

'You should, especially if you don't drink coffee. Hatcher smoked, but his brand of cigarettes was very mild. I don't suppose it really matters, your not being a smoker, since they don't allow us to smoke in the office anymore. We received a memo from headquarters. They said that the smoke got into the forms. I don't know why that should make any difference.'

'What about the pickle smell?' I said.

'For some reason they don't mind that.'

'Why don't you just go out into the alley to smoke?'

'Too much work to do. Every minute counts. We're short-handed as it is. We've always been short-handed, but the work still has to get done. They never explained to you about the working hours?'

I was hesitant to reveal that I had gotten my position not by applying to the company, but through the influence of my doctor, who is the only doctor in this two-street town. He wrote down the address of the storefront office for me on his prescription pad, as if the job with Q. Org were another type of medication he was using to treat me. I was suspicious, especially after what happened with the doctor who treated us both for so long. His therapy, as you know from my previous correspondence, was to put me on a train that traveled clear across the country and over the border. This was supposed to help me overcome my dread of straying too far from my own home, and perhaps effect a breakthrough with all the other fears accompanying my nervous condition. I told him that I couldn't possibly endure such a venture, but he only repeated his ridiculous maxim that nothing in the world is unendurable. To make things worse, he wouldn't allow me to bring along any medication, although of course I did. But this didn't help me in the least, not when I was traveling through the mountains with only bottomless gorges on either side of the train tracks and an infinite sky above. In those moments, which were eternal I a.s.sure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride. I know that your condition differs from mine, and therefore you have no means by which to fully comprehend my ordeals, just as I cannot fully comprehend yours. But I do acknowledge that both our conditions are unendurable, despite the doctor's second-hand plat.i.tude that nothing in this world is unendurable. I've even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It's only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominantly a response of pa.s.sive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsessions that you fear you might act upon. When the train that the doctor put me on finally made its first stop outside of this two-street town across the border, I swore that I would kill myself rather than make the return trip. Fortunately, or so it seemed at the time, I soon found a doctor who treated my state of severe disorientation and acute panic. He also a.s.sisted me in attaining a visa and working papers. Thus, after considering the matter, I ultimately told Ribello that my reference for the position in the storefront office had in fact come from my doctor.

'That explains it, then,' he said.

'Explains what?'

'All doctors work for the Quine Organization. Sooner or later he would have brought you in. That's how Hatcher was brought in. But he couldn't persevere. He couldn't take the fact that we were short-handed and that we would always be short-handed. And when he found out about the indefinite hours... well, he exploded right in the office.'

'He had a breakdown?' I said.

'I suppose you could call it that. One day he just jumped up from his desk and started ranting about how we were always short-handed... and the indefinite hours. Then he became violent, turning over several of the empty desks in the office and shouting, "We won't be needing these." He also pulled out some file drawers, throwing their contents all over the place. Finally he started tearing up the forms, ones that hadn't yet been processed. That's when Pilsen intervened.'

'Which one is he?'

'The large man with the mustache who sits at the back of the office. Pilsen grabbed Hatcher and tossed him into the street. That was it for Hatcher. Within a few days he was officially dismissed from the company. I processed the form myself. There was no going back for him. He was completely ruined,' said Ribello as he took a sip of coffee and then lit another cigarette.

'I don't understand. How was he ruined?' I said.

'It didn't happen all at once,' explained Ribello. 'These things never do. I told you that Hatcher was a cigarette smoker. Very mild cigarettes that he special-ordered. Well, one day he went to the store where he purchased his cigarettes and was told that the particular brand he used, which was the only brand he could tolerate, was no longer available.'

'Not exactly the end of the world,' I said.

'No, not in itself,' said Ribello. 'But that was just the beginning. The same thing that happened with his cigarettes was repeated when he tried to acquire certain foods he needed for his special diet. Those were also no longer available. Worst of all, none of his medications were in stock anywhere in town, or so he was told. Hatcher required a whole shelf of pharmaceuticals to keep him going, far more than anyone else I've ever known. Most important to him were the medications he took to control his phobias. He especially suffered from a severe case of arachnophobia. I remember one day in the office when he noticed a spider making its way across the ceiling. He was always on the lookout for even the tiniest of spiders. He practically became hysterical, insisting that one of us exterminate the spider or he would stop processing forms. He had us crawling around on top of the filing cabinets trying to get at the little creature. After Pilsen finally caught the thing and killed it, Hatcher demanded to see its dead body and to have it thrown out into the street. We even had to call in exterminators, at the company's expense, before Hatcher would return to work. But after he was dismissed from the company, Hatcher was unable to procure any of the old medications that had allowed him to keep his phobias relatively in check. Of course the doctor was no help to him, since all doctors are also employees of Q. Org.'

'What about doctors on the other side of the border?' I said. 'Do they also work for the company?'

'I'm not sure,' said Ribello. 'It could be. In any case, I saw Hatcher while I was on my way to the office one day. I asked him how he was getting along, even though he was obviously a complete wreck, almost totally ruined. He did say that he was receiving some kind of treatment for his phobias from an old woman who lived at the edge of town. He didn't specify the nature of this treatment, and since I was in a hurry to get to the office I didn't inquire about it. Later I heard that the old woman, who was known to make concoctions out of various herbs and plants, was treating Hatcher's arachnophobia with a medicine of sorts which she distilled from spider venom.'

'A homeopathic remedy of sorts,' I said.

'Perhaps,' said Ribello in a distant tone of voice.

At this point the unshaven man came over to the table and told us that he was closing for the day. Since Ribello had invited me to lunch, such as it was, I a.s.sumed that he would pay for the coffee, especially since I hadn't taken a sip of mine. But I noted that he put down on the table only enough money for himself, and so I was forced to do the same. Then, just before we turned to leave, he reached for my untouched cup and quickly gulped down its contents. 'No sense in it going to waste,' he said.

Walking back to the office through the narrow, fog-strewn alley, I prompted Ribello for whatever else he could tell me about the man whose position in the storefront office I had been hired to fill. His response, however, was less than enlightening and seemed to wander into realms of hearsay and rumor. Ribello himself never saw Hatcher again after their meeting in the street. In fact, it was around this time that Hatcher seemed to disappear entirely-the culmination, in Ribello's view, of the man's ruin. Afterward a number of stories circulated around town that seemed relevant to Hatcher's case, however bizarre they may have been. No doubt others aside from Ribello were aware of the treatments Hatcher had been taking from the old woman living on the edge of town. This seemed to provide the basis for the strange anecdotes which were being spread about, most of them originating among children and given little credence by the average citizen. Prevalent among these anecdotes were sightings of a 'spider thing' about the size of a cat. This fabulous creature was purportedly seen by numerous children as they played in the streets and back alleys of the town. They called it the 'n.o.bby monster,' the source of this childish phrase being that, added to the creature's resemblance to a monstrous spider, it also displayed a k.n.o.b-like protrusion from its body that looked very much like a human head. This aspect of the story was confirmed by a few older persons whose testimony was invariably dismissed as the product of the medications that had been prescribed for them, even though practically everyone in town could be discredited for the same reason, since they were all-that is, we were all-taking one kind of drug or another in order to keep functioning in a normal manner. There came a time, however, when sightings of the so-called n.o.bby monster ceased altogether, both among children and older, heavily medicated persons. Nor was Hatcher ever again seen around town.