Grimscribe: His Lives and Works

by Thomas Ligotti

  “Sorry, doctor, but this may be too much.”

  “Just hold on to yourself,” he said, “we’re almost there. Driver, pull into that alley behind those houses.”

  The taxi joggled as we made our way through the narrow passage. On either side of us were high wooden fences beyond which rose so many houses of such impressive height and bulk, though of course they were still monuments to decay. The cab’s headlights were barely up to the task of illuminating the cramped little alley, which seemed to become ever narrower the further we proceeded. Suddenly the driver jerked us to a stop to avoid running over an old man slouched against the fence, an empty bottle lying at his side.

  “This is where we get out,” said Dr. Dublanc. “Wait here for us, driver.”

  As we emerged from the taxi I pulled at the doctor’s sleeve, whispering about the expense of the fare. He replied in a loud voice, “You should worry more about getting a taxi to take us back home. They keep their distance from this neighborhood and rarely answer the calls they receive to come in here. Isn’t that true, driver?” But the man had returned to that dormant state in which I first saw him. “Come on,” said the doctor. “He’ll wait for us. This way.”

  Dr. Dublanc pushed back a section of the fence that formed a kind of loosely hinged gate, closing it carefully behind us after we passed through the opening. On the other side was a small backyard, actually a miniature dumping ground where shadows bulged with refuse. And before us, I assumed, stood the house of Mr. Catch. It seemed very large, with an incredible number of bony peaks and dormers outlined against the sky, and even a weathervane in some vague animal-shape that stood atop a ruined turret grazed by moonlight. But although the moon was as bright as before, it now appeared to be considerably thinner, as if it had been worn down just like everything else in that neighborhood.

  “It hasn’t altered in the least,” the doctor assured me. He was holding open the back door of the house and gesturing for me to approach.

  “Perhaps no one’s home,” I suggested.

  “The door’s unlocked. You see how he’s expecting us?”

  “There don’t appear to be any lights in use.”

  “Mr. Catch likes to conserve on certain expenses. A minor mania of his. But in other ways he’s quite extravagant. And by no means is he a poor man. Watch yourself on the porch—some of these boards are not what they once were.”

  As soon as I was standing by the doctor’s side he removed a flashlight from the pocket of his overcoat, shining a path into the dark interior of the house. Once inside, that yellowish swatch of illumination began flitting around in the blackness. It settled briefly in a cobwebbed corner of the ceiling, then ran down a blank battered wall and jittered along warped floor moldings. For a moment it revealed two suitcases, quite well used, at the bottom of a stairway. It slid smoothly up the stairway banister and flew straight to the floors above, where we heard some scraping sounds, as if an animal with long-nailed paws was moving about.

  “Does Mr. Catch keep a pet?” I asked in a low voice.

  “Why shouldn’t he? But I don’t think we’ll find him up there.”

  We went deeper into the house, passing through many rooms which fortunately were unobstructed by furniture. Sometimes we crushed bits of broken glass underfoot; once I inadvertently kicked an empty bottle and sent it clanging across a bare floor. Reaching the far side of the house, we entered a long hallway flanked by several doors. All of them were closed and behind some of them we heard sounds similar to those being made on the second floor. We also heard footsteps slowly ascending a stairway. Then the last door at the end of the hallway opened, and a watery light pushed back some of the shadows ahead of us. A round-bodied little man was standing in the light, lazily beckoning to us.

  “You’re late. You’re very late,” he chided while leading us down into the cellar. His voice was high-pitched yet also quite raspy. “I was just about to leave.”

  “My apologies,” said Dr. Dublanc, who sounded entirely sincere on this occasion. “Mr. Catch, allow me to introduce—”

  “Never mind that ‘Mr. Catch’ nonsense. You know well enough what things are like for me, don’t you, doctor? So let’s get started, I’m on a schedule now.”

