The Collected Short Fiction by Thomas Ligotti Part 5

But William Wilson will not hear any more of this insanity. He's already suffered anough at the hands of his twin. Taking up his sword, Wilson attacks the specter and savagely hacks him to bits. ("There's my peace with you!" he shouts.) Then he goes around feeding the hunks of flesh to the dogs in the neighborhood, all the while admiring the simple hunger of the devouring beasts.

William Wilson soon afterward starves to death, for when he returns home he finds that the thought of what he's done won't let him stop laughing long enough to take any nourishment, or even a drink of water.

The Worthy Inmate of the Will of the Lady Ligeia (1985).

First published in The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales, 1994 The Lady Ligeia is a woman of great beauty-dark hair, high forehead, striking eyes-and also great learning. Her husband, a man of only average looks and accomplishments, shares in her studies of occult wisdom, and to him it sometimes seems that he and his wife are treading on the bounds of forbidden knowledge. From the very beginning there was perhaps something extraordinary about their marriage pact. (For instance, Ligeia kept her last name a secret from her mate, and he never pressed the issue, never questioned this arrangement.) When the Lady Ligeia is dying from an unknown disorder, her husband still doesn't understand what she sees in him. He feels unworthy of her love, which is incomprehensibly intense; he feels it is entirely unmerited.

When living, the Lady Ligeia often spoke of the will to conquer death, the will to survive its terrible, seemingly inevitable victory. Ligeia's widower appears to share these sentiments, and after her death he begins a new life with Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine, a blue-eyed blond woman from a distinguished English family. However, not long into his second marriage he shuts himself away in a secluded room of bizarre decor: nightmarish colors, garish appointments, and weird, restless tapestries. There he recklessly jeopardizes his mental balance with drugs and strange dreams. His physical well-being doesn't sustain any serious damage (he's as fit as he ever was), but his second wife's health, like her predecessors suddenly and inexplicably seems to be declining.

He sees Lady Rowena suffer a series of relapses and recoveries, until to his eyes she has at last wasted away altogether, and dies in that secluded and fantastically renovated chamber. Her lifeless form lies before him, but all he can think about is his first wife, his lost love, Ligeia.

By design, that strange room he built for himself is perfect for dreaming in, and now he is dreaming quite strenuously, dreaming with every ounce of his will about his first wife, the Lady Ligeia. He also takes an immoderate amount of opium as an aid to his dreaming. At the same time the corpse of his second wife. Lady Rowena, seems to be exhibiting incredible signs of revived life-color in the face, faint pulsing of the heart-which then disappear, only to reappear after a brief interval. This occurs off and on throughout the night and culminates in the supernatural resurrection not of Lady Rowena, but of the Lady Ligeia, whom the widower of both ladies has dreamed back to life, supplying the body of his second wife to accommodate the first.

But the resurrection is an illusory one. Lady Rowena is, in fact, not dead; nor is the Lady Ligeia alive. For all his efforts, their husband hadn't dreamed either of them anywhere but has succeeded only in dreaming himself out of one world and into another. Through this exercise of will he has finally merited the love of the dark woman whose raven hair is now spreading from the shadows of her shroud. He has willed himself into her domain, from which no one ever escapes and which is the very source of the will itself.

And now they are both locked forever in the formless phantasmagoria from which emanates innumerable echoes of each gory and pa.s.sionate throb of the Heart Divine. Best of all, Ligeia has her husband back.

"Oh Rowena, Rowena," he screams. But n.o.body-never mind the blond, blue-eyed widow-can hear him now.

The Interminable Residence of the Friends of the House of Usher (1985).

First published in The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales, 1994.

A man of average height and features has just managed to escape the House of Usher only seconds before it collapses full force deep into the murky waters of the adjacent tarn. The man runs under a nearby tree, seeking refuge from the violent storm which began and consummated that evening's catastrophe. Once there, however, he looks up and notes that the tree is leafless. (Its limp branches are flowing freely in the wind and even its roots, unearthed, are waving around.) The man of average height and features was spending a few days at the House of Usher at the invitation of a friend and former cla.s.smate, Roderick, who along with his twin sister, Madeline, owned the house and a fair amount of surrounding property, including a graveyard. Roderick immediately impressed his childhood friend as a very sick man. Only the softest sounds, the dimmest light, and a generally immobile routine could be tolerated by his morbidly keen senses and nervous system.

