Thomas Ligotti (1953–) is an iconic American writer of weird short fiction whose oeuvre has been as ground-breaking as, if not always as well-acknowledged as, that of Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and H. P. Lovecraft. His first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), is an outright classic in the field. His subsequent compilation, The Nightmare Factory (1996), won both the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award. The influence of workplace experiences infused Ligotti’s fiction with fresh energy, resulting in the masterpiece “My Work Is Not Yet Done” (2002).

Jon Padgett is a professional—though lapsed—ventriloquist who lives in New Orleans. His first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine. Padgett is the creator of the Thomas Ligotti Online website and is the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Vastarien, a source of critical study and creative response to Ligotti’s work.

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“The Town Manager” illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

“But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap.”

- Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal

Thomas Ligotti’s mid-career story “The Town Manager” takes place in what he elsewhere calls “skeleton towns”: isolated, semi-rural hamlets that are many years beyond their best days.[1] Prior examples include the gothic setting of “The Tsalal,” the town and its people featured in “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World,” and perhaps a dozen or more Ligotti tales set in such decrepit locales. “The Town Manager,” however, stands apart from previous, similar stories for several reasons: 1) the deconstruction of this fictional town’s corporate governing system is highlighted, 2) humor—specifically of an absurdist nature—is utilized to more devastating effect than in previous stories of its kind, and 3) the physical degradation and corruption of the landscape featured in “The Town Manager” mirrors a kind of self-indicting rottenness that infects the narrator himself.

The Story

“The Town Manager” opens during a significant change in the town’s leadership. The unnamed hamlet maintains a simple, corporate form of government in which the populace is led by a single individual, traditionally called “the town manager.” As the story opens, the latest town manager has disappeared—a not unusual but always mysterious occurrence that marks the end of one manager’s administration and the beginning of another’s. The action required of the populace during this leadership changeover (a bogus search for the former manager) has gone on since time immemorial, set in stone via a shoddy and oblique town charter.

The new town manager, who remains an invisible and possibly supernatural entity throughout the story, leads the town to an unprecedented phase in its history, as strangers come in from outside and redevelop the whole area, transforming the hamlet into “Funny Town,” a kind of sideshow tourist trap. All the inhabitants are assigned new, often humiliating and thankless jobs.

The transformation of the town turns out to be nothing more than a huge moneymaking scheme, as for a time it is filled with tourists who pay exorbitant fees to buy the narrator’s soup or visit the other sideshows offered there. The residents do not benefit from this economic windfall, though, the money they generate collected multiple times a day by armed guards (outsiders) who leave only the most meager funds for the workers.

Eventually, the tourists stop coming to town, and the townsfolk realize that the latest town manager has disappeared. The narrator, however, doesn’t wait to witness further degradations. He leaves for other towns and cities, working odd jobs. After his travels reveal a similar political framework everywhere he goes, the narrator decides to kill himself, but is finally approached by a well-dressed man on commission to find new talent. He tells the narrator that he may be town manager material. The narrator, who sees only two options ahead of him (suicide or town management), replies, “I’m listening.”

The Ritualistic Politics of a Skeleton Town 

Ligotti observed that “[‘The Town Manager’] was meant to be against the world… an anti-governmental story.”[2] The story presents a municipal government that operates much like a big corporation. Towns, like business departments or agencies, are run by a single manager, who presumably is supervised by a higher authority (nameless, out-of-town entities).

Like many legislators or workers, managers or not, the town manager who vanishes at the beginning of the story has become almost entirely non-productive in the weeks leading up to his presumed resignation: “[H]e spent the whole of each working day asleep behind his desk.” The town managers, the narrator tells us, have been declining in overall quality for some time, but each of them during their tenure (not unlike new mayors or other executive leaders) introduces “some element of change” to the community. A new opera house, far inferior to the old one, is built as part of a push for “civic rehabilitation.” [3] An unneeded trolley is created that runs from one end of the small town to the other in no time at all. These changes lead to work for the residents, of course, which seems their only true purpose. Unfortunately, the changes also lead to instability and uncertainty.

As in our world in certain times and places, administrative overhauls and reorganizations are the most disruptive aspects of the residents’ lives:

The difficult part was waiting for new administrators to reveal the nature of their plans for the town and then adjusting ourselves to whatever form they might take. This was the system in which we had functioned for generations. This was the order of things into which we had been born and to which we had committed ourselves by compliance. The risk of opposing this order, of plunging into the unknown, was simply too much for us to contemplate for very long.[4]

The town itself appears to be run through poor memory and superstition, via the Town Charter, “now only a few poorly phrased notes assembled from recollections and lore…”[5] The residents are resigned to the ritualistic precepts enumerated in this ancient document, except during the limbo-time between town manager administrations. The townsfolk, of course, have little free agency and will to change the system in any meaningful way:

Our only concern was to act in such a way that would allow us to report to the new town manager, when he appeared, that we had made an effort to discover the whereabouts of his predecessor. Yet this ritual seemed to matter less and less to each successive town manager, the most recent of whom barely acknowledged our attempts to locate the dead or living body of the previous administrator.[6]

Here are people not even motivated by fear of noncompliance (at least until the trolley operator’s death). They are simply brainwashed into action and obedience by tradition. Leeman, the Barber, comes closest to progressive thinking by suggesting that “it’s time to find out just who we’re dealing with,” but that line of thinking dissolves once the new town manager makes its presence known.[7] The townsfolk are trained by previous administrations to follow the directives of the Town Charter and go through specific motions when the town manager disappears. In this case, they have to search for the old town manager, whether or not they know for certain that he is gone for good. According to the narrator, “these searches were performed with increasingly greater speed and efficiency whenever one town manager turned up missing as the prelude to the installation of another.”[8] In this twisted world, again, not so unlike ours, speed and efficiency are paired with illogic and absurdity – the paradox of moving through red tape like clockwork via ritualistic activities.

Many of these rituals carry a peculiarly occult feeling, from the lamplight being turned off to symbolize the passing of the old manager to the new. “He has left us,” someone says, suggesting the town manager as a temporary, shabby savior.[9] The sinister, unseen, new town manager—who communicates with slashing, all-capped, often misplaced, malformed words containing no vowels except for “A,” “U” and “O,”—suggests both illiteracy and the occult. Communication with the new manager, as with the monstrous manager in Ligotti’s “Our Temporary Supervisor,” has become a wholly esoteric process. Directives are found on floating pieces of paper, or, when they are not followed in a timely manner, burned or scratched into mutilated flesh. The previous town manager was simply lazy and incompetent. This new town manager is alien to the residents on a different level, operating in a gloomy locale out of town limits.

