Creepy,creepy.
Oh,
yes, a creepy tale about two men – a master and his disciple. Plomb is
the name of the disciple and I'll bestow the name of Laff on the unnamed
master who serves as the tale's narrator.
Here's the opening
lines: “Last year at this time, perhaps on this very day, Plomb visited
me at my home. He always seemed to know when I had returned from my
habitual traveling and always appeared uninvited on my doorstep.”
Ah,
yet again another visit from the irksome Plomb. Master Laff would like
nothing more than to have this annoying runt out of his life forever. To
this end, he comes up with a cunning stroke of genius: “The plan was
simple: to feed Plomb’s hunger for mysterious sensations to the point of
nausea and beyond. The only thing to survive would be a gulf of shame
and regret for a defunct passion.”
Since Laff's area of mastery
includes arcane knowledge revolving around the occult and hidden,
magical, psychic phenomenon, for Plomb, every one of Laff's words and
gestures contain a supercharged meaning.
So when Laff takes out a
white box no larger than a modest jewelry case and removes two
sparkling items from the drawer: a small silvery knife and a pair of
old-fashioned wire-rimmed spectacles, Plomb sits up, all attention.
Laff
places the wire-rimmed spectacles on Plomb's face., He asks Plomb to
hold out a hand and makes a tiny cut on the palm with the razor-sharp
knife. The master occultist instructs Plomb to keep watching the thin
red trickle and then tells Plomb, “Your eyes are now fused with those
fantastic lenses, and your sight is one with its object.” Laff goes to
to elaborate on what Plomb will see: fantastic visions, overwhelming
scenes, a dazzling diffusion of the known universe – all brilliant,
great, alive.
Laff concludes by telling Plomb, “You feel
yourself to be a witness to the most cryptic phenomenon that exist or
ever could exist. And yet, somehow concealed in the shadows of what you
can see is something that is not yet visible, something that is beating
like a thunderous pulse and promises still greater visions.”
However,
as it turns out, the narrator has much underestimated the power of
suggestion and how, when giving a suggestion to a subject with an
overactive and lively imagination, the suggestion can rebound back to
the person who did the suggesting in the first place.
Thomas
Ligotti structures his short tale in four parts. The first part consists
of Plomb's visit to Lass's run down residence and departure with his
new spectacles. The next three parts expand what it means to write a
work of psychic terror. Again, it becomes apparent to what extent
Laff has underestimated the profound impact he has had on pint-sized
Plomb, a man with unbounded imagination.
The consequences? One
aspect: Laff has a nightmare involving Plomb than turns into a series of
nightmares over many days, leading us to ask: Did Lass also
underestimate the very nature of the occult? Did he fail to judge just
how much power there is between master-disciple when one specializes in
arcane magic? Finally, is The Spectacles in the Drawer a tale of cosmic horror on top of the psychological?
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