The Collected Short Fiction

  'His gastrointestinal disorder,' I said, feeling more and more the symptoms of this malady in my own body.

  'Exactly. It's the precise mechanics of this experience of his that interested me enough to invest in his excursion. This is what remains so obscure. There is nothing obvious, if I may say, about his Tsalal or its mechanism, yet Grossvogel is making what to my mind are some fascinating claims and distinctions with such overwhelming certitude. But he is certainly mistaken, or possibly being devious, on one point at least. I say this because I know that he has not been entirely forthcoming about the hospital where he was treated. In the research pertaining to my Investigation I have looked into such places and how they operate. I know for a fact that the hospital where Grossvogel was treated is an extremely rotten institution, an absolutely rotten institution. Everything about it is a sham and a cover-up for the most gruesome goings-on, the true extent of which I'm not sure even those involved with such places realize. It's not a matter of any sort of depravity, so to speak, or of malign intent. There simply develops a sort of... collusion, a rotten alliance on the part of certain people and places. They are in league with... well, if only you could read my Investigation you would know the sort of nightmare that Grossvogel was faced with in that hospital, a place reeking of nightmares. Only in such a place could Grossvogel have confronted those nightmarish realizations he has discoursed upon in his countless pamphlets and portrayed in his series of Tsalal sculptures, which he says were not the product of his mind or imagination, or his soul or his self, but only the product of what he was seeing with his body and its organs of physical sensation—the shadow, the darkness. The mind and all that, the self and all that, are only a cover-up, only a fabrication, as Grossvogel says. They are that which cannot be seen with the body, which cannot be sensed by any organ of physical sensation. This is because they are actually non-existent cover-ups, masks, disguises for the thing that is activating our bodies in the way Grossvogel explained—activating them and using them for what it needs to thrive upon. They are the work, the artworks in fact, of the Tsalal itself. Oh, it's impossible to simply tell you. I wish you could read my Investigation. It would have explained everything, it would have revealed everything. But how could you read what was never written in the first place?'

  'Never written?' I inquired. 'Why was it never written?'

  'Why?' he said, pausing for a moment and grimacing in pain. 'The answer to that is exactly what Grossvogel has been preaching in both his pamphlets and his public appearances. His entire doctrine, if it can even be called that, if there could ever be such a thing in any sense whatever, is based on the non-existence, the imaginary nature of everything we believe ourselves to be. Despite his efforts to express what has happened to him, he must know very well that there are no words that are able to explain such a thing. Words are a total obfuscation of the most basic fact of existence, the very conspiracy against the human race that my treatise might have illuminated. Grossvogel has experienced the essence of this conspiracy first-hand, or at least has claimed to have experienced it. Words are simply a cover-up for this conspiracy. They are the ultimate means for the cover-up, the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness—its ultimate artistic cover-up. Because of the existence of words, we think that there exists a mind, that some kind of soul or self exists. This is just another of the infinite layers of the cover-up. There is no mind that could have written An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race—no mind that could write such a book and no mind that could read such a book. There is no one at all who can say anything about this most basic fact of existence, no one who can betray this reality. And there is no one to whom it could ever be conveyed.'

  'That all seems impossible to comprehend,' I objected.

  'It just might be, if only there actually were anything to comprehend, or anyone to comprehend it. But there are no such beings.'

  'If that's the case,' I said, wincing with abdominal discomfort, 'then who is having this conversation?'

  'Who indeed?' he answered. 'Nevertheless, I would like to continue speaking. Even if this is only nonsense and dreams, I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this moment, when this pain is taking over my mind and my self. Pretty soon none of this will make any difference. No,' he said in a dead voice. 'It doesn't matter now.'

