The Nightmare Factory

by Thomas Ligotti

  “I’m afraid it is that bad. When I first visited the prison’s psychiatric section and met the other doctors, I swore I wouldn’t become as hopeless and cruelly cynical as they were. Things would be different with me. I overestimated myself by a wide margin, though. Today one of the orderlies was beaten up again by two of the prisoners, excuse me, ‘patients’. Last week it was Dr. Valdman, that’s why I was so moody on Norleen’s birthday. So far I’ve been lucky. All they do is spit at me. Well, they can all rot in that hellhole as far as I’m concerned.”

  David felt his own words lingering atmospherically in the room, tainting the serenity of the house. Until then their home had been an insular haven beyond the contamination of the prison, an imposing structure outside the town limits. Now its psychic imposition transcended the limits of physical distance. Inner distance constricted, and David sensed the massive prison walls shadowing the cozy neighborhood outside.

  “Do you know why I was late tonight?” he asked his wife.

  “No, why?”

  “Because I had an overlong chat with a fellow who hasn’t got a name yet.”

  “The one you told me about who won’t tell anyone where he’s from or what his real name is?”

  “That’s him. He’s just an example of the pernicious monstrosity of the place. Worse than a beast, a rabid animal. Demented blind aggression…and clever. Because of this cute name game of his, he was classified as unsuitable for the regular prison population and thus we in the psychiatric section ended up with him. According to him, though, he has plenty of names, no less than a thousand, none of which he’s condescended to speak in anyone’s presence. From my point of view, he doesn’t really have use for any human name. But we’re stuck with him, no name and all.”

  “Do you call him that, ‘no name’?”

  “Maybe we should, but no, we don’t.”

  “So what do you call him, then?”

  “Well, he was convicted as John Doe, and since then everyone refers to him by that name. They’ve yet to uncover any official documentation on him. Neither his fingerprints nor photograph corresponds to any record of previous convictions. I understand he was picked up in a stolen car parked in front of an elementary school. An observant neighbor reported him as a suspicious character frequently seen in the area. Everyone was on the alert, I guess, after the first few disappearances from the school, and the police were watching him just as he was walking a new victim to his car. That’s when they made the arrest. But his version of the story is a little different. He says he was fully aware of his pursuers and expected, even wanted, to be caught, convicted, and exiled to the penitentiary.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why ask why? Why ask a psychotic to explain his own motivation, it only becomes more confusing. And John Doe is even less scrutable than most.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Leslie.

  “I can tell you by narrating a little scene from the interview I had with him today. I asked him if he knew why he was in prison.

  “‘For frolicking,’ he said.

  “‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  “His reply was: ‘Mean, mean, mean. You’re a meany.’

  “That childish ranting somehow sounded to me as if he were mimicking his victims. I’d really had enough right then but foolishly continued the interview.

  “‘Do you know why you can’t leave here’? I calmly asked with a poor variant of my original inquiry.

  “‘Who says I can’t? I’ll just go when I want to. But I don’t want to yet.’

  “‘Why not?’ I naturally questioned.

  “‘I just got here,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d take a rest after frolicking so hard. But I want to be in with all the others. Unquestionably stimulating atmosphere. When can I go with them, when can I?’

  “Can you believe that? It would be cruel, though, to put him in with the regular prison population, not to say he doesn’t deserve this cruelty. The average inmate despises Doe’s kind of crime, and there’s really no predicting what would happen if we put him in there and the others found out what he was convicted for.”

  “So he has to stay in the psychiatric section for the rest of his term?” asked Leslie.

  “He doesn’t think so. He thinks he can leave whenever he wants.”

  “And can he?” questioned Leslie with a firm absence of facetiousness in her voice. This had always been one of her weightiest fears about living in this prison town, that every moment of the day and night there were horrible fiends plotting to escape through what she envisioned as rather papery walls. To raise a child in such surroundings was another of her objections to her husband’s work.

  “I told you before, Leslie, there have been a very few successful escapes from that prison. If an inmate does get beyond the walls, his first impulse is usually one of practical self-preservation, and he tries to get as far away as possible from this town, which is probably the safest place to be in the event of an escape. Anyway, most escapees are apprehended within hours after they’ve gotten out.”

  “What about a prisoner like John Doe? Does he have this sense of ‘practical self-preservation,’ or would he rather just hang around and do damage to someone?”

  “Prisoners like that don’t escape in the normal course of things. They just bounce off the walls but not over them. You know what I mean?”

  Leslie said she understood, but this did not in the least lessen the potency of her fears, which found their source in an imaginary prison in an imaginary town, one where anything could happen as long as it approached the hideous. Morbidity had never been among her strong points, and she loathed its intrusion on her character. And for all his ready reassurance about the able security of the prison, David also seemed to be profoundly uneasy. He was sitting very still now, holding his drink between his knees and appearing to listen for something.

  “What’s wrong, David?” asked Leslie.

  “I thought I heard…a sound.”

  “A sound like what?”

  “Can’t describe it exactly. A faraway noise.”

  He stood up and looked around, as if to see whether the sound had left some tell-tale clue in the surrounding stillness of the house, perhaps a smeary sonic print somewhere.

  “I’m going to check on Norleen,” he said, setting his glass down rather abruptly on the table beside his chair and splashing the drink around. He walked across the living room, down the front hallway, up the three segments of the stairway, and then down the upstairs hall. Peeking into his daughter’s room he saw her tiny figure resting comfortably, a sleepy embrace wrapped about the form of a stuffed Bambi. She still occasionally slept with an inanimate companion, even though she was getting a little old for this. But her psychologist father was careful not to question her right to this childish comfort. Before leaving the room Dr. Munck lowered the window which was partially open on that warm spring evening.

