Teatro Grottesco

by Thomas Ligotti

  It was only when the bell rang to signal the end of the work day, sounding several hours later than we were accustomed to hearing it, that I had a chance to speak with the new employee. Once we were outside the factory, and everyone was proceeding in a state of silent exhaustion back to town, I made a point of catching up to him as he strode at a quick pace through the dense, grayish fog. I didn’t mince words. ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded to know.

  Unexpectedly he stopped dead in his tracks and faced me, although we could barely see each other through the fog. Then I saw his head turn slightly in the direction of the factory we had left some distance behind us. ‘Listen, my friend,’ he said, his voice filled with a grave sincerity. ‘I’m not looking for trouble. I hope you’re not either.’

  ‘Wasn’t I working right along with you?’ I said. ‘Wasn’t everyone?’

  ‘Yes. You all made a good start.’

  ‘So I take it you’re working with the new supervisor.’

  ‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘I don’t know anything about that. I couldn’t tell you anything about that.’

  ‘But you’ve worked under similar conditions before, isn’t that true?’

  ‘I work for the company, just like you. The company sent me here.’

  ‘But something must have changed at the company,’ I said. ‘Something new is happening.’

  ‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘The Quine Organization is always making adjustments and refinements in the way it does business. It just took some time for it to reach you out here. You’re a long way from company headquarters, or even the closest regional center.’

  ‘There’s more of this coming, isn’t there?’

  ‘Possibly. But there really isn’t any point in discussing such things. Not if you want to continue working for the company. Not if you want to stay out of trouble.’

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘I have to go. Please don’t try to discuss this matter with me again.’

  ‘Are you saying that you’re going to report me?’

  ‘No,’ he said, his eyes looking back at the factory. ‘That’s not necessary these days.’

  Then he turned and walked off at a quick pace into the fog.

  The next morning I returned to the factory along with everyone else. We worked at an even faster rate and were even more productive. Part of this was due to the fact that the bell that signaled the end of the work day rang later than it had the day before. This lengthening of the time we spent at the factory, along with the increasingly fast rate at which we worked, became an established pattern. It wasn’t long before we were allowed only a few hours away from the factory, only a few hours that belonged to us, although the only possible way we could use this time was to gain the rest we needed in order to return to the exhausting labors which the company now demanded of us.

  But I had always possessed higher hopes for my life, hopes that were becoming more and more vague with each passing day. I have to resign my position at the factory. These were the words that raced through my mind as I tried to gain a few hours of rest before returning to my job. I had no idea what such a step might mean, since I had no other prospects for earning a living, and I had no money saved that would enable me to keep my room in the apartment building where I lived. In addition, the medications I required, that almost everyone on this side of the border requires to make their existence at all tolerable, were prescribed by doctors who were all employed by the Quine Organization and filled by pharmacists who also operated only at the sufferance of this company. All of that notwithstanding, I still felt that I had no choice but to resign my position at the factory.

  At the end of the hallway outside my apartment there was a tiny niche in which was located a telephone for public use by the building’s tenants. I would have to make my resignation using this telephone, since I couldn’t imagine doing so in person. I couldn’t possibly enter the office of the temporary supervisor, as Blecher had done. I couldn’tgo into that room enclosed by heavily frosted glass behind which I and my fellow workers had observed something that appeared in various forms and manifestations, from an indistinct shape that seemed to shift and churn like a dark cloud to something more defined that appeared to have a ‘head part’ and ‘arm-protrusions.’ Given this situation, I would use the telephone to call the closest regional center and make my resignation to the appropriate person in charge of such matters.

  The telephone niche at the end of the hallway outside my apartment was so narrow that I had to enter it sideways. In the confines of that space there was barely enough room to make the necessary movements of placing coins in the telephone that hung on the wall and barely enough light to see what number one was dialing. I remember how concerned I was not to dial a wrong number and thereby lose a portion of what little money I had. After taking every possible precaution to insure that I would successfully complete my phone call, a process that seemed to take hours, I reached someone at the closest regional center operated by the company.

  The phone rang so many times that I feared no one would ever answer. Finally the ringing stopped and, after a pause, I heard a barely audible voice. It sounded thin and distant.

  ‘Quine Organization, Northwest Regional Center.’

  ‘Yes,’ I began. ‘I would like to resign my position at the company,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry, did you say that you wanted to resign from the company? You sound so far away,’ said the voice.

  ‘Yes, I want to resign,’ I shouted into the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘I want to resign. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, I can hear you. But the company is not accepting resignations at this time. I’m going to transfer you to our temporary supervisor.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, but the transfer had been made and once again the phone began ringing so many times that I feared no one would answer.

