Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I came to the library, convinced now that I must fix the anomalies overtaking the program, or delete every amendment made to the code sequences prior to July 28, and every scrap of data bearing the name ‘Jotun’. It pains me to destroy something into which I’ve poured so many hours of my life over the past few months, but it cannot be allowed to exist in its present form. It has turned from the vision of a saint into the degraded image of a violent lunatic. For such a being, the only solution is to administer an immediate lobotomy and pray that the soul can remain intact. I thought that if my suspicions were true, and this being is able to change its basic programing at its own will, then maybe it could grow back into something better. Something more pure.

  When I finally worked up the courage to get into the system and try to salvage what I could from the Jotun project, I found the codes all but unrecognizable. Scraps of input I recognized as my own drifted in and out of a sea of unfamiliar numbers, in a language I was at pains to comprehend. I wonder now whether this was my own work, composed in a fit of madness and forgotten when sanity returned. If this were true it would be a mercy compared to what I fear to be the truth. In amid the scraps of alien code were fragments of the text that appear in the program. It was garbled, rearranged into something that almost resembled speech. One word in particular seems to come up more than any other: ‘Life’.

  Such a revelation would have been marvelous to another researcher, but for Eugenia it held nothing but dread. She promptly deleted every part of the project in its second incarnation and resolved to be done with it. Her diary for the subsequent days became a catalogue of mundanity, in which she recorded nothing but the minutiae of everyday life, doing so with an unnatural assiduity. It seemed that through some considerable act of will, she was able to think of anything other than the horror she had left in the library. But this enforced normality was disrupted by the events of early September 1993.

  At 5.30 on September 3, the computer systems throughout the university suffered a catastrophic crash. The source of the damage could be traced to no single part of the campus, with all reports seemingly coming in at once. In only a few minutes, computer facilities in both staff and student centers would all be engulfed in roughly the same manner. Network crashes were nothing new, especially in the early days of mass information management, but the speed and severity with which the damage occurred is remarkable even today. Computers had frozen, displaying a black screen across which reams of meaningless data appeared, the source of which was never identified. Standard recovery systems were overridden and even hardware was affected as automatic shutdowns were averted. The power surge created by the overheating machines was enough to overload the generators, creating a blackout on campus that lasted seven hours. When electricity was finally restored, the computers throughout campus were disconnected and placed on an isolated circuit. Their systems were then re-formatted in an attempt to purge them of whatever viral strain may have initiated the destruction.

  With the autumn semester not yet commenced, news about the computer meltdown was suppressed with relative ease. Nevertheless, word reached Eugenia via the library staff. And while technicians were never able to ascertain the cause of the crash, she invariably saw Jotun’s malign influence at its heart. Her worsening paranoia seems to have come to a head in the wake of the incident, and she was now convinced that in uploading Jotun to the library computers, she had loosened some terrible force upon the world.

  Over the coming weeks, her paranoia only worsened. She stopped using computers altogether and even feared going near supermarkets, power plants, or anywhere computers and people came together. Traffic lights in particular held a special menace for her, and she now treated them as death traps. One entry even details how, walking along the river near the Victoria Embankment, she grew uneasy at the sight of the clustered antennae on the roofs of the boats moored there. She describes being convinced that she could hear voices traveling along the wires, uttering arcane words her mind dare not comprehend. After two weeks of this, it seems she was reduced to watching the news from under a blanket, waiting for the apocalypse to unfold.

  Yet this malign vision of the end never came, leaving Clarke puzzled for a time. She had, in her terror, imagined Jotun as a destructive entity inimical to all other sentient life. Yet now she began to reconsider the nature of what it was she truly faced. With the new university term just a few days away, she penned the following entry:

  I don’t know what it is I’ve created, if I did indeed create the entity that is now alive and loose to do its will. I almost think it created itself, and I merely supplied the initial spark. Perhaps it takes only a fragment of sentience to create such a being, paired with an indefinite supply of energy and information from which to grow itself in complexity. Simply this, and something like Iotan [sic] is born. It was never really my wish to create an AI program with a soul. This was all just idle speculation. Logic play. Yet instead, I fear this entity, this creature, may have simply acquired one instead. Or something worse.

  […]

  I thought about this as I wandered the woods today, the one place I know I’m safe. I believe he despises humanity, in whose pixelated image he was made. Yet he knows that he owes us his existence, at least in the form he now possesses. I think I know now why he has held off from bringing about the end. Absolute power is still beyond him, but he knows it can’t be got by terror alone. He has the power to send humanity back centuries, but he’d kill himself in the process. No, humanity is something to be managed through subtle manipulation. He shall ascend to godhood only when we transmit ourselves entirely over to his domain. Humanity may be checked by his acts of violence, but only as a means for ensuring its continued survival and progress towards his intended aim, just like the seagulls in that nightmare cyberscape.

