The Collected Short Fiction

  The Collected Short Fiction of Thomas Ligotti

  Thanks to Ramonoski, Vlad and Duat, this collection is an almost complete collection of the short fiction of Thomas Ligotti, presented in chronological order—a note on that later. An index in alphabetical order, replete with strike-throughs to show missing stories, is available here for those who have a title in mind but cannot quite place the year it appeared. 'The' and 'A/An' are ignored for alphabetical ordering purposes, i.e. The Medusa is to be found, quite rightly, amongst Mad Night Of Atonement and The Mystics Of Muelenburg.

  The introduction to each story shows where each tale was first published, with best attempts at accuracy—and here's that note I mentioned. The history of Ligotti's work is harder to clarify the further one regresses towards the early eighties, particularly given his tendency to rewrite for newer collections. Where possible, I have listed—and even included—variants, giving details of Thomas Ligotti collections which contain the piece. Despite Douglas E. Winters' excellent bibliography, I cannot claim to give definitive lists of other anthologies or appearances. Consequently www.ifsdb.org is recommended for full details of where any given story may be tracked down, though this too has inevitable omissions.

  Rarities and alternate versions are welcomed: [email protected]

  This is version 2.0, missing:

  The Real Wolf, published in Nocturne #1.

  The Blonde: A Sonnet, written as Frank Santino.

  Paradoxes From Hell, consisting of The Complete Madman, The Decayed Mystic, The Stricken Philosopher, The Deranged Poet and Postscript, written as Charles Miguel Riaz.

  Excerpt from Dreams Of The Zodiac (written under the name Charles Miguel Riaz and linked somehow to The Physic)

  I Have A Special Plan For This World (Poem)

  Allan And Adelaide: An Arabesque (1981)

  First published in Fantasy Macabre #2, 1981.

  There are some qualities—some incorporate things

  That have a double life, which thus is made

  A type of that twin entity which springs

  From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.

  —Poe, Silence - A Sonnet.

  1. The brand new beasts

  We tried, my twin sister and I, to be rid of them. They had always been my chief grievance about the old house. Despite their nature as a sort of inheritance, I could never place them in the same order as the house itself. To me their necessity was not at all evident, not like the foundation of the house or the particular arrangement of its rooms. And this, I found, was true: they had no relationship to the physical aspects of the house and its furnishings. Their presence was more like that of the grotesque shadows in our lamplit hallways, a shifting and spectral element of the scene. What a fright to have these shadows, but what a stranger fright would be their absence! Nonetheless, to effect such an absence was precisely my ambition.

  So it was that Adelaide and I descended into the deepest cellar of our house to perform the exorcism. By pure chance I had found the exact book, among all the volumes of our vast library, that would finally make this possible. Adelaide had asked me to find a particular book for her one sullen afternoon, and it was right beside it that I found the other book. What good fortune this courtesy to my sister had brought me, though I am never entirely surprised when anything of a pleasant nature is connected with gentle Adelaide.

  It was she who made the exorcism a success, even lending the ceremony a measure of queer excitement. In the dripping silence of that stonework cellar, thick candles burned on either side of the statuesque Adelaide, who read in the most compelling tones from the book I held open before her. It was written in a language that I but half-knew, though it seemed the very tongue of Adelaide's soul. One by one I turned the pages when her instructing eyes told me to do so. Oh, the virtuosity of her hermetic performance! From the subterranean passages below that cellar floor the formless squeals of bestial things continually emanated like the seeping cold of the abyss. How long I had listened to those maddening sounds, which sometimes were perceptible in every part of the house and even penetrated the walls of my sleep. Now would be their end. Adelaide spoke the final words of the ritual, and as the echoes died so did the sounds of those things below us become silence. I was free of them.

  This, I thought, was the beginning of a golden age in the old house. For the first time in its immemorial history the house would be filled with only the natural sounds of its residents and those comforting noises of its ripe structure. For the first time I could hear, of a winter's evening, my sister's voluptuous singing without fear of her voice merging with that demonic chorus below. And for a brief time this state of bliss endured. Adelaide sang while I accompanied her on my guitar, the wind of moonless nights harmonized with our music, and all was like a perfect piece of an eternal dream.

