Songs of a Dead Dreamer Read Online

  Songs of a Dead Dreamer

Thomas Ligotti

Subterranean Press 2010

Songs of a Dead Dreamer © 1986, 2010 by Thomas Ligotti.

All rights reserved.

Grit Jacket © 2010 by Aeron Alfrey. All rights reserved.

Print interior Design © 2010 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Subterranean Press Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-516-1

Subterranean Printing

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com

To my mother and

to the retentivity of my father

CONTENTS

Dreams for Sleepwalkers

The Frolic

Les Fleurs

Alice'southward Final Hazard

Dream of a Manikin

The Nyctalops Trilogy:

I. The Chymist

II. Beverage to Me Just with Labyrinthine Eyes

III. Eye of the Lynx

Notes on the Writing of Horror

Dreams for Insomniacs

The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise

The Lost Art of Twilight

The Troubles of Dr. Thoss

Masquerade of a Dead Sword

Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech

Professor Nobody's Niggling Lectures on Supernatural Horror

Dreams for the Dead

Dr. Locrian'due south Aviary

The Sect of the Idiot

The Greater Festival of Masks

The Music of the Moon

The Journal of J.P. Drapeau

Vastarien

DREAMS

for

Sleepwalkers

The Frolic

In a cute habitation in a cute office of town—the boondocks of Nolgate, site of the country prison house—Dr. Munck examined the evening newspaper while his young married woman lounged on a sofa nearby, lazily flipping through the colorful parade of a style mag. Their daughter Norleen was upstairs comatose, or perchance she was illicitly enjoying an after-hours session with the new television she'd received on her altogether the week earlier. If so, her violation went undetected by her parents in the living room, where all was quiet. The neighborhood outside the house was placidity, too, as it was twenty-four hour period and night. All of Nolgate was tranquility, for it was not a identify with much of a night life, salve perhaps at the bar where the prison's correctional officers congregated. Such persistent tranquility made the doctor'due south wife fidgety with her existence in a locale that seemed light-years from the nearest metropolis. Merely thus far Leslie did non mutter of the lethargy of their lives. She knew her husband was quite dedicated to his new professional person duties in this new place. Perchance this evening, though, he would showroom more of those symptoms of disenchantment with his work that she had been meticulously observing in him of late.

"How did it get today, David?" she asked, her radiant optics peeking over the mag cover, where some other pair of optics radiated a sleeky gaze. "You were pretty tranquillity at dinner."

"It went about the aforementioned," said Dr. Munck without lowering the small-town newspaper to wait at his wife.

"Does that hateful you don't want to talk about it?"

He folded the newspaper backwards and his upper body appeared. "That's how information technology sounded, didn't it?"

"Yep, it certainly did. Are you okay?" Leslie asked, laying aside the magazine on the coffee table and offering her consummate attending.

"Severely doubting, that's how I am." He said this with a kind of far-off reflectiveness. Leslie now saw a chance to delve a little deeper.

"Anything particularly doubtful?"

"Simply everything," he answered.

"Shall I make us drinks?"

"That would be much appreciated."

Leslie walked to another part of the living room and from a large cabinet pulled out some bottles and some glasses. From the kitchen she brought out a supply of ice cubes in a brown plastic saucepan. The sounds of drink-making were the merely intrusion upon the living room's plush repose. The drapes were fatigued on all windows except the one in the corner where an Aphrodite sculpture posed. Beyond that window was a deserted streetlighted street and a piece of moon above the opulent leafage of spring trees.

"Here y'all go. A piddling drinky for my hard-working darling," she said, handing him a glass that was very thick at its base and tapered well-nigh undetectably toward its rim.

"Cheers, I actually needed i of these."

"Why? Problems at the hospital?"

"I wish y'all'd stop calling it a hospital. It'southward a prison, as you well know."

"Aye, of course."

"Y'all could say the word prison once in a while."

"All correct, then. How's things at the prison house, dear? Dominate on your case? Inmates interim up?" Leslie checked herself before things spiraled into an statement. She took a deep gulp from her beverage and calmed herself. "I'm sad virtually the snideness, David."

"No, I deserved information technology. I'grand projecting my anger onto you. I think you've known for some time what I can't bring myself to admit."

"Which is?" Leslie prompted.

"Which is that maybe information technology was not the wisest conclusion to motility here and take this saintly mission upon my psychologist's shoulders."

Her husband's remark indicated an even more astute mood of demoralization than Leslie had hoped for. But somehow his words did not cheer her the manner she thought they would. She could distantly hear the moving van pulling upwards to the house, but the sound was no longer as pleasing every bit it once was.

"You said y'all wanted to do something more than treat urban neuroses. Something more meaningful, more challenging."

"What I wanted, masochistically, was a thankless job, an impossible one. And I got it."

"Is it really that bad?" Leslie inquired, not quite believing she asked the question with such encouraging skepticism most the bodily severity of the situation. She congratulated herself for placing David's self-esteem above her own desire for a change of venue, important equally she felt this was.

