Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

As our dummy dresser approaches her work, she is overwhelmed by an amorphous anxiety without a specific source. An awesome load of new clothes has arrived to adorn a display of manikins. Their unclothed bodies repel her touch because, as Miss Locher explained, they are neither warm nor cold, as only artificial bodies can be.

Something statuesque is approaching her. It radiates a field of dynamic tension that grows more intense the closer it comes, its shadow lengthening upon the floor. Still, she cannot turn around to see the horror behind her, for at this point she cannot move her body, which is stiff-jointed and rigid. Perhaps she can scream, she thinks, and makes an attempt to do so. But this fails, because by then there is already a firm and tepid hand that has covered her mouth from behind.

What I did not expect were the sheer lengths to which you would go in order to fire up my sense of strange revelation. Was this, I pray, done to bring us closer in the divine bonds of unreality?

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.

You don’t much like the policía, do you, Rrrosa? Yes, of course I can blame you. Without them, where would all of us outlaws be? What would we have? Only a 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.

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.