The Nightmare Factory

by Thomas Ligotti

  And it was at this place in my dream that I came to believe that there obtained a terrible intimacy between myself and those whispering effigies of chaos whose existence I dreaded for its very remoteness from mine. Had these beings, for some grim purpose comprehensible only to themselves, allowed me to intrude upon their infernal wisdom? Or was my unwanted access to such putrid arcana merely the outcome of some loathsome fluke in the universe of atoms, a chance intersection among the demonic elements of which all creation is composed? But the truth was notwithstanding in the face of these insanities; whether by calculation or accident, I was the victim of the unknown. And I finally succumbed to an ecstatic horror at this insufferable insight.

  On waking, it seemed that I had carried back with me a tiny, jewel-like particle of this horrific ecstasy, and, by some alchemy of association, this darkly crystalline substance infused its magic into my image of the old town.

  Although I formerly believed myself to be the consummate knower of the town’s secrets, the following day was one of unforeseen discovery. The streets that I looked upon that motionless morning were filled with new secrets and seemed to lead me to the very essence of the extraordinary. And a previously unknown element appeared to have emerged in the composition of the town, one that must have been hidden within its most obscure quarters. I mean to say that, while these quaint, archaic facades still put on all the appearance of a dreamlike repose, there now existed, in my sight, evil stirrings beneath this surface. The town had more wonders than I knew, a secreted cache of blasphemous offerings. Yet somehow this formula of deception, of corruption in disguise, served to intensify the town’s most attractive aspects: a wealth of unsuspected sensations was now provoked by a few slanting rooftops, a low doorway, or a narrow backstreet. The mist spreading evenly through the town early that morning was luminous with dreams.

  The whole day I wandered in a fevered exaltation throughout the old town, seeing it as if for the first time. I scarcely stopped a moment to rest, and I am sure I did not pause to eat. By late afternoon I might also have been suffering from a strain on my nerves, for I had spent many hours nurturing a rare state of mind in which the purest euphoria was invaded and enriched by chaotic currents of fear. Each time I rounded a streetcorner or turned my head to catch some beckoning sight, the darkest tremors were inspired by the hybrid spectacle I witnessed—splendid scenes broken with malign shadows, the lurid and the lovely forever lost in each other’s embrace. And when I passed under the arch of an old street and gazed up at the towering structure before me, I was nearly overwhelmed.

  My recognition of the place was immediate, though I had never viewed it from my present perspective. And suddenly it seemed I was no longer outside in the street and staring upwards, but was looking down from the room just beneath that peaked roof. It was the highest room on the street, and no window from any of the other houses could see into it. The building itself, like some of those surrounding it, seemed to be empty, perhaps abandoned. I contemplated several ways by which I could force entry, but none of these methods was needed: the front door, contrary to my initial observation, was slightly ajar.

  The place was indeed abandoned, stripped of furnishings and fixtures, its desolate, tunnel-like hallways visible only in the sickly light that shone through unwashed, curtainless windows. Identical windows also appeared on the landing of each section of the staircase that climbed up through the central part of the house like a crooked spine. I stood in a near cataleptic awe of the world I had wandered into, this decayed paradise. It was a place of strange atmospherics of infinite melancholy and unease, the everlasting residue of some cosmic misfortune. I ascended the stairs with a solemn, mechanical intentness, stopping only when I had reached the top and found the door to a certain room.

  And even at the time, I asked myself: could I have entered this room with such unhesitant resolve if I truly expected to find something extraordinary within it? Was it ever my intention to confront the madness of the universe, or at least my own? I had to confess that although I had accepted the benefits of my dreams and fancies, I did not profoundly believe in them. At the deepest level I was their doubter, a thorough skeptic who had indulged a too-free imagination, and perhaps a self-made lunatic.

  To all appearances the room was unoccupied. I noted this fact without the disappointment born of real expectancy, but also with a strange relief. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the confusing twilight of the room, I saw the circle of chairs.

  They were as strange as I had dreamed, more closely resembling devices of torture than any type of practical or decorative object. Their tall backs were slightly bowed and covered with a coarse hide unlike anything I had ever beheld; the arms were like blades and each had four semicircular grooves cut into it that were spaced evenly across its length; and below were six jointed legs jutting outwards, a feature which transformed the entire piece into some crablike thing with the apparent ability to scuttle across the floor. If, for a stunned moment, I felt the idiotic impulse to install myself in one of these bizarre thrones, I quickly extinguished this desire upon observing that the seat of each chair, which at first appeared to be composed of a smooth and solid cube of black glass, was in fact only an open cubicle filled with a murky liquid which quivered strangely when I passed my hand over its surface. And as I did this I could feel my entire arm tingle in a way which sent me stumbling backward to the door of that horrible room and which made me loathe every atom of flesh gripping the bones of that limb. I turned around to exit but was stopped by a figure standing in the doorway.

