The Grimscribe's Puppets (19 page)

There are cinemas in which no film is ever shown, only flickering lights, for everyone seeks refuge there for other activities they do not want anyone else to see, though all do them. There are no restaurants, no food stores, and I cannot remember eating there. Hunger there is, aplenty, but in Vastarien one learns that hunger is to be maintained unabated, for yearning is the true satisfaction. An empty cup is the only fullness. We practice an Epicureanism of asceticism.

The dream city is an incarnation of entropy, as are all places, if truth be told, but the dwellers in Vastarien acknowledge the fact and rejoice in it in their own grim way. One senses that the whole place is a vast womb, all its inhabitants desiring to be dreamt again, to dwell inside the head of the one who begat them. But they soon forget, for the frustration itself becomes a cherished sustenance. It is only through discomfort and anxiety and despair that one finally becomes self-aware, aware that one is no real self but merely an echo of one. The rule is that one comes to transcend the torment of despondency and longing by submitting to them, coming to enjoy the taste of them, and thenceforward to live on a diet of fading pangs.

But this I could not do. Cursed by this dissatisfaction with dissatisfaction, I alone sought a way out. I remembered, or thought I did, that there was somewhere a world of waking reality, though I could not be absolutely sure that this seeming recollection was not merely another dream. But that possibility I excluded.

So I sought some clue as to any path one might take to find a world more real than this one of Vastarien. I ventured to violate the unspoken code of unspeaking silence. I began to stop people in the streets, their faces indistinct in the never-ending twilight mist, and to inquire what they remembered of the world from which we had come. Was there a path back there? All alike appeared distinctly uncomfortable at being accosted. To a man, they averred total ignorance even as to what I might mean. I had the fleeting impression once or twice that someone knew all too well of a realer world than ours, but dared not tell me.

Understand, if you will, that I, too, savored the baleful glory of Vastarien, a place of ontological tenuousness, of a precious shoddiness everywhere threatening to erode and to collapse into dust. I, too, paused to gaze upon the inert piles of chipped and sooty bricks that implied a defunct chimney when it still stood, still a few feet erect into the vague sky. My eye followed the remaining beams, ribs of buildings long gone, for one’s eye was thus led along into an absent past, to a ghostly memory of a building that must have risen anciently as a proud colossus. With this vision of the past, one could savor the more bittersweetly the structure’s present state of ruination. Every shell of a building chanted of the holiness of desolation. And Vastarien was all desolation.

But it was only a
shadow
of obliteration. I must have the real thing! Others sought in vain to persuade me that in the nature of the case, the nullity I sought must perforce take the shape of a dream, a trace, a cinder. A “real” world would be raw and bleeding. I protested that a vision of ruination, however bracing, could not match that which was true and waking, hard and unyielding, unremittingly grounded. They kindly warned me not to go that way. But I replied that the unreal unreal was not good enough. There had to be a
real
unreal, and I must find it. To savor the merely hypothetical could never deliver the soul from its suspicions that it was fundamentally a falsehood. My opponents tried to divert me from this heresy, pointing out that a “real unreal” must be a sham and a hoax. In the end they would have driven me out, but there was no other place for me to go, or so they thought.

At last, as if in response to the prayer of my yearning, a bookstore window peeped out along a street of closed and locked stores where it had not been yesterday, and I knew I must enter at once. Who knew if some crumbling page might yield the secret I sought? And if not, disappointment was another delicacy I had learned to savor. And yet one can become sated with just about anything…

No proprietor was in evidence, only a caged bird. It was plainly a crow, but it repeated learned phrases like a parrot. Until it seemed to see me pick up one book at random, an old and faded paperback edition. A paperbound book held many natural advantages over a finer, hardbound book, even if the latter were bound in faded cloth. A paperback was cheap and shoddy to begin with, by design, and entropy had much to work with. Spines would be bent into broken circles, pages would have sloughed off their cheap glue to fall like autumn leaves onto forgotten floors and between articles of furniture, forever missing. Such was the volume I had chosen, not for its title but for its condition, for I felt that, in such a condition, it actually embodied that gray truth I sought in its pages.

And then the crow spoke to me its own words, not those copied pointlessly from another.

