Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The psych wing of the HQ infirmary is larger than a lot of people back on earth would expect, and it’s certainly much larger than the Conglomerate would like anyone to know. Tannishtha was surprised when she first saw it; there’d been nothing in the orientation to indicate that it took up an entire floor of the infirmary. But, turns out, the bleakness and hostility of Mars is anything but good for the human mind. Also, it turns out there’s a company policy against sending anyone home who isn’t as sane as the day they left. Which, to date, has meant that no one admitted to the psych ward has gone home. The truth is that the residents of the infirmary are more accurately considered prisoners than patients, something Tannishtha came to realize—and accept—very quickly.

  While the lock confirms the DNA sample from her cheek swab, she pulls her hair back into a tight ponytail and waits. Then the door opens with a loud click, and she steps inside the room assigned to Patient 35, a young anthropologist from Idaho. Her name is Clay, and she’s knotted her blonde hair into innumerable tangles. No one’s tried to stop her. No one’s seen any point in trying to stop her. She has bigger problems than tangled hair, which means the psych department also has bigger problems than her hair.

  Tannishtha checks the chart set into the wall to be sure the patient’s taken her morning regimen of antipsychotics and sedatives, and then she sits down on a stool across from Clay’s bed. The patient is sitting up, her back against the plastic wall. Her blue eyes are glassy, and she’s smiling in a stupid, absent sort of way.

  “How are you feeling today?” Tannishtha asks her.

  There’s a lengthy pause while Clay twists her hair with an index finger. “How did I feel yesterday,” she finally replies. “How did I feel the day before that?”

  “But you’re sleeping better. That’s what your chart says.”

  “I’m sleeping more, not better. I’m sleeping more, so I see more of Hell than before. Please, don’t ever confuse more with better. Please don’t do that.”

  “I apologize. I suppose I was being hopeful, on your behalf.”

  Clay stops twisting her hair and sits up straighter, uncrossing her legs so her calves and bare feet dangle over the edge of her bed.

  “Hope,” she says. “Did you know Hesiod wrote that after Pandora let all the evils out of that box, she shut it before hope could escape? I understood that, and I knew something else, looking into the heart of light, the silence… of light. I don’t need your hope. I don’t want your hope.”

  Tannishtha scratches an eyebrow, purses her lips without thinking about it, and reviews the records floating in the otherwise-empty space between her hands. She tries not to linger on the way that her patient spat the word hope, spat it at her, but it’s impossible to do otherwise.

  “Can we talk about that? How you feel about hope?”

  “Didn’t we just do that?”

  “I’d like you to elaborate, if you can.”

  “And if I do, can I go back to the dig?”

  Tannishtha sighs. “You know I can’t authorize that, and I believe you know there’s no one else who ever will.”

  Clay stares up at the low ceiling a moment. “Why? Why are they keeping me away? I’ve seen more than any of you, so they’re keeping me away? I’m the only one it’s spoken to, and they’re keeping me away?”

  “Going back to the site will only make you sicker, Clay. You understand that. I know you do.”

  “I’m not sick. Why is it everyone keeps telling me how sick I am and pushing the meds down my throat, shooting them into my arms, when I’m not fucking sick.”

  Tannishtha Bandopadhyay still hasn’t taken her eyes off the holo between her hands, and she replies, without looking up, “There are five suicide attempts that suggest otherwise. There’s the attack on Dr. Sazerac. There are the nightmares, the seizures, the hallucinations. I don’t think you need to hear the entire list.”

  Four hours after the doors to Quadrant Twenty-Seven were unsealed, and three minutes, four seconds after the seven sculptures were discovered sitting neatly in their niches, Clay stabbed Peter Sazerac, using a ceramic shard she’d picked up off the temple floor, piercing his bio-suit and leave a nasty gash just above his left femoral artery. By the time she was subdued and medics got her back to HQ, she was presenting all the symptoms of schizophreniform disorder Type B. Yet she was responding to none of the treatments for SD-B, including an experimental retroviral. But Tannishtha knows no one in the Conglomerate gives a shit whether or not Patient 35 would ever again be sane; they care only what appeared to have triggered her illness.

