Table Of ContentGrimscribe
Thomas Ligotti
Introduction
The Voice Of The Damned
1. The Last Feast Of Harlequin
2. The Spectacles In The Drawer
3. Flowers Of The Abyss
4. Nethescurial
The Voice Of The Demon
5. The Dreaming In Nortown
6. The Mystics Of Muelenberg
7. In The Shadow Of Another World
8. The Cocoons
The Voice Of The Dreamer
9. The Night School
10. The Glamour
The Voice Of The Child
11. The Library Of Byzantium
12. Miss Plarr
The Voice Of Our Name
13. The Shadow At The Bottom Of The World
INTRODUCTION
HIS NAME IS . . .
Will it ever come to me? There is a grand lapse of memory that may be the only
thing to save us from ultimate horror. Perhaps they know the truth who preach
the passing of one life into another, vowing that between a certain death and a
certain birth there is an interval in which an old name is forgotten before a new
one is learned. And to remember the name of a former life is to begin the
backward slide into that great blackness in which all names have their source,
becoming incarnate in a succession of bodies like numberless verses of an
infinite scripture.
To find that you have had so many names is to lose the claim to any one of them.
To gain the memory of so many lives is to lose them all.
So he keeps his name secret, his many names. He hides each one from all the
others, so that they will not become lost among themselves. Protecting his life
from all his lives, from the memory of so many lives, he hides behind the mask
of anonymity.
But even if I cannot know his name, I have always known his voice. That is one
thing he can never disguise, even if it sounds like many different voices. I know
his voice when I hear it speak, because it is always speaking of terrible secrets. It
speaks of the most grotesque mysteries and encounters, sometimes with despair,
sometimes with delight, and sometimes with a voice not possible to define. What
crime or curse has kept him turning upon this same wheel of terror, spinning out
his tales which always tell of the strangeness and horror of things? When will he
make an end to his telling?
He has told us so many things, and he will tell us more. Yet he will never tell his
name. Not before the very end of his old life, and not after the beginning of each
new one. Not until time itself has erased every name and taken away every life.
But until then, everyone needs a name. Everyone must be called something. So
what can we say is the name of everyone?
Our name is Grimscribe. This is our voice.
The Voice Of The Damned
The Last Feast of Harlequin
My INTEREST IN THE TOWN OF Mirocaw was first aroused when I heard
that an annual festival was held there which promised to include, to some extent,
the participation of clowns among its other elements of pageantry. A former
colleague of mine, who is now attached to the anthropology department of a
distant university, had read one of my recent articles ("The Clown Figure in
American Media," Journal of Popular Culture), and wrote to me that he vaguely
remembered reading or being told of a town somewhere in the state that held a
kind of "Fool's Feast" every year, thinking that this might be pertinent to my
peculiar line of study. It was, of course, more pertinent than he had reason to
think, both to my academic aims in this area and to my personal pursuits.
Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various
anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the
significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. Every year for the
past twenty years I have attended the pre-Lenten festivals that are held in various
places throughout the southern United States. Every year I learned something
more concerning the esoterics of celebration. In these studies I was an eager
participant-along with playing my part as an anthropologist, I also took a place
behind the clownish mask myself. And I cherished this role as I did nothing else
in my life. To me the title of Clown has always carried connotations of a noble
sort. I was an adroit jester, strangely enough, and had always taken pride in the
skills I worked so diligently to develop.
I wrote to the State Department of Recreation, indicating what information I
desired and exposing an enthusiastic urgency which came naturally to me on this
topic. Many weeks later I received a tan envelope imprinted with a government
logo. Inside was a pamphlet that catalogued all of the various seasonal festivities
of which the state was officially aware, and I noted in passing that there were as
many in late autumn and winter as in the warmer seasons. A letter inserted
within the pamphlet explained to me that, according to their voluminous records,
no festivals held in the town of Mirocaw had been officially registered. Their
files, nonetheless, could be placed at my disposal if I should wish to research this
or similar matters in connection with some definite project. At the time this offer
was made I was already laboring under so many professional and personal
burdens that, with a weary hand, I simply deposited the envelope and its contents
in a drawer, never to be consulteq again.
Some months later, however, I made an impulsive digression from my
responsibilities and, rather haphazardly, took up the Mirocaw project. This
happened as I was driving north one afternoon in late summer with the intention
of examining some journals in the holdings of a library at another university.
Once out of the city limits the scenery changed to sunny fields and farms,
diverting my thoughts from the signs that I passed along the highway.
Nevertheless, the subconscious scholar in me must have been regarding these
with studious care. The name of a town loomed into my vision. Instantly the
scholar retrieved certain records from some deep mental drawer, and I was faced
with making a few hasty calculations as to whether there was enough time and
motivation for an investigative side trip. But the exit sign was even hastier in
making its appearance, and I soon found myself leaving the highway, recalling
the road sign' s promise that the town was no more than seven miles east.