"I'm afraid it is that bad. When I kickoff visited the prison's psychiatric unit and met the other doctors, I swore I wouldn't become as hopelessly contemptuous as they were. Things would be different with me. I overestimated myself by a broad margin, though. Today 1 of the orderlies was beaten up once again by two of the prisoners, excuse me, 'patients.' Last calendar week information technology was Dr. Valdman. That's why I was then edgy on Norleen'due south birthday. And so far I've been lucky. All they do is spit at me. Well, they tin all rot in that hellhole equally far equally I'm concerned."

David felt his own words lingering atmospherically in the room, tainting the placidity of the house. Until so their home had been an insular haven beyond the contamination of the prison, an imposing structure exterior the town limits. Now its psychic imposition transcended the limits of concrete distance. Inner distance constricted, and David sensed the massive prison walls shadowing the cozy neighborhood outside.

"Do you lot know why I was belatedly tonight?" he asked his wife.

"No, why?"

"Because I had an overlong chat with a fellow who hasn't got a name nevertheless."

"The one yous told me about who won't tell anyone where he'due south from or what his real name is?"

"That's him. He'south the standout example of the pernicious monstrosity of that place. A existent beauty, that guy. One for the books. Absolute madness paired with a sharp cunning. Because of his beautiful footling proper name game, he was classified as unsuitable for the general prison population and thus we in the psychiatric section ended up with him. Co-ordinate to him, though, he has plenty of names, no less than a thousand, none of which he's condescended to speak in anyone's presenc

east. Information technology'south difficult to imagine that he has a name similar anybody else. And we're stuck with him, no name and all."

"Do you call him that, 'no proper name'?"

"Maybe we should, but no, nosotros don't."

"So what practice you call him, so?"

"Well, he was convicted as John Doe, and since and so everyone refers to him every bit that. They've yet to uncover any official documentation on him. Information technology's as if he simply dropped out of nowhere. His fingerprints don't match any record of previous convictions. He was picked up in a stolen car parked in front of an simple school. An observant neighbor reported him as a suspicious character oftentimes seen in the area. Everyone was on the alert, I approximate, after the first few disappearances from the schoolhouse, and the police force were watching him just every bit he was walking a new victim to his automobile. That'southward when they fabricated the arrest. But his version of the story is a piffling unlike. He says he was fully enlightened of his pursuers and expected, even wanted, to be caught, convicted, and put in a penitentiary."

"Why?"

"Why? Who knows? When you inquire a psychopath to explicate himself, it only becomes more than confusing. And John Doe is chaos itself."

"What do you mean?" asked Leslie. Her husband emitted a brusque burst of laughter and then roughshod silent, as if scouring his listen for the right words.

"Okay, hither's a little scene from an interview I had with him today. I asked him if he knew why he was in prison."

"'For frolicking,' he said.

"'What does that mean?' I asked.

"His reply was: 'Mean, mean, mean. You lot're a meany, that's what yous are.'

"That kittenish ranting somehow sounded to me as if he were mimicking his victims. I'd really had enough right then just foolishly continued the interview.

"'Practise you know why you can't leave here?' I calmly asked with a poor variant of my original inquiry.

"'Who says I can't? I'll just go when I want to. Merely I don't want to go yet.'

"'Why non?' I naturally questioned.

"'I just got here,' he said. 'Thought I'd take a vacation. Frolicking the fashion I exercise can be exhausting sometimes. I want to be in with all the others. Quite a rousing temper, I look. When can I get with them, when can I?'

"Can you believe that? Information technology would be cruel, though, to put him in general population, not to say he doesn't deserve such cruelty. The average inmate doesn't look favorably on Doe's kind of crime. They encounter information technology as reflecting badly on them, being that they're simply your garden variety armed robbers, murderers, and whatnot. Everyone needs to feel they're better than someone else. There'due south really no predicting what would happen if we put him in there and the others plant out what he was convicted for."

"So he has to stay in the psychiatric unit for the residuum of his term?" asked Leslie.

"He doesn't call up so. Beingness interred in a maximum security correctional facility is his thought of a holiday, call up? He thinks he tin leave whenever he wants."

"And can he?" asked Leslie with a firm absence of facetiousness in her voice. This had always been one of her weightiest fears about living in a prison town—that not far from their own backyard at that place was a horde of fiends plotting to escape through what she envisioned every bit rather papery walls. To raise a child in such surround was the prime number objection she had to her husband's work.

"I told you earlier, Leslie, there have been very few successful escapes from that prison. If an inmate does go beyond the walls, his first impulse is e'er one of practical self-preservation. And so he tries to get as far away as possible from this town, which is probably the safest place to exist in the effect of an escape. Anyhow, most escapees are apprehended within hours afterward they've broken out."

"What virtually a prisoner similar John Doe? Does he accept a sense of 'practical self-preservation,' or would he rather just hang around and do what he does somewhere that'southward conveniently located?"

"Prisoners similar that don't escape in the normal grade of things. They but bounciness off the walls just not over them. You lot know what I mean?"