  It was following just such an evening of song that everything changed, reverted to what it had once been and even worse. In the darkness I awoke among the nightmare-tangled covers of my bed. Sounds had disturbed my sleep, sounds like nothing I had ever heard or hope to hear. What shapes, what forms of corrupt generation made such a bestial cacophony? Every corner of my room, of the entire house, was tainted with surge after surge of acoustic foulage.

  I ran to my sister's bed chamber but found it empty and her covers undisturbed, a situation I perceived immediately due to my gift of acute vision in the absence of light. The thought of her roaming alone among the noises of that night caused me near crippling apprehension. Of all dread misfortunes, was she perhaps on one of the lower floors, where the diseased din rose to its most intense potency? Running down the corridor, I arrived at the top of the stairway and to my relief saw the figure of Adelaide already ascending.

  But she seemed to be lumbering up the stairs, lacking her usual quality of almost airborn grace. And of all things, it now appeared as if she were walking backwards, for I saw naught but her hair tumbling over that pretty face. Even more curious, it seemed that two eyes peered out at me from among her nest of locks. But in the darkness of the middle of the night, especially that night, one is likely to witness anything, and I rubbed this strange illusion from my sleep ensorcelled eyes, now to see my sister looking as she always had. She reached the top of the stairs, and I embraced her with fear of a thousand things.

  "Adelaide, what is happening?" I cried. "Have they returned to torment us?"

  She did not reply immediately but rushed us to the sanctum of her bed chamber, where I first noticed the torn and sullied condition of her nightgown.

  "Do not worry about my gown, my brother. I have been… working this night. There is not sufficient time in the day for the chores required to keep our house as we wish it to remain."

  "But did you not hear the sounds? What are they, Adelaide, do you know? I've never heard such horror, not even before we went into the cellar and drove them out. But they did not make sounds like this. Oh tell me, have the old beasts returned? If so, we will use words of even greater power to exorcise them once again. We still have the book."

  When I had finished, Adelaide looked into my face with infinite solemnity, and said:

  "We still have the book, my brother, but it is of no use against these ones."

  "But they are the old beasts," I argued. "We know them well, their fears and weaknesses."

  "Listen to me, Allan," instructed my sister. "These are not our old friends, not the ones who made the noises we had grown to know over the years. These, Allan, are the new beasts."

  Without entirely comprehending her words, I cried out:

  "But they will destroy our beautiful home. They are not like the others. They have the run of the house!"

  "It is only for this night, when f
irst they come. You were not here the first night of the old ones."

  "Nor were you, my twin."

  "They are always like this the first night," she continued without answering my protest.

  At that moment I thought I heard something sniffing and wheezing outside the door. Holding one of the lamps my sister had lit, I opened the door and cast its light into the hallway. Whatever was there had moved out of my sight, but for a second I glimpsed a shadow which lumbered at a queer removal from its source. After this sight I informed Adelaide that for her protection I would stay with her through the course of what would no doubt be a sleepless night. Following a moment of strange reluctance on her part, she agreed to my intentions.

  Despite the trauma and tragedy of that evening, courageous Adelaide soon retired within the curtains of her bed and fell into a quiet sleep. For what seemed an eternity I stood a vigil by the door, imagining what destruction and stench we would have to confront when we descended into the house next morning. And I suffered that peculiar terror of knowing nothing would ever be the same again.

  But eventually, following Adelaide's fearless example, I too ignored the infernal invasion of our home and allowed myself to rest. Soundlessly I crept over to the bed curtains and pulled them back to witness Adelaide's dreaming serenity. With sorrow as my soporific, I curled up at the foot of my sister's bed… and slept.

