Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She drew nearer to the entrance, and could make out the singer’s figure, in approximately the same place as before, pacing about before a ruined altar, in and out of crevices of shadow black as pitch. His fists were clenched, his shoulders hunched with tension. Yet—there was something wrong with him. He was not so young now, nor so handsome. When he whirled at the sound of her footstep, scowling in Magdalena’s direction while not seeming to see her, Magdalena realized to her horror that he’d grown skeletal; his face was wizened and sickly pale, as aged as her Aunt Erica’s; his neck was emaciated, the ropy tendons and artery prominent. His eyes were narrowed to slits like those of a frightened, ferocious animal. He doesn’t know me! Magdalena thought. He doesn’t see me.

  Yet, and this was a truth Magdalena would recall for the remainder of her life, and would entrust to no one except, one day, many decades later, her granddaughter who loved her, she would have cast aside all her pride and fear, and gone to the singer, to present herself to him in any way he would accept her, if there hadn’t suddenly stepped out of the shadows another figure—a queer stunted old-young woman, with a wizened monkeyish face, deft and solicitous, clearly compelled by adoration; this person came quickly to the singer as he leaned weakly against a broken pew, and wiped his oily-damp forehead with a cloth; and lifted a pitcher to his mouth, steadying his shaky hands so that he could drink. Ah, how thirsty he was! His emaciated chest rising and sinking with the effort of swallowing! And blind, empty, blank as an idiot’s fixed stare, his beautiful eyes turned in Magdalena’s direction.

  The haglike woman was stroking the singer’s thin hands, whispering words of praise and encouragement; he seemed to be listening, and his bloodless lips twitched in a sort of smile; at last he threw his head back proudly, his gray hair thin and straggly on his death’s-head of a skull, and began another time to sing. Now the day is over… At first his voice quavered, for it was no longer a young man’s voice; the ghastly tendons and artery in his throat grew taut; then by degrees his voice grew stronger, richer, as if drawing strength from the man’s physical being, sucking life from his very soul. Magdalena recalled his mysterious words uttered not in pride nor certainly in protest but in simple resignation: I must sing, I have no choice.

  So singing now, as always: Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh. Shadows of the evening… steal across the sky.

  So for the second and final time Magdalena knew herself banished from this place, and fled too stricken with grief even to weep. A rising sea-wind snatched at her like crude, jeering fingers.

  7.

  “Please let me in! It’s Magdalena!”

  Desperately she rang the doorbell but there seemed to be no sound inside—was the doorbell broken? The afternoon had rapidly darkened to night and the house on Charter Street was darkened upstairs and down; Magdalena had been frantic trying to locate it in this neighborhood that, by night, she didn’t recognize. She was exhausted from miles of walking, most of it uphill, on slippery wet cobblestones, beset by the wind. She pounded on the heavy oak door with her bare fists, frantic, sobbing like a terrified child. “Please! Let me in! It’s Magdalena!” When at last the outdoor light was switched on she could see a woman’s stern face at a vestibule window; it was Hannah staring at her without recognition. Magdalena’s thick long hair had come undone from its neat coils on both sides of her head and was snarled and windblown; she was to discover afterward to her amazement that most of its fair, wheat-brown color had drained from it, as color drains from the world at the hour of a solar eclipse; her young face was lined and haggard, her clothes were disheveled, with a look of being torn. “Hannah, Hannah, please! Have mercy!” Magdalena begged.

  At last, as if reluctantly, Hannah seemed to recognize Magdalena’s voice, if not her face; she relented, and swung open the heavy oak door. “Miss Schön! I wouldn’t have known you,” she said, staring at the girl with wonder and sympathy.

  The Genesis Mausoleum

  Colleen Douglas

  “Yes, I found the place,” said Arpad. “It’s a queer sort of place, pretty much as the legends describe it.” He spat quickly into the fire, as if speaking was distasteful to him, and, half-averting his face from the scrutiny of Tefere, he stared with morose and somber eyes into the jungle-matted Venezuelan darkness.

