Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Ligotti, Thomas

  Yet without this sharpening would he have noticed the newspaper someone had left behind on the seat of that empty chair? Messily bunched and repeatedly creased, it was still a welcome sight to his eyes. At this point he needed something of this kind, something to peruse in the rich glow of the lamp that was guiding him through an artificial night, preparing him for the authentic one in which he would have to face the unpredictable verdict which either terminated or terribly elongated his wakefulness. He reached for the pages, rustled them, unfolded and refolded them like an arrangement of bedcovers. His eyes followed dark letters across ruddy paper, and at last his mind was out of its terrible school for a while. When the food arrived he made way for the plate, building a nest of print and pictures around it: advertisements for the town’s shops and businesses, weather forecasts, happenings on the west shore, and a feature article entitled “THE REAL STORY OF DR. THOSS—Local Legend Revived.” A brief note explained that the article, written some years ago, was periodically reprinted when interest in the subject seemed, for one reason or another, newly aroused. Alb Indys paused over his meal for a moment and smiled, feeling disappointed and slightly relieved at the same time. It now appeared that he had been inspired by a misunderstanding, by imaginary consultations with a legendary doctor and his fictitious cures.

  Who, then? What? When and why? His name, according to the article, may indeed have been that of a real doctor, one who lived either in the distant past or whose renown was imported, by recollection and rumor, from a distant place. A number of people associated him with the following vague but poignant tragedy: an excellent physician, and a most respected figure in the community, was psychically deranged one night by some incident of indefinite character; afterward he continued to make use of his training in physic but in a wholly new fashion, in a different key altogether from that of his former practice. This went on for some time before, violently, he was stopped. Decapitation, drowning in the nearby sea, or both were the prevailing conclusions to the real doctor’s legend. Of course, the particulars vary, as do those of a second, and more widely circulated, version.

  This variant Dr. Thoss was a recluse of the witch-days, less a doctor of medicine than one deeply schooled at forbidden universities of the supernatural. Or was he naturally a very wise man who was simply misunderstood? Histories of the period are unhelpful in resolving such questions. No definite misbehavior is attributed to him, except perhaps that of keeping an unpleasant little companion. The creature, according to most who know this Thossian legend, is said to possess the following traits: it is smallish, “no bigger than a man’s head”; shrivelled and rotting, as if with disease or decomposition; speaks in a rough voice; and moves about by means of numerous appendages of special qualities, called “miracle claws” by some. There was good reason, the article went on, to put this abbreviated marvel at the center of this legend, for the creature may not have been merely a diabolical companion of Dr. Thoss but the mysterious doctor himself. Was his tale, then, a cautionary one, illustrating what happened to those who, either from evil or benevolent motives, got “into trouble” with the supernatural? Or was Dr. Thoss itself intended to serve as no more than an agent of spectral hideousness, a bogie for children and the secluded campfire? Ultimately the point of the legend is unclear, the article asserted, beyond evoking a certain uneasiness in those of superactive imagination.

  But an even greater obscurity surrounded one last morsel of lore concerning who the doctor was and what he was about. It related to the way his name had come to be employed by certain people and under certain circumstances. Not the place for a scholarly inquest into regional expressions, the article merely cited an example, one that no doubt was already familiar to many of the newspaper’s readers. This particular usage was based on the idea—and the following verb must be stressed—of “feeding one’s troubles to the sea (or ‘wind’) and Dr. Thoss,” as if this figure—whatever its anatomical or metaphysical identity—were some kind of eater of others’ suffering. A concluding note invited readers to submit whatever smatterings they could to enlarge upon this tiny daub of local color.

  End of the real story of Dr. Thoss.

  Alb Indys had read the article with interest and appetite, more than he ever hoped to have, and he now pushed both crumpled newspaper and decimated meal away from him, sitting for a moment in blurry reflection on both. The surface of the old table, jaundiced by the little lamp above it, somehow seemed to be decaying in its grain, dissolving into a putrid haze. Possibly his attention had simply wandered too far when he heard, or thought he heard, a strange utterance. And it was delivered in a distorted, dry-throated voice, as though transmitted by garbled shortwave. “Yes, my name is Thoss,” the voice had said. “I am a doctor.”

  “Excuse me, will there be anything else you’d like to order?”

  Shaken back to life, Alb Indys declined further service, paid his bill, and left. On his way out, for no defensible reason, he scrutinized every face in the room. But none of them could have said it, he assured himself.

  In any case, the doctor was now exposed as only a phantasm of local superstition. Or was he? To be perfectly honest about it, Alb Indys had to credit the nonexistent healer with some part of his present well-being. How he had eaten, and every bit! True, it was not much of a day—the town was a tomb and the sky its vault—but for him a secret sun was glowing somewhere, he could feel it. And there were hours remaining before it had to set, hours. He walked to the end of the street where it dipped down a steep hill and the sidewalk ended in a flight of old stone stairs that had curving grins sliced into them. He continued walking to the edge of town, and then down a narrow road which led to one of the few places he could abide outside his own room.

