The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

by Thomas Ligotti

  And I did knowwhat that meant. I felt intimations of a thousand discrete and misshapen marvels: of things going wrong in curious ways, of the edge of the world where an endless ribbon of road continued into space by itself, of a universe handed over to new gods. Father would gaze at my round little face, squinting his eyes as if I were giving off light. “Moon face,” he called me.

  When I got older, my features became more angular, an involuntary betrayal of my father’s conception of his little Alice, among all the other betrayals once I’d broken the barrier of maturity. I suppose it was a blessing that he did not live to see me grow up and change, saved from disappointment by a sudden explosion in his brain while he was giving a lecture at the college.

  But perhaps he would have perceived, as I did not for many years, that my “change” was illusory, that I merely picked up the conventional gestures of an aging soul (nervous breakdown, divorce, remarriage, alcoholism, widowhood, stoic tolerance of a second-rate reality) without destroying the Alice he loved. She was always kept very much alive, though relegated to the role of an author for children. Obviously she endured, because it was she who wrote all those books about her soul mate Preston, even if she has not written one for many years now.

  Not too many, I hope. Oh, those years, those years.

  So much for the past.

  At present I would like to deal with just a single year, the one ending today—about an hour from now, judging by the clock that five minutes ago chimed eleven p.m. from the shadows on the other side of this study. During the past three hundred and sixty-five days I have noticed, sometimes just barely, an accumulation of peculiar episodes in my life. A lack of tidiness, you might say.

  (As a result, I’ve been drinking heavily again; and loneliness is getting to me in ways it never did in the past. Ah, the past.) Some of these episodes are so elusive and insubstantial that it would be impossible to talk about them sensibly, except perhaps in the moods they leave behind like fingerprints, and which I’ve learned to read like divinatory signs. My task will be much easier if I confine myself to recounting but a few of the incidents, thereby giving them a certain form and structure I so badly need just now. A tidying up, so to speak.

  I should start by identifying tonight as that sacred eve which Preston always devotedly observed, celebrating it most intensely in Preston and the Ghost of the Gourd. (At least there should be a few minutes remaining of this immovable feast, according to the clock ticking at my back; though from the look of things, the hands seem stuck on the time I reported a couple of paragraphs ago.

  Perhaps I misjudged it before.)

  For the past several years I’ve made an appearance at the local suburban library on this night to give a reading from one of my books as the main event of an annual Hallowe’en fest. Tonight I managed to show up once again for the reading, even if I hesitate to say everything went as usual. Last year, however, I did not make it at all to the costume party. This brings me to what I think is the first in a yearlong series of disruptions unknown to a biography previously marked by nothing more than episodes of conventional chaos. My apologies for taking two steps backward before one step forward. As an old hand at storytelling, I realize this is always a risky approach when bidding for a reader’s attention. But here goes.

  Around this time last year I attended the funeral of someone from my past, long past. This was none other than that sprite of special genius whose exploits served as the primamateria for my Preston Penn books. The gesture was one of pure nostalgia, for I hadn’t actually seen this person since my twelfth birthday party. It was soon afterward that my father died, and my mother and I moved out of our house in North Sable, Mass, (see Childhood Homes of Children’s Authors for a photo of the old two-story frame job), heading for the big city and away from sad reminders. A local teacher who knew of my work, and its beginnings in North S, sent me a newspaper clipping from the Sable Sentinel, that reported the demise of my former playmate and even mentioned his secondhand literary fame.

  I arrived in town very quietly and was immediately overwhelmed by the lack of change in the place, as if it had existed all those years in a state of suspended animation and had been only recently reanimated for my benefit. It almost seemed that I might run into my old neighbours, schoolmates, and even Mr. So and So who ran the icecream shop, which I was surprised to see still in operation. On the other side of the window, a big man with a walrus mustache was digging ice cream from large cardboard cylinders, while two chubby kids pressed their bellies against the counter. The man hadn’t changed in the least over the years. He looked up and saw me staring into the shop, and there really seemed to be a twinkle of recognition in his puffy eyes. But that was impossible. He could have never perceived behind my ancient mask the child’s face he once knew, even if he had been Mr. So and So and not his look-alike (son? grandson?). Two complete strangers gawking at each other through a window smeared with the sticky handprints of sloppy patrons. The scene depressed me more than I can say.

