“I work in the restaurant business.”
“Oh right, what, waitress?”
“Yes, well no, cashier. Nearly the same thing. But a bit different.” Her words trailed off, confused, but it didn’t matter: Monkton didn’t appear to be paying much attention to what she was saying. He was looking where her T-shirt hinted at the divide between her breasts. Didn’t men realize, she wondered, that women know exactly where their eyes are looking? Maybe they did and they thought women liked it. Could they really be that stupid? She supposed they could—but their intelligence needn’t concern her tonight. There would be a party; she could meet people, have a few drinks, relax, forget her worries, forget that mocking face that seemed to be following her about. The man was talking to her:
“Come on, then, er, Bella. Everyone’s here. We can go.”
They walked in a large group north up Holloway Road. The night was crisp; Bella pulled her collar up. Cars sped by, burning trails of light onto her retinas; the occasional bus, its steamed-up windows yellow rectangles. A few Asian-owned grocery shops still spread their fruit and vegetables out onto the pavement. A tramp curled himself into a ball in a shop doorway as they walked past on their way to a party. Bella felt a twinge of guilt, but reminded herself that she had troubles of her own and this would help her forget them for a while, might even make them go away, one never knew.
A man with long hair in a ponytail, who had introduced himself as Terry, passed a rolled and lighted cigarette to Bella. She took it between thumb and index finger and inhaled deeply. Too deeply, it seemed, for she shuddered a little as she held the smoke in her lungs. Her head swam as she exhaled. Terry was talking to her about his new play, about schematic problems he was having with act three; but she wasn’t a very attentive listener. She’d drunk several glasses of wine, three cups of tea (of very dubious content), and had shared three, or was it four, cigarettes. Anyway, Terry didn’t seem to be aware of her inattentiveness; he watched his fingernails as he spoke. He didn’t seem to hear when she excused herself to go to the toilet. She looked back from the doorway and saw that he retained the same position and his lips appeared still to be moving—she giggled and left the room.
The hall was even more congested than the room she’d just left. She managed to pick her way through people sitting on the floor and reach the stairs. The toilet was on the first floor and amazingly there was no queue. She locked the door, pushed her jeans and briefs down, and took a seat. It was good to go, a relief. She wondered if Terry was still talking to his nails. She might not have seen it if it hadn’t moved: in the corner to her right, almost hidden by curtains, a disfigured triangular face caught the light with a slight movement. Bella screamed and leapt to her feet, tugging at her jeans. The creature was laughing at her back, she knew, as she yanked the door open and fled downstairs, over the heads in the hall, and out the front door.
She didn’t have her coat but wouldn’t go back in; she’d come and retrieve it another time. Digging her hands deep in the pockets of her jeans, she trudged homewards. She didn’t have far to walk, but the cold bit through her thin sweater, making her shiver. The party had been a mistake; she remembered the derelict they’d strode past on Holloway Road and flushed with guilt.
As she turned a corner she caught a glimpse of someone behind her on the other side of the road. The pursuer drew level on the opposite pavement and kept pace with her. She glanced across and her heart leapt onto her tongue. The grinning head bobbed on a black-clad body, scarcely visible in the dark, which pranced with a lunatic’s gaiety. The face turned to her, glowing under the orange lamps, but glowing yellow, and not just the face, the whole head. Sobriety had returned, thanks to the cold, so what caused the apparition of this grinning dancing demon? There must have been something in the tea; those had looked like very big tea leaves, if leaves at all, at the bottom of her cup. She was hallucinating, that’s why the dancing head glowed yellow under the orange lights which killed colour; it wasn’t the source of its own light, but the product of whatever drugs Bella had consciously or unconsciously consumed.
Still the head kept pace with her, teetering above its stalk-like body, despite the advance of her rationale. If she turned a corner, it turned also, but kept the same distance between them. Thoughts fluttered around her skull: was the thing being cautious in not approaching? was it content to laugh from a safe distance? Deciding to risk it, Bella dived into a narrow passageway which she had used in daylight as a short cut. She denied herself the luxury of looking back and so didn’t perceive that she was being pursued until she heard footsteps approaching at speed. They didn’t stop at a respectful distance behind her. A hand clamped down on her shoulder and she wheeled round.
“Oh God!” It was Monkton from the pub. “What are you playing at? You terrified me.”
“Sorry,” said the newcomer, breathing alcohol through the mist into her face. “I didn’t think. But then I’m hardly in a state to be thinking. You left so suddenly. Good party. Why d’you leave?”
“I, er . . . I had a headache, needed some air,” Bella said, looking over Monkton’s shoulder but seeing nothing in the orange mist.
“Right. Well. You going home, then? Got far to go? Can’t let you go on your own.”
Monkton was eager and Bella would be glad of company, in the general sense if not the particular. The threat she felt from the face seemed to have grown since its disappearance and replacement by Monkton.
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s not far.”
One thing had led to another. Bella’s gratitude to Monkton for walking her home, not fully expressed, for she couldn’t tell him about the face; and Monkton’s assumption that Bella would be grateful to him for looking after her. She’d invited him to come in and offered him the choice of cold beer or black coffee. He’d chosen beer, so she took two beers out of the fridge, thinking, what the hell, she was lonely.
“Don’t worry about it, Brian,” Bella had tried to comfort him. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”
“It’s not the damn drink,” he’d said sharply.
The delay had been caused by Monkton’s inability to come, despite his sustained erection. Since he didn’t immediately put the blame on Bella, as she imagined most men would if they thought they could get away with it, she reasoned that it must have been a continuing problem, which Monkton was aware of and duly upset by. Bella was determined not to let the episode be a total failure. Her aggression hadn’t worked, so she would invite a change in the balance of power. She cajoled Monkton to rise above the problem and by so doing end it. He had sat astride her and entered, no less firm in his intention than before. If he’d kept his eyes closed it might have been all right, but he’d opened them to sneak a look. The uncovered window was above the head of the bed. Watching through half-closed eyes Bella knew Monkton had seen someone watching him from the opposite pavement. Laughing at him.
“Bastard,” shouted Monkton.
Bella knew. She only opened her eyes properly because she was supposed to. Dismay welled up inside her. A twitching insinuation of complicity plucked at her mind, born out of a responsibility felt. This must have read on her face; it was the only explanation for Monkton hitting her, as he did, three times across the face.
“You don’t fuck with me!” he shouted. “Nobody fucks with me!” How one’s real face showed itself. “Laughing at me. Bitch! Don’t laugh at me!” he added with venom as he clambered from the bed and reached for his clothes. Bella felt consciousness disintegrating. She heard him mutter thickly about her not having seen the last of him, as he left the flat with a slamming of doors. Pulling herself over, she looked out of the window: the man who’d hit her marched away; otherwise the street was deserted.
The crack in the wall opened wider than before and seemed to drown the room with its absence. Bella turned to the window. Tarpaulins stretched over skips drooped tails which were derelicts whose coats flapped as they congregated to watch her. Through the lifeless mob a vital angry presence
stalked. It was only a matter of time before he stepped through the divide in the wall on a mission of vengeance for his useless erection.
Bella walked the streets looking for a job. No one needed a cashier. One restaurant offered her part-time dishwashing which she refused. Back on Holloway Road a tramp asked her to help him with his bus fare so he could get to hospital. She brushed it aside, as she had all previous requests. But once imprisoned in the orange misty darkness of the side streets, she felt guilty. She shouldn’t have turned down the job; she should have helped the tramp. Society and its governing powers wouldn’t help him—on her shoulders she felt their absolved responsibility weighing heavily, like the pound coin in her pocket. She would turn back and look for the tramp to give him what little she had, but the sharp report of footsteps reverberated in her wake. It could be anyone. Or it could be Monkton, angry after his humiliation, seeking revenge, the only way masculine aggression knew how. She took a circuitous route and lost her pursuer, if indeed there had ever been one.
*
Bella no longer trusted the veneer of reality which had once sufficed to seduce her into belief, acceptance, submission. Within a week she saw its corners turning up, patches worn thin, like an old photograph on a book cover. She went back to the Archway Tower. The streets were crawling with derelicts, they were multiplying, the world was spinning its last; what about the other people around me, she questioned, is it ending for them as well?
She pushed past a tramp choosing his dinner from a dustbin and stepped onto the platform of a bus. She sat upstairs and watched the pavement creep by. A one-legged tramp hauled himself through the crowds on crutches. The bus stood for an age at traffic lights. The Tower loomed ahead, poking its head into the slate roof of clouds. Bella got off and walked. Footsteps resounded at her back; she stopped and turned and an anonymous swarm of people surged past her. She turned back again and watched the ground as she walked. Into her field of vision came a man beneath whose army greatcoat only one foot showed, and that didn’t touch the ground. Now it did; now it didn’t. His crutches echoed like nails in shoes. Abruptly he swung round on his metal sticks and extended a begging hand in Bella’s direction. But she felt threatened and couldn’t even bring herself to look at him. All she saw as she skirted his crutches and left him hanging there were the tattered military ribbons on his greatcoat.
She stood outside the Tower and gazed up at its vastness. The BI was in her pocket, but any meaning it may have once had no longer existed. The door swung open easily beneath her hand. She scorned the hypocrisy of the lifts and found the staircase. Footsteps followed her up the stairs, stopping when she did; they were her own. She needn’t fear footsteps in any case; only herself, her own worst enemy.
Out of breath at the ninth floor, she rested her forehead against the whitewashed plastered wall. Her own footsteps still reverberated around the corners. Beneath her hand in the wall she felt a crack which opened at her touch. Black spilled onto the white and the footsteps grew louder. “Accidental damage should be reported immediately to line manager.” The crack gaped ever wider. Bella fled upstairs and banged through the swing doors on the tenth floor. A door across the landing stood open; she ran to it and into a familiar room. Empty of people, filled with benches, vacant counter windows and one solitary chair. “Report to receptionist ten minutes after your appointment time if your name has not been called.” The door on the other side of the room opened and into the room came a man wearing a sober suit and a grinning triangular mask for a face. Bella groped for the chair and propelled it at the window. The area of impact splintered, and she climbed onto the window ledge, kicking at the glass. “It is dangerous to allow children on the window sill.”
She had to find him—not that he was of any particular importance—but she would be able to impose a token amount of order, to put one little thing right. She couldn’t hope to solve anything, but could maybe purge a little of her guilt. It seemed to her that if she could remove a part of the guilt, there being still time, she might wipe some of the smile from the laughing face.
There were so many derelicts, however, so many homeless, she could look for ever. Dragging her shattered leg impeded her, all the more so for the lack of support in her spine, which she estimated to have snapped in three places. Instinct drew her on. Loss of blood onto the pavement was alarming pedestrians, but she could neither stop nor hide in a doorway.
Fifty yards away she caught sight of his back. His crutches glinted in the harsh sunlight, his foot scuffed the ground uselessly. She dug into her pocket for coins, but her hand sank into a raw gash. She knew as she tore her hand free of the muscle that it was too little too late. The tramp turned round and raised a crutch in defence. She knew what face she would see if she looked, even though it didn’t belong there. So she wouldn’t validate its existence by looking; she wouldn’t give it the pleasure. Instead, she would have the last laugh and accept the responsibility. She tore at her own eyes with her nails and blood ran into the hollows of her cheeks, accentuating the geometry described by the two bloody sockets in relation to the smashed hanging jaw.