  Although I had previously met the man, he now seemed to be someone quite different, someone openly sinister rather than merely enigmatic. When he had disturbed me the day before, I could not have suspected his alliances: his manner had been unusual but very polite, and he had offered no reason to question his sanity. Now he appeared to be no more than a malignant puppet of madness. From the twisted stance he assumed in the doorway to the vicious and imbecilic expression that possessed the features of his face, he was a thing of strange degeneracy. Before I could back away from him, he took my trembling hand. “Thank you for coming to visit,” he said in a voice that was a parody of his former politeness. He pulled me close to him; his eyelids lowered and his mouth widely grinned, as if he were enjoying a pleasant breeze on a warm day. And then he said, “They want you with them on their return. They want their chosen ones.”

  Nothing can describe what I felt on hearing these words which could only have meaning in a nightmare. Their implications were a quintessence of hellish delirium, and at that instant all the world’s wonder turned suddenly to dread. I tried to free myself from the madman’s grasp, shouting at him to let go of my hand. “Your hand?” he shouted back at me. Then he began to repeat the phrase over and over, laughing as if some sardonic joke had reached a conclusion within the depths of his lunacy. In his foul merriment he weakened, and I escaped. As I rapidly descended the many stairs of the old building, his laughter pursued me as hollow reverberations which filled the shadowy edifice.

  And that freakish, echoing laughter remained with me as I wandered dazed in darkness, trying to flee my own thoughts and sensations. Gradually the terrible sounds that filled my brain subsided, but they were now replaced by a new terror—the whispering of strangers whom I passed on the streets of the old town. And no matter how low they spoke or how quickly they silenced one another with embarrassed throat-clearings and stern looks, their words reached my ears in fragments that I was able to reconstruct because of their frequent repetition. The most common terms were deformity and disfigurement. If I had not been so distraught I might have approached these persons with a semblance of politeness, cleared my own throat, and said, “I beg your pardon, but I could not help overhearing…And what exactly did you mean, if I may ask, when you said…” But I discovered for myself what those words meant—how terrible, poor man—when I returned to my room and stood before the mirror on the wall, holding my head in balance with a supporting hand on eith
er side.

  For only one of those hands was mine.

  The other belonged to them.

  Life is the nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real. And to suffer a solitary madness seems the joy of paradise when compared to the extraordinary condition in which one’s own madness merely echoes that of the world outside. I have been lured away by dreams; all is nonsense now.

  Let me write, while I still am able, that the transformation has not limited itself. I now find it difficult to continue this manuscript with either hand; these twitching tentacles can barely grasp the pen, and I am losing the will to push a shriveled paw across this page. While I have put myself at a great distance from the old town, its influence is undiminished. In these matters there is a terrifying freedom from the laws of space and time. I am bound by greater laws, strange powers that are at their work as I look helplessly on.

  In the interest of others, I have taken precautions to conceal my identity and the precise location of a horror which cannot be helped; yet, I have also taken pains to reveal, as if with malicious intent, the existence and nature of those same horrors. Ultimately, neither my motives nor my actions are of any consequence: they are both well known to the things that whisper in the highest room of an old town. They know what I write and why I am writing it. Perhaps they are even guiding my pen by means of a hand that is an extension of their own. And if I ever desired to see what lay beneath those dark robes, I will soon be able to satisfy this curiosity with only a glance in my mirror.

  I must return to the old town, for now my home can be nowhere else. But my manner of passage to that place cannot be the same, and when I enter again that world of dreams it will be by way of a threshold which no human being has ever crossed…nor ever shall.

  THE GREATER FESTIVAL OF MASKS

  There are only a few houses in the district where Noss begins his excursions. Nonetheless, they are spaced in such a way that suggests some provision has been made to accommodate a greater number of them, like a garden from which certain growths have been removed or have yet to appear. It even seems to Noss that these hypothetical houses, the ones now absent, may at some point change places with those which can be seen, in order to enrich the lapses in the landscape and give the visible a rest within nullity. And of these houses now stretching high or spreading low there will remain nothing to be said, for they will have entered the empty spaces, which are merely blank faces waiting to gain features. Such are the declining days of the festival, when the old and the new, the real and the imaginary, truth and deception, all join in the masquerade.

  But even at this stage of the festival some have yet to take a large enough interest in tradition to visit one of the shops of costumes and masks. Until recently Noss was among this group, for reasons neither he nor anyone else could clearly explain. Now, however, he is on his way to a shop whose every shelf is crammed and flowing over, even at this late stage of the festival, with costumes and masks. In the course of his little journey, Noss keeps watching as buildings become more numerous, enough to make a street, many narrow streets, a town. He also observes numerous indications of the festival season. These signs are sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant in nature. For instance, not a few doors have been kept ajar, even throughout the night, and dim lights are left burning in empty rooms. On the other hand, someone has ostentatiously scattered a bunch of filthy rags in a certain street, shredded rags that are easily disturbed by the wind and twist gaily about. But there are many other gestures of festive abandonment: a hat, all style mangled out of it, has been jammed into the space where a board is missing in a high fence; a poster stuck to a crumbling wall has been diagonally torn in half, leaving a scrap of face fluttering at its edges; and into strange pathways of caprice revelers will go, but to have shorn themselves in doorways, to have littered the shadows with such wiry clippings and tumbling fluff. Reliquiae of the hatless, the faceless, the tediously groomed. And Noss passes it all by with no more, if no less, than a glance.

