MY CASE FOR RETRIBUTIVE FICTION

Thomas Ligotti

 

Thomas Ligotti (longshadows.com/ligotti) lives near Tampa, Florida. He is one of the most important living writers of supernatural horror fiction, and a master of the short story. In an interview he listed the writers who have most influenced him: Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, and Bruno Shulz—“masters of depicting warped realities or warping the usual picture of the world that realistic fiction provides. The challenge for such writers is to make tangible their distorted, or merely intensified, experience. A morbid hyperattentiveness to the most inward imaginings and feelings is evident in this type of writer. And once feeling becomes the principal determinant of expression, all kinds of warping, or what appears to be warping, will occur in the structure, style, and content of a narrative.” Ligotti’s stories have been collected in Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Grimscribe, Noctuary, The Nightmare Factory, and others, including many small press volumes. “My Case for Retributive Action” appeared in Weird Tales, and is a fine example of Ligotti: One reviewer called it “Kafka meets Lovecraft.” It is one of several recent Ligotti stories involving the sinister Quine Corporation, and its malign effects on its workers. Weird Tales, along with Interzone, comprised the top rank of small press magazines publishing fantasy in 2001. Ligotti’s work has appeared often in Weird Tales, and other small press magazines.

It was my first day working as a processor of forms in a storefront office. As soon as I entered the place—before I had a chance to close the door behind me or take a single step inside—this rachitic individual wearing mismatched clothes and eyeglasses with frames far too small for his balding head came hopping around his desk to greet me. He spoke excitedly, his words tumbling over themselves, saying, “Welcome, welcome. I’m Ribello. Allow me, if you will, to help you get your bearings around here. Sorry there’s no coat rack or anything. You can just use that empty desk.”

Now, I think you’ve known me long enough, my friend, to realize that I’m anything but a snob or someone who by temperament carries around a superior attitude toward others, if for no other reason than I simply lack the surplus energy required for that sort of behavior. So I smiled and tried to introduce myself. But Ribello continued to inundate me with his patter. “Did you bring what they told you?” he asked, glancing down at the briefcase hanging from my right hand. “We have to provide our own supplies around here, I’m sure you were told that much,” he continued before I could get a word in. Then he turned his head slightly to sneak a glance around the storefront office, which consisted of eight desks, only half of them occupied, surrounded by towering rows of filing cabinets that came within a few feet of the ceiling. “And don’t make any plans for lunch,” he said. “I’m going to take you someplace. There are some things you might want to know. Information, anecdotes. There’s one particular anecdote… but we’ll let that wait. You’ll need to get your bearings around here.”

Ribello then made sure I knew what desk I’d been assigned, pointing out the one closest to the window of the storefront office. “That used to be my desk. Now that you’re with us I can move to one of the desks farther back.” Anticipating Ribello’s next query, I told him that I had already received instructions regarding my tasks, which consisted entirely of processing various forms for the Quine Organization, a company whose interests and activities penetrate into every enterprise, both public and private, on this side of the border. Its headquarters are located far from the town where I secured a job working for them, a remote town that’s even quite distant from any of the company’s regional centers of operation. In such a place, and many others like it, the Quine Organization also maintains offices, even if they are just dingy storefront affairs permeated by a sour, briny odor. This smell could not be ignored and led me to speculate that before this building had been taken over as a facility for processing various forms relating to the monopolist Q. Org, as it is often called for shorthand, it had long been occupied by a pickle shop. You might be interested to know that this speculation was later confirmed by Ribello, who had taken it upon himself to help me get my bearings in my new job, which was also my first job since arriving in this little two-street town.