  Clay’s the sole person who touched one of the objects that she calls the idols. Before anyone could stop her, she’d picked up one of the green soapstone artifacts. Sazerac had tried to intercede before her hand reached it, but he’d been too slow. He’d also been too slow getting out of her way afterwards.

  Tannishtha looks up and stares for a moment at the faintly glowing admittance code tattooed just beneath Clay’s jawline. There is a chip implanted underneath it, and an explosive charge about the size of a grain of sand. No one has ever escaped from the ward, but if they ever do, the charges will ensure they don’t get far.

  “It was oily,” Clay says.

  “What was oily?”

  “Greasy. The stone was greasy. Oily.”

  Tannishtha taps the tip of her nose twice, three times, then she asks, “Did you want to touch the idol?” She always asks that same question; it’s on the mandated form, and she has no choice.

  “I’m tired of answering that. You know what I’ll say.”

  “Then say it again, and we can move along to something new, okay?”

  Clay rocks forward once, then slams the back of her head against the wall with enough force that Tannishtha is startled, even though she’s seen Clay do the same thing many times before. Tannishtha has recommended that the patient be fitted with a headguard, but, so far, she’s been ignored.

  “Please,” she says, “don’t do that.”

  Clays smiles. “I might hurt myself, and then where would the company be?”

  “And what do you think will happen if you do, Clay? If you do hurt yourself? You know how it is, or at least you think you do. What do you expect is the likelihood they’ll just find someone else to touch the stone?”

  “Very high,” Clay replies. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Please, it’s only one question. Answer it, and we can move on.”

  “I wanted to touch it,” Clay says, and her smile becomes a grin, even as tears begin streaming down her cheeks. “I’ve never wanted anything else so badly in my life. I never will again, unless it’s a second chance.”

  “A second chance at what, Clay?”

  Instead of answering the question, Clay rubs her head and stares at the psychiatrist, and, finally, she asks, “What’s a shoggoth? Have you ever heard that word, Dr. Bandopadhyay? Have you ever heard of a shoggoth?”

  “No,” Tannishtha replies. “I never have.”

  “I’ve dreamed of them, of shoggoths, and I still can’t tell you what they are. I dreamed of a march of monsters, and they sang, and a mountain walked before them.”

  “A mountain walked?”

  Clay frowned slightly and shrugged her shoulders. “From the blackness between the stars,” she whispered, “fiery the angels fell, burning… and as they fell, deep thunder rolled, indignant, burning.”

  “That’s William Blake,” Tannishtha tells her.

  “Is it? I’m not sure I’ve ever read William Blake.”

  “Where did the angels fall, Clay?”

  For a long time, Tannishtha is silent, waiting on Clay to reply. When it’s obvious she isn’t going to, Tannishtha repeats her earlier question.

  “If you ever had a second chance at what, Clay?”

  “You know that answer, Doctor. A second chance at touching the other six.”

  01000110 01101111 01110101 01110010

  THE BEFORE

  July 21st, 2141 (MTC 36/3/2
459416.5):

  Bench McDermott struggled with the dragger’s stick, shifting into third as the engine whined and clattered and the control panel began to glow orange with the comingling of yellow and red warning lights. There was a pop, so he knew one of the rear induction coils had blown, probably the very same one he’d had replaced back in Biblis, only twelve days before. He cursed, then began the ailing vehicle’s shutdown sequence, flipping the row of toggles above his head.

  Nonny Lasseter was riding shotgun, and she scowled and clicked her tongue once against the roof of her mouth. “Didn’t I tell you?” she asked. “Didn’t I say that tweezer was a bloody goloph, out to rob you blind? Didn’t I just?”

  “You’re not helping,” he grunted, as the engines began to power down and the treads ground to a clanking halt.

  “We’ll be lucky we make the next stead,” she sighed and began digging about in a pocket of her grimy blue coveralls. “We’ll be lucky we don’t die out here on the flats.”

