Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  That June, I made for the Peninsula. The hills were grey and wet with drizzle. I had left a note explaining where I had gone, to be picked up by the postman if I did not retrieve it before morning. I had made sensible arrangements. I had supplies. Thus fortified, I went to the valley where I had gone with Elizabeth, to a slanted part of the hill, in a clinging mist—and sunk between the cringing branches of fern was a door.

  It was made of two slabs of violently worked stone with a third sitting on top. The earth around this stone was churned and grey, with fresh gouges cut out of the hillside. My lamp made little impression on those clouded shadows within, instead bouncing the darkness to and fro. When I looked more closely at the carvings I found them grotesque, forming faces the one minute, then meaningless gibberish the next, somehow aggressively gross and foul. I examined them little. Like Elizabeth before me, I chose to make my way down that long, breathless passage to the bowels of the hill.

  The corridor was so steep that I had to hold my lamp at waist height to descend. And it would suddenly zig-zag—break off at an angle, double in on itself, more of a passage laid down by a burrowing creature than one by an architect—so that I scraped myself badly on irregularities in the wall, for I am a bigger woman than Elizabeth. I held out my lamp to them at one point and was repulsed. They seemed like meaningless notches until I pulled back to see them in toto, and there I saw the repeated graffito of a figure in chains. I thought it was a patterned line of yoked animals, each holding the beast ahead’s tail in its jaws, but the carving was an undeveloped scribble. The animals continued on and on and down the stairs in their endless march. Their eyes bulged and their manes tangled in their teeth. It was not worth looking at. A final drastic descent forced my eyes away from the carvings and to attend the more urgent business of not breaking my neck.

  The bottom level opened up into a narrow room with eight sides. An alcove was set into each, with each alcove pock-marked with niches. An archway led into the dark main artery and a half-arch into two connecting rooms. My lamplight was increasingly sulky despite the fresh oil and wick, and in this light, like Elizabeth had, I took the whole for a smuggler’s den. Inside each niche was an irregularly wrapped bundle of rough sacking or crudely pounded flax.

  I took my knife and eased out one of the bundles, not liking the greasy sacking or the oily stains it left on my fingers. If there had been filthy remains in there I might have been less disturbed than I was by what I found: an unfamiliar calico dress, with a blouse, jacket and boots. A quick slash of another bundle proved to similarly hold a woman’s clothes, neatly folded. The next room was so peppered with niches it looked like a beehive, and each contained more of these effects. Some of the clothes were of an antiquated style. One bundle held a fibrous patterned wrapper such as some Māori still wear. My guttering lamp hinted at more chambers ahead—more chambers, and deeper, that I never visited—alcove upon alcove, and God knows they were all probably full.

  I took my lamp away from those miserable artefacts. Trophies, I thought then, pointing to some grotesque kidnapping or slavery spree.

  I continued on down the main passage. It sloped down sharply and I had to press on the ice-cold, slippery walls in order not to lose my footing. The final descent took me to an enormous chamber, Dorothy, as Elizabeth had described, only more vast and empty and black than she could ever have communicated. I set my lamp down and it shuddered and spluttered in the face of such enormous shadow. Here I became aware of the hush only a great and quiet body of water can make. My sight slowly adjusted to some dim braziers filled with what looked like greenish coals—flameless and crawling, moving independently of each other somehow—and the light cast weird ripples on a pool of wide, drear, fathomless water. The light also fell upon a great stone slab where the water sloshed down into carved channels and washed about its base, and fell on a basin big enough for a child to curl up inside it, and it fell also on my friend Elizabeth.

  But not Elizabeth’s miserable corpse: Elizabeth alive and well and living, Elizabeth as fresh as though she had come through the door with me.

  “Oh, Caroline, thank God,” she said, as naturally as ever. More naturally, even, than she had been of months previous; something like her of old, with that same familiar ease. But it was wrong, Dorothy. I cannot describe, as she could not describe either. It was dim in that room but I could see the stark whites of her eyes and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. “What a relief you came.”