Things had always been moving in that direction. At one time the town manager conducted business from a suite of offices in the town hall and lived in a fine house in The Hill district of town. Now this official would be working out of a weather-beaten shed next to a ruined farmhouse. Nothing remained the same for very long. Change was the very essence of our lives.[10]

The town managers have become despotic but are themselves subject to some kind of outside direction and rules. Their own bosses are invisible and unknown entities. It is rule by proxy. The search for the old town manager, even when the residents know he is gone, suggests the absurdity of certain religious rituals. In “the new epoch” of the town’s management, excuses are no longer made for the ridiculous pet projects the managers enact.[11] Immediate compliance is expected under the penalty of death, a kind of Old Testament operation. Again, though, the town managers themselves are a part of outside, corporate (and perhaps globalized) forces—a fact highlighted by the workmen and construction crews from foreign locales who transform the town. The new town manager may be uneducated and is certainly deranged (even homicidal), but is nonetheless successful in transforming the town (temporarily) into a moneymaking operation at the expense of the townsfolk, who are used like raw materials. They are dehumanized to the point where they, like the town managers, literally live in their work facility and, presumably unlike the town managers, do not profit for their efforts. Armed guards and spies from outside of the area ensure that no resident takes more than the meager amount that they are allowed to keep. The townsfolk are given just enough to survive and are often humiliated and starved in the process. The corrupt municipal government alone is allowed to thrive even as it degenerates further into madness.

At the end of the story, the narrator realizes to his dismay that every other community in the country and presumably the world is ruled by the same principles and order as his skeleton hometown. There is no escape from this system of dissolution that pushes citizens to follow insane edicts and treats them as cogs in a great machine that no one individual, town manager or not, can fathom.

Horror Hilarity

“What drew us to [‘The Town Manager’] was a kind of dark sense of humor underlying the story,” the Weird Fiction Review interviewer of Thomas Ligotti comments.[12] Elsewhere, in a separate interview, Ligotti addresses this point:

The particular town manager of the title reflects an advanced stage of the town’s degeneration and derangement. States and circumstances of degeneration, derangement, ruin, decay, etc. have a tremendous attraction for me, whether they are incarnated as a decrepit urban area or a worn-out small town. And sometimes the result of this attraction is humorous.[13]

Use of humor has always been a feature, often understated by critics, of Thomas Ligotti’s work. Even early tales, like “The Chymist,” are infused with dark humor. That story’s first-person, present-tense narrator engages in continuous, sardonic wordplay while waxing poetic about the degenerating city in which he lives. Later works, like “The Bungalow House” and Ligotti’s novella “My Work Is Not Yet Done,” include grimly and often absurdly funny moments from narrators who are also obsessed, like Ligotti, with bleak and ruined landscapes.

Illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

The humor in “The Town Manager” is of an absurd (or, rather, absurdist) flavor, from the useless trolley to the murder of the trolley operator by possibly supernatural means via the semi-literate town manager. In the pivotal book, The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin quotes philosopher Apuleius, describing ancient mime plays in which “serious, even horrifying matters are miraculously mingled with the… humorous.” [14] This is of a kind used by Ligotti, humor that might be found in a Beckett or Ionesco play – a hilarity that reinforces and deepens rather than defuses the horror of existence.

This grim absurdity reaches its comical apex in Ligotti’s story when the new town manager transforms the hamlet into “Funny Town.”[15] The hardware store becomes “Comfort Castle,” a maze of nonfunctional lavatories, putting Ritter—formerly the hardware store owner—in the position of Attendant, a job with no apparent function. The progressive-minded barber, Leeman, is the subject of a worse humiliation, being forced to wear infant clothes, sitting day by day in the middle of a giant playpen, formerly his barber shop, which is christened “Baby Town.”[16]

The whole community becomes likewise transformed into a series of sideshows, some “whimsical,” like the aforementioned shops, but others surreal and sinister and oppressive. The narrator himself is set to selling soup (actually only bouillon cubes in water) and is confined, day and night, to “tunnel-like arcades” behind main street, “where it was perpetually night.” The alleys sometimes end up “in someone’s kitchen or living room” or just peter out or transform into a “big city” façade, in which street noises (“screams and sirens”) are piped in through speakers.[17]

The artificial nature of the new town is, at its height, where the narrator is stationed, inside of “painted theatrical backdrops of tall tenement buildings with zigzagging fire escapes [rising] up on every side…”[18] The narrator is forced to subsist on his product, working and living there on a flimsy mattress day and night. This kind of black humor bolsters the material that might be too bleak to ingest without it.

Ligotti’s narrator ultimately abandons his hometown to escape the insanity, humiliation and injustice of his plight. What he finds is more of the same, everywhere. The state of the outside world, so like that of the degenerating skeleton town, leads the narrator to the brink of suicide. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explains how such epiphanies can lead the individual to similarly existential depths:

…in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. [19]

“Even though I’m writing a weird story,” Ligotti writes, “I want it to be all of a piece. I wouldn’t want anything humorous in the story to undermine the story as a whole, which is definitely not supposed to be funny.”[20] Ligotti has succeeded here. Though notable elements of “The Town Manager” are indeed humorous, nothing about the story as whole is (a hallmark of successful absurdism in literature).

Illustration by Jason Van Hollander for Weird Tales #333

Degeneration of Landscape, Degeneration of Self

In a recent email conversation with Ligotti, I asked if there was a connection between “The Town Manager” and the Detroit area, in which he was born and raised, and where he lived for many years. Ligotti replied:

[T]he sub-prime mortgage scam is often cited as having its beginnings in Detroit, where poor were preyed upon by greedy lending institutions. That didn’t sit well with me. The ruination of Detroit had begun long before that, though. During the late sixties there was a co-called “white flight” to the suburbs that contributed in a major way to the deterioration of Detroit… However, Detroit did become particularly interesting afterward… It wasn’t the “great ruins,” such as the train station, that attracted me so much as the houses on backstreets by the railroad yard that you couldn’t tell were inhabited or not, old car repair places and other such left behind businesses, and abandoned lots that came to be used as dumping yards for sofas and large appliances. Those weren’t ruins of a city but of people’s lives.[21]

In the story, the town itself is shrinking as its “decrepitude” (and that of its residents’ lives) worsens:

The buildings and houses comprising our town were now far fewer than in my childhood and youth. Whole sections that had once been districts of prolific activity had been transformed by a remarkable corrosion into empty lots where only a few bricks and some broken glass indicated that anything besides weeds and desiccated earth had ever existed there.[22]

Paradoxically, the growth of the systematic machine comes at the cost of the living and working space of the townspeople.

When the perspective changes from first-person plural to first-person singular for the first time, the narrator describes his “youthful ambition.”[23] Namely, he had always wanted to live in a prestigious neighborhood known as The Hill, which had at some point in a previous administration been razed level with the rest of the town and was now an “empty stretch of ground.”[24] Perhaps it is this ambition and unwillingness to accept his situation that sets the narrator apart enough to be later considered managerial material. Ligotti writes:

In “The Town Manager,” the town’s continued decrepitude was the result of a succession of outside business and political interests that gradually sucked the life out of the place while enriching themselves in increasingly odd and nonsensical ways. I experienced that madness from the inside in the form of new ownerships that bought out a family company that published a modest series of quality books. The number of titles subsequently published grew rapidly while the quality of the books went into the toilet, and I lost my place in the company by my reluctance to work longer and harder for entities located outside the U.S. It’s a familiar story now, but at the time it was new kind of hell wherein formerly decent people went rotten before my eyes.[25]

Why does the narrator of “The Town Manager” go “rotten” in a community that mirrors Ligotti’s own degenerating work experiences, where quality “went into the toilet?” Or rather, other than his “youthful ambition,” what is it about the narrator that sets him apart?