Leslie said she understood, but this did not in the least lessen the potency of her fears, which found their source in an imaginary prison in an imaginary town, one where anything could happen as long equally it approached the hideous. Morbidity had never been her strong suit, and she loathed its intrusion on her grapheme. And for all his ready reassurance about the able security of the prison, David also seemed to be profoundly uneasy. He was sitting very still now, holding his potable between his knees and appearing to listen for something.

"What's wrong, David?" asked Leslie.

"I thought I heard…a sound."

"A sound like what?"

"Can't draw it exactly. A faraway racket."

He stood upward and looked around, as if to see whether the sound had left some tell-tale clue in the surrounding stillness of the house, possibly a smeary sonic print somewhere.

"I'm going to check on Norleen," he said, setting his glass down on the table abreast his chair. He so walked across the living room, upwards the three segments of the stairway, and downward the upstairs hall. Peeping into his daughter's room, he saw her tiny figure resting comfortably, a sleepy embrace wrapped about the form of a blimp Bambi. She all the same occasionally slept with an inanimate companion, fifty-fifty though she was getting a little old for this. Simply her psychologist father was careful not to question her right to this childish condolement. Earlier leaving the room, Dr. Munck lowered the window which was partially open on that warm leap evening.

When he returned to the living room, he delivered the wonderfully routine bulletin that Norleen was peacefully comatose. In a gesture containing faint overtones of celebratory relief, Leslie made them two fresh drinks, afterward which she said:

"David, you lot said you had an 'overlong conversation' with that John Doe. Not that I'm morbidly curious or anything, but did you ever get him to reveal anything nigh himself? Annihilation at all?"

"Oh, certain," Dr. Munck replied, rolling an ice cube around in his mouth. His voice was now more than relaxed.

"You could say he told me everything near himself, but all of it was nonsense—the blathering of a maniac. I asked him in a casually interested sort of way where he was from."

"'No place,' he replied similar a psychotic simpleton.

"'No identify?' I probed.

"'Aye, precisely, Herr Doktor. I'm non some snob who puts on airs and pretends to emanate from some high-flown patch of geography. Ge-og-ra-phy. That'southward a funny word. I like all the languages you have.'

"'Where were you lot born?' I asked in another brilliant alternate form of the question.

"'Which time do you hateful, you meany?' he said back to me, and so forth. I could go along with this dialogue—

"You exercise a pretty good John Doe imitation, I must say.

"Thank you, simply I couldn't keep it upwardly for very long. It wouldn't be piece of cake to imitate all his different voices, accents, and degrees of articulacy. He may be something akin to a multiple personality, I'm not sure. I'd take to go over the tapes of my interviews with him to see if whatever patterns of coherency turn upwardly, possibly something the detectives could utilize to constitute who this guy really is. The tragic office is that knowing Doe'due south legal identity is a formality at this point, just tying upward loose ends. His victims are dead, and they died horribly. That'due south all that counts at present. Certain, he was somebody'south baby male child at one fourth dimension. But I tin't pretend to intendance anymore about biographical details—the name on his nativity certificate, where he grew upward, what made him the fashion he is. I'yard no aesthete of pathology. It'southward never been my ambition to study mental illness without effecting some improvement. So why should I waste my time trying to assist someone like John Doe, who doesn't live in the same earth as nosotros do, psychologically speaking. I used to believe in rehabilitation, not a purely castigating approach to criminal behavior. But those people, those things at the prison house are only an ugly stain on our earth. The hell with them. Just plow the

m all under for fertilizer, I say." Dr. Munck then drained his drinking glass until the ice cubes rattled.

"Want some other?" Leslie asked with a smooth therapeutic tone to her phonation.

David smiled now, his illiberal outburst having purged him somewhat of his ire. "Let'due south get drunk and fool around, shall we?"

Leslie nerveless her hubby'southward glass for a refill. Now in that location was reason to gloat, she thought. David was not giving up his work from a sense of ineffectual failure merely from anger, an anger that was melting into indifference. Now everything would be as it had been before; they could leave the prison town and move back habitation. In fact, they could move anywhere they liked, maybe accept a long vacation offset, care for Norleen to some sunny place. Leslie thought of all these things as she made two more drinks in the quiet of that beautiful room. This quiet was no longer an indication of soundless stagnancy just a delicious, lulling prelude to the promising days to come. The indistinct happiness of the future glowed inside her along with the alcohol; she was gravid with pleasant prophecies. Perhaps the fourth dimension was now right to take some other child, a picayune blood brother or sis for Norleen. But that could await just a while longer…a lifetime of possibilities lay ahead. An affable genie seemed to be on standby. They had but to make their wishes, and their bidding would be done.

Earlier returning with the drinks, Leslie went in the kitchen. She had something she wanted to requite her husband, and this seemed the perfect fourth dimension to do information technology. A little token to show David that though his job had proved a sorry waste of his worthy effort, she had supported his piece of work in her own style. With a drink in each hand, she held under her left elbow the minor box she had got from the kitchen.

"What'due south that?" asked David, taking his drink.

"Just a lilliputian something for the art lover in you. I bought it at that piddling shop where they sell things the inmates at the prison make. Some of it is quality trade—belts, jewelry, ashtrays, you know."

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