  Unfortunately, an even more depressing reunion waited a few steps down the street. G. V. Ness and Sons, Funeral Directors. For all the years I’d lived in North Sable, this was only my second visit (“Good-bye, Daddy”) to that cold colonial building. But such places always seem familiar, having that perfectly vacant, neutral atmosphere common to all funeral homes, the same in my hometown as in the suburb outside New York (“Good riddance, Hubby”) where I’m now secluded.

  I strolled into the proper room unnoticed, another anonymous mourner who was a bit shy about approaching the casket. Although I drew a couple of small-town stares, the elderly, elegant author from New York did not stand out as much as she thought she would. But with or without distinction, it remained my intention to introduce myself to the widow as a childhood friend of her deceased husband.

  This intention, however, was shot all to hell by two oxlike men who rose from their seats on either side of the grieving lady and lumbered my way. For some reason I panicked.

  “You must be Dad’s Cousin Winnie from Boston. The family’s heard so much about you over the years,” they said.

  I smiled widely and gulped deeply, which must have looked like a nod of affirmation to them. In any case, they led me over to “Mom” and introduced me under my inadvertent pseudonym to the red-eyed, half-delirious old woman. (Why, I wonder, did I allow this goof to go on?) “Nice to finally meet you, and thank you for the lovely card you sent,” she said, sniffing loudly and working on her eyes with a grotesquely soiled handkerchief. “I’m Elsie.”

  Elsie Chester, I thought immediately, though I wasn’t entirely sure that this was the same person who was rumored to have sold kisses and other things to the boys at North Sable Elementary. So he had married her, whaddaya know? Possibly they had to get married, I speculated cattily. At least one of her sons looked old enough to have been the consequence of teenage impatience. Oh, well. So much for Preston’s vow to wed no one less than the Queen of Nightmares.

  But even greater disappointments awaited my notice. After chatting emptily with the widow for a few more moments, I excused myself to pay my respects at the coffinside of the deceased. Until then I’d deliberately averted my gaze from that flower-crazed area at the front of the room, where a shiny, pearl-gray casket held its occupant in much the same position as the “Traveling Tomb” racer he’d once constructed. This part of the mortuary ritual never fails to put me in mind of those corpse-viewing sessions to which children in the nineteenth century were subjected in order to acquaint them with their own mortality. At my age this was unnecessary, so allow me to skip quickly over this scene with a few tragic and inevitable words. …

  Bald and blemished, that was unconsciously expected. Totally unfamiliar, that wasn’t. The mosquito-faced child I once knew had had his features smushed and spread by the years—bloated, not with death but with having overfed himself at the turgid banquet of life, lethargically pushing away from the table just prior to explosion. A portrait of lazy indulgence. Defunct.
Used up. The eternal adult. (But perhaps in death, I consoled myself, a truer self was even now ripping off the false face of the thing before me. This must be so, for the idea of an afterworld populated with a preponderance of old, withered souls is too hideous to contemplate.)

  After paying homage to the remains of a memory, I slipped out of that room with a stealth my Preston would have been proud of. I’d left behind an envelope with a modest contribution to the widow’s fund. I had half a mind to send a batch of gaping black orchids to the funeral home with a note signed by Laetitia Simpson, Preston’s dwarfish girlfriend. But this was something that the other Alice would have done—the one who wrote those strange books.

  As for me, I got into my car and drove out of town to a nice big Holiday Inn near the interstate, where I found a nice suite—spoils of a successful literary career—and a bar. And as it turned out, this overnight layover must take us down another side road (or back road, if you like) of my narrative. Please stand by.

