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

reclaimed by real humans, as if the earth in these places had been polluted by an alien occupancy, and only pestilence abided there. You know this as well as I do, Doctor. But nobody writes about this fact, and its corollary that one day there will be no room left for a real world to be built—the unreal was moving in. I believe I realized this truth at a deep level within me during the one brave day I spent at a middling library. And now I was shaken by it to my marrow.
    Maybe there are grubby pamphlets passed around among people like my friend’s father, crumpled pages whose possession would cause someone to be branded as a shameful little bigot, you might say—an outcast. So anything that appears in print or otherwise about the small people is labeled as pernicious ravings and propaganda. There are means for hushing up what people would prefer not to delve into. But I’ve already gone into that.
    Gazing at the new small town going up, such as it was, was to witness the intrusion of an unnatural colony of beings into the anatomy of our world—not a different race or group, but something that did not belong, neither here nor anywhere conceivable by human senses or cognition. It was something unknown that had taken form, or was in the process of taking form, coming of age in a world it was displacing. That night with my friend brought so many things home to me. A new phase in my sentiment toward the smalls had begun fermenting within my being. “None of it is real,” my friend said. “I don’t know what it is.” A creeping sense of something hitherto concealed overcame me, as I’m sure it did him. Fear had now gotten the better of both hatred and curiosity. Beside me, my friend whispered: “Let’s get out of here.” In sync, we jumped to our feet. When we turned about, though, I almost lost consciousness. For behind us was a regiment of small people standing in a semi-circle. How long had they been there? To me, that was more frightening than discovering their presence—being watched without knowing it by a group of smalls.
    They didn’t speak a word—neither to us nor among one another. Nothing shocked me about that, but it did add to the disorienting unreality of the situation. For a time, they stayed in place. Paradoxically, they appeared gigantic, that is, gigantic for toys, given their toy-like aspect. For instance, their clothes seemed to be painted on them, not worn by them. And their faces were so smooth, gleaming in the moonlight without any of the characteristic qualities of flesh. Despite their masculine semblance, their faces were beardless. They were also unwrinkled, unworn by time and somehow immortal. This was how they had always been, created somehow but not developed in stages from birth to their present age. There had been no process of coming of age for them, I thought later—no birth or death or all the things in between that trouble our own existence, or at least troubled us when we attended to them. There was only going through the motions, a pretense of life. In a way, they were a mirror of us—of what we wanted for ourselves. They marked time and nothing else. Time to do this. Time to do that. Time to make another town. Time to relocate, having poisoned a new landscape with small country.
    During the standoff between the smalls and my friend and me, an uncanny stillness prevailed. But then their heads swiveled simultaneously. Each turned toward another. They didn’t seem to be exchanging glances, though, or even looking directly into one another’s glassy, empty eyes—not as my friend and I looked to each other with the same thought in our minds. We couldn’t run around them, because they surrounded us. And we didn’t want to jump down the steep incline at our backs and land in the small town. So we began to move slowly through their ranks, not knowing what to expect. While we had come there to harm them, our taste for that was now lost. It seemed to us, as we later talked of it,