  Tefere, still weak and dizzy from the fever that had incapacitated him, was curiously puzzled. Arpad, he thought, had undergone an inexplicable change during the three days of his absence; a change that was too elusive to be fully defined.

  Others, however, were all too obvious. Arpad, even during extreme hardship or illness, had been irrepressibly cheerful. Now he seemed sullen, uncommunicative, and preoccupied. His face had grown hollow—even pointed—and his eyes had narrowed to secretive slits. Tefere was troubled by these changes; he tried to dismiss his impressions, putting them down to the influence of the ebbing fever.

  “But can’t you tell me what the place was like?” he persisted.

  “There isn’t much to tell” said Arpad, in a queer grumbling tone. “Just a few crumbling walls and falling pillars.”

  “But didn’t you find the burial-pit of the Incan legend, where the gold was supposed to be?”

  “I found it—but there was no treasure.” Arpad’s voice had taken on surliness and Tefere decided to refrain from further questioning.

  “I guess,” he commented lightly, “that we had better stick to orchid hunting. Treasure doesn’t seem to be in our line. By the way, did you see any unusual flowers or plants during the trip?”

  “Hell, no,” Arpad snapped. His face had gone suddenly ashen in the firelight, and his eyes had assumed a set glare. “Shut up, can’t you? I don’t want to talk. I’ve had a headache all day; some damned Venezuelan fever coming on, I suppose. We’d better head for the Orinoco tomorrow. I’ve had all I want of this trip.”’

  Morgan Arpad and Marshal Tefere, professional orchid hunters, with two Amerindian guides, had been following an obscure tributary of the upper Orinoco. The country was rich in rare flowers, and beyond its floral wealth, they had been drawn by vague but persistent rumors among the local tribes concerning the existence of a ruined city somewhere on this tributary; a city that contained a burial pit in which vast treasures of gold, silver, and jewels had been interred together with the dead of some nameless people. The two men had thought it worthwhile to investigate these rumors. Tefere had fallen sick while they were still a full day’s journey from the site of the ruins, and Arpad had gone on in a canoe with one of the guides, leaving the other to attend to Tefere. He had returned at nightfall of the third day following his departure.

  Tefere decided after a while, as he lay staring at his companion, that the latter’s moroseness as likely due to disappointment over his failure to find the treasure. However, he had to admit, it was not like Arpad to be disappointed or downcast under such circumstances. After all, he had only recently suffered the loss of his wife Christine, and still pressed on with this assignment. Arpad did not speak again, but sat glaring before him as if he saw something invisible to others. Somehow, there was a shadowy fear in his aspect. Tefere continued to watch him, and saw that the guides, impassive and cryptic, were also watching him, as if with some obscure expectancy. The riddle was too much for Tefere, and he gave it up after a while, lapsing into a restless, fever-turbulent slumber from which he awakened at intervals to see the set face of Arpad, dimmer and more distorted each time with the slowly dying fire and the invading shadows.

  Tefere felt stronger in the morning: his mind was clear, his pulse tranquil once more; and he saw with mounting concern the indisposition of Arpad, who seemed to rouse and exert himself with great difficulty, speaking hardly a word and moving with sluggishness. He appeared to have forgotten his announced project of returning toward the Orinoco, and Tefere took entire charge of the preparations for departure. His companion’s condition puzzled him more and more—apparently there was no fever and the symptoms were wholly ambiguous. However, on general p
rinciples, he administered a stiff dose of quinine to Arpad before they started.

  The paling saffron of dawn sifted upon them through the jungle tops as they loaded their belongings into the dugouts and pushed off down the slow current. Tefere sat near the bow of one of the boats, with Arpad in the rear, and a large bundle of orchid roots and part of their equipment filling the middle. The two guides occupied the other boat, together with the rest of the supplies.

