Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Thomas Ligotti

  It seemed there was a young woman of a noble and wealthy family, a princess in all but title whom Streldone loved and who loved him in return, accepting his proposal of marriage and cleaving to his vision of their future as two who would be one. But there was also another, who was called Wynge, though Streldone referred to him thereafter as the Sorcerer. As Streldone explained the situation, the Sorcerer had appropriated the young woman for himself. This unnatural feat was achieved, Streldone hated to say, not only through the powerful offices of the Duke of Soldori himself, but also with the willing compliance of the young woman’s father. Both men, according to Streldone, had been persuaded in this affair because the Sorcerer had promised to supply them, by means of alchemical transmutations of base metals into gold and silver, with an unending source of riches to finance their wars and other undertakings of ambition. Without bothering to embellish the point, Streldone declared that he and his beloved, in their present state of separation, were two of the most wretched beings in the world and desperate for assistance in their struggle to be reunited. And that carnival night would be the last opportunity for Faliol to untangle them from the controlling strings of the Sorcerer and his compatriots.

  “Do I have your attention, sir?” Streldone asked.

  Faliol vouchsafed his understanding of the matter by repeating to its last detail Streldone’s account of his plight.

  “Well, I am glad to know that your wits are still in order, however distracted you may seem. I have heard certain rumors, you understand. In any event, tonight the Sorcerer is attending the duke’s masquerade at the palace. She will be with him. Help me steal her back, so that we may both escape from Soldori, and I will fill the empty part of that pouch.”

  Faliol asked if Streldone had possessed the foresight to have brought along a pair of costumes to enable their entrance to the masquerade. Streldone, somewhat vainly, produced from the shadows of the coach two such costumes, one that was appropriate to a knight of the old days and the other that of a court jester of the same period. Faliol reached out for the wildly patterned costume with the jeering mask.

  “But I am afraid,” said Streldone, “that I intended that costume for myself. The other is more suited to allow your sword—”

  “No sword will be needed,” Faliol assured his nervous companion. “This will be fitting,” he added, holding the hook-nosed fool’s face opposite his own.

  They were now traveling in the direction of the palace, and Soldori’s carnival began to thicken about the wheels of Streldone’s coach. Gazing upon the nocturnal confusion, Faliol’s eyes were as dark and swirled with shadows as the raving night itself.

  II: The Story of the Spectacles

  His eyes fixed and clouded as a blind man’s, the mage sat before a small circular table upon which a single wax taper burned in a silver stick. Illuminated by that modest flame, the surface of the table was inlaid with esoteric symbols, a constellation of designs which reduced essential forces of existence to a few, rather picturesque, patterns. But the mage was not occupied with these. He was simply attending to someone who was raving in the shadows of a secret chamber. The hour was late and the night was without a moon. The narrow window behind the beardless, pallid face of the mage was a solid sheet of blackness that seemed to absorb the candlelight. Every so often someone would move before this window, his hands running through his thick dark hair as he spoke, or tried to speak. Occasionally he would move toward the candle flame, and a glimpse could be caught of his bold attire in blacks and reds, his shining blue eyes, his fevered face. Calmly, the mage listened to the man’s wild speech.

  “Not if I have become mad but of what my madness consists is the knowledge I seek from you. And please understand that I have no hopes, only a searing curiosity to riddle the corpse of my dead soul. As for the assertion that I have always been engaged in deeds which one might deem mad, I would be obliged to answer—Yes, countless deeds, countless mad games of flesh and steel. Having confessed that, I would also avow that these were sanctioned provocations of chaos, known in some form to the body of the world and even blessed by it, if the truth be spoken. But I have provoked another thing, a new madness which arrives from a world that is on the wrong side of light, a madness that is unsanctioned and without the seal of our natural selves. It is a forbidden madness, a saboteur from outside the body of known laws. And as you know, I have been the subject of its devastation.

  “Since the madness began working its ruin upon me, I have become an adept of every horror which can be thought or sensed or dreamed. In my very dreams—have I not told you of them?—there are scenes of slaughter without purpose, without constraint, and without end. I have crept through dense forests not of trees but of tall pikes planted in the earth; and upon each of them a crudely formed head has been fixed. These heads all wear faces which would forever blind the one who saw them anywhere but in a dream. And they follow my movements not with earthly eyes but with shadows rolling in empty sockets. Sometimes the heads speak as I pass through their uncanny ranks, telling me things I cannot bear to hear. Nor can I shut out their words, and I listen until I have learned the horrors of each brutal head. And the voices from their lacerated mouths, so clear, so precise to my ears that every word is a bright flash in my dreaming brain, a brilliant new coin minted for the treasure house of hell. At the end of the mad dream these heads endeavor to laugh, creating a blasphemous babble which echoes throughout that terrible forest. And when I awaken, the night continues to reverberate with fading laughter.