As I sat down at my desk, where a lofty stack of forms stood waiting to be processed, I tried to put my encounter with Ribello out of my head. I was very much on edge for reasons that you well know (my nervous condition and so forth), but in addition I was suffering from a lack of proper rest. A large part of the blame for my deprivation of sleep could be attributed to the woman who ran the apartment house where I lived in a single room on the top floor. For weeks I’d been pleading with her to do something about the noises that came from the space underneath the roof of the building, which was directly above the ceiling of my room. This was a quite small room made that much smaller because one side of it was steeply slanted in parallel to the slanted roof above. I didn’t want to come out and say to the woman that there were mice or some other kind of vermin living under the roof of the building which she ran, but that was my implication when I told her about the “noises.” In fact, these noises suggested something far more sizable, and somehow less identifiable, than a pack of run-of-the-mill vermin. She kept telling me that the problem would be seen to, although it never was. Finally, on the morning which was supposed to be the first day of my new job—after several weeks of struggling with inadequate sleep in addition to the agitations deriving from my nervous condition—I thought I would just make an end of it right there in that one-room apartment on the top floor of a building in a two-street town on the opposite side of the border from the place where I had lived my whole life and to where it seemed I would never be able to return. For the longest time I sat on the edge of my bed holding a bottle of nerve medicine, shifting it from one hand to the other and thinking, “When I stop shifting this bottle back and forth (an action that seemed to be occurring without the intervention or control of my mind), if I find myself holding it in my left hand I’ll swallow the entire contents and make an end of it, and if I find myself holding it in my right hand I’ll go and start working in a storefront office for the Quine Organization.”

I don’t actually recall in which hand the bottle ended up, or whether I dropped it on the floor in passing it from hand to hand, or what in the world happened. All I know is that I turned up at that storefront office, and, as soon as I stepped inside, Ribello was all over me with his nonsense about how he would help me get my bearings. And now, while I was processing forms one after another like a machine, I also had to anticipate going to lunch with this individual. None of the other three persons in the office—two middle-aged men and an elderly woman who sat in the far corner—had exercised the least presumption toward me, as had Ribello, whom I already regarded as an unendurable person. I credited the others for their consideration and sensitivity, but of course there might have been any number of reasons why they left me alone that morning. I remember that the doctor who was treating us both, and whom I take it you are still seeing, was fond of saying, as if in wise counsel, “However much you may believe otherwise, nothing in this world is unendurable—nothing.” If he hadn’t gotten me to believe that, I might have been more circumspect about him and wouldn’t be in the position I am today, exiled on this side of the border where fogs configure themselves with an astonishing regularity. These fogs are thick and gray; they crawl down my throat and all but cut off my breathing.

Throughout that morning I tried to process as many forms as possible, if only to keep my mind off the whole state of affairs that made up my existence, added to which was having to go to lunch with Ribello. I had brought along something to eat, something that would keep in my briefcase without going rotten too soon. And for some hours the need to consume these few items I had stored in my briefcase was acutely affecting me, yet Ribello gave no sign that he was ready to take me to this eating place he had in mind. I didn’t know exactly what time it was, since there wasn’t a clock in the office and none of the others seemed to have taken a break for lunch, or anything else for that matter.

But I was beginning to feel light-headed and anxious. Even more than food, I needed the medication that I left behind in my one-room apartment.

Outside the front window I couldn’t see what was going on in the street due to an especially dense fog that formed sometime around mid morning and hung about the town for the rest of the day. I had almost finished processing all the forms that were on my desk, which was far more work than I initially calculated I would be able to accomplish in a single day. When there were only a few forms left, the elderly woman who sat in the corner shuffled over to me with a new stack that was twice the size of the first, letting them fall on my desk with a thump. I watched her limp back to her place in the corner, her breath now audibly labored from the effort of carrying such a weighty pile of forms. While I was turned in my seat, I saw Ribello smiling and nodding at me as he pointed at his wristwatch. Then he pulled out a coat from underneath his desk. It seemed that it was finally time for us to go to lunch, although none of the others budged or blinked as we walked past them and left the office through a back door that Ribello pointed me toward.

Outside was a narrow alley which ran behind the storefront office and adjacent structures. As soon as we were out of the building I asked Ribello the time, but his only reply was, “We’ll have to hurry if we want to get there before closing.” Eventually I found that it was almost the end of the working day, or what I would have considered to be such. “The hours are irregular,” Ribello informed me as we rushed down the alley where the back walls of various structures stood on one side and high wooden fences on the other, the fog hugging close to both of them.

