My Work Is Not Yet Done

by Thomas Ligotti

  The person who interviewed me asked, among other things, what single personal quality I believed I might possess that would distinguish me for consideration as an employee of the Blaine Company. I hesitated for some time, and even thought it might be best if I gave no reply at all, or a very feeble and conventional response. Instead I spoke some words that I was sure the interviewer wanted to hear and that, in fact, were true. ‘My quality,’ I said, ‘my personal quality is the capacity to drive myself and those around me to the uttermost limits of our potential – to affect persons, and even places, in a way that brings their unsuspected possibilities and purposes out of hiding and into the full light of realization. That is my personal quality.’

  As oddly phrased and vehement as this statement might sound to other individuals, it was, I knew, exactly what my interviewer wanted to hear. On the spot I was offered the position for which I had applied at the Blaine Company – that of a manipulator of documents. When I entered the company’s old offices to be interviewed my only purpose was to lose myself in the manipulation of documents, to bury as deeply as I could this passionate personal quality of mine, which had always resulted in the most unfortunate and twisted consequences for those involved, whether it was an individual person or a group of persons or a commercial entity like the Blaine Company. Because my personal quality, as stated to my interviewer at the Blaine Company, was more than a figure of speech or an exaggerated claim for the purposes of self-promotion, even if I have been at a lifelong loss to account for the full force of this extraordinary quality. For years my only purpose had been to suppress this quality, to crush it as best I could. However, after contemplating that portrait of U G Blaine – after seeing written upon that face what I might describe as a ‘profoundly baseless sense of purpose in the world’– everything changed inside my head, which I could no longer keep from filling up with strange and violent thoughts and fantasies. ‘This company will soon need to relocate,’ I thought as I walked away from my interview that day. ‘In order to satisfy its sense of purpose as a commercial entity, and the baseless sense of purpose of its founder and president, this company will need to relocate to another place.’ And I knew precisely the place that was well suited to the company’s purposes . . . and to my own. Thus, when I finally located and entered the small lavatory where U G Blaine wished to confer with me, I was incited to the point of derangement by the grim drama which was now coming to a climax.

  ‘Opportunity awaits you in the Golden City,’ I shouted, my voice resounding against the tile walls and floor, the metal doors and porcelain fixtures of the antiquated lavatory surrounding me. ‘Opportunity awaits you in the Golden City,’ I repeated, mocking the slogan that a public relations company had used to transform the image of the city once known as Murder Town. It was this preposterous dream of changing its public image that made the Golden City ideal for the purposes of Blaine (the company), which held the deranged and preposterous idea that it could ever become a dominant force in the world marketplace, even though its only commercial activity was that of manipulating documents for small-time businesses and a few private individuals. Only in this atmosphere of a crumbling city surrounded by vast, decaying neighborhoods, its streets filled with hordes of wandering derelicts and permeated by a yellowish haze that no meteorologist or scientist of any kind had ever successfully accounted for . . . only in this Murder Town could I manage to drive Mr U G Blaine to the uttermost limit of his potential – just as I had driven this city itself, whose streets I inhabited for a time, to the vile and devious limit of its potential, leaving behind an inexplicable yellowish haze, a mere side effect of the things that I had done there, things that I was born to do as a freak of this world (or perhaps another world altogether, so unknown am I to myself), things that my freakish nature learned to do over many years, and things that made me seek my own burial in an occupation where I could forget my freakish self and everything I knew about this world where I did not belong. Only here could Blaine be made to realize his unsuspected possibilities and purposes, especially that baseless sense of purpose which I could not escape seeing in that portrait of a middle-aged man in a business suit.

  Of course it was not a man in a business suit who awaited my arrival in that small lavatory – it was the Blaine presence, as I called it, that pervaded the bright little room with its yellow tint. ‘Your restructuring of the company has been a great success,’ I said to the Blaine presence, which now quivered and curled about the room in trembling, yellow-tinted waves. ‘Soon it will be just you and your derelicts in this building. You will be the dominant force in the marketplace of the Golden City, manipulating all the documents in town. But you will never go further than that. This is where you belong. This is where you will stay. And there’s nothing either of us can do to change that. You think that I can assist you in extending your power and influence, your marketplace dominance, but I came to tell you that no such thing will ever happen. This place is your uttermost limit.’

  The Blaine presence was now becoming extremely agitated, its yellow tint swirling about the room and batting itself against the walls. ‘There’s no use in blaming me for what you are,’ I screamed. ‘You’re the creator of a marketplace for violent thoughts and fantasies. I saw that in the portrait of the middle-aged man in a business suit, and I can feel it in the presence you have now made of yourself. That’s all there can ever be for you in this world.’

