Songs of a Dead Dreamer Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction (by Ramsey Campbell)

  DREAMS FOR SLEEPWALKERS The Frolic

  Les Fleurs

  Alice’s Last Adventure

  Dream of a Mannikin

  The Chymist (The Nyctalops Trilogy)

  Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes (The Nyctalops Trilogy)

  Eye of the Lynx (The Nyctalops Trilogy)

  Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story

  DREAMS FOR INSOMNIACS The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise: A Tale of Possession in Old Grosse Pointe

  The Lost Art of Twilight

  The Troubles of Dr. Thoss

  Masquerade of a Dead Sword: A Tragedie

  Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech

  Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror

  DREAMS FOR THE DEAD Dr. Locrian’s Asylum

  The Sect of the Idiot

  The Greater Festival of Masks

  The Music of the Moon

  The Journal of J.P. Drapeau

  Vastarien

  THOMAS LIGOTTI, born 1953 in Detroit, Michigan is one of the brightest—that is to say, darkest—new writers on the contemporary horror scene. Since the early 1980s his work has appeared regularly in such fantasy and horror magazines as Fantasy Tales, Grue and Nyctalops, earning him high repute among devoted followers of weird and macabre fiction.

  Celebrated for the daunting intensity of their bizarre visions, Ligotti’s tales run the full gamut of the literature of fear, from the domestic terrors of ‘The Frolic’ and ‘Aunt Elise’ to the exotic frissons of ‘The Lost Art of Twilight’ and ‘Masquerade of a Dead Sword.’ In between are the assorted nightmares of ‘Dr. Locrian’s Asylum,’ ‘Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes,’ and ‘The Chymist’; surreal adventures in the worlds of ‘Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech’ and ‘The Greater Festival of Masks’; and unnerving revelations of the horror writer’s art in ‘Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story’ and ‘Professor Nobody’s Little Lecture on Supernatural Horror.’

  A strange talent whose works feature some of the most grotesque images in modern horror fiction, Ligotti also proves the reliable dictum that the very worst horrors are often those which remain unseen. As one critic wrote of Ligotti’s power as a storyteller: ‘It is a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage.’ The present collection contains twenty stories that give evidence for such praise.

  To my mother and

  to the memory of my father

  Acknowledgements

  Songs of a Dead Dreamer appeared previously in a limited edition of 300 copies published by the Silver Scarab Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1986. All the stories have been revised, several omitted and some new ones added to this, the first general edition. Many of the stories have also appeared previously in small press magazines or anthologies and are reprinted by kind permission of the editors. They are:

  ‘The Frolic’ in Fantasy Tales, Vol. 5, No. 9, Spring 1982

  ‘Les Fleurs’ in Dark Horizons Journal of the British Fantasy Society, No. 23, Summer 1981

  ‘Alice’s Last Adventure’ in Prime Evil ed. Douglas Winter, New American Library, New York, 1988

  ‘Dream of a Mannikin, or the Third Person’ in Eldritch Tales, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1982

  ‘The Chymist’ in Nyctalops, Vol. Ill, No. 2, March 1981

  ‘Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes’ in Nyctalops, Vol. Ill, No. 3, June 1982

  ‘Eye of the Lynx’ in Nyctalops Vol. III. No. 4, April 1983

  ‘Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story’ in Dark Horizons, No. 28, Spring 1985

  ‘The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise’ in Grimoire, £3, Summer 1983

  ‘The Lost Art of Twilight’ in Dark Horizons, No. 30, Summer 1986

  ‘Masquerade of a Dead Sword’ in Heroic Visions II, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Ace Books, New York, 1986

  ‘Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech’ in Grimoire, £5, Summer 1983

  ‘Dr. Locrian’s Asylum’ in Grue, No. 5,1987

  ‘The Sect of the Idiot’ in Crypt of Cthulhu, Vol. 7, No. 6, Roodmas, 1988

  ‘The Music of the Moon’ in Fantasy Macabre, No. 9, 1987

  ‘The Journal of J.P. Drapeau’ in Dagon, No. 21, 1987

  ‘Vastarien’ in Crypt of Cthulhu, Vol. 6, No. 6, St. John’s Eve, 1987

  Introduction

  I DON’T know when I have enjoyed a collection of an author’s horror stories more than the book you now hold in your hands, if hands they are. I’ll go further: it has to be one of the most important horror books of the decade. His work alone (though in fact, of course, not only his) would justify the existence of the semi-professional magazines—Nyctalops, Eldritch Tales, Fantasy Tales—that have published him, for Ligotti is one of the few consistently original voices in contemporary horror fiction, one of the few whose work is instantly recognizable.

