Thomas Ligotti - The Lost Art Of Twilight.rtf

The Lost Art Of Twilight

by Thomas Ligotti

* * * *

I have painted it, tried to at least. Oiled it, watercolored it, smeared it upon a mirror which I positioned to re­kindle the glow of the real thing. And always in the abstract. Never actual sinking suns in spring, autumn, winter skies; never a sepia light descending over the trite horizon of a lake, not even the particular lake I like to view from the great terrace of my great house. But these Twilights of mine were not merely all abstraction, which is simply a way to keep out the riff-raff of the real world. Other painterly abstractionists may claim that nothing is represented in their canvases, and probably nothing is: a streak of iodine red is just a streak of iodine red, a patch of flat black equals a patch of flat black. But pure color, pure light, pure lines and their rhythms, pure form in general all mean much more than that. The others have only seen their dramas of shape and shade; I — and it is impossible to insist on this too strenuously — I have been there. And my twilight abstractions did in fact represent some reality, somewhere, sometime: a zone formed by palaces of soft and sullen color hovering beside seas of scintillating pattern and be­neath rhythmic skies; a zone in which the visitor himself is transformed into a formal essence, a luminous presence, free of substance — a citizen of the ab­stract. And a zone (I cannot sufficiently amplify my despair on this point, so I will not try) that I will never know again.

Only a few weeks ago I was sitting out on the terrace of my massive old mansion, watching the early autumn sun droop into the above-mentioned lake, talking to Aunt T. Her heels clomped with a pleasing hollowness on the flagstones of the terrace. Silver-haired, she was attired in a gray suit, a big bow flopping up to her lower chins. In her left hand was a long envelope, neatly caesarianed, and in her right hand the letter it had contained, folded in sections like a triptych.

“They want to see you,” she said, ges­turing with the letter. “They want to come here.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said and skept­ically turned in my chair to watch the sunlight stretching in long cathedral­like aisles across the upper and lower levels of the lawn.

“If you would only read the letter,” she insisted.

“It’s in French, no? Can’t read.”

“Now that’s not true, to judge by those books you’re always stacking in the library.”

“Those happen to be art books. I just look at the pictures.”

“You like pictures, Andre?” she asked in her best matronly ironic tone. “I have a picture for you. Here it is: they are going to be allowed to come here and stay with us as long as they like. There’s a family of them, two children and the letter also mentions an un­married sister. They’re traveling all the way from Aix-en-Provence to visit America, and while on their trip they want to see their only living blood re­lation here. Do you understand this pic­ture? They know who you are and, more to the point, where you are.”

“I’m surprised they would want to, since they’re the ones —”

“No, they’re not. They’re from your father’s side of the family. The Duvals,” she explained. “They do know all about you but say [Aunt T. here consulted the letter for a moment] “that they are sans prejuges.”

“The generosity of such creatures freezes my blood. Phenomenal scum. Twenty years ago these people do what they did to my mother, and now they have the gall, the gall, to say they aren’t prejudiced against me.”

Aunt T. gave me a warning hrumph to silence myself, for just then the one I called Rops walked out onto the ter­race bearing a tray with a slender glass set upon it. I dubbed him Rops because he, as much as his artistic namesake, never failed to give me the charnel house creeps.

He cadavered over to Aunt T. and served her her afternoon cocktail.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the glass of cloudy stuff.

“Anything for you, sir?” he asked, now holding the tray over his chest like a silver shield.

“Ever see me have a drink, Rops,” I asked back. “Ever see me —”

“Andre, behave. That’ll be all, thank you.”

Rops left our sight in a few bony strides. “You can continue your rant now,” said Aunt T. graciously.

“I’m through. You know how I feel,” I replied and then looked away toward the lake, drinking in the dim mood of the twilight in the absence of normal refreshment.

“Yes, I do know how you feel, and you’ve always been wrong. You’ve al­ways had these romantic ideas of how you and your mother, rest her soul, have been the victims of some mon­strous injustice. But nothing is the way you like to think it is. They were not backward peasants who, we should say, saved your mother. They were wealthy, sophisticated members of her own fam­ily. And they were not superstitious, because what they believed about your mother was the truth.”

“True or not,” I argued, “they be­lieved the unbelievable — they acted on it — and that I call superstition. What reason could they possibly —”

“What reason? I have to say that at the time you were in no position to judge reasons, considering that we knew you only as a slight swelling inside your mother’s body. But I was actually there. I saw the ‘new friends’ she had made, that ‘aristocracy of blood,’ as she called it, in contrast to her own people’s hard-earned wealth. But I don’t judge her, I never have. After all, she had just lost her husband — your father was a good man and it’s a shame you never knew him — and then to be carrying his child, the child of a dead man . . . She was frightened, confused, and she ran back to her family and her homeland. Who can blame her if she started acting ir­responsibly? But it’s a shame what hap­pened, especially for your sake.”

“You are indeed a comfort. . .Aun­tie,” I said with now regrettable sar­casm.

