The Collected Short Fiction

  For in this constricted setting, echoes emerge which only a void of supernatural dimensions could create. Yet at first they may sound like the reverberant groaning of those clouds in which a storm slumbers. And then they may seem to mimic the hissing of the ocean as it swirls about the broken land below. Slowly, however, the echoes distinguish themselves from these natural sounds and attain their own voice: a voice that carries across incredible distances, a voice whose words come to lose their stratum of sense, a voice that is dissolving in sighs and sobs and chattering insanity. Every niche, every pattern, every shadow of the room is eloquent with this voice. And one's attention may be distracted by this strange soliloquy, this uncanny music. Thus, one may not notice, as afternoon approaches nightfall, that something else is present in the room, something which has been secreted out of sight and waits to rise up in the shape of a revelation, to rise up like a cry in one's own throat.

  Such phenomena may be quite severe in their effects, leaving their witness in a perilous orientation between two worlds, one of which is imposing its madness and its mysteries on the other. We feel the proximity of a great darkness beyond earthly reason, of a cryptic land of dreams whose shadows mingle with our own, breathing their intense life into the airless world of the mundane. For a time we are content to reside within that metaphysical twilight and delve deep into its hues. Long exasperated by questions without answers, by answers without consequences, by truths which change nothing, we learn to become intoxicated by the mood of mystery itself, by the odor of the unknown. We are entranced by the subtle scents and wavering reflections of the unimaginable.

  In the beginning it is not our intention to seek order within madness or to give a name to certain mysteries. We are not concerned with creating a system out of the strangeness of that house. What we seek—in all its primitive purity—is the company of the spectral. But ultimately, as if possessed by some fatal instinct, we succumb to the spirit of intrigue and attempt to find a drab focus for the amorphous glories we have inherited.

  We are like the man who, by some legacy of fate, has come to stay in another old house, one very much like our own. After passing a short time within the cavernous and elaborate solitude of the place, he becomes a spectator to strange sights and sounds. He then begins to doubt his sanity, and at last flees the advancing shadows of the house for the bright shelter of a nearby town. There, amid the good society of the local citizens, he learns the full history of the house. (It seems that long ago some tragedy occurred, an irreparable melodrama that has continued to be staged many years after the deaths of the actors involved.) Others who have lived in the house have witness the same eerie events, and its most recent guest is greatly relieved by this knowledge. Faith in his mental soundness has been triumphantly restored: it is the house itself which is mad.

  But this man need not have been so comforted. If the spectral drama could be traced to definite origins and others have been audience to it, this is not to prove that all testimony regarding the house is unmarked by madness. Rather, it suggests a greater derangement, a conspiracy of unreason implicating a plurality of lunatics, a delerium that encompasses past and present houses and minds, the claustral cellars of the soul and the endless.

  For we are the specters of a madness that surpasses ourselves and hides in mystery. And though we search for sense throughout endless rooms, all we may find is a voice whispering from a mirror in a house that belongs to no one.

  Unreal Horror

  One must speak of the impostor city.

  There is never a design to arrive in this place. Destination is always elsewhere. Only when the end of one's journey is reached too soon, or by means of a strange route, may suspicions arise. Then everything requires a doubting gaze.

  Yet everything also seems above sensible question. On the occasion that one has set out for a great metropolis, here the very site of anticipation is found. Its monuments spread wondrously across bright skies, despite an unseasonable mist which may obscure its earthward landmarks.

  But here, one soon observes, nightfall is out of pace. Perhaps it will occur unexpectedly early, bringing a darkness of an unfamiliar quality and duration. Throughout these smothering hours there may be sounds that press strangely upon the fringes of sleep.

  The following day belongs forever to a dim season. And all the towers of the great metropolis have withered in a mist which now lies upon low buildings and has drawn a pale curtain across the sky.

  Through the mist, which hovers thick and stagnant, the city projects the features of its true face. Drab, crumpled buildings appear along streets which twist without pattern like cracks between the pieces of a puzzle. Dark houses bulge; neither stone nor wood, their surface might be of decaying flesh, breaking away at the slightest touch.

  Some of these structures are mere facades propped up by a void. Others falsify their interiors with crude scenes painted where windows should be. And where a true window appears there is likely to be an arm hanging out of it, a stuffed and dangling arm with a hand whose fingers are too many or too few.

  Here and there scraps of debris hop about with no wind to guide them. These are the only things that seem to move in these streets, though there is a constant scraping noise that follows one's steps. If one pauses for a moment to look into a narrow space between buildings, something may be seen dragging itself along the ground, or perhaps it has already laid itself across the street, obstructing the way that leads out of the city. This figure is only that of a dead-eyed dummy; yet, when someone tries to step over the thing, its mouth suddenly drops open. At the time this is the best the city can do—a sham of menace that has no life and deceives no one.

  Only later—when, in disgust, one has left behind this place of feeble impostures—will the true menace make itself known. And it begins when familiar surroundings inspire, on occasion, moments of doubt. Then places must verify themselves, objects are asked to prove their solidity, a searching hand makes inquiries upon the surface of a window.

  Afterward there are intense seizures of suspicion that will not abate. Everything seems to be on the verge of disclosing its unreality and drifting off into the shadows. And the shadows themselves collapse and slide down rooftops, trickle down walls and into the streets like black rain. One's own eyes stare absently in the mirror; one's mouth drops open in horror.

  Demonic Horror

  Even in the darkness they seemed to linger, halftone freaks parading translucent until they faded with the dawn. Eyes open or closed, the lamp glowing or not, he felt that they were threatening to pass over the threshold and manifest themselves on the other side of sleep. Their faces would begin to darken the air, and then dissolve. The light in his room momentarily molded itself into fantastic limbs that slipped in and out of the glare of his eyeglasses. A draft grew thick and foul, gusting briefly against his cheek.

  And the morning he drifted pale from his home, another night exacted from him by disfigured masters, a little more of himself sliding into the black mirror of dreams.

  At first he would regain some of his losses of the previous night, but less of his own life was being returned to his possession. Their presence was now with him, an invisible mist surrounding him and distorting his senses. The streets he walked seemed to slant beneath his feet; a scene in the distance would be twisted out of all earthly shape, suggesting the remote latitudes of nightmare. Voices whispered to him from the depths of vertiginous stairwells and the far corners of long narrowing hallways. Somehow the ravelling clouds carried a charnel odor which pursued him back to the door of his home and into his sleep.

  And into the dreams he fell, helplessly skittering down slanted streets, tumbling down stairwells, caught in a mesh of moldering clouds. Then the faces began to float above him, sharp fingers reaching into his flesh. He screamed himself awake. But even in the darkness they seemed to linger.

  Finally he was chased from his home and into the streets, walking ceaselessly until daybreak. He became a seeker of crowds, but the crowds
thinned and abandoned him. He became a seeker of lights, but the lights grew strange and led him into desolate places.

  And now the lights were reflected in the black, shining surface of wetted streets. Every house in that neighborhood was a battered, cracking vessel of darkness; every tree was perfect stillness. There was not another soul to companion him, and the moon was a fool.

  And they were there with him. He could feel their scabby touch, though he could not see them. As long as he walked, as long as he was awake, he would not see them. But someone was pulling at his sleeve, a frail little man with eyeglasses.

  It was only an elderly gentleman who wanted to be shown the way along these dim streets, to exchange a few remarks with this grateful stranger, one so eager for company on that particular evening. Finally the soft-voiced old man tipped his hat and continued slowly down the street. But he had walked only a few steps when he turned and said: "Do you like your demon dreams?"

  And into the dreams he fell... and forever.

  Macabre Horror

  To others he always tried to convey the impression that he lived in a better place than he actually did, one far more comfortable and far less decayed. "If they could only see what things are really like, rotting all around me."

  Feeling somewhat morose, he closed his eyes and sank down into gloomy reflections. He was sitting in a plump, stuffed chair which was sprouting in several places through the worn upholstery.

  "Would you like to know how it feels to be dead?" he imagined a voice asking him.

  "Yes, I would," he imagined answering.

  A rickety but rather proud-looking gentleman—this is how he imagined the voice—led him past the graveyard gates. (And they were flaking with age and squeaking in the wind, just as he always imagined they would.) The quaintly tilting headstones, the surrounding grove of vaguely stirring trees, the soft gray sky overhead, the cool air faintly fragrant with decay: "Is this how it is?" he asked hopefully. "Late afternoon in a perpetual autumn?"

  "Not exactly," the gentleman answered. "Please keep watching."

  The gentleman's instruction was intended ironically, for there was no longer anything to behold: no headstones, no trees or sky, nor was there a fragrance of any kind to be blindly sensed.

  "Is this how it is, then?" he asked once more. "A body frozen in blackness, a perpetual night in winter?"

  "Not precisely," the gentleman replied. "Allow your vision to become used to the darkness."

  Then it began to appear to him, glowing with a glacial illumination, a subterranean or extrastellar phosphorescence. Initially, the radiant corpse he saw seemed to be in a stiffly upright position; but he had no way of calculating his angle of perspective, which may actually have been somewhere directly above the full length of the body, rather than frontally facing its height. No less than its mold-spotted clothes, the flesh of the cadaver was in gauzy tatters, lips shrivelled to a powdery smudge on a pale shroud of a face, eyes dried up in the shells of their sockets, hair a mere sprinkling of dust. And now he imagined the feeling of death as one previously beyond his imagination. This feeling was simply that of an eternally prolonged itching sensation.

  "Yes, of course," he thought, "this is how it really must be, an incredible itch when all the fluids are gone and ragged flesh chafes in ragged clothes. A terrible itching and nothing else, nothing worse." Then, out loud, he asked the old gentleman: "Is this, then, how it truly feels to be dead? Only this and not the altogether unimaginable horror I've always feared it would be?"

  "Is that what you would now have, this true knowledge?" asked a voice, though it was not the voice of the rickety and proud-looking old man he had first imagined. This was another voice altogether, a strange voice which promised: "Then the true knowledge shall be yours."