  “Yet why should I speak of waking from these dreams? For to awaken, as I once understood this miracle, means to reclaim a world of laws which for a time were lost, to rise into the light of the world as one falls into the darkness of dream. But for me there is no sense of breaking through the envelope of sleep. It seems that I remain a captive of these dreams, these visions. For when one leaves off, another begins, like a succession of connected rooms which will never lead to freedom. And for all I can know, I am even now the inhabitant of one of these rooms, and at any moment—I beg forgiveness, wise man—you may transform into a demon and begin to disembowel weeping children before my eyes and smear their entrails upon the floor so that in them you may read my future, a future without escape from those heads and from what comes after.

  “For there is a citadel in which I am a prisoner and which holds within it a type of school—a school of torture. Ceremonial stranglers, their palms grooved by the red cord, stalk the corridors of this place or lie snoring in its shadows, dreaming of perfect throats. And somewhere the master carnifex, the supreme inquisitor, waits as I am taken from my cell and dragged across stone floors—until I am finally presented to this fiend with witless, rolling eyes. Then my arms, my legs, everything is shackled, and I am screaming to die while the Torture of the Question…”

  “Enough,” said the mage without raising his voice.

  “Yes, enough,” the madman said. “And so have I said numberless times. But there is no end, there is no hope. And this endless, hopeless torment incites me with a desire to turn its power on others, and even to dream of turning it on all. To see the world drown in oceans of agony is the only vision which now brings me any relief from my madness, from a madness which is not of this world.”

  “Though neither is it of any other world,” said the mage in the same quiet voice.

  “But I have also had visions of butchering the angels,” replied the madman, as if to argue the irreparable nature of his mania.

  “You have envisioned precisely what you have been made to envision, and nothing that has risen from your own true being. But how could you have known this, when it is the nature of what you have seen—this Anima Mundi of the oldest philosophers and alchemists—to deceive and to pose as the soul of another world, and not as the soul of the world we know? There is only one world and one soul of that world, which appears in forms of beauty or bravery or madness according to how Anima Mundi would turn you. And no ordinary devising may turn you away from w
hat it wills. This is the power that has made you what you now are, and would unmake you for its own design. It has played with you as it would a puppet.”

  “Then I will make myself its destruction.”

  “You cannot. Your very wish to destroy it is not yours but that of the thing itself. You are not who you are. You are only what it would have you be.”

  “You speak as if it were a god of deceit and illusion.”

  “There is no other or truer way to speak of it. But no further words now,” finished the mage.

  He then instructed the madman to seat himself at the table of arcane designs and to wait there with eyes calmly closed. And for what remained of that moonless night the mage worked in another part of his dwelling, returning to the wretched dreamer just before dawn. In one of his hands was the product of his labors: a pair of strangely darkened spectacles, as if they had shadows sealed within them. These he fitted to the madman’s face.

  “Do not yet open your eyes, my unhappy friend, but heed my words. I know the visions you have known, for they are among the visions that all were born to know. There are eyes within our eyes, and when these others open all becomes confusion. The meaning of my long life consists of the endeavor to seize and settle these visions, until my natural eyes themselves have altered in accordance with my purpose. Now, for what reason I cannot say, Anima Mundi has revealed itself to you in its most essential aspect—that of chaos at feast. Having seen the face behind all its others, your life can never again be as you have known it. All the pleasures of the past are now defiled, all your hopes violated beyond hope. There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them. Your world is presently black with the scars of madness, but you must make it blacker still in order to find any solace. You have seen both too much and not enough. Through the shadow-fogged lenses of these spectacles, you will be blinded so that you may see with greater sight. Through their darkly clouded glass Anima Mundi will diffuse into nothingness before you. What would murder another man’s mind will bring yours peace.

  “Henceforth, all things will be in your eyes a distant play of shadows that fretfully strive to engage you, ghosts that clamor to pass themselves as actualities, masks that desperately flit about to conceal the stillness of the void behind them. Henceforth, I say, all things will be reduced in your eyes to their inconsequential essence. And all that once shined for you—the steel, the stars, the eyes of another—will lose its luster and take its place among the other shadows. All will be dulled in the power of your vision, which will give you the ability to see that the greatest power, the only power, is to care for nothing.

  “Please know that this is the only means by which I may help you. You have been made ready to receive this salvation by your very torments. Though we cannot overthrow the hold that Anima Mundi has on the others of this earth, we must still try as we can. For as long as the soul of the world has its way, it will grieve all in whom it lives. But it will not live in you on the condition you obey one simple rule: You must never be without these spectacles or your furies will return to you. There, now you may open your eyes.”

  Faliol sat very still for some time, an ease of heart within him as he gazed through the spectacles. At first he did not notice that one of the mage’s own eyes was closed, covered by a sagging eyelid. When at last he saw this and perceived the sacrifice, he said, “And how may I serve you, wise man?”

  Beyond the window at the back of the two figures, something seemed to be at watch. Neither man took note of the image, which was so obscure as to be nearly invisible. Some would call it a face, yet its features were translucent such that not even the sharpest eye could read them clearly. Nor could any eye outside that room where Faliol and the mage sat quietly conversing suffer to behold such a vision.

