Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Thomas Ligotti

“I know,” said David, his voice at a distance from Leslie’s enthusiasm. “I didn’t think anyone actually bought that stuff.”

  “Well, I did. I thought it would help to support those prisoners who are doing something creative, instead of…well, instead of destructive things.”

  “Creativity isn’t always an index of niceness, Leslie,” David warned his wife.

  “Wait’ll you see it before passing judgment,” she said, opening the flap of the box. “There—isn’t that nice work?” She set the piece on the coffee table.

  Dr. Munck now plunged into that depth of sobriety which can only be reached by falling from a prior alcoholic height. He looked at the object. Of course he had seen it before, watched it being tenderly molded and caressed by creative hands, until he sickened and could watch no more. It was the head of a young boy, a lovely piece discovered in gray formless clay and glazed in blue. The work radiated an extraordinary and intense beauty, the subject’s face expressing a kind of ecstatic serenity, the convoluted simplicity of a visionary’s gaze.

  “Well, what do you think of it?” asked Leslie.

  David looked at his wife and said solemnly: “Please put it back in the box. And then get rid of it.”

  “Get rid of it? Why?”

  “Why? Because I know which of the inmates did this work. He was very proud of it, and I even forced a grudging compliment for the craftsmanship of the thing. But then he told me the source of his model. That expression of sky-blue peacefulness wasn’t on the boy’s face when they found him lying in a field about six months ago.”

  “No, David,” said Leslie as a premature denial of what she was expecting her husband to reveal.

  “This was his most recent—and according to him most memorable—‘frolic.’”

  “Oh my God,” Leslie murmured softly, placing her right hand to her forehead. Then with both hands she gently placed the boy of blue back in his box. “I’ll return it to the shop,” she said quietly.

  “Do it soon, Leslie. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be residing at this address.”

  In the moody silence that followed, Leslie briefly mused upon the now openly expressed departure from the town of Nolgate, their escape. Then she said: “David, did he actually talk about the things he did. I mean about—”

  “I know what you mean. Yes, he did,” answered Dr. Munck with a professional gravity.

  “Poor David,” Leslie said, lovingly sympathetic now that machinations were no longer required to achieve her ends.

  “Actually, it wasn’t that much of an ordeal, strange to say. The conversation we had could even be called stimulating in a clinical sense. He described his ‘frolicking’ in a highly imaginative manner that was rather engrossing. The strange beauty of this thing in the box here—disturbing as it is—somewhat parallels the language he used when talking about those poor kids. At times I couldn’t help being fascinated, though maybe I was shielding my true feelings with a psychologist’s detachment. Sometimes you just have to keep some distance from yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.

  “Anyway, nothing he said was sickeningly graphic in the way you might imagine. When told me about his ‘most memorable frolic,’ it was with a powerful sense of wonder and nostalgia, shocking as that sounds to me now. He seemed to feel a kind of homesickness, though his ‘home’ is a ramshackle ruin of his decayed mind. His psychosis has evidently bred an atrocious fairyland which exists in a powerful way for him. And despite the demented grandeur of his thousand names, he actually sees himself as only a minor figure in this world—a mediocre courtier in a broken-down kingdom of miracles and horrors. This modesty is very interesting when you consider the egotistical magnificence that a lot of psychopaths would attribute to themselves given a limitless imaginary orbit where they could play any imaginary role. But not John Doe. He’s a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a Neverland where dizzy chaos is the norm, a state of affairs on which he gluttonously thrives. Which is as good a description as any of the metaphysical economy of a psychotic’s universe.

  “There’s actually quite a poetic geography to his interior dreamland as he describes it. He talked about a place that sounded like a cosmos of crooked houses and littered alleys, a slum among the stars. Which may be his distorted rendering of a life spent growing up in a shabby neighborhood—an attempt on his part to recast the traumatic memories of his childhood into a realm that cross-breeds a mean-street reality with a fantasy world of his imagination, a phantasmagoric mingling of heaven and hell. This is where he does his ‘frolicking’ with what he calls his ‘awestruck company.’ The place where he took his victims might possibly have been an abandoned building, or even an accommodating sewer. I say this based on his repeated mentioning of ‘the jolly river of refuse’ and ‘the jagged heaps in shadows,’ which could certainly be mad transmutations of a literal wasteland, some grubby and secluded environment that his mind turned into a funhouse of bizarre marvels. Less fathomable are his memories of a moonlit corridor where mirrors scream and laugh, dark peaks of some kind that won’t remain still, a stairway that’s ‘broken’ in a very strange way, though this last one fits in with the background of a dilapidated slum. There is always a paradoxical blend of forsaken topographies and shining sanctuaries in his mind, almost a self-hypnotic—” Dr. Munck caught himself before continuing in this vein of reluctant admiration.

  “But despite all these dreamy back-drops in Doe’s imagination, the mundane evidence of his frolics still points to crimes of a very familiar, down-to-earth type. Run-of-the-mill atrocities, if one can speak of the deeds he committed as such. Doe denies there was anything pedestrian about his mayhem. He says he just made the evidence look that way for the dull masses, that what he really means by ‘frolicking’ is a type of activity quite different from, even opposed to, the crimes for which he was convicted. This term probably has some private associations rooted in his past.”

  Dr. Munck paused and rattled around the ice cubes in his empty glass. Leslie seemed to have drifted into herself while he was speaking. She had lit a cigarette and was now leaning on the arm of the sofa with her legs up on its cushions, so that her knees pointed at her husband.

  “You should really quit smoking someday,” he said.

  Leslie lowered her eyes like a child mildly chastised. “I promise that as soon as we move—I’ll quit. Is that a deal?”

  “Deal,” said David. “And I have another proposal for you. First let me tell you that I’ve definitely decided to give notice of my resignation.”

  “Isn’t that a little soon,” asked Leslie, hoping it wasn’t.

  “Believe me, no one will be surprised. I don’t think anyone will even care. Anyway, my proposal is that tomorrow we take Norleen and rent a place up north for a few days or so. We could go horseback riding. Remember how she loved it last summer? What do you say?”

  “That sounds nice,” Leslie agreed with a ripple of enthusiasm. “Very nice, in fact.”

  “And on the way back we can drop off Norleen at your parents’. She can stay there while we take care of the business of moving out of this house, maybe find an apartment temporarily. I don’t think they’ll mind having her for a week or so, do you?”

  “No, of course not, they’ll love it. But what’s the great rush? Norleen’s still in school, you know. Maybe we should wait till she gets out. It’s just a month away.”

  David sat in silence for a moment, apparently ordering his thoughts.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Leslie with just a slight quiver of anxiety in her voice.

  “Nothing is actually wrong, nothing at all. But—”

  “But what?”

  “Well, it has to do with the prison. I know I sounded very smug in telling you how safe we are from that place, and I still maintain that we are. But this John Doe character I’ve told you about is very strange, as I’m sure you’ve gathered. He’s positively a child-murdering psychopath…and then again. I really don’t know what to say that wou
ld make any sense.”

  Leslie quizzed her husband with her eyes. “I thought you said that inmates like him just bounce off the walls, not—”

  “Yes, much of the time he’s like that. But sometimes…”

  “What are you trying to say, David?” asked Leslie, who was becoming infected by the uneasiness her husband was trying to hide.

  “It’s something that Doe said when I was talking with him today. Nothing really definite. But I’d feel infinitely more comfortable about the whole thing if Norleen stayed with your parents until we can organize ourselves.”

  Leslie lit another cigarette. “Tell me what he said that bothers you so much,” she said firmly. “I should know, too.”

  “When I tell you, you’ll probably just think I’m a little crazy myself. You didn’t talk to him, though, and I did. The mannerisms of his speech, or rather the many different mannerisms. The shifting expressions on that lean face. Much of the time I talked to him I had the feeling he was playing at some game that was beyond me, though I’m sure it just seemed that way. This is a common tactic of the psychopath—messing with the doctor. It gives them a sense of power.”

  “Tell me what he said,” Leslie insisted.

  “All right, I’ll tell you. I think it would be a mistake, though, to read too much into it. But toward the end of the interview today, when we were talking about those kids, he said something I didn’t like at all. He enunciated his words in one of his affected accents, Scottish this time with a little German flavor thrown in. What he said, and I’m reciting it verbatim, was this: ‘You wouldn’t be havin’ a misbehavin’ laddie nor a little colleen of your own, now would you, Professor von Munck?’ Then he grinned at me silently.

  “Now I’m sure he was deliberately trying to upset me. Nothing more than that.”

  “But what he said, David: ‘nor a little colleen.’”

  “Grammatically, of course, it should have been ‘or’ not ‘nor,’ but I’m sure it wasn’t anything except a case of bad grammar.”

  “You didn’t mention anything about Norleen, did you?”

  “Of course I didn’t. That’s not exactly the kind of thing I would talk about with these people.”

  “Then why did he say it like that?”

  “I have no idea. He possesses a very weird sort of cleverness, speaking much of the time with vague suggestions and subtle jokes. He could have heard things abut me from someone on the staff, I suppose. Then again, it might be just an innocent coincidence.” He looked to his wife for comment.

  “You’re probably right,” Leslie agreed with an ambivalent eagerness to believe in this conclusion. “All the same, I think I understand why you want Norleen to stay with my parents. Not that anything might happen—”

  “Not at all. There’s no reason to think anything would happen. No doubt this is a case of the doctor being out-psyched by his patient, but I don’t really care anymore. Any reasonable person would be a little spooked after spending day after day in the pandemonium and often physical danger of that place. The murderers, the rapists, the dregs of the dregs. It’s impossible to lead a normal family life while working under those conditions. You saw how I was on Norleen’s birthday.”

  “I know. Not the best neighborhood in which to bring up a child.”

  David nodded slowly. “When I went to check on her a little while ago, I felt, I don’t know, vulnerable in some way. She was hugging one of those stuffed security blankets of hers.” He took a sip of his drink. “It was a new one, I noticed. Did you buy it when you were out shopping today?”

  Leslie gazed blankly. “The only thing I bought was that,” she said, pointing at the box on the coffee table. “What ‘new one’ do you mean?”

  “The stuffed Bambi. Maybe she had it before and I just never noticed it,” he said, partially dismissing the issue.

  “Well, if she had it before, it didn’t come from me,” Leslie said quite resolutely.

  “Nor me.”

  “I don’t remember her having it when I put her to bed,” said Leslie.

  “Well, she had it when I looked in on her after hearing…”

  David paused. From the expression on his face, he seemed to be contemplating a thousand thoughts at once, as if he were engaged in some frantic, rummaging search within every cell of his brain.

  “What’s the matter, David?” Leslie asked, her voice weakening.

  “I’m not sure exactly. It’s as if I know something and don’t know it at the same time.”

  But Dr. Munck was beginning to know. With his left hand he covered the back of his neck, warming it. Was there a draft coming from another part of the house? Theirs was not the kind of place to be drafty, not a broken-down, hole-in-the-wall hovel where the wind gets in through ancient attic boards and warped window-frames. There actually was quite a wind blowing now; he could hear it hunting around outside and could see the restless trees through the window behind the Aphrodite sculpture. The goddess posed languidly with her flawless head leaning back, her blind eyes contemplating the ceiling and beyond. But beyond the ceiling? Beyond the hollow snoozing of the wind, cold and dead? And the draft?

  What?

  “David, do you feel a draft?” asked his wife.

  “Yes,” he replied as if some sobering thought had just come to mind. “Yes,” he repeated as he rose out of his chair and walked across the living room, ever hurrying as he approached the stairway, leaped up its three segments, and ran down second-floor hall. “Norleen, Norleen,” he chanted before reaching the half-closed door of her room. He could feel the breeze coming from there.

  He knew and did not know.

  He groped for the light switch. It was low, the height of a child. He turned on the light. The child was gone. Across the room the window was wide open, the white translucent curtains flapping upwards on the invading wind. Alone on the bed was the stuffed animal, torn, its soft entrails littering the mattress. Now stuffed inside, blooming out like a flower, was a crumpled piece of paper. And Dr. Munck could discern within the folds of that page a fragment of the prison’s letterhead. But the note was not a typed message of official business: the handwriting varied from a neat italic script to a child’s scrawl. He desperately stared at the words for what seemed a timeless interval without comprehending their message. Then, finally, the meaning of the note sank heavily in.

  Dr. Monk, read the note from inside the animal, We leave this behind in your capable hands, for in the black-foaming gutters and back alley of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some intergalactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . . my awestruck little deer and I have gone frolicking. See you anon. Jonathan Doe.

  “David?” he heard his wife’s voice inquire from the bottom of the stairs. “Is everything all right?”

  Then the beautiful house was no longer quiet, for there rang a bright freezing scream of laughter, the perfect sound to accompany a passing anecdote of some obscure hell.

  Les Fleurs

  April 17th. Flowers sent out in the early a.m.

  May 1st. Today—and I thought it would never happen again—I have met someone about whom, I think, I can be hopeful. Her name is Daisy. She works in a florist shop! The florist shop, I might add, where I paid a visit to gather some sorrowful flowers for Clare, who to the rest of the world is still a missing person. At first, of course, Daisy was politely reserved when I asked about some lilting blossoms for a loved one’s memorial. I soon cured her, however, of this detached manner. In my deeply shy and friendly tone of voice I asked about some of the other flowers in the shop, ones having no overtones of loss. She was quite glad to take me on a tour of the shop’s iridescent inventory. I confessed to knowing next to nothing about commercial plants and things, and remarked on her enthusiasm for her work, hoping all the while that at least part of her animation was inspired by me. “Oh, I love working with flowers,” she said. “I think they’re real interesting.” Then she asked if
I was aware that there were plants having flowers which opened only at night, and that certain types of violets bloomed only in darkness underground. My inner flow of thoughts and sensations suddenly quickened. Though I had already sensed she was a girl of special imagination, this was the first hint I received of just how special it was. I judged my efforts to know her better would not be wasted, as they have been with others. “That is real interesting about those flowers,” I said, smiling a hothouse warm smile. There was a pause which I filled in with my name. She then told me hers. “Now what kind of flowers would you like?” she asked. I staidly requested an arrangement suitable for the grave of a departed grandmother. Before leaving the shop I told Daisy I might need to stop by again to satisfy some future floral needs. She seemed to have no objection to this. With the vegetation nestled in my arm I songfully walked out of the store. I then proceeded directly to Chapel Gardens cemetery. For a while I sincerely made an effort to find a headstone that might by coincidence display my lost one’s name. And any dates would just have to do. I thought she deserved this much at least. As events transpired, however, the recipient of my commemorative bouquet had to be someone named Clarence.

  May 16th. Day, as I now intimately called her, visited my apartment for the first time and fell in love with its quaint refurbishments. “I adore well-preserved old places,” she said. It seemed to me she really did. I thought she would. She remarked what decorative wonders a few plants would do for my ancient rooms. She was obviously sensitive to the absence of natural adornments in my bachelor quarters. “Night-blooming cereuses?” I asked, trying not to mean too much by this and give myself away. A mild grin appeared on her face, but it was not an issue I thought I could press at the time. Even now I press it within these scrapbook pages with great delicacy.

  Day wandered about the apartment for a while. I watched her as I would some exotic animal—a sleek ocelot perhaps. Then suddenly I realized I had regrettably overlooked something. She looked it over. The object was positioned on a low table before a high window and between its voluminous curtains. It seemed so vulgarly prominent to me then, especially since I hadn’t intended to let her see anything of this sort so early in our relationship. “What is this?” she asked, her voice expressing a kind of outraged curiosity bordering on plain outrage. “It’s just a sculpture. I told you I do things like that. It’s not very good. Kind of dumb.” She examined the piece more closely. “Watch that,” I warned. She let out a little “Ow.” “Is it supposed to be some type of cactus?” she inquired. For a moment she seemed to take a genuine interest in that obscure objet d’art. “It has tiny teeth,” she observed, “on these big tongue things.” They do look like tongues; I’d never thought of that. Rather ingenious comparison, considering. I hoped her imagination had found fertile ground in which to grow, but instead she revealed a moribund disgust. “You might have better luck passing it off as an animal than a plant, or a sculpture of a plant, or whatever. It’s got a velvety kind of fur and looks like it might crawl away.” I felt like crawling away myself at that point. I asked her, as a quasi-botanist, if there were not plants resembling birds and other animal life. This was my feeble attempt to exculpate my creation from any charges of unnaturalness. It’s strange how you’re sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes. Finally I mixed some drinks and we went on to other things. I put on some music.