  “Let’s remind me again why I hired you?”

  “Can’t find your dick in a whorehouse, that’s the why, short and simple.” Which was true. So, Bench had always hired a navigator to read the scans and topo charts while he drove. She was Mars-born and could suss out terrain backwards, forwards, and sideways, and she’d come as highly recommended as any. Didn’t hurt she was jake with a spectrometer too, not when an olivine safari meant payoff or bust. But none of that stopped her from being a pain in the scrotum. He’d only taken her on because his last navigator had quit when another prospector offered him double what Bench was paying.

  “Weather blowing up,” Nonny said and pointed through the windshield towards the southern horizon. “Expect we’ll be here till it passes, yeah. Not time to patch this heap forehand.”

  Bench squinted in the direction Nonny had indicated, saw the roiling smudge there, cursed, then switched on the eye, and waited while the doppler screen reluctantly flickered to life. And there it was, a duster sweeping up from the plains above Echus Chasma and the great gash of the VM beyond. Not a huge storm, a cat one-five, maybe. But still nothing he’d want to be out in with only a soft suit.

  “Well, least she’s not a blaster,” Nonny said, her eyes also on the screen. She tapped it once with a stubby finger. “Should pass in a few hours. Catch some shuteye meantime, ain’t gonna do us no harm.”

  “Didn’t haul my fat ass out here to spend half a day sleeping next to you, Nonny.”

  “Could do worse,” she snorts. “Fair expect you have.”

  Bench pressed two buttons on his left, near the pilot’s release hatch, and the dust guards (which also needed to be replaced) groaned and began to slide over anything and everything that the storm might scour or gum up. He left the windshield open for now. He’d close it at the last minute. Bench didn’t like sitting blind.

  “Want some emma?” Nonny asked, popping the lid off a pill bottle. “Sweet merch courtesy the fine, fine chemos at Galilei.” She fished out three of the pills and dry-swallowed them.

  “I also didn’t come out here to chase with you, Nonny. Been clean seven years, and I ain’t about to backslide now.”

  “Your loss, boss man.” She laughed and put her stash back into her pocket.

  And that’s when Bench spotted something moving between the dragger and the oncoming storm. At first, he took it for a trail of dust devils, sweeping along like heralds of the blow. He watched, and believing he was seeing nothing more than a few twisters, watched only half-interested. In a couple of minutes, Nonny Lasseter was asleep in the navver’s seat, snoring loudly enough it was unlikely he’d hear the storm when it finally reached them. With most of the vehicle offline, everything but the life support and the central AI, the silence and stillness was beginning to make him nervous. The quiet out on the flats could smother a man, and it always got to Bench, sooner or later. Usually, he had the cacophony of the dragger to keep it at bay. When he didn’t, which was an increasingly frequent state of affairs, he had his music. Bench wasn’t much for the nowdays crap spewed out from Earth, but the dragger’s brain had a decent library of old tunes from the mid and latter twentieth to soothe and console. He called up “Hey Jude,” set it to repeat, and leaned his seat back, unbuckled the safety harness, and settled in for the wait, however long it might prove to be.

  It occurred to him, partway through the first chorus, that the dust devils hadn’t registered on the radar. Probably a glitch, he thought, glancing at the screen. He thumped it a couple of times, which usually did the trick. Thing likely had a short somewhere in its innards. But the display didn’t change. There was the storm at the top, sixteen kilometers and closing fast. But there was nothing reading between the dragger’s coordinates and the storm.

  He looked at the windshield again and asked the AI to bump the resolution and to magnify by fifty.

  Immediately, he wished he hadn’t.

  Alas, how terrible is wisdom

  when it brings no profit to the man that’s wise!

  This I knew well, but had forgotten it,

  else I would not have come here.

  That was the first thing in his mind, that nasty snatch of poetry, though he had no idea where or when he’d heard it. He’d made it through three years of college before shipping out, and in between the courses on geology, physics, engineering, and suchlike, he’d had to suffer through a few lit elects, so probably he’d picked it up there and the words had lain dormant in his brain ever since.