A clue comes early in the story after Leeman the barber voices the townsfolk’s complaints about the useless search for the missing Town Manager. The narrator pipes up:

I referred him and the others to the section of the town charter, a brief document to be sure, that required “a fair search of the town and its environs” whenever a town manager went missing. This was part of an arrangement that had been made by the founders and that had been upheld throughout succeeding generations. [26]

This perhaps highlights a willingness on the narrator’s part to at least speak for an appeal to tradition—a trait that would be valued in any managerial capacity. When Leeman rebukes this defense of the Town Charter by suggesting that “’it’s time to find out just who we’re dealing with,’” the narrator observes, “Others agreed with him. I myself did not disagree.”[27] The political savvy of the narrator is obvious. He is knowledgeable but knows when to speak up and when to keep his mouth shut.

Later in the story, we are given to know that the narrator, like other townsfolk, has endured a series of job changes due to various town managers’ directives over the years. The narrator had initially cultivated a successful delivery business and had ended up sweeping the barber’s floors and doing odd jobs about town. We are told that his drive “was all but extinguished” (my emphasis) once The Hill in which he had wanted to live “had eroded to nothing.”[28] Now the reader knows that there is some ambition left, which perhaps can be cultivated later at the right time and in the right place.

Near the end of the story, when the narrator is forced to sell bouillon cubes in water, he realizes that the town has been transformed into a successful, if dreary and fascistic, tourist destination:

I was in awe of the town manager’s scheme. Not only had this faceless person taken our last penny to finance the most extensive construction project the town had ever seen, from which there was no doubt a considerable amount of kickback involved, but this ingenious boondoggle had additionally brought an unprecedented flood of revenue into our town.[29]

Again, the narrator, cleverer and more observant than his fellow townsfolk, reveals his proto-managerial chops. He understands that the whole scheme is an “ingenious boondoggle.” One wonders how much, or whether, the tourists appreciated “Funny Town,” or if they had any choice at all in the matter – perhaps having been directed by their own town managers to take a vacation under strict specifications.

In any case, once the boondoggle and the latest town manager’s tenure have reached an end, the narrator leaves his hometown (as Ligotti left his longtime job and home in the Detroit area) only to realize the system that has ground him and the rest of his fellow citizens down also rules elsewhere in the world—everywhere else in the world. There is, in fact, no escape from the humiliating degradations of the individual by a degenerating, totalitarian, corporate form of government, in which quality goes “into the toilet” in a never ending quest to make the most revenue at the least possible cost. The narrator decides, in light of this soul-crushing revelation, “to make an end of it.”[30]

Before he can take any action toward suicide, though, the narrator is approached by “a well-dressed man,” who is on commission to find people like the narrator for town management. In the end, it seems like the narrator will go that route, since “It was either that or make an end of it.” [31]

How does the “well-dressed man” know that the narrator is indeed managerial material? He asks him, “’You’ve been some places, am I right?’”[32] In the world of this story, extensive traveling likely connotes both a greater awareness of the form and function of the system at large and an ambitious, paradoxically unsatisfied nature—traits that would suggest managerial promise. Perhaps, also, the powers that be have been watching the narrator (maybe for many years in some esoteric and/or technological sense).

Finally, why does the narrator choose town management, the very process by which he has been ruined, over suicide? Ligotti writes:

In “The Town Manager,” the narrator who speaks for both the town and himself ultimately goes rotten in a way that’s quite apparent by how the story ends. It wasn’t his plan to go the way he did. It was the fact, as he discovers, that the whole world as well as the town he knew had become unsalvageable and his options had run out. That’s the “realistic perspective…” This situation can be seen in plenty of zombie movies and TV shows: you either become realistic or die, by the bite of a zombie or the savagery of other humans.[33]

Conclusion

“The Town Manager” is a singular piece of fiction within Thomas Ligotti’s remarkable oeuvre to date, even among the subset of his “skeleton town” tales, thanks to its incisive dissection of governmental systems, its perfect application of absurdist humor, and the self-eviscerating, moral degeneration of its narrator. The story, among the best examples of literary weird fiction, is a sardonic, subtle indictment of corporate rule and is as fiercely humane and uncanny as the best of Thomas Ligotti’s work.

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[1] Noctuary, Thomas Ligotti (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2012), 79.

[2] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

[3] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 30.

[4] Ibid., 31.

[5] Ibid., 27.

[6] Ibid., 27

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 25.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 29.

[11] Ibid., 31.

[12] Thomas Ligotti, interview by Jeff VanderMeer, “Thomas Ligotti on Weird Fiction,” Born to Fear, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014), 202.

[13] Thomas Ligotti, interview by Daniel Ableev, “Interview Nonsense with Thomas Ligotti,” Born to Fear, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014), 156–157.

[14] The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2004), 159.

[15] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 36.

[16] Ibid., 34.

[17] Ibid., 34–35.

[18] Ibid., 35.

[19] Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning” in The Myth of Sisyphus (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1991), 6.

[20] Thomas Ligotti, interview by Jeff VanderMeer, “Thomas Ligotti on Weird Fiction,” Born to Fear, ed. Matt Cardin (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2014), 203.

[21] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

[22] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 25–26.

[23] Ibid., 26.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

[26] Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books, 2007), 27.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 30.

[29] Ibid., 36.

[30] Ibid., 38.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Thomas Ligotti, e‑mail message to author, October 23, 2017.

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There is no shortage of good horror and weird fiction about ventriloquism, but it’s always focused on the dummies, isn’t it? Arguably the best part of

I say this because I came to Jon Padgett’s debut collection The Secret of Ventriloquism with certain expectations, in large part grounded in the body of past dummy stories, and those expectations were largely subverted and challenged, for which I am very thankful. There are strange dummies in these stories, most notably the dummy Reg in the title story, but overall Padgett is interested in looking at ventriloquism as cause for a weird occasion from a different direction altogether. His stories seem to take a step back and apply the kind of uncanny questions that we focus upon ventriloquist’s dummies, in all of their unlife, to the ventriloquists themselves, and by extension to humanity: what are we to be imbued with life and thoughts? And what are we to believe—that we’re ever acting under our own power, that we’re masters of ourselves: our bodies, our minds, our voices? And if we can be understood to be no different than dummies, then surely we are in fact being animated by voices not our own.

Padgett’s prior experience as a working ventriloquist shines through the authority in the writing of stories such as “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism,” a step-by-step guide for the reader to become first a practitioner of ventriloquism, and then a practitioner of the occult art of Greater Ventriloquism. What separates the two, you might ask? (And that is an important question, because this Greater Ventriloquism is the fictional philosophy cutting through all of the stories in this collection, giving them a much appreciated spine of intent and eerie energy.) The trick to being a Greater Ventriloquist, it seems, is to take the lessons one gains in manipulating a ventriloquist’s dummy and then realize that you can “control all the animal-dummies around you” the way one might control the non-animal variety. If the implications of that seem disturbing to you, I will not spoil the rest of the story (I wouldn’t do that anyway); suffice it to say, though, the story leaves you thinking of ventriloquism less as a stage trick or performance and more as a kind of vastation.

