Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

“Devils,” I screamed, leaning hard upon the staircase rail. “Devils,” I repeated. But they appeared horribly unperturbed by my outburst. “Diables,” I reiterated in their own loathsome tongue. But neither was French their true language, as I found out when they began speaking among themselves. I covered my ears, trying to smother their voices. They had a language all their own, a style of speech well-suited to dead vocal organs. The words were breathless, shapeless rattlings in the back of their throats, parched scrapings at a mausoleum portal. Arid gasps and dry gurgles were their dialects. These grating intonations were especially disturbing as they emanated from the mouths of things that had at least the form of human beings. But worst of all was my realization that I understood perfectly well what they were saying.

The boy was incensed and coughed out an incredibly foul characterization of his father. Exactly what he said could only be conveyed by that queer hacking patois, which suggested feelings and relationships of a nature incomprehensible outside of the world it mirrored with disgusting perfection. It was a discourse in hell on the subject of sin. An argument ensued, and the father’s composure turned to an infernal rage. He finally subdued his son with bizarre threats that have no counterparts in the language of ordinary malevolence. After the boy was silenced he turned to his aunt, seemingly for comfort. This woman of chalky cheeks and sunken eyes touched the boy’s shoulder and easily drew him toward her with a single finger, guiding his body as if it were a balloon, weightless and toy-like. They spoke in sullen whispers, using a personal form of address that hinted at a longstanding and unthinkable allegiance between them. Apparently aroused by this scene, the daughter now stepped forward and used this same mode of address as though bidding for my recognition. Her mother abruptly gagged out a single syllable at her. What she called the child might possibly be imagined, but only with reference to the most feral degenerates of the human world. Their own form of expression carried the dissonant overtones of another world altogether. Each utterance was an opera of iniquity, a chorus of savage anathemas, a psalm hissing of fetid lust.

“I will not become one of you,” I thought I screamed at them. But the sound of my voice was already so much like theirs that the words had exactly the opposite meaning I intended. The family suddenly ceased bickering among themselves. My flare-up had consolidated them. Each mouth, cluttered with uneven teeth like a village cemetery overcrowded with battered gravestones, opened and smiled. The look on their faces told me something about my own. They could see my growing hunger, see deep down into the dusty catacomb of my throat which cried out to be anointed with bloody nourishment. They knew my weakness. Yes, they could stay in my house. (Famished.) Yes, I could make arrangements to cover up the disappearance of Aunt T. and the servants, for I am a wealthy man and know what money can buy. (Please, my family, I’m famished.) Yes, they would receive sanctuary in my home for as long as they liked, which would likely be very long. (Please, I’m famishing down to the depths of me.) Yes, yes, yes. I agreed to everything. It would all be taken care of. (To the depths!) But first I begged them, for heaven’s sake, to let me go out into the night. Night, night, night, night. Night, night, night.

The second technique that Alb Indys put to use could be styled as a kind of artistic forgery, though it might just as well be described by the term which he himself preferred—collaboration. And who were his collaborators? In many instances, there was no way of knowing: anonymous penmen, mostly, of illustrations in very old books and periodicals. His shelves were full of them, dark and massive, their worn covers incredibly tender to the touch. French, Flemish, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, any cultural source of published material would do as long as its pictures spoke the language of dark lines and vacant spaces.

According to the article, Thoss might well have been a real doctor, one who lived either in the distant past or whose renown was imported, by recollection and rumor, from a distant place. A number of people associated him with the following vague but lamentable tragedy. A superb physician, and a most respected figure in his community, was psychically deranged one night by some incident of indefinite character. Afterward he continued to make use of his training in physic but in an utterly new fashion, in a different key altogether from that of his former practice. This went on for some time before, violently, he was stopped. Decapitation, drowning in the nearby sea, or both were the prevailing conclusions to the doctor’s legend. Of course, the particulars vary, as do those of a second, and more widely circulated, version. This variant Dr. Thoss was a recluse of the witch-days, less a doctor of medicine than one deeply schooled at forbidden universities of the supernatural. Or was he naturally a very wise man who was simply misunderstood? Histories of the period are unhelpful in resolving such questions. No definite misbehavior is attributed to him, except perhaps that of keeping an unpleasant little companion. The creature, according to most who know this Thossian legend, is said to have possessed the following traits: it was smallish, “no bigger than a man’s head”; shriveled and rotting, as if with disease or decomposition; spoke in a rasping voice or in several voices at ...

