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

instance.
    November 16th. Tonight we held an emergency meeting, our assembly in crisis. The others feel there’s a problem, and of course I know they’re right. Ever since I met my latest love I could sense their growing uneasiness, which was their prerogative. Now, however, all has changed; my romantic misjudgment has seen to that. They expressed absolute horror that an outsider should know so much. I feel it myself. Day is a stranger now, and I wonder what her loquacious self might disclose about her former friend, not to mention his present ones. A marvelous arcana is threatened with exposure. The inconspicuousness we need for our lives could be lost, and with it would go the keys to a strange kingdom.
    We’ve confronted these situations before. I’m not the only one to have jeopardized our secrecy. We, of course, have no secrets from each other. They know everything about me, and I about them. They knew every step of the way the progress of my relationship with Daisy. Some of them even predicted the outcome. And though I thought I was right in taking the chance that they were wrong, I must now defer to their prophecy. Those lonely souls,
mes frères!
“Do you want us to see it through?” they asked in so many words. I consented, finally, in a score of ambiguous, half-hesitant ways. Then they sent me back to my unflowered sanctum.
    I’ll never again get involved in another situation of this kind, I promised myself, even though I’ve made this resolution before. I stared at the razory dentes of my furry sculpture for a perilously long while. What that poor girl saw as tongue-like floral appendages were silent: the preservation of such silence, of course, is their whole purpose. I remember that Daisy once jokingly asked me on what I modeled my art.
    November 17th.
    To Eden with me you will not leave
    To live in a cottage of crazy, crooked eaves
.
    In your own happy home you take care these nights;
    When you let your little cat in, please turn on the lights!
    Something scurries behind and finds a cozy place to stare
,
    Something sent to you from paradise, with serpents to spare:
    Tongues flowering; they leap out laughing, lapping. Disappear!
    I do this to pass the hours. Only to pass the hours.
    November 17th. 12:00 a.m. Flowers.

ALICE’S LAST ADVENTURE
    â€œPreston, stop laughing. They ate the whole backyard. They ate your mother’s favorite flowers! It’s not funny, Preston.”
    â€œAaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Aaaaa heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”
    â€” PRESTON AND THE STARVING SHADOWS
    A long time ago, Preston Penn made up his mind to ignore the passing years and join the ranks of those who remain forever in a kind of half-world between childhood and adolescence. He would not give up the bold satisfaction of eating insects (crispy flies are his favorite), nor that peculiar drunkenness of a child’s brain, induplicable once grown-up sobriety has set in. The result was that Preston successfully negotiated quite a few decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty. In this state of arrested development, he defiantly lived through many a perverse adventure. And he still lives in the pages of those books I wrote about him, though I stopped writing them some years ago.
    Did he have a prototype? I should say so. One doesn’t just
invent
a character like Preston using only the pitiful powers of imagination. He was very much a concoction of reality, later adapted for my popular series of children’s books. Preston’s status in both reality and imagination has always held a great fascination for me. In the past year, however, this issue has especially demanded my attention, not without some personal annoyance and even anxiety. Then again, perhaps I’m getting senile.
    My age is no secret, since it can be looked up in a number of literary reference sources. Over twenty years ago, when the last Preston book appeared (
Preston and the Upside-Down