  Of course I asked her if she was all right, if she was hurt in any way; she gave me a brief, almost lipless smile, and this was not an expression I had ever seen her wear. She denied injury. She was fine, she said; she’d tell me all about it later. What was important was that I could let her out.

  I asked her why she needed to be let out and she said she couldn’t get out alone. I couldn’t see why not, as it wasn’t as though the corridors were so labyrinthine and nothing seemed to bar her. The water washed close to her bare brown feet. I grew impatient. I demanded to know where had she been and by what means was she now here, in the very place she had feared most?

  “Caroline,” she said calmly, “I never left.”

  Then she walked toward me. I cannot write clearly of how she moved because every time I think of it my head pounds and my nose often bleeds. But yet she moved and the manner in which her bones shifted inside her skin, and in contrast to how you or I would move—

  I believe there is a part of the mind that decides upon courses of action without requiring conscious thought. I also believe that these are left over from the antique days when Man was preyed upon, before cities and civilization. I told you I had been sensible, Dorothy; it was a matter of conscious decision that I had brought Kenneth’s gun. But it was on this aforementioned instinct that I lifted it, took aim, and shot Elizabeth dead.

  I did not wait around to see her fall. I could rely upon my accuracy. I fled into the lapping darkness while all around me the sound of water filled my ears—deafened, driven mad by a sound I did not know if I was conjuring up, desperate to find light as a swimmer to break water. I scrambled up the narrow steps and through the angular shaft, convinced that if I stopped to heave for breath or look over my shoulder I would meet my end.

  Did I murder a young woman, or did I avenge her? Did she die there down in the dark, Dorothy, or is the very idea I could have killed her a laughable one? Perhaps it would have been cleverer to search in those insidious bundles until I found the one that had been hers. Certainly everything down there should have been burnt. But not by my hand, Dorothy, not by any hand I have met in this life, I think, nor yours. What is down there should not be sought, not even for purposes of expurgation.

  That place showed itself to me in my dreams and did not leave me after waking; it simply widened its window to the very edges of my vision. I have seen the cave and the water and the altar constantly since then. Even if I take the medicine that the doctor prescribed, the one to help me sleep, it never comes to any good. I was never a beauty but I have grown twisted and haggard for lack of peace. It’s little wonder that they all think I am ill. At least I have no husband to wonder at my malaise and my megrims, like poor Elizabeth’s. I may sit and tremble alone every time I think a door in my house creaks open. I never go anywhere without Kenneth’s gun now. It sits next to me as I write.

  And yet I know I must go back. I will go back. I have held on this long, but it has been unbearable suffering. I have concluded that the door is a disease and that the act of passing through its foetid dark is enough to invalid one. Perhaps I had nothing to fear from what Elizabeth had become. I am not sure. Maybe you are not meant to go back until the place is ready for you and your own alcove is empty. I am ready now: last night I took all the drugs Dr. Miller had left and I still woke at the end of my garden, digging at a slope there with my bare and bleeding hands. I will not sleep again.

  Dorothy, I took that place with me. It is inside me now. Whosoever is its master is well-versed in claiming victims. You a
re the one to whom I may try to communicate it and therefore, I will warn you before I succumb. You must not come. The only woman you may save now is yourself. You have been a rare friend and correspondent. If you deem me a madwoman I won’t care, just so long as you stay in town and never set foot in Turanga. It is too much like you to come and investigate if I disappeared from hearing. If I present you the facts to begin with, it may quell your desire to procure them. Do not come. This is not your mystery.

  I do not know my purpose. I do not know what I am to be, nor Elizabeth, nor Alice—those numberless alcoves, Dorothy, where have we gone? Elizabeth was the merest child. The cruelties it could do with you I cannot imagine. When I think of how she moved—this country is so new to us and so old to the world, and its emptiness should have been a warning rather than an invitation—there are terrible things in the darkness and I will not let you become another of them.