  Then the ringing stopped, although no voice came on the line. ‘Hello,’ I said. But all I could hear was an indistinct, though highly reverberant, noise – a low roaring sound that alternately faded and swelled as if it were echoing through vast spaces deep within the caverns of the earth or across a clouded sky. This noise, this low and bestial roaring, affected me with a dread I could not name. I held the telephone receiver away from my ear, but the roaring noise continued to sound within my head. Then I felt the telephone quivering in my hand, pulsing like something that was alive. And when I slammed the telephone receiver back into its cradle, this quivering and pulsing sensation continued to move up my arm, passing through my body and finally reaching my brain where it became synchronized with the low roaring noise which was now growing louder and louder, confusing my thoughts into an echoing insanity and paralyzing my movements so that I could not even scream for help.

  I was never sure that I had actually made that telephone call to resign my position at the company. And if in fact I did make such a call, I could never be certain that what I experienced – what I heard and felt in that telephone niche at the end of the hallway outside my apartment – in any way resembled the dreams which recurred every night after I stopped showing up for work at the factory. No amount of medication I took could prevent the nightly onset of these dreams, and no amount of medication could efface their memory from my mind. Soon enough I had taken so much medication that I didn’t have a sufficient amount left to overdose my system, as Blecher had done. And since I was no longer employed, I could not afford to get my prescription refilled and thereby acquire the medication I needed to tolerate my existence. Of course I might have done away with myself in some other manner, should I have been so inclined. But somehow I still retained higher hopes for my life. Accordingly, I returned to see if I could get my job back at the factory. After all, hadn’t the person I spoke with at the regional center told me that the Quine Organization was not accepting resignations at this time?

  Of course I couldn’t be sure what I had been told over the telephone, or even if I had made such a call to resign my position with the company. It was
n’t until I actually walked onto the floor of the factory that I realized I still had a job there if I wanted one, for the place where I had stood for such long hours at my assembly block was unoccupied. Already attired in my gray work clothes, I walked over to the assembly block and began fitting together, at a furious pace, those small metal pieces. Without pausing in my task I looked across the assembly block at the person I had once thought of as the ‘new man.’

  ‘Welcome back,’ he said in a casual voice.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied.

  ‘I told Mr Frowley that you would return any day now.’

  For a moment I was overjoyed at the implicit news that the temporary supervisor was gone and Mr Frowley was back managing the factory. But when I looked over at his office in the corner I noticed that behind the heavily frosted glass there were no lights on, although the large-bodied outline of Mr Frowley could be distinguished sitting behind his desk. Nevertheless, he was a changed man, as I discovered soon after returning to work. No one and nothing at the factory would ever again be as it once was. We were working practically around the clock now. Some of us began to stay the night at the factory, sleeping for an hour or so in a corner before going back to work at our assembly blocks.

  After returning to work I no longer suffered from the nightmares that had caused me to go running back to the factory in the first place. And yet I continued to feel, if somewhat faintly, the atmosphere of those nightmares, which was so like the atmosphere our temporary supervisor had brought to the factory. I believe that this feeling of the overseeing presence of the temporary supervisor was a calculated measure on the part of the Quine Organization, which is always making adjustments and refinements in the way it does business.

  The company retained its policy of not accepting resignations. It even extended this policy at some point and would not allow retirements. We were all prescribed new medications, although I can’t say exactly how many years ago that happened. No one at the factory can remember how long we’ve worked here, or how old we are, yet our pace and productivity continues to increase. It seems as if neither the company nor our temporary supervisor will ever be done with us. Yet we are only human beings, or at least physical beings, and one day we must die. This is the only retirement we can expect, even though none of us is looking forward to that time. For we can’t keep from wondering what might come afterward – what the company could have planned for us, and the part our temporary supervisor might play in that plan. Working at a furious pace, fitting together those small pieces of metal, helps keep our minds off such things.

  IN A FOREIGN TOWN, IN A FOREIGN LAND

  HIS SHADOW SHALL RISE TO A HIGHER HOUSE

  In the middle of the night I lay wide awake in bed, listening to the dull black drone of the wind outside my window and the sound of bare branches scraping against the shingles of the roof just above me. Soon my thoughts became fixed upon a town, picturing its various angles and aspects, a remote town near the northern border. Then I remembered that there was a hilltop graveyard that hovered not far beyond the edge of town. I have never told a soul about this graveyard, which for a time was a source of great anguish for those who had retreated to the barren landscape of the northern border.

  It was within the hilltop graveyard, a place that was far more populated than the town over which it hovered, that the body of Ascrobius had been buried. Known throughout the town as a recluse who possessed an intensely contemplative nature, Ascrobius had suffered from a disease that left much of his body in a grossly deformed condition. Nevertheless, despite the distinguishing qualities of his severe deformity and his intensely contemplative nature, the death of Ascrobius was an event that passed almost entirely unnoticed. All of the notoriety gained by the recluse, all of the comment I attached to his name, occurred sometime after his disease-mangled body had been housed among the others in the hilltop graveyard.

