There's good reason why author Thomas Ligotti places The Night School under the heading The Voice of the Dreamer.
In addition to this short-story counting as a deftly crafted work of
literature, it has all the makings of a nightmarish dream. Indeed, I
almost had the feeling I was reading an extended entry in the narrator's
dream journal.
Our narrator returns home late at night from a
movie theater and decides to take a short cut across the grounds of a
school which prompts him to reflect on his desire to know something real
about his existence, something truly helpful before it is his time to
die. This quest has led him to take classes with an Instructor
Carniero.
Although he hasn't been taking classes that long, he
senses Carniero to be someone in a position to reveal "what was at the
bottom on things." He hurries along in the cold when he looks down and
sees the one remaining button on his overcoat has become loose and might
not last much longer. This being the case, he judges his taking a short
cut was a wise move.
He enters the school grounds, the school building hidden by many trees when he thinks he hears someone say, "Look up here
(author's italics). He does look and goes on to describe the night sky,
clouds and moon in terms of "a slowly flowing mass of mottled shapes, a
kind of unclean outpouring from the black sewers of space." Now that's
quite the description. Such language indicates his disposition toward
nature and, by extension, life. In a word, our narrator isn't exactly a
happy-go-lucky kind of guy.
On closer inspection, the narrator
detects dense, dirty smoke rising up into the sky, which leads his eye
down to a thickly wooded area where there's a small fire amongst the
trees. Ah, he can see human figures standing behind a misshapen metal
drum that's stinking and spewing smoke. Somebody calls out, "Class has
resumed. He's come back after all."
Let's pause here to observe
that if this is a dream, it's a powerful one for a few reasons: 1) words
are spoken, always an important key in understanding a dream; 2)
pungent smells can trigger memory and associations; 3) the narrator
cites his feelings, another important key in working with dreams.
The
wind howls, the fire crackles and the narrator shouts above the
confusion of sounds, “Was there an assignment?” He repeats his question
but those around the fire barely take note. He moves off but it's
evident he feels both confused and ill prepared, two common feeling when
we're trapped in an unsettling dream.
The narrator recounts his
classes with Instructor Carniero. He's a slender gentleman of darkish
complexion who wears a dark suit and speaks with a foreign accent.
Someone tells him Carniero is Portuguese but he's lived almost
everywhere. He draws complex diagrams on the blackboard, “a strange
array of abstract symbols, frequently geometric figures altered in some
way: various polygons with asymmetrical sides, trapezoids whose sides
did not meet, semicircles with double or triple slashes across them, and
many other examples of a deformed or corrupted scientific notation.”
The narrator elaborates but one telling detail sticks out: his signs
appear to be “more relevant to magic than mathematics.”
Who is
this guy? And what is he teaching? Sounds like Carniero is into some
pretty heavy stuff, things like Gnosticism or Hermeticism or alchemy. Is
it any wonder Carniero points at his diagrams and repeatedly tells his
students, “Look up here. If you do not look, you will learn nothing –
you will be nothing.”
The tale gets progressively creepier when
the narrator finally enters the four-story structure that functions as
the school building. At one point, he's told by a student in class that
Carniero has indeed recovered from an illness and is back teaching but
in another room.
The narrator decides to hunt down Carniero. “For
a time I wandered about the hallways on the main floor of the school,
keeping clear of the walls which certainly were thickening with a dark
substance, an odorous sap with the intoxicating potency of a thousand
molting autumns or the melting soil of spring.”
Amid distant
cries and echoing voices, our protagonist eventually meets up with
someone in dirty work closes, a man with yellowish eyes in a thin face
with a coarse, patchy complexion. He's told to look for Carniero “up
there.” When he asks the exact location, he's merely told the top floor.
The
creepiness and weirdness is ratcheted up again and again with each
assent to the next floor, the stairwell “swollen with a blackness that
was the very face of the plague – pustulant, scabbed, and stinking
terribly.” The narrator finally reaches the top floor that's filled with
a blackish fog wherein he himself experiences a “blackness quivering in
his very bones, eating away at them.”
What happens next and
next is for each reader to discover. What's truly magical is the way
Thomas Ligotti's vivid images and language leave a reader free to
decide whether the narrator is talking about an actual happening or one
of his powerful nightmares. However, it strikes me there's a takeaway
message here: both in our dream life and waking life, we're well to keep
a clear head and strive to expand our awareness and lucidity.
American author Thomas Ligotti, born 1953
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