  My final wish is this: that you respect our long friendship in the face of derangement. Do not come. Do not question. Live a long life and go into the hills as seldom as possible. Remember me kindly and for my sake, remember Elizabeth kindly, and for hers a woman called Alice and hundreds else. We passed through the door. We have been trapped and set loose. I wish to be the last.

  If by awful chance you see the door—if it comes to you invidiously in its defiled stone and darkness—the entrance to the water and to the holes where we go, you must think of me within. Then use dynamite.

  I remained

  Your faithful friend

  Caroline B—.

  This letter was found concealed in the effects of Auckland resident Dr. Dorothy L—, eight months after her May 1908 disappearance.

  The Face of Jarry

  Cat Hellisen

  The beach was empty. People don’t like to walk their dogs so far down the strand, especially after that woman got murdered. A group of kids stabbed her to death for her cellphone. Part of me really hoped it was an iPhone or something and she didn’t die over a crappy Pep-store entry level Android. Because that would have sucked. I mean, it sucked anyway, but you know.

  It was an early morning phone call with my mother that had driven me here. The same tail-devouring conversation: questions about the ex, how I could look prettier if I made a little more effort. A numb circle of repetition that had me running, as usual, trying to escape the purgatory of my mother’s disappointment.

  The sand was cold under my feet. I’d shucked my battered slops and tossed them in my sling bag, and all around me the beach was damp and strange. Mist rolled in off the grey waters and the waves gnashed white teeth that I could just glimpse now and again through the low bank of clouds. It was coming in thick and fast, and I had to watch my feet as I strode in order to not trip over the hillocks of storm-spat kelp that littered the coast. They stretched out in sepia glyphs, in a language I could almost understand. I closed my eyes and they stayed in my vision, bright and strobing, the aftershocks of dreams.

  The feeling was sudden and intense: that if I took a moment, I could read this sea-writing and know the secrets that came from the deep. A cold sharpness, marrow-deep, and it passed so quickly that I had to laugh in case I thought I was going mad. I had to mock myself. Not that it made me feel any better, but there’s something about getting in the first hit against yourself that’s always felt satisfying to me. No-one can tear me down more than I do myself. It’s an idiot’s armor against the world.

  In trying to escape my mother’s stupid call, I’d walked almost to the river mouth. A handful of cuttlefish bones were scattered near the shoreline and a dead gannet lay with its beak pointing to the sky like a bleached sentinel.

  No roving gangs of murdering children, though. So that was a bonus.

  The river-water here was grit-filled, dirty with silt, but even so, I hopped off the edge of the crumbing sand bank and stood thigh deep in the cold rush of the estuary flow. I’d stepped into some other world. Not here, not there. Not anywhere.

  I wished I could stay.

  With a deep breath I turned around to walk back home and the mist billowed like a new sail, revealing three shapes staggering a little way from me, leaning against the wind as they crossed the dunes. I yelped in fear, and one ash-grey figure turned his muted face to me, his horns iron dark, curling like a ram’s. I’d seen these three figures before, still and naked and robbed of speech, sitting on a bench in the art gallery.

  My heart stuttered. Some kind of Cape Town artistic statement, like the cowled death in a boat on Liesbeek River. A bunch of university brats dressed up as the Butcher Boys.

  Fuck them. I had to get home and catch a train into town. I still had the afternoon shift to prep for. Even here in the long lonely places, I wasn’t going to get to run away from myself.

  §

  It was in the news the next morning. How unknown thieves had broken into the gallery and somehow made off with the Butcher Boys. Everyone seemed bewildered by the why as much as the how. Students, I thought again, and spent the rest of the week running coffees and cakes for sweating tourists with wide American accents, dressed in safari gear in an air-conditioned shopping mall. I didn’t have the time or energy to notice any more talk about the stolen sculpture.