  This I knew well, but had forgotten it,

  else I would not have come here.

  What is it I’m seeing? he thought, praying he wouldn’t find the answer. What the fuck is it I’m seeing?

  The procession marched along, west to east, swaying this way and capering that, flapping, lurching. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, because in places the creatures seemed to bleed together, one into the next. They were enormous, the tallest of them easily thirty meters high, some surely sixty meters long. Nothing alive was that big. Nothing alive had ever been that big. He thought, A mountain walked, and then he pushed the thought away.

  Hey Jude, don’t be afraid…

  Bench shut his eyes, then opened them again, but the parade of monstrosities was still right there. Don’t look. Don’t look, and you won’t see. Don’t look, and they won’t see you. But no one survives the hardscrabble by lying to himself, and so Bench did look. He looked long and careful. He considered trying to wake Nonny, but she was deep in the grip of the emmas, and she’d be out until they wore off.

  “Dragons,” he whispered to himself, as there was no one else to hear. “That’s what they are. They’re dragons.”

  They weren’t dragons, of course, but somehow it was easier to watch the creatures once he’d put a name to them.

  That’s when he noticed that his left hand was on the airlock lever, and a second later the computer warned him in its tinny, genderless voice that neither the dragger’s cabin nor its occupants were prepared for exposure, and he quickly pulled his hand back. But the marching things were singing, he realized, and they were singing to him. They were calling him to join them. There would be this one opportunity, and then there would never be another. Never, ever again. He told the AI to begin filming, and the recorder hummed to life. He sat there, disbelieving, yet certain he wasn’t hazing, though he wished to Hell and Heaven that he were.

  They weren’t dragons…

  And don’t you know that it’s just you, hey Jude…

  … else I would not have come here.

  Before the storm reached the procession, it had passed from view and taken its song with it. And when the sand and the wail of the tempest finally enshrouded the dragger, Bench McDermott was more grateful than he’d ever been in all his life.

  01000110 01101001 01110110 01100101

  Peter Sazerac (Doc Pete to his team) sits on the floor and stares into the cylindrical holding tank where his softsuit floats suspended in the bluish gel the chemo geeks call “th
e soup.” In fact, it’s a complex emulsion of hypersterile organic and inorganic compounds—a finely tuned and constantly monitored environment that allows the living cells to survive indefinitely free of their human host. The suits still give him the creeps, no matter how many times he’s donned his. Back in Nevada, his body was meticulously laser-scanned, and a wax model was created, from which a custom-made culture mannequin was then crafted, around which the suit was grown, beginning with a hybrid of stem cells and a sample of his own DNA. The resulting cloned organism is as alive as Peter Sazerac, though so many mutations were introduced during the process that it’s hardly an identical clone. The “skinbag” also possesses a biomechanoid prong that links with a surgically implanted port at the base of the wearer’s skull, entering the cerebellum, temporarily allowing the suit and the host to act as a symbiote. The suit is a highly modified human slipcover, capable of withstanding all the environmental factors inimical to unprotected walkabouts.

  “It’s healing nicely,” says Oklahoma, as the door slides shut behind her. Her real name isn’t Oklahoma, but she was born in Norman and picked up the nickname during basic. It stuck. “No need to wait three months for a replacement.”

  “That would have been a fucking situation,” he replies, though there’s a part of him that has no desire to ever set foot in the temple again. They’ve only gone so far as the area dubbed the anteroom. But there’s that other part of him, the part that made him a scientist, then led him to Mars, that aches to know what lies beyond the anteroom.

  Oklahoma stands beside him, and she places one hand against the tank. “The graft seems to be taking perfectly. Clay did a number on you. How’s the leg?”

  “I’ll live,” he tells her. “They say I’ll be good to go in a week or so.”

  “I’m always surprised at how warm these tanks are,” Oklahoma says. “Any word on Clay, how she’s doing?”

  “You’re kidding, right? The ward’s got her now, and it always will, till death do them part.”