My Work Is Not Yet Done

by Thomas Ligotti

  But she was gone. And so was I.

  ‘Wake up, Mr Can,’ I said to the man in the corner just before I left the room.

  4

  AFTER LEAVING KERRIE and Mr Can behind in that shed-like room, I sent out my last message to Richard (WORK NOT DONE, in case you forgot), using every possible means of communication, including the barking dog in the backyard next to Richard’s house, some writing in chalky deodorant on his bathroom mirror, and even telepathy, which I knew from the beginning of this whole heinous saga was not a strength of mine. But once again I failed to raise him by wireless means. And I still could not locate his position on my radar.

  The streets outside were now so death-darkened that I could no longer make my way on foot. Even when I switched to travelling by means of spectral byways, at which I had become so adept, I found that I was no longer master of these roads. All the routes that were familiar to me seemed to have changed, mostly into a series of dead-ends. I felt as if I were trying to negotiate a maze that was not taking me where I wanted to go but where it wanted me to go. And when I finally reached what I thought was the way to freedom, I discovered that I was still not outside the maze but at its very center. And that center was the old meeting room which was outside company space, even if it was deep inside the world of Richard the Minotaur.

  I reassumed worldly appearances and opened the door to the room. While always dim, the place had never looked dimmer to my eyes than it did at that moment. Nevertheless, I ventured across the floor of the room in corporate form. I walked to the table in corporate form. And in corporate form I took a seat at that table where, at the opposite end, sat Richard.

  ‘I’m glad you made it here,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think I had much choice.’

  ‘But this is where you want to be. Nothing else really matters any more.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re resigned to the facts.’

  ‘You mean because you’re here to do some terrible deed?’

  ‘My very worst,’ I said, although not as convincingly as I would have liked.

  ‘Your worst, I’m sure. All because I made you feel bad. That really proves it – you haven’t learned anything. And after what you’ve been through.’

  ‘Illusions don’t die that easily. Whatever I’ve learned doesn’t really matter. I’m still Domino as long as you exist.’

  ‘You mean as long as you exist.’

  ‘That’s right. You said that you knew I wasn’t a dead man.’

  ‘Oh, that was just some simple detective work.’

  ‘Then why wasn’t it done by the real detectives?’

  ‘Because they didn’t know what I knew. They had you down from the start as a suspect in Perry’s . . . Before I forget – why the mannikin hands? That was fairly crude.’

  ‘I thought it appropriate. What’s the difference? All right, I didn’t know how far I could take things at the time. Now tell me what it was the detectives didn’t know.’

  ‘It was an assumption they made. Considering what happened to Perry, they naturally fat you were up and around in the usual manner of mad-dog murderers. How could they know that this was rather far from the case? When they ran the check on your credit card purchases the day you were . . . the day you resigned, they quite reasonably focused on your visit to the gun shop. They didn’t consider it important that you later picked up a few things at that office supply store, although they did ask me if I thought this was significant. But I just shrugged like an innocent.’

  I must have given Richard the blankest look in the world when he started talking about the office supply store. I remembered buying the guns; I remembered buying the clothes. I remembered suddenly being back in my apartment that night – how confused I was, and how I was in such a terrible funk because I didn’t know whether I was alive or dead. I didn’t think I had the strength to pick up a piece of paper . . . and the idea of paper left a chilling echo in my mind.

  ‘Do you see now? You weren’t able to remember buying those reams of paper,’ Richard continued. ‘It’s strange how some things are just blocked from your brain.’

  ‘What would you know about that?’

  ‘Not as much as you, I’m sure. But I do have your interest now, don’t I? So you’re going to listen to me crow about how I deduced what became of little Domino.’

  ‘I don’t have to listen to anything,’ I said, pulling my Buck Skinner Hunting Knife from my pocket and laying it on the table.

  ‘Wow. That is a real hand-chopper. There are some people I’d like to use that on myself. Do you think you’re the only one who has scores to settle? It’s not a question of whether the punishment fits the crime, is it? Not to swines like us. It’s just a matter of getting that pain out of your system . . . and into someone else’s. It’s a dark world. Nothing but darkness. And whose business is it but our own what goes on in the dark?’

  I wanted to be calm and menacing. I wanted to be a creature of murder-lust, a monster of all madnesses. I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror. But I couldn’t help following his script. ‘Naturally I have my confusions about what I am, what I became. But I didn’t expect to find myself wondering what on earth you are.’

  ‘Me?’ said Richard. ‘I’m a person just like you. Well, not exactly like you. You’re a miracle man. You didn’t know that. A medical marvel. As I was saying, once your presence at the office supply store was established, it only remained to check out in the local papers if anything else of interest had happened around those corners that night.’

  As Richard spoke these words a deafening sound came into my head. The sound of crashing and crunching, of metal and bone and screams and screams and screams. Then the sound of a roaring black river.