“Have you ever encountered a book that is not an instance of that which it relates, but which talks about a further reality, far removed from itself? That is the book you hold. Take it! There is no one to pay. Not with money, anyway.”

I had the book that told the way past space-hung screens that keep lost dimensions to their own demesnes! Casting furtive glances over my shoulder, I half-ran back to my dingy quarters and threw myself on the bed, the only article of furniture in the place, and opened the coveted volume. The title, I now saw, was
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
by one Thomas Ligotti, a name I had once heard in the most dreadful of connections. I tried to calm my pulsing anticipation, and I began to read.

It was a challenging treatise that moved ineluctably to the conclusion that the human species had taken a fatal misstep in its evolution, the result being that our kind was cursed with the terrible burden of
too much intelligence
, too large a brain for its own good. This is why mankind alone made its life a gauntlet of worries, a series of troubling and unanswerable questions. This is why philosophers and religious believers had tormented themselves with conundrums that had nothing to do with reality outside their mad brains but arose only within them. Thus did they rack themselves with guilt for failing to meet the self-issued demands of fictive moral codes bequeathed them by their benighted ancestors.

The animals were wiser than man because they were free of these painful delusions. And meantime, human beings lived as a pestilence upon the earth, infesting it like termites until its resources were exhausted, its continents depopulated from sexual plagues. Some had the wisdom to abort their offspring rather than sadistically allow them to be born into such a gallery of horrors. But this author proclaimed, not the death of God but the extermination, the abortion of all mankind. It would only be a gain both in the long run and in the short run.

As I devoured the pages, slowly, not wishing to cheat myself of any savory morsel, I found myself utterly absorbed, oblivious of anything around me. And when at last I looked up from the book, though still stretched out on a bed, I knew at once that I was no longer in the dream city of Vastarien.

Sliding off the thin mattress, I hastened to the window and gazed forth. It was the world I had sought, the land of ontological worth, of waking reality! I had done it! Or rather the book had done it!

Before me there stretched an endless vista of sublime desolation such as I had never imagined! All was wreckage, as far as the eye could see. Clearly, some universal holocaust had visited the earth. To all appearances, no one could have escaped, at least as far as the damage extended. And in that moment I resolved to set forth to tour the smoking pit of this world, this ubiquitous monument of ruination. I seemed to myself to be inhabiting a fleshly body, but so I had when in Vastarien. The test would come when I knew whether I could feel hunger, thirst, or fatigue. If I did, there was no apparent chance of satisfying these needs, so I should succumb without regret. Ligotti’s pages had convinced me that it should be my veriest duty in any case. But in the meantime I had to crisscross as much of the forlorn landscape as I could, rejoicing in the smashing of all things. For only in their desuetude could their true beauty come to fruition. Only in death could they come to true birth. And I felt like a proud father looking over a maternity ward.

In my pilgrimage I heard no chirping bird, saw no scampering animal. All had returned to the primordial stillness that had blanketed the primitive earth billions of years ago. The many centuries of pestilential corruption had at last been purified.

On the fifth day of my journey, after a peaceful sleep in the shelter of a rubble heap, I was alarmed at the sound of human voices ahead! It was like hearing a fire engine in the middle of the night. And it was a fire I meant to put out. I had found a rifle and a pistol in the ruins of a store a couple of days before, and I scrounged around till I found the matching ammunition.

Over a hill I saw them sitting around a campfire. They were singing hymns, seeking to fortify one another’s spirits amid the carnage surrounding them. How they had escaped the descending axe, I could not guess, though there must have been ways. After all, I did not know the nature of what had befallen the world. The small band caught sight of me and rose, approaching me with welcoming arms outstretched. They made themselves into simple targets, and I killed them all. Their bullet-riddled corpses displayed the fossils of shock and disbelief. But it was their own fault for having lived, was it not?

There might be more vermin that had survived extermination, but I should deal with them as I found them. For now, I rejoiced with great and solemn joy. Here was the reality for which I had thirsted like a hart panting for the woodland stream! Here was all-embracing dissolution, a universe of crushed debris. And it was no dream! It was reality! The gods of entropy be praised!

