The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti

Author:Thomas Ligotti
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2014-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

3.

I do not recall making my way back to the apartment that night, but I woke up there the next morning. When I saw the sunlight shafting through my bedroom window, the enormous divide between night and day seemed comfortingly unbridgeable. Then I realized I had fallen asleep with all my clothes on and the connection was made once again. I jumped out of bed and stumbled over to my roommate’s room, which of course was empty. For a moment I had entertained the protective thought that I had dreamed the events of the night before. Or perhaps dream merely overlapped reality in certain places—props and stage sets from one having been deceptively transferred in my memory to the other. On another hand, maybe everything I recalled was just one dream mingling with its own kind, all of it lacking any point of contact with real facts and experiences, whatever they might finally be.

One fact, however, was later established: Quinn never returned to the apartment. After a few days I reported him as missing to the Nortown police. Before doing this I destroyed the notebook in his room, for in a fit of paranoia I thought the police would find it in the course of their investigations and then ask some rather uncomfortable questions. I did not want to explain to them things that they simply would not believe, especially activities indulged in that final night. This would only have erroneously cast suspicion upon myself. Fortunately, the Nortown authorities are notoriously lax in their official functions. As it turned out, the police asked very few questions and never came around to the apartment.

After Quinn’s disappearance I immediately began looking for another apartment. And although my roommate was gone, the strange dreams continued during my last days at the old residence. But these dreams were different in some particulars. The general backdrop was much the same nightmare expanse, but now I viewed it from some mysterious distance outside the dream. It was actually more like watching a film than dreaming, and they did not seem to be my own dreams at all. Perhaps these were Quinn’s leftover visions or terrors still haunting the apartment, for he played the dreams’ central role. Perhaps it was in these dreams that I continued to follow Quinn beyond the point at which I lost him. For at that point I imagined him as already starting to change, and in my last dreams he changed further.

He no longer bore any resemblance to my former roommate, though with dreamlike omniscience I knew it was he. His shape kept changing, or rather was deliberately being changed by those kaleidoscopic beasts. Playing out a scene from some Boschian hell, the tormenting demons encircled their victim and were dreaming him. They dreamed him through a hideous series of grotesque transfigurations, maliciously altering the screaming mass of the damned soul. They were dreaming things out of him and dreaming things into him. Finally, the purpose of their transformations became apparent. They

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