Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

  As always, there was no one else in the church at this time of day (and with hours remaining of it). Everything was very 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 his unrested body into a pew at the back. His eyes were fixed on the distant apse, where everything—pillars, pictures, pulpit—was partially folded within shadows that seemed to be the creation of dark hours. But his insomnia was not at issue here, nor the pernicious rancor that derived from it. His sufferings and transgressions alike were allowed reprieve. None of the devils and demons he had inserted into a certain collaboration of his would invade this church and violate its solemnity. He followed the moments as they tried to move past him. Each was smothered by 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 to him from the pulpit. Yes, a pulpit in such a large church would be equipped with a microphone that amplified normal speech. Then why not speak normally—why whisper in such confused language and so rapidly, the effect being that of a single voice multiplying itself into many? What were the voices saying now? He could not understand them, as if he were hearing them in a dream. If only he could move, just turn his head a little. And if only he could open his eyes and see what was wrong. The voices kept repeating without fading, echoing without end in what now seemed a fantastically spacious church. Then, with an effort sufficient to move the earth itself, he managed to turn his head 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 ran out of the church. And he kept running as if in flight from the hissing discord that now filled the seaside air, like static from a broken radio, and from what sounded like breaking waves close at his back. There was not much daylight left and he did not want to be caught in the damp and chill of an off-season evening. What misjudgments he had made that day, what mistakes, there was no question about it. An eternity of sleeplessness was to be preferred if those were the dreams sleep had in waiting.

  And when Alb Indys reached his room, he was thinking about a gleaming crescent moon ready to be placed in a new scene. How thankful he was to have some project, however malicious in spirit, 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 beneath his 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. 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 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. Yet it had not been done rightly. 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: in these he penned only 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? Something was gravely wrong. If only he were not so drained by chronic insomnia, all those lost dreams swishing around 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 beside the window. 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 very well could have slept through what would usually be one of his white nights of insomnia had it not been for a noise that wakened him. The room was moderately brightened by a blade of moon whose light came through the window. The moonlight even made visible the stuffed chair whose representation appeared in the drawing that had been meddled with. If only Alb Indys had examined the drawing more closely, he might have observed that something was crouching in that chair, that its softly packed arms had other arms overhanging them—two thin appendages that were now flexing in the room’s faint luminescence. White night, white noise. As if speaking in static, a parched, crackling voice repeatedly croaked these words: I am a doctor. Then the roundish occupant of the chair hopped onto the bed with a single thrust, and its claws began their work, delivering the bedeviled artist to his miraculous remedy.

  • • •

  It was the landlord who eventually found Alb Indys, though there was considerable difficulty identifying what lay on the bed. A rumor spread throughout the seaside town about a swift-acting and terrible disease, something that one of the tourists might have brought in. But no other trouble was reported. Much later, the entire incident was confused by preposterous fabulations which had the effect of relegating it to the doubtful realm of regional legend.

  THE TROUBLES OF DR. THOSS

  When Alb Indys first heard the name of Dr. Thoss, he was flustered by his inability to locate the source from which it emanated. Right from the start, though, there seemed to be at least two voices chattering this name just within earshot, saying it over and over as if it were the central topic of some rambling discourse. Initially their words sounded as if they were being emitted by an old radio in another apartment, for Alb Indys had no such device of his own. But he finally realized that the name was being uttered, in rather hoarse tones, in the street below his window, which was set in the wall not far from the foot of his bed. After spending the night, not unusually, walking the floor or slumping wide-eyed in a stuffed chair beside the aforementioned window, he was now, at mid-afternoon, still attired in pale gray pajamas. Since morning he had kept to his bed, propped up against its tall headboard by huge pillows. Upon his lap rested a drawing book filled with thick sheets of paper, very white. A bottle of black ink was in reach on the bedside table, and a shapely black pen with a silvery nib was held tightly in his right hand. Presently Alb Indys was busily at work on a pen-and-ink rendering of the window and stuffed chair he had begun during his wakefulness the night before. That was when he overheard, however indistinctly, the voices down in the street.

  Alb Indys tossed the drawing book farther down the bed, where it fell against a lump swelling in the blankets: more than likely the creation of a wadded pair of trousers or an old shirt, possibly both, given the artist’s personal habits. The window of his room was partly open and, walking over to it, he discreetly pushed it out a little more. They should have been close by, those speakers whom Alb Indys wished would go on speaking. He remembered hearing one voice say, “It’s going to be the end of someone’s troubles,” or words to that effect, with the name of Dr. Thoss figuring in the discussion. The appellation was unfamiliar to him and gave rise to feelings that had much less to do with hope, which Alb Indys tried to keep at a minimum, than it did with nervous expectancy, as of some fore-vision of the unknown. But the talking had stopped, and just as he was becoming interested in this doctor. Where were they, those interlocutors? How could they have simply vanished?

