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Elizabeth smiled. Her Precious One knew. Her Precious One understood. She was a good mother.

“Be brave,” she whispered as she lifted her hand. “This will hurt me more than it will you.”

When it didn’t, Elizabeth consoled herself with the knowledge that there would be other occasions to prove she was a good mother.

Many occasions in the years to come.

Thomas Ligotti

THE SHADOW, THE DARKNESS

I’m convinced that without E-mail this book would have been vastly different—and taken twice as long to produce. The plain fact is, writers will respond to E-mail but not to telephone calls or written letters or, especially, home visits (there’s a story behind that one). There’s something at once impersonal and personal about E-mail; it’s safe and at the same time intimate, providing instant access with a leisurely response (say, hours or at most a day) that seems, by snail-mail standards, lightning fast. I would compare it to the long-dead practice of multiple daily mail deliveries—remember how Sherlock Holmes was always getting and sending letters, all day long? Computers in general might be a pain in the arse, and the Internet might indeed prove to be evil, but without E-mail and the delete key on my word processor, I honestly don’t know how Yd get anything done anymore.

Which brings me, in a fashion, to Thomas Ligotti, whom I was able to bother and remind and just plain keep in touch with because of E-mail. He was a pleasure to work with, won the Bram Stoker Award in 1997 for his story “The Red Tower,” and is the author of the short story collection The Nightmare Factory, which was itself nominated for a Stoker.

Possibly because of E-mail, he has provided us with one of the stories in this book you wont be able to get out of your head.

It seemed that Grossvogel was charging us entirely too much money for what he was offering. Some of us, we were about a dozen in all, blamed ourselves and our own idiocy as soon as we arrived in that place which one neatly dressed old gentleman immediately dubbed the “nucleus of nowhere.” This same gentleman, who a few days before had announced to several persons his abandonment of poetry writing due to the lack of what he considered proper appreciation of his innovative practice of the “Hermetic lyric,” went on to say that such a place as the one in which we found ourselves was exactly what we should have expected, and probably what we idiots and failures deserved. We had no reason to expect anything more, he explained, than to end up in the dead town of Crampton, in a nowhere region of the country—of the world, in fact—during a dull season of the year that was pinched between such a lavish and brilliant autumn and what promised to be an equally lavish and brilliant wintertime. We were trapped, he said, completely stranded for all practical purposes, in a region of the country, and of the entire world, where all the manifestations of that bleak time of year, or rather its absence of manifestations, were so evident in the landscape around us, where everything was absolutely stripped to the bone, and where the pathetic emptiness of forms in their unadorned state was so brutally evident. When I pointed out that Grossvogel’s brochure for this excursion, which he deemed a “physical-metaphysical excursion,” did not strictly misrepresent our destination, I received only evil looks from several of the others at the table where we sat, as well as from the nearby tables of the small, almost miniature diner in which the whole group of us were now packed, filling it to capacity with the presence of exotic out-of-towners who, when they stopped bickering for a few moments, simply stared with a killing silence out the windows at the empty streets and broken-down buildings of the dead town of Crampton. The town was further maligned as a “drab abyss,” the speaker of this phrase being a skeletal individual who always introduced himself as a “defrocked academic.” This self-designation would usually provoke a query as to its meaning,