  When he returned to the living room he delivered the wonderfully routine message that Norleen was peacefully asleep. In a gesture containing faint overnotes of celebratory relief, Leslie made them two fresh drinks, after which she said:

  “David, you said you had an ‘overlong chat’ with that John Doe. Not that I’m morbidly curious or anything, but did you ever get him to reveal very much about himself?”

  “Sure,” Dr. Munck replied, rolling an ice cube around in his mouth. His voice was now more relaxed.

  “He told me everything about himself, and on the surface all of it was nonsense. I asked him in a casually interested sort of way where he was from.

  “‘No place,’ he replied like a psychotic simpleton.

  “‘No place?’ I probed.

  “‘Yes, precisely there, Herr Doktor.’

  “‘Where were you born?’ I asked in another brilliant alternate form of the question.

  “‘Which time do you mean, you meany?’ he said back to me, and so forth. I could go on with this dialogue—”

  “You do a pretty good John Doe imitat
ion, I must say.”

  “Thank you, but I couldn’t keep it up for very long. It wouldn’t be easy to imitate all his different voices and levels of articulateness. He may be something akin to a multiple personality, I’m not sure. I’d have to go over the tape of the interview to see if any patterns of coherency turn up, possibly something the detectives could use to establish the man’s identity, if he has one left. The tragic part is that this is all, of course, totally useless information as far as the victims of Doe’s crimes are concerned…and as far as I’m concerned it really is too. I’m no aesthete of pathology. It’s never been my ambition to study disease merely for its own sake, without effecting some kind of improvement, trying to help someone who would just as soon see me dead, or worse. I used to believe in rehabilitation, maybe with too much naiveté and idealism. But those people, those things at the prison are only an ugly stain on existence. The hell with them,” he concluded, draining his glass until the ice cubes rattled.

  “Want another?” Leslie asked with a smooth therapeutic tone to her voice.

  David smiled now, the previous outburst having purged him somewhat. “Let’s get drunk, shall we?”

  Leslie collected his glass for a refill. Now there was reason to celebrate, she thought. Her husband was not giving up his work from a sense of ineffectual failure but from anger. The anger would turn to resignation, the resignation to indifference, and then everything would be as it had been before; they could leave the prison town and move back home. In fact, they could move anywhere they liked, maybe take a long vacation first, treat Norleen to some sunny place. Leslie thought of all this as she made the drinks in the quiet of that beautiful room. This quiet was no longer an indication of soundless stagnancy but a delicious lulling prelude to the promising days to come. The indistinct happiness of the future glowed inside her along with the alcohol; she was gravid with pleasant prophecies. Perhaps the time was now right to have another child, a little brother for Norleen. But that could wait just a while longer…a lifetime of possibilities lay ahead, awaiting their wishes like a distinguished and fatherly genie.

  Before returning with the drinks, Leslie went into the kitchen. She had something she wanted to give her husband, and this was the perfect time to do it. A little token to show David that although his job had proved a sad waste of his worthy efforts, she had nevertheless supported his work in her own way. With a drink in each hand, she held under her left elbow the small box she had got from the kitchen.

  “What’s that?” asked David, taking his drink.

  “Something for you, art lover. I bought it at that little shop where they sell things the inmates at the penitentiary make—belts, jewelry, ashtrays, you know.”

  “I know,” David said with an unusual lack of enthusiasm. “I didn’t think anyone actually bought that stuff.”

  “I, for one, 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 admonished.

  “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, discovered in gray formless clay and glossily glazed in blue. The work radiated an extraordinary and intense beauty, the subject’s face expressing a kind of ecstatic serenity, the labyrinthine 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. It’s obviously remarkable. But then he told me who the boy was. 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 last—and according to him most memorable—‘frolic’.”

  “Oh my God,” Leslie murmured softly, placing her right hand to her cheek. 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 contemplated the now openly expressed, and definite reality of their 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 seriousness.

  “Poor David,” Leslie sympathized.

  “Actually it wasn’t that much of an ordeal. The conversation we had could even be called stimulating in a clinical sort of way. He described his ‘frolicking’ in a kind of unreal and highly imaginative manner that wasn’t always hideous to listen to. 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 feelings with a psychologist’s detachment. Sometimes you just have to distance yourself, even if it means becoming a little less human.

  “Anyway, nothing that he said was sickeningly graphic in the way you might imagine. When he told me about his last and ‘most memorable frolic,’ it was with a powerful sense of wonder and nostalgia, shocking as that sounds to me now. It seemed to be a kind of homesickness, though his ‘home’ is a ramshackle ruin of his decaying mind. His psychosis had bred this blasphemous 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 horror. This is really interesting when you consider the egoistical magnificence that a lot of psychopaths would attribute to themselves given a limitless imaginary realm in which they could play any imaginary role. But not John Doe. He’s a comparatively lazy demi-demon from a place, a No Place, 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 the back alleys of some cosmic slum, an innerdimensional dead end. Which might be an indication of a ghetto upbringing in Doe’s past. And if so, his insanity has transformed these ghetto memories into a realm that cross-breeds a banal streetcorner reality with a psychopath’s paradise. This is where he does his ‘frolicking’ with what he calls his ‘awe-struck company,’ the place possibly being 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 are certainly mad transmutations of a literal wasteland. 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.

  “But despite all these dreamy back-drops in Doe’s imagination, the mundane evidence of his frolics still points to a crime of very familiar, down-to-earth horrors. A run-of-the-mill atrocity. Consistently enough, Doe says he made the evidence look that way as a deliberate afterthought, that what he really means by ‘frolicking’ is a type of ac
tivity quite different from, even opposed to, the crime 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 hand in my resignation no later than tomorrow morning.”

  “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 deep glow 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—”