  A long time passed before his body was found, its bony fingers digging into the tattered material of a plump, stuffed armchair, its skin already crumbling and covered with the room's dust. His discoverers were some acquaintances who wondered what had become of him. And as they stood for a few numbed moments around the site of his seated corpse, a few of them absent-mindedly gave their collared necks or shirt-sleeved arms a little scratch.

  Along with the trauma this unexpected discovery imposed, there was the lesser shock of the dead man's run-down home, which was not at all the place his acquaintances imagined they would find. But somehow it continued to be the better place of their imagination when—on autumn afternoons or winter nights—they recollected the thing they found in the chair, or simply reflected on the phenomenon of death itself. Often these musings would be accompanied by a tiny scratch or two just behind the ears or at the base of the neck.

  Puppet Horror

  The one sitting all cock-eyed was telling me things. Of course its soft and carefully sewn mouth was not moving, none of their mouths move unless I make them. Nonetheless I can still understand them when they have something to say, which is actually quite often. They have lived through things no one would believe.

  And they are all over my room. This one is on the floor, lying flat on its little stomach with its head propped within the crux of its two hands, a tiny foot waving in the air behind. That one is lazily sprawled high upon an empty shelf, leaning on its elbow, a thin leg of cloth peaked like a triangle. They are everywhere else too: in the fireplace that I would never light; in my most comfortable chair which they make seem gigantic; even under my bed, a great many of them, as well as in it. I usually occupy a small stool in the middle of the room, and the room is always very quiet. Otherwise it would be difficult to hear their voices, which are faint and slightly hoarse, as might be expected from such throats as theirs.

  Who else would listen to them and express what they have been through? Who else could understand their fears, however petty they may seem at times? To a certain degree, then, they are dependent on me. Patiently I attend to histories and anecdotes of existences beyond the comprehension of most. Never, I believe, have I given them reason to feel that the subtlest fluctuations of their anxieties, the least nuance of their cares, have not been accounted for by me and given sympathetic consideration.

  Do I ever speak to them of my own life? No; that is, not since a certain incident which occurred some time ago. To this day I don't know what came over me. Absent-mindedly I began confessing some trivial worry, I've completely forgotten what it was. And at that moment all their voices suddenly stopped, every one of them, leaving an insufferable vacuum of silence.

  Eventually they began speaking to me again, and all was as it had been before. But I shall never forget that interim of terrible silence, just as I shall never forget the expression of infinite evil on their faces which rendered me speechless thereafter.

  They, of course, continue to talk on and on... from ledge and shelf, floor and chair, from under the bed and in it.

  Prehistoric Horror

  I cannot imagine how this voice invaded the dream, yet did not belong to it.

  "O intelligent life of a fool's future," it said, "hear this song. If only you could gaze with me from this mere rock, this dull slab which is yet a throne to roiling seas and to the mist which veils a rustling paradise. And beneath those churning waters—the slow fierce music of a dim world of monsters, deep eyes ever searching. And upon the unpatterned lands—chaotic undulations amidst vines and greenish vapor, the flickering dance of innumerable tails and tongues. And above in the skies smeared over with ashen clouds—leathery wings flapping. O fallen beast, if only you could see all this through my lidless eyes, this sacred world innocent of hope, how willingly you would then follow the death of all your empty dreams."

  "Innocent of hope, perhaps," I thought upon waking in the darkness. "And yet, O wide-eyed lizard, I would hear you sing something of your pain and your panic. A paradise of prehistory, indeed. How finely spoken. But a lyric of life all the same—of slime itself, of ooze as such.

  "I scorn your eloquence and your world, the poetry of a living oblivion, and now seek a simpler style of anni
hilation. My hopes remain intact. Your split-tongued words were merely a boorish intrusion on a dream of much deeper things—the Incomparably Remote.

  "And now let me close my eyes once again to follow in dreams the backward path far beyond all noise and numbers, falling into that world where I am the brother of silence and share a single face with the void."

  But the reptile's voice continues to mock me, night after night.

  And it will laugh and rave throughout all the humid nights of history. Until that perfect lid of darkness falls over this world once more.

  Nameless Horror

  The place was an old studio. To him it seemed abandoned, yet who knows? Certainly nothing there was in its place—not the broken odds and ends lying about, not the scattered papers, not even the dust. The panes of the skylight were caked with it. Yet who can be sure? Perhaps there was some imperceptible interval between occupation and abandonment, some fine phase of things which he was simply unable to detect at the moment. He stooped and picked up a few of the wrinkled papers, which appeared to be drawings. Now a little rain began drooling down the panes of the skylight.

  The drawings. He shuffled a stack of them page after page before his eyes. So intricate, everything in them was made of tiny, tiny hairs or little veins, insect veins. There were shapes: he could not tell what they were supposed to be, but something about the shape of the shapes, their twistings and the way they flared around, was so horrible. A little rain seeped in through some fine cracks in the windowpanes above; it dripped down and made strange marks on the dusty floor of the old studio.