Free Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

unnerving as well as hazardous by pedestrian trick-or-treaters. The costumes did me no good. (The same ghost was everywhere, a lean little wraith that I imagined was following me home.) The masks did me no good. And those Prestonian shadows wavering against two-story façades (why did I have to choose
that
book?) certainly did me no good at all. Alice, the other one, could take all this madness, every nightmare her creator threw at her. That horrible Rev. Dodgson. I don’t care if there is more in his books than anyone knows. I don’t want to know. I wish I had never heard of him—that corrupter of little minds. I just want to forget it all.
Alice and the Disappearing Past
. Dr. Guardsman, administer your medicine in tall glasses . . . but please not looking-ones.
    And now I’m safe at home with one of the tallest of those glasses resting full and faithful on my desk as I write. A lamp with a shade of Tiffany glass (circa 1922 ) casts its amiable light on the pages I’ve filled over the past few hours. (Though the hands of the clock seem locked in the same V position as when I started writing.) The lamplight shines upon the window directly in front of my desk, allowing me to see a relatively flattering reflection of myself in the black mirror of the glass. The house is soundless, and I’m a rich, retired authoress-widow.
    Is there still a problem? I’m not really sure.
    I remind you that I’ve been drinking steadily since early this afternoon. I remind you that I’m old and no stranger to the mysteries of geriatric neuroticism. I remind you that some part of me has written a series of children’s books whose hero is a disciple of the bizarre. I remind you of what night this is and to what zones the imagination can fly on this hallowed eve. I need not, however, remind you that this world is stranger than we know, or at least mine seems to be, especially this past year. And I now notice that it’s
very
strange—and, once again, untidy.
    Exhibit One
. Outside my window is an autumn moon hanging in the blackness. Now, I have to confess that I’m not up on lunar phases (“loony faces,” as Preston might say), but there seems to have been a switch since I last looked out the window—the thing seems to have reversed itself. Where it used to be concaving to the right, it’s now
convexing
in that direction, last quarter changed to first quarter, or something of that nature. But I doubt Nature has anything to do with it; more likely the explanation lies with Memory. So it’s not the moon as such that’s troubling me. The real trouble is with everything else, or at least what I can see of the suburban landscape in the street-lighted darkness. Like writing that can only be read in a mirror, the shapes outside my window—trees, houses, but thank goodness no people—now look awkward and wrong.
    Exhibit Two
. To the earlier list of reasons for my diminished competence, I would like to add an upcoming alcohol withdrawal. The last mouthful I guzzled from that glass on my desk tasted strangely vile, noxious to the point where I doubt I’ll be having any more. I almost wrote, and now will, that the booze tasted inside out. Of course, there are certain diseases with the power to turn the flavor of one’s favorite drink into that of a hellbroth. Perhaps, then, I’ve fallen victim to such a malady. But I remind you that though my mind may be terminally soused, it has always resided
in corpore sano
.
    Exhibit Three
(the last). My reflection in the window before me. Perhaps something faulty in the melt of the glass. My face. The surrounding shadows seem to be overlapping it a little at a time, like bugs attracted to something sweet. But the only thing sweet about Alice is her blood, highly sugared over the years from her drinking habit. So what is it, then? Shadows of senility? Or those starving things I read about earlier this evening come back