“What do you mean, irregular?” I said.

“Did I say irregular? I meant to say indefinite,” he replied. “There’s always a great deal of work to be done. I’m sure the others were as glad to see you arrive this morning as I was, even if they didn’t show it. We’re perpetually shorthanded. All right, here we are,” said Ribello as he guided me toward an alley door with a light dimly glowing above it.

It was a small place, not much larger than my apartment, with only a few tables. There were no customers other than ourselves, and most of the lights had been turned off. “You’re still open, aren’t you?” said Ribello to a man in a dirty apron who looked as if he hadn’t shaved for several days.

“Soon we close,” the man said. “You sit there.”

We sat where we were told to sit, and soon afterward a woman brought two cups of coffee, slamming them in front of us on the table. I looked at Ribello and saw him pulling a sandwich wrapped in wax paper out of his coat pocket. “Didn’t you bring your lunch?” he said. I told him that I thought we were going to a place that served food. “No, it’s just a coffeehouse,” Ribello said as he bit into his sandwich. “But that’s all right. The coffee here is very strong. After drinking a cup you won’t have any appetite at all. And you’ll be ready to face all those forms that Erma hauled over to your desk. I thought she was going to drop dead for sure.”

“I don’t drink coffee,” I said. “It makes me—” I didn’t want to say that coffee made me terribly nervous, you understand. So I just said that it didn’t agree with me.

Ribello set down his sandwich for a moment and stared at me. “Oh dear,” he said, running a hand over his balding head.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hatcher didn’t drink coffee.”

“Who is Hatcher?”

Taking up his sandwich once again, Ribello continued eating while he spoke. “Hatcher was the employee you were hired to replace. That’s the anecdote I wanted to relate to you in private. About him. Now it seems I might be doing more harm than good. I really did want to help you get your bearings.”

“Nevertheless,” I said as I watched Ribello finish off his sandwich.

Ribello wiped his hands together to shake free the crumbs clinging to them. He adjusted the undersized eyeglasses which seemed as if they might slip off his face at any moment. Then he took out a pack of cigarettes. Although he didn’t offer me any of his sandwich, he did offer me a cigarette.

“I don’t smoke,” I told him.

“You should, especially if you don’t drink coffee. Hatcher smoked, but his brand of cigarettes was very mild. I don’t suppose it really matters, your not being a smoker, since they don’t allow us to smoke in the office anymore. We received a memo from headquarters. They said that the smoke got into the forms. I don’t know why that should make any difference.”

“What about the pickle smell?” I said.

“For some reason they don’t mind that.”

“Why don’t you just go out into the alley to smoke?”

“Too much work to do. Every minute counts. We’re shorthanded as it is. We’ve always been shorthanded, but the work still has to get done. They never explained to you about the working hours?”

I was hesitant to reveal that I had gotten my position not by applying to the company, but through the influence of my doctor, who is the only doctor in this two-street town. He wrote down the address of the storefront office for me on his prescription pad, as if the job with Q. Org were another type of medication he was using to treat me. I was suspicious, especially after what happened with the doctor who treated us both for so long. His therapy, as you know from my previous correspondence, was to put me on a train that traveled clear across the country and over the border. This was supposed to help me overcome my dread of straying too far from my own home, and perhaps effect a breakthrough with all the other fears accompanying my nervous condition. I told him that I couldn’t possibly endure such a venture, but he only repeated his ridiculous maxim that nothing in the world is unendurable. To make things worse, he wouldn’t allow me to bring along any medication, although of course I did. But this didn’t help me in the least, not when I was traveling through the mountains with only bottomless gorges on either side of the train tracks and an infinite sky above. In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride. I know that your condition differs from mine, and therefore you have no means by which to fully comprehend my ordeals, just as I cannot fully comprehend yours. But I do acknowledge that both our conditions are unendurable, despite the doctor’s secondhand platitude that nothing in this world is unendurable. I’ve even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It’s only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being a predominantly response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsessions that you fear you might act upon. When the train that the doctor put me on finally made its first stop outside of this two-street town across the border, I swore that I would kill myself rather than make the return trip. Fortunately, or so it seemed at the time, I soon found a doctor who treated my state of severe disorientation and acute panic. He also assisted me in attaining a visa and working papers. Thus, after considering the matter, I ultimately told Ribello that my reference for the position in the storefront office had in fact come from my doctor.

