Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Thomas Ligotti

  Finally I passed the open door of a tidy little room where a group of ladies and the head librarian, Mr. Grosz, were sipping coffee. Mr. Grosz said how nice it was to see me again and introduced me to the moms who were helping out with the party.

  “My William’s read all your books,” said a full-figured Mrs. Harley. “I just can’t keep him away from them.” Not for lack of trying, I thought, judging by the quietly infuriated tone of her voice. My only reply was a dignified smile.

  Mr. Grosz offered me some coffee but I declined: bad for the stomach. Then he wickedly suggested that, as it was starting to get dark outside, the time seemed right for the festivities to begin. My reading was to inaugurate the evening’s fun, a good spooky story “to get everyone in the mood.” First, though, I needed to get myself in the mood, and pardoned myself to a use the ladies’ room, where I could refortify my fluttering nerves from a flask I had stowed away in my purse. As a strange and embarrassing social gesture, Mr. Grosz offered to wait right outside the lavatory until I finished.

  “I’m quite ready now, Mr. Grosz,” I said, glaring down at the little man from atop an unelderly pair of high heels. He cleared his throat, and I almost thought he was going to extend a crooked arm for me to take. But instead he merely stretched it out to indicate, in a stock gentlemanly manner, the way to go. I think he might even have bowed.

  He led me back down the hallway toward the children’s section of the library, where I assumed my reading would take place as it always had in the past. However, we walked right by this area, which was dark and empty, and proceeded down a flight of stairs leading to the library’s basement. “Our new facility,” bragged Mr. Grosz. “Converted one of the storage rooms into a small auditorium of sorts.” We were now facing a large metal door painted an institutional shade of green. It looked for all the world as if it might lead into the back ward of a madhouse. I could hear screaming on the other side, which sounded to me like the cries of bedlamites rather than the clamor of rambunctious kids. “Which one will it be tonight?” asked Mr. Grosz while staring at my left hand. “Preston and the Starving Shadows,” I answered, showing him the book I was holding. He smiled and confided that it was one of his favorites. Then he opened the door for me, pushing its weight with both hands, and we entered what chamber of horrors I knew not.

  Over fifty kids were sitting in or standing on or knocking over their seats. Shouting from the podium at the front of the long, narrow room, a pointy-hatted witch was outlining the party activities for the night; and when she saw Mr. Grosz and me arrive, she began telling the children about a “special treat for us all,” meaning that the half-crocked lady author was about to deliver a half-cocked oration. “Let’s give her a big hand,” she said, clapping as I stepped onto the rickety-looking platform. I thanked everyone for inviting me to their party and fixed my book on a lamp-bearing lectern decorated with wizened cornstalks. Then I tried my best to warm up the crowd with a little patter about the story everyone was going to hear. When I invoked the name of Preston Penn, a few kids actually cheered, or at least one did at the rear of the room. I assumed it was William Harley.

  Just as I was about to begin reading, something happened I had not been led to expect—the lights were switched off. (“It slipped my mind entirely,” Mr. Grosz apologized afterward.) In the dark, I noticed that facing each other on opposite sides of the room were two rows of jack-o’-lanterns glowing orange and yellow from on high. They all had identical faces and looked like mirror reflections of one another, with triangular eyes and noses and wailing Os for mouths. (As a child, I was convinced that pumpkins naturally grew this way, complete with facial features and phosphorescent insides.) Furthermore, they seemed to be suspended in space, their means of support concealed by the darkness, which also hid within it the faces of the children. Thus, these jack-o’-lanterns became my audience.

  But as I read, the real audience asserted itself with foot shuffling, whispers, and some rather ingenious noises made with the folding wooden chairs they were sitting in. I also heard a “devilish giggling,” in the words I employed to describe the snickering laughter of the very imp whose story I was reciting. Toward the end of the reading, there came a low moan from somewhere in the back, and it sounded as if a seat had fallen over along with whomever was sitting in it. “It’s all right,” I heard an adult voice call out. The door at the back opened, allowing a moment of brightness to break the spooky spell, and some shadows exited. When the lights came on at the end of the story, I noticed that one of the seats in the last row was missing its occupant.

