Songs of a Dead Dreamer

by Ligotti, Thomas

  “Faliol, a scholar?” someone whispered in the crowded depths of the room, while another added: “And a scholar of his own grief, so I’ve heard.”

  Faliol unfixed the tiny silver clasp and opened the book somewhere toward its middle, where a thin strip of red velvet cloth, one the same shade as the letters upon the cover of the book, marked his place. And if there had been a miniature mirror bound in place of the book’s left-hand leaf, Faliol could have seen three thuggish men gazing mutely, not to say thoughtfully, in his direction. Moreover, if there had been a second mirror set at the same angle on the book’s right-hand leaf, he could also have noticed a fourth pair of eyes spying on him from the other side of the hostelry’s engrimed window panes.

  But there were only long, stern-looking letters written—to be precise handwritten, in Faliol’s own hand—upon the opposing leaves of the book. Thus Faliol could not have seen either of these parties who, for reasons separate or similar, were observing him. He saw only two pale pages elegantly dappled by the words of somber verses. Then a shadow passed across these pages, and another, and another.

  The three men were now standing evenly spaced before Faliol, though he continued to read as if they were not present. He read until the lantern above was extinguished, its stump of tallow snuffed out by the middleman’s hugely knuckled stumps of flesh. Clasping his book closed, Faliol replaced it within the rags around his heart and sat perfectly still. The three men seemed to watch in a trance of ugsome hilarity at this slowly and solemnly executed sequence of actions. The face at the windowpanes merely pressed closer to witness what, in its view, was a soundless scene.

  Some harsh words appeared to be addressed to the man in rags by the three men standing before him. The first of them splashed some ale in the spectacled face, as did the second man from his enormous tankard. Then more ale—this time expectorated—was received by the victim as the third man’s contribution to what became quite a lengthy series of petty torments. But Faliol remained silent and as motionless as possible, thereby expressing an attitude of mind and body which seemed only to provoke further the carnival-mad souls of the three Soldorians. As the moments passed, the men waxed more cruel and their torments more inventive. Finally, they jostled a bloody-mouthed Faliol out of his seat, two of them pinioned him against the planks of the wall, someone snatched his spectacles...

  Two blue eyes were suddenly revealed: they firmly clenched themselves closed, then reopened as if bursting out of black depths and into the light. Faliol’s mouth stretched wide to let out a perfectly silent scream or one beyond human hearing—the scream of a mute under torture. But very soon his features relaxed, while his ragged chest began pumping up and down with an even rhythm.

  The one who had taken Faliol’s spectacles had turned away and his clumsy fingers were fiddling with delicate silver stems, fumbling with two shadowy lenses that were more precious than he knew. Thus amused and diverted, he did not perceive that Faliol was terrifying both of his companions out of their wits, that they had loosened their grasp on him, and that he had drawn his dagger from its shoulder-sheath.

  “Where—” he started to shout to his loutish comrades as they ran bleeding from the hostelry’s horror. Then he turned about-face to feel Faliol’s sword against his greasy leather doublet. He saw, he must have seen, that the blade was unclean but very sharp; and he must have felt it scrape playfully against the chain-mail vest concealed beneath his doublet’s sorry cover. Soon Faliol was lowering his blade until it reached the spot where the vest’s protection no longer protected. “Now put them on, that you might see,” he quietly instructed the giant with the pair of tiny toy spectacles. “Put... them... on,” he said in a calm, dead voice.

  The giant, his lip-licking tongue visibly parched, obeyed the command.

  Everyone in the room leaned closer to see the giant in dark spectacles, and so did the well-groomed face at the hostelry window. Most of the men laughed—drunkenly and anonymously—but a few remained silent, if they did not in fact become silent, at this sight. “And a scholar of the wildest folly, too,” someone whispered. Faliol himself grinned like a demon, his eyes widening at his work. After a few moments he returned his sword to its sheath, and even so the giant held his transfixed position. Faliol put away his dagger, and the giant did not budge a hair. A hopeless paralytic, he stood with arms hanging limp and thick at his enormous flanks, slightly trembling. The giant’s face was extraordinarily pale, his grizzled cheeks like two mounds of snow that had been sown with ashes. Above them, circles of glass gleamed like two black suns.

  All laughter had ceased by now, and many turned away from the unwonted spectacle. The giant’s meaty lips were opening and closing, very slowly and very much in the manner of a dying fish gasping in the dry air. But the giant, having worn Faliol’s own eyes, was not dying in his body: only his mind was a corpse. “The wildest folly,” whispered the same voice.

  Gently, almost contritely, Faliol removed the spectacles from the face of the grotesque idol, though he waited until he was outside the hostelry before replacing them on his own.

  “Sir,” called a voice from the shadows of the street. Faliol paused, but only as if considering the atmosphere of the night and not necessarily in response to an unknown accoster. “Please allow me to identify myself with the name Streldone. My messenger spoke with you in Lynnese? Good, that is a blessing. Here is my coach, so that we need not talk in all this confusion,” he said, gesturing toward the jerking shadows of that carnival night. And when the coach began moving down streets on the circumference of the festivities, this expensively attired man—though he was just barely more than a youth—continued to speak to a silent Faliol.