  2. The twin who went to town

  My sister Adelaide sometimes forces herself to leave the immense comforts of our old house and travels into town, a place where I have never been. Though we are twins, identical in many habits and activities, somehow this burden has fallen upon her shoulders. "Allan," she says to me, "do not worry while I'm away. I will be back soon. Then we'll do something special. And take good care of the house, my brother. You know how I like to think of it every moment that we're separated." I wave to her as she walks down the road leading to the town. Even when she can no longer see me, I wave. And I really don't worry very much about her, for I know she is quite able to take care of herself.

  I once asked Adelaide if I might not accompany her on one of these trips into town. For some time the idea had been plaguing my mind. One night, not long before, I had awakened from a wild carnival of a dream from which I could save no memory concerning its particular adventures. But upon opening my eyes I uncontrollably called out something into the darkness. Two words: "The town!" It was after this dream that I appealed to my sister for a chance to see this place which for me was such an obscurity. Would it forever remain so?

  "You do not know what it is like, Allan," she answered. "The people there are not as you are. They are unnaturally confused; always in strange turmoil and doing strange things. They do not have your sense of reason or your balance of temperament. You must stay as you are, then, and remain at the house."

  My sister flattered me, for she has always been the twin with the true powers of reason and deep knowledge. In many disciplines she has been my instructress. So when she advised that I should be the one to keep myself at home, I listened closely and complied.

  Adelaide returned late the other night from her most recent excursion to the town. I was already asleep but awoke when I heard a series of sounds tracing my sister's way to her bed chamber and a well-deserved rest. Later that night I was awakened by a second commotion. At least, I think I was awake and not dreaming. (There are so many confusions in the middle of the night.) In any case, what I heard was a thunderous, insistent pounding on our front door. And there was a voice, the voice of a woman if I am not mistaken. It was difficult to tell because of the storm and the fact that the voice was unnaturally straining itself to be heard above the violent rain and thunder. Perhaps that is all I really heard. But at one point the voice sounded so definite. Quite clearly I heard the unknown woman scream out: "You she-devil! What have you done to them? You didn't need them all." After this outburst, which rang lucidly in my ears, the voice became lost among all the moaning turbulence of the storm.

  The next morning was decorated by a heavy mist, making it almost impossible to see out our windows. As we serenely passed the morning hours, I told Adelaide of my dubious experience the night before. She was tired, and I'm not sure she heard my story properly.

  "You see how mad those townspeople are?"

  I had said nothing specifically about any townspeople, only the strange woman, who might have come from the countryside of my imagination. "They spread lies even in your dreams," she continued. "So I hope you will listen to me from now on and never again mention that town. This is for your own good, Allan."

  Ever since then I have never initiated this subject in conversation, though occasionally Adelaide forgets herself and alludes to the matter, saying: "Oh, those horrible people." But I do not talk about them; I do not even think about their unspeakable lives. I cannot help, however, those things that come to me in dreams. Adelaide cannot blame me for what happens there.

  And lately I feel there has been some terrible trouble with my dreams, though not only the ones about the town. There are other dreams, more—how shall I say it?—more loathsomely reverberant in their power. I only hope that this power will soon exhaust itself in the coming nights, like a frightening storm throughout which one is allowed to sleep.

  Please let this be so.

  3. The demented deacons

  I have seen the soul of the universe… and it is insane.

  A dream has all but laid my world to waste. Even now I still doubt if I have fully made my way back to the waking realm. But if I have not, the difference is no longer a great one: certain signs have told me there is nothing left that waits on my return. It was a horror. Shadowy things frolicked in the dream like lurid acrobats. And vast stretches of space. But I should start at the beginning, though no dream has one that can ever be remembered.

  I found myself in a windowless room lit by candles on metal stands of varying heights. I recall feeling that the room was in a strange place somewhere outside the house. Opposite me was a dark curtain which hung from the ceiling to the floor and spanned the entire distance between the walls, dividing the room into sections of unknown relative proportions. Eventually I came to realize that I was bound to a throne-like chair facing the curtain. Behind the chair, and in the periphery of my vision, passed back and forth a number of slow moving shapes. These shapes, from the little that could be seen of them, resembled figures on playing cards. (And how this painfully recalls those wonderful games Adelaide was always teaching me.) At some point I came to think of these figures as "The Demented Deacons."