That sense of vastation is also something that cuts through the collection as a whole. In “Organ Void,” for instance, the protagonist encounters a homeless person on the side of a highway and makes a deal for a cardboard sign bearing the title of the story, after which they begin to be figuratively and literally emptied out. Being emptied out makes sense, of course, in the context of ventriloquism. As the cutaway diagram on the cover of Secret makes clear, dummies of all kinds are ultimately empty; all the better to be imbued with voice. “The Infusorium,” meanwhile, makes use of the other meaning of vastation, “being laid to waste,” with a story set in a decaying industrial town with strange soot soaking into everything and everyone, with horrifying consequences. In that story, it seems, the only way to solve anything is through purging by fire, but even that just contributes to the vastation of the land and the people, one way or another.

Like “20 Simple Steps,” “The Mindfulness of Horror Practice” makes key use of the imperative tense, taking the form of a mindfulness exercise that leads the reader through four stages of developing awareness of themselves. Padgett in fact excels at this kind of direct address to the reader, in a tone that reflects that of a seeming self help guru (in his introduction to the collection, Matt Cardin mentions that Padgett is influenced by, among others, Eckhart Tolle). This seems strangely appropriate at a time when readers are swamped by self help manuals and personal care how-to’s, but the goal of “Mindfulness” is a grotesque one: to gain enlightenment via revelling in the grotesquerie and transience of one’s own existence. The final stage is a kind of oblivion: “Accept as the days and nights go by that you are a walking skeleton, an ambulatory miracle of meat. New thoughts come, but they arrive from beyond the foam, beyond the foam, beyond the foamy sponge of your brain.” Of course, if these new thoughts don’t come from your disgusting, transient body, or the “foamy sponge of your brain,” then where do they come from? (A Greater Ventriloquist, as it turns out, or something even more unnerving.)

I’m loathe to go much further in identifying high points of the collection, largely because this is a collection that begs to be read as a whole, and then also to be revisited past the first reading. Stories like “Origami Dreams,” for instance, thrive via a kind of nightmare logic; characters gain and lose fingers without notable causation, houses unfold into other structures against the laws of architecture (and physics), and identities shift and lock into place outside even the barest sense of consent on the part of the persons involved. All of this provides that frisson that comes from removing the boundary between reality and fantasy, but the story can also lack a sense of purpose unless one reads it in the greater context of the collection as a whole, and the principles created and revealed therein. My recommendation for reading, then, might be to first read “20 Simple Steps” and the title story, an exceedingly strange and creepy one-act play, to get a sense of the mythos Padgett is creating, and then read the collection as a whole from there—rereading those stories again along the way, of course.

In retrospect, Padgett’s notable achievement with this collection is to thematically and philosophically explore the notion of ventriloquism in weird horror in a different way, and certainly a more contemporary way that aligns nicely with certain pessimistic strains of thought à la writers like Thomas Ligotti (who was also Padgett’s mentor; Padgett himself founded Thomas Ligotti Online, one of the most notable online venues for discussing weird horror). When we understand that we are no better than dummies—when we see the strings that move us and hear the voice that animates us—we become the uncanny object, as opposed to the dummy. Our own embodiment thus becomes a vessel for great horrors. It’s eerie enough to make one pine for the good old days as a kind of relief, when dummies were dummies, ventriloquists were ventriloquists, and the horror was only in our minds. If only that was ever the case.

The post Review: Jon Padgett’s “The Secret of Ventriloquism” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Were there any particular events in your life that pushed your imagination to contemplate horror?

I think the first and foremost source of horror that preoccupied my mind were nightmares. I’ve been a professional at bad dreams all my life. Hamlet had nothing on me as far as that’s concerned. Nightmares are the only realm in which we are without help and absent of all hope of being saved from the worst and most unnatural fates. But that’s all very abstract, and I don’t think it’s the response you’re looking to get from me. No doubt I did have more than my share of nightmares. There were other things, though, and I’m not sure I can put my finger on what they were or how much any one of them might be blamed or credited for my obsession with the artistic expression of horror. I was often sick as a child. Often my illnesses were accompanied by fevers and deranged perceptions that they bring about—malignant faces on the ceiling of my bedroom, shadows in corners, shapes watching me from dark places, that sort of thing. When I was two years old, I was hospitalized and operated on for an abdominal rupture. In my reading on authors of supernatural writing, I came across an article on childhood surgical procedures, focusing on one in particular that had been undergone by Bram Stoker. The person who wrote the article had a theory on what effect this may have had on the man who would later write Dracula and other tales of things that did not exist and could not exist in our so-called normal world, the real and orderly world where the substance of our lives is assumed to be played out. And of course H. P. Lovecraft recorded at length in his letters the journeys he made to a world without any rules concerning what should be and what should not be. I have to say that my destinations were more mundane but it’s the emotions aroused by nightmares affects us most. They have no counterpart in intensity and suggestion in our daylight lives. Throughout my youngest days I used to think that if I had a bad dream the night before it was less likely I would have another on the next one. I’m not claiming to be unique in the nightmares and traumas of my early life, or even that they were material to my later preoccupation with horror movies and literature. They just happened. So did night terrors, which have continued to this day, in which I feel myself awake but am paralyzed in body. Those may account for what is possibly my worst fear: the syndrome of being “locked in” your body and unable to give a sign that you’re aware of what is happening. It’s that sort of disorder that I believe alone makes anyone’s continued existence not worth the risk. Like many other potential sufferings, at least for me, it’s simply too awful to contemplate. A bestselling book was written by someone in that condition. This sort of heroic accomplishment is supposed to assure us all that we have reservoirs of strength that can get us through the most strange and terrible ordeals. That may be true for some people. But I can’t help trembling when I think of those for whom it is a lie. So many lies are told in order to keep us from collapsing into a heap should we give too much attention to the thousands of potential nightmares that threaten us both day and night.

Could you talk about your religious background?

I attended Catholic school from grades one through three and remained a theist throughout my teenage years. No incident or study on my part that I can name led to my becoming an atheist around the age of nineteen. To my recollection, I became aware of my lapse from religious belief while doing homework for a college history class. It was not a momentous occurrence to say the least. Looking back, I would have to say that my Catholicism, which was rather elaborate and obsessive for a child, was a matter of observance of ritual and private practice without being directed by emotional or spiritual feeling. Even in grade school I realized that I lacked any sentiment positive or negative for my creator. This didn’t seem strange to me. I think I assumed that everyone felt, or failed to feel, the same way. I found Jesus Christ singularly uninspiring as a messiah or useful in any way to me in my life. What I did feel was a profound sense of sympathy for others. The sound of an ambulance siren always inspired a prayer from me, though at some point this became a knee-jerk or superstitious response. Later, the sound of an ambulance siren aroused nothing but fear in me. I’ve made a number of trips in such a vehicle for problems ranging from a broken leg to emergency surgery for diverticulitis in 2012 in the early hours of April Fool’s Day. You can’t make this stuff up, as they say. While suffering an ego-annihilating pain just before I underwent anesthesia, I did experience a confused awareness that my death during surgery would not be a bad thing. This became a lucid thought and a hope without ambivalence prior to subsequent surgeries to repair my guts.

The essay “Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures” reads like an early attempt at addressing the themes you would later explore in your nonfiction book “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.” Why did you feel it needed to be included in a collection of fiction?

I’ve been a didactic writer to a greater or lesser extent from the beginning. It may be deluded to think that the world simply must hear what you have to say, but I think this delusion is necessary if one is to write anything at all, whether it’s poetry, fiction, or a sermon. So didacticism is inherent in every effort to spill ink on a page. It’s more a matter of the way that urgency to tell the world what you think about it is dressed up for the reading public. Should a work of fiction be poorly garbed in its technique and manner of telling, its didactic undergarments will show through. That’s about the worst thing that can happen to a fiction writer, at least from viewpoint of readers who want to “get lost” in a narrative and not in what ideas and emotions a writer wants to express in so many words. Personally speaking, my own favorite literary forms are designed for the expression of their authors’ thoughts and feelings. As a reader, I’ve devoted myself almost entirely to essays, lyric poetry, expressionistic stories and dramas, aphorisms, moral tales, and any other form in which a writer stands at a podium or on a soapbox. It’s not really that I prefer short forms as much as I’d rather hear what someone has to say about their experience of being alive—what they like, what they hate—than listen to them spin a yarn. I like to feel close to a writer’s character more than I do to a made-up character maneuvering within a set of circumstances that is neatly resolved in the end. Admittedly, I also like those things. I can get lost in them as much as any Harlequin Romance-reading schoolgirl. But with few exceptions, I’d rather see those stories on my TV or DVD player. Reading them, especially when they reach toward the thousand-page mark, is a chore I can’t perform. There have been exceptions in my life as a reader. The detective novels of Raymond Chandler particularly stand out. Then again, the first-person voice of Philip Marlowe definitely leans toward didacticism, and one can’t avoid feeling that it’s the voice of the author speaking through him. Certain literary critics and linguistic philosophers would chortle contemptuously over such a perspective, but who really cares what they think except their colleagues and students? As far as I’m concerned, school’s out as long as my veins are still coursing with blood and not formaldehyde.

You wrote of the paradoxical nature of supernatural horror fiction, how it grants us a reprieve from the true horror of existence while also affirming it. Do you see a point where the everyday horror reaches the point of absurdity that would make supernatural horror irrelevant?

I really don’t see such a point in future. However, I don’t think that position may be argued any more than its antithesis. At present, however, it certainly seems that supernatural horror is more relevant than ever and everyday horror is more prevalent, or at least more in our minds, than it has been in some time. I definitely would argue that.

How has your style changed/evolved over the years? What have you explored more recently that you didn’t early in your career, if anything?

To revisit the matter of my didacticism, I think I evolved more in that direction than in any other. Of course, this tendency appears most conspicuously in my nonfiction book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. However, even though this is a late work, it’s actually the culmination of themes and thoughts that had been developing in one way or another throughout my writing life. In my chronologically first story that I thought worth preserving, “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” I portrayed a depressed narrator who discovers a cult of supernatural anti-natalists—avant le lettre, of course, but anti-natalists all the same—who inhabit a small Midwestern town. I wrote the first draft of this story, which was longer and more detailed than the published story, in the late 1970s. The story didn’t appear in a polished form until ten years later, but it was in every thematic respect the same story. I simply removed some narrative details. Something else was also there in my work beginning with “The Last Feast of Harlequin” and it later played a leading role in my purported career. In a word it was Darkness. I won’t give away the finale of “Last Feast of Harlequin,” but I will say that the darkness which is the prominent symbol and motif of the story predominates in the end, as one might expect in one of my stories.

I continued this use of darkness as a device and practically a character throughout a number of the stories I’ve written. Now, between the emphasis on pessimism in “Professor Nobody’s Lectures on Supernatural Horror” and the prominence of depression, darkness, and the rest of it in “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” which is easily my best-known story, you might think that readers would take me seriously on these matters. Yet that doesn’t seem to have been the case until I wrote The Conspiracy against the Human Race. It was as if they couldn’t wholly bring themselves to believe that the dark nature of my fiction reflected a corresponding turn of mind and set of sentiments in their author. But there it was, as big and ugly as life. And it seems to have been there from the beginning. I just wasn’t quite as didactic in those days.

Cover for Thomas Ligotti’s Grimscribe

What do you see as the distinction between your work and that of Lovecraft?

There are a few ways I could answer this question. One of them is that in Lovecraft’s defining stories, meaning such later works as “The Shadow out of Time” and “At the Mountains of Madness,” there is a sense of adventure. In his letters, Lovecraft often wrote of experiencing moments of what he called “adventurous expectancy,” by which he meant feeling oneself on the brink of some weird and hyper-exciting revelation that is always held in suspension and never known in its particulars. This is patently an aesthetic perception of existence. Borges described a similar feeling of the imminence of a revelation that never occurs as the definitive aesthetic experience. In Lovecraft’s work, unlike that of Borges, the origin of his feeling of adventurous expectancy derives from something terrible that is associated with the inconceivable spatial and temporal nature of the physical universe. I think that a great many people experience the same thing in their lives. I have myself. But it never occurred to me to express this feeling as a source of adventure in my stories.

My focus has fairly consistently been on what I have thought of as an “infernal paradise,” a realm where one wallows in something putrid and corrosive that lies beyond exact perception. In his stories, Lovecraft’s adventurous expectancy ultimately has its origin in something terrible, and not the child’s picture-book wonderland you find in the work of a lot of writers of fantastic fiction. But it’s still thrilling in its own way. It isn’t purely hellish, as is the case with my stories. Lovecraft was an astronomy buff as a child and so this feeling probably stemmed from that time. I was a pathological Catholic as a child, and one might make a connection between my early life and my later writings on that basis. Ultimately, the difference I’m trying to articulate between Lovecraft’s adventurous expectancy and my infernal paradise may seem superficial. I would say as much myself. But it seems to me that what captivates a reader’s interest in one writer’s work as opposed to another’s is quite often based on superficial qualities, even when there are deeper likenesses. Anyone can think of examples among both popular and literary writers. Lovecraft’s defining works portray a variety of monsters. Mine seldom do. What’s the difference? Not much on the deepest level. But monsters are a great literary hook and there is necessarily a surface adventure in dealing with them. If asked to name the definitive image in Lovecraft, one might likely say its tentacles flailing from the body of a monster. For me it would be probably be puppets, manikins, and clown-like things, even though these are more often a matter of metaphor than a literal presence of a monstrous type. Nevertheless, if Lovecraft’s tentacle monsters and my puppets and so on fought each other, I think the monsters would win.

How did you feel when Conspiracy Against the Human Race started to draw more readers and buyers over the past year or so? Are you concerned that some readers otherwise unfamiliar with your work will only know you as the author of CATHR?

I’ve said for quite a while that I’ve been luckier in the publication of my writing than I’ve had any reason to expect. I think this may be an instance of that. Either way I’ll take it, as I always have. I don’t know if it matters whether I’m ultimately known for the stories or the notorious breviary of nihilism. Oddly enough, I’ve always thought of The Conspiracy against the Human Race as a kind of inspirational, quasi-self-help book. Seriously. And for my pains, a number of readers and reviewers have blithely said that having written The Conspiracy Against the Human I would be a hypocrite and all around inauthentic being not to kill myself. Something similar was said about J.-K. Huysmans following the publication of his novel A rebours. I believe it was Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly who, in a newspaper review of A rebours, wrote that Huysmans had but two options after publishing that book: the muzzle of a gun or the foot of the cross. Huysmans choose the foot of the cross, but not until he published a novel focusing on Satanism. Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote the same thing about Baudelaire in an earlier essay, but the author of Fleurs du mal didn’t make a move either way. Naturally, plenty of critics and biographers have asserted a deathbed confession of Catholic faith by Baudelaire. They were wise to the fact that no one could prove them wrong, of course. In nineteenth-century France, Catholic writers were given considerable latitude in purveying what otherwise might be consider fairly degenerate subject matter. They were Catholic, after all, so they had license to depict the ravages of the most titillating sinfulness. Of all the French Catholics, I admire the horror writer Petrus Borel, also known as The Lycanthrope, who said he was a papist because he couldn’t be a cannibal. I’m not sure if those who said that as the author of Conspiracy I should commit suicide knew that such a statement was long famed. However, I did know the game, so their observation or demand failed to faze me.

What was your reaction upon finding out that you had joined a small cadre only ten living authors included in the Penguin Classics U.S. lineup?

I didn’t know that was the case. Now that I do know, I can’t help thinking of Steven Millhauser, whose work I admire very much for its weird imagination and superfine writing in which I hear echoes of familiar voices, including those of Vladimir Nabokov and Bruno Schulz, that moved so many of my own stories in the direction they took. I remember reading about the day he was informed in the middle of a course he was teaching that his novel Martin Dressler had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The anecdote continues that he told his class a terrible mistake had been made and that needed to excuse himself to put things right. I’m fairly sure that I have neither the reason nor the right to be nonplussed as Millhauser was that day.

The post Interview: Thomas Ligotti and the Realm of Nightmares appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Instructor Carniero was holding class once again.

I discovered this fact on my return from a movie theater. It was late and I thought, “Why not take a short cut across the grounds of the school?” This thought led to a whole train of thoughts that I often pondered, especially when I was out walking at night. Mainly these thoughts were about my desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence, something that could help me in my existence before it was my time to die and be put into the earth to rot, or perhaps have my cremated remains drift out of a chimney stack and sully the sky. Of course, this desire was by no means unique to me. Nonetheless, I had spent quite a few years, my whole life it seemed, seeking to satisfy it in various ways. Most recently, I had sought some kind of satisfaction by attending the classes of Instructor Carniero. Though I had not attended his classes for very long, he seemed to be someone who could reveal what was at the bottom of things. Lost in my thoughts, then, I left the street I was walking along and proceeded across the grounds of the school, which were vast and dark. It was quite cold that night, and when I looked down the front of my overcoat I saw that the single remaining button holding it together had become loose and possibly would not last much longer. So a short cut on my return from that movie theater appeared to be the wise move.

I entered the school grounds as if they were only a great park located in the midst of surrounding streets. The trees were set close and from the perimeter of that parcel of land I could not see the school hidden within them. Look up here, I thought I heard someone say to me. When I did look up, I saw that the branches overhead were without leaves, and through their intertwining mesh the sky was fully visible. How bright and dark it was at the same time. Bright with a high, full moon shining among the spreading clouds, and dark with the shadows mingling within those clouds—a slowly flowing mass of mottled shapes, a kind of unclean outpouring from the black sewers of space.

I noticed that in one place these clouds were leaking down into the trees, trickling in a narrow rivulet across the wall of the night. But it was really smoke, dense and dirty, rising up to the sky. A short distance ahead, and well into the thickly wooded grounds of the school, I saw the spastic flames of a small fire among the trees. By the smell, I guessed that someone was burning refuse. Then I could see the misshapen metal drum spewing smoke, and the figures standing behind the firelight became visible to me, as I was to them.

“Class has resumed,” one of them called out. “He’s come back after all.”

I knew these were others from the school, but their faces would not hold steady in the flickering light of the fire that warmed them. They seemed to be smudged by the smoke, greased by the odorous garbage burning in that dark metal drum, its outer surface almost glowing from the heat and flaking off in places.

“Look there,” said another member of the group, pointing deeper into the school grounds. The massive outline of a building occupied the distance, a few of its windows sending a dim light through the trees. From the roof of the building a number of smokestacks stood out against the pale sky.

A wind rose up. It droned noisily around us and breathed a crackling life into the fire in the decayed metal drum. I tried to shout above the confusion of sounds. “Was there an assignment?” I cried out. But they appeared not to hear me, or perhaps were ignoring my words. When I repeated the question they briefly glanced my way, as if I had said something improper. I left them hunched around the fire, assuming they would be along. The wind died, and I could hear someone say the word “maniac,” which was not spoken, I realized, either to me or about me.

Instructor Carniero, in his person, was rather vague to my mind. I had not been in his class very long before some disease—a terribly serious affliction, one of my fellow students hinted—had caused his absence. So what remained, for me, was no more than the image of a slender gentleman in a dark suit, a gentleman with a darkish complexion and a voice thick with a foreign accent. “He’s a Portuguese,” someone told me. “But he’s lived almost everywhere.” And I recalled a particular phrase of reproof he used to single out those of us who had not been attending to the diagrams he was incessantly creating on the blackboard. “Look up here,” he would say. “If you do not look, you will learn nothing—you will be nothing.” A few members of the class never needed to be called to attention in this manner, a certain small group who had been longtime students of the instructor and without distraction scrutinized the unceasing series of diagrams he would design upon the blackboard and then erase, only to construct again, with slight variation, a moment later.

Although I cannot claim that these often complex diagrams were not directly related to our studies, there were always extraneous elements within them which I never bothered to transcribe into my own notes for the class. They were a strange array of abstract symbols, frequently geometric figures altered in some way: various polygons with asymmetrical sides, trapezoids whose sides did not meet, semicircles with double or triple slashes across them, and many other examples of a deformed or corrupted scientific notation. These signs appeared to be primitive in essence, more relevant to magic than mathematics. The in structor marked them in an extremely rapid hand upon the blackboard, as if they were the words of his natural language. In most cases they formed a border around a familiar diagram allied to chemistry or physics, enclosing it and sometimes, it seemed, transforming its sense. Once a student questioned him regarding what seemed his apparently superfluous embellishment of these diagrams. Why did Instructor Carniero subject us to these bewildering symbols? “Because,” he answered, “a true instructor must share everything, no matter how terrible or lurid it might be.”