  “I was informed that you had arrived in Soldori not long ago, and have been following you since, waiting for a discreet moment to approach you. Of course you were aware of my presence,” he said, pausing to scan Faliol’s expressionless face. “Well, but this is all something I know nothing about. In any event, how unfortunate that you were forced to reveal yourself back in that sty of a drinking house. But I suppose you couldn’t allow yourself to undergo much more of that treatment merely for the sake of anonymity. No harm done, I’m sure.”

  “And I am sure,” Faliol replied in a monotone, “that three very sad men would disagree with you.”

  The young man laughed briefly at what he understood to be a witticism. “In any event, their kind will have their throats wrapped in the red cord sooner or later. The duke is quite severe when it comes to the lawlessness of others. Which brings me to what I require of you tonight, assuming that we need not bargain over the terms my messenger proposed to you in Lynesse. Very well,” said Streldone, though obviously he had been prepared to haggle over the matter. But he left no pause which might have been filled with the second thoughts of this hired sword, who looked and acted more like one of the clockwork automatons which performed their mechanical routines high above the town square of Soldori. Thus, with a slow turn of his head and a set movement of his hand, Faliol received the jeweled pouch containing one-half his payment. Streldone promised that the other portion would follow upon the accomplishment of their night’s work, as he now portrayed its reasons and aims.

  It seemed there was a young woman of a noble and wealthy family, a young woman whom Streldone loved and who loved him in return. At least she loved him to the point of accepting his proposal of marriage and cleaving to his vision of their future as two who would be one. But there was also another, a man who called himself, or who was called, Wynge. Streldone referred to him thereafter as the Sorcerer, by way of further severing his adversary from the dignity of an authentic name. 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 with the compliance of the young woman’s father, but also through the powerful offices of the Duke of Soldori himself. Both men, according to Streldone, had been persuaded in this affair because the Sorcerer had promised to su
pply 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 all the world and two of the most deserving of assistance in their struggle to be reunited. And tonight Faliol must help untangle them from the taut, controlling strings of the Sorcerer and his compatriots in evil.

  “Do I have your attention, sir?” Streldone abruptly 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 really are in order, however distracted you may seem. 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 everything,” 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 its plain 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 listening to someone who was raving in the shadows of that most 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 gleaming in 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 candleflame, and a glimpse could be caught of his fine 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 sabotage.

  “Since the madness began working its destruction, 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 hideous 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 ragged 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 houses of hell. At the end of my mad dream the heads make an effort to... laugh, creating a blasphemous babble which echoes throughout that terrible forest. And when I awaken I find myself standing on some hillside where I have never been, and for a moment the night continues to reverberate with fading laughter.

  “But did I say that I awoke? If I did, then that is only one more madness among many. For to awaken, as I once understood this miracle, means to re-inherit 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, that delicate membrane which excludes merely a single universe while containing countless more. It seems that I remain a captive of these dreams, these visions. For when that one leaves off this one begins, each giving way to the other like a labyrinth of connected room which will never lead to freedom beyond their strange walls. And for all that I can know, I am even now the inhabitant of such a room, and at any moment—I beg forgiveness, wise man—you may 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, that hillside, and from what comes after.

  “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. Artists of mayhem curse softly as their mutilated canvasses prematurely expire of their elegant lacerations. And somewhere the master carnefex, the supreme inquisitor waits as I am dragged across crude, incredibly crude floors and am presented to his rolling, witless 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.

  “Enough,” the madman repeated. “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, 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 absolute hopelessness of his mania.

  “You have envisioned precisely what you believe you have not envisioned. 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, not the soul of the world we know? There is only one world and one soul of that world, which appears in beauty or in boredom or in madness according to how deeply anima mundi has revealed itself to you. It is something which is not there when you look and there again when you look away.”

  “You speak as if it were a god or demon.”

  “There is no other or truer way. Like god or demon, it is an assemblage of ourselves though not of ourselves alone. 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 secretly in another part of hi
s house, 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.

  “Do not open your unhappy eyes, my friend, but listen to my words. I know the visions you have known, for they are the visions I was born to know. There are eyes within our eyes, and when these others open all becomes confusion and horror. 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 them. Now, for what reasons I cannot say, anima mundi has revealed itself to you in its most savage aspect; which is to say, its secret face. Thus, your life will 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 soundness or peace. 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 the lesser madness of anima mundi will diffuse into the infinite, all-penetrating vision of things in which madness is the sole substance and thereby becomes absent and meaningless for its very ubiquity and absolute meaning. But what would murder another man’s mind will bring yours peace, while making you a puppet of peace rather than its prince.

  “Henceforth, all things will be in your eyes a distant play of shadows that fretfully strive to impersonate something real, ghosts that clamor to pass themselves as flesh, masks that desperately flit about to conceal the stillness of the void behind them—henceforth, 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 to see that the greatest power, the only power, is to care for nothing.