  A late-afternoon crowd had settled into the hotel’s barroom, relieving me of the necessity of drinking in total solitude, which at the time I was quite prepared to do. After a couple of Scotches on the rocks, I noticed a young man looking my way from the other side of that greenish room. At least he appeared young, extremely so, from a distance. But as I walked over to sit at his table, with a boldness I’ve never attributed to alcohol, he seemed to gain a few years with every step I took. He was now only relatively young—from an old dowager’s point of view, that is. His name was Hank De Vere, and he worked for a distributor of gardening tools and other such products, in Maine. But let’s not pretend to care about the details. Later we had dinner together, after which I invited him to my suite.

  It was the next morning, by the way, that inaugurated that yearlong succession of experiences which I’m methodically trying to sort out with a few select examples. Half step forward coming up: pawn to king three.

  I awoke in the darkness peculiar to hotel bedrooms, abnormally heavy curtains masking the morning light. Immediately it became apparent that I was alone. My new acquaintance seemed to have a more developed sense of tact and timing than I had given him credit for. At least I thought so at first. But then I looked through the open doorway into the other room, where I could see a convex mirror in an artificial wood frame on the wall.

  The bulging eye of the mirror reflected almost the entire next room in convexed perspective, and I noticed someone moving around in there. In the mirror, that is. A tiny, misshapen figure seemed to be gyring about, leaping almost, in a way that should have been audible to me. But it wasn’t.

  I called out a name I barely remembered from the night before. There came no answer from the next room, but the movement in the mirror stopped, and the tiny figure (whatever it was) disappeared. Very cautiously I got up from the bed, robed myself, and peeked around the corner of the doorway like a curious child on Christmas morning. A strange combination of relief and confusion arose in me when I saw that there was no one else in the suite.

  I approached the mirror, perhaps to search its surface for the little something that might have caused the illusion. My memory is vague on this point, since at the time I was a bit hung over. But I can recall with spectacular vividness what I finally saw after gazing into the mirror for a few moments. Suddenly the sphered glass before me became clouded with a mysterious fog, from the depths of which appeared the waxy face of a corpse. It was the visage of that old cadaver I’d seen at the funeral home, now with eyes open and staring reproachfully into mine. …

  Of course I really saw nothing of the kind. I did not even imagine it, except just now. But somehow this imaginary manifestation seems more fitting and conclusive than what I actually found in the mirror, which was only my old and haggard face … a corpselike countenance if ever there was one.

  But there was another conclusion, let’s say encore, to this episode with the mirror. A short while later I was checking out, and as the desk clerk was fiddling with my bill, I happened to look out of a nearby window, beyond which two children were romping on the lawn in front of the hotel: an arm-swinging, leaping mime show. After a few seconds the kids caught me watching them. They stopped and stared back at me, standing perfectly still, side by side… then suddenly they were running away. The room took a little spin that only I seemed to notice, while others went calmly about their business. Possibly this experience can be attributed to my failure to employ the usual postdebauch remedies that morning. The old nerves were somewhat shot, and my stomach was giving me no peace. Still, I’ve remained in pretty fair health over the years, all things considered, and I drove back home without further incident.

  That was a year ago. (Get ready for one giant step forward: the old queen is now in play.)

  In the succeeding months I noted a number of similar happenings, though they occurred with varying degrees of clarity. Most of them approached the fleeting nature of deja-vu phenomena. A few could be pegged as self-manufactured, while others lacked a definite source. I might see a phrase or the fragment of an image that would make my heart flip over (not a healthy thing at my age), while my mind searched for some correspondence that triggered this powerful sense of repetition and familiarity: the sound of a delayed echo with oblique origins.

  I delved into dreams, half-conscious perceptions, and the distortions of memory, but all that remained was a chain of occurrences with links as weak as smoke rings.