  When he fully extended the bedroom window, Alb Indys saw no one on the street. He stretched forward for a better look.
Strands of blond hair, almost white, fell across his face, and then by a sudden salty breeze were blown back, thin and loose. It was not a very brilliant day, not one of excess activity. A few silhouettes and shadows maneuvered in the dimness on the other side of unreflecting windows. The stones of the street, so sparkling and picturesque for those enjoying a holiday here, succumbed to dullness out of season. Alb Indys fixed on one of them which looked dislodged in the pavement, imagining he heard it working itself free, creaking around in its stony cradle. But the noise was that of metal hinges squeaking somewhere in the wind. He quickly found them, his hearing made keen by insomnia. They were attached to a wooden sign hung outside the uppermost window of an old building. The structure ascended in peaks and slants and ledges into the gray sky, until at its highest, turreted point swung the sign. Alb Indys could never clearly make out its four capital letters so far above, though he had gazed up at them a thousand times. (And how often it seemed that something gazed back at him from that high window.) But a radio station need not be a visual presence in an old resort town, only an aural landmark, a voice for vacationers signaling the “sound beside the sea.”

  Alb Indys closed the window and returned to his thin-lined representation of it. Though he began the picture in the middle of a sleepless night, he did not copy the constellations beyond the windowpanes, keeping the drawing unmarred by any artistic suggestion of those star-filled hours. Nothing was in the window but the pure whiteness of the page, the pale abyss of unshut eyes. After making a few more marks on the picture, completing it, he signed his work very neatly in the lower right-hand corner. This page would later be put in one of the large portfolios stacked upon a desk across the room.

  What else was contained in these portfolios? Two sorts of things, two types of artwork which between them told of the nature and limits of Alb Indys’s pictorial talents. The first type included such scenes as the artist had recently executed: images of his immediate surroundings, sights observable within his room. This was not his first study of the window, the subject he most often returned to and always in the same plain style. Sometimes he sat in the chair beside the window and portrayed his bed, lumpy and unmade, with occasional attention to the side table (noting each nick that blemished its original off-white surface) and the undecorated lamp which stood upon it (recording each chip that pocked its glassy smoothness). The desk-side of the room also received its fair share of treatments. The wall at that end of the room was the most tempting of the four, in itself a subtle canvas that had been painted and pitted and painted again, coated and repeatedly scraped of infinitesimal, sea-town organisms, leaving it shriveled and pasty and incurably damp. No pictures were hung to patch either this or any other wall of the room, though a tall bookcase obscured who knows what unseen worlds behind it. Transitory compositions—a flung shoe leaning toe-up against a bedpost, a dropped glove which hazard endowed with a pointing index finger—formed the remaining examples of this first type of drawing in which the artist indulged.

  And the second type? Was it more interesting than the first? Perhaps, though not as far as imagination was concerned, for Alb Indys had none whatever, or at least none that he employed in a customary sense—that of evoking from within himself something that did not already exist outside him. Whenever he tried to form a picture of something, anything, in his mind, all he saw was a blank: a new page that retained the purity of its original mintage, nothingness unstained by inner conception. Once he nearly had a vision of something, a few specks flying across a fuzzy background of white snow in a white sky—and there was a garbled voice which he had not intentionally conjured. But it all fizzled out after a few seconds into a silent stretch of emptiness. This artistic handicap, however, was anything but a frustration or a disappointment to Alb Indys. He did not often test the powers of his imagination, for he somehow knew that there was as much to be lost as gained in doing so. In any case, there were many ways to make a picture, and Alb Indys had a second method, as mentioned, by which he created his artworks, one that differed markedly from his first, more conventional, idiom.