  He belongs to the most honourable tradition in the field, that of subtlety and awesomeness rather than the relentlessly graphic. At times he suggests terrors as vast as Lovecraft’s, though the terrors are quite other than Lovecraft’s. He’s capable of writing tales as dismayingly horrifying as any of his contemporaries—‘The Frolic’, for example—yet even there one finds a hint of more than horror, an extra dimension of awe. Others of his tales—‘The Troubles of Dr. Thoss’, ‘The Greater Festival of Masks’. ‘Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech’—read like dreams prompted by memories of M.R. James, dreams stranger than anything the good doctor ever wrote: perhaps the dreams of the consciousness glimpsed behind one of Liggotti’s most elaborate stories, “Dream of a Mannikin”. Despite faint echoes of writers he admires, however, Ligotti’s vision is wholly personal. Few other writers could conceive a horror story in the form of notes on the writing of the genre, and I can’t think of any other writer who could have brought it off.

  In ‘The Consolations of Horror’ (a companion piece, published in Dark Horizons 27, to ‘Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures’), Ligotti defines the consolations of the genre thus: “simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity and—like it or not—peculiar set of experiences to appreciate.” In his case the consolations also include an elegant and witty style, an inimitable imagination, a willingness to expand the genre, and a timelessness which ought to mean that his fiction will be read with as much pleasure a hundred years from now. May this book bring him the acclaim which he certainly deserves.

  Ramsey Campbell

  DREAMS

  FOR

  SLEEPWALKERS

  The Frolic

  IN A beautiful home in a beautiful part of town—the town of Nolgate, site of the state prison—Dr. Munck examined the evening newspaper while his young wife lounged on a sofa nearby, lazily flipping through the colorful parade of a fashion magazine. Their daughter Norleen was upstairs asleep, or perhaps she was illicitly enjoying an after-hours session with the new color television she’d received on her birthday the week before. If so, her violation of the bedtime rule went undetected due to the affluent expanse between bedroom and living room, where her parents heard no sounds of disobedience. The house was quiet. The neighbourhood and the rest of the town were also quiet in various ways, all of them slightly distracting to the doctor’s wife. But so far Leslie had only dared complain of the town’s social lethargy in the most joking fashion (“Another exciting evening at the Munck’s monastic hideaway”). She knew her husband was quite dedicated to this new position of his in this new place. Perhaps tonight, though, he would exhibit some encouraging symptoms of disenchantment with his work.
/>   “How did it go today, David?” she asked, her radiant eyes peeking over the magazine cover, where another pair of eyes radiated a glossy gaze. “You were pretty quiet at dinner.”

  “It went about the same,” said David, without lowering the small-town newspaper to look at his wife.

  “Does that mean you don’t want to talk about it?”

  He folded the newspaper backwards and his upper body appeared. “That’s how it sounded, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, it certainly did. Are you okay today?” she asked, laying aside the magazine on the coffee table and offering her complete attention.

  “Severely doubting, that’s how I am.” He said this with a kind of far-off reflectiveness.

  “Anything particularly doubtful, Dr. Munck?”

  “Only everything,” he answered.

  “Shall I make us drinks?”

  “That would be much appreciated.”

  Leslie walked to another part of the living room and from a large cabinet pulled out some bottles and some glasses. From the kitchen she brought out a supply of ice cubes in a brown plastic bucket. The sounds of drink-making were unusually audible in the living room’s plush quiet. The drapes were drawn on all windows except the one in the corner where an Aphrodite sculpture posed. Beyond that window was a deserted streetlighted street and a piece of moon above the opulent leafage of spring trees.

  “There you go, doctor,” she said, handing him a glass that was very thick at its base and tapered almost undetectably toward its rim.

  “Thanks, I really need one of these.”

  “Why? Aren’t things going well with your work?”

  “You mean my work at the prison?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You could say at the prison once in a while. Not always talk in the abstract. Overtly recognize my chosen professional environment, my—”

  “All right, all right. How’s things at the wonderful prison, dear? Is that better?” She paused and took a deep gulp from her glass, then calmed a little. “I’m sorry about the snideness, David.”

  “No, I deserved it. I’m blaming you for long realizing something I can’t bring myself to admit.”

  “Which is?” she prompted.

  “Which is that maybe it was not the wisest decision to move here and take this saintly mission upon my psychologist’s shoulders.”

  This remark was an indication of even deeper disenchantment than Leslie had hoped for. But somehow these words did not cheer her the way she thought they would. She could distantly hear the moving vans pulling up to the house, but the sound was no longer as pleasing as it once was.

  “You said you wanted to do something more than treat urban neuroses. Something more meaningful, more challenging.”

  “What I wanted, masochistically, was a thankless job, an impossible one. And I got it.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Leslie inquired, not quite believing she asked the question with such encouraging skepticism about the actual severity of the situation. She congratulated herself for placing David’s self-esteem above her own desire for a change of venue, important as she felt this was.

  “I’m afraid it is that bad. When I first visited the prison’s psychiatric section and met the other doctors, I swore I wouldn’t become as hopeless and cruelly cynical as they were. Things would be different with me. I overestimated myself by a wide margin, though. Today one of the orderlies was beaten up again by two of the prisoners, excuse me, ‘patients’. Last week it was Dr. Valdman, that’s why I was so moody on Norleen’s birthday. So far I’ve been lucky. All they do is spit at me. Well, they can all rot in that hellhole as far as I’m concerned.”

  David felt his own words lingering atmospherically in the room, tainting the serenity of the house. Until then their home had been an insular haven beyond the contamination of the prison, an imposing structure outside the town limits. Now its psychic imposition transcended the limits of physical distance. Inner distance constricted, and David sensed the massive prison walls shadowing the cozy neighbourhood outside.

  “Do you know why I was late tonight?” he asked his wife.

  “No, why?”

  “Because I had an overlong chat with a fellow who hasn’t got a name yet.”

  “The one you told me about who won’t tell anyone where he’s from or what his real name is?”

  “That’s him. He’s just an example of the pernicious monstrosity of the place. Worse than a beast, a rabid animal. Demented blind aggression... and clever. Because of this cute name game of his, he was classified as unsuitable for the regular prison population and thus we in the psychiatric section ended up with him. According to him, though, he has plenty of names, no less than a thousand, none of which he’s condescended to speak in anyone’s presence. From my point of view, he doesn’t really have use for any human name. But we’re stuck with him, no name and all.”

  “Do you call him that, ‘no name’?”

  “Maybe we should, but no, we don’t.”

  “So what do you call him, then?”

  “Well, he was convicted as John Doe, and since then everyone refers to him by that name. They’ve yet to uncover any official documentation on him. Neither his fingerprints nor photograph corresponds to any record of previous convictions. I understand he was picked up in a stolen car parked in front of an elementary school. An observant neighbor reported him as a suspicious character frequently seen in the area. Everyone was on the alert, I guess, after the first few disappearances from the school, and the police were watching him just as he was walking a new victim to his car. That’s when they made the arrest. But his version of the story is a little different. He says he was fully aware of his pursuers and expected, even wanted, to be caught, convicted, and exiled to the penitentiary.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why ask why? Why ask a psychotic to explain his own motivation, it only becomes more confusing. And John Doe is even less scrutable than most.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Leslie.

  “I can tell you by narrating a little scene from the interview I had with him today. I asked him if he knew why he was in prison.

  “‘For frolicking,’ he said.

  “‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  “His reply was: ‘Mean, mean, mean. You’re a meany.’ “That childish ranting somehow sounded to me as if he were mimicking his victims. I’d really had enough right then but foolishly continued the interview.

  “‘Do you know why you can’t leave here?’ I calmly asked with a poor variant of my original inquiry.

  “‘Who says I can’t? I’ll just go when I want to. But I don’t want to yet.’

  “‘Why not?’ I naturally questioned.

  “‘I just got here,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d take a rest after frolicking so hard. But I want to be in with all the others. Unquestionably stimulating atmosphere. When can I go with them, when can I?’

  “Can you believe that? It would be cruel, though, to put him in with the regular prison population, not to say he doesn’t deserve this cruelty. The average inmate despises Doe’s kind of crime, and there’s really no predicting what would happen if we put him in there and the others found out what he was convicted for.”

  “So he has to stay in the psychiatric section for the rest of his term?” asked Leslie.

  “He doesn’t think so. He thinks he can leave whenever he wants.”

  “And can he?” questioned Leslie with a firm absence of facetiousness in her voice. This had always been one of her weightiest fears about living in this prison town, that every moment of the day and night there were horrible fiends plotting to escape through what she envisioned as rather papery walls. To raise a child in such surroundings was another of her objections to her husband’s work.

  “I told you before, Leslie, there have been a very few successful escapes from that prison. If an inmate does get beyond the walls, his first impulse is usually one of practical self-preservation, and he tries to get as far a
way as possible from this town, which is probably the safest place to be in the event of an escape. Anyway, most escapees are apprehended within hours after they’ve gotten out.”

  “What about a prisoner like John Doe? Does he have this sense of ‘practical self-preservation,’ or would he rather just hang around and do damage to someone?”

  “Prisoners like that don’t escape in the normal course of things. They just bounce off the walls but not over them. You know what I mean?”

  Leslie said she understood, but this did not in the least lessen the potency of her fears, which found their source in an imaginary prison in an imaginary town, one where anything could happen as long as it approached the hideous. Morbidity had never been among her strong points, and she loathed its intrusion on her character. And for all his ready reassurance about the able security of the prison, David also seemed to be profoundly uneasy. He was sitting very still now, holding his drink between his knees and appearing to listen for something.

  “What’s wrong, David?” asked Leslie.

  “I thought I heard... a sound.”

  “A sound like what?”

  “Can’t describe it exactly. A faraway noise.”

  He stood up and looked around, as if to see whether the sound had left some tell-tale clue in the surrounding stillness of the house, perhaps a smeary sonic print somewhere.

  “I’m going to check on Norleen,” he said, setting his glass down rather abruptly on the table beside his chair and splashing the drink around. He walked across the living room, down the front hallway, up the three segments of the stairway, and then down the upstairs hall. Peeking into his daughter’s room he saw her tiny figure resting comfortably, a sleepy embrace wrapped about the form of a stuffed Bambi. She still occasionally slept with an inanimate companion, even though she was getting a little old for this. But her psychologist father was careful not to question her right to this childish comfort. Before leaving the room Dr. Munck lowered the window which was partially open on that warm spring evening.