  III: Anima Mundi

  While the revelers in the streets of Soldori remedied their discontents by throwing off the everyday face of orthodoxy, those attending the masquerade at the duke’s palace found their deliverance by donning other faces, other bodies, and perhaps other souls. The anonymity of that night—no unmasking was expected to be held—enabled a multitude of sins against taste, from the most subtle to the most grotesque indiscretions. The society of the court had transformed itself into a race of gods or monsters, competing at once with the brightest and highest of stars and the strangest of the world’s lower creatures. Many would undoubtedly spend the succeeding days or weeks in darkened rooms behind closed doors, so that the effects their disguises had wrought on their bodies might be known to none. For a few rare spirits, this by necessity would be their last appearance in the eyes of the court before a final seclusion. All were quite clearly arrayed as if something unparalleled, and possibly conclusive, was to occur that night. Musicians played in several of the palace’s most sumptuous and shimmering halls, glittering glasses were filled by fountains of unnaturally colored wine, and maskers swarmed about like living gargoyles freed from the cathedral’s stone. All, or nearly all, were straining for some unheard-of antic, suffering the pleasures of expectancy.

  But as the hours passed, hopes dissolved. The duke—in essence a simple man, even a dull one—took no initiative to unloose the abundant possibilities of the masquerade; and, as if instinctively aware of these perilous directions, he restrained the efforts of others to pursue them and thereby digress in a wayward manner from the night’s steadily unwinding course. No petitioning could sway him. He allowed several odd witticisms to pass unacknowledged, and he feigned that certain dubious suggestions and proposals were abstruse to his mind. Unnourished by any source within the duke’s character, every attempt at innovation curled at its colorful edges and died. The initial strangeness of the masked gathering went stale. Voices began to sound as though they were transacting business of some tedious sort, and even the sight of a jester, albeit one with darkness within the eyes of his mask, offered no special merriment to this sullen assembly.

  Accompanying the jester, who made no lively movements, was a knight out of armor, dressed in radiant blues and golds, a crusader’s cross emblazoned upon his chest, and over his face a white silk mask of blandly noble expression. The odd duo progressed from room to room of the palace, as if they were negotiating a thick wood in search of something or someone. The knight was manifestly nervous, his hand too obviously ready to go for the sword at his side, his head patrolling with skittish alertness the bizarre world around him. The jester, on the other hand, was altogether composed and methodical, and with excellent reason: he knew, as the knight did not, that their purpose was not a difficult one, as they would enjoy the complicity of Wynge himself, whom the knight had called the Sorcerer and whom the jester addressed as a wise man mage. With this advantage, Faliol might easily assist the knight in escaping Soldori. Not that such heroics were any longer of concern to Faliol, who was merely serving the mage in a machination to break the duke. The alchemical transformation that the ruler desired would indeed take place, though not precisely as promised. What reserves of wealth the duke and his conspirator possessed would tonight undergo, per the plan of the mage, a reverse alchemy that would leave them paupers. And then his work would be done in Soldori, such as he could accomplish what he set out to do.

  The knight and the jester now paused at the arched entrance to the last, and most intimate, of the masquerade’s many rooms. Pulling at the knight’s golden sleeve, the jester angled his pointed, sneering muzzle toward a costumed pair in the far corner. The indicated figures were appareled as monarchs of the old days, a king and queen in ancient robes and stoles and many-horned crowns.

  “How can you be sure they are the ones?” whispered the knight to the buffoon at his side.

  “Approach and take her hand. You will be sure. But say nothing until you have led yourselves back through these rooms and to freedom.”

  “But the king might well be the Sorcerer in disguise,” objected the knight. “He could have us both executed.”

  “Do as I tell you, though I cannot t
ell you all. You will see me greet the king and caper about as his jester. Believe me when I say that there is no sorcerer, only one who does what he can in this world against powers that can never be undone. And he has been working for your cause even before you knew of its troubles. Trust me that all will be well.”

  “I do trust you,” said the knight, as he furtively stuffed a jeweled pouch twice the size of the first into the belt of the jester, though Faliol cared nothing for the copious reward.

  The two characters separated and merged with the murmuring crowd. The jester arrived first at their destination. From a distance he seemed to speak a few words into the king’s ear and then suddenly leaped back to play the fool before him, hopping about wildly. The knight bowed before the queen and then without ostentation led her away to other rooms. Though her mask covered the expression beneath it, the manner in which she placed her hand upon the knight’s appeared to reveal her knowledge of his identity. After they had gone, the jester ceased his antics and stood close to the statue-like king.

  “I shall watch the duke’s men around us, who may have been watching you, wise man.”

  “And I shall see that our two little babes find their way through the forest,” replied the mock-monarch, who abruptly strode off.

  But that was not part of your design, thought Faliol. And neither was the king’s roguish voice that of the solemn mage. The dark eyes of the jester’s mask followed the movements of the impostor until he became lost in the throng. Faliol had just started in pursuit when a strange commotion in another part of the palace educed much talk on all sides.