The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti Read Free Book Online Page A

knew it. Pretty soon all of this land around here will be small country.”
    They were moving around like mad in a kind of pit. Stretching out for about a mile was a half-built town that was almost a double of the town where my friend and I lived. The smalls were hopping around in a frenzy to finish it, as if they were on a tight schedule. “Maybe they have to complete the place before a certain time,” my friend conjectured. “Why else would they be working at night?” Or maybe that’s just the way they are, I thought. All kinds of small building machinery were positioned along the town’s main street, though none of it was in motion. Small people who looked as if they were directing operations stood with their stubby arms outstretched, pointing in all directions or inspecting unrolled building plans held tightly by their tiny digits. Everyone seemed busy with some project—putting up storefronts that had little detail or identifying features, working on skeletal frameworks that maybe were going to be houses, or carrying around what appeared to be prefabricated parts that would ultimately be integrated into the toy town. On several street corners small people were yelling through staticky bull horns. But they didn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular, and what they were shouting wasn’t distinguishable as anything but gibberish. As a matter of fact—just pure, natural fact—when I considered the scene before me from its smallest to its most prominent features, the whole enterprise of the small people’s town-building seemed to be nothing but an act. They weren’t building anything with point and purpose at its core, anything that was more than a spectral illusion—they were putting on a show. Whether or not this was intentional on their part intrigued me for some reason.
    Once I had thrown off the strangeness of the spectacle, I could see how rickety, how shoddy everything was. All the buildings were crooked or unevenly sized with respect to the town as a whole. The windows were more trapezoidal than square or rectangular, and the shutters attached to some windows hung loosely, flapping against the walls behind them. A light breeze could have caused the town to collapse and blow away, which may have accounted for the disappearance and emergence of so much small country within real landscapes. I knew that all towns, and even cities, in the big world would eventually go to ruin in time, however sturdy they might appear for however long a period. Thousands of years of towns and cities in the past had proven that. And thousands or millions of years awaited the dissolution of the world as it now stood. But this town was not made to last. It was as if the small people knew there was no point in bothering with permanence. As I said, that explained a lot to me about small country—how it was always moving from one location to another, as my friend’s father was aware so that he could move his family away from wherever it rose up after a period of seclusion. But there was also something more. They sought no permanent standing in the world. For them, existence was all chaos, nonsense, and emptiness. I knew the same had been written about our world, the supposedly real world. But that was opinion, speculation. And only very few had claimed as much. Yet the small people as a lot seemed to embrace these objectionable qualities as truths. Now it became more explicable to me that they should be passed over in the archives of human thought. Theirs was not a lone voice speaking out of time. Theirs was a society subsisting, even thriving, on the brink of nonexistence—an enigma that repulsed wholesome deliberation by real people. And their habitats were all but ruins upon inauguration.
    No one in the big world, or very few, mentioned that the fully extinct leavings of towns like this remained after the smalls relocated, because once a place had become small country it was left alone, as if it was not fit to be