Read Online Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti - Free Book Online Page A

starting to get dark outside, the time seemed right for the festivities to begin. My reading was to inaugurate the evening’s fun, a good spooky story “to get everyone in the mood.” First, though, I needed to get myself in the mood, and pardoned myself to use the ladies’ room, where I could refortify my fluttering nerves from a flask I had stowed away in my purse. As a strange and embarrassing social gesture, Mr. Grosz offered to wait right outside the lavatory until I finished.
    â€œI’m quite ready now, Mr. Grosz,” I said, glaring down at the little man from atop an unelderly pair of high heels. He cleared his throat, and I almost thought he was going to extend a crooked arm for me to take. But instead he merely stretched it out to indicate, in a stock gentlemanly manner, the way to go. I think he might even have bowed.
    He led me back down the hallway toward the children’s section of the library, where I assumed my reading would take place as it always had in the past. However, we walked right by this area, which was dark and empty, and proceeded down a flight of stairs leading to the library’s basement. “Our new facility,” bragged Mr. Grosz. “Converted one of the storage rooms into a small auditorium of sorts.” We were now facing a large metal door painted an institutional shade of green. It looked for all the world as if it might lead into the back ward of a madhouse. I could hear screaming on the other side, which sounded to me like the cries of bedlamites rather than the clamor of rambunctious kids. “Which one will it be tonight?” asked Mr. Grosz while staring at my left hand.
“
Preston and the Starving Shadows
,”
I answered, showing him the book I was holding. He smiled and confided that it was one of his favorites. Then he opened the door for me, pushing its weight with both hands, and we entered what chamber of horrors I knew not.
    Over fifty kids were sitting in or standing on or knocking over their seats. Shouting from the podium at the front of the long, narrow room, a pointy-hatted witch was outlining the party activities for the night; and when she saw Mr. Grosz and me arrive, she began telling the children about a “special treat for us all,” meaning that the half-crocked lady author was about to deliver a half-cocked oration. “Let’s give her a big hand,” she said, clapping as I stepped onto the rickety-looking platform. I thanked everyone for inviting me to their party and fixed my book on a lamp-bearing lectern decorated with wizened cornstalks. Then I tried my best to warm up the crowd with a little patter about the story everyone was going to hear. When I invoked the name of Preston Penn, a few kids actually cheered, or at least one did at the rear of the room. I assumed it was William Harley.
    Just as I was about to begin reading, something happened I had not been led to expect—the lights were switched off. (“It slipped my mind entirely,” Mr. Grosz apologized afterward.) In the dark, I noticed that facing each other on opposite sides of the room were two rows of jack-o’-lanterns glowing orange and yellow from on high. They all had identical faces and looked like mirror reflections of one another, with triangular eyes and noses and wailing
O
s for mouths. (As a child, I was convinced that pumpkins naturally grew this way, complete with facial features and phosphorescent insides.) Furthermore, they seemed to be suspended in space, their means of support concealed by the darkness, which also hid within it the faces of the children. Thus, these jack-o’-lanterns became my audience.
    But as I read, the real audience asserted itself with foot shuffling, whispers, and some rather ingenious noises made with the folding wooden chairs they were sitting in. I also heard a “devilish giggling,” in the words I employed to describe the snickering laughter of the very imp whose story I