THOMAS LIGOTTI
The Strange Design of Master Rignolo
THOMAS LIGOTTI was born in Detroit and currently lives in nearby Michigan. He has worked as a grocery store clerk, in the circulation department of a local newspaper, as a telephone interviewer for a marketing research firm, as an assistant teacher for the Government Employment Programme, and in various editorial capacities for a reference book publisher.
All of which have probably had no effect whatsoever on his uniquely bizarre tales of fantasy and dread which have been appearing in the small press magazines over the past decade. More recently his fiction has been finding its way between book covers with the anthologies Prime Evil, Ramsey Campbell’s Stories That Scared Me, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, and his own acclaimed collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer.
It’s pretty hard to describe the story that follows, so we’ll leave you to soak up the atmosphere and rich prose that is unmistakably Ligotti’s, and let the horror creep up on you.
IT WAS WELL INTO EVENING and for some time Nolon had been seated at a small table in a kind of park. This was a long, thin stretch of land—vaguely triangular in shape, like a piece of broken glass—bordered by three streets of varying breadth, varying evenness of surface, and of varying stages of disintegration as each thoroughfare succumbed in its own way and in its own time to the subtle but continuous movements of the slumbering earth beneath. From the far end of the park a tiny figure in a dark overcoat was approaching Nolon’s table, and it appeared there was going to be a meeting of some sort.
There were other tables here and there, all of them unoccupied, but most of the park was unused ground covered with a plush, fuzzy kind of turf. In the moonlight this densely-woven pile of vegetation turned a softly glowing shade of aquamarine, almost radiant. Beyond the thinning trees, stars were bright but without luster, as if they were made of luminous paper. Around the park, a jagged line of high roofs, black and featureless, crossed the clouded sky like the uneven teeth of an old saw.
Nolon was resting his hands at the edge of the small, nearly circular table. In the middle of the table a piece of candle flickered inside a misshapen bubble of green glass, and Nolon’s face was bathed in a restless green glare. He too was wearing a dark overcoat, unbuttoned at the top to reveal a scarf of lighter shade stuffed inside it. The scarf was wrapped about Nolon’s neck right to the base of his chin. Every so often Nolon glanced up, not at the outline of Grissul moving across the park, but to try and catch sight of something in that lighted window across the street—a silhouette which at regular intervals slipped in and out of view. Above the window was a long, low roof surmounted by a board which appeared to be a sign or marquee. The words, or possibly it was only a single word, on this board were entirely unreadable, their paint washed out by some great deluge or deliberately effaced or . . . But the image of two tall, thin bottles could still be seen,
their slender necks angled festively this way and that.
Grissul sat down.
“Have you been here long?” he asked, resting his hands upon the table.
Nolon calmly pulled out a watch from deep inside his coat. He stared at it for a few moments, tapped the glass once or twice, then gently pushed the watch back inside his coat.
“Someone must have known I was thinking about seeing you,” Grissul continued, “because I’ve got a little story I could tell.”
Nolon again glanced over at the lighted window across the street. Grissul noticed this and twisted his head around, saying, “Well, someone’s there after all. Do you think tonight we could get, you know, a little service of some kind?”
“Maybe you could go across yourself and see what our chances are,” Nolon replied.
“All the same to me,” Grissul insisted, twisting his head to face Nolon. “I’ve still got my news.”
“Is that specifically why this meeting is taking place?”
A blank expression fell across Grisul’s face. “Not that I know of,” he replied. “As far as I’m concerned, we just met by chance.”
“Of course,” Nolon agreed, smiling a little. Grissul smiled back but with much less subtlety.
“So I was going to tell you,” Grissul began, “that I was out on that field, the one behind the empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides down and goes off in all directions. And there’s a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don’t know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grassy reeds, you know where I mean?”
“I now have a good idea,” Nolon replied, a trifle bored or at least pretending to be.
“This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn’t planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks, much taller than me, with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked—I don’t know—when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. I’m telling you, Mr. Nolon, it was right in the ground. It appeared to be a part of it, like—”
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