  In the cellar we paused amid the quivering light of candles, dozens of them positioned high and low, melting upon a shelf or an old crate or right on the filth-covered floor. Among the surrounding objects, I could see that an old-fashioned film projector had been set up on a table toward the center of the room, and a portable movie screen stood by the opposite wall. The projector was plugged into what appeared to be a small electrical generator humming on the floor.

  “I think there are some chairs about that you can sit on,” said Mr. Catch as he threaded the film around the spools of the projector. Then for the first time he spoke to me directly. “I’m not sure how much the doctor has explained about what I’m going to show you. Probably very little.”

  “Yes, and deliberately so,” interrupted Dr. Dublanc. “If you just roll the film I think my purpose will be served, with or without explanations. What harm can it do?”

  Mr. Catch made no reply. After blowing out some of the candles to darken the room sufficiently, he switched on the projector, which was a rather noisy mechanism. I worried that whatever dialogue or narration the film might contain would be drowned out between the whirring of the projector and the humming of the generator. But I soon realized that this was a silent film, a cinematic document that in every aspect of its production was thoroughly primitive, from its harsh light and coarse photographic texture to its nearly unintelligible scenario.

  It seemed to serve as a visual record of a scientific experiment, a laboratory demonstration in fact. The setting, nevertheless, was anything but clinical—a bare wall in a cellar which in some ways resembled, yet was not identical to, the one where I was viewing this film. And the subject was human: a shabby, unshaven, and unconscious derelict who had been propped up against a crude grayish wall. Not too many moments passed before the man began to stir, perhaps awakening from a deep stupor. However, the movements he made did not appear to be his own. More specifically, they seemed to be the spasmodic twitchings of some energy that inhabited the old tramp. One of his legs wiggled for a second. Then his chest heaved and collapsed. Soon his head began to wobble, and it kept on wobbling, as if something was making its way through the derelict’s scalp, rustling among long greasy locks. Part of it finally poked upwards—a thin sticklike thing. More of them emerged, dark wiry appendages that were bristling and bending and reaching for the outer world. At the end of each was a pair of slender snapping pincers. What ultimately broke through that shattered skull, pulling itself out with a wriggling motion of its many newborn arms, was approximately the size and proportions of a spider monkey. It had tiny translucent wings which fluttered a few times, glistening but useless, and seemed to be in an emaciated condition. When it twisted its head toward the camera, it stared into the lens with malicious eyes and seemed to be chattering with its beaked mouth.

  I whispered to Dr. Dublanc: “Please, I’m afraid that—”

  “Exactly,” he hissed back at me. “But you need to face certain realities so that you may free yourself from your fear of them.”

  Now it was my turn to give the doctor a dubious look. I was not blind to the fact that he was practicing a highly unconventional form of therapeutics, to say the least. And our presence in that cellar—

  that cold swamp of shadows in which candles flickered like fireflies—seemed to be as much for Dr. Dublanc’s benefit as it was for mine, if “benefit” is the proper word in this case.

  “You might indulge me on occasion,” I said.

  “Shhh. Watch the film.”

  It was almost finished. After the creature had hatched from its strange egg, it proceeded very rapidly to consume the grubby derelict, leaving only a collection of bones attired in cast-off clothes. Picked perfectly clean, the skull leaned wearily to one side. And the cre
ature, which earlier had been so emaciated, had grown rather plump with its feast, becoming bloated and meaty like an overfed dog. In the final sequence, a net was tossed into the scene, capturing the gigantic vermin and dragging it off camera. Then whiteness filled the screen and the film was flapping on its reel.

  “So what did you think?” said the doctor. No doubt noticing that I was still under the spell of what I had just seen, he snapped his fingers in front of my face. I blinked and then looked at him in dazed silence. Taking advantage of the moment, he tried to lend a certain focus or coloration to the events of the film. “You must understand,” he explained, “that the integrity of material forms is only a prejudice. This is not to mention the substance of those forms, which is an even more dubious state of affairs. That a monstrous insect could burst forth from the anatomy of a human being should be no cause for consternation. Your prejudices about a clockwork world of sunrise schedules and lunar routines have been a real obstacle in the therapy I’ve been practicing with you. You’ve put me in the position of having to cater to your anxiety that the world is not ruled by regularity. But it’s time you realized that nothing is bolted down, so to speak. And no more is that thing which we call the mind, with its craving for evermore novel sensations and perceptions. You could learn a great deal from Mr. Catch. I know that I have. Of course, I still recognize that there remain some unfortunate aspects to his case—there was only so much I could do for him—but nonetheless I think that he has gained rare and invaluable knowledge, the consequences notwithstanding.

  “His research had taken him into areas where, how should I say, where the shapes and levels of phenomena, the multiple planes of natural existence, revealed their ability to establish new relationships with one another … to become interconnected, as it were, in ways that we never thought possible. At some point everything became a blur for him, a sort of pandemonium of forces, a phantasmagoria of possibilities which he eagerly engaged. We can have no idea of the tastes and temptations that may emerge or develop in the course of such work … a curious hedonism that could not be controlled. Oh, the vagaries of omnipotence, breeder of indulgence. Well, Mr. Catch retreated in panic from his own powers, yet he could not put the pieces back as they had been: unheard of habits and responses had already ingrained themselves into his system. The worst sort of slavery, but how persuasively he spoke of the euphoria he had known, the infinitely diverse sensations beyond all common understanding. It was just this understanding that I required in order to free him of a life that, in its own fashion, had become as abysmal and problematic as your own—except that his pathology existed at the opposite pole. Some middle ground must be established, some balance. How well I understand that now! This is why I have brought you two together. This is the only reason, however it may seem to you.”

  “It seems to me,” I replied, “that Mr. Catch has snuck out on us. Personally, I hope we’ve seen the last of him.”

  Dr. Dublanc emitted the shadow of a laugh. “Oh, he’s still in the house. You can be sure of that. Let’s take a look upstairs.”

  He was, in fact, not far at all. Stepping into that hallway of closed doors at the top of the cellar stairs, we saw that one of those doors was now partially open and the room beyond it was faintly aglow. Without announcing us, Dr. Dublanc slowly pushed back the door until we could both see what had happened inside.

  It was a small unfurnished room with a bare wooden floor upon which a candle had been fixed with its own drippings. The candlelight shone dimly on the full face of Mr. Catch, who seemed to have collapsed in a back corner of the room, lying somewhat askew. He was sweating, though it was cold in the room, and his eyes were half-closed in a kind of languorous exhaustion. But something was wrong with his mouth: it seemed to be muddied and enlarged, sloppily painted into a clown’s oversized grin. On the floor beside him were, to all appearances, the freshly ravaged remains of one of those creatures in the film.

  “You made me wait too long!” he suddenly shouted, opening his eyes fully and straightening himself up for a moment before his posture crumbled once again. He then repeated this outburst: “You couldn’t help me and now you make me wait too long.”

  “It was in order to help you that I came here,” the doctor said to him, yet all the time fixing his eyes on the mutilated carcass on the floor. When he saw that I had observed his greedy stare he regained himself. “I’m trying to help both of you the only way you can be helped. Tell him, Mr. Catch. Tell him how you breed those amazing individuals and enable them to induce the most rapturous exaltation, bliss on the brink of apotheosis.”

  Mr. Catch groped in his pants pocket, pulled out a large handkerchief, and wiped off his mouth. He was smiling idiotically, quite obviously intoxicated by his recent feast, and with difficulty worked himself to a standing position. His body now seemed even more swollen and bulbous than before, really not quite human in its proportions. After replacing his handkerchief in one pocket, he reached down into the other, digging around inside it. “It’s really too much to go into detail,” he explained in a voice that had become placid. “What should I say? Much of it is a psychic matter. Hence, my appeal to the doctor. The rest involves some chemical formulations to instigate what is essentially a universal process of transfiguration, the so-called miracle of creation in all its forms. A catalyzing agent is introduced into the subject by insemination or ingestion.” With a kind of giddy pride, he held out his open hand. In the thick pad of his palm I could see two tiny objects that were shaped like eggs. “The larvae of the gods,” he said with a hint of awe in his voice.

  I turned abruptly to the doctor. “The pills you gave me.”

  “It was the only thing that could be done for you. I’ve tried so hard to help you both.”

  “I had suspected something was up,” said Mr. Catch, now reviving himself from his stupefaction. “I should never have brought you into this. Don’t you realize that it’s difficult enough without involving your own patients. The derelicts are one thing, but this is quite another. I’m sorry I ever involved you in my predicament. Well, my suitcases are packed. It’s your operation now, doctor. Let me by, time to go.”

  Mr. Catch maneuvered himself from the room, and a few moments later the sound of a door being slammed echoed throughout the house. The doctor kept close watch on me, waiting for some reaction, I suppose. Yet he was also listening very intently to certain sounds emanating from the rooms around us. The noise of restless skittering was everywhere.

  “You understand, don’t you?” asked the doctor. “Mr. Catch isn’t the only one who has waited too long … far too long. I thought by now the pills would have had their effect.”

  I went into my pocket and removed the two little eggs which I had failed to swallow earlier. “I can’t claim that I had much faith in your methods,” I said. Then I tossed the pills at Dr. Dublanc who, speechless, caught them. “You won’t mind if I return home by myself.”

  Indeed, he was probably relieved to see me go. In the course of treating Mr. Catch, the doctor had apparently also become a hideous degenerate, a wholly unbalanced specimen in need of the most radical therapy himself. As I traced my way back through the house I heard him running about opening door after door, finally crying out with a pitiful delight, “There you are, you beauties. There you are.”

  Although the doctor himself now seemed hopeless, I think that his therapeutic strategy may have been somewhat beneficial in my case, or at least given me a glimpse of how I could meet the demoniac undercurrents of existence halfway. For during those first few moments on that hazy morning, when the taxi edged out of the alley and passed through that neighborhood of deteriorating houses, I felt myself attain the middle ground Dr. Dublanc spoke of—the balancing point between an anxious flight from the abyss and the temptation to plunge into it. There was a great sense of escape, as if I could exist serenely outside the grotesque ultimatums of creation, an entranced spectator casting a clinical gaze at the chaotic tumult both around and within himself.
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br />   But the feeling soon evaporated. A genuine cure for the quandaries of an inconstant existence is exceedingly rare. “Could you go a little faster?” I said to the driver, for it seemed to me that we were making no progress in our leave from that district in which all order had dissipated. Things again appeared to be changing, ready to burst forth from their sagging cocoons and take on uncertain forms. Even the pale morning sun seemed to be wavering from its proper proportions.

  At the end of the ride, I was content to pay the extraordinary fare and return to my bed. The following day I started looking for a new doctor.

  The Voice

  of the

  DREAMER

  The Night School

  Instructor Carniero was holding class once again.

  I discovered this fact on my return from a movie theater. It was late and I thought, “Why not take a short cut across the grounds of the school?” This thought led to a whole train of thoughts that I often pondered, especially when I was out walking at night. Mainly these thoughts were about my desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence, something that could help me in my existence before it was my time to die and be put into the earth to rot, or perhaps have my cremated remains drift out of a chimney stack and sully the sky. Of course, this desire was by no means unique to me. Nonetheless, I had spent quite a few years, my whole life it seemed, seeking to satisfy it in various ways. Most recently, I had sought some kind of satisfaction by attending the classes of Instructor Carniero. Though I had not attended his classes for very long, he seemed to be someone who could reveal what was at the bottom of things. Lost in my thoughts, then, I left the street I was walking along and proceeded across the grounds of the school, which were vast and dark. It was quite cold that night, and when I looked down the front of my overcoat I saw that the single remaining button holding it together had become loose and possibly would not last much longer. So a short cut on my return from that movie theater appeared to be the wise move.