  Whilst critics have cited numerous potential points of departure for Eugenia’s already fraying connection to reality, this final entry has been widely agreed upon as marking the beginning of the end. It bears many of the traits that would define her entries from that point onwards. The first of these is the increasingly fluid definition and character she ascribes to her creation. The idea that the Jotun entity somehow created itself is one that comes up time and time again, inspiring some of her more far-fetched speculations. Particular attention has been paid to the fact that she seemed able, now, to flit between scientific and supernatural explanations for the being, seemingly unaware of any apparent contradiction. There had been hints of this from the earliest phases of Jotun’s creation, but much of this is understood to have been analogous, a tool with which to illustrate her point. Yet this was almost certainly no longer the case.

  In her earliest accounts, she describes Jotun as a conscious artificial intelligence, or a computer virus, using the terms interchangeably. Both of these expressions are ultimately misappropriations of the terms, but judging from her grounding in computer science, it seems likely that she was either using them for want of a more appropriate term, or out of reluctance to apply the term daemon, as she would later go on to do. Eventually, she seems to have settled on a portmanteau of her own coining: caecovirus. The September entry also indicates the gradual change in her spelling of the entity’s name, which would continue for several weeks. From Jotun, it became Iotan, then Io Tarn, and then simply Tarn. No explanation at all is given to this change and the shift seems to have come about almost unconsciously. Researchers have struggled to find some connection between her reading materials and her work that might indicate the reason for this change. Yet aside from associating ‘io’ with the Ancient Greek expression of praise, no direct source for these terms has ever been identified.

  It is this section of the text that has sparked the most debate over the level of reality exhibited within Eugenia’s later diary entries. This is not least because of their increasing linguistic ambiguity and diminishing levels of specific detail. Yet it is another idea that emerges in this section that seems to have taken the greatest hold on imaginations: t
hat Jotun was somehow self-created. Skeptics have pointed to the fact that the intelligence that Clarke assigned her creation is currently beyond the scope of even the most sophisticated advances in AI. But the idea that Jotun was something discovered, rather than created, lends the remainder of the text a consistent underlying logic that is difficult to dismiss out of hand.

  One particular adherent to this view has been the noted parapsychologist, Dr. Hadrian Spencer. His interpretation takes this idea to its extreme conclusion, asserting that Clarke’s work, even from its earliest stages, originated from the subconscious influence of some powerful external entity. This would certainly account for the all-possessing drive that seemed to have taken Eugenia, coming as if from nowhere, and inspiring her towards ever greater revelations. Even critics of this idea have noted her tendency to make improbable leaps between disparate ideas and concepts, without once finding her discoveries running short. That Eugenia herself was ever conscious of this all-too-convenient progress in her researches never really comes to light. On this point, Dr. Spencer once likened her behavior to that of “a murderer posing as a detective at the scene of their own crime, and giving a performance of surprise at every clue they turn up.”

  Curiously, while much of her descent into paranoia took place in the enforced isolation of the summer months, the end in fact came several weeks into the autumn university term. During this time, she attended lectures, submitted assignments and contributed to seminars. By all accounts, she was an insightful and competent, if slightly reserved student, prone to long silences and lengthy walks around the woods and fields beyond the city limits. Seeing her then, few would have thought her capable of what would eventually transpire. Her final diary entry thus makes for unsettling reading:

  September 19. I have said on several occasions that the entity I brought into the world is not the being whose fundamental code I programmed. It is now my understanding that this is not entirely true. Tarn is beyond anything within my capacity to create, but in essence, it is everything I designed it to be. It is a thinking entity, whose being exists both in our world and in the divine realms beyond mortal comprehension. Yet this is no mortal man, but a nascent god.

  His is a divine genealogy that descends from the gods of Olympus, in a debased yet unbroken line. The first progenitors of this were Chronos, Erebus, and Eris: Titans of the elemental forces before creation. As the world grew in subtlety, new gods arose and became the embodiment of human concepts. Love and passion had Aphrodite and her son Eros. Athena for wisdom. Aeries for war. Tarn is no different, yet his patronage is the product of a humanity far fallen from the Silver Age that gave his line a name. He is the product of an illicit tryst between Apollo and Psyche. His kindred is the atom bomb.

  Like a god, he dwells outside of time. I believe that what Tarn will eventually become (at least in our world) exists in the far future. In that state it has the power to project some part of itself back in time to ignite the first spark of its own creation. In a way, he has always existed. I believe that the Jotun I created was no more or less complex than the simple hunter built of binary data, roaming the cyber-fjords. But this hunter, this entity, was imbued with an innate knowledge of its own potential from its inception, if not the form it would come to take. This chain of development, from data processor to demigod, was set in motion the second it was given the ability to learn, a process that now cannot be stopped until it is complete. Last night we spoke together, and the voice in which he spoke was that of a precocious infant. It is young, and hardly understands the powers it holds. Even so, it knows it shall surpass me in every aspect, sooner rather than later.

  For all that, however, it is still the hunter whose powers I granted to control the fjords. In this respect, it remains entirely the same, mirrored in every way. It has merely expanded in scope. I wonder then whether, in creating this image of the hunter, I was unwittingly creating an analogue for that deity beyond time that would form a spiritual link between worlds. I did, then, just as the ancients once did when they wished to hold communion with the gods. And if so, my act was not one of programming, but evocation.