Still, the two friends managed to keep themselves entertained by reading rare books of occult lore, and sometimes Roderick would play, however quietly, unusual melodies on his guitar. Roderick also tries to explain some unusual theories which lately have obsessed his supersubtle mind, theories about his relations.h.i.+p to the house and to his twin sister. But at the time Roderick's friend doesn't really understand all this.

The visitor at the House of Usher is at first appalled by the desolate countryside, the unwholesome appearance of the tarn, and the shocking, if not dangerous, condition of the house itself. After a while, though, these striking abnormalities cease to affect him the way they once did. When Roderick announces that Madeline has died, he helps the bereaved brother inter the deceased twin without asking any questions. (She had a rosy flush on her face!) Life at the House of Usher is then carried on as usual by its two remaining residents. This state of affairs begins to decay when one night there's a storm which upsets Roderick to the point of hysteria. His housemate tries to calm him down by reading from a storybook. But Roderick is inconsolable and now claims that the two of them locked Madeline in the family crypt while she was still alive. His friend is unnerved by this outburst. He had no idea things were so bad. This was madness!

Even worse, Roderick is proved to be telling the truth when his sister staggers into the room, falls upon her twin, and they both end up as a lifeless heap on the floor. The man of average height and features barely manages to get out of the house before that too goes down. He stares at the empty lot where the House of Usher used to be, and then he turns away to seek a haven far removed from the site of this terrible ordeal.

But before he can take a single step he realizes that there is no longer anyplace he can go, no longer anyone who will have him. Oh, the books, the shadows, and the horrible entombment of that poor girl. How did he ever get into this one! While the Ushers were effortlessly delivered to their doom by the hereditary freaks and weaknesses of their family, he came to the house, and stayed, of his own free will, and by the same will, without asking a single question, he too must now be consumed by the tarn whose diseased waters await his embrace.

The Fabulous Alienation of the Outsider, being of no fixed Abode (1985).

First published in The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales, 1994 The outsider lifts his shadowwearied eyes and gazes about the moldy chamber where, to his knowledge, he has always lived. He has no recollection of who he is or how he came to dwell so far removed from others of his kind who, he reasons, must exist, perhaps in that world above which he vividly recalls, though he glimsed it only once and long ago.

One night the outsider emerges from his underground domain and, guided solely by the glowing moon he has never really seen before, scrambles down a dark road, searching for friendly lights and, he hopes, friendly faces.

Eventually he comes upon a large, festively illuminated house. At first he peeks shyly through the windows at the partiers inside; but soon his unbearable longing for the society of others, along with a barely evolved sense of etiquette, liberate him from all hesitancies. Locating an unlocked door, he crashes the affair.

Inside the house-a structure of gorgeous Georgian decor-everyone screams and flees at the first sight of the outsider. After only a few seconds of recognition and companions.h.i.+p, this recluse by default is once again left to keep his own company. That is to say, he has been abandoned to the company of that untimely horror which initially set those gay and fine-looking people so indecorously on their heels. "What was it?" he asks himself, posing the question over and over with seemingly infinite repit.i.tion before finally collecting wits to squint a little to one side. "What was it?" he asks for the infinite time add one or two. "It was you," answers the mirror. "It was you."

Now it is the outsider's turn to make his getaway from that hideous living corpse of unholy and unwholesome familiarity, that thing which had imperfectly decomposed in its subterranean resting place. He seeks refuge in a chaotic dreamworld where no one really notices the dead and no one even looks twice at the disgusting.

Eventually, however, he tires of this deranged, though unhostile dimension of alienage. His heart more pulverized than simply broken, he decides to return to the subhumous envelope from which he never should have strayed, there to reclaim his birthright of sloth, amnesia, and darkness. A period of time pa.s.ses, indefinite for the outsider though decisive for the balance of the world's population.

For reasons unknown, the outsider once more drags his bulky frame earthwards. Arriving exhaused in the superterranean realm, he finds himself standing, badly, in neither darkness nor daylight, but some morbid transitional phase between the two. A senile sun throbs with deadly dimness, and every living thing on the face of the land has been choked by desolation and by an equivocal gloom which has perhaps already lasted millenia, if not longer. The outsider, a thing of the dead, has managed to outlive all those others whom, either from madness or mere loss of memory, he would willingly seek out to escape a personal void that seems to have existed prior to astronomy.

