Noctuary by Thomas Ligotti Page B

peculiar. Suddenly these creatures, which had become as tedious to him as everything else, filled him with an astonishment he had not known in many years.
    That morning they were gathered at the center of the lake, barely visible within a milky haze which hovered above still waters. For as long as he observed them, they did not allow themselves the slightest motion- toward the grassy shores circling the lake. Each of them - there were four - faced a separate direction, as though some antagonism existed within their order. Then their sleek, ghostly forms revolved with a mechanical ease and came to huddle around an imaginary point of focus. For a moment their heads nodded slightly toward one another, bowing in wordless prayer; but soon they stretched their snaking necks in unison, elevated their orange and black bills toward the thick mist above, and gazed into its depths. There followed a series of haunting cries unlike anything ever heard on the vast grounds of that isolated estate.
    Arthur Emerson now wondered if something he could not see was disturbing the swans. As he stood at the tall windows which faced the lake, he made a mental note to have Graff go down there and find out what he could. Possibly some unwelcome animal was now living in the dense woods nearby. And as he further considered the matter, it appeared that the numerous wild ducks, those brownish goblins that were always either visible or audible somewhere in the vicinity of the lake, had already vacated the area. Or perhaps they were only obscured by the unusually heavy mist of that singular morning.
    Arthur Emerson spent the rest of the day in the library. At intervals he was visited by a very black cat, an aloof and somewhat phantasmal member of the small Emerson household. Eventually it fell asleep on a sunny window ledge, while its master wandered among the countless uncatalogued volumes he had accumulated over the past fifty years or so.
    During his childhood, the collection which filled the library's dark shelves was a common one, and much of it he had given away or destroyed in order to provide room for other works. He was the only scholar in a lengthy succession of businessmen of one kind or another, the last living member of the old family; at his death, the estate would probably pass into the hands of a distant relative whose name and face he did not know. But this was not of any great concern to Arthur Emerson: resignation to his own inconsequence, along with that of all things of the earth, was a philosophy he had nurtured for some time, and with considerable success.
    In his younger years he had travelled a great deal, these excursions often relating to his studies, which could be approximately described as ethnological bordering on the esoteric. Throughout various quarters of what now seemed to him a shrunken, almost claustrophobic world, he had attempted to satisfy an inborn craving to comprehend what then seemed to him an astonishing, even shocking existence. Arthur Emerson recalled that while still a child the world around him suggested strange expanses not subject to common view. This sense of the invisible often exerted itself in moments when he witnessed nothing more than a patch of pink sky above leafless trees in twilight or an abandoned room where dust settled on portraits and old furniture. To him, however, these appearances disguised realms of an entirely different nature. For within these imagined or divined spheres there existed a certain... confusion, a swirling, fluttering motion that was belied by the relative order of the seen.
    Only on rare occasions could he enter these unseen spaces, and always unexpectedly. A striking experience of this kind took place in his childhood years and involved a previous generation of swans which he had paused one summer afternoon to contemplate from a knoll by the lake. Perhaps their smooth drifting and gliding upon the water had induced in him something like a hypnotic state. The ultimate