~*~

Are you stupid enough to ask yourself why I would compose such an account, when no one still lives to read it? The truth is simple, and it is this: the book you are holding is not a description of some reality at a distance. Of course not. It is entirely self-referential, a world unto itself. It is not
about
something; it
is
that thing.

By Michael Griffin

Max climbs in the echo chamber of the concrete stairwell, every step rhythmic time with earlier footfalls. Fifth story, one from home. Already, a tickle of sweat under his arms. Maybe Cassandra won’t be working tonight. Maybe for once he can relax.

From the next landing above, an eruption of clangs and clatters. Two brutes barreling down, lugging an ungainly burden of welded steel. The massive construct shrieks against the metal rail and caroms into the outer wall, tearing a jagged trench in the concrete, pluming dust and scattering chips. Max covers his ears against the racket, hesitating. No way he can turn back in time. No way the twin hulks can stop their momentum. He flattens, flings up his arms to cover his skull. The avalanche of metal passes over. Jagged edges shred his suit, slicing skin.

The thundering terror rounds the corner below. Max straightens, pulls together the torn jacket sleeve, as if the edges, like a wound, might somehow heal.

Max resumes his climb. Blood trickles from gashed forearms, drips from fingertips, leaving a trail to the sixth floor. Home.

Through the apartment door, the smoke alarm shrieks over the pulse of industrial music at nightclub volume. He enters, finds the entry hall billowing smoke, walls and ceiling dark with soot. In the living room, most of the carpet is burned away, the rest blackened. What color was it before? An area near the dining room, still smoldering, churns out eye-watering murk.

Cassandra leans over a heavy steel plate, firing her plasma torch one-handed. Her denim shorts and tank top are shot through with pinhole burns, every one the aftermath of a spit of molten steel trajecting toward skin. No safety gear but a single glove and unlaced steel-toed boots.

An afternoon wasted in daydreams of home, hopes of a quiet night. What was he thinking? When is this place ever quiet?

Max disables the smoke alarm and stomps smoldering carpet. Cassandra’s still cutting. He turns down Einstürzende Neubauten, a band he always loved, at least until Cassandra started blasting them every waking moment. Finally, she looks up. The cut form breaks free from the half-inch slab, clanks onto the pile. She kills the plasma cutter, snatches a black-smudged liquor bottle and swigs. Whiskey runs a rivulet from the corner of her mouth, cuts a clean trail through ash-dark skin. She backhands it away, a delicate gesture that hints at what Max used to find appealing in her. What if they could clear away all the wreckage, the noise? Just two of them again, like the beginning?

He reaches for the fire extinguisher. Cassandra snatches it up first and gusts a chilly white cloud at his feet.

“Got tired of stopping to put it out.” She shrugs. “So I just let it burn.”

Stifling a cough, Max examines his bleeding forearm. “I passed two guys on the stairs, lugging a new sculpture of yours.”

“Furniture!” Cassandra glares. “Why can’t you respect my work, just because it’s
avant garde
? It’s furniture. Not sculpture. Not experiments.”

Max raises both hands in surrender. “Just noticing you’ve been busy. This enormous piece I hadn’t seen before.” He tries to be discreet, scrutinizing her latest geometric absurdity. Nothing but angles, sharp edges. All her earlier work’s comfort and familiarity vanished. Same as their relationship.

Cassandra loops a thick cable over her arm. “I need patrons if we’re ever going to rent a place with a workshop.” She throws a blue tarp over her work, picks up the bottle and finishes it.

“Hope we make it before you burn the building down,” Max says. Part of him wouldn’t mind being rid of all this. Being forced to start over.

~*~

Max doesn’t tell anyone of his obsession with the new neighbor, because there’s no good explanation. It’s just that every morning on his way to work, no matter what time he leaves, Max glimpses the neighbor for only a split second. Most days, the neighbor disappears behind the adjacent front door. Sometimes the guy slips down the stairwell, and vanishes by the time Max follows. Lately Max thinks a lot about timing. The turn of the knob, the opening of the door. Better to hesitate, or open right away? Whatever he chooses never makes any difference. It’s become a game, maddeningly unwinnable. The neighbor, like a ghost, lingers just long enough to eliminate any doubt he’s been seen.