This possibility is now, of course, as defunct as the planet itself. With all biology in tatters, the outsider will never again hear the consoling gasps of those who shunned him and in whose eyes and hearts he achieved a certain tangible ident.i.ty, however loathsome. Without the others he simply cannot go on being himself-for there is no longer anyone to be outside of. In no time at all he is overwhelmed by this atrocious paradox of fate.

In the middle of this revelation, a feeling begins to well up in the outsider, an incalculable sorrow deep inside. From the center of his being (which now is the center of all being that remains in existence) he summons a suicidal outburst of pain whose force shatters his rotting shape into innumerable fragments. Catastrophically enough, this antic, designed to conclude universal genocide, gives off such energy that the distant sun is revived by a transfusion of warmth and light.

And each fragment of the outsider cast far across the earth now absorbs the warmth and catches the light, reflecting the future life and festivals of a resurrected race of beings: ones who will remain forever ignorant of their origins but for whom the sight of a surface of cold, unyielding gla.s.s will always hold profound and unexplainable terrors.

The Blasphemous Enlightment of Prof. Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston, Providence, and the Human Race (1985).

First published in The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales, 1994 In the late 1920s Prof. Thurston is putting a few final touches to a ma.n.u.script he intends no other person ever to lay eyes on, so that no one else will have to suffer unnecessarily in the way he has this past year or so. When it's all done with, he just sits in silence for a few moments in the library of his Boston home (summer sunlight wandering over the oak walls), and then he breaks down and weeps like a lost soul for the better part of the day, letting up later that night.

Prof. Thurston is the nephew of George Gammell Angell, also a professor (at Brown U., Providence, PJ), whose archaeological and anthropological unearthings led him, and after his death led his nephew, to some disturbing conclusions concerning the nature and fate of human life, with implications universal even in their least astounding aspects.

They discovered, positively, that throughout the world there exist savage cults which practice strange rites: degenerate Eskimos in the Arctic, degenerate Caucasians in New England seaport towns, and degenerate Indiand and mulattoes in the Louisiana swamps not far from Tulane University, New Orleans. The two professors also discovered that the primary aim of these cults is to await and welcome the return of ante-prehistoric monstrosities which will unseat the human race, overrun the earth, and generally have their way with our world.

These beings are as detestably inhuman as humanly imaginable, though no more so. From the common individual's viewpoint their nature is one of supreme evil and insanity, notwithstanding that the creatures themselves are indifferent to, if not totally unaware of, such mundane categories of value.

From the beginning of time they have held a certain attraction for persons interested in pursuing an existence of utter chaos and mayhem; that is, one of complete liberation at all conceivable levels.

After learning the designs these beings have on our planet, Prof. Thurston just a.s.sumes he will be murdered to keep him quiet on the subject, as his uncle and others have been. (And to think that at one point in his investigation he was planning to publish his findings in the journal of the American Archaelogical Society!) All he can do now is wait.

For some reason, however, the followers of the Great Old Ones (as the extraterrestrial ent.i.ties are referred to) never follow through, and Prof. Thurston appears to escape a.s.sa.s.sination, at least for an indefinite period of time. But this is of little comfort, because knowing what he knows, Prof. Thurston is the most miserable being on earth. He grieves for his lost dream of life, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer are a horror to his eyes. It goes without saying that he now finds even the simplest daily task a joyless requisite for survival and no more.

After months of boredom and a personal devastation far worse than any worldwide apocalypse could possibly be, he decides to return to his old job at the university. Not that he believes any longer in the hollow conclusions of his once beloved anthropology, but at least it would give him a way to occupy himself, to lose himself. Still, he continues to be profoundly despondent and his looks degenerate beyond polite comment.

"What's wrong, Prof. Thurston?" a student asks him one day after cla.s.s. The professor glances up at the girl. After only the briefest gaze into her eyes he can see that she really cares. "Amazing," he thinks. Of course there is no way he could tell her what is really wrong, but they do talk for a while and later take a walk across the campus on a clear autumn afternoon. They begin to see each other secretly off campus, and with graduation day behind them they finally get married, their ceremony solemn and discreet.

The couple honeymoons at a picturesque little town on the seacost of Ma.s.sachusetts. To all appearances, several sublime days pa.s.s without one ripple of grief. One day, as he and his bride watch the sun descend into a perfectly unwrinkled ocean, Prof. Thurston almost manages to rationalize into nonexistence his dreadful knowledge. After all, he tells himself, there still exist precious human feeling and human beauty (e.g. the quaint little town) created by human hands. These things have been perennially threatened by disorder and oblivion. Anyway, all of it was bound to end somehow, at sometime. What difference did it make when the world was lost, or to whom?

