Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

  Who, then? What? When and why? According to the article, Thoss might well have been 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 lamentable tragedy. A superb physician, and a most respected figure in his 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 an utterly 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 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 have possessed the following traits: it was smallish, “no bigger than a man’s head”; shriveled and rotting, as if with disease or decomposition; spoke in a rasping voice or in several voices at once; and moved 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 a fancied agent of spectral hideousness, a bogey for children or a spook whose yarn is spun around a campfire? Ultimately the point of the legend is unclear, the article asserted, except as a means for fascinating the 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 the 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 mind 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 shining 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 hill and the sidewalk ended in a flight of old stone stairs that had curving grins sliced into them by time. 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. As he closed in, he saw the great hexagonal peak, hornlike, projecting above brown-leafed trees. Surrounding the graveyard was a vertical barrier of thin black bars, with a thicker bar horizontally connecting them through the middle, spine-like. There was no gate, and the road he was on freely entered the church grounds. To his left and right were headstones and monuments. They formed a forest of memorials, clumps of crosses and groves of gravestones. Some of them were so tilted by the years that they looked as if they were about to topple over. But could one of them have just now fallen down entirely? Something was missing that seemed to have been there a moment ago. When Alb Indys reached the edge of the graveyard he turned around, surveying not only the markers 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 the six-sided tower that crowned the edifice. This great structure—with its dark, cowl-shaped windows and broken Roman-numeral 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 crashing waves, 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 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 bro
ken 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.

  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 in some measure to blame for many unforeseen incidents. Every violation of routine order was being committed by carousing masses, their high-register songs of celebration harmonizing with a low, droning pedal point which seemed to be sustained by the night itself. Having declared their town an enemy of quiescence, the people of Soldori had taken 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 extravaganzas perpetrated by his counterparts in Lynnese or Daranzella, was now holding a lavish masquerade, if only as a strategic concession to his subjects. Of all the inhabitants of the Three Towns, those under the rule of the Duke of Soldori—occasionally to the duke’s dismay—were the most loving of amusement. In every quarter of their usually sedate principality, frolicking merrymakers combed the night for a new paradise, and were as likely to find it in a blood-match as in a bewitching countenance. 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 three well-drunk and hog-faced men seated in a roisterous hostelry might well 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 garbed in a craze of colors, none of them construed to a pointed effect. One might have described this outfit as a motley gone mad. Indeed, 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, nor even those who, like Faliol himself, were both—would have dared to duplicate. But now these notorious colors were buried under a rainbow of rags which were tied about the man’s arms, legs, and every other part 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 frayed 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, 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, was the presence on his face of a pair of spectacles. And given that these spectacles were darkly tinged, as though fashioned from some murky substance, 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 ensconced, he strode 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 identical to the onyx-eyed amulet which in other days hung from a silver chain around his lean throat.

  Now, however, no medallion ornamented 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 inscribed upon its soft, worn cover. And the cover of the book was black, while the characters of its title were the red of autumn leaves.

  “Faliol, a scholar?” someone whispered in t
he 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 velvet 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 windowpanes.

  But there were only 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. All he saw were two pale pages elegantly dappled by somber verses. Then a shadow passed across these pages, and another, and another.