The Grimscribe's Puppets

Also from Miskatonic River Press:

Dead But Dreaming

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Dead But Dreaming 2

edited by Kevin Ross

Dissecting Cthulhu

edited by S. T. Joshi

Horror for the Holidays

edited by Scott David Aniolowski

The Strange Dark One

by W. H. Pugmire

A Season in Carcosa

edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Deepest, Darkest Eden

edited by Cody Goodfellow

www.miskatonicriverpress.com

The Grimscribe’s Puppets

edited by

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

New York 
•
Florida

2013

~
for Tom, the CEO of our Nightmare Factory
~

Publishing History —

“The Blue Star” (English version) © M. Angerhuber 2000 (in “TERROR TALES” e-zine)

THE GRIMSCRIBE’S PUPPETS edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Copyright © 2013 by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

Authors retain copyright to their stories, and unless noted otherwise, stories are
© 2013 per author.

Cover art © Daniele Serra, www.multigrade.it

All Rights Reserved.

For information contact Miskatonic River Press

Published in the United States by:

Miskatonic River Press, LLC

944 Reynolds Road, Suite 188

Lakeland, Florida 33801

www.miskatonicriverpress.com

ISBN 978-1-937408-01-5

Contents

"Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?"

Furnace

The Lord Came at Twilight

The Secrets of the Universe

The Human Moth

Basement Angels

No Signal

The Xenambulist: A Fable in Four Acts

The Company Town

The Man Who Escaped This Story

Pieces of Blackness

The Blue Star

20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism

The Holiness of Desolation

Diamond Dust

After the Final

Eyes Exchange Bank

By Invisible Hands

Where We Will All Be

Gailestis

The Prosthesis

Into the Darkness, Fearlessly

Oubliette

"Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?"

That’s how Poppy Z. Brite began her “Foreword” to Tom’s collection,
THE NIGHTMARE FACTORY
in 1996. He most certainly was. The tales collected in
TNF
(to many a mind, then and now, truly his best) were culled from
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
,
Grimscribe
,
Noctuary
, and
Teatro Grottesco and Other Tales
, each a seminal work. He was out there, being read, being adored, and he was already considered a grandmaster.

Since the appearance of that collection, Thomas Ligotti has become one of the most honored and respected horror/weird fiction writers of the 20
^th
and 21
^st
century. If you read him, if you’ve followed him from the late ’80s when his first collection,
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
, appeared, you know why: the shadows he’s illuminated deep within and around you have tainted you, perhaps mutated your philosophical views… and you want more.

In the decades since his work emerged and began to intoxicate readers and critics, mountains of criticism and analysis has been written about Tom’s work (and the man behind it), and there is a thriving fan-tribute website dedicated to him, TLO,
Thomas Ligotti Online
; and it is more than fitting that the work of this modern master is delved into and examined, time and time again, in the depth it has been. It’s a tribute to the power and brilliance and creative genius of his work. And that is where this anthology began, as another form of fan tribute, a love letter from this reader

A couple of years back, in tribute to Tom, I had penned (with his kind permission) a novella, “and this is where I go down in the darkness” (
Portraits of Ruin
, Hippocampus Press, 2012), and after finishing my love letter of thanks for all he has given us, I wondered if other writers who had been influenced by him, or who placed his work in high regard, might also like to say thank you in fictional form. As you’ll see in the tales you’re about to read, many did.

Poppy Z. Brite answered her own question with a resounding yes, and today her answer rings as loudly as it did then. He is out there and his expansive influence continues…
as it will for a very long time
.

