Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In the silence, Anson could not tell if he was still waiting for Tony to answer or if he had blinked out between associations and his cousin was waiting on him. Hoping he sounded warning rather than groggy, he started, “Tony…”

  His cousin sighed like a concession, hands held up over something he had not wanted to say. Dragonfly-paned, the window’s glass was streaked with a thin branching of ice, twisting its refraction across the light-fogged sky like a sea-spell over sand; he stared and the shadows rippled, blinked and they froze again. Tony’s wiry voice rocked and fell, touching truth with the hindsight nicety of an oracle: “She’s not going to have a lot of sympathy for me.”

  §

  Wrapped in a grey-and-navy-striped bathrobe and hunched over a mug of heavily honeyed tea, Gorgo Waite looked less like a trawler’s bycatch and more like a daytime Goth: he wondered if it was her camouflage, as academic hermitage had been his mother’s. He could imagine her in fishnet sleeves and drainpipe jeans, her pupilless eyes passing for contacts and her hair for dedicated dye, her triangular face cut-porcelain fashionable. Even dry, her skin had a faint iridescent bloom, but it would look like powder in most lights; the gill slits lying closed as knife-cuts under her chin would stand out only as much as scars might. Even with sea-green bruises sponging the side of her face, she looked as fearless as the Spartan queen one of her parents must have named her for, or the monster.

  What she did not have was the sleek-skulled, strong-boned look of the children of Innsmouth, bred to withstand the pressures of the deep and the perils of ascent, their scales or spines or powerful claws. The tips of her fingers were bruisily purple, as if her nails had shed themselves, but no nacreous sheaths had grown in their place; the bare ridges where her eyebrows should have been looked painfully vulnerable, knowing the hard ring of scutes that should have protected her deep-set eyes. Only her teeth showed small and sharp, grey as sidewalk ice, and he wondered how recently they had come in, or if she had been born with them, and if her parents had guessed then at the changeling they had brought unwittingly into a drydock world. If they had known their own heritage, hoped against the strength of the tides and the fall of Mendel’s dice that their child would go down to the sea as easily as generations of her ancestors, since they could not hope that nothing of Innsmouth would touch them on land. If they had lived to find out that they were wrong. He could offer her a choice of herbal teas from the breadbox on the counter, a mug from RISD or one with a broken heat-sensitive cartoon; he could not ask her the rest. She had said almost nothing as she dried herself off on an oversized towel the color of a bruised orange, not even wincing when the terrycloth snagged on the visible softness of her skin; Anson had finally made himself stop hesitating outside the bathroom like an amateur valet and foraged through the kitchen cabinets until he found clean mugs and a teakettle that produced a sustained blare like a boat horn when the water boiled. He would leave an IOU for Trina if he had to. He was tempted to sign it with Tony’s name. Until then, he set one mug down in front of Gorgo and cradled the other between his chilled hands, steam coiling upward like a noir effect in the bright mid-morning sun; with no conversation forthcoming, he reached across the coffee table for the topmost of a slumping stack of National Geographic, and she said as if he had just stopped speaking, “So which kind are you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Her mouth was as pale as her cheekbones, despite the heat of the tea. “Dracula or Renfield. One of them, or just in the know? Your cousin—”

  “—really is my cousin, and for God’s sake don’t call him Dracula where he can hear. He’s insufferable enough as it is.” That drew a slight smile, although it might only have been for his efforts. She was asking the wrong question; sooner or later he would have to tell her the right one. He was not Tony, by choice or talent. Already she was looking down at her tea again, small-fingered hands linked tightly around the college-logo ceramic, dipping her face into the steam as if into a veil. He felt as if he were trying not to spook a strange cat, offering a palm for inspection without threatening a pat: “If you’ve heard the litanies, I’m guessing you know at least something about the four families of Innsmouth and the bargain they made with the people of the deeps, who bring the sea-catch and delight in the imperishable”—the unwieldy, inadequate translation of nineteenth-century hymnals for a word that shone like incorruptible gold in the devouring salt of the ocean, like the translated bodies of her children that time could not slow or slacken or kill—“and the promise they made to their descendants, that all who dwell in her waters shall never die. And they pledged their children to one another and their blood to the mother of the sea and it all ran like cod in winter until the Feds got tired of chasing Charlie Solomon all around Boston and went after law-abiding citizens for a change. But there weren’t many—unaffected—people left in Innsmouth by the end. Most of them were in-laws or recent arrivals, people from away.” No native-born New Englander himself, he made sure she could hear the quotation marks around the taxonomy. “So we’re not very closely related on the landward side, Tony and I, but we don’t need to be. Cousin is the easiest way to talk about it. We’re cousins, too, if you want to think of it that way.”