But Prof. Thurston cannot sustain these consoling thoughts for long. All during their honeymoon he snaps pictures of his smiling wife. He loves her dearly, but her innocence is tearing him apart. How long can he conceal the terrible things he knows about himself, about her, and about the world? Even after he takes a picture, this wonderful girl just keeps smiling at him! How long can he live with this new pain?

The problem continues to obsess him (to the future detriment, he fears, of his marriage). Then, on the last night of the honeymoon, everything is resolved.

He awakens in darkness from a strange dream he cannot recall. Outside the window of the bedroom it sounds as though the whole town is in an ambivalent uproar-hysterical voices blending festival and catastrophe. And there are weirdly colored lights quivering upon the bedroom wall. Prof. Thurston's wife is also awake, and she says to her husband: "The new masters have come in the night to their chosen city. Have you dreamed of them?" There pa.s.ses a moment of silence. Then, at last, Prof. Thurston answers his wife with the long, abandoned howl of a madman or a beast, for he too has dreamed the new dream and, without his conscious knowledge or consent, has embraced the new world.

And now nothing can hurt him as he has been so cruelly hurt in the past. Nothing will ever again cause him that pain he suffered so long, an intolerable anguish from which he could never have found release in any other way.

The Premature Death of H.P. Lovecraft, Oldest Man in New England (1985).

First published in The Agonizing Resurrection Of Victor Frankenstein And Other Gothic Tales, 1994.

H.P. Lovecraft, the last great writer of supernatural horror tales, has just died of stomach cancer at the age of forty-six in a Providence, Rhode Island, hospital. He died alone and with no particular expression on his face. Upon the nightstand next to his bed are a few books and many handwritten pages in which Lovecraft recorded the sensations of his dying. (These notes are later lost, to the dismay of scholars.) Two nurses come to look in on the gentleman in the private room and are the first to discover that he has, not unexpectedly, pa.s.sed away. They have already seen death many times in their nursing careers, though they're still quite young, and neither is alarmed. They know nothing can be done for the dead man. One of them says: "Open a window, it's stuffy in here."

"Sure is," replies the other. A crisp mid-March breeze freshens the room.

"Well, there's no more that can be done for him," comments the first nurse. Then she asks: "Do you remember if he had a wife or anybody that visited him?" The other nurse shakes her head negatively, then adds: "Are you kidding! He's not exactly the husband type. I mean, just take a look at that face.'"

The first nurse nods positively. She makes a humorous remark about the deceased, and then both nurses leave the room smiling.

But apparently neither of them noticed the fantastic and frightening thing which occurred right before their eyes: H.P. Lovecraft, for only the shortest-lived moment, had ever so faintly smiled back at them.

Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story (1985).

First published in Dark Horizons #28, 1985.

Also published in: Songs Of A Dead Dreamer.

For much too long I have been promising to formulate my views on the writing of supernatural horror tales. Until now I just haven't had the time. Why not? I was too busy churning out the leetle darlings. But many people, for whatever reasons, would like to be writers of horror tales, I know this. Fortunately, the present moment is a convenient one for me to share my knowledge and experience regarding this special literary vocation. Well, I guess I'm ready as I'll ever be. Let's get it over with.

The way I plan to proceed is quite simple. First, I'm going to sketch out the basic plot, characters, and various other features of a short horror story. Next, I will offer suggestions on how these raw elements may be treated in a few of the major styles which horror writers have exploited over the years. Each style is different and has its own little tricks. This approach will serve as an aid in deciding which style is the right one and for whom. And if all goes well, the novitiate teller of terror tales will be saved much time and agony discovering such things for himself. We'll pause at certain spots along the way to examine specific details, make highly biased evaluations, submit general commentary on the philosophy of horror fiction, and so forth.

At this point it's only fair to state that the following sample story, or rather its rough outline form, is not one that appears in the published works of Gerald K. Riggers, nor will it ever appear. Frankly, for reasons we'll explore a little later, I just couldn't find a way to tell this one that really satisfied me. Such things happen. (Perhaps farther down the line we'll a.n.a.lyze these extreme cases of irreparable failure, perhaps not.) Nevertheless the unfinished state of this story does not preclude using it as a perfectly fit display model to demonstrate how horror writers do what they do. Good. Here it is, then, as told in my own words. A couple-three paragraphs, at most.

