Thomas Ligotti - Grimscribe: His Lives and Works

1. The Last Feast Of Harlequin
2. The Spectacles In The Drawer
3. Flowers Of The Abyss
4. Nethescurial

5. The Dreaming In Nortown
6. The Mystics Of Muelenberg
7. In The Shadow Of Another World
8. The Cocoons

9. The Night School
10. The Glamour

11. The Library Of Byzantium
12. Miss Plarr

I must whisper my words in the wind, knowing somehow that they will reach you who sent me here. Let this misadventure, like the first rank scent of autumn, be carried back to you, my good people. For it was you who decided where I would go, you who wished I come here and to him. And I agreed, because the fear that filled your voices and lined your faces was so much greater than your words could explain. I feared your fear of him: the one whose name we did not know, the one whom we saw but who never spoke, the one who lived far from town in that ruined house which long ago had seen the passing of the family Van Livenn.

I was chosen to unravel his secrets and find what malice or indifference he harbored toward our town. I should be the one, you said. Was I not the teacher of the town's child-citizens, the one who had knowledge that you had not and who might therefore see deeper into the mystery of our man? That was what you said, in the shadows of our church where we met that night; but what you thought, whether you knew it or not, was that he has no children of his own, no one, and so many of his hours are spent walking through those same woods in which lives the stranger. It would seem quite natural if I happened to pass the old Van Livenn house, if I happened to stop and perhaps beg a glass of water for a thirsty walker of the woods. But these simple actions, even then, seemed an extraordinary adventure, though none of us confessed to this feeling.

Nothing to fear, you said. And so I was chosen to go alone.

You have seen the house and how, approaching it from the road that leads out of town, it sprouts suddenly into view-a pale flower amid the dark summer trees, now a ghostly flower at autumn. At first this is how it appeared to my eyes. (Yes, my eyes, think about them, good people: dream about them.) But as I neared the house, its greyish-white planks, bowed and buckled and oddly spotted, turned the pallid lily to a pulpy toadstool. Surely the house has played this trick on some of you, and all of you have seen it at one time or another: its roof of rippling shingles shaped like scales from some great fish, sea-green and sparkling in the autumn sun; its two attic gables with paned windows that come to a point like the tip of a tear, but do not gleam like tears; its sepulcher-shaped doorway at the top of rotted wooden stairs, where there is barely a place for one to stand. And as I stood among the shadows outside that door, I heard hundreds of raindrops running up the steps behind me, as the air went cold and the skies gained shadows of their own. The light rain spotted the empty, ashen plot nearby the house, watering the barren ground where a garden might have blossomed in the time of the Van Livenns. What better excuse for my imposing upon the present owner of this house? Shelter me, stranger, from the icy autumn storm, and from a fragrance damp and decayed.

He responded promptly to my rapping, without suspicious movements of the ragged curtains, and I entered his dark home. There was no need for explanation; he had already seen me walking ahead of the clouds. And you, good people, have already seen him, at one time or another: his lanky limbs like vaguely twisted branches; his lazy expressionless face; the colorless rags which are easier to see as tattered wrappings than as parts of even the poorest wardrobe. But his voice, that is something none of you has ever heard. Although shaken at how gentle and musical it sounded, I was even less prepared for the sense of frightening distances created by the echo of his hollow words.

"It was just such a day as this when I saw you the first time out there in the woods," he said, looking out at the rain. "But you did not come near to the house."

He had also seen me on other occasions, and our introduction to each other appeared to have already been made long before. I removed my coat, which he took and placed on a very small wooden chair beside the front door. Extending a long crooked arm and wide hand toward the interior, he welcomed me into his home.

But somehow he himself did not seem at home there, even then. And nothing seemed to belong to him, though there was little enough in that house to be possessed by anyone. Apart from the two old chairs in which we sat down and the tiny misshapen table between them, the few other objects I could see appeared to have been brought together only by accident or default, as if a child had put all the odd, leftover furnishings of her dollhouse into an odd, leftover room. A huge trunk lying in the corner, its great tarnished lock sprung open and its heavy straps falling loosely to the floor, would have looked much less sullen buried away in an attic or a cellar. And that miniature chair by the door, with an identical twin fallen on its back near the opposite wall, belonged in a child's room, but a child whom one could not imagine as still living, even as a dim memory in the most ancient mind. The tall bookcase by the shuttered window would have seemed in keeping, if only those cracked pots, bent boots, and other paraphernalia foreign to bookcases had not been stuffed among its battered volumes. A large bedroom bureau stood against one wall, but that would have seemed misplaced in any room: the hollows of its absent drawers were deeply webbed with disuse. All of these things seemed to me wracked by their own history of transformation, culminating in the metamorphoses of decay. And there was a thick dreamy smell that permeated the room, inspiring the sense that invisible gardens of pale growths were even then budding in the dust and dirty corners everywhere around me. But not everything was visible, to my eyes.

The only light in the house was provided by two lamps that burned on either side of a charred mantle over the fireplace. Behind each of these lamps was an oval mirror in an ornate frame, and the reflected light of their quivering wicks threw our shadows onto the wide bare wall at our backs. And while the two of us were sitting still and silent, I saw those ather two fidgeting upon the wall, as if wind-blown or perhaps undergoing some subtle torture.

"I have something for you to drink," he said. "I know how far it is to walk from the town."

And I did not have to feign my thirst, good people, for it was such that I wanted to swallow the storm, which I could hear beyond the door and the walls but could only see as a brilliance occasionally flashing behind the curtains or shining needle-bright between the dull slats of the shutters.