The Grimscribe's Puppets Read online

  Also from Miskatonic River Press:

  Dead But Dreaming

  edited by Kevin Ross & Keith Herber

  Dead But Dreaming 2

  edited by Kevin Ross

  Dissecting Cthulhu

  edited by S. T. Joshi

  Horror for the Holidays

  edited by Scott David Aniolowski

  The Strange Dark One

  by W. H. Pugmire

  A Season in Carcosa

  edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Deepest, Darkest Eden

  edited by Cody Goodfellow

  www.miskatonicriverpress.com

  The Grimscribe’s Puppets

  edited by

  Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  New York • Florida

  2013

  ~for Tom, the CEO of our Nightmare Factory~

  Publishing History —

  “The Blue Star” (English version) © M. Angerhuber 2000 (in “TERROR TALES” e-zine)

  THE GRIMSCRIBE’S PUPPETS edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Copyright © 2013 by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Authors retain copyright to their stories, and unless noted otherwise, stories are

  © 2013 per author.

  Cover art © Daniele Serra, www.multigrade.it

  All Rights Reserved.

  For information contact Miskatonic River Press

  Published in the United States by:

  Miskatonic River Press, LLC

  944 Reynolds Road, Suite 188

  Lakeland, Florida 33801

  www.miskatonicriverpress.com

  ISBN 978-1-937408-01-5

  Contents

  "Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?"

  Furnace

  The Lord Came at Twilight

  The Secrets of the Universe

  The Human Moth

  Basement Angels

  No Signal

  The Xenambulist: A Fable in Four Acts

  The Company Town

  The Man Who Escaped This Story

  Pieces of Blackness

  The Blue Star

  20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism

  The Holiness of Desolation

  Diamond Dust

  After the Final

  Eyes Exchange Bank

  By Invisible Hands

  Where We Will All Be

  Gailestis

  The Prosthesis

  Into the Darkness, Fearlessly

  Oubliette

  Preface

  "Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?"

  That’s how Poppy Z. Brite began her “Foreword” to Tom’s collection, THE NIGHTMARE FACTORY in 1996. He most certainly was. The tales collected in TNF (to many a mind, then and now, truly his best) were culled from Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, Noctuary, and Teatro Grottesco and Other Tales, each a seminal work. He was out there, being read, being adored, and he was already considered a grandmaster.

  Since the appearance of that collection, Thomas Ligotti has become one of the most honored and respected horror/weird fiction writers of the 20th and 21st century. If you read him, if you’ve followed him from the late ’80s when his first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, appeared, you know why: the shadows he’s illuminated deep within and around you have tainted you, perhaps mutated your philosophical views… and you want more.

  In the decades since his work emerged and began to intoxicate readers and critics, mountains of criticism and analysis has been written about Tom’s work (and the man behind it), and there is a thriving fan-tribute website dedicated to him, TLO, Thomas Ligotti Online; and it is more than fitting that the work of this modern master is delved into and examined, time and time again, in the depth it has been. It’s a tribute to the power and brilliance and creative genius of his work. And that is where this anthology began, as another form of fan tribute, a love letter from this reader

  A couple of years back, in tribute to Tom, I had penned (with his kind permission) a novella, “and this is where I go down in the darkness” (Portraits of Ruin, Hippocampus Press, 2012), and after finishing my love letter of thanks for all he has given us, I wondered if other writers who had been influenced by him, or who placed his work in high regard, might also like to say thank you in fictional form. As you’ll see in the tales you’re about to read, many did.

  Poppy Z. Brite answered her own question with a resounding yes, and today her answer rings as loudly as it did then. He is out there and his expansive influence continues… as it will for a very long time.

  (a certain) bEast

  Berlin, Germany

  FEB 2012

  Furnace

  By Livia Llewellyn

  Everyone knew our town was dying, long before we truly saw it. There’s a certain way a piece of fruit begins to wrinkle and soften, caves in on itself around the edges of a fast-appearing bruise, throwing off the sickly-sweet scent of decay and death that always attracts some creeping hungry thing. Some part of the town, an unused building sinking into its foundations, a forgotten alleyway erupting into a slow maelstrom of weeds and cracked stone, was succumbing, had festered, succumbed: and now threw off the warning spores of its demise. Everywhere in the town we went about the ins and outs of our daily lives and business, telling ourselves everything was normal, everything was fine. And every now and then a spore drifted into our lungs, riding in on a faint thread of that rotting fruiting scent, and though we did not pause in our daily routines, we stumbled a bit, we slowed. It was the last days of summer, I had just turned thirteen, and the leaves were beginning to turn, people were gathering the final crops of their fine little backyard gardens, culling the lingering remains of the season’s foods and flowers, smoothing over the soil. My grandfather had placed a large red-rusted oil barrel off the side of the garage, and every evening he threw the gathering detritus of summer into the can, and set it on fire. Great plumes of black smoke rose into the warm air, feather-fine flakes of ash and hot red sparks. I stood on the gravel path, watching the bright red licks of fire crackle and leap from the barrel’s jagged edges as my grandfather poked the burning sticks and leaves further down. An evening wind carried the dark smoke up into the canopy of branches overhead, tall evergreens swaying and whispering as they swept and sifted the ash further into the sky. We watched in silence. The air smelled gritty and smoky and dark, in that way the air only ever smells at the end of a dying summer, the smell of the sinking sun and dark approaching fall. The trees shifted, the branches changed direction, and the sickly-sweet scent caught in our throats, driving the smoke away.