THE STORY.

A thirtyish but still quite youthful man, let's name him Nathan, has a date with a girl whom he deeply wishes to impress. Toward this end, a minor role is to be played by an impressive new pair of trousers he intends to find and purchase. A few obstacles materialize along the way, petty but frustrating bad luck, before he finally manages to secure the exact trousers he needs and at an extremely fair price. They are exceptional in their tailoring, this is quite plain. So far, so good. Profoundly good, to be sure, since Nathan intensely believes that one's personal possessions should themselves possess a certain substance, a certain quality. For example, Nathan's winter overcoat is the same one his father wore for thirty winters; Nathan's wrist.w.a.tch is the same one his grandfather wore going on four decades, in all seasons. For Nathan, peculiar essences inhere in certain items of apparel, not to mention certain other articles small and large, certain happenings in time and s.p.a.ce, certain people, and certain notions. In Nathan's view, yes, every facet of one's life should s.h.i.+ne with these essences which alone make things really real. What are they? Nathan, over a period of time, has narrowed the essential elements down to three: something magic, something timeless, something profound. Though the world around him is for the most part lacking in these special ingredients, he perceives his own life to contain them in fluctuating but usually acceptable quant.i.ties. His new trousers certainly do; and Nathan hopes, for the first time in his life, that a future romance-to be conducted with one Lorna McFickel-will too.

So far, so good. Luckwise. Until the night of Nathan's first date. Miss McFickel resides in a respectable suburb but, in relation to where Nathan lives, she is clear across one of the most dangerous sectors of the city. No problem: Nathan's ten-year-old car is in mint condition, top form. If he just keeps the doors locked and the windows rolled up, everything will be fine. Worst luck, broken bottles on a broken street, and a flat tire. Nathan curbs the car. He takes off his grandfather's watch and locks it in the glove compartment; he takes off his father's overcoat, folds it up neatly, and snuggles it into the shadows beneath the dashboard. As far as the trousers are concerned, he would simply have to exercise great care while attempting to change his flat tire in record time, and in a part of town known as Hope's Back Door. With any luck, the trousers would retain their triple traits of magicality, timelessness, and profundity. Now, all the while Nathan is fixing the tire, his legs feel stranger and stranger. He could have attributed this to the physical labor he was performing in a pair of trousers not exactly designed for such abuse, but he would have just been fooling himself. For Nathan remembers his legs feeling strange, though less noticeably so, when he first tried on the trousers at home. Strange how? Strange as in a little stiff, and even then some. A little funny. Nonsense, he's just nervous about his date with lovely Lorna McFickel.

To make matters worse, two kids are now standing by and watching Nathan change the tire, two kids who look like they recently popped up from a bottomless ash pit. Nathan tries to ignore them, but he succeeds a little too well in this. Unseen by him, one of the kids edges toward the car and opens the front door. Worst luck, Nathan forgot to lock it. The kid lays his hands on Nathan's father's coat, and then both kids disappear into a rundown apartment house.

Very quickly now, Nathan chases the kids into what turns out to be a condemned building, and he falls down the stairs leading to a lightless bas.e.m.e.nt. It's not that the stairs were rotten, no. It is that Nathan's legs have finally given out; they just won't work anymore. They are very stiff and feel funnier than ever. And not only his legs, but his entire body below the waist...except, for some reason, his ankles and feet. They're fine. For the problem is not with Nathan himself. It's with those pants of his. The following is why. A few days before Nathan purchased the pants, they were returned to the store for a cash refund. The woman returning them claimed that her husband didn't like the way they felt. She lied. Actually, her husband couldn't have cared less how the pants felt, since he'd collapsed from a long-standing heart ailment not long after trying them on. And with no one home to offer him aid, he died. It was only after he had lain several hours dead in those beautiful trousers that his unloving wife came home and, trying to salvage what she could from the tragedy, put her husband into a pair of old dungarees before making another move. Poor Nathan, of course, was not informed of his pants' sordid past. And when the kids see that he is lying helpless in the dust of that bas.e.m.e.nt, they decide to take advantage of the situation and strip this man of his valuables...starting with those expensive-looking slacks and whatever treasures they may contain. But after they relieve a protesting, though paralyzed Nathan of his pants, they do not pursue their pillagery any further. Not after they see Nathan's legs, which are the putrid members of a man many days dead. With the lower half of Nathan rapidly rotting away, the upper must also die among the countless shadows of that condemned building. And mingled with the pain and madness of his untimely demise, Nathan abhors and grieves over the thought that, for a while anyway, Miss McFickel will think he has stood her up on the first date of what was supposed to be a long line of dates destined to evolve into a magic and timeless and profound affair of two hearts....

