The Collected Short Fiction

  "Anything is possible," I assured her.

  "Just do me a favor and keep Norman away from me, if you don't mind."

  "I think I can do that very easily. But you have to do something for me."

  "What?"

  I leaned toward her very confidentially.

  "Please die, Desiderata," I whispered in her ear, while gripping her neck with both hands, cutting short a scream along with her life. Then I really went to work.

  "Wake up, Norman," I shouted a little later. I was standing at the foot of his bed, my hands positioned behind my back. "You were really dead to the world, you know that?"

  A little drama took place on Norman's face in which surprise overcame sleepiness and both were vanquished by anxiety. He had been through a lot the past couple nights, struggling with our "Notes" and other things, and really needed his sleep. I hated to wake him up.

  "Who? What do you want?" he said, quickly sitting up in bed.

  "Never mind what I want. Right now we are concerned with what you want, you know what I mean? Remember what you told that girl the other night, remember what you wanted her to do that got her so upset?"

  "If you don't get the hell out of here—"

  "That's what she said too, remember? And then she said she wished she had never met you. And that was the line, wasn't it, that gave you the inspiration for our fictionalized adventure. Poor Nathan never had the chance you had. Oh yes, very fancy rigmarole with the enchanted trousers. Blame it all on some old bitch and her dead husband. Very realistic, I'm sure. When the real reason—"

  "Get out of here!" he yelled. But he calmed down somewhat when he saw that ferocity in itself had no effect on me.

  "What did you expect from that girl. You did tell her that you wanted to embrace, what was it? Oh yes, a headless woman. A headless woman, for heaven's sake, that's asking a lot. And you did want her to make herself look like one, at least for a little while. Well, I've got the answer to your prayers. How's this for headless?" I said, holding up the head from behind my back.

  He didn't make a sound, though his two eyes screamed a thousand times louder than any single mouth. I tossed the long-haired and bloody noggin in his lap, but he threw the bedcovers over it and frantically pushed the whole business onto the floor with his feet.

  "The rest of her is in the bathtub. Go see, if you want. I'll wait."

  He didn't make a move or say a word for quite a few moments. But when he finally did speak, each syllable came out so calm and smooth, so free of the vibrations of fear, that I have to say it shook me up a bit.

  "Whooo are you?" he asked as if he already knew.

  "Do you really need to have a name, and would it even do any good? Should we call that disengaged head down there Laura or Lorna, or just plain Desiderata? And what, in heaven's name, should I call you—Norman or Nathan, Harold or Gerald?"

  "I thought so," he said disgustedly. Then he began to speak in an eerily rational voice, but very rapidly. He did not even seem to be talking to anyone in particular. "Since the thing to which I am speaking," he said, "since this thing knows what only I could know, and since it tells me what only I could tell myself, I must therefore be completely alone in this room, or perhaps even dreaming. Yes, dreaming. Otherwise the diagnosis is insanity. Very true. Profoundly certain. Go away now, Mr. Madness. Go away, Dr. Dream. You made your point, now let me sleep. I'm through with you." Then he lay his head down on the pillow and closed his eyes.

  "Norman," I said. "Do you always go to bed with your trousers on?"

  He opened his eyes and now noticed what he had been too deranged to notice before. He sat up again.

  "Very good, Mr. Madness. These look like the real thing. But that's not possible since Laura still has them, sorry about that. Funny, they won't come off. The imaginary zipper must be stuck. Gee, I guess I'm in trouble now. I'm a dead man if there ever was one, hoo. Always make sure you know what you're buying, that's what I say. Heaven help me, please. You never know what you might be getting into. Come off, damn you! Oh, what grief. Well, so when do I start to rot, Mr. Madness? Are you still there? What happened to the lights?"

  The lights had gone out in the room and everything glowed with a bluish luminescence. Lightning began flashing outside the bedroom window, and thunder resounded through a rainless night. The moon shone through an opening in the clouds, a blood-red moon only the damned and the dead can see.

  "Rot your way back to us, you freak of creation. Rot your way out of this world. Come home to a pain so great that it is bliss itself. You were born to be bones not flesh. Rot your way free of that skin of mere skin."

  "Is this really happening to me? I mean, I'm doing my best, sir. It isn't easy, not at all. Horrible electricity down there. Horrible. Am I bathed in magic acid or something? Oh, it hurts, my love. Ah, ah, ah. It hurts so much. Never let it end. If I have to be like this, then never let me wake up, Dr. Dream. Can you do that, at least?"

  I could feel my bony wings rising out of my back and saw them spread gloriously in the blue mirror before me. My eyes were now jewels, hard and radiant. My jaws were a cavern of dripping silver and through my veins ran rivers of putrescent gold. He was writhing on the bed like a wounded insect, making sounds like nothing in human memory. I swept him up and wrapped my sticky arms again and again around his trembling body. He was laughing like a child, the child of another world. And a great wrong was about to be rectified.

  I signaled the windows to open onto the night, and, very slowly, they did. His infant's laughter had now turned to tears, but they would soon run dry, I knew this. At last we would be free of the earth. The windows opened wide over the city below and the profound blackness above welcomed us.

  I had never tried this before. But when the time came, I found it all so easy.

  Professor Nobody's Little Lectures On Supernatural Horror (1985)

  First published in Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, 1985

  This version taken from: Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, 1989

  One Whole Night in a Haunted World

  Mist on a lake, fog in a wood, streetlights shining on wet pavement—such sights make it all very easy. Something lives in the lake and hides in the woods, stalks upon the pavement or dwells under it. Whatever it may be, this something lies just out of sight.. .but not out of vision. In certain surroundings our entire being is made of eyes, every atom dilates to witness the haunting of the universe. Even the dullest find this easily done...

  Now take a crowded room, such as this one: the door is shut; the clock on the wall is sweeping aside the seconds with its thin red finger; the window blinds deliver slices of light from the outside world and shuffle them with shadows; someone coughs, there, like that. And suddenly the hollows of routine begin to buzz a bit. Did someone leave a friend out in the hallway? I see a pair of squinting eyes looking in. . .but never mind, they went away. You see, even here it's not so very hard.

  And if here, then everywhere and at every time. Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes, one by one, will open to the world, will see its horror as it has never been seen before. Then: no belief or body of laws will guard you; no friend, no counselor, no appointed personage will save you; no crowded schoolroom, no locked bedroom, no private office will hide you. Not even the solar brilliance of spring is protection against the horror. For the horror eats light and digests it into darkness.

  And in darkness we open our eyes, briefly, and in darkness we close them.

  Thank you, that will be all for today.

  On Morbidity

  Isolation, mental derangement, strange emotional states, visions, well-tended fevers, neglected well-being: only a few of the many techniques cultivated by the virtuoso of morbidity. Just as vital to his development is a real feeling for supernatural horror. Retreating from a world of "health" and "sanity," or at least one that daily invests in such commodities, the morbid man seeks the shadows behind the scenes of life. He backs himself into a corner
alive with cool drafts and fragrant with centuries of must. The flowers he finds on the wallpaper seem half-real and cause him to dream of vampire gardens and dwarfish creatures with flesh of thorns. There, in that corner, he builds a world of ruins out of the battered stones of his imagination.

  But this world is not one of pure romance, not all a dazzling music hall of lyrical mania. So let us condemn it for a moment, this deep end of dreams. Though there is no name for the morbid man's sin, it still seems in violation of some law or other, perhaps many laws, probably all of them. He does not appear to be doing any good, either for himself or others. And while we all know that the macabre and uncanny are quite palatable as side-dishes of existence, he has turned them into a hideous specialty of the house! Ultimately, however, he may meet these charges of wrongdoing with a simple "What of it?"

  Now, such a response assumes morbidity to be a certain class of vice, one to be pursued without apology, and one whose advantages and disadvantages must be enjoyed or endured outside the law. But as a sower of vice, if only in his own soul, the morbid man incurs this criticism: that he is a symptom or a cause of decay within various individual and social spheres of being. And decay, like every other process of becoming, hurts everybody. "Good!" shouts the morbid man. "Not good!" counters the crowd. Born of extremely narrow and personal feelings, both positions betray inadmirable origins: the one in resentment, the other in fear. And when the ethical debate on this issue eventually reaches an impasse or becomes too tangled for truth, then the psychiatric one can begin. Later on we will find other angles from which this problem may be attacked, enough to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives.

  Meanwhile, the morbid man keeps putting his time to no good use, until in the end—amidst mad winds, moonlight, and craving specters—he uses his exactly like everyone else uses theirs: all up.

  Thank you, don't forget to read the assignment.

  Pessimism and Supernatural Horror—Lecture One

  Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page. Fiction, unable to compete with the world for vividness of pain and lasting effects of fear, compensates in its own way. How? By inventing more tortuous and excruciatingly bizarre means to surprising ends. Among these means, of course, is the supernatural. In transforming natural ordeals into supernatural ones, we find the strength to affirm and deny their horror simultaneously, to savor and suffer them at the same time. Nevertheless, the most endearing thing about the supernatural is not that its horrors are real or unreal, but that, in some paradoxical way, they are both. Indeed, the imagination makes no such distinctions, for it is the dreaming star around which the poor pictures of "reality" pallidly circle.

  A case in point is the vampire. Is he merely a human aspiration extended beyond natural logic by the logic of hope and desire? Or is he. . .a vampire? Changing shape at will, sinking teeth into flesh, gorging himself on that warm and lovely blood, and—unless someone is decent enough to stop him— anticipating this nightly regimen far into eternity: such activities, in their proper realm of dreams, are living truths and a legitimate source of terror. Only when we awake, from stories or from sleep, does the vampire die, and, as a "concept," become a parasite of our flesh. But both of these worlds, real and unreal, are contained within us—and between them our souls are doomed to wander.

  So supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not the pastime of even our closest relations in the wholly natural world; we gained it, as part of our gloomy inheritance, when we became what we are. Once awareness of the human predicament was achieved, our consciousness immediately had to split: one half went the way of apologetics, even celebration, of this new toy of conscious existence; the other half took to condemning and occasionally launching direct assaults on this "gift". The first merely provides justification for the unavoidable facts of life, which need to be justified if they are to be tolerated at all. The second, a perverse and gratuitous twin, keeps us from being absolute victims, allows us to struggle against our doom while all the time cheering on its despicable agents and their sleazy ways. All the things that victimize us in natural life can become the very stuff of demonic delight in the make-believe world of supernatural horror.

  In the end, of course, we remain puppets and our smiles are still painted ones. But now at least we have moistened them with our own blood.

  Thank you, we'll pick this up at our next meeting.

  Pessimism and Supernatural Horror—Lecture Two

  Dead bodies that walk in the night, iiving bodies suddenly possessed by new owners and deadly aspirations, a community ravaged by beings that obey alien laws, and a whole world at the mercy of unknown laws which authorize chaotic upheavals of the natural order—some examples of the logic of supernatural horror. It is a logic that is founded on fear; it is a logic whose sole principle states: "Existence equals Nightmare." Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure. A few more examples: someone catches the night in a bad mood and must pay a dreadful price; someone opens the wrong door, sees something he should not have, and suffers the consequences; someone walks down an unfamiliar street. . .and is lost forever.

  That these unfortunates deserve their fate is obvious. To be an accomplice, however involuntarily, in a reasonless non-reality is grounds for the harshest sentencing. And, come to think of it, none of this could happen in a real world; that is, one of reasonable order and proportion. But could there ever be such a world, and could we abide it? The evidence is not encouraging. Where pain and pleasure form a corrupt alliance against us, paradise and hell are merely different departments in the same monstrous bureaucracy. And between these two poles exists everything we now know or can ever know. No one has yet succeeded in even imagining a utopia, earthly or otherwise, that can stand up under the mildest criticism. But one must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. Afterward, nothing comes as a surprise.

  Then again, perhaps we ourselves are being unreasonable in asking that the world be real; perhaps it is only a demon of some kind who put this thought in our heads, this wish in our hearts. Why not be content that we are allowed to perform in this gruesome circus of shadows? And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot quite be sure that it couldn't exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our awareness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, both at the individual and the collective levels, horror operates with an eerie autonomy. Generating specters, ghouls, and grisly dooms, it is a loathsome foam upon which our lives merely float.

  And, ultimately, we must admit it: horror is more real than we are.

  Thank you, no class tomorrow due to the holiday.

  Sardonic Harmony

  A sense of beauty and order, compassion for human hurt, offering others the benefit rather than the disadvantages of our doubts, nurturing a rich respect for gestures of decency and nobility—all our best attributes are also our most troublesome, serving to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one's rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The so-called affirmations of life—all based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, religion in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.

  By means of supernatural horror we may evade, momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Each one of us, out of the blackness of nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world. Well, here we are. . .looking down the road at a few connvulsions and a final obliteration. What a weirdly fantastic scenario! So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are des
tined to a fool's fate which deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe.

  Supernatural horror, in all its bizarre constructions, enables a reader to taste a selection of treats at odds with his well-being. Admittedly, this is not an indulgence likely to find universal favor. True macabrists are as rare as poets and form a secret society unto themselves, if only because their memberships elsewhere were cancelled, some of them from the moment of birth. But those who have sampled these joys marginal to stable existence, once they have gotten a good whiff of other worlds, will not be able to stay away for long. They will loiter in moonlight, eyeing the entranceways to cemeteries, waiting for some terribly propitious moment to crash the gates.

  Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb... and find them to our liking."

  Thank you, you've been an attentive class. Good luck on the final.

  The Troubles Of Dr. Thoss (1985)

  First published in Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, 1985

  This version taken from: Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, 1989

  When Alb Indys first heard the name of Dr. Thoss, he had some difficulty locating its speaker, or even discerning how many voices had spoken it. Initially the words seemed to emanate from an old radio in another apartment, for Alb Indys had no such device of his own. But he finally realized that this name had been uttered, in a rather harsh voice, just outside the corner window, and only window, of his room. After spending the night, not unusually, walking the floor or slumping wide-eyed in his only chair, he had been in bed since morning. Now, at mid-afternoon, he remained unslept and was still attired in pale gray pajamas. Bolstered by huge pillows, he was sitting up against the headboard. Upon his lap rested a drawing book filled with stiff sheets of paper, very white. A bottle of black ink was in reach on the sidetable next to his bed, and a shapely black pen with a sharp silvery nib was held tightly in his right hand. That Alb Indys was at that moment busy with a pen-and-ink rendering of the window, along with the empty chair beside it, was perhaps the chief reason that, very vaguely, he had overheard the words spoken beyond it.