  —What is that? I asked.

  —I don’t know, my grandfather replied. He rubbed ash from his eyes, and stared out into a distance place neither of us could see. —Something’s wrong.

  ~*~

  Summer officially ended, school began, and the town continued. It was easy for all of us to say that everything was fine. The dissonance in the air was the usual changing of the seasons, we told ourselves. Near the downtown area, on a small lonely street along the outskirts of the factories and warehouses that ringed the downtown district, that strange and troubling area where suburbia fizzled out to its bitter end and the so-called city proper began, a number of small businesses closed with no warning to their loyal long-time customers or to those who worked for them. I knew of this only because my mother drove down that particular street one early afternoon, having taken me out of school for a dentist appointment. My mother had frequented most of these stores in her childhood,
and she loved driving down the street as an adult, pointing out to me all the various places she had been taken by my grandfather. A small confectioner’s store that supplied those queer square mint-tinged wafers that were both creamy and crunchy, the pastel sweets popular at weddings and wakes. A stationers store, where my mother’s family had bought boxes and boxes of thick cream paper and envelopes with the family crest, a horned griffin rampant over a field of night-blooming cereus, and where my grandfather bought business cards and memo pads with his name printed neatly in the middle, just above his title of supervisor for the town’s electric and water company. A dilapidated movie theatre that showed films in languages no one had ever heard of, from countries no one could ever seem to recall having seen on our schools and library’s aging maps and globes. A haberdashery where my father once had his soft brown wool felt fedoras and thick lambskin winter gloves blocked and stitched to his exact measurements and specifications. It had been taken over just that spring by the son of the former owner, an earnest and intense young man with perfect pale skin and unruly black hair, and unfortunately large black eyes. All three of those stores and more sat dark and fallow all along the block, faded red CLOSED and OUT OF BUSINESS signs swinging against padlocked doors, display windows choked with cobwebs and dust, the now familiar odor of sickly sweetness lingering in the air.

  —Why do I keep smelling that, I said, pinching my nose shut. —What is it?

  —It smells like camphor, my mother said.

  —What’s that?

  —Like the moth balls in our closets, she said. —You know, what I use to keep your father’s and grandmother’s things from molding and rotting away. To preserve things.

  —Preserve? Like jam?

  —In a way. To protect things. So they’ll never grow old, and always stay the same.

  That afternoon as my mother steered the car along the narrow meridian dividing the street in two, the pale young man stood outside the haberdashery’s doors, his long arms wrapped around a bolt of fabric as if he were carrying the body of a dead child. I started in shock to realize it was not a bolt of fabric, but a length of thick grey wool wrapped around the stiff body of a large bird with two beaks twisted into a hideous spiral and a spider-like cluster of lidless coal-colored eyes. My mother stopped the car, and we stepped onto the dry worn street sitting under a cool and cloudless sky crowned by telephone wires. No one else was here this time of the afternoon in this part of the town, a part of the town in the middle of everything yet nowhere in particular, where the buildings rose no more than two stories before flattening out in resignation and despair, where you could walk down the sidewalks for hours, see no strip mall or market or house that didn’t look like the one behind it and before, hear only the soft crinkle of your shoes against cracked cement and the occasional miserable distant bark of a dog. In hindsight, we should have been more vigilant, more aware that these were the places of a town where septicemia and putrefaction creep in first, those lonely and familiar sections we slipped into and through every day without concern or care—not the seedy crumbling but flashy edges where decay was expected, and, from a certain element of our small society, even accepted and encouraged. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts, these were the places we never gave a single thought about, because we thought they would be here forever, unchanging in the antiseptic amber of our fixed memories. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts were always the first to go.

  —Don’t come any closer, said the pale young man to my mother as she stepped onto the sidewalk.

  —What happened to all the stores? my mother asked. —When did everything close?

  —Don’t go near the windows, said the pale young man. —It’s terrible, don’t look. He stepped forward as if to block her, his already too large eyes widening further, the rims and lids as purple-red as the leaves on the trees, as if he had been weeping for hours, for centuries. My mother, a woman who, like her father, my grandfather, did not pay much heed to the general spoken and unspoken rules of a town, brushed past him, and I followed in her wake, already at thirteen very much a similar stubborn member of my family. My mother stepped up to one of the display windows, and I to the other, cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the sun as I pressed my face against the glass. —Don’t look, the young man repeated, but he did nothing to stop us, only stood on the sidewalk cradling his many-eyed black-feathered bird wrapped in fabric, shivering in the afternoon sun. Inside the store, everything appeared covered in the light dust typical of such a place, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary. I had last been in the store five years ago, to help my mother pick out a fine linen handkerchief for my father for the holidays, before he had disappeared in the deep network of tunnels and passages owned by the town’s electric and water company. I kept staring through the glass. Bowlers and fedoras slumping over the resigned foreheads of cracked mannequin heads, weary trays of uneven chevron-covered ties, unpolished cufflinks depressed into velvet folds of faded burgundy. My breath fogged the glass, and I wiped it away with a pass of my hands. Everything was quiet, peaceful, still.