Incidentally, this story was originally intended for publication under my perennial pen name, G. K. Riggers, and ent.i.tled: "Romance of a Dead Man."

THE STYLES.

There is more than one way to write a horror story, so much one expects to be told at this point. And such a statement, true or false, is easily demonstrated. In this section we will examine what may be termed three primary techniques of terror. They are: The realistic technique, the traditional Gothic technique, and the experimental technique. Each serves its user in different ways and realizes different ends, there's no question about that. After a little soul-searching, the prospective horror writer may awaken to exactly what his ends are and arrive at the most efficient technique for handling them. Thus...

The realistic technique. Since the cracking dawn of consciousness, restless tongues have asked: is the world, and are its people, real? Yes, answers realistic fiction, but only when it is, and they are, normal. The supernatural, and all it represents, is profoundly abnormal, and therefore unreal. Few would argue with these conclusions. Fine. Now the highest aim of the realistic horror writer is to prove, in realistic terms, that the unreal is real. The question is, can this be done? The answer is, of course not: one would look silly attempting such a thing. Consequently the realistic horror writer, wielding the hollow proofs and premises of his art, must settle for merely seeming to smooth out the ultimate paradox. In order to achieve this effect, the supernatural realist must really know the normal world, and deeply take for granted its reality. (It helps if he himself is normal and real.) Only then can the unreal, the abnormal, the supernatural be smuggled in as a plain brown package marked Hope, Love, or Fortune Cookies, and postmarked: the Edge of the Unknown. And of the dear reader's seat. Ultimately, of course, the supernatural explanation of a given story depends entirely on some irrational principle which in the real, normal world looks as awkward and stupid as a rosy-cheeked farm lad in a den of reeking degenerates. (Amend this, possibly, to rosy-cheeked degenerate...reeking farm lads.) Nevertheless, the hoax can be pulled off with varying degrees of success, that much is obvious. Just remember to a.s.sure the reader, at certain points in the tale and by way of certain signals, that it's now all right to believe the unbelievable. Here's how Nathan's story might be told using the realistic technique. Fast forward.

Nathan is a normal and real character, sure. Perhaps not as normal and real as he would like to be, but he does have his sights set on just this goal. He might even be a little too intent on it, though without pa.s.sing beyond the limits of the normal and the real. His fetish for things "magic, timeless, and profound" may be somewhat unusual, but certainly not abnormal, not unreal. (And to make him a bit more real, one could supply his coat, his car, and grandfather's wrist.w.a.tch with specific brand names, perhaps autobiographically borrowed from one's own closet, garage, and wrist.) The triple epithet which haunts Nathan's life-similar to the Latinical slogans on family coats-of-arms-also haunts the text of the tale like a song's refrain, possibly in italics as the submerged chanting of Nathan's undermind, possibly not. (Try not to be too artificial, one recalls this is realism.) Nathan wants his romance with Lorna McFickel, along with everything else he considers of value in existence, to be magic, timeless, and the other thing. For, to Nathan, these are attributes that are really normal and really real in an existence ever threatening to go abnormal and unreal on one, anyone, not just him.

Okay. Now Lorna McFickel represents all the virtues of normalcy and reality. She could be played up in the realistic version of the story as much more normal and real than Nathan. Maybe Nathan is just a little neurotic, maybe he needs normal and real things too much, I don't know. Whatever, Nathan wants to win a normal, real love, but he doesn't. He loses, even before he has a chance to play. He loses badly. Why? For the answer we can appeal to a very prominent theme in the story: Luck. Nathan is just unlucky. He had the misfortune to brush up against certain outside supernatural forces and they devastated him body and soul. But how did they devastate him, this is really what a supernatural horror story, even a realistic one, is all about.