(a certain) bEast

Berlin, Germany

FEB 2012

By Livia Llewellyn

Everyone knew our town was dying, long before we truly saw it. There’s a certain way a piece of fruit begins to wrinkle and soften, caves in on itself around the edges of a fast-appearing bruise, throwing off the sickly-sweet scent of decay and death that always attracts some creeping hungry thing. Some part of the town, an unused building sinking into its foundations, a forgotten alleyway erupting into a slow maelstrom of weeds and cracked stone, was succumbing, had festered, succumbed: and now threw off the warning spores of its demise. Everywhere in the town we went about the ins and outs of our daily lives and business, telling ourselves everything was normal, everything was fine. And every now and then a spore drifted into our lungs, riding in on a faint thread of that rotting fruiting scent, and though we did not pause in our daily routines, we stumbled a bit, we slowed. It was the last days of summer, I had just turned thirteen, and the leaves were beginning to turn, people were gathering the final crops of their fine little backyard gardens, culling the lingering remains of the season’s foods and flowers, smoothing over the soil. My grandfather had placed a large red-rusted oil barrel off the side of the garage, and every evening he threw the gathering detritus of summer into the can, and set it on fire. Great plumes of black smoke rose into the warm air, feather-fine flakes of ash and hot red sparks. I stood on the gravel path, watching the bright red licks of fire crackle and leap from the barrel’s jagged edges as my grandfather poked the burning sticks and leaves further down. An evening wind carried the dark smoke up into the canopy of branches overhead, tall evergreens swaying and whispering as they swept and sifted the ash further into the sky. We watched in silence. The air smelled gritty and smoky and dark, in that way the air only ever smells at the end of a dying summer, the smell of the sinking sun and dark approaching fall. The trees shifted, the branches changed direction, and the sickly-sweet scent caught in our throats, driving the smoke away.

—What is that? I asked.

—I don’t know, my grandfather replied. He rubbed ash from his eyes, and stared out into a distance place neither of us could see. —Something’s wrong.

~*~

Summer officially ended, school began, and the town continued. It was easy for all of us to say that everything was fine. The dissonance in the air was the usual changing of the seasons, we told ourselves. Near the downtown area, on a small lonely street along the outskirts of the factories and warehouses that ringed the downtown district, that strange and troubling area where suburbia fizzled out to its bitter end and the so-called city proper began, a number of small businesses closed with no warning to their loyal long-time customers or to those who worked for them. I knew of this only because my mother drove down that particular street one early afternoon, having taken me out of school for a dentist appointment. My mother had frequented most of these stores in her childhood, and she loved driving down the street as an adult, pointing out to me all the various places she had been taken by my grandfather. A small confectioner’s store that supplied those queer square mint-tinged wafers that were both creamy and crunchy, the pastel sweets popular at weddings and wakes. A stationers store, where my mother’s family had bought boxes and boxes of thick cream paper and envelopes with the family crest, a horned griffin rampant over a field of night-blooming cereus, and where my grandfather bought business cards and memo pads with his name printed neatly in the middle, just above his title of supervisor for the town’s electric and water company. A dilapidated movie theatre that showed films in languages no one had ever heard of, from countries no one could ever seem to recall having seen on our schools and library’s aging maps and globes. A haberdashery where my father once had his soft brown wool felt fedoras and thick lambskin winter gloves blocked and stitched to his exact measurements and specifications. It had been taken over just that spring by the son of the former owner, an earnest and intense young man with perfect pale skin and unruly black hair, and unfortunately large black eyes. All three of those stores and more sat dark and fallow all along the block, faded red CLOSED and OUT OF BUSINESS signs swinging against padlocked doors, display windows choked with cobwebs and dust, the now familiar odor of sickly sweetness lingering in the air.

—Why do I keep smelling that, I said, pinching my nose shut. —What is it?

—It smells like camphor, my mother said.

—What’s that?

—Like the moth balls in our closets, she said. —You know, what I use to keep your father’s and grandmother’s things from molding and rotting away. To preserve things.

—Preserve? Like jam?

—In a way. To protect things. So they’ll never grow old, and always stay the same.

That afternoon as my mother steered the car along the narrow meridian dividing the street in two, the pale young man stood outside the haberdashery’s doors, his long arms wrapped around a bolt of fabric as if he were carrying the body of a dead child. I started in shock to realize it was not a bolt of fabric, but a length of thick grey wool wrapped around the stiff body of a large bird with two beaks twisted into a hideous spiral and a spider-like cluster of lidless coal-colored eyes. My mother stopped the car, and we stepped onto the dry worn street sitting under a cool and cloudless sky crowned by telephone wires. No one else was here this time of the afternoon in this part of the town, a part of the town in the middle of everything yet nowhere in particular, where the buildings rose no more than two stories before flattening out in resignation and despair, where you could walk down the sidewalks for hours, see no strip mall or market or house that didn’t look like the one behind it and before, hear only the soft crinkle of your shoes against cracked cement and the occasional miserable distant bark of a dog. In hindsight, we should have been more vigilant, more aware that these were the places of a town where septicemia and putrefaction creep in first, those lonely and familiar sections we slipped into and through every day without concern or care—not the seedy crumbling but flashy edges where decay was expected, and, from a certain element of our small society, even accepted and encouraged. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts, these were the places we never gave a single thought about, because we thought they would be here forever, unchanging in the antiseptic amber of our fixed memories. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts were always the first to go.