Read Online Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti - Free Book Online Page A

receding into the distance away from me, while the house before which I stood appeared to loom closer and closer. In a thoughtless moment of panic I ran back to my car, struggling to open the door as the wind pounded against it. As soon as I was inside the car, I started the engine and drove as fast as conditions would allow. Nevertheless, it seemed that I was making no progress along the route by which I had come to that region: the horizon was still darkening and receding ahead of me while the house in my rear-view mirror remained constant in its looming perspective. Eventually, however, things began to change and that backroad landscape, along with the isolated two-story house, diminished behind me.
    Only later did I ask myself where I would live out the rest of my life if not in that backroad landscape, that remote paradise in which a house had been erected that seemed perfectly designed for me. But this same place, a true resting place in which I should have been able to live out the rest of my life in some kind of peace, was now only one more thing that I had to fear.
    AFTERWORD
     
    In addition to the five stories presented here, I also found notes, mostly in the form of unconnected phrases, for a sixth story with the apparent working title of ‘Sideshow.’ Following the manner of the other pieces, this story similarly seemed destined to be no more than a dreamlike vignette, an episode of ‘peculiar and ridiculous show business,’ to quote from the author’s notes. There were other unique phrases or ideas that appeared in these notes which had also emerged in my conversations with the author as we sat in the corner booth of that coffee shop throughout the course of several nights. For example, such phrases as ‘the volatility of things’ and ‘unexpected mutations’ appeared repeatedly, as if these were to serve as the guiding principles of this presumably abandoned narrative.
    I suppose I should not have been surprised to find that the author of the aborted narrative had made references to myself, since he had clearly characterized his work to me as ‘autobiographical wretchedness.’ In these notes I am fairly designated as the ‘other man in the coffee shop’ and as a ‘pitiful insomniac who manufactures artistic conundrums for himself in order to distract his mind from the sideshow town in which he has spent his life.’ The words ‘sideshow town’ appear earlier in what seems to be the intended opening sentence of the aborted, or perhaps deliberately abandoned, story. This particular sentence is interesting in that it directly suggests a continuity with one of the other stories, something that, in my notice, is otherwise absent among these feverish, apparently deranged fragments. ‘After failing to find a house in which I might live out the rest of my life,’ the sentence begins, ‘I began to travel frantically from one sideshow town to another, each of them descending further than the one before it into the depths of a show-business world.’
    Given the incomplete nature of the notes for the story called ‘Sideshow,’ not to mention the highly elliptical quality that was conspicuous even in the author’s completed works which I had read, I did not search very long for the modicum of ‘coherence and continuity’ that he claimed to assign to the ‘senseless episodes’ forming the fundamental stratum of both his writings and his experience of the world. And at some point these notes ceased to resemble a rough outline for a work-in-progress and took on the tone of a journal or private confession. ‘Told X [a reference to myself, I assumed] that I wrote when I was prompted ,’ he wrote.
    ‘Didn’t mention what might constitue such a prompt, and he didn’t ask. Very strange, since he seemed to display all the subtle qualities of a highly receptive temperament, not to mention those far less subtle traits which were evident from our first meeting. Like gazing into a funhouse mirror: the