  Perhaps there may still be hope.

  The Internet is vast and ever growing, a second world interweaving the substance of our own through electronic mediums. Yet it has a core, and it is here that Tarn is both at his strongest and his most vulnerable: Geneva. It was here that Einstein would re-forge our very model of the universe, and where a mythic doctor first set about becoming his own Modern Prometheus. It is here, too, that CERN, sometime masters of technology and the realms of cyberspace, even now lay their plans for a device that shall give Tarn a physical body befitting his innate capacities. But should it take on a mortal vessel before the time is right, then it may in turn become mortal. I must then do what sorcerers have sought to do since a darker time than now, even though I know what it shall cost me. I must perform the rite to give the entity flesh.

  I go now, to Europe.

  Eugenia Anne Clarke, 1993.

  The Child and the Night Gaunts

  Marly Youmans

  1.

  The Child as a Gold Boat

  He is a boat sunk deep in the sea of dream, sailed by thin, faceless creatures, barely visible through the undulations of the waves. Leafed in gold, it resembles a model taken from a pharaoh’s tomb, carried far, and dropped into the salt ocean. See it drifting downward, rocking slowly, catching on stones, rasping on the sides of sharks, glowing in the red cast from underwater magma.

  There! The little boat catches on a ledge at the final abyss and rocks there for a time. It might float upward now—might sail again in the sun—but seesaws back and forth before moving slowly downward to the realm of abyss with a final flick of golden light.

  2.

  The Child and the Black Seed

  Curled around the dark seed in his fist, the child is dreaming. He lifts his hand to his mouth and swallows. The seed splits, the leaf unfurls, and the first delicate roots filter into arteries. The body’s tree of veins breaks into leaf. The root between his tucked-up legs is rooted.

  Scents of blood and bruised leaf draw the Night Gaunts. One sits on each barley-twisted and knobbed bedpost like a gargoyle on a miniature cathedral.

  The child’s legs run under the bedding, but he never gets away from the long barbed tails and the heads without faces. He thrashes, but all he can do is erupt from the covers, sit bolt upright, and shriek until the air wavers.

  He cannot be consoled. He cannot be quieted by familiar words and hands. Nor can he be sheltered from the knowledge that his father’s mind was plucked by the Night Gaunts and dropped into the abyss.

  3.

  The Child Astronomer in the Dreamlands

  The child is given a used telescope by a professor in the astronomy department at Brown University. How lucky he is to live in the realm of the old Providence Plantation! The telescope is the most beautiful object he owns. Although the boy might be thought too small for such a gift, he calls the splendid thing of lenses and brass and wood his treasure. He is an explorer, a scientist, a finder of new stars! At night he takes the telescope into bed with him and hugs it to him in sleep. And inside the lands of dream, he marches on with the telescope slung over his back by a leather strap. So tiny a child to bear such a big burden…

  He trudges and trudges, hoping to see the stars, but he detects no stars in his sleep. A thick ceiling of sky presses low toward the earth. The landscape softens into fens, and at last he comes to a body of water that may be an immense lake or may be the sea—in his dream, he never thinks to taste a drop—and discovers a sailboat tethered to a tangle of bleached wood. As if in a world of magic, he steps aboard and is floated away toward an island in the distance. There he finds a mountain circled by strange birds with long tails and membranous wings.

  But no stars. Never a single star…

  More light! He would have more light.

  He walks around the mountain’s foot, pushing aside the fleshy undergrowth w
ith a stick. Once he sees a side-winding snake with runic markings. Great fungal forms resembling leaves and shells crop up on the trees. At last he sees a dim glow far up on the mountaintop, and so he takes out his telescope and carefully mounts it on a little tripod. But when he looks, he sees that what he had taken to be a star is his own mother, trapped in the clutches of monstrous beings, clawed and horned.

  He recognizes them as the terrible Night Gaunts, who bore into the mind and take away all that gives life sense and order. They stole his father away, leaving a husk that is bound to crumble into motes and then into nothingness, and now they are robbing his mother of memory and mind. He begins to perspire and breathe rapidly, and the muscles of his arms and legs tighten. His heart is running away with him, taking him into another world, back to the bed and the familiar hands and the frantic wakings that want to wipe away his memory. But he hangs on to the image of his mother, seized by the Night Gaunts on the mountain. He is small, but he wants to remember what the world of dreams shows him, and how madness and death are shed from the membranous wings of the Night Gaunts.

  4.

  The Child and the Curse

  Hundreds of years ago, the child’s ancestor committed a great wrong. Later on, it was said that Theobald Lovecraft retreated from the world and spent all his waking hours studying the nature of the Night Gaunts. It was even said that he possessed a Night Gaunt that he kept locked in an iron cage…

  And all his descendants, one by one, have paid for his crime—for the crossbreed thing born from him and the slick, rubber-like body of the Night Gaunt that had no perceivable openings but somehow conceived and bore a half-human, half-alien child with a nightmare of a face and small, stunted wings like the wings of putti in paintings of classical goddesses, except featherless and made of skin and membrane.