  And today, one year later, this tenuous haunting has regained the clarity of the first incident at the hotel. Specifically I refer to a pair of episodes that have caused me to become a little insecure about my psychic balance and to attempt to confirm my lucidity by writing it all out. Organization is what’s needed. Thus:

  Episode One. Place: The Bathroom. Time: A Little After Eight a.m., the Last Day of October.

  The water was running for my morning bath, cascading into the tub a bit noisily for my sensitive ears. The night before, I suffered from an advanced case of insomnia, which even extra doses of my beloved Guardsman’s Reserve Stock did not help. I was very glad to see a sunny autumn morning come and rescue me. My bathroom mirror, however, would not let me forget the sleepless night I’d spent, and I combed and creamed myself without noticeable improvement. Sandal was with me, lying atop the toilet tank and scrutinizing the waters of the bowl below.

  She was actually staring very hard and deliberately at something. I’d never seen a cat stare at its own reflection and have always been under the impression that they cannot see reflected images of themselves. (Lucky them!) But this one saw something. “What is it, Sandal?” I asked with the patronizing voice of a pet owner. Her tail had a life of its own; she stood up and hissed, then yowled in that horribly demonic falsetto of threatened felines. Finally she dashed out of the bathroom, relinquishing her ground for the first time in all my memory of her.

  I had been loitering at the other side of the room, a groggy bystander to an unexpected scene. With a large plastic hairbrush gripped in my left hand, I investigated. I gazed down into the same waters, and though at first they seemed clear enough, something soon appeared from within that porcelain burrow. It had dozens of legs and looked all backward and inside out, but what was most disgusting about the thing was that it had a tiny human head, one like a baby’s except all blue and shriveled.

  This latter part, of course, is an exaggeration; or rather, it’s an alarm without a fire. It helps if I can tack a neat storybook finish onto these episodes, because what seem to be their real conclusions just leave me hanging. You can’t have stories end that way and still expect to hold your reader’s esteem. Some genius once said that literature was invented the first time a certain boy cried “Wolf!” and there was none. I suppose this is what I’m doing now. Crying wolf. Not that it’s my intention to make a fiction out of what is real. (Much too real, judging by my recent overdrinking and resultant late-night vomiting sessions.) But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality
—which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair. So don’t worry about my cries of wolf. Even if it turns out that I’m making everything up, at least what you have left can be enjoyed as a story—no small value to my mind. It’s just a different story, that’s all: one about another old-lady author of children’s yarns, which, incidentally, has nothing to do with the “truth” one way or the other.

  So: Yes, I was in the bathroom, staring into the toilet bowl. The truth is that there was nothing in there, except nice, disinfected water of a bluish tint. The water was still, like a miniature lake, and cruelly reflected a miniature face.

  That’s all I really saw, my hysterical kitty notwithstanding. I gazed at my wrinkled self in the magic pool for a few moments longer and then cocked the handle to flush it away. (You were right, Father, it doesn’t pay to get old and ugly.)

  I spent the rest of the morning lying around the baggy old suburban home my second husband left me when he died some years ago. An old war movie on television helped me pass the time. (And vain lady that I am, what I remember most about the war is the shortage of silk and other luxury items, like the quicksilver needed to make a mirror of superior reflective powers.) In the afternoon I began preparing myself for the reading I was to give at the library, the preparation being mostly alcoholic. I’ve never looked forward to this annual ordeal and only put up with it out of a sense of duty, vanity, and other less comprehensible motives. Maybe this is why I welcomed the excuse to skip it last year. And I wanted to skip it this year, too, if only I could have come up with a reason satisfactory to the others involved—and, more importantly, to myself. Wouldn’t want to disappoint the children, would I? Of course not, though heaven only knows why. Children have made me nervous ever since I stopped being one of them. Perhaps this is why I never had any of my own—adopted any, that is—for the doctors told me long ago that I’m about as fertile as the seas of the moon.