As I proceeded across the grounds of the school, I noticed certain changes in my surroundings. The trees nearer to the school looked different from those in the encompassing area. These were so much thinner, emaciated and twisted like broken bones that had never healed properly. And their bark seemed to be peeling away in soft layers, because it was not only fallen leaves I trudged through on my way to the school building, but also something like dark rags, strips of decomposed material. Even the clouds upon which the moon cast its glow were thin or rotted, unraveled by some process of degeneration in the highest atmosphere of the school grounds. There was also a scent of corruption, an enchanting fragrance really— like the mulchy rot of autumn or early spring—that I thought was emerging from the earth as I disturbed the strange litter strewn over it. This odor became more pungent as I approached the yellowish light of the school, and strongest as I finally reached the old building itself.

It was a four-story structure of dark scabby bricks that had been patched together in another era, a time so different that it might be imagined as belonging to an entirely alien history, one composed solely of nights well advanced, an after-hours history. How difficult it was to think of this place as if it had been constructed in the usual manner. Far easier to credit some fantastic legend that it had been erected by a consort of demons during the perpetual night of its past, and that its materials were pilfered from other architectures, all of them defunct: ruined factories, ravaged mausoleums, abandoned orphanages, penitentiaries long out of use. The school was indeed a kind of freakish growth in a dumping ground, a blossom of the cemetery or the cesspool. Here it was that Instructor Carniero, who had been everywhere, held his class.

On the lower floors of the building a number of lights were in use, weak as guttering candles. The highest story was blacked out, and many of the windows were broken. Nevertheless, there was sufficient light to guide me into the school, even if the main hallway could hardly be seen to its end. And its walls appeared to be tarred over with something which exuded the same smell that filled the night outside the school. Without touching these walls, I used them to navigate my way into the school, following several of the greater and lesser hallways that burrowed throughout the building. Room after room passed on either side of me, their doorways filled with darkness or sealed by wide wooden doors whose coarse surfaces were pocked and peeling. Eventually I found a classroom where a light was on, though it was no brighter than the swarthy illumination of the hallway.

When I entered the room I saw that only some of the lamps were functioning, leaving certain areas in darkness while others were smeared with the kind of greasy glow peculiar to old paintings in oil. A few students were seated at desks here and there, isolated from one another and silent. By no means was there a full class, and no instructor stood at the lectern. The blackboard displayed no new diagrams but only the blurred remnants of past lessons. I took a desk near the door, looking at none of the others as they did not look at me. In one of the pockets of my overcoat I turned up a little stub of a pencil but could find nothing on which to take notes. Without any dramatic gestures, I scanned the room for some kind of paper. The visible areas of the room featured various items of debris without offering anything that would allow me to transcribe the complex instructions and diagrams demanded by the class. I was reluctant to make a physical search of the shelves set into the wall beside me because they were very deep and from them drifted that heady fragrance of decay.

Two rows to my left sat a man with several thick notebooks stacked on his desk. His hands were resting lightly on these notebooks, and his spectacled eyes were fixed on the empty lectern, or perhaps on the blackboard beyond. The space between the rows of desks was very narrow, so I was able to lean across the unoccupied desk that separated us and speak to this man who seemed to have a surplus of paper on which one could take notes, transcribe diagrams, and, in short, do whatever scribbling was demanded by the instructor of the class.

“Pardon me,” I whispered to the staring figure. In a single, sudden movement, his head turned to face me. I remembered his pitted complexion, which had obviously grown worse since our class last met, and the eyes that squinted behind heavy lenses. “Do you have any paper you could share with me?” I asked, and was somehow surprised when he shifted his head toward his notebooks and began leafing through the pages of the topmost one. As he performed this action, I explained that I was unprepared for the class, that only a short time before did I learn it had resumed. This happened entirely by chance, I said. I was coming home from a movie theater and decided to take a short cut across the school grounds.

By the time I was finished illuminating my situation, the other student was searching through his last notebook, the pages of which were as solidly covered with jottings and diagrams as the previous ones. I observed that his notes were different from those I had been taking for Instructor Carniero’s course. They were far more detailed and scrupulous in their transcriptions of those strange geometric figures which I considered only as decorative intrusions in the instructor’s diagrams. Some of the other students’ notebook pages were wholly given over to rendering these figures and symbols to the exclusion of the diagrams themselves.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t seem to have any paper I could share with you.”

“Well, could you tell me if there was an assignment?”

“That’s very possible. You can never tell with this instructor. He’s a Portuguese, you know. But he’s been all over and knows everything. I think he’s out of his mind. The kind of thing he’s been teaching should have gotten him into trouble somewhere, and probably did. Not that he ever cared what happened to him, or to anyone else. That is, those that he could influence, and some more than others. The things he said to us. The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self. The whole filthy integration of things and the nocturnal product, as he called it, drowning in the pools of night.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recall those concepts,” I confessed.

“You’re new to the class. To tell the truth, you don’t seem to understand what the instructor is teaching. But soon enough he will get through to you, if he hasn’t already. You can never know. He’s very captivating, the instructor. And always ready for anything.”

“I was told that he recovered from the sickness that caused his absence, and that he was back teaching.”

“Oh, he’s back. He was always ready. Did you know that the class is now being held in another part of the school? I couldn’t tell you where, since even I haven’t been with Instructor Carniero as long as some of the others. To tell the truth, I don’t care where it’s being held. Isn’t it enough that we’re here, in this room?”

I had little idea how to answer this question and understood almost nothing of what the man had been trying to explain to me. It did seem clear, or at least very possible, that the class had moved to a different part of the school. But I had no reason to think that the other students seated elsewhere in the room would be any more helpful on this point than the one who had now turned his spectacled face away from me. Wherever the class was being held, I was still in need of paper on which to take notes, transcribe diagrams, and so forth. This could not be accomplished by staying in that room where everyone and everything was degenerating into the surrounding darkness.

For a time I wandered about the hallways on the main floor of the school, keeping clear of the walls which certainly were thickening with a dark substance, an odorous sap with the intoxicating potency of a thousand molting autumns or the melting soil of spring. The stuff was running from top to bottom down the walls, leaking from above and dulling the already dim light in the hallways.

I began to hear echoing voices coming from a distant part of the school I had never visited before. No words were decipherable, but it sounded as if the same ones were being repeated in a more or less constant succession of cries that rang hollow in the halls. I followed them and along the way met up with someone walking slowly from the opposite direction. He was dressed in dirty work clothes and almost blended in with the shadows which were so abundant in the school that night. I stopped him as he was about to shuffle straight past me. Turning an indifferent gaze in my direction was a pair of yellowish eyes set in a thin face with a coarse, patchy complexion. The man scratched at the left side of his forehead and some dry flakes of skin fell away. I asked him:

“Could you tell me where Instructor Carniero is holding class tonight?”

He looked at me for some moments, and then pointed a finger at the ceiling. “Up there,” he said. “Look up there.”

“On which floor?”