  The second technique that Alb Indys put to use could be styled as a kind of artistic forgery, though it might just as well be described by the term which he himself preferred—collaboration. And who were his collaborators? In many instances, there was no way of knowing: anonymous penmen, mostly, of illustrations in very old books and periodicals. His shelves were full of them, dark and massive, their worn covers incredibly tender to the touch. French, Flemish, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, any cultural source of published material would do as long as its pictures spoke the language of dark lines and vacant spaces. In fact, the more disparate the origins of these images, the better they served his purpose: because Alb Indys liked to take a century-old engraving of a sub-arctic landscape, studiously plagiarize its manner of depicting vast expanses of frozen whiteness, then select an equally old depiction of a church in a foreign town he had never heard of, painstakingly transport it stone by stone deep into the glacial desert, and finally, from still older pages, transcribe with all possible fidelity an unknown artist’s conception of assorted devils and demons, making them dance down from the ice-mad mountains and invade the house of worship. This was the typical process and product of his work with collaborators, whose art Alb Indys plainly exploited in ways their fabricators never intended. Confiscating their images, he was moved to patch them to one another in a spirit of malicious abandon, as though to express the deranging effects worked upon him by the cruel vigilance he suffered night after night. Under his careful eye and steady hand there took place a mingling of artistic forms that together were monstrously chimerical, their disparate components tumbling out of the years to create nightmarish anatomies. For it seemed perfectly natural to Alb Indys that, like everything else, the most innocuous phenomena should eventually find their way from good dreams into bad, or from bad dreams into those that were wholly abysmal.

  At the moment he was working on a new collaboration, but all he had as yet was its barest beginnings: a sickle-shaped scar of moon, a common enough image which Alb Indys wanted to remove from one black sky and fix in another where it would take on a more ominous significance. Its relocation could have provided him with a way to waste the rest of the afternoon. However, the commotion outside the window earlier had upset the pace of his day and given it a new rhythm. Almost any event could do this to an insomniac’s fragile routine, so as yet there was no reason to contemplate the phenomenal. An appearance by his landlord, whether rent-hungry or merely casual, sometimes altered his course for weeks after. Before, his thoughts were of nothing, genuinely. But now old preoccupations had become stirred up and took on an edge. Was there anything special about this doctor, this Thoss? Alb Indys could not help wondering. Was he like the others, or was he a doctor who would hear, really hear you? Not one had yet heard him, not one had offered him a remedy worth the name.

  If there was indeed a new doctor who had set up practice in the seaside town, Alb Indys could encounter none of this individual’s cures, either real or pretended, by staying at home. He needed to find out some things for himself, make inquiries, get out into the world. When was the last time he had had a good meal? Perhaps that would be a way to begin, and afterward he could take it from there. One could always get acceptable food at the place right around the corner, with no reason to fear they were poisoning their patrons. Good, he thought. And once he had eaten he might have a nice walk for himself, gain some advantage from the fresh air and scenery of the town. After all, many people came here for vaguely therapeutic reasons, believing there were medicines dispensed by the very mood of the town’s quaint streets and its sea-licked shores. It might even happen that his maladies would disappear of their own accord, leaving him with no need for this doctor, this Thoss.

  He dressed himself in dark, heavy clothes and made sure to lock the door behind him. But he had forgotten to shut the window properly and a breeze edged in, disturbing the pages of
the drawing book on his bed, fluttering them against that lump in the blankets.

  • • •

  At the eatery Alb Indys chose for his repast, he found a small table in a quiet, comfortable corner where he sat facing the rear wall and an unoccupied chair. Toward the front of the one-room establishment was a large blackboard that enumerated the specialties being offered. But because of his distance from the blackboard, and a certain atmospheric dimness of the place, only a single word in bold letters was easily readable. So he ordered that.

  “Fish,” he said when the waitress arrived.

  “Fish of the day?”

  “Yes,” he had answered, mechanically and without a trace of the anticipation he thought he might feel.

  But despite his lack of interest in daily meals, he did not regret this outing. A little lamp attached to the wall next to him, its light muffled by a grayish shade of some coarse fabric, created a nocturnal ambiance in the corner of the room where he sat. And it was not long before Alb Indys found that if he kept his gaze fixed upon a certain knotty plank in the wall just above the chair facing him, everything peripheral to his left eye’s vision faded into a dark fog, while the little lamp to his right cast an island of illumination upon the table at which he was seated. This manipulation of his vision instilled in him the feeling that he was nestled in a glowing refuge somewhere in the darkness of an unknown hinterland. But he could not sustain the illusion. The state of mild delight into which he fooled himself faded, while shapes around him sharpened.

  Yet without this sharpening would he have noticed the newspaper someone had left on the seat of the other chair? Messily bunched and repeatedly creased, it was still a welcome sight to his eyes. At this point he needed something to open his mind to the world around him, something to free his awareness of the coming night wherein he would have to face the verdict that would either terminate or terribly elongate his wakefulness. He reached for the pages, then 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, enlivened by imaginary consultations with a legendary doctor and his fictitious cures.