“That explains it, then,” he said.

“Explains what?”

“All doctors work for the Quine Organization. Sooner or later he would have brought you in. That’s how Hatcher was brought in. But he couldn’t persevere. He couldn’t take the fact that we were shorthanded and that we would always be shorthanded. And when he found out about the indefinite hours… well, he exploded right in the office.”

“He had a breakdown?” I said.

“I suppose you could call it that. One day he just jumped up from his desk and started ranting about how we were always shorthanded… and the indefinite hours. Then he became violent, turning over several of the empty desks in the office and shouting, ‘We won’t be needing these.’ He also pulled out some file drawers, throwing their contents all over the place. Finally he started tearing up the forms, ones that hadn’t yet been processed. That’s when Pilsen intervened.”

“Which one is he?”

“The large man with the mustache who sits at the back of the office. Pilsen grabbed Hatcher and tossed him into the street. That was it for Hatcher. Within a few days he was officially dismissed from the company. I processed the form myself. There was no going back for him. He was completely ruined,” said Ribello as he took a sip of coffee and then lit another cigarette.

“I don’t understand. How was he ruined?” I said.

“It didn’t happen all at once,” explained Ribello. “These things never do. I told you that Hatcher was a cigarette smoker. Very mild cigarettes that he special ordered. Well, one day he went to the store where he purchased his cigarettes and was told that the particular brand he used, which was the only brand he could tolerate, was no longer available.”

“Not exactly the end of the world,” I said.

“No, not in itself,” said Ribello. “But that was just the beginning. The same thing that happened with his cigarettes was repeated when he tried to acquire certain foods he needed for his special diet. Those were also no longer available. Worst of all, none of his medications were in stock anywhere in town, or so he was told. Hatcher required a whole shelf of pharmaceuticals to keep him going, far more than anyone else I’ve ever known. Most important to him were the medications he took to control his phobias. He especially suffered from a severe case of arachnophobia. I remember one day in the office when he noticed a spider making its way across the ceiling. He was always on the lookout for even the tiniest of spiders. He practically became hysterical, insisting that one of us exterminate the spider or he would stop processing forms. He had us crawling around on top of the filing cabinets trying to get at the little creature. After Pilsen finally caught the thing and killed it, Hatcher demanded to see its dead body and to have it thrown out into the street. We even had to call in exterminators, at the company’s expense, before Hatcher would return to work. But after he was dismissed from the company, Hatcher was unable to procure any of his old medications that allowed him to keep his phobias relatively in check. Of course the doctor was no help to him, since all doctors are also employees of Q. Org.”

“What about doctors on the other side of the border,” I said. “Do they also work for the company?”

“I’m not sure,” said Ribello. “It could be. In any case, I saw Hatcher while I was on my way to the office one day. I asked him how he was getting along, even though he obviously was a complete wreck, almost totally ruined. He did say that he was receiving some kind of treatment for his phobias from an old woman who lived at the edge of town. He didn’t specify the nature of this treatment, and since I was in a hurry to get to the office I didn’t inquire about it. Later I heard that the old woman, who was known to make concoctions out of various herbs and plants, was treating Hatcher’s arachnophobia with a medicine which she distilled from spider venom.”

“A homeopathic remedy of sorts,” I said.

“Perhaps,” said Ribello in a distant tone of voice.

At this point the unshaven man came over to the table and told us that he was closing for the day. Since Ribello had invited me to lunch, such as it was, I assumed that he would pay for the coffee, especially since I hadn’t taken a sip of mine. But I noted that he put down on the table only enough money for himself, and so I was forced to do the same. Then, just before we turned to leave, he reached for my untouched cup and quickly gulped down its contents. “No sense in it going to waste,” he said.

Walking back to the office through the narrow, fog-strewn alley, I prompted Ribello for whatever else he could tell me about the man whose position in the storefront office I was hired to fill. His response, however, was less than enlightening and seemed to wander into realms of hearsay and rumor. Ribello himself never again saw Hatcher after their meeting in the street. In fact, it was around this time that Hatcher seemed to disappear entirely—the culmination, in Ribello’s view, of the man’s ruin. Afterward a number of stories circulated around town that seemed relevant to Hatcher’s case, however bizarre they may have been. No doubt others aside from Ribello were aware of the treatments Hatcher had been taking from the old woman living on the edge of town. This seemed to provide the basis for the strange anecdotes which were being spread about, most of them originating among children and given little credence by the average citizen. Most prevalent among these anecdotes were sightings of a “spider thing” about the size of a cat. This fabulous creature was purportedly seen by numerous children as they played in the streets and back alleys of the town. They called it the “nobby monster,” the source of this childish phrase being that, added to the creature’s resemblance to a monstrous spider, it also displayed a knob-like protrusion from its body that looked very much like a human head. This aspect of the story was confirmed by a few older persons whose testimony was invariably dismissed as the product of the medications that had been prescribed for them, even though practically everyone in town could be discredited for the same reason, since they are all—that is, we are all—taking one kind of drug or another in order to keep functioning in a normal manner. There came a time, however, when sightings of the so-called nobby monster ceased altogether, both among children and older, heavily medicated persons. Nor was Hatcher ever again seen around town.

“He just abandoned his apartment, taking nothing with him,” said Ribello just as we reached the alley door of the office. “I believe he lived somewhere near you, perhaps even in the same building. I hear that the woman who ran the apartment house wasn’t put out at all by Hatcher’s disappearance, since he was always demanding that she accommodate his phobias by bringing in exterminators at least once a week.”

I held open the door for Ribello but he didn’t take a step toward the building. “Oh no,” he said. “My work’s done for the day. I’m going home to get some sleep. We have to rest sometime if we’re to process the company’s forms at an efficient pace. But I’ll be seeing you soon.”

After a few moments Ribello could no longer be seen at all through the fog. I went back inside the office, my mind fixed on only one thing: the items of food stashed within my briefcase. But I wasn’t two steps inside when I was cornered by Pilsen near the lavatories. “What did Ribello say to you?” he said. “It was about the Hatcher business, wasn’t it?”

“We just went out for a cup of coffee,” I said, for some reason concerned to keep Ribello’s confidence.

“But you didn’t bring your lunch. You’ve been working all day, and you haven’t had anything to eat. It’s practically dark now, your first day on the job. And Ribello doesn’t make sure you take your lunch.”

“How do you know we didn’t go somewhere to eat?”

“Ribello only goes to that one place,” Pilsen said. “And it doesn’t serve food.”

“Well, I admit it. We went to the place that doesn’t serve food, and now I’m famished. So if I could just return to my desk…”

But Pilsen, a large man with a large mustache, grabbed the collar of my coat and pulled me back toward the lavatories.

“What did Ribello say about the Hatcher business?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because he’s a congenital liar. It’s a sickness with him—one of many. You see how he dresses, how he looks. He’s a lunatic, even if he is a very good worker. But whatever he told you about Hatcher is completely false.”

“Some of it did sound far-fetched,” I said, now caught between the confidences of Ribello, who may have been no more than a congenital liar, and Pilsen, who was a large man and probably someone I didn’t want to offend.

“Far-fetched is right,” said Pilsen. “The fact is that Hatcher was promoted to work in one of the company’s regional centers. He may even have moved on to company headquarters by now. He was very ambitious.”