  Alb Indys approached the old church from the graveyard side and, as he closed in, only the great hexagonal peak, hornlike, could be seen projecting above the brown-leafed trees. Surrounding the graveyard was a barrier of thin black bars, with a thicker bar connecting them through the middle, spinelike. There was no gate, and the road he was on freely entered the church grounds. To his left and right were headstones and monuments, little marble slabs and golden plaques. They formed a forest of memorials, clumps of crosses and groves of gravestones. Some of them were very small and oddly shaped, and so loosened by time that they almost seemed to rock back and forth in the wind. But could one of them have just now fallen down entirely? Something was missing that had been there before, seemingly had sunk or slid away. Alb Indys watched for a moment, then proceeded toward the church. When he reached the edge of the graveyard he turned around, surveying not only the stones themselves but also the spaces between them. And the wind was pulling at his fine pale locks.

  Standing in full view of the church, Alb Indys could not resist elevating his gaze to the height of that spire which rose from a square central tower whose four corners put out four lesser points. This great structure—with its dark, cowlshaped windows and broken roman-numeraled clock—was buttressed by two low-roofed transepts which squatted and slanted on either side of it. Beneath the cloud-filled sky the church was an even shade of grayish white, unblemished by shadows. And from behind the church, where pale scrubby grasses edged toward a steep descent into sand and sea, came the sound of tossing waves, a hissing sound which Alb Indys perceived as somehow dry and electronic.

  As always, there was no one else in the church at this time of day (and with hours remaining of it). Everything was very simple inside, very solemn and quiet and serenely lighted. The dark-paned windows along either wall confused all time, bending dawns into twilights, suspending minutes in eternity. Alb Indys slid into a pew at the back and rested his hands at his sides. His eyes were fixed on the distant apse, where everything—pillars, pictures, pulpit—appeared as an unfocused fragment of itself, folded within shadows that seemed to be the creation of dark hours. But his insomnia was not at issue here: suffering and transgressions alike were reprieved in this place that shut out time. He followed each moment as it tried
to move past him: each was smothered by the stillness, and he watched them die. “But trouble feeds in the wind and hides in the window,” he drowsily said to himself from somewhere inside his now dreaming brain.

  Suddenly everything seemed wrong and he wanted to leave, but he could not leave because someone was speaking from the pulpit. Yes, a pulpit in such a large, such an enormous, church would be equipped with its microphone, but then why whisper in such confused language and so rapidly, like a single voice trying to be more? What were the voices saying now? No, he would rather not hear, because now everything was happening that he wished would not happen, and it was so late at night, and with so many hours left to sleep, finally to sleep for hours and hours, he would not be able to get away in time. If he could only move, just turn his head a little. And if he could only get his eyes to open and see what was wrong. The voices kept repeating without fading, multiplying in the fantastically spacious church. Then, with an effort sufficient to move the earth itself, he managed to turn his head just enough to look out a window in the east transept. And without even opening his tightly closed eyelids, he saw what was in the window. But he suddenly awoke for an entirely different reason, because finally he understood what the voices were saying. They said they were a doctor, and their name was—

  Alb Indys had to get home, even if all the way there the sound of the sea was hissing behind him like a broken radio, and even if the wind rushed by his ears like breaking waves of air. There was not much daylight left and tonight, of all nights, he did not want to catch anything, did not want to be caught, that is, in the damp and chill of an off-season sundown. What misjudgements he had made that day, what mistakes, there was no question about it. And what a doctor to call upon to treat one’s troubles...

  An eternity of sleeplessness was to be preferred, if those were the dreams sleep had in waiting. Gratefully he would hold on to his old troubles, with the permission of the world, the wind, and the legendary Dr. Thoss.

  And when Alb Indys reached his room, he was thinking about a gleaming crescent moon ready to be placed in a new scene, and he was thankful to have some project, any project, to fill the hours of that night. Exhausted, he threw his dark coat in a heap on the floor, then sat down on the bed to remove his shoes. He was holding the second one in his hand when he turned and, for some reason, began to contemplate that lump he had left in the bedcovers. Without reasoning why, he elevated the shoe directly above this shapeless swelling, held it aloft for a few moments, then let it drop straight down. The lump collapsed with a little poof, as if it had been an old hat with no head inside, or a magician’s silk scarf that only seemed to have a plump white dove hidden under it. Enough of this for one day, Alb Indys thought sleepily, there was work he could be doing.

  But when he picked up the drawing book of stiff clean pages from where he had earlier abandoned it on the bed, he saw that the work he intended to do had, by some miracle, already been done. He looked at the drawing of the window, the drawing he had finished off earlier that day with his meticulous signature. Was it only because he was so tired that he could not recall darkening those window panes and carving that curved scar of moon behind them? Could he have forgotten about scoring that bone-white cicatrix into the flesh of night? But he was holding that particular moon in reserve for one of his “collaborations” and this was not one of those. This belonged to that other type of drawing: he only penned, in these, what was enclosed within the four-walled frame of his room, never anything outside it. Then why did he ink in this night and this moon, and with the collaboration of what other artistic hand? If only he were not so drained by chronic insomnia, all those lost dreams hissing in his head, perhaps he could have thought more clearly about it. His dozing brain might even have noticed another change in the picture, for something now squatted in the chair which formerly had been unoccupied. But there was too much sleep to catch up on, and, as the sun went out in the window, Alb Indys shut his eyes languorously and lay down upon his bed.

  And he never would have wakened that night, which seemed as white as winter, if it had not been for the noise. The window was lit up by a silvery blade of moon. It brightened the chair, whose two thin arms had other arms overhanging each of them, flexing slowly in the room’s stillness. White night, white noise. As if speaking in static, the parched, crackling voice repeatedly said: I am a doctor. Then the occupant of the chair hopped gracefully onto the bed with a single thrust of its roundish body, and its claws began their work, delivering the sleeper to his miraculous remedy...

  It was the landlord who eventually found him, though there was considerable difficulty identifying what lay on the bed. A rumor spread throughout the seaside town about a swift and terrible disease, something that perhaps one of the vacationers had brought in. But no other trouble was reported. Much later, the entire incident was confused by preposterous elaborations, which had the effect of relegating all of its horrors to the doubtful realm of regional legend.

  Masquerade

  of a Dead Sword:

  A Tragedie

  When the world uncovers some dark disguise,

  Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

  Psalms of the Silent

  I: Faliol’s Rescue

  NO DOUBT the confusions of carnival night were to blame, in some measure, for many unforeseen incidents. Every violation of routine order was being perpetrated by the carousing mob, their cries of celebration providing the upper voices to a strange droning pedal point which seemed to be sustained by the night itself. Having declared their town an enemy of silence, the citizens of Soldori took to the streets; there they conspired against solitude and, to accompanying gyrations of squealing abandon, sabotaged monotony. Even the duke, a cautious man and one not normally given to those gaudy agendas of his counterparts in Lynnese or Daranzella, was now holding an extravagant masquerade, if only as a strategic concession to the little patch of world under his rule. Of all the inhabitants of the Three Towns, the subjects of the Duke of Soldori—occasionally to the duke’s own dismay—were the most loving of amusement. In every quarter of this principality, frolicking celebrants combed the night for a new paradise, and were as likely to find it in a blood-match as in a song. All seemed anxious, even frantic to follow blindly the entire spectrum of diversion, to dawdle about the lines between pain and pleasure, to obscure their vision of both past and future.

  So perhaps three well-drunk and boar-faced men seated in a roisterous hostelry could be excused for not recognizing Faliol, whose colors were always red and black. But this man, who had just entered the thickish gloom of that drinking house, was attired in a craze of colors, none of them construed to a pointed effect. One might have described this outfit as motley gone mad. Indeed, perhaps what lay beneath this fool’s patchwork were the familiar blacks and reds that no other of the Three Towns—neither those who were dandies, nor those who were sword-whores (however golden their hearts), nor even those who, like Faliol himself, were both—would have dared to parody. But these notorious colors were now buried deep within a rainbow of rags which were tied about the man’s arms, legs, and at every other point of his person, seeming to hold him together like torn strips hurriedly applied to the storm-fractured joists of a sagging roof. Before he had closed the door of that cave-like room behind him, the draft rushing in from the street made his ragged livery come alive like a mass of tattered flags flapping in a calamitous wind.

  But even had he not been cast as a tatterdemalion, there was still so much else about Faliol that was unlike his former self. His sword, a startling length of blade to be pulled along by this ragman, bobbed about unbuckled at his left side. His dagger, whose sheath bore a mirror of polished metal (which now seemed a relic of more dandified days), was strung loosely behind his left shoulder, ready to fall at any moment. And his hair was trimmed monkishly close to the scalp, leaving little reminder of a gloriously hirsute era. But possibly the greatest alteration, the greatest problem and mystery of Faliol’s travesty of his own image, wa
s the presence on his face of a pair of... spectacles. And owing that the glass of these spectacles was unevenly blemished, as though murky currents flowed beneath their brittle surface, the eyes behind them were obscured.

  Still, there remained any number of signs by which a discerning scrutiny could have identified the celebrated Faliol. For as he moved toward a seat adjacent to the alcove where the booming-voiced trio was ensconsed, he moved with a scornful, somehow involuntary assuredness of which no reversals of fate could completely unburden him. And his boots, though their fine black leather had gone gray with the dust of roads that a zealous equestrian such as Faliol would never have trod, still jangled with a few of those once innumerable silver links from which dangled small, agate-eyed medallions, ones exactly like that larger, onyx-eyed medallion which in other days hung from a silver chain around his lean throat. The significance of this particular ornament was such that Faliol—though often questioned, but never twice by the same inquisitor—avoided revelations of any kind.

  Now, however, no medallion of any kind was displayed upon Faliol’s chest; and since he had lost or renounced the inkish eye of onyx, he had acquired two eyes of shadowed glass. Each lens of the spectacles reflected, like twin moons, the glow of the lantern above the place where Faliol seated himself. As if unaware that he was not settled in some cloistered cell of lucubration, he removed from somewhere within his shredded clothes a small book having the words Psalms of the Silent written in raised letters upon its soft, worn cover. And the cover was black, while the letters were the red of autumn leaves.