The Secret of Ventriloquism

by Jon Padgett

S. T. Joshi has famously argued that the truly great authors of weird fiction have been great precisely because they use their stories as a vehicle for expressing a coherent worldview.

When forced to speak, matter suffers. The voice that is squeezed out through the dead materials of the mechanism becomes the voice of the mechanism’s protest against animation, the voice of its resistance to voice. -Steven Connor,

Accept as the days and nights go by that you are a walking skeleton, an ambulatory miracle of meat. New thoughts come, but they arrive from beyond the foam, beyond the foam, beyond the foamy sponge of your brain.

“I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember… if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” -Leo Tolstoy

I've often thought that the ideal vacation would be one in which nothing at all notable happened. Too often, though, “breaks” of this kind—those borrowed realities—are haunted by the idea of relaxation rather than the real thing.

“A wise man once observed, ‘You’re never upset for the reason you think.’”

“Houses dream, did you know that?” I asked the shock-haired boy who followed me, head bowed (perhaps in prayer). “All things dream, to one degree or another. And sometimes our waking selves share dreams of the darkened hollow, the deep forest, city squares. Like them, houses dream, and when those dreams are nightmares, we call them haunted. This is such a house.”

Of course, you may think this is all complete nonsense, but a lot of things that people say—even most things—are complete nonsense. This is not the ventriloquist’s concern.

At first I couldn’t get the fucking skull to stop screaming no matter what I did. But you don’t want to hear about that. You want to know why I killed him.