  It was an uneventful journey. The river wound like a sluggish olive snake between dark, interminable walls of forest from which the goblin faces of orchids leered. There were no sounds other than the splash of paddles, the furious chattering of monkeys and petulant cries of fiery colored macaws. The sun rose above the jungle and poured down a tide of brilliance.

  Tefere rowed steadily, looking back over his shoulder at times to address Arpad with some casual remark or friendly question. The latter, with dazed eyes and features queerly pale and pinched in the sunlight, sat dully erect and made no effort to use his paddle. He offered no reply to the queries of Tefere, but shook his head at intervals with a sort of shuddering motion. After a while he began to moan thickly, as if in pain or delirium.

  They went on in this manner for an hour. The heat grew more oppressive between the stifling walls of jungle. Tefere became aware of a shriller tone in the moans of his companion. Looking back, he saw that Arpad had removed his sun-helmet, seemingly oblivious of the heat, and was clawing at the crown of his head with frantic fingers. Convulsions shook his entire body; the dugout began to rock dangerously as he tossed to and fro in agony. His voice mounted to a high pitched shrieking.

  Tefere made a quick decision. There was a break in the lining of forest and he headed the boat for shore immediately. The guides followed, whispering between themselves and eyeing the sick man with glances of apprehensive awe and terror that puzzled Tefere. He felt that there was some dark and unsettling mystery about the whole affair, and he could not imagine what was wrong with Arpad. He went through in his mind all the known manifestations of malignant tropical diseases but among them, he could not recognize the thing that assailed his companion.

  Having gotten Arpad ashore on a narrow beach without the aid of the guides, who seemed unwilling to approach the sick man, Tefere administered a heavy hypodermic injection of morphine from his medicine chest. This appeared to ease Arpad’s suffering and the convulsions ceased. Tefere, taking advantage of their remission, proceeded to examine the crown of Arpad’s head.

  He was startled to find, amid the thick disheveled hair, a hard and pointed lump that resembled the tip of a horn, rising under the still-unbroken skin. Worse, as he probed the area, it seemed to grow beneath his fingers.

  At the same time, abruptly and mysteriously, Arpad opened his eyes and appeared to regain full consciousness; for a few minutes he was more his normal self than at any time since his return from the ruins. He began to talk, as if anxious to relieve his mind of some oppressing burden. His voice was peculiarly thick and toneless, but Tefere was able to follow his mutterings and piece them together.

  “The pit! The pit!” said Arpad. “The infernal thing that was in the pit, in the deep crypt…! I wouldn’t go back there for the treasure of a dozen El Dorados… I didn’t tell you much about those ruins, Tefere. Somehow it was hard—impossibly hard—to talk.

  “I guess the guide knew there was something wrong with the ruins. He led me to the place… but he wouldn’t tell me anything about it; and he waited by the riverside while I searched for the treasure.

  “Great grey walls there were, old; they loomed and leaned at mad, unnatural angles, threatening to crush the trees about them. And there were columns, too: thick, swollen columns the likes of which I had never seen, on which, abominable carvings the jungle had not wholly screened from view.

  “There was no trouble finding that accursed burial pit. The pavement above had been broken through quite recently, I think. A big tree had pried it with its roots; one of the flags had been tilted back on the pavement and another had fallen through into the pit. There was a large hole whose bottom I could see dimly in the light. Something glimmered at the bottom; but I could not be sure what it was.

  “I had taken along a coil of rope, as you remember. I tied one end of it to a main root of the tree, dropped the other through the opening and went down like a monkey. When I got to the bottom I could see little at first in the gloom, except the whitish glimmering all around me, at my feet. Something that was brittle crunched beneath my feet when I began to move. I turned on my flashlight and saw that the place was littered with bones. Human skeletons lay tumbled everywhere. They must have been removed long ago… I groped around amid the bones and dust but couldn’t find anything of value, not even a bracelet or a finger-ring on any of the skeletons.

  “It wasn’t until I thought of climbing out that I noticed in one of the corners—nearest to the opening in the roof—ten feet above my head it hung, and I had almost touched it unknowingly when I descended the rope.