“Then there’s nothing to say. I appreciate your straightening me out concerning this Hatcher business. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to my desk. I’m really very hungry.”

Pilsen didn’t say another word, but he watched me as I walked to my desk. And I felt that he continued to watch me from his place at the back of the office. As I ate the few items of food I kept in my briefcase, I also made it quite conspicuous that I was processing forms at the same time, not lagging behind in my work. Nevertheless, I wasn’t sure that this ferocious display of form processing was even necessary, as Ribello had implied was the case, due to the monumental quantity of work we needed to accomplish with a perpetually shorthanded staff. I wondered if Pilsen wasn’t right about Ribello. Specifically, I wondered if Ribello’s assertion that our working schedule was “indefinite” had any truth to it. Yet several more hours passed and still no one, except Ribello, had gone home since I arrived at the office early that morning. Finally I heard one of the three persons sitting behind me stand up from his, or possibly her, desk. Moments later, Pilsen walked passed me wearing his coat. He was also carrying his large briefcase, so I surmised that he was leaving for the day, which was now evening, when he exited the office through the front door. After waiting a short while, I did the same.

I had walked only a block or so from the storefront office when I saw Ribello heading toward me. He was now wearing a different set of mismatched clothes. “You’re leaving already?” he said when he stopped in front of me on the sidewalk.

“I thought you were going home to get some sleep,” I said.

“I did go home, and I did get some sleep. Now I’m going back to work.”

“I talked to Pilsen, or rather he talked to me.”

“I see,” said Ribello. “I see very well. And I suppose he asked what I might have said about Hatcher.”

“In fact he did,” I said.

“He told you that everything I said was just nonsense, that I was some kind of confirmed malcontent who made up stories that showed the company in a bad light.”

“Something along those lines,” I said.

“That’s just what he would say.”

“Why is that?”

“Because he’s a company spy. He doesn’t want you hearing what’s what on your first day. Most of all he doesn’t want you to hear about Hatcher. He was the one who informed on Hatcher and started the whole thing. He was the one who ruined Hatcher. That old woman I told you about who lives on the edge of town. She works for the company’s chemical division, and Pilsen keeps an eye on her too. I heard from someone who works at one of the regional centers that the old woman was assigned to one of the company’s biggest projects—a line of drugs that would treat very specific disorders, such as Hatcher’s arachnophobia. It would have made Q. Org twice the company it is today, and on both sides of the border. But there was a problem.”

“I don’t think I want to hear anymore.”

“You should hear this. The old woman was almost taken off the company payroll because she was using more than just her esoteric knowledge of herbs and plants. The chemical engineers at company headquarters gave her detailed instructions to come up with variations on their basic formula. But she was moving in another direction entirely and following completely unsanctioned practices, primarily those of an occult nature.”

“You said she was almost taken off the company payroll.”

“That’s right. They blamed her for Hatcher’s disappearance. Hatcher was very important to them as an experimental subject. Everything was set up to make him a guinea pig—denying him his usual brand of cigarettes, taking him off his special diet and his medications. They went through a great deal of trouble. Hatcher was being cleansed for what the old woman, along with the company’s chemical engineers, intended to put into him. The spider venom made some kind of sense. But, as I said, the old woman was also following practices that weren’t sanctioned by the company. And they needed someone to blame for Hatcher’s disappearance. That’s why she was almost taken off the payroll.”

“So Hatcher was an experiment,” I said.

“That’s what happens when you explode the way he did, ranting about the unending workload we were expected to handle and how the company always left us shorthanded. The question remains, however. Was the Hatcher experiment a success or a failure?”

Ribello then looked at his wristwatch and said that we would talk further about Hatcher, the Quine Organization, and a host of other matters he wanted to share with me. “I was so glad to see you walk into the office this morning. We have so many forms to process. So I’ll be seeing you in, what, a few hours or so?” Without waiting for my response, Ribello rushed down the sidewalk toward the storefront office.

