Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

Dr. Monk, read the note from inside the animal, We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alley of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . . my awestruck little deer and I have gone frolicking. See you anon. Jonathan Doe.

experience, more than you would believe. This whole city is most certainly a pitiful corpse, while the neighborhood outside the walls of this bar has the distinction of being the withering heart of the deceased. And I am a devoted student of its anatomy—a pathologist, after a fashion, with an eye for necroses that others overlook.

I tell you, no one worships this city as I do. Especially its witticisms of proximity, one strange thing next to another, which together add up to a greater strangeness. One of the more grotesque examples of this phenomenon occurs when you observe that a little shop whose display window features a fabulous array of prosthetic devices is right next-door to Marv’s Second Hand City.

lawless paradise . . . and paradise is a bore. Violence without violation is only a noise heard by no one, the most horrendous sound in the universe.

The drug has rendered you fantastically sensitive to the shaping influence of a certain form of energy, namely that which is being generated by me, or rather through me. To put it romantically, I’m now dreaming you. That’s really the only way I can explain it that you might understand. Not dreaming about you, like some old love song. I’m dreaming you. Your arms and legs don’t respond to your brain’s commands because I’m dreaming of someone who is as still as a statue. I hope you can appreciate how remarkable this is. Damn! I suppose that was your attempt to scream. You really are terrified, aren’t you? Just to be safe, perhaps I’d better dream of someone who hasn’t anything to scream with. There, that should do it. You do look strange, though, like that. But this is only just the beginning. These minor tricks are child’s play and I’m sure don’t impress you in any way whatever. Soon I’ll show you that I can really make an impression, once I put my mind to it.

Can you feel us both being swept into a tempest of transfigurations? Can you feel the fevers of this chemist? The power of my dreaming, my dreaming, my dreaming, my . . . Now Rose of madness—BLOOM!

It is said that death is a great awakening, an emergence from the mystifications of life. Ha, I have to laugh. Death is the consummation of mortality and—to let out a big secret—only heightens mortal imperfections. Of course, it takes a great master to pry open a pair of post-mortem eyes once they are sewn tightly closed by Dr. Reaper. And even afterward there is so little these creatures are good for. As conversationalists they are incredibly feeble.

Oh, how nice, how nice and lovely to be settled in a world where it’s always dead with darkness and always alive with lights! And where it will always, forever after, be Christmas Eve.

I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written in embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble race is mine.

What I most love about twilight is the deceptive sense, as one looks down the dimming west, not that it is some fleeting transitional moment, but that there’s actually nothing before or after it: that that’s all there is.)

Gaunt immortality in black and gold, Wreathed consoler hideous to behold. The beautiful lie of a mother’s womb, The pious trick—for it is the tomb!

The voices spoke a foreign language, but it wasn’t French, as one might have suspected. It was something more foreign than that. Perhaps a cross between a madman talking in his sleep and the sonar screech of a bat. I heard the voices cluttering and chattering with each other until I fell soundly asleep once more.

I gazed up through the trees at the opposing tones of the sky. I kept my hands in my pockets and touched nothing, except with my eyes.

There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them.

Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure.