Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  None of them, Anson had realized then, were grieving. He could not expect them to. They had not lost anything, not even time.

  The wind was skimming sand off the dunes like spray from the crest of a wave, salt-fine and stinging. Beside him, Gorgo had her hands deep in the blazer’s pockets, her hair spilling and her face set toward the sea; he saw her bruised profile, impassive as a coin, but her gills gaped redly beneath her chin. He shrugged, a little helplessly, a little humorously: it was nothing more than the truth.

  “If the sea needs a gatekeeper, it should be someone who can swim better than me.”

  The tide’s breath broke, one vast exhalation or an endless drawing in. Gorgo stirred and Anson braced himself not to hold her back, but she was only reaching for a pebble from the retreating wave, cormorant-black with a white granite scrawl through its heart. “More weight,” she said, straight-faced. When she dropped it into her pocket, it clacked.

  Anson said seriously, “There’s always the sacrifices. At the hinges of the year, like your father wrote: for the mother and the father, for the sun and the moon, for the earth and the sea. And always family. You’d be eligible. They have to be blood of the sea’s blood to work.” He could not imagine her consenting in a crown of kelp and the stinging frills of sea nettle, bowing her head to anything, but he had never put his name in the lottery, either, for the garlands or the knife.

  Her grin was as sharp and unexpected as the snap of a moray’s jaws, viperfish-wide. “If I want the sea to have my blood, I’ll do it my own way.”

  He laughed suddenly, thinking of the time he had met Tony at Cafe Sushi and his cousin had been waiting for him downstairs, a cigarette flaring between his cupped hands like an informant in a detective film, and Anson who had never seen his cousin smoke anything but weed had blurted, What the hell, Tony? Does nicotine even work on fish? It had been a joke between them for a little while, as long as anything lasted easily with Tony’s evasions and Anson’s impatience. He could more easily imagine a life without loving, long-haul-driving Meredith than without Tony, grappled to one another with genetics and familiarity and exasperation that transcended love; he would have to someday, before it was time to gather at the ruined harbor where the barks and brigantines of Innsmouth had once set sail for the East Indies and the South Seas, kindle the shore fires and chant the litanies and watch for the answer from Devil Reef, from the world beneath the waters of the world. The scattered children of Innsmouth, slowly migrating home. He had not lied to Gorgo: he had never walked into the ocean. He had jumped, drunkenly, and been dragged out retching onto the harborwalk at Rowes Wharf; he smelled the sea in Boston, wild as a gull’s cry on the wind, and it was only distance and salt. If he lived to see the next city shine like a bell between worlds, it would only be another shore to stand on.

  In the tarry swirl of seaweed at his feet, a warm color blinked like a lobster buoy. It was the plastic ring and cap off a milk bottle, lying red as a channel light in a soda-froth of foam; it was the sea giving back nothing that was not already the land’s. Anson palmed it anyway and turned to look for Gorgo. The sea wind had already reeled her from him, windblown at the waves’ edge with her hands full of salt and her eyes as huge and black as time.

  There was no following his cousin into the sea, any of them; he followed her up the shoreline instead, looking despite himself for drowned books, bottles, hearts rolling on the tide.

  Every Hole in the Earth We Will Claim As Our Home

  Gemma Files

  Uh, hi, yeah. Is this the Let’s Talk Hotline? For… mental health issues, and stuff? Yeah, so I need to speak to somebody, but first off, I have a question: this is anonymous, right? I mean, you don’t need my name, do you? Just to talk?

  Okay, good. Good. That’s what I thought.

  All right, so… before we start, I need to know: does confidentiality apply here? I mean, I know you’re probably not a doctor or anything, just a volunteer at best. If I tell you what’s bothering me, though, is it true you really can’t tell anyone else? ’Cause if I can’t be sure—all right, good. That’s good, too.

  (I really do want to tell someone, you see. But if I go ahead then you can’t break your word and pass on what I’m going to say, not to anybody. It’s in… both our best interests you keep to that one simple rule, believe it or not.)

  All right, yes, I believe you, I’m sorry I asked. It’s just that—well. I just had to.

  Look, I’ll be straight with you, okay? I don’t know what kind of good this’ll do, telling you what I’m going to tell you. But I have to do it, anyhow; I can’t not. And I don’t want to write it down somewhere, to risk somebody else finding it, reading it… don’t want to document it, on the off-chance that doing so will somehow make it realer than I want it to be. No. I just want to say it, this whole thing, straight out, to someone who doesn’t know anything about me, someone I’m probably never going to talk to again. Someone who can’t even see me. And then I want to hang up and walk away, and never think about any of it again. That way, it’s sort of like it never happened. Like I can just… let it go and forget about it.

  You’re my single best bet, in that respect.

  Okay, so—one last thing. You’re not taping this, are you? No? You promise?

  (I mean, I guess I’d really have no way of knowing, if you were. Have to just take it on faith.)

  …well, anyhow.

  Might as well start, then.

  §

  So I’ve been working Sick Kids’ Hospital here in Toronto as my primary security site for… three years now, come January, and I mainly do night shift, which is about as stressful as you’d think it was likely to be. Worse for the nurses and the doctors, obviously, but the things we see coming in, the kids on the ward, the long-term cases… it wears on you. I’m the only one at my station who hasn’t transferred out yet, gone somewhere else at least once, for a kind of mental rest. I don’t know why, really –maybe I’m lazy, like my Mom used to say. Maybe I’m scared of change, so when I finally get somewhere permanent, I tend to stick to it like glue.

  Anyway, the floor I work most often is the ground floor, General Intake and Emergency, and my main circuit covers the waiting room. That’s where all the kids and caretakers who don’t have appointments have to go, to get triaged through Emergency. Mostly it’s accidents, or things getting swallowed, though sometimes there’s bugs and other symptoms; anything a GP on call doesn’t feel qualified to treat at home, anything a hotline flags as particularly weird-sounding. Ninety-nine percent of the time these don’t come too much, thank God, but sometimes…

  What we’ve been getting a rise in lately is kids who can’t be vaccinated catching things from kids whose parents opt not to have them vaccinated for one reason or another, but still send them out into the world. Like that measles outbreak at Disneyland. Most of the time, the result looks horrible, but isn’t necessarily life-threatening—the kids are segregated for a while, treated as best they can be, emerge with a few scars. It’s like chickenpox.

  The worst-case scenario, though—and there’re always going to be a few of those, statistically.

  Well.

  I don’t know if you ever heard the story about how Roald Dahl’s daughter died, but it was of encephalitis—complications from getting measles. The thing that always amazed me was that when Dahl heard there’d been measles at the school his kids went to, he begged his brother-in-law, who was a doctor, to get him enough gamma globulin to protect his children. But the guy could only get enough for one of them, so he opted to give it to Dahl’s son Theo, and said: oh, go ahead and let the girls catch it, it’ll be good for them.

  So one of them did and she was okay, but the other—Olivia—wasn’t. She got sick, and slow, and sleepy, and their local GP came over and took a look and said it was probably just a cold, but keep watching her. And then, later that day, she opened her eyes but she looked… weird, not like herself, like she wasn’t really seeing anything, you know? So they loaded her into the
car and took off, but by the time they got her to the hospital it was too late. It took about a day more, but they finally called it.

  When he wrote about it later on, Dahl said he went in to kiss her and she was still warm, and he asked the guy he was with why. Like: she’s still warm, why is she so warm? And all the other guy said was: it happens.

  But that’s how it goes, right? I mean, Sick Kids’ is good, top of the line, no question. Parents come from all over the world, just ’cause they know how good it is… but kids still die, sometimes, and you don’t get used to it. You can’t.

  So what happened is they brought this boy in with measles, his mom and his dad, about three and a half weeks ago. I can’t tell you his name, obviously. But it was the same story, or a lot like it: presented with fever and rash, sick and sleepy, slow. Eyes rolled up. Had a seizure when he first got there, almost the first five minutes after registration, like he knew he was finally in the right place for it. So they rushed him upstairs and the mom and dad stayed downstairs together, waiting to find out, until a doctor came down and told them it was encephalitis; kid’s whole brain was swelled up, right down to the stem. And he was alive for now but in a coma, and they didn’t know when he’d wake back up, or if. They didn’t know anything.

  Mom and Dad sat there together for a few hours more and then Dad had to go, ’cause he was on shift someplace else. Mom wouldn’t leave, though. Didn’t have anyone to call to come sit with her, I guess, though I heard her talking on her phone to somebody—might’ve been her job, maybe—and explaining what was going on. But she just sat there alone after that. Around 23:00, I brought her some coffee, and she took it, but it’s not like she spoke, even to say thanks. That was okay; I didn’t expect it. She needed her time.

  Sometimes I’d look over, and I thought she was praying.

  Things thin out after midnight, even near the E.R. So that’s when I notice there’s this other woman sitting in the back, a few rows of chairs away—spotted her when I left to do rounds, then saw she was still there when I came back. Had a book in her hands, even had it open, but she wasn’t reading, not really. She was watching the measles-kid’s mom from the corner of her eye, and… uh… listening, I think.

  It sounds bad—it is bad—but if this woman hadn’t read to me so much as middle-class white, even at a distance, I probably would have paid more attention to her, or had a few red flags go up. But she did, so I just sort of looked her up and down, then filed her away: an older lady, upper forties to mid-fifties, not fat but big, all over; eyes light, grayish or blueish, hair light, maybe mouse with a little blonde, or a little gray. She looked like a teacher or a nanny, somebody’s relative or whatever. A counselor.

  Around 2:00, I went to the bathroom and when I came back, this woman was sitting next to the kid’s mom, her arm around her shoulders. And I was sure they must’ve known each other from somewhere, because the mom, she had her head down, just letting the woman hold her, kind of—shaking a bit, it looked like, from where I was. Like she was crying.

  Okay.

  So that was odd, but… I didn’t know what to do, or even if I should do anything. I mean, it didn’t seem like the mom thought the woman was bothering her; she seemed grateful, or what have you. I could have called the doc working her son’s case, but what would that amount to? Nothing, probably. So…

  … after a while, I got up, moved a bit closer—got myself a coffee, this time, and sat down where the woman’d used to be, the first time I saw her. Like I was taking my break, which I was. Then bent a little forward, enough so I could hear what she was saying.

  Yeah, I know: believe me, I know. That’s why I’m telling this to you, instead of—

  Well okay, I don’t really know why, myself. I just… want to tell somebody. Somebody who can’t tell anybody else.

  The woman, this older woman, she was murmuring in the mom’s ear, really soft. She sounded reasonable. Like she’d done this before. And here’s what she was saying, okay, as far as I can remember…

  (… and I have tried to remember, since then, believe me. Very hard.)

  She said—

  §

  In Malaysia, after a tsunami comes, after the wave laps up and goes back out again, strange things are found. Dead bodies, yes, lots of those—like during that last one, when my family and I were there, celebrating. My husband had gotten a promotion, and the fare was cheap. Something exotic to do together, before the kids were too old to want to travel with us anymore, before they had their own lives. The wave came while we were walking down to the beach, that time, and it took everyone away, my son, my husband, my daughter… everyone but me. They found me in a tree, three days later, where I’d tied myself to the trunk with my towel and been wrenched from every angle, so hard my ribs broke. And I never saw my husband or my son again, not even in the tents where they put the bodies they found after, covered in mud and sand.

  But I did find her at last, my daughter, and I found someone else, as well. And that made all the difference.

  There was no hospital, nowhere to put the sick and dying, except for next to the dead. She was in the middle of a group of other survivors, only barely still alive—crushed and broken, bruised so badly I didn’t recognize her until she made a noise that sounded like “Mama.” I don’t know if she knew I was there, or if she only wanted to think I was. Her skin was purple, her eyes black with blood.

  The water had torn everything I remembered of her away.

  So I sat there for as long as I could, not even able to hold her hand, because every time I touched her she screamed. And when the sun began to fall I got up and walked away, back down to the beach, or where the beach had been. I stood there in the dying light and wondered whether or not I should wade out into the tide, walk forward until the undertow found me. I wondered what was left for me here, on dry land, when the ocean had already eaten everything I loved.

  That’s when she came to me, the old woman. That’s when she put her hand in mine, cold even in that wet, terrible heat, and began to speak, in much the same way I’m speaking to you now—the same tone, even. As though she wanted to make me feel better and this was all she had to offer.

  She told me about the things that get left behind after every wave, things from the bottom of the sea. Things that sometimes, in times of trouble, families will adopt and tame—to be a familiar, a fetch, an injection of luck in the wake of terrible tragedy. The pelesit, which looks like a cricket, a tiny green cricket with soft underwater skin in place of armor, which enters into the mouth of a dying person and bores a hole through the back of their throat, into the skull, the base of the brain. And the polong, something neither man nor woman, its toes and fingers webbed, with lidless eyes and gills—equally tiny, equally green. The polong, which rides the pelesit through that hole and makes its home where the spine’s roots begin, knitting its new body back together around it. Making sure whichever family member lies on the very verge of death stays alive, unable to cough out their soul and pass on.

  You can have her back again, she told me, if you are willing. It is possible. A great sacrifice, and a great blessing.

  Would it really be her, though? I asked, not looking ’round. And heard the old lady laugh, not unkindly.

  Who can say? she replied. How would you know, were it not? It seemed so, to me; it seems so still, even now. For just as the pelesit does the polong’s bidding, the polong is a quick study. Sometimes an echo is enough. Sometimes anything is better than nothing.

  Losing a child is like a disaster, like losing the whole world, but I tell you—you can survive this, with help. The pelesit and the polong can help you survive, along with their makers … the great old ones beneath the sea, who lie chained deep enough that the creatures they spawn in their exile inevitably fall upward, seeking to seed themselves once more along drier shores, from which our gods once banished them. The cracks of the world, deep down and hidden, where all such things abide.

  And I thought for a while, after that, watchin
g the sea, the old woman at my side. We stood there a long time, her and I, neither of us moving, until the sun sunk completely and the moon rose, hidden behind a bank of clouds. ’Til the sea was black, entirely, right to the horizon, and that veiled moon and some distant stars gave the only light.

  Why would they do this for me, these “great old ones”? I asked her, at last. To which she replied, perhaps with a shrug: because it pleases them, and appalls the gods. Because they crave revenge. Ask rather, since it is the only pleasure left to them—why would they not?