  At that point I picked up a wastepaper container that stood by the lavatory sink and was shaped like a bullet with a rounded point. Across the room was a small window with panes of frosted glass. I smashed those glass panes by ramming the rounded top of the wastepaper container into it with all the violent force within me. Through the smashed panes of that window in a lavatory on one of the uppermost floors of the building you could see out over the city, the moon shining down through the yellowish haze. ‘There,’ I shouted while pointing out the broken window. ‘Go out into your world of haze. That’s your element now. And you can’t survive beyond its limits. The limits of the Golden City.’

  I felt a powerful, almost cyclonic gust sweep past me on all sides, even moving through me as it soared out the broken window and blended into the yellowish haze beyond, leaving behind it a room charged with the residue of vicious and violent impulses.

  After that night, the Golden City was rechristened as Murder Town. Early the next morning, the streetlights still shining through the yellowish haze, brutally mauled bodies were discovered lying in every street of the city and far into the vast, decaying neighborhoods surrounding it. For a time news reports broadcasted by radio and television and printed in newspapers with a dignified image as well as tabloid rags like the Metro Herald – where I once worked as a reporter myself – were concerned with nothing but these murders, which they called ‘Murders of Mystery’ or ‘Mysterious Mass Murders’.

  However, it was not long before serious consideration was given to the possibility that these were not murders at all but the consequences of what the Metro Herald designated the ‘Yellow Plague’, because the bodies of the victims all displayed jaundiced blotches that overworked hospital personnel, police investigators, and morgue attendants had at first assumed to be bruises caused by violent attacks. For a day or so city officials had the opportunity to present the cause of these astonishingly lurid and numerous deaths as, quite possibly, an instance of a mysterious disease rather than of mysterious murder. With the cooperation of local law enforcement and medical officials, along with the services of a sophisticated public relations campaign, the issue of how such an incredible number of corpses might have been produced during a single night could have been confused long enough for the city to waver between its old reputation as a place of murder and an entirely new identity as a place of disease. Of course, given the alternative of henceforth being known to the world as the ‘City of the Yellow Plague’, on the one hand, or as ‘Murder Town’, on the other, the latter appellative seemed the preferable choice.

 
Apparently unrelated to the Mystery Murders, according to news reports disseminated by all the local media, was the discovery of the body of a middle-aged man dressed in a worn business suit in a suburb just outside the city limits. Eventually identified as U G Blaine, the corpse was found lying in the parking lot of a small outdoor shopping center. Investigators uncovered no signs that might have connected Blaine’s death to those which took place the night before in Murder Town. To all appearances the man had simply collapsed and died in a place where the yellowish haze of what was once known as the Golden City dissolved altogether, giving way to the lucid atmosphere of an upper-class suburb contiguous with the city’s outlying neighborhoods.

  On that same morning that Blaine’s body was found, I walked through the deserted streets of a city where others were still afraid to walk, strolling calmly through the stillness and the yellowish haze. For a moment I felt that I had finally driven myself to my limit, and I was content as errant pages from local newspapers flapped idiotically along the sidewalk and streetlights glared down upon me.

  But before the morning had passed I was ready to move on – to relocate once more. My purpose, for a time, had exhausted itself. But now I could see there were other cities, other people and places. I could see all the world as if it loomed only a few feet in front of me – its every aspect so clear to my eyes that I would never be able to drive it from my mind until the last of my violent thoughts and fantasies had been fulfilled. Even though I knew in the depths of myself that it was all just another preposterous ambition, a false front propped up by baseless purposes and dreams, I could not help thinking to myself –‘I have a special plan for this world.’

  May this document, unmanipulated, stand as my declaration of purpose.

  THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

  CLASSIFIED AD I

  A MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION is dreaming. We are an organization of more than 100 thousand souls (full-time) and are presently seeking individuals willing to trade their personal lot for a share in our dream. Entry-level positions are now available for self-possessed persons who can see beyond the bottom line to a bottomless realm of possibilities. Our enterprise is now thriving in a tough, global marketplace and has taken on a life all its own. If you are a committed, focused individual with a hunger to be part of something far greater than yourself . . . our door is now open. Your life need not be a nightmare of failure and resentment. Join us. Outstanding benefits.

  An opening scene

  Dawn in the rain forest. Sunlight begins flickering through the green luxuriance and appears here and there as radiant pools upon the soft, dark earth. A tribe of hunter-gatherers lies sleeping near a shallow stream. The camera pans from one inanely tranquil face to another. Thus far no noises of any kind occur on the soundtrack – no rustling in the underbrush, no burbling of the shallow stream, no screeching from the rain forest’s animal life. While surveying the sleeping tribe, the camera moves in for a close-up of one hunter whose face is anything but inanely tranquil. It is not even the face of one who lives in the rain forest. Although the man is practically naked, and a sharpened stick is lying within reach of his sleeping form, his skin is pale and his hair neatly styled. Now his features are becoming contorted, as if he is experiencing a nightmare. He seems to be talking in his sleep, but thus far there are no noises of any kind on the soundtrack. Finally the silence is broken by the spasmic drone of an alarm clock. The eyes of the hunter suddenly open and stare in panic; his pale skin is running with sweat. The alarm clock continues to sound.