Just how, amid all the realism of Nathan's life, does the supernatural sneak past Inspectors Normal and Real standing guard at the gate? Well, sometimes it goes in disguise. In realistic stories it is often seen impersonating two inseparable figures of impeccable reputation. I'm talking about Dr. Cause and Prof. Effect. Imitating the habits and mannerisms of these two, not to mention taking advantage of their past record of reliability, the supernatural can be accepted in the best of places, be unsuspiciously abandoned on almost any doorstep-not the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of reality but its legitimized heir. Now in Nathan's story the source of the supernatural is somewhere inside those mysterious trousers. They are woven of some fabric which Nathan has never seen the like of; they have no labels to indicate their maker; there is something indefinably alluring in their makeup. When Nathan asks the salesman about them, we introduce our first cause: the trousers were made in a foreign land-South America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia-which fact clarifies many mysteries, while also making them even more mysterious. The realistic horror writer may also allude to well-worn instances of sartorial magic (enchanted slippers, invisible making jackets), though one probably doesn't want the details of this tale to be overly explicit. Don't risk insulting your gentle reader.

At this point the alert student may ask: but even if the trousers are acknowledged as magic, why do they have the particular effect they eventually have, causing Nathan to rot away below the waist? To answer this question we need to introduce our second cause: the trousers were worn, for several hours, by a dead man. But these "facts" explain nothing, right? Of course they don't. However, they may seem to explain everything if they are revealed in the right manner. All one has to do is link up the first and second causes (there may even be more) within the scheme of a realistic narrative. For example, Nathan might find something in the trousers leading him to deduce that he is not their original owner. Perhaps he finds a winning lottery ticket of significant, though not too tempting, amount. (This also fits in nicely with the theme of luck.) Being a normally honest type of person, Nathan calls the clothes store, explains the situation, and they give him the name and phone number of the gentleman who originally put those pants on his charge account and, afterward, returned them. Nathan puts in the phone call and finds out that the pants were returned not by a man, but by a woman. The very same woman who explains to Nathan that since her husband has pa.s.sed on, rest his soul, she could really use the modest winnings from that lottery ticket. By now Nathan's mind, and the reader's, is no longer on the lottery ticket at all, but on the revealed fact that Nathan is the owner and future wearer of a pair of pants once owned (and worn? it is interrogatively hinted) by a dead man. After a momentary bout with superst.i.tious repellence, Nathan forgets all about the irregular background of his beautiful, almost new trousers. The reader, however, doesn't forget. And so when almost-real, almost-normal Nathan loses all hope of achieving full normalcy and reality, the reader knows why, and in more ways than one.

The realistic technique.

It's easy. Now try it yourself.

The traditional Gothic technique. Certain kinds of people, and a fortiori certain kinds of writers, have always experienced the world around them in the Gothic manner, I'm almost positive. Perhaps there was even some little stump of an ape-man who witnessed prehistoric lightning as it parried with prehistoric blackness in a night without rain, and felt his soul rise and fall at the same time to behold this cosmic conflict. Perhaps such displays provided inspiration for those very first imaginings that were not born of the daily life of crude survival, who knows? Could this be why all our primal mythologies are Gothic? I only pose the question, you see. Perhaps the labyrinthine events of triple-volumed shockers pa.s.sed, in abstract, through the brains of hairy, waddling things as they moved around in moon-trimmed shadows during their angular migrations across lunar landscapes of craggy rock or skeletal wastelands of jagged ice. These ones needed no convincing, for nothing needed to seem real to their little minds as long as it felt real to their blood. A gullible bunch of creatures, these. And to this day the fantastic, the unbelievable, remains potent and unchallenged by logic when it walks amid the gloom and grandeur of a Gothic world. So much goes without saying, really.

Therefore, the advantages of the traditional Gothic technique, even for the contemporary writer, are two. One, isolated supernatural incidents don't look as silly in a Gothic tale as they do in a realistic one, since the latter obeys the hard-knocking school of reality while the former recognizes only the University of Dreams. (Of course the entire Gothic tale itself may look silly to a given reader, but this is a matter of temperament, not technical execution.) Two, a Gothic tale gets under a reader's skin and stays there far more insistently than other kinds of stories. Of course it has to be done right, whatever you take the words done right to mean. Do they mean that Nathan has to function within the ma.s.sive incarceration of a castle in the mysterious fifteenth century? No, but he may function within the ma.s.sive incarceration of a castlelike skysc.r.a.per in the just-as-mysterious twentieth. Do they mean that Nathan must be a brooding Gothic hero and Miss McFickel an ethereal Gothic heroine? No, but it may mean an extra dose of obsessiveness in Nathan's psychology, and Miss McFickel may seem to him less the ideal of normalcy and reality than the pure Ideal itself. Contrary to the realistic story's allegiance to the normal and the real, the world of the Gothic tale is fundamentally unreal and abnormal, harboring essences which are magic, timeless, and profound in a way the realistic Nathan never dreamed. So, to rightly do a Gothic tale requires, let's be frank, that the author be a bit of a lunatic, at least while he's authoring, if not at all times. Hence, the well-known inflated rhetoric of the Gothic tale can be understood as more than an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon the waves of bombast. It is actually the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. And these winds just won't blow in a soul whose climate is controlled by central air-conditioning. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. The most one can do is offer a pertinent example: a Gothic scene from "Romance of a Dead Man," translated from the original Italian of Geraldo Riggenni. This chapter is ent.i.tled "The Last Death of Nathan."

Through a partially shattered window, its surface streaked with a blue film of dust and age, the diluted glow of twilight seeped down onto the bas.e.m.e.nt floor where Nathan lay without hope of mobility. In the dark you're not anywhere, he had thought as a child at each and every bedtime; and, in the bluish semiluminescence of that stone cellar, Nathan was truly not anywhere. He raised himself up on one elbow, squinting through tears of confusion into the filthy azure dimness. His grotesque posture resembled the half-anesthetized efforts of a patient who has been left alone for a moment while awaiting surgery, anxiously looking around to see if he's simply been forgotten on that frigid operating table. If only his legs would move, if only that paralyzing pain would suddenly become cured. Where were those wretched doctors, he asked himself dreamily. Oh, there they were, standing behind the turquoise haze of the surgery lamps. "He's out of it, man," said one of them to his colleague. "We can take everything he's got on him." But after they removed Nathan's trousers, the operation was abruptly terminated and the patient abandoned in the blue shadows of silence. "Jesus, look at his legs, look," they had screamed. Oh, if only he could now scream like that, Nathan thought among all the fatal chaos of his other thoughts. If only he could scream loud enough to be heard by that girl, by way of apologizing for his permanent absence from their magic, timeless, and profound future, which was in fact as defunct as the two legs that now seemed to be glowing glaucous with putrefaction before his eyes. Couldn't he now emit such a scream, now that the tingling agony of his liquefying legs was beginning to spread upward throughout his whole body and being? But no. It was impossible-to scream that loudly-though he did manage, in no time at all, to scream himself straight to death.

The traditional Gothic technique.

It's easy. Now try it yourself.

The experimental technique. Every story, even a true one, wants to be told in only one single way by its writer, yes? So, really, there's no such thing as experimentalism in its trial-and-error sense. A story is not an experiment, an experiment is an experiment. True. The "experimental" writer, then, is simply following the story's commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept, and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there's the writer who can't face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there's the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him. Either way, literary experimentalism is simply the writer's imagination, or lack of it, and feeling, or absence of same, thras.h.i.+ng their chains around in the escape-proof dungeon of the words of the story. One writer is trying to get the whole breathing world into the two dimensions of his airless cell, while the other is adding layers of bricks to keep that world the h.e.l.l out. But despite the most sincere efforts of each prisoner, the sentence remains the same: to stay exactly where they are, which is where the story is. It's a condition not unlike the world itself, except it doesn't hurt. It doesn't help either, but who cares?

The question we now must ask is: is Nathan's the kind of horror story that demands treatment outside the conventional realistic or Gothic techniques? Well, it may be, depending on whom this story occurred to. Since it occurred to me (and not too many days ago), and since I've pretty much given up on it, I guess there's no harm in giving this narrative screw another turn, even if it's in the wrong direction. Here's the way mad Dr. Riggers would experiment, blasphemously, with his man-made Nathanstein. The secret of life, my ugly Igors, is time...time...time.

The experimental version of this story could actually be told as two stories happening "simultaneously," each narrated in alternating sections which take place in parallel chronologies. One section begins with the death of Nathan and moves backward in time, while its counterpart story begins with the death of the original owner of the magic pants and moves forward. Needless to say, the facts in the case of Nathan must be juggled around so as to be comprehensible from the beginning, that is to say from the end. (Don't risk confusing your worthy readers.) The stories converge at the crossroads of the final section where the destinies of their characters also converge, this being the clothes store where Nathan purchases the fateful trousers. On his way into the store he b.u.mps into a woman who is preoccupied with counting a handful of cash, this being the woman who has just returned the trousers.

"Excuse me," says Nathan.