  He was fairly certain that her silence meant no, thanks, but at least she did him the grace of not saying it to his face. Drying in full sunlight, her hair still gleamed as if water ran from it; he could almost see the next swallow of tea as she drank it, the hollow of her throat pulsing as softly as a frog’s. She swirled the mug, a tiny vortex of orange and star anise. Her voice was cool, dismissive.

  “Dracula, then.”

  Sharper than he had intended, Anson said, “No.”

  “Oh?” If she were one of his students, he would have thought she was goading him, demure as a teenager’s shark-instinct for the unconvincing or the ill-defended. “You’re not related to Innsmouth’s families?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Isn’t it?” Gorgo’s voice was small and cold and cutting as her teeth, suddenly flashing for the throat. “All who dwell in her waters—I walked into the sea, Mr. Samaritan Chemistry Teacher. She threw me back. Despite my prayers. Despite this,” twisting one hand to show herself from thin-webbed clinging toes to hijiki-black hair. “And I’m supposed to feel grateful for you deigning to read my palm like Sherlock fucking Holmes and tell me the history of everything I’ll never have? That you’ll send me a card at Christmas—wish you were here!—and leave me to wither while the rest of Innsmouth inherits the deeps?”

  For a moment he thought of laughing, then of strangling Tony. He swallowed both impulses, awkward as they were; he could not blame his cousin, any more than he would blame a gull for eating starfish, or a Portuguese man-o’-war for stinging. As evenly as he could, Anson said, “Gorgo. Look at me.”

  He was anticlimactic and he knew it: a tall, round-faced man with dusty brown hair slightly feathered from pulling off a woolen winter hat, fair-lashed blinking eyes, the sides of his throat as unlined as infancy. His coat and boots were drying by the hall rack, creeping a lichen-bloom of road salt into the paper grocery bags laid down in place of a doormat, but his sweater was still patched with dampness and the cuffs of his trousers were drip-drying as if he had walked out into the scouring-blue ice-slap of Gloucester Harbor. He flexed his fingers for her, a little ironically, unwebbed.

  “I turn thirty-eight in September,” he said flatly. “I’d be showing by now.”

  It was impossible to tell if she was studying him with translucently lidded eyes, but some of the tension had gone out of her hands and shoulders and he thought that her voice sounded for the first time genuinely, if skeptically, curious. “How is that possible?”

  Anson shrugged lightly, as if he had not been asking himself the same question since he was old enough to look into a mirror. “Genetics. My great-grandmother came from a junior branch of the Eliots, married into a knowing family in Boston; they changed their name after the raids, just to be sure. She was only ha
lf-deep; her daughter married a man she met at college in Iowa and her gift came right down the maternal line to my generation, where it hit an immovable wall of combinatorics. Both of my siblings have the look; they’ll go down to the sea in their time, though my sister keeps saying she’ll come back if they don’t have fast food under Devil Reef. I look like my father and he’s a Reconstructionist Jew who thinks the Esoteric Order of Dagon makes a great D&D setting.”

  “You won’t—”

  “I don’t even dream of Y’ha-nthlei.” He could not say even that name as it deserved, sinuous as a gleam of silt-silvered light; his mouth was made for dryer words. “And before you ask, no, I’ve never tried walking into the ocean. I passed BU’s swimming test and that’s about as far as it goes. I don’t have even vestigial gills. That’s why Tony called me. The asshole,” he said without rancor. “All who dwell in her waters shall never die, but they need to be able to dwell in the waters first.”

  The breath she let out was not a laugh, but it was closer than anything he had heard from her in hours. “There’s not a name for that, is there?”