This particular usage was based on the idea—and the following verb must be stressed—of “feeding one’s troubles to the sea (or ‘wind’) and Dr. Thoss,” as if this figure—whatever its anatomical or metaphysical identity—were some kind of eater of others’ suffering. A concluding note invited readers to submit whatever smatterings they could to enlarge upon this tiny daub of local color. End of the real story of Dr. Thoss. Alb Indys had read the article with interest and appetite, more than he ever hoped to have, and he now pushed both the crumpled newspaper and decimated meal away from him, sitting for a moment in blurry reflection on both. The surface of the old table, jaundiced by the little lamp above it, somehow seemed to be decaying in its grain, dissolving into a putrid haze. Possibly his mind had simply wandered too far when he heard, or thought he heard, a strange utterance. And it was delivered in a distorted, dry-throated voice, as though transmitted by garbled shortwave. “Yes, my name is Thoss,” the voice had said. “I am a doctor.” “Excuse me, will there be anything else you’d like to order?” Shaken back to life, Alb Indys declined further service, paid his bill, and left. On his way out, for no defensible reason, he scrutinized every face in the room. But none of them could have said it, he assured himself.

There was no gate, and the road he was on freely entered the church grounds. To his left and right were headstones and monuments. They formed a forest of memorials, clumps of crosses and groves of gravestones. Some of them were so tilted by the years that they looked as if they were about to topple over. But could one of them have just now fallen down entirely? Something was missing that seemed to have been there a moment ago. When Alb Indys reached the edge of the graveyard he turned around, surveying not only the markers themselves but also the spaces between them. And the wind was pulling at his fine pale locks.

Suddenly everything seemed wrong and he wanted to leave. But he could not leave, because someone was speaking to him from the pulpit. Yes, a pulpit in such a large church would be equipped with a microphone that amplified normal speech. Then why not speak normally—why whisper in such confused language and so rapidly, the effect being that of a single voice multiplying itself into many? What were the voices saying now? He could not understand them, as if he were hearing them in a dream. If only he could move, just turn his head a little. And if only he could open his eyes and see what was wrong. The voices kept repeating without fading, echoing without end in what now seemed a fantastically spacious church. Then, with an effort sufficient to move the earth itself, he managed to turn his head to look out a window in the east transept. And without even opening his tightly closed eyelids, he saw what was in the window. But he suddenly awoke for an entirely different reason, because finally he understood what the voices were saying. They said they were a doctor, and their name was—

Enough of this for one day, Alb Indys thought sleepily. There was work he could be doing. But when he picked up the drawing book from where he had earlier abandoned it on the bed, he saw that the work he intended to do had, by some miracle, already been done. Yet it had not been done rightly. He looked at the drawing of the window, the drawing he had finished off earlier that day with his meticulous signature. Was it only because he was so tired that he could not recall darkening those window panes and carving that curved scar of moon behind them? Could he have forgotten about scoring that bone-white cicatrix into the flesh of night? But he was holding that particular moon in reserve for one of his collaborations and this was not one of those. This belonged to that other type of drawing: in these he penned only what was enclosed within the four-walled frame of his room, never anything outside it. Then why did he ink in this night and this moon, and with the collaboration of what other artistic hand? Something was gravely wrong. If only he were not so drained by chronic insomnia, all those lost dreams swishing around in his head, perhaps he could have thought more clearly about it. His dozing brain might even have noticed another change in the picture, for something now squatted in the chair beside the window. But there was too much sleep to catch up on, and, as the sun went out in the window, Alb Indys shut his eyes languorously and lay down upon his bed. And he very well ...

When the world uncovers some dark disguise, Embrace the darkness with averted eyes. PSALMS OF THE SILENT