  His attention appears more sharply awakened as he approaches the center of the town, where the houses, the shops, the fences, the walls are more, much more…close. There seems barely enough space for a few stars to squeeze their bristling light between the roofs and towers above, and the outsized moon—not a familiar face in this neighborhood—must suffer to be seen only as a fuzzy anonymous glow mirrored in silvery windows. The streets are more tightly strung here, and a single one may have several names compressed into it from end to end. Some of the names may be credited less to deliberate planning, or even the quirks of local history, than to an apparent need for the superfluous, as if a street sloughed off its name every so often like an old skin, the extra ones insuring that it would not go completely nameless. Perhaps a similar need could explain why the buildings in this district exhibit so many pointless embellishments: doors which are elaborately decorated yet will not budge in their frames; massive shutters covering blank walls behind them; enticing balconies, well-railed and promising in their views, but without any means of entrance; stairways that enter dark niches…and a dead end. These structural adornments are mysterious indulgences in an area so pressed for room that even shadows must be shared. And so must other things. Backyards, for example, where a few fires still burn, the last of the festival pyres. For in this part of town the season is still at its peak, or at least the signs of its termination have yet to appear. Perhaps revelers hereabouts are still nudging each other in corners, hinting at preposterous things, coughing in the middle of jokes. Here the festival is not dead. For the delirium of this rare celebration does not radiate out from the center of things, but seeps inward from remote margins. Thus, the festival may have begun in an isolated hovel at the edge of town, if not in some lonely residence in the woods beyond. In any case, its agitations have now reached the heart of this dim region, and Noss has finally resolved to visit one of the many shops of costumes and masks.

  A steep stairway leads him to a shrunken platform of a porch, and a little slot of a door puts him inside the shop. And indeed its shelves are crammed and flowing over with costumes and masks. The shelves are also very dark and mouth-like, stuffed into silence by the wardrobes and faces of dreams. Noss pulls at a mask that is over-hanging the edge of one shelf—a dozen fall down upon him. Backing away from the avalanche of false faces, he looks at the sardonically grinning one in his hand.

  “Excellent choice,” says the shopkeeper, who steps out from behind a long counter in the rearguard of shadows. “Put it on and let’s see. Yes, my gracious, this is excellent. You see how your entire face is well-covered, from the hairline to just beneath the chin and no farther. And at the sides it clings snugly. It doesn’t pinch, am I right?” The mask nods in agreement. “Good, that’s how it should be. Your ears are unobstructed—you have very nice ones, by the way—while the mask holds on to the sides of the head. It is comfortable, yet secure enough to stay put and not fall off in the heat of activity. You’ll see, after a while you won’t even know you’re wearing it! The holes for the eyes, nostrils, and mouth are perfectly placed for your features; no natural function is inhibited, that is a must. And it looks so good on you, especially up close, though I’m sure also at a distance. Go stand over there in the moonlight. Yes, it was made for you, what do you say? I’m sorry, what?”

  Noss walks back toward the shopkeeper and removes the mask.

  “I said alright, I suppose I’ll take this one.”

  “Fine, there’s no question about it. Now let me show you some of the other ones, just a few steps this way.”

  The shopkeeper pulls something down from a high shelf and places it in his customer’s hands. What Noss now holds is another mask, but one that somehow seems to be…impractical. While the other mask possessed every virtue of conformity with its wearer’s face, this mask is neglectful of such advantages. Its surface forms a strange mass of bulges and depressions which appear unaccommodating at best, possibly pain-inflicting. And it is so much he
avier than the first one.

  “No,” says Noss, handing back the mask, “I believe the other will do.”

  The shopkeeper looks as if he is at a loss for words. He stares at Noss for many moments before saying: “May I ask a personal question? Have you lived, how shall I say this, here all your life?”

  The shopkeeper is now gesturing beyond the thick glass of the shop’s windows.

  Noss shakes his head in reply.

  “Well, then there’s no rush. Don’t make any hasty decisions. Stay around the shop and think it over, there’s still time. In fact, it would be a favor to me. I have to go out for a while, you see, and if you could keep an eye on things I would greatly appreciate it. You’ll do it, then? Good. And don’t worry,” he says, taking a large hat from a peg that poked out of the wall, “I’ll be back in no time, no time at all. If someone pays us a visit, just do what you can for them,” he shouts before closing the front door behind him.