  Orientation video

  A pretty, dark-haired actress in a business suit is standing amid a maze of desks, talking to the camera and expertly gesturing. The occupants of the desks are seemingly oblivious to her presence. At the end of the video the actress smartly crosses her arms over her chest, fixes a stern expression on her face, and utters the corporate motto which introduced the video as a title (‘Think Again’). As she continues to stare into the camera the scene around her begins to change: shadows drift about the maze of desks and the faces of all the employees become rotten and corroded, as if they are being afflicted with leprosy in fast motion. One by one they rise from behind their desks and succumb to the strange fidgety conniptions of a danse macabre. Under the stress of these fitful, brittle movements their limbs break off and fall to the floor, where the shadows move in to devour them. Noses and ears quickly wither, lips peel back to reveal broken teeth, eyeballs shrivel in their sockets. The pretty, dark-haired actress continues to stare into the camera with a stern expression.

  Memo from the CEO

  As the forces operating in today’s marketplace become more shadowy and incomprehensible we must recommit ourselves every second of every day to a ceaseless striving for that elusive dream which we all share and which none of us can remember, if it ever existed in the first place. And if anyone thinks that, as all the world races toward the same elusive dream, our competition isn’t fully prepared to gnaw off its own genitals to get to the promised land before us and keep it for themselves . . . think again.

  From a supervisor’s notebook

  . . . And if I were determined to live solely on the flesh of my own staff, with no access to the staffs of other surviving supervisors or any other personnel, the greatest challenge to present itself would be maintaining each of them in an edible state, while also regulating my consumption of these bodies. Perhaps I should try to keep them alive; in that case I could simply restrict myself to ingesting only those elements capable of regeneration, such as blood. Even so, I do dream about their armpits and elbows . . . those of the men as well as the women. I think that during this time of cannibalistic survival I would particularly savor the more wrinkly parts of the human anatomy.

  The hunter

  The green doors of an elevator slide open, revealing a man in a dark business suit. He is standing dead center in the framing shot, and his hair is noticeably neat and well styled. In his right hand is an automatic pistol with a nickel-plated handle. He holds the weapon close to his side as he steps out of the elevator and begins walking swiftly down one brightly lit hallway after another. A series of offices with open doors passes on either side of him. At the end of one of the hallways he stops before a door that is closed. He removes a security card from the inside pocket of his suit and pushes it into the thin slot beside the door. There is a soft, droning sound as the man opens the door and walks inside, leaving his security card behind. Beyond the door he moves into a maze of desks, at each of which a man or a woman is seated. The man stops at the center of the maze, which now seems to spin around him like a carousel. Cacophonous music in waltz time begins rising on the soundtrack, becoming louder and faster as it approaches a painful crescendo. The music is then cut off by the sudden report of a single gunshot. The room stops spinning. The man lies dead within the maze of desks, his shattered skull pouring blood upon the floor. Later the coworkers of this man disclose that for some time he had complained about hearing barely audible messages on his telephone every time he made or received a call in the office. Officers of the company merely shake their heads in condescending sympathy. The following day they authorize financing for the installation of a new telephone system.

  CLASSIFIED AD II

  MAJOR SUPERCORP IN the process of expanding its properties and market-base has limited openings for Approved Labor in domestic and off-shore sites (real and virtual). We are among the biggest legitimate multi-monopolies on the world scene and our Corporate Persona is one that any AL can adopt in good conscience. Experience in sensory-deprived conditions preferred. Knowledge of outlawed dialects on the Nightmare Network a plus. Standard survival package of benefits. Prehistoric ALs okay with biologic documentation from transport agency.

  The farmers

  An unplanted field beneath a gray prehistoric sky. The camera slowly pans from left to right, revealing several figures at various positions in the foreground and background. Each of them is wearily gouging the earth with crude implements typical of the i
ncipient age of agriculture. They are clothed in tunics made from animal hides which are tattered and filthy. Their long hair and weasely beards are matted and lice-ridden. The camera pauses for a long-shot of farmers and field to reinforce the profound tedium of this panorama of a Stone Age planting season. Almost simultaneously the figures all freeze and then look up from the earth upon which their eyes have been previously fixed. What they have seen is the greenish, glowing dome that now hovers over the field and has closed off its perimeter. Some of the farmers begin running about in panic-stricken hysterics, while the rest fall to the ground unconscious or dead from the shock of the inexplicable phenomenon which, given their quasi-feral instincts, they perceive as an overpowering menace. Shafts of greenish light begin to shoot out from various points of the dome, seizing upon each of the farmers and levitating them high above the field. Even the dead bodies are captured and carried beyond the inner surface of the dome. The field now stands empty, the primitive farming tools lie abandoned on the ground. Superimposed on this scene the following legend appears: