Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Thomas Ligotti

  Soon afterward, though, the bland harmony of the music was undermined by an unfortunate dissonance. That detective (Briceberg, I think) arrived for an encore of his interrogation re: The Clare Affair. Fortunately I was able to keep him and his questions out in the hallway the entire time. We reviewed the previous dialogue we’d had. I reiterated to him that Clare was just someone I worked with and with whom I was professionally friendly. It appears that some of my co-workers, unidentified, suspected that Clare and I were romantically involved. “Office gossip,” I countered, knowing she was one girl who knew how to keep certain secrets, even if she could not be trusted with others. Sorry, I said, I had no idea where she could have disappeared to. I did manage to subversively hint, however, that I would not be surprised if in a sudden flight of neurotic despair she had impulsively relocated to some land of her heart’s desire. I myself had despaired to find that within Clare’s dark and promisingly moody borders lay a disappointing dreamland of white picket fences and flower-printed curtains. No, I didn’t tell that to the detective. Besides, I further contended, it was well known in the office that Clare had begun dating someone approximately seven to ten days (my personal estimation of the term of her disloyalty) before her disappearance. So why bother me? This, I found out, was the reason: he had also been informed, he told me, of my belonging to a certain offbeat organization. I replied there was nothing offbeat in serious philosophical study. Furthermore, I was an artist, as he well knew, and, as anybody knows, artistic personalities have a perfectly natural tendency toward such things. I thought he would understand if I put it that way. He did. The man appeared satisfied with my every statement. Indeed, he seemed overly eager to dismiss me as a person of interest in the case, no doubt trying to create a false sense of security on my part and lead me to make an unwitting admission to the foulest kind of play. “Was that about the girl where you work who disappeared?” Daisy asked me afterward. “Mm-hm,” I noised. I was brooding and silent for a while, hoping she would attribute this to my inward lament for that strange girl at the office and not to the lamentably imperfect evening we’d had. “Maybe I’d better go,” she said, and then did. There was not much of our date left to salvage anyway. After she abandoned me I got very drunk on a liqueur tasting of flowers from open fields, or so it seemed. I also took this opportunity to reread a story about some men who visit the white waste regions of a polar wonderland. I don’t expect to dream tonight, having already sated myself with this arctic fantasy. Brotherhood of Paradise offbeat indeed!

  September 21st. Day came up to the cool, clean offices of G. R. Glacy, the advertising firm for which I worked, to meet me for lunch. I showed her my cubicle of commercial artistry, and drew her attention to my latest project. “Oh, that’s lovely,” she said when I pointed out the drawing of a nymph with flowers in her freshly shampooed hair. “That’s really nice.” That “nice” remark almost spoiled my day. I asked her to look closely at the flowers mingling in the locks of the mythical being. It was barely noticeable that one of the flower stems was growing out of, or perhaps into, the creature’s head. Day didn’t seem to appreciate the craftiness of my craft very much. And I thought we were making such progress along “offbeat” paths. (Damn that Briceberg!) Perhaps I should wait until we return from our trip before showing her any of the paintings I have hidden at my home. I want her to be prepared. Everything is all prepared for our vacation at least. Day finally found someone to take care of her cat.

  October 10th. Good-bye diary. See you when I get back.

  November 1st. After a period of ruminative silence on the subject, I will now set down a brief chapter from Day’s and my tropical sojourn. I’m not sure whether the events to be delineated represent an impasse or a turning point in the course of our relationship. Perhaps there is some point that I have completely failed to get. As yet, I am still in the dark. I’ve been here before with Clare and had hoped that my escapist interlude with Day would be definitive, or close to it, and not filled with dubiety. Nevertheless, I still feel that the episode to follow deserves documentation.

  A Hawaiian paradise at midnight. Actually we were just gazing upon the beachside luxuriance from our hotel veranda. Day was tipsy from consuming several drinks that wore flowers on their foamy heads. I was in a condition similar to hers. A few moments of heady silence passed, punctuated by an occasional sigh from Day. We heard the flapping of invisible wings whipping the warm air in darkness. We listened closely to the sounds of black orchids growing, even if there were none. (“Mmmm,” hummed Day.) We were ripe for a whim. I had one, not knowing yet if I could pull it off. “Can you smell the mysterious cereus?” I said, placing one hand on her far shoulder and dramatically passing the other in a horizontal arc before the jungle beyond. “Can you?” I hypnotically repeated. “I can,” said a game Day. “But can we find them, Day, and watch them open in the moonlight?” “We can, we can,” she chanted giddily. We could. Suddenly the smooth-skinned leaves of the night garden were brushing against our smooth-skinned selves. Day paused to touch a flower that was orange or red but smelled of a deep violet. I encouraged her to press on across the flower-bedded earth. We plunged deeper into the dream garden. Faster, faster, faster the sounds and smells rushed by us. It was easier than I thought. At some point, with almost no effort at all, I successfully managed our full departure from known geography. “Day, Day,” I shouted. “We’re here. I’ve never shown this to anyone, and what torture it’s been keeping it from you. No, don’t speak. Look, look.” Oh, the thrill of bringing a romantic companion to this dark paradise. How I yearned to show her this resplendent world in full bloom and have her behold it with ensorcelled delight. She was somewhere near me in the darkness. I waited, seeing her a thousand ways in my mind before actually gazing at the real Day. I looked. “What’s wrong with the stars, the sky?” was all she said. She was trembling.

  At breakfast the next morning I subtly probed her for impressions and judgments of the night before. But she was badly hung over and had only a chaotic recall of what she had experienced. Well, at least she didn’t go into hysterics, as did my old flame Clare.

  Since our return I have been working on a painting entitled “Sanctum Obscurum.” Though I have done this kind of work many times before, I am including in this one elements that I hope will stir Day’s memory and precipitate a conscious recollection of not only a certain night in the islands but of all the subtle and not so subtle messages I have tried to communicate to her. I only pray she will understand.

  November 14th. Stars of disaster! Earthly, not unearthly, asters are what Day’s heart craves. She is too much a lover of natural flora to be anything else. I know this now. I showed her the painting, and even imagined she was excited about seeing it. But I think she was just waiting to see what kind of fool I would make of myself. She sat on the sofa, scraping her lower lip with a nervous forefinger. Opposite her I let a velvet cloth drop. She looked up as if there had been a startling noise. I was not wholly satisfied with the painting myself, but this exhibition was designed to serve an extra-aesthetic purpose. I searched her eyes for a reflection of understanding, a ripple of empathetic insight. “Well?” I asked, the necessity of the word tolling doom. Her gaze told me all I needed to know, and the fatal clarity of the message was reminiscent of another girl I once knew. She gave me a second chance, looking at the picture with a theatrical scrutiny.

  The picture itself? An interior done up very much like my own apartment—a refuge crowding about a window of a disproportionate breadth, so as to direct the viewer’s sight telescopically outward. Beyond the window is a vista wholly alien to terrestrial nature and perhaps to all that we deem human. Outside is a gorgeous kingdom of glittering colors and velvety jungle-shapes, a realm of contorted rainbows and twisted auroras. Hyper-radiant hues are calmed by the glass, so that their strange intensity does not threaten the chromatic integrity of the world within. Some stars, colored from the most spectral part of the spectrum, blossom in the high darkness. The outer wor
ld glistens in stellar light and is mirrored by gleams from within each labyrinthine form. And upon the window’s surface is the watery reflection of a lone figure gazing out at this otherworldly paradise.

  “Of course, it’s very good,” she observed. “Very realistic.”

  Not at all, Daisy Day. Not realistic in either manner or matter.

  Some uncomfortable moments later Day told me she had a prior engagement and was running late. It seemed she had made girl plans with a girlfriend of hers to do some girly things girls do when they get together with others of their kind. I said I understood, and I did. There is no doubt in my mind of the gender of Day’s companion this night, and perhaps other nights I did not know about. But it was for a different reason that I was distressed to see her go. Something that I could read in her every move and expression, something I have seen before, gave away her suspicions about me and my private life. Of course, she already knew about the meetings I attend and all such things. I’ve even paraphrased and abridged for her the discussion which goes on at these gatherings, always obscuring their real meaning in progressively more transparent guises, hoping one day to show her the naked truth. Like Clare, however, Day has prematurely learned too much of the truth about me and the others. And I fear she may decide to relay her inside information to the wrong people. The dogged Detective Briceberg, for instance.

  November 16th. Tonight we held an emergency meeting, our assembly in crisis. The others feel there’s a problem, and of course I know they’re right. Ever since I met my latest love I could sense their growing uneasiness, which was their prerogative. Now, however, all has changed; my romantic misjudgment has seen to that. They expressed absolute horror that an outsider should know so much. I feel it myself. Day is a stranger now, and I wonder what her loquacious self might disclose about her former friend, not to mention his present ones. A marvelous arcana is threatened with exposure. The inconspicuousness we need for our lives could be lost, and with it would go the keys to a strange kingdom.

  We’ve confronted these situations before. I’m not the only one to have jeopardized our secrecy. We, of course, have no secrets from each other. They know everything about me, and I about them. They knew every step of the way the progress of my relationship with Daisy. Some of them even predicted the outcome. And though I thought I was right in taking the chance that they were wrong, I must now defer to their prophecy. Those lonely souls, mes frères! “Do you want us to see it through?” they asked in so many words. I consented, finally, in a score of ambiguous, half-hesitant ways. Then they sent me back to my unflowered sanctum.

  I’ll never again get involved in another situation of this kind, I promised myself, even though I’ve made this resolution before. I stared at the razory dentes of my furry sculpture for a perilously long while. What that poor girl saw as tongue-like floral appendages were silent: the preservation of such silence, of course, is their whole purpose. I remember that Daisy once jokingly asked me on what I modeled my art.

  November 17th.

  To Eden with me you will not leave

  To live in a cottage of crazy crooked eaves.

  In your own happy home you take care these nights;

  When you let your little cat in, please turn on the lights!

  Something scurries behind and finds a cozy place to stare,

  Something sent to you from paradise, with serpents to spare:

  Tongues flowering; they leap out laughing, lapping. Disappear!

  I do this to pass the hours. Only to pass the hours.

  November 17th. 12:00 a.m. Flowers.

  Alice's Last Adventure

  “Preston, stop laughing. They ate the whole backyard. They ate your mother’s favorite flowers! It’s not funny, Preston.”

  “Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

  —Preston and the Starving Shadows

  A long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half-world between childhood and adolescence. He would not give up the bold satisfaction of eating insects (crispy flies are his favorite), nor that peculiar drunkenness of a child’s brain, induplicable once grown-up sobriety has set in. The result was that Preston successfully negotiated quite a few decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty. In this state of arrested development, he defiantly lived through many a perverse adventure. And he still lives in the pages of those books I wrote about him, though I stopped writing them some years ago.

  Did he have a prototype? I should say so. One doesn’t just invent a character like Preston using only the pitiful powers of imagination. He was very much a concoction of reality, later adapted for my popular series of children’s books. Preston’s status in both reality and imagination has always held a great fascination for me. In the past year, however, this issue has especially demanded my attention, not without some personal annoyance and even anxiety. Then again, perhaps I’m getting senile.

  My age is no secret, since it can be looked up in a number of literary reference sources. Over twenty years ago, when the last Preston book appeared (Preston and the Upside-Down Face), one reviewer rather snootily referred to me as the “‘Grande Damned’ of a particular sort of children’s literature.” What sort you can imagine if you don’t otherwise know, if you didn’t grow up—or not grow up, as it were—reading Preston’s adventures with the Dead Mask, the Starving Shadows, or the Lonely Mirror.

  Even as a little girl, I knew I wanted to be an author; and I also knew just the kind of tales I would tell. Let someone else give preadolescents their literary introductions to life and love, guiding them through those volatile years when anything might go wrong and landing them safely on the shores of incipient maturity. That was never my destiny. Instead, I would write about a puckish little character based on a real-life childhood playmate of mine whose deeds of mischief were legend throughout the small town where I was born and raised. As Preston Penn, my erstwhile chum could throw off the shackles of material existence and explore the mysteries of an upside-down, inside-out, faintly sinister, and always askew universe. The embodiment of topsy-turvydom, Preston gained a reputation as a champion of misbehavior and an adventurer who looked beneath the surface of everyday things—pools of rainwater, tarnished mirrors, moonlit windows—to discover a stunning sortilege, usually with the purpose of stunning in turn his perennial foe: the dictatorial world of adulthood. A conjurer of stylish nightmares, he gave his grown-up adversaries fits and sleepless nights. No dilettante of the extraordinary, but its personification. Such is the spiritual biography of Preston Penn.

  But to give credit where credit is due, it was my father, just as much as Preston’s original, who provided the spark for the stories I’ve written. To put it briefly, Father had the blood of a child coursing through his big adult body, flooding with fancy the overly sophisticated brain of Foxborough College’s associate professor of philosophy. Typical of his character was a love for the books of Lewis Carroll, and thus the genesis of my name. When I was old enough to understand such things, my mother told me that while she was pregnant my father willed me into a little Alice. That sounded like something he would say.

  I remember one occasion when Father was reading Through the Looking-Glass to me for the umpteenth time. Suddenly he stopped, closed the book, and said to me, as if in deep confidence, that there was more in the Alice books than anyone knew. But that he knew, and someday would tell me. To Father, the creator of Alice, as I later came to see it, was a symbol of psychic supremacy, the sterling ideal of an unstructured mind manipulating reality to its whim and gaining a kind of objective force through the minds of others. And it was very important to Father that I share “The Master’s” books in the same spirit.

  “See, honey,” he would say while rereading Through the Looking Glass to me, “see how smart little Alice right away notices that the room on the other side of the mirror is not as ‘tidy’ as the one she just came from. Not as tidy,” he
repeated with professorial emphasis but chuckling like a child, a strange little laugh that I inherited from him. “Not tidy. We know what that means, don’t we?” I would look up at him and nod with all the solemnity that my six, seven, eight years could muster.

  And I did know what that meant. I felt intimations of a thousand misshapen marvels—of things going haywire in curious ways, of the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continued into space by itself, of a universe handed over to new gods.