  They were carrying on a kind of inquisition, with myself as the sole object defining their roles. They asked me strange questions which suggested matters having nothing whatever to do with my life.

  "Who are your gods?" they asked, somehow in unison. Ignorant silence was my answer. They became more clever, gleefully tittering at the virtuosity of their interrogation.

  "Do your gods soar?" they inquired, pantomiming the question with outstretched wings that were not wings, nor were they arms. I saw no harm in giving a positive answer, which could be nothing but complimentary to any gods worthy of the name.

  "And do they not sometimes descend to earth?" the Deacons continued. To affirm this question, I reasoned, would be safe enough, since its answer was nearly self implied. Complacently I awaited the next question. For this one they had to confer among themselves for a few moments; then, while the others looked on, one of them stepped forward and addressed me.

  "When they descend, do they not begin to lumber like beasts? Do they sometimes get down and crawl, your gods?"

  I should have remained silent but instead I shouted, "No more of your questions!" This outburst seemed to please the Deacons to no end as a minor revelation. They next returned to less suggestively sinister questions. Once again a single figure, different from the previous one, came forward to interrogate me.

  "Do your gods sometimes speak in tongues strange to you? Do these ones sing their words and use magic?
Do they look sidelong to admire themselves in mirrors?"

  Again their questions seemed innocent ones, and ones whose denial would be out of keeping with any concept of godhood. Of course my gods, though I knew them not, were learned in the ways of language and sorcery and indeed had much to admire about themselves.

  There was now excitement among the figures, even as they lethargically milled around my chair, speaking to one another in low tones. There was some important matter to be deliberated upon, and soon they seemed to have reached a kind of agreement, judging by a certain mood which distinctly emanated from these figures. A new phase of the inquisition was to begin, one for which the interrogative talents of the Deacons were now inadequate. They moved away from my chair, their ranks perhaps dispersing and dissolving back into the shadows whence they came.

  I was now alone, my eyes fixed upon the curtain that veiled some indefinite portion of the room. Whatever was beyond the curtain would continue the inquisition, I thought as if this were obvious. And considering the remarkable questions put to me by the playing-card figures, how much more remarkable would be the interrogations from the darker side of the curtain, where there seemed only an unknown and lightless abyss. I waited with an imaginary forevision of the horrific wonders to come.

  However, events did not unfold as I expected. Yes, there were questions asked of me from that region on the other side of the curtain. But with these questions the dream diverged into greater realms of nightmare. For the source of these questions was the very genius of demonic dread—that Horror-Maker known to me from a thousand dreams where sudden dread usurps all serenity like a panic cry of "Fire," of "Murder," of stealthy "Invader."

  Its presence always permeates the dream: fog with a pallid face drifting in through an open window. It fuses its tormented spirit with dead objects, animating things which should not move or live, breathing a blasphemous life into the unliving. One glance at a design on the wall catches this Horror Maker engendering a world of writhing creatures there. It lives in all things, and they tilt and flutter with a menacing absence of purpose or predictability. Finally it melds with the slowly coagulating shadows, and now it is without limits as it spreads to command a domain of quivering darkness. The universe becomes its impossible body, its corpse. As the blackness of space is its corrupting blood, so the planets are multiple skulls of the freakish beast; the paths of doomed meteors trace the architecture of its labyrinthine skeletal frame; spasms of dying galaxies are its nervous tics; and strange stellar venues of incomprehensible properties are the chambers of its soul. Within this universe the dreamer is trapped, his dreams confined to the interior of a form other than his own. But finally this Horror-Maker moves from outside to inside the dreamer, subverting his heroic autonomy, and becoming one with him. Now it is he himself who generates those nightmares from that design on the wall. Every glimpse conjures universes of cavorting horrors, and ultimately even the crystal absence of the void becomes populated by every monstrosity that can or cannot exist. There is no refuge from the living void, the terror of the invisible. And the focus of my fear sharpened into hideous implications about my sister and myself. The interrogations of the Horror-Maker could not be evaded, unless I was willing to remain in that dream forever.