The Mystics of Muelenburg by Thomas Ligotti

The Mystics of Muelenburg - a short tale of horror by master of the craft Thomas Ligotti.

"If things are not what they seem - and we are forever reminded that this is the case - then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing."

So relates the unnamed narrator before paying a visit once again to an abandoned warehouse, the abode of one Klaus Klingman. Klingman has been serving as something of a mentor and this time Klingman relates a mysterious, diabolical happening that occurred in the medieval village of Muelenburg.

Prior to delving into this actual point in history of which he speaks, Klingman bellows, "The worst fear of the race - yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible dissolution of things. Nothing compares, even oblivion is a sweet dream."

This Ligotti tale is chock-full of philosophic themes, among their number what distinguished historian Teofilo F. Ruiz terms 'The Terror of History', that is, the meaningless brutality and utter cruelty inherent in our everyday existence, things such as famine, plague, war and the suffering brought on by our many human frailties.

How to cope with this onslaught of chaos? One human answer: organize society within a set pattern, what we term 'civilization'. But however we term it, no matter how highfalutin soundings, it's all a mental construct and nothing other than a mental construct.

This undeniable fact was driven home in the Middle Ages, a time when European society organized itself into three classes: those who wielded weapons (knights), those who prayed (monks) and those who worked (peasants). All fine and dandy when life hums along in relative stability but when Europe was hit by the great famine and then the Black Death - chaos.

In this Ligotti tale, famine and plague are nothing more than bit players compared to what happened in Muelenburg – known reality disappeared, a time when every man and every woman experienced  what amounted to a cross between bad acid trip and complete cosmic blackout. “Submerged in unvarying grayness, distracted and confused by phantasmal intrusions above them, the people in the town felt their world dissolving.”

Klingman continues with his telling and then concludes by informing the narrator, “And so terrible had been their recent ordeal that of its beginning, its progress, and its termination, they could remember...nothing.”

The narrator is outraged. No memory...how can this be?

Let's pause here and reflect on the dynamics of memory. Are the Muelenburg townsfolk victims (or beneficiaries) of something comparable to what in the world of psychoanalysis and hypnosis is referred to as negative hallucination – not seeing or remembering what is or was physically present?

Or, is what happened a consequence of the mysterious structure of our cosmos, where roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy, 27% dark matter and less than 5% is all we can see and measure around us with our senses (and instruments such as microscopes and telescopes)?

Klingman's final words of the evening, “Fluidity, always fluidity.” Thereafter the narrator reflects on Klingsman's overarching pronouncement: "For no one else recalls the hysteria that prevailed when the stars and the moon dimmed into blackness. Nor can they summon the least memory of when the artificial illumination of this earth turned weak and lurid, and all the shapes we once knew contorted into nightmares and nonsense. And finally how the blackness grew viscous, enveloping what light remained and drawing us into itself. How many such horrors await in that blackness to be restored to the legions of the dead."