  Meredith would have had something helpful to say, tart and gentle at once; he had held Anson through breakups and layoffs and the aftermath of family reunions, always knowing when to offer suggestions and when to curl himself around his lover’s greater height and say nothing more than oh, love, oh, love, like the nonsense syllables of a lullaby. Anson, confronted with tears or furious silence, always felt himself falling back on practicalities, trying to talk a way through the pain until Meredith had snapped, the one time they really fought, Do I look like I’m in an analytical frame of mind right now, Jesus! It occurred to Anson from time to time that they were still together because Meredith, even then, had never called him cold-blooded.

  His tea was still warm between his hands, brackish with mint and bitter licorice root; he drank it slowly, watching the nictitating membrane ease back from Gorgo’s eyes. “There’s not a name for a lot of things,” he said. “Doesn’t mean they don’t still exist.”

  Silently, trailing cover stories of standing stones, zombies, the Emperor Nero, she pushed the stack of National Geographic toward him across the damp-scarred table.

  §

  In the spring of Anson’s first year in Boston, the worst winter storm since ’78 dropped twenty-five inches of snow for April Fool’s Day and his second roommate played Bill Haley and the Comets like they were coming back into style and a woman named Solange Adair wrote to him by post at Danielsen Hall. She had an apartment on Pinckney Street, among the red-brick sidewalks and gaslights of Beacon Hill; he remembered afterward the incongruity of walking past snow-snapped trees still folded with budding green leaves, sweating under a balmy sky as he picked his way through slush-crusted sidewalk drifts and the rutted footpaths of unploughed side streets. White-winged and grey as the late snow, seagulls circled and called over the Charles.

  She opened the door for him herself, from her wheelchair. He could not guess her age: into her fifties, by the extent of her metamorphosis, not so far gone that she could not pass at need for postal deliveries and repair calls. Behind their broad-framed sunglasses, her eyes were the flat lidless silver of sequins; she had wreathed her naked skull in scarves of sail-blue and sunset-green, twisted like the turrets of a conch’s shell. Over the warm rosewood of her skin, the faint olive-tinting of her nascent scales shone like the patina on bronze. Everywhere inside was dark wood and books, paintings and sculptures by artistic movements Anson had never heard of. Most of them looked like abstracts to him, churning storm-light colors; any motion fell through freeze-framed angles, multiplied and shattered around corners that were not there. He recognized none of the artists’ signatures. The sitting room and the hallway smelled of baking. She offered him coffee, which he was too much of a college student not to take, and apple-cider cookies, which he was too newly a college student to feel comfortable accepting, as if she were a friend’s grandmother inviting him back into childhood. “Families take care of family,” she said mildly after he thanked her for the third self-conscious time. When she met his gaze directly, her eyeshine flared white as a mirror.

  She had known his mother, she said, although he never knew if she meant in the flesh or in dreams. For so many of his family, there was so little difference between the two.

  For the first six months, he had dreamed of his mother nearly every night. He had known even then that it was not the true communion of his siblings, who could already compare details of never-drowned Y’ha-nthlei, the phosphorescent spires and avenues of the city they would someday inherit. In the last weeks of her life ashore, Leonor Penders had lain most of the day in a claw-footed bathtub filled with cold water and commercial marine salt, the thick carmine fronds of her gills open and pulsing eagerly in the currents stirred by her own restless hands, crescent-clawed and webbed to the last joint. Sometimes she ran the shower, equally cold, adding salt from the steadily depleting bucket on the bathmat; her scales had come in with the slick glisten of wet nori, but all of her family had cut their fingers on them by the end. For days after they had gotten back from the ceremony, the indigo-shingled house on 63rd Street had smelled of standing water and drying salt, the sulfurous funk of decaying seaweed and the sharper iodine of brine. Anson could still remember the one sound she had made as the waters of Ipswich Bay closed over her head.