  ‘It was a bus, Frank. The last of the line for the night. The driver was fully exonerated, if you care to know. You ran like a big black bird right in front of him, as several eye-witnesses told the officers at the scene. You were literally mashed to a pulp, completely unrecognizable as a human being, let alone anyone in particular . . . especially since you weren’t carrying any identification on your person. That wasn’t very smart.’

  ‘Then I am a dead man,’ I said aloud to myself.

  ‘Everyone who saw that gruesome accident thought you were. Some of them said they didn’t know which was worse – seeing your body all smeared and twisted in ways no one should have to see . . . or finding out that you were still alive. Comatose, but alive. I visited you a few times. Of course there wasn’t – I’m sorry, isn’t – anything to see but a heap of bandages. And a rather small heap at that, blood pooling through the gauze. But the fascinating part was the brain waves you were putting out on the EEG. Before I got there, they didn’t think there was any point in hooking you up to it. But I can play a pretty convincing medicine man when I want to. I told them I was a specialist and that I’d known cases like this before. You should have seen the look on their faces when that monitor started skipping and jumping all over the place. That was when I knew you were going to be a problem for me.’

  ‘How could you know that?’

  ‘That’s a strange question coming from you, Domino. I might just as well ask how you knew how to do the things you did. I’m not requesting details. I heard Chipman’s voice when he described Sherry Mercer’s office. He saw something in there that I never want to know about. And that’s not even considering what became of the young man himself. It was bad enough getting those “work not done” messages whenever another one of the group seemed to just disappear. But I knew what I was getting myself into when I hired you. You and the rest of them. But it was you, Frank. You were the blackest of the bunch. I could see it in you from the start. Believe me, I know all about it. We – all of us – are the darkness that dreams are made on. I’m not claiming that I’m special in any way. It doesn’t take anything more than a pair of clear eyes to see what makes the world go ’round. I’ve known about it since I was a child. Was it my fault that I liked
to stare into the shadows until they started to stare back into me? That I performed little operations on stray animals? I really did want to be a doctor at that time in my life. But when I put my hands inside those creatures I never expected to feel what was really in there. It wasn’t until I was older that I knew what I had felt inside them was also inside of me – that there wasn’t anything else inside except that darkness. I thought about killing myself . . . but that wasn’t the way for me. It had other plans for my life, and there wasn’t much I could do except carry them out. It’s my kind that calls the shots in this world, but we didn’t ask for the job. Most of the time we think we’re making our own agendas, following assignments that come from our own brains . . . or “from above”, almost never from below, except perhaps in those strictly legendary instances wherein some poor boob thinks he’s made himself a deal with the devil. What a load of crap that is. I’m not looking for your sympathy, Frank. Wouldn’t that be deranged? I just wanted you to know that I have some idea of what you’ve been up to, not to mention up against, these past few days. It was strange what happened with you, but I don’t think it was an accident. Most people have no idea what goes on in this world. But you know what it likes. It likes fear and agitation and conflict and all that stuff that makes such good copy for those folks who are selling that sort of thing – never mind all the sideliners whose happy lot is merely to peek in the window of the torture shop of life. I wanted you to know that I knew about that too. That’s all I had to say. So what now?’

  ‘I’ve gotten very good lately at coming up with fates worse than death. How about one of those?’ I said. But my words sounded hollow even to me. I was still afraid, not of Richard himself, but of what was inside him, of what had been using him, and myself, as such obliging organisms for the most vicious and sinister acts.

  ‘You can do whatever you want to me, sure,’ he said. ‘But unless I’m completely out of touch with things, you just barely made it here. And you’re looking at me as if I’m standing in a black fog. Do you think you can do what you want to me and still make it to your next stop? That’s where all of this is really heading for you, isn’t it? Come on, you can’t lie to me.’

  He was right of course. I couldn’t lie to him. But I didn’t think I needed to lie.

  ‘I believe you’re right, Richard. What happened to me wasn’t an accident. And it won’t be over until my allotted body count is tallied up. There were seven of you.’

  ‘Correct. And it was seven that you took. You didn’t think about Chipman, did you? He never made much of an impression on anyone. But he was the joker I planted in the deck. If you waste the last bit of light you have left on me you’ll never make it to where you want to go. It’s a terrible choice you have to make. I’m sure you’d like to step into the blackness inside me and dance around in it with that big knife of yours. That’s the real bad guy, and we both know it. That black stuff. But what can we do about it? We’re just pictures painted on the darkness. Go and save yourself, Domino, if saving yourself still means anything to you. To tell you the truth, I’m fed up with the whole thing. You can do whatever you want.’

  I suspected that Richard’s words were only part of an act to save himself. I was sure of it when he asked me, ‘By the way, whatever happened to that document of your idea, your special plan? Just out of curiosity. I don’t really expect to see it.’

