The Clown Puppet by Thomas Ligotti

 


The Clown Puppet, story as compressed vintage Thomas Ligotti, that is, the entire piece takes place one late evening in a medicine shop with only three characters: the narrator, the shop's owner-Mr. Vizniak, and (insertion of the uncanny) a marionette.

“It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.” So the narrator begins and expounds, using terms like “nonsensicality” and “impeccable chaoticism,” concluding with an especial description: Scribbles of a mentally deranged epileptic. However, IF he allows an exception to this condition of outrageous nonsense, it would be certain visits (the nature of which, more below).

He then lets us know Mr. Vizniak allows him to stand behind the counter and, after a certain hour, keep the store located on a backstreet open or closed as he wishes. After all, Mr. Vizniak knows, the narrator says, this will enable him (the narrator) to become distracted from all the “outrageous nonsense” As to exactly HOW the shop's owner knows this, he remarks: “Later events more or less proved that Mr. Vizniak indeed possessed a special knowledge and that there existed, in fact, a peculiar sympathy between the old man and myself.”

He looks out the small front window – BEEF, PORK, GOAT glowing in neon from outside the meat shop across the street. We're talking serious irony here since the primal drive keeping ALL of life going, or, in the narrator's terms, all the “outrageous nonsense” going: eating other forms of life.

When he retreats to the back room to take a break from the meat nonsense brought on by his excessive contemplation of the beef-pork-goat store, his obsession shifts to death nonsense, “one of the worst and most outrageous forms of nonsense.”

It happens when he returns to stand behind the counter: yet again another of those visits, the “nadir of the nonsensical,” a medicine shop visit. As per usual, first the surrounding light changes to a reddish-gold and then a puppet creature appears. Having conducted research into puppets and marionettes, he can provide much detail regarding the specifics of the puppet creature, “an antiquated marionette hovering before me in a reddish-gold haze.”

Also, as per usual, he looks up to see where the wires attached to the puppet thing lead but, alas, he can only trace them so far until they are "lost in a thick blur, a ceiling of distorted light and shadow ...a vague sluggish movement, like a layer of dense clouds seen from far away through a gloomy reddish-gold twilight." Keeping to logic and reason, he surmises: "This phenomenon of the wires disappearing into a blur supported my observation over the years that the puppet thing did not have a life of its own."

Again, as per usual, as if playing his part in some previously written script, after the puppet thing hands him a crumpled slip of paper with scribbles written on it, a page torn from an old prescription pad, he asks the puppet thing to perform an extraordinary act. As it conjured on command a diamond yo-yo in the past so now it produces the personal identification he requested - an old foreign passport belonging to Mr. Vizniak!

He's stunned. "Nothing like this had ever occurred during one of these puppet visits: no one else had ever been involved in any of the encounters." He's just about to hit his emotional breaking point when another bit of newness transpires: the puppet creature turns to look and then moves toward the curtained doorway leading to back room - and disappears entirely behind the curtain! Never before has it left his presence. Just then he hears Mr. Vizniak calling from the street outside, "Open the door. Something has happened."

From this point forward, The Clown Puppet takes a number of creepy, bizarre twists. But one thing is clear: our narrator now knows he's not alone, perhaps many other humans in addition to himself, including you the reader, will one day be given the answer to who controls the strings of the clown puppet and, by extension, who controls the strings of you.


Author Thomas Ligotti, born 1953