  And over and over, he saw her in dreams as the fantastic mermaid she had never become—never would, so long as the sea endured. She was pearl-bellied, with the deeply cleft tail of a siren, spangled green as a flapper’s glass-beaded dress; she was blue-skinned and orange-scaled, flaunting as a tropical wrasse; she was rayed and spined like a lionfish, carrying in human hands a pair of scallop shells written closely with the laws of the undersea, tiny snail-tracks that glimmered and changed as he tried to read along. She was the young woman he knew best from photographs, laughing in studio apartments, her hair as dark and tousling as bracken. She was cradling the crescent moon in a dripping web of algae to her breast. He woke each time with a hard knot of anger in his chest: fought with his siblings, fought with his father, cut class one morning in early November and walked all the way to Pinole Point, imagining he could feel the fault lines of the continent grating and shifting beneath his feet as he crossed from autumn-dry tall grass to salt-marsh sedge and pickleweed reddening like Indian paintbrush. He watched the water until late afternoon, but only terns and plovers came to meet him at the edge of the mirror-blue waves. The bus to Richmond came late and he took the BART home.

  He knew the sacrifices, the scriptures, the rites that marked the year as casually and surely as his father’s side of the calendar: Purim, Pesach, Tisha b’Av, the Days of Awe. He was not sure how much any of them helped. At school, his teachers treated him with uncomfortable sympathy; at home, Ron Penders who had married his wife once with wine and seven blessings and once with cups of seawater and blood refused to sit shiva for a woman who would never die. Beth spent hours in the upstairs bathroom as if something of her mother still resonated there within the pale blue walls and the white cast iron. Garen hoarded her books of marine biology and papered the wall above his bed with painstakingly hand-copied anatomies. Anson told his dreams to none of them.

  To Solange Adair, for the first time to anyone, he said, “No. Not for real. I’ve never dreamed of any of them.”

  All that spring and into summer, as he stayed on after the semester’s end with a part-time job at the Boston Book Annex and a jerry-rigged bedroom in a triple-decker firetrap in Brighton, he visited the rowhouse on Pinckney Street with the other sea-strays who came and went in her home as though it were their own: claw-fingered, solitary Isobel Wardie Lau, whose father was older than the destruction of Akrotiri; stargazing Lelian Perry, whose sea-thirst had sprung up halfway through a law scholarship to the University of Chicago; and Tony Woodhouse, a talkative, cagey Tufts student with a night-shift pallor and bottle-brush black hair, dressed perpetually in T-shirts for Boston
bands he was just too young to have seen. He was wearing one for Salem 66 the first time Anson saw him, folded like a piece of elastic into the narrow-cushioned window niche with a pamphlet copy of Swinburne’s “By the North Sea.” The night he fell asleep on Anson’s floor, he was advertising Mission of Burma. You’re different, he had pronounced before the three beers and half a bong caught up with him, sprawled like a starfish on carpet the color of the rain-stained walls. One finger pointing at Anson, as though he were making a note for himself in the morning: You don’t hear it calling.

  Only slightly less buzzed, Anson had snorted, No, I hear you talking, man, and you’re pretty loud, and the conversation had drifted away with the grey wash of dawn and Anson needing to pull himself piecemeal out of bed in order to shelve pop art and poetry at the Annex. If anyone else at Solange’s agreed with Tony’s observation, they never told him. He liked to think it would not have mattered. There was a sea-smell in the house now, familiar as a shadow.

  And then in June it ended, as suddenly and firmly as it had begun. Under the full moon of the solstice, it was Solange Adair’s time to go down to the sea with the blood of fishes and the blood of humanity painted on her brow and her palms, anointing each stickle and barbel and sharp-edged fin as the waves churned against the sea-chewed stubs of piers and spilled between the tumbled granite boulders of Innsmouth’s long-abandoned quarry, paving the tide’s road for the land-sprung soul to follow, and the witch-lights haloed the low black spine of the reef. With one arm around Isobel’s shoulders, Anson felt her claws tensing through his shirt where her arm circled his waist and said nothing, even when she drew blood; he could not tell if she shook with sorrow or eagerness, the moon like mercury in her eyes. Tony was a stranger in a good shirt and a tweed jacket, for once not slouching. In the driftwood light of the shore fires, the bracelet coiling on Lelian’s wrist ran against his dark skin like a meltwater of pearls. She made the same noise as his mother as the waters took her in and he did not know if it was a sound of pain or welcome this time, either.