  “It looked like latticework at first. Then I saw that the lattice was partly formed of human bones—a complete skeleton, like that of a warrior. A pale withered thing grew out of the skull, like a set of fantastic antlers ending in myriads of long and stringy tendrils that had spread upward till they reached the roof. They must have lifted the skeleton or body along with them as they climbed.

  “I examined the thing with my flashlight. It must have been a plant of some sort and apparently it had started growing in the cranium: some of the branches had issued from the crown, others through the eye holes, the mouth and the nose holes to flare upward. And the roots of the thing had gone downward, trellising themselves on every bone. The very toes and fingers were ringed with them, and they drooped in writhing coils. Worst of all, the ones that had issued from the toe-ends were rooted in a second skull, which dangled just below, with fragments of the broken-off root system.

  “The sight made me feel more than a little nauseated at the inexplicable mingling of the human and the plant. I started to climb the rope, in a feverish hurry to get out, but the thing fascinated me and I couldn’t help pausing to study it a little more when I had climbed halfway. I leaned toward it too fast, I guess, and the rope began to sway, bringing my face lightly against the leprous, antler-shaped boughs above the skull.

  “Something broke and I found my head enveloped in a cloud of powder. The stuff settled on my hair… my beautiful raven-haired Chrissie-Lou who had always taken such care, would have been horrified; it got into my nose and eyes, nearly choking and blinding me. I shook it off as well as I could. Then I climbed on and pulled myself through the opening…”

  The effort of narration had been too heavy a strain and Arpad lapsed into disconnected mumblings. The mysterious malady returned and his delirious ramblings were mixed with groans of torture and cries to Chrissie-Lou. But at moments he regained a flash of coherence.

  “My head! My head!” he muttered. “There must be something in my brain, something that grows and spreads; I can feel it there taking root!”

  The dreadful convulsions began once more and Arpad writhed uncontrollably, shrieking with agony. Tefere, sick at heart and shocked by his sufferings, abandoned all effort to restrain him and took up the hypodermic. With much difficulty, he managed to inject a triple dose and Arpad grew quiet by degrees, and lay with open glassy eyes, breathing heavily. Tefere for the first time noticed the odd protrusion of Arpad’s eyeballs, which seemed to start from their sockets, making it impossible for the lids to close and lending the drawn features an expression of horror. It was as if something were pushing Arpad’s eyes from his head.

  Tefere, trembling with sudden weakness and terror, felt that he was in some nightmare. He could not believe the story Arpad had told him. Assuring himself that his companion had been ill throughout with the incubation of some strange fever, he stooped over and found that the horn-shaped lump on Arpad’s head had now broken through the skin.

  Surrealit
y took over as he stared at the object that his prying fingers had revealed amid the matted hair. It was unmistakably a plant-bud of some sort, with folds of pale green and bloody pink that seemed about to expand. The thing issued from above the center of the skull.

  Nausea swept upon Tefere and he recoiled from the lolling head, averting his gaze. His fever was returning, there was a deep ache in all his limbs and his eyes blurred with a miasmal mist.

  He fought to subdue his illness. He could not give way to it; he had to fight on, stay with Arpad and the guides until they reached the nearest trading station.

  Through sheer determination his eyes cleared and he felt a resurgence of strength. He looked around for the guides and saw, with a start, that they had vanished. Peering further, he observed that the dugout used by the guides had also disappeared. He and Arpad had been deserted. Perhaps the guides had known what was wrong with the sick man and had been afraid. They were gone, and had taken much of the camp equipment and most of the provisions with them.

  Tefere turned once more to the body of Arpad, quelling his repugnance. Resolutely he drew out his clasp knife and, stooping over the stricken man, he excised the protruding bud, cutting as close to the scalp as he could with safety. The thing was unnaturally tough and rubbery; it exuded a thin, sanguineous fluid and Tefere shuddered when he saw its internal structure, full of nerve-like filaments, with a core that suggested cartilage.