  —I don’t see anything different, my mother said. —Everything looks the same as I remember. This is the way it should be.

  —I know, the young man said. —It all looks the same on the outside. It always has. You have to look underneath.

  —How can one look underneath? I asked.

  —You just do. You just know.

  I’m not certain how long we stood on the quiet sidewalk of the lonely street in that empty part of town, staring through fingerprint smeared windows into darkness. I now only remember how after a time had passed and as the afternoon sun hitched further down toward the town’s jagged horizon, everything in the store seemed to recede, sink into an interminable black fuzz not unlike mold spreading across fruit. Soft sweet mold and mannequin heads, and no life at all in the displays and counters and fixtures and heavy folds of fabric, only the amber-tinged cool approaching dark. My eyes adjusted to the fading light, and everything in the haberdashery blurred and shifted into a single indistinct mass: for one wild terrible second I felt like I was staring into the only place left in the world, that there was only my face pressed to the glass front of a dead forgotten store endlessly out of the reach of my immovable limbs, and everything and everyone behind me, including myself, was forever gone.

  —Nothing’s changed except the sign, my mother said. —This is unacceptable. The stores must be reopened, so we can shop here, as we’ve always done. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

  The young man replied, —Yes. And it will never end.

  My mother looked at him, but did not reply.

  I stepped back from the glass, and as I did, I caught a glimpse of the pale young man’s face, reflected beneath the faded gold letters of the haberdashery that bore his father’s name. I saw underneath him. I saw his wide unmoving mouth, his tiny painted teeth, his lidless lashless eyes, his cool matte porcelain skin. It was then I remembered I had crushed on him briefly, that last spring. I’d told my mother how handsome he looked, how comforting and familiar, and she’d laughed me into embarrassed silence, and so I’d driven it from my mind. The young man turned from us, and as he walked down the sidewalk back into suburbia, trailing oily iridescent feathers at his feet and the numbing sweet smell of camphor through the air, I caught a glimpse of his neck below his black, black hair, and the straight bloodless seam like a strange new road, slicing through every part of the town I’d ever known.

  ~*~

  My mother drove us home in silence, and we never spoke of the incident to each other again. I believe I was afraid to ask my mother what she meant when she said she saw nothing underneath, whether she meant she saw nothing out of the ordinary, or if she meant that she had perceived that same black nothingness the pale young man claimed he saw welling beneath the surface of the haberdashery, the nothingness that had spread throughout that entire row of stores. I was afraid to ask my mother what she meant when she saw
nothing underneath, nothing changed, and said that was the way it should always be. I believe I knew then what I was afraid of, or rather there was a confirmation within me of what I had always known that I was afraid of; and my mother knew that I knew, and together in silence we drove home. We drove down the street several weeks later. All of the stores displayed their usual faded yet cheerful red and white OPEN signs, but my mother didn’t slow the car, nor did she spin her usual tales of how her family had frequented the various shops over the years and what items she bought that were still somewhere in our house, carefully packed in cedar boxes lined with tissue paper and small white moth balls. I slid down in the car seat until my eyes were level with the plastic button lock on the door, and stared out the window at the haberdashery. Sitting on the sidewalk beside the dusty glass door, still holding the stiff deformed bird bundled in wool felt, I saw the pale young man that for one brief second in my past I had crushed on like the soles of my feet against soft gray gravel, standing, staring out into the street, the look on his face not unlike that of my grandfather when he stood over the can of burning leaves and ash. I had never told my mother what I thought I’d seen that strange afternoon in the face of the pale young man, or at the back of his neck. I didn’t need to. My mother smiled, and stared ahead, and drove on.

  Fall deepened and thickened and the air above and over our heads grew cold, but the gold and red leaves and the earth itself were still hot to the touch, as though the trees were drawing up and throwing off some unseen underground fire. I woke up early in the morning, having slept every night with the light at my desk never off and the small television always tuned to movies so old even my grandfather had never heard of them. I dressed for school to the snowy images of sleek, long-dead women and men, drifting through a world constructed solely of pixilated shades of black and grey. My grandfather seemed never to sleep, spending evenings after work in the kitchen, spreading maps and charts of the town’s systems and infrastructures over the table, scribbling indecipherable equations and geometric shapes in blue ball point pen across the outlines of our streets and neighborhoods he’d traced onto wide sheets of translucent onionskin, the low light of the kitchen lamp falling over his thick white hair and worried face. I would tip-toe into the kitchen to make breakfast, expecting him to be fast asleep, slumped over the table, a pencil drifting out of his large hand. He was always awake, sitting straight in the chair, on his face the same indeterminable and unfathomable look as when we stood at the barrel while summer died all around us, watching the ash disappear into the thick grotto of whispering evergreens.