These seven miles included several confusing turns, the forced taking of a
temporarily alternate route, and a destination not even visible until a steep rise
had been fully ascended. On the descent another helpful sign informed me that I
was within the city limits of Mirocaw. Some scattered houses on the outskirts of
the town were the first structures I encountered. Beyond them the numerica,l
highway became Townshend Street, the main avenue of Mirocaw.
The town impressed me as being much larger once I was within its limits than it
had appeared from the prominence just outside. I saw that the general hilliness of
the surrounding countryside was also an internal feature of Mirocaw. Here,
though, the effect was different. The parts of the town did not look as if they
adhered very well to one another. This condition might be blamed on the
irregular topography of the town. Behind some of the old stores in the business
district, steeply roofed houses had been erected on a sudden incline, their peaks
appearing at an extraordinary elevation above the lower buildings. And because
the foundations of these houses could not be glimpsed, they conveyed the
illusion of being either precariously suspended in air, threatening to
topple down, or else constructed with an unnatural loftiness in relation to their
width and mass. This situation also created a weird distortion of perspective. The
two levels of structures overlapped each other without giving a sense of depth,
so that the houses, because of their higher elevation and nearness to the
foreground buildings, did not appear diminished in size as background objects
should. Consequently, a look of flatness, as in a photograph, predominated in
this area. Indeed, Mirocaw could be compared to an album of old snapshots,
particularly ones in which the camera had been upset in the process of
photography, causing the pictures to develop on an angle: a cone-roofed turret,
like a pointed hat jauntily askew, peeked over the houses on a neighboring
street; a billboard displaying a group of grinning vegetables tipped its contents
slightly westward; cars parked along steep curbs seemed to be flying skyward in
the glare-distorted windows of a five-and-ten; people leaned lethargically as they
trod up and down sidewalks; and on that sunny day the clock tower, which at
first I mistook for a church steeple, cast a long shadow that seemed to extend an
impossible distance and wander into unlikely places in its progress across the
town. I should say that perhaps the disharmonies of Mirocaw are more acutely
affecting my imagination in retrospect than they were on that first day, when I
was primarily concerned with locating the city hall or some other center of
information.
I pulled around a corner and parked. Sliding over to the other side of the seat, I
rolled down the window and called to a passerby: "Excuse me, sir," I said. The
man, who was shabbily dressed and very old, paused for a moment without
approaching the car. Though he had apparently responded to my call, his vacant
expression did not betray the least awareness of my presence, and for a moment
I thought it just a coincidence that he halted on the sidewalk at the same time I
addressed him. His eyes were focused somewhere beyond me with a weary and
imbecilic gaze. After a few moments he continued on his way and I said nothing
to call him back, even though at the last second his face began to appear dimly
familiar. Someone else finally came along who WaS able to direct me to the
Mirocaw City Hall and Community Center.
The city hall turned out to be the building with the clock tower. Inside I stood at
a counter behind which some people were working at desks and walking up and
down a back hallway. On one wall was a poster for the state lottery: a jack-in-
the-box with both hands grasping green bills. After a few moments, a tall,
middle-aged woman came over to the counter.
"Can I help you?" she asked in a neutral, bureaucratic
•
vOice.
I explained that I had heard about the festival-saying
nothing about being a nosy academic-and asked if she could provide me with
further information or direct me to someone who could.
"Do you mean the one held in the winter?" she asked. "How many of them are
there?"
"Just that one."
"I suppose, then, that that's the one I mean." I smiled as if sharing a joke with
her.
Without another word, she walked off into the back hallway. While she was
absent I exchanged glances with several of the people behind the counter who
periodically looked up from their work.
"There you are," she said when she returned, handing me a piece of paper that
looked like the product of a cheap copy machine. Please Come to the Fun, it said
in large
letters. Parades, it went on, Street Masquerade, Bands, The Winter Raffle, and
The Coronation of the Winter Queen.
The page continued with the mention of a number of miscellaneous festivities. I
read the words again. There was something about that imploring little "please" at
the top of the announcement that made the whole affair seem like a charity
function.
"When is it held? It doesn't say when the festival takes place."
"Most people already know that." She abruptly snatched the page from my hands
and wrote something at the bottom. When she gave it back to me, I saw "Dec.
19-21" written in blue-green ink. I was immediately struck by
an odd sense of scheduling on the part of the festival committee. There was, of
course, solid anthropological
and historical precedent for holding festivities around the winter solstice, but the
timing of this particular event did not seem entirely practical.
"If you don't mind my asking, don't these days somewhat conflict with the
regular holiday season? I mean, most people have enough going on at that
time."
"It's just tradition," she said, as if invoking some venerable ancestry behind her