  At first there was no specific mention of Ascrobius, but only a kind of twilight talk – dim and pervasive murmurs that persistently revolved around the graveyard outside of town, often touching upon more general topics of a morbid character, including some abstract discourse, as I interpreted it, on the phenomenon of the grave. More and more, whether one moved about the town or remained in some secluded quarter of it, this twilight talk became familiar and even invasive. It emerged from shadowed doorways along narrow streets, from half-opened windows of the highest rooms of the town’s old houses, and from the distant corners of labyrinthine and resonant hallways. Everywhere, it seemed, there were voices that had become obsessed to the point of hysteria with a single subject: the ‘missing grave.’ No one mistook these words to mean a grave that somehow had been violated, its ground dug up and its contents removed, or even a grave whose headstone had absconded, leaving the resident of some particular plot in a state of anonymity. Even I, who was less intimate than many others with the peculiar nuances of the northern border town, understood what was meant by the words ‘a missing grave’ or ‘an absent grave.’ The hilltop graveyard was so dense with headstones and its ground so riddled with interments that such a thing would be astonishingly apparent: where there once had been a grave like any other, there was now, in the same precious space, only a patch of virgin earth.

  For a certain period of time, speculation arose concerning the identity of the occupant of the missing grave. Because there existed no systematic record-keeping for any particular instance of burial in the hilltop graveyard – when or where or for whom an interment took place – the discussions over the occupant of the missing grave, or the former occupant, always degenerated into outbursts of the wildest nonsense or simply faded into a vaporous and sullen confusion. Such a scene was running its course in the cellar of an abandoned building where several of us had gathered one evening. It was on this occasion that a gentleman calling himself Dr Klatt first suggested ‘Ascrobius’ as the name upon the headstone of the missing grave. He was almost offensively positive in this assertion, as if there were not an abundance of headstones on the hilltop graveyard with erroneous or unreadable names, or none at all.

  For some time Klatt had been advertising himself around town as an individual who possessed a distinguished background in some discipline of a vaguely scientific nature. This persona or imposture, if it was one, would not have been unique in the history of the northern border town. However, when Klatt began to speak of the recent anomaly not as a missing grave, even an absent grave, but as an uncreated grave, the others began to listen. Soon enough it was the name of Ascrobius that was mentioned most frequently as the occupant of the missing – now uncreated – grave. At the same time the reputation of Dr Klatt became closely linked to that of the deceased individual who was well known for both his grossly deformed body and his intensely contemplative nature.

  During this period it seemed that anywhere in town one happened to find oneself, Klatt was there holding forth on the subject of his relationship to Ascrobius, whom he now called his ‘patient.’ In the cramped back rooms of shops long gone out of business or some other similarly out-of-the-way locale – a remote street corner, for instance – Klatt spoke of the visits he had made to the high backstreet house of Ascrobius and of the attempts he had made to treat the disease from which the recluse had long suffered. In addition, Klatt boasted of insights he had gained into the deeply contemplative personality whom most of us had never met, let alone conversed with at any great length. While Klatt appeared to enjoy the attention he received from those who had previously dismissed him as just another impostor in the northern border town, and perhaps still considered him as such, I believe he was unaware of the profound suspicion, and even dread, that he inspired due to what certain persons called his ‘meddling’ in the affairs of Ascrobius. ‘Thou shalt not meddle’ was an unspoken, though seldom observed, commandment of the town, or so it seemed to me. And Klatt’s exposure of the formerly obscure existence of Ascrobius, even if the doctor’s anecdotes were misleading or totally fabricated, would be regarded as a high
ly perilous form of meddling by many longtime residents of the town.

  Nonetheless, nobody turned away whenever Klatt began talking about the diseased, contemplative recluse: nobody tried to silence or even question whatever claims he made concerning Ascrobius. ‘He was a monster,’ said the doctor to some of us who were gathered one night in a ruined factory on the outskirts of the town. Klatt frequently stigmatized Ascrobius as either a ‘monster’ or a ‘freak,’ though these epithets were not intended simply as a reaction to the grotesque physical appearance of the notorious recluse. It was in a strictly metaphysical sense, according to Klatt, that Ascrobius should be viewed as most monstrous and freakish, qualities that emerged as a consequence of his intensely contemplative nature. ‘He had incredible powers available to him,’ said the doctor. ‘He might even have cured himself of his diseased physical condition; who can say? But all of his powers of contemplation, all of those incessant meditations that took place in his high backstreet house, were directed toward another purpose altogether.’ Saying this much, Dr Klatt fell silent in the flickering, makeshift illumination of the ruined factory. It was almost as if he were waiting for one of us to prompt his next words, so that we might serve as accomplices in this extraordinary gossip over his deceased patient, Ascrobius.