  “Okay, kids,” said the parental witch after some minor applause for Preston, “everyone move their chairs against the walls and make room for the games and stuff.”

  The games and stuff had the room in a low-grade uproar. Masked children ruled the night, indulging their appetite for sweet things to eat and drink, disorder for its own sake, and high-spirited pandemonium. I stood at the periphery of the commotion and chatted with Mr. Grosz.

  “What exactly was the disturbance all about?” I asked him. “Did one of the kids have a spell of some kind?”

  He took a gulp from a plastic cup of cider and smacked his lips offensively. “Oh, it was nothing. You see that child there with the black-cat outfit? She seemed to have fainted. But once we got her outside she was all right. She had on her kitty mask all through your reading, and I think the poor thing hyperventilated or something like that. Complained that she saw something in her mask and was very frightened for a while. At any rate, you can see she’s fine now, and she’s even wearing her mask again. Amazing how children can put things right out of their minds and recover so quickly.”

  I agreed that it was amazing, and then asked precisely what it was the child thought she saw in her mask. I couldn’t help being reminded of another cat earlier in the day that also saw something that gave her a fright.

  “She couldn’t really explain it,” replied Mr. Grosz. “It was just something that came and went. You know how it is with children. Yes, I daresay you do know, considering you’ve spent your life writing about them.”

  I took credit for knowing how it is with children, knowing instead that Mr. Grosz was really talking about someone else, about her. Not to overdo this quaint notion of a split between my professional and my private personas, but at the time I was already quite self-conscious about the matter. While I was reading the Preston book to the kids, I had suffered the uncanny experience of having almost no recognition of my own words. Of course, this is rather a cliché with writers, and it has happened to me many times throughout my long career. But never so completely. They were the words of someone entirely alien to me. They were written by some other Alice. And I’m not her, at least not anymore.

  “I do hope,” I said to Mr. Grosz, “that it wasn’t the story that scared the child. I have enough angry parents on my hands as it is.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t. Not that it wasn’t a good scary children’s story. I didn’t mean to imply that, of course. But, you know, it’s that time of year. Imaginary things are supposed to seem more real. Like your Preston. He was always a big one for Hallowe’en, am I right?”

  I said he was quite right and hoped he would not pursue the subject. “Imaginary things” were not at all what I wanted to talk about just then. I tried to laugh it away. And you know, Father, for a moment it was exactly like your own laugh and not my hereditary impersonation of it.

  Much to everyone’s regret, I did not stay very long at the party. The reading had largely sobered me up, and my tolerance level was running quite low. Yes, Mr. Grosz, I promise to do it again next year, anything you say; just let me get back to my car and my bar.

  The drive home through the suburban streets was something of an ordeal, a trip made unnerving as well as hazardous by pedestrian trick-or-treaters. The costumes did me no good. (The same ghost was everywhere, a lean little wraith that I imagined was following me home.) The masks did me no good. And those Prestonian shadows waveri
ng against two-story facades (why did I have to choose that book?) certainly did me no good at all. Alice, the other one, could take all this madness, every nightmare her creator threw at her. That horrible Rev. Dodgson. I don’t care if there is more in his books than anyone knows. I don’t want to know. I wish I had never heard of him—that corrupter of little minds. I just want to forget it all. Alice and the Disappearing Past. Dr. Guardsman, administer your medicine in tall glasses…but please not looking-ones.

  And now I’m safe at home with one of the tallest of those glasses resting full and faithful on my desk as I write. A lamp with a shade of Tiffany glass (circa 1922) casts its amiable light on the pages I’ve filled over the past few hours. (Though the hands of the clock seem locked in the same V position as when I started writing.) The lamplight shines upon the window directly in front of my desk, allowing me to see a relatively flattering reflection of myself in the black mirror of the glass. The house is soundless, and I’m a rich, retired authoress-widow.

  Is there still a problem? I’m not really sure.

  I remind you that I’ve been drinking steadily since early this afternoon. I remind you that I’m old and no stranger to the mysteries of geriatric neuroticism. I remind you that some part of me has written a series of children’s books whose hero is a disciple of the bizarre. I remind you of what night this is and to what zones the imagination can fly on this hallowed eve. I need not, however, remind you that this world is stranger than we know, or at least mine seems to be, especially this past year. And I now notice that it’s very strange—and, once again, untidy.

  Exhibit One. Outside my window is an autumn moon hanging in the blackness. Now, I have to confess that I’m not up on lunar phases (“loony faces,” as Preston might say), but there seems to have been a switch since I last looked out the window—the thing seems to have reversed itself. Where it used to be concaving to the right, it’s now convexing in that direction, last quarter changed to first quarter, or something of that nature. But I doubt Nature has anything to do with it; more likely the explanation lies with Memory. So it’s not the moon as such that’s troubling me. The real trouble is with everything else, or at least what I can see of the suburban landscape in the street-lighted darkness. Like writing that can only be read in a mirror, the shapes outside my window—trees, houses, but thank goodness no people—now look awkward and wrong.

  Exhibit Two. To the earlier list of reasons for my diminished competence, I would like to add an upcoming alcohol withdrawal. The last mouthful I guzzled from that glass on my desk tasted strangely vile, noxious to the point where I doubt I’ll be having any more. I almost wrote, and now will, that the booze tasted inside out. Of course, there are certain diseases with the power to turn the flavor of one’s favorite drink into that of a hellbroth. Perhaps, then, I’ve fallen victim to such a malady. But I remind you that though my mind may be terminally soused, it has always resided in corpore sano.

  Exhibit Three (the last). My reflection in the window before me. Perhaps something faulty in the melt of the glass. My face. The surrounding shadows seem to be overlapping it a little at a time, like bugs attracted to something sweet. But the only thing sweet about Alice is her blood, highly sugared over the years from her drinking habit. So what is it, then? Shadows of senility? Or those starving things I read about earlier this evening come back for a repeat performance? Since when does reading a story constitute an incantation calling up its imagery before the body’s eyes and not the mind’s?

  Something’s backward here. Backward into a corner: checkmate.

  Now, perhaps this seems like merely a cry of wolf, however sincere I may be. I can’t actually say that it isn’t. I can’t say that what I’m hearing right now isn’t some Hallowe’en trick of my besotted brain.

  The giggling out in the hallway, I mean. That demonic giggling I heard at the library. Even when I concentrate, I’m still not able to tell if the sound is inside or outside my head. It’s like looking at one of those toy pictures that yield two distinct scenes when tilted this way or that, but, at a certain angle, form only a merging blur of them both. Nonetheless, the laughing is there, somewhere. And the voice is so familiar.

  Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

  Exhibit Four (the shadows again). They’re all over my face in the window. Stripping away, as in the story. But there’s nothing under that old mask; no child’s face there, Preston. It is you, isn’t it? I’ve never heard your laughter, except in my mind. Yet that’s exactly how I imagined it would sound. Or has my imagination given you, too, a hand-me-down, inherited laugh?

  My only fear is that it isn’t you but some impostor. The moon, the clock, the drink, the window. This is all very much your style, only it’s not being done in fun, is it? It’s not funny at all. Stop it, Preston, or whoever you are. And who is it? Who could be doing this? I’ve been good. I just got old, that’s all. Please stop. The shadows in the window are coming out. No, not my face. Not my little moon face.

  I can’t see

  anymore.

  I can’t see.

  Help me

  Father

  Dream of a Manikin

  Once upon a Wednesday afternoon a girl stepped into my office for her first session. Her name was Amy Locher. (And didn’t you once tell me that long ago you had a doll with this same given name?) Under the present circumstances I don’t think it too gross a violation of professional ethics to use the subject’s real name in describing her case to you. Certainly there’s something more than simple ethics between us, ma chère amie. Besides, I understood from Miss Locher that you recommended me to her. This didn’t seem necessarily ominous at first; perhaps, I speculated, your relationship with the girl was such that made it awkward for you to take her on as one of your own patients. Actually it’s still not clear to me, my love, just how deeply you can be implicated in the overall experience I had with the petite Miss L. So you’ll have to forgive any stupidities of mine which may crudely crop up in the body of this correspondence.

  My first impression of Miss Locher, as she positioned herself almost sidesaddle in a leather chair before me, was that of a tense but basically self-possessed young woman. She was outfitted, I noticed, in much the classic style you normally favor. I won’t go into our first-visit preliminaries here (though we can discuss these and other matters at dinner this Saturday if only you are willing). After a brief chat we zeroed in on what Miss Locher called the “motivating factor” for consulting me. This involved, as you may or may not know, a recurring dream she had been having over the period of about a month. What will follow are the events of that dream as I have composed them from my tape of Miss Locher’s September 10th session.

  In the dream our subject has entered into a new life, at least to the extent that she holds down a different job from her waking one. Miss Locher had already informed me that for three years she has worked as a loan processor at a local financial firm. However, her working day in the dream finds her as a long-time employee of a fashionable clothing shop. Like those witnesses for the prosecution that the government wishes to protect with new identities, she has been outfitted by the dream with what seems to be a mostly tacit but somehow complete biography; a marvelous trick of the mind, this. It appears that one of the duties of her new job is to change the clothes of the manikins in the shop’s display windows. She in fact feels as if her entire existence is slavishly given over to dressing and undressing these dummies. She is profoundly dissatisfied with her lot, and the manikins become the focal point of her animus.

  Such is the general background presupposed by the dream, which now begins in proper. As our dummy dresser approaches her work, she is overwhelmed by an amorphous anxiety without a specific source. An awesome load of new clothes has arrived to adorn a display of manikins. Their unclothed bodies repel her touch because, as Miss Locher explained, they are neither warm nor cold, as only artificial bodies can be. (Note this rare awareness of temperature in a dream, albeit neutral.) After bitterly surveying the ranks
of these putty-faced creatures, she says: “Time to stop dancing and get dressed, sleeping beauties.” These words are spoken without spontaneity, as if ritually uttered to inaugurate each dressing session. But the dream changes before the dresser is able to put one stitch on the dummies, who stare at nothing with “anticipating” eyes.

  The working day is now finished. She has returned to her small apartment, where she retires to bed…and has a dream. (This dream is that of the manikin dresser and not hers, she emphatically pointed out!)

  The manikin dresser dreams she is in her bedroom. But what she now thinks of as her “bedroom” is to all appearances actually an archaically furnished hall with the dimensions of a small theater. The room is dimly lit by some jeweled lamps along the walls, the lights shining upon an intricately patterned carpet and various pieces of old furniture. She perceives the objects of the scene more as pure ideas than as material phenomena, for details are blurry and there are many shadows. There is something, however, which she visualizes quite clearly: one of the walls of this lofty room is missing, and beyond this great gap is a view of star-clustered blackness.

  The dreamer is positioned on the other side of the room from the brink of the starry abyss. Sitting on the edge of a velvety divan, she stares and waits “without breath or heartbeat.” All is silent, another odd perception to have in a dream. This silence somehow “electrifies” the dream with strange currents of force betokening an unseen demonic presence.

  Then a new feeling enters the dream, one slightly more tangible. There seems to be an iciness drifting in from that starscape across the room. (Temperature again; a rare dream indeed!) Once again our dreamer experiences a premonitory dread of something unknown. Without moving from her place on that uncomfortable couch, she visually searches the room for clues to the source of her terror. Many areas are inaccessible to her sight—like a picture that has been scribbled out in places—but she sees nothing particularly frightening and is relieved for a moment. Then her trepidation begins anew when she realizes for the first time that she hasn’t looked behind her, and indeed she seems physically unable to do so.