“Well, you have my sympathy whether you want it or not. I think I’ve proven that over the years.”

“Indeed you have,” I agreed, and somewhat sincerely.

Aunt T. poured the last of her drink down her throat and a little drop she wasn’t aware of dripped from the corner of her mouth, shining in the crepus­cular radiance like a pearl.

“When your mother didn’t come home one evening — I should say morning — everyone knew what had happened, but no one said anything. Contrary to your ideas about their superstitious-ness, they actually could not bring themselves to believe the truth for some time.”

“It was good of all of you to let me go on developing for a while, even as you were deciding how to best hunt my mother down.”

“I will ignore that remark.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“We did not hunt her down, as you well know. That’s another of your per­secution fantasies. She came to us, now didn’t she? Scratching at the windows in the night —”

“You can skip this part, I already – “

“— swelling full as the fullest moon. And that was strange, because you would actually have been considered a dangerously premature birth according to normal schedules; but when we fol­lowed your mother back to the mau­soleum of the local church, where she lay during the daylight hours, she was carrying the full weight of her preg­nancy. The priest was shocked to find what he had living, so to speak, in his own backyard. It was actually he, and not so much any of your mother’s fam­ily, who thought we should not allow you to be brought into the world. And it was his hand that ultimately released your mother from the life of her new friends, and immediately afterward she began to deliver, right in the coffin in which she lay. The blood was terrible. If we did—”

“It’s not necessary to —”

“— hunt down your mother, you should be thankful that I was among that party. I had to get you out of the country that very night, back to Amer­ica. I —”

At that point she could see that I was no longer listening, was gazing with a distracted intensity on the pleasanter anecdotes of the setting sun. When she stopped talking and joined in the view, I said:

“Thank you, Aunt T., for that little bedtime story. I never tire of hearing it.”

“I’m sorry, Andre, but I wanted to remind you of the truth.”

“What can I say? I realize I owe you my life, such as it is.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean the truth of what your mother became and what you now are.”

“I am nothing. Completely harm­less.”

“That’s why we must let the Duvals come and stay with us. To show them the world has nothing to fear from you, because that’s what I believe they’re actually coming to see. That’s the mes­sage they’ll carry back to your family in France.”

“You really think that’s why they’re coming.”

“I do. They could make quite a bit of trouble for you, for us.”

I rose from my chair as the shadows of the failing twilight deepened. I went and stood next to Aunt T. against the stone balustrade of the terrace, and whispered:

“Then let them come.”

I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the de­funct, grand and innumerable. My li­neage is longer than time. My name is written with embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble name is mine.

In the immediate family, the first to meet his maker was my own maker: he rests in the tomb of the unknown father. But while the man did manage to sire me, he breathed his last breath in this world before I drew my first. He was felled by a single stroke, his first and last. In those final moments, so I’m told, his erratic and subtle brainwaves made strange designs across the big green eye of an EEG monitor. The same doctor who told my mother that her husband was no longer among the living also in­formed her, on the very same day, that she was pregnant. Nor was this the only poignant coincidence in the lives of my parents. Both of them belonged to wealthy families from Aix-en-Provence in southern France. However, their first meeting took place not in the old country but in the new, at the Ameri­can university they each happened to be attending. And so two neighbors crossed a cold ocean to come together in a mandatory science course. When they compared notes on their common backgrounds, they knew it was destiny at work. They fell in love with each other and with their new homeland. The couple later moved into a rich and prestigious suburb (which I will decline to mention by name or state, since I still reside there and, for reasons that will eventually become apparent, must do so discreetly). For years the couple lived in contentment, and then my im­mediate male forbear died just in time for fatherhood, becoming the appropri­ate parent for his son-to-be.

Offspring of the dead.

But surely, one might protest, I was born of a living mother; surely upon arrival in this world I turned and gazed into a pair of glossy maternal eyes. Not so, as I think is evident from my earlier conversation with dear Aunt T. Wid­owed and pregnant, my mother had fled back to Aix, to the comfort of family estates and secluded living. But more on this in a moment. Meanwhile I can no longer suppress the urge to say a few things about my ancestral hometown.

Aix-en-Provence, where I was born but never lived, has many personal, though necessarily second-hand, asso­ciations for me. However, it is not just a connection between Aix and my own life that maintains such a powerful grip on my imagination and memory, a life­long fascination which actually has more to do with a few unrelated facts in the history of the region. Two pieces of historical data, to be exact. Separate centuries, indeed epochs, play host to these data, and they likewise exist in entirely different realms of mood, worlds apart in implication. Nevertheless, from a certain point of view they can impress one as inseparable opposites. The first datum is as follows: In the seventeenth century there occurred the spiritual possession by divers demons of the nuns belonging to the Ursuline convent at Aix. And excommunication was soon in coming for the tragic sisters, who had been seduced into assorted blasphemies by the likes of Gresil, Sonnillon, and Verin. De Plancy’s Dictionnaire infer...