“The top one,” he answered, as if a little amazed at my ignorance.

“There are a lot of rooms on that floor,” I said.

“And every one of them is his. Nothing to be done about that. But I have to keep the rest of this place in some kind of condition. I don’t see how I can do that with him up there.” The man glanced around at the stained walls and let out a single, wheezing laugh. “It only gets worse. Starts to get to you if you go up any further. Listen. Hear the rest of them?” Then he groaned with disgust and went on his way.

But by that point I felt that any knowledge I had amassed— whether or not it concerned Instructor Carniero and his night classes—was being taken away from me piece by piece. The man in dirty work clothes had directed me to the top floor of the school. Yet I remembered seeing no light on that floor when I first approached the building. The only thing that seemed to occupy that floor was an undiluted darkness, a darkness far greater than the night itself, a consolidated darkness, something clotted with its own density. “The nocturnal product,” I could hear the spectacled student reminding me in a hollow voice. “Drowning in the pools of night.”

What could I know about the ways of the school? I had not been in attendance very long, not nearly long enough, it seemed. I felt myself a stranger to my fellow students, especially since they revealed themselves to be divided in their ranks, as though among the degrees of a secret society. I did not know the coursework in the way some of the others seemed to know it and in the spirit that the instructor intended it to be known. My turn had not yet come to be commanded by Instructor Carniero to look up at the hieroglyphs on the blackboard and comprehend them fully. So I did not understand the doctrines of a truly septic curriculum, the science of a spectral pathology, philosophy of absolute disease, the metaphysics of things sinking into a common disintegration or rising together, flowing together, in their dark rottenness. Above all, I did not know the instructor himself: the places he had been… the things he had seen and done… the experiences he had embraced… the laws he had ignored… the troubles he had caused… the fate that he had incurred, gladly, upon himself and others.

I was now close to a shaft of stairways leading to the upper floors of the school. The voices became louder, though not more distinct, as I approached the stairwell. The first flight of stairs seemed very long and steep, not to mention badly defined in the dim light of the hallway. The landing at the top of the stairs was barely visible for the poor light and unreflecting effluvia that here moved even more thickly down the walls. But it did not appear to possess any real substance, no sticky surface or viscous texture as one might have supposed, only a kind of density like heavy smoke, filthy smoke from some smoldering source of expansive corruption. And it carried the scent of corruption as well as the sight, only now it was more potent with the nostalgic perfume of autumn decay or the feculent muskiness of a spring thaw.

I climbed another flight of stairs, which ascended in the opposite direction from the first, and reached the second floor. Each of the four stories of the school had two flights of stairs going in opposite directions between them, with a narrow landing that intervened before one could complete the ascent to a new floor. The second floor was not as well-lighted as the one below, and the walls there were even worse: their surface had been wholly obscured by that smoky blackness which seeped down from above, the blackness so richly odorous with the offal of worlds in decline or perhaps with the dark compost of those about to be born, the primeval impurity in which all things are founded, the native putridity.

On the stairs that led up to the third floor I saw the first of them—a young man who was seated on the lower steps of this flight and who had been one of the instructor’s most assiduous students. He was absorbed in his own thoughts and did not acknowledge me until I spoke to him.

“The class?” I said, stressing the words into a question.

He gazed at me calmly. “The instructor suffered a terrible disease, a monumental disease.” This was all he said. Then he returned within himself and would not respond. There were others similarly positioned higher on the stairs or squatting on the landing. The voices were still echoing in the stairwell, chanting a blurred phrase in unison. But the voices did not belong to any of these students, who sat silent and entranced amid the scattered pages torn from their voluminous notebooks. Pieces of paper with strange symbols on them lay scattered everywhere like fallen leaves. They rustled as I walked through them toward the stairs leading to the highest story of the school.

The walls in the stairwell were now swollen with a blackness that was the very face of a plague—pustulant, scabbed, and stinking terribly. It was reaching to the edges of the floor, where it drifted and churned like a black fog. Only in the moonlight that shone through a hallway window could I see anything of the third floor. I stopped there, for the stairs to the fourth were deep in blackness. Only a few faces rose above it and were visible in the moonlight. One of them was staring at me, and, without prompting, spoke.

“The instructor is holding class again despite his terrible disease. Can you imagine? He is able to suffer anything and has been everywhere. Now he is in a new place, somewhere he has not been.” The voice paused and the interval was filled by the many voices calling and crying from the total blackness that prevailed over the heights of the stairwell and buried everything beneath it like tightly packed earth in a grave. Then the single voice said: “The instructor died in the night. You see? He is with the night. You hear the voices? They are with him. And he is with the night. The night has spread itself within him. He who has been everywhere may go anywhere with the disease of the night. Listen. The Portuguese is calling to us.”

I listened and finally the voices became clear. Look up here, they said. Look up here.

The fog of blackness had now unfurled down to me and lay about my feet, gathering there and rising. For a time I could not move or speak or form any thoughts. Inside me everything was becoming black. The blackness was quivering in my bones, eating away at them, making everything black within my body. It was holding me, and the voices were saying, “Look up here, look up here.” And I began to look. But I aborted my gesture before it was completed. I was already too close to something I could not endure, that I was not prepared to endure. Even the blackness quivering inside me could not go on to its end. I could not remain where I was nor look up to the place where the voices called out to me.

Then the blackness seemed to exude from my being, washing itself out of me, and I was no longer inside the school but outside it, almost as if I had suddenly awakened there. Without looking back, I retraced my steps across the grounds of the school, forgetting about the short cut I had meant to take that night. I passed those students who were still standing around the fire burning in an old metal drum. They were feeding the bright flames with pages from their notebooks, pages scribbled to blackness with all those diagrams and freakish signs. Some of those among the group called out to me. “Did you see the Portuguese?” one of them shouted above the noise of the fire and the wind. “Did you hear anything about an assignment?” another voice cried out. And then I heard them all laughing among themselves as I made my way back to the streets I had left before entering the school grounds. I moved with such haste that the loose button on my overcoat finally came off by the time I reached the street outside the grounds of the school.

As I walked beneath the streetlights, I held the front of my overcoat together and tried to keep my eyes on the sidewalk before me. But I might have heard a voice bid me, “Look up here,” because I did look, if only for a moment. Then I saw the sky was clear of all clouds, and the full moon was shining in the black spaces above. It was shining bright and blurry, as if coated with a luminous mold, floating like a lamp in the great sewers of the night. The nocturnal product, I thought, drowning in the pools of night. But these were only words I repeated without understanding. My desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence, something that could help me in my existence before it was my time to die and be put into the earth to rot, or perhaps have my cremated remains drift out of a chimney stack and sully the sky—that would never be fulfilled. I had learned nothing, and I was nothing. Yet instead of disappointment at my failure to fulfill my most intense desire, I felt a tremendous relief. The urge to know the fundament of things was now emptied from me, and I was more than content to be rid of it. The following night I went to the movie theater again. But I did not take a short cut home.

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“The Night School” by Thomas Ligotti. From Grimscribe. Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Ligotti. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with The McIntyre Agency.

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