Thomas Ligotti - Teatro Grottesco

By the sound of his voice, the visitor was a young man. My father invited him into the house, speaking in a straightforward and amiable fashion that I knew was entirely forced. I wondered how long he would be able to maintain this uncharacteristic tone in conversation, for he bid the young man to have a seat in the living room where the two of them could talk ‘at leisure,’ a locution that sounded absolutely bizarre as spoken by my father.

‘As I said at the door, sir,’ the young man said, ‘I’m going around the neighborhood telling people about a very worthy organization.’

‘Citizens for Faith,’ my father cut in.

‘You’ve heard of our group?’

‘I can read the button pinned to the lapel of your jacket. This is sufficient to allow me to comprehend your general principles.’

‘Then perhaps you might be interested in making a donation,’ said the young man.

‘I would indeed.’

‘That’s wonderful, sir.’

‘But only on the condition that you allow me to challenge these absurd principles of yours — to really put them to the test. I’ve actually been hoping that you, or someone like you, would come along. It’s almost as if a fortuitous element of intervention brought you to this house, if I were to believe in something so preposterous.’

So ended my father’s short-lived capitulation to straightforwardness and amiability.

‘Sir?’ said the young man, his brow creasing a bit with incomprehension.

‘I will explain. You have these two principles in your head, and possibly they are the only principles that are holding your head together. The first is the principle of nations, countries, the whole hullabaloo of mother lands and father lands. The second is the principle of deities. Neither of these principles has anything real about them. They are merely impurities poisoning your head. In a single phrase — Citizens for Faith — you have incorporated two of the three major principles — or impurities — that must be eliminated, completely eradicated, before our species can begin an approach to a pure conception of existence. Without pure conception, or something approaching pure conception, everything is a disaster and will continue to be a disaster.’

‘I understand if you’re not interested in making a donation, sir,’ said the young man, at which point my father dug his hand into the right pocket of his trousers and pulled out a wad of cash that was rolled into a tube and secured with a thick rubber band. He held it up before the young man’s eyes.

‘This is for you, but only if you will give me a chance to take those heinous principles of yours and clean them out of your head.’

‘I don’t believe my faith to be something that’s just in my head.’

Until this point, I thought that my father was taunting the young man for pure diversion, perhaps as a means of distracting himself from the labors in which he had been engaged so intensely over the past few days. Then I heard what to my ears was an ominous shift in my father’s words, signifying his movement from the old-school iconoclast he had been playing to something desperate and unprincipled with respect to the young man.

‘Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to suggest that anything like that was only in your head. How could such a thing be true when I know quite well that something of the kind inhabits this very house?’

‘He is in every house,’ said the young man. ‘He is in all places.’

‘Indeed, indeed. But something like that is very much in this particular house.’

My suspicion was now that my father made reference to the haunted condition — although it barely deserved the description — of our rented house. I myself had already assisted him in a small project relevant to this condition and what its actual meaning might be, at least insofar as my father chose to explain such things. He even allowed me to keep a memento of this ‘phase-one experiment,’ as he called it. I was all but sure that this was the case when my father alluded to his basement.

‘Basement?’ said the young man.

‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘I could show you.’

‘Not in my head but in your basement,’ said the young man as he attempted to clarify what my father was claiming.

‘Yes, yes. Let me show you. And afterward I will make a generous donation to your group. What do you say?’

The young man did not immediately say anything, and perhaps this was the reason that my father quickly shouted out my name. I backed up a few steps and waited, then descended the stairway as if I had not been eavesdropping all along.

‘This is my son,’ my father said to the young man, who stood up to shake my hand. He was thin and wore a second-hand suit, just as I imagined him while I was eavesdropping at the top of the stairs. ‘Daniel, this gentleman and I have some business to conduct. I want you to see that we’re not disturbed.’ I simply stood there as if I had every intention of obediently following these instructions. My father then turned to the young man, indicating the way to the basement. ‘We won’t be long.’

No doubt my presence — that is, the normality of my presence — was a factor in the young man’s decision to go into the basement. My father would have known that. He would not know, nor would he have cared, that I quietly left the house as soon as he had closed the basement door behind him and his guest. I did consider lingering for a time at the house, if only to gain some idea of what phase my father’s experimentation had now entered, given that I was a participant in its early stages. However, that night I was eager to see a friend of mine who lived in the neighborhood.

To be precise, my friend did not live in the bad neighborhood where my family had rented a house but in the worse neighborhood nearby. It was only a few streets away, but this was the difference between a neighborhood where some of the houses had bars across their doors and windows and one in which there was nothing left to protect or to save or to care about in any way. It was another world altogether… a twisted paradise of danger and derangement… of crumbling houses packed extremely close together… of burned-out houses leaning toward utter extinction… of houses with black openings where once there had been doors and windows… and of empty fields over which shone a moon that was somehow different from the one seen elsewhere on this earth.

Sometimes there would be an isolated house hanging onto the edge of an open field of shadows and shattered glass. And the house would be so contorted by ruin that the possibility of its being inhabited sent the imagination swirling into a pit of black mysteries. Upon closer approach, one might observe thin, tattered bedsheets in place of curtains. Finally, after prolonged contemplation, the miracle of a soft and wavering glow would be revealed inside the house.

Not long after my family moved into a vicinity where such places were not uncommon, I found one particular house that was nothing less than the ideal of the type of residence, so to speak, I have just described. My eyes became fixed upon it, held as if they were witnessing some miraculous vision. Then one of the bedsheets that covered the front window moved slightly, and the voice of a woman called out to me as I stood teetering on the broken remnants of a sidewalk.

‘Hey, you. Hey, boy. You got any money on you?’

‘Some,’ I replied to that powerful voice.

‘Then would you do something for me?’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Would you go up to the store and get me some salami sticks? The long ones, not those little ones. I’ll pay you when you come back.’

When I returned from the store, the woman again called out to me through the glowing bedsheets. ‘Step careful on those porch stairs,’ she said. ‘The door’s open.’