  I heard about Jarry on the train a few days later. The Southern line had broken down just outside Dieprivier, and I was packed in with a million other sweaty souls, wondering if this was hell or purgatory and deciding it was probably purgatory because hell would smell like brimstone not sun-warm piss and cheese Nik-Naks and dead things. The weather had turned strangely humid for summer, making everyone sticky-tired and mildew-scented. A constant shrieking hum razored the air like an army of invisible cicadas, fungus growing in odd places. Just the other day I had opened my tea tin to find a collection of silvery pearls—snail eggs—buried in among the composting oolong.

  Now I was crushed on a graffitied seat on the train, hugging my laptop bag to my chest, my earphones buried in my ears like a protective ward against unwanted conversation and the interminable buzz, trying to avoid breathing too deeply, and half-listening to the jabber around me.

  A million different languages spilling like warm wax, and the word that hooked me, that made me sit up a little straighter and almost forget the stench and the lateness and the sweat gathering like slug slime under my T-shirt, the word that almost made me forget about my shitty life—the word was Jarry.

  Two men were standing close to me and their voices were a little different from everyone else’s. Maybe that’s what caught my attention. They spoke English like a foreign language, with a lilt and cadence I’d never heard before. I tried to place them. Tourists, certainly. From where?

  “The old way into Jarry is closed now,” said the one with his back to me. “The dream is ended.”

  His companion, who had eyes like bright dark fish, looked like he was having stomach troubles. He winced. “There will be other ways in. I’m sure of it.”

  “And if there were—do we want to go back? How long before we forget who we are, become part of the Long Road and see nothing more of this world? Perhaps it’s better to stay here with the apes.”

  Were they rehearsing some kind of play? That had to be it. Actors using the wasted time on a stuck train to learn their lines.

  The dream is ended. I wondered what the play was about.

  Then a screech, a lurch, and the chuff-chuff-chuff of the groaning train as we set on our way once more. I glanced down at my watch. Forty-five minutes late. When I looked up, the men were moving, pushing their way through the crowd toward the end of the carriage. No more talk of Jarry and the Long Road. I settled back and closed my eyes. Maybe I’d catch some sleep before Valsbaai.

  §

  Jarry crawled into my head after that. I looked for it in dreams, in books abandoned yellowly in the leaf-clogged gutters, in the calligraphy of dead jellyfish, in the seal corpses that washed up stinking from the storms. But Jarry, whatever it was, remained as incomprehensible as the strange weather. My mother
called two days after my birthday to ask if I could look something up on “the Google” for her. Instead I searched for Jarry, for a play about dreams, but there was nothing.

  I forgot.

  It was almost a month later when I saw the girl with the sign. Normally, I ignore people-with-signs. It’s not that I’m a complete shit, it’s just that I have only so many R5 coins to give out and after a while the eye contact makes me feel guilty. And, sure, I am guilty. Too rich in a world where most people are pretty much starving.

  The girl was standing in the middle of the road, on the yellow-painted island, the sign around her neck on a piece of twine. She was staring blindly ahead and the wind from the passing cars whipped her hair around her head in a fury.

  She wasn’t asking for money or hand-outs or anything. The sign just said:

  JARRY!!!

  FIND A NEW ROAD

  BEFORE THE JESUS COMES

  JARRY!!!

  Normally, I’d hurry past people like her, with her grime and her sour smell and her madness like a blanket all tucked up around her, but instead, I waited for the lights to turn red, then darted through the stalled traffic. She didn’t flinch as I came close, didn’t flinch or wheedle or beg. She ignored me.

  “Hi,” I said. “Um, so, Jarry?”

  The lights changed, cars revved and roared, rubbish smacked around our heels. Someone yelled something out of his car window as he passed us, but the wind dragged it away.

  “On your sign?” I tapped the word. The first Jarry with its eleventy-billion exclamation marks, each drawn with a meticulous neatness in purple kokie pen. “What is it? Like, a place or something?”

  I was starting to feel more than a little stupid. Her pale eyes were turned to the horizon and she didn’t blink. What the hell had possessed me to come and make idle chit-chat to some weirdo with a sign anyway? A Jesus-freak with a sign, I should clarify. At least she wasn’t trying to convert me or get me to repent or cower from some non-existent end-times.