When I reached the door to my one-room apartment, everything within me was screaming out for sleep and medication. But I paused when I heard footsteps moving toward me from the end of the dim hallway. It was the woman who operated the apartment house, and she was carrying in her arms what looked like a bundle of dirty linen.

“Cobwebs,” she said without my asking her. She turned and pointed her head back toward a set of stairs down the hallway, the kind of pull-down steps that lead up to an attic. “We do keep our houses clean here, no matter what some people from across the border may think. It’s quite a job, but at least I’ve made a start.”

I couldn’t help but stare in silence at the incredible wadding of cobwebs the woman bore in her arms as she began to make her way downstairs. Some vague thoughts occurred to me, and I called to the woman. “If you’re finished for the time being I can put up those stairs to the attic.”

“That’s good of you, thanks,” she shouted up the stairwell. “I’ll bring in the exterminator soon, just as you asked. I don’t know exactly what’s up there but I’m sure it’s more than I can deal with myself.”

I understood what she meant only after I ascended into the attic and saw for myself what she had seen. At the top of the stairs there was only a single lightbulb which didn’t begin to illuminate those vast and shadowed spaces. What I did see were the dead bodies, or parts of bodies, of more than a few rats. Some of these creatures looked as if they had escaped from just the sort of thick, heaping cobwebs which I had seen the woman who ran the apartment house carrying in her arms. It clung to the bodies of the rodents just as the dense, gray fog clung to everything in this town. Furthermore, all of these bodies seemed to be in a state of deformity… or perhaps transition. When I looked closely at them I could see that, in addition to the four legs normally allowed them by nature, there were also four other legs that had begun sprouting from their undersides. Whatever had killed these vermin had also begun to change them.

But not all of the affected rodents had died or been partially eaten. Later investigations I made into the attic, once I had persuaded the woman who ran the apartment house to defer calling in the exterminator, revealed rats and other vermin with physical changes even more advanced. These changes explained the indefinable noises I had heard since moving into my one-room apartment just beneath the roof of the building, with the attic between.

Some of the things I saw had eight legs of equal length and were able to negotiate the walls of the attic and crawl across the slanted ceiling just under the roof. Others had even begun making webs of their own. I think you would have recognized much of this, my friend, as something out of your own gruesome obsessions. Fortunately my own fears did not include arachnophobia, as was the case with Hatcher. (Nonetheless, I did ingest heavy doses of my medication before proceeding into the attic.) When I finally located him in the most remote corner of the attic I saw the knob-like head of a human being protruding from the pale, puffy body of a giant spider, or spider-thing. He was in the act of injecting his own venom into another verminous citizen of the attic. As soon as his pinpoint eyes noticed mine he released the creature, which squeaked away to begin its own transformation.

I couldn’t imagine that Hatcher desired to continue his existence in that state. As I approached him he made no move of either aggression or flight. And when I took out the carving knife I had brought with me it seemed that he lifted his head and showed me his tiny throat. He had made his decision, just as I had made mine: I never returned to the storefront office to process forms for the Quine Organization, in whose employ are all the doctors on this side of the border… and perhaps also on your side. It is now my conviction that our own doctor has long been working for this company. At the very least I blame him for my exile to this remote, two-street town of fog and nightmares. At worst, I think it was his intention to deliver me across the border to become another slave or experimental subject for the company he serves. I prepared two vials of the venom I extracted from Hatcher’s body. The first I’ve already used on the doctor who has been treating me on this side of the border, even if the culmination of that treatment was to be imprisoned in a storefront office processing folders for an indefinite number of hours lasting the remainder of my indefinite existence. I’m still watching him suffer his painful mutations while I help myself to all the medications I please from the cabinets in his office. Before morning comes I’ll put him out of his misery, and his medications will put me out of mine.

The second vial I offer to you, my friend. For so long you have suffered from such gruesome obsessions which our doctor did not, or would not, alleviate. Do with this medicine what you must. Do with it what your obsessions dictate. You might even consider, at just the right moment, giving the doctor my greetings… and reminding him that nothing in this world is unendurable—nothing.