  I noticed that he had been staring out the front window of the diner for some time, gazing at the town. Some of the others in the diner were doing the same, dumbstruck at what they saw and agonized, as I was, by the means by which they were seeing it. The vacant scene of the town's empty streets and the desolate season that had presided over the surrounding landscape, that place we had complained was absent of any manifestations of interest when we first arrived there, was undergoing a visible metamorphosis to the eyes of many of us, as though an eclipse were occurring. But what we were now seeing was not a darkness descending from far skies but a shadow which was arising from within the dead town around us, as if a torrent of black blood had begun roaring through its pale body. I realized that I had suddenly and unknowingly joined in the forefront of those who were affected by the changes taking place, even though I literally had no idea what was happening, no knowledge that came to my mind, which had ceased to function in the way it had only moments before, leaving my body in a dumb state of agony, its organs of sensation registering the gruesome spectacle of things around me: other bodies eclipsed by the shadow swirling inside their skins, some of them still speaking as though they were persons who possessed a mind and a self, imaginary entities still complaining in human words about the pain they were only beginning to realize, crying out for remedies as they entered the 'nucleus of the abysmal,' and still seeing with their minds even up to the very moment when their minds abandoned them entirely, dissipating like a mirage, able to say only how everything appeared to their minds, how the shapes of the town outside the windows of the diner were turning all crooked and crabbed, reaching out toward them as if with claws and rising up like strange peaks and horns into the sky, no longer pale and gray but swirling with the pervasive shadow, the all-moving darkness that they could finally see so perfectly because now they were seeing with their bodies, only with their bodies pitched into a great black pain. And one voice called out—a voice that both moaned and coughed—that there was a face outside, a 'face across the entire sky,' it said. The sky and town were now both so dark that perhaps only someone preoccupied with the photographic portraiture of the human face could have seen such a thing among that world of churning shadows outside the windows of the diner. Soon after that the words all but ceased, because bodies in true pain do not speak. The very last words I remember were those of a woman who screamed for someone to take her to a hospital. And this was a request which, in the strangest way, had been anticipated by the one who had induced us into making this 'physical-metaphysical excursion' and whose body had already mastered what our bodies were only beginning to learn—the nightmare of a body that is being used and that knows what is using it, making things be what they would not be and do what they would not do. I sensed the presence of a young woman who had worn a uniform as white as gauze. She had returned. And there were others like her who moved among us, and who knew how to minister to our pains in order to effect our metamorphic recovery. We did not need to be brought to their hospital, since the hospital and all its rottenness had been brought to us.

  And as much as I would like to say everything that happened to us in the town of Crampton (whose deadness and desolation seem an illusion of paradise after having its hidden life revealed to our eyes)—as much as I would like to say how it was that we were conveyed from that region of the country, that nucleus of nowhere, and returned to our distant homes—as much as I would like to say precisely what assistance and treatments we might have received that delivered us from that place and the pain we experienced there, I cannot say anything about it at all. Because when one is saved from such agony, the most difficult thing in the world is to question the m
eans of salvation: the body does not know or care what takes away its pain and is incapable of questioning these things. For that is what we have become, or what we have all but become—bodies without the illusion of minds or imaginations, bodies without the distractions of souls or selves. None of us among our circle questioned this fact, although we have never spoken of it since our... recovery. Nor have we spoken of the absence of Grossvogel from our circle, which does not exist in the way it once did, that is to say, as an assemblage of artists and intellectuals. We became the recipients of what someone designated the 'legacy of Grossvogel,' which was more than a metaphorical expression, since the artist had in fact bequeathed to each of us, on the condition of his 'death or disappearance for a stipulated period of time,' a share in the considerable earnings he had amassed from the sales of his works.

  But this strictly monetary inheritance was only the beginning of the success that all of us from that abolished circle of artists and intellectuals began to experience, the seed from which we began to grow out of our existence as failed minds and selves into our new lives as highly successful organisms, each in our own field of endeavor. Of course we could not have failed, even if we tried, in attaining whatever end we pursued, since everything we have experienced and created was a phenomenon of the shadow, the darkness which reached outward and reached upward from inside us to claw and poke its way to the heights of a mountainous pile of human and non-human bodies. These are all we have and all we are; these are what is used and thrived upon. I can feel my own body being used and cultivated, the desires and impulses that are pulling it to succeed, that are tugging it toward every kind of success. There is no means by which I could ever oppose these desires and impulses, now that I exist solely as a body which seeks only its efficient perpetuation so that it may be thrived upon by what needs it. There is no possibility of my resisting what needs to thrive upon us, no possibility of betraying it in any way. Even if this little account of mine, this little chronicle seems to disclose secrets that might undermine the nightmarish order of things, it does nothing but support and promulgate that order. Nothing can resist or betray this nightmare because nothing exists that might do anything, that might be anything that could realize a success in that way. The very idea of such a thing is only nonsense and dreams.

  There could never be anything written about the 'conspiracy against the human race' because the phenomenon of a conspiracy requires a multiplicity of agents, a division of sides, one of which is undermining the other in some way and the other having an existence that is able to be undermined. But there is no such multiplicity or division, no undermining or resistance or betrayal on either side. What exists is only this pulling, this tugging upon all of the bodies of this world. But these bodies have a collective existence only in a taxonomic or perhaps a topographical sense and in no way constitute a collective entity, an agency that might be the object of a conspiracy. And a collective entity called the human race cannot exist where there is only a collection of non-entities, of bodies which are themselves only provisional and will be lost one by one, the whole collection of them always approaching nonsense, always dissolving into dreams. There can be no conspiracy in a void, or rather in a black abyss. There can only be this tugging of all these bodies toward that ultimate success which it seems my large-bodied friend realized when he was finally used to the fullest extent, and his body used up, entirely consumed by what needed it to thrive.

  'There is only one true and final success for the shadow that makes things what they would not be,' Grossvogel proclaimed in the very last of his pamphlets. 'There is only one true and final success for the all-moving blackness that makes things do what they would not do,' he wrote. And these were the very last lines of that last pamphlet. Grossvogel could not explain himself or anything else beyond these inconclusive statements. He had run out of the words that (to quote someone who shall remain as nameless as only a member of the human race can be) are the ultimate artwork of the shadow, the darkness—its ultimate artistic cover-up. Just as he could not resist it as his body was pulled toward that ultimate success, he could not betray it with his words.

  It was during the winter following the Crampton excursion that I began fully to see where these last words of Grossvogel were leading. Late one night I stood gazing from a window as the first snow of the season began to fall and become increasingly prolific throughout each dark hour that I observed its progress with my organs of physical sensation. By that time I could see what was inside the falling flakes of snow, just as I could see what was inside all other things, activating them with its force. And what I saw was a black snow falling from a black sky. There was nothing recognizable in that sky—certainly no familiar visage spread out across the night and implanted into it. There was only this blackness above and this blackness below. There was only this consuming, proliferating blackness whose only true and final success was in merely perpetuating itself as successfully as it could in a world where nothing exists that could ever hope to be anything else except what it needs to thrive upon... until everything is entirely consumed and there is only one thing remaining in all existence and it is an infinite body of blackness activating itself and thriving upon itself with eternal success in the deepest abyss of entity. Grossvogel could not resist or betray it, even if it was an absolute nightmare, the ultimate physical-metaphysical nightmare. He ceased to be a person so that he could remain a successful organism. 'Anyone would do the same,' he said.

  And no matter what I say I cannot resist or betray it. No one could do so because there is no one here. There is only this body, this shadow, this darkness.

  I Have A Special Plan For This World (2001)

  First published in The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror 12, 2001

  Also published in: My Work Is Not Yet Done.

  I remember working in an office where the atmosphere of tension had become so severe and pervasive that one could barely see more than a few feet in any direction. This resulted in considerable difficulties for those of us who were trying to perform the tasks which our jobs required. For instance, if for some reason we needed to leave our desks and negotiate our way to another part of the building, it was not possible to see beyond a certain distance, which was at most a few feet. Outside of this limited perimeter—this 'cocoon of clarity', as I thought of it—everything became obscured in a kind of quivering blur, an ambience of agitation within which the solid and dreary decor of the company offices appeared quite distorted.

  People were constantly bumping into each other in the narrow aisleways and high-ceilinged hallways of the Blaine Company offices, so severe was this state of affairs in which the atmosphere of tension at that place had caused any object more than a few feet away to be lost in a jittering and filmy tableau. One might glimpse some indistinct shape nearby, perhaps something resembling a face, which at best would look like a rubber mask. Then suddenly you found yourself colliding with one of your fellow office workers. At that moment the image of the other person became grotesquely clarified in contrast to the otherwise blurry environment brought on by the severe tension, the incredible agitation that existed in the office and pervaded its every corner, even into the smallest storage room and the sub-basement of the old office building in which the Blaine Company was the only tenant.

  After one of those collisions between coworkers, which occurred with great frequency during this time of tension, each of the persons involved would quickly mouth some words of pardon to the other. Of course I can only be sure about my own words—they were always polite expressions of self-pardoning, no matter how I actually felt at that precise moment of collision. As for the words that were spoken by the other person, I cannot attest, because these were invariably garbled or sometimes entirely lost in that same atmosphere of tension and agitation that obtained throughout the Blaine workplace. (Even in the closest quarters all exchanges of conversation carried only a few inches at most before they turned into a senseless babble or were lost altogether.) But whatever these w
ords might have been was irrelevant, for very soon you had collected yourself and were rushing off once again into the blurred spaces before you in the Blaine offices, trying to put out of your mind that intensely clarified image you had witnessed, if only for a flashing moment—that microscopically detailed eyeball, that pair of super-defined lips (or just a single one of those lips), a nostril bristling with tiny hairs, a mountainous knuckle. Whatever you might have seen you wanted only to drive from your mind as soon as possible. Otherwise this image of some part of a human face or a human body would hook itself into your brain and become associated with the viciously tense and agitated state in which we all existed, thereby initiating a series of violent thoughts and fantasies concerning that eyeball or pair of lips, especially if you recognized the person to whom those parts were attached and could give a name to the object of your murderous rage.

  To a certain extent the conditions I have described could be attributed to the management system under which the company was organized. It seemed evident that the various departmental supervisors, and even upper-level managers, operated according to a mandate that required them to create and maintain an environment of tension-filled conflict among the lower staff of the company. Whether this practice was dictated by some trend in managing technique or was endemic to the Blaine Company was a matter of speculation. But there was another, and more significant, reason for this climate of tense agitation under which we labored, a situation that, after all, is common to working environments everywhere. The reason to which I refer is this: the city in which the Blaine Company offices were located—in fact had very recentlyre-located—had once been known, quite justly, as 'Murder Town'. Hence, it was not unreasonable to conclude that the atmosphere of tension, of agitation, that, at certain times, severely affected the spaces of the building in which the Blaine Company was the only tenant, had its counterpart in the streets of the city outside the building.