  I was in a position that was frustrating beyond endurance. The worst of the swine was the one I had to let go. It seemed I had truly been beaten while he would continue to flourish.

  ‘I’ll tell you this, Richard. Keep watch on your computer screen. I’ll send you something soon.’

  Having said that, I put my knife back in my pocket and began my crawl along the lines of darkness that would lead me to only one place, one little room.

  5

  THERE HE WAS, that bundle of bleeding bandages. The EEG was still active, portraying alarming surges of brain activity and glowing with an eerie incandescence. It was only by the colored lights of the medical appliances in that room that I could see anything at all. He looked like a mummy of someone whose every limb had been amputated to some extent. Tubes trailed out of a bandaged stump that had once been a whole arm as well as from the wrappings which suggested a shapeless head beneath. A catheter snaked its way from under a blanket, dribbling into a plastic bag hung on the side of the bed.

  At the nurses’ station down the quiet hallway there was a bulletin board which had pinned to it some newspaper clippings that pertained to this patient: the initial accident report (with a diagram), the investigation into the driving record of the guy at the wheel of that bus, the awful revelation that the victim still lived despite the incredible trauma sustained during the mishap, and a ‘search goes on’ piece that put out a call to anyone who might be able to provide information that could identify the man who lay in a coma at Memorial Hospital. The bent frames of a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses that might have belonged to the unknown man had been found some distance from his body, but the lenses had either popped out or were lost among the shattered debris of the accident.

  And you were right, Richard. It was not an accident at all. As I looked down on that remnant of a human body I was finally able to remember what happened.

  Rushing back to the office supply store to collect my forgotten packs of paper, I was very much preoccupied with the statement, my Ultimate Statement, that would eventually blacken those empty pages and eject them from the printer in my apartment. But the substance of this document still remained confused in my mind, its message frail and without force, its theme trite: ‘They made me feel bad,’ to paraphrase your own words, Richard, ‘so I bought some guns and killed them all.’ Such a statement, no matter how detailed and lengthy, simply would not do. I realized that even as I was running down the sidewalk to make it back to the office supply store before it closed. And I also knew that no words of greater weight or reason would occur to me once I had returned home. In a fraction of a second I became sick with the idea of sitting before my computer screen and tapping the same message over and over with only the slightest variations on the theme of ‘they made me feel bad, so I bought some guns and killed them all’. There was nothing in such a statement except self-humiliation, self-ridicule, and self-indictment. Anyone reading it would have thought, ‘What a worthless piece of human wreckage. And what a shame about those seven people.’ There would have been no salvation for me in making such a statement, in committing such an act.

  But then I saw my salvation speeding down the street in the form of a bus headed for the suburbs. I picked up my pace. I raced toward the only salvation that I knew was available to me. And I timed it perfectly.

  By killing myself I felt that I would also be killing all of you, killing every bad body on this earth. To my mind, at that moment, every swinish one of us in this puppet show of a world would be done with when that bus made contact with me. Every suicide is a homicide – or many homicides – thwarted. My rage, my inner empire of murderous hate, had never been so intense as in those moments before I met that oncoming bus. Soon my statement would be made, not with words but with the violent action which is the only thing anyone really attended to, if only for a day or so. And the theme of my statement: ‘To whom it may concern – I hereby refuse to be a swine living in a world of swine that was built by swine and belongs only to swine. This swine has been fed full of his swinish ambitions, his swinish schemes, and, over and above all, his swinish fears and obsessions. Therefore I forfeit my part of this estate to my heirs in the kingdom of the swine.’

  That would seem to have been the end of it. I never suspected that I was going to be put to further use. I never suspected that there was a grander – if not exactly ‘grand’ – scheme of things. Not for a moment did I consider that I would continue to be manipulated and conspired against . . . that I would become the instrument of greater manipulations and conspiracies, all the while being kept in the dark about what was really going on, about
what should have been the real subject of my Ultimate Statement, as I now attempt to deliver it to you, not one of whom will ever benefit from it. People do not know, and cannot face, the things that go on in this world, the secret nightmares that are suffered by millions every day . . . and the excruciating paradox, the nightmarish obscenity of being something that does not know what it is and yet believes that it does know, something that in fact is nothing but a tiny particle that forms the body of The Great Black Swine Which Wallows in a Great River of Blackness that to us looks like sunrises and skyscrapers, like all the knotted events of the past and the unraveling of these knots in the future, like birthdays and funerals, like satellites and cell phones and rockets launched into space, like nations and peoples, like the laws of nature and the laws of humanity, like families and friends, like everything, including these words that I write. Because this document, this supposedly Ultimate Statement, is only a record of incidents destined for the garbage can of the incredible. And rightly so. These incidents are essentially no different from any others in the world: they occurred in a particular sequence, they were witnessed and sometimes documented, but in the end they have no significance, no sense, no meaning, at least as I – and you and you and you – imagine these vacuous concepts.