Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  C’TTAR: Pleased to meet you.

  TERRY: And I’m not official, as such. But I was passing and saw the island. And thought “hello.” I’ve read all of Cthulhu’s books. I’m a big fan.

  MOTHER: Books?

  TERRY: H.P.

  MOTHER: Sauce?

  TERRY: Lovecraft.

  LENG PRIEST: You are his acolyte, madam?

  MOTHER: Ha. No. I’m his mother.

  LENG PRIEST: But your form is human.

  MOTHER: Only on the outside, dear. When the island emerged I thought it would be nice to stretch my legs a bit. I went to Ikea. So many wandering lost souls. Such a lovely temple to existential angst. Well done on that. pause Where is that boy? Cthulhu! Cthulhu! It’s so nice of you to pop round. He doesn’t have many friends. And you’ve got one of his stones, I see.

  LENG PRIEST: His sacred image, passed from the dawn of time.

  MOTHER: If you like it, I’ve got dozens in the yard. Help yourself. It would free up a bit of space for me. Although I suppose I’ll have a whole world to revel in soon enough. It will make a nice change. pause Well, I’m just going to have to go down there and get him.

  Sound of footsteps, descending.

  C’TTAR: Nobody said anything about a mother.

  TERRY: Makes you think, eh?

  LENG PRIEST: Women aren’t usually part of the mythos. Except as virgin sacrifices, of course.

  Sound of footsteps, ascending.

  MOTHER: I just can’t rouse him. He keeps murmuring “just five more.”

  LENG PRIEST: Minutes?

  MOTHER: Millennia, more like, knowing Cthulhu.

  LENG PRIEST: But we have waited strange eons for his return. The stars are aligned.

  MOTHER: Well, it would be a shame to disappoint you. Just let me get changed and we’ll see if we can’t get this apocalypse started. Maybe I’ll do a little spawning. I’ll shut the door, to keep the draft out, eh?

  Door closes.

  All Gods Great and Small

  Karen Heuler

  “What is the size of a god?” McClellan asked, his hand firmly on his scotch, one leg behind him. He stood in John Bream’s house, a thing of palmwood and thatch, answering Bream’s current refrain that he was damned by the gods in all things. Bream was a failure up north, forced farther and farther south as his various projects resulted in more loss than gain, more humiliation than triumph. He was in Ecuador now, where bribes were cheap and land plentiful. Unfortunately, the land held trees and vines and ants and natives, all of which had to be removed before his properties could be made profitable.

  “The size of a god?” Bream laughed contemptuously. He liked to make expansive gestures and he liked to seem smarter than his friends. “Gods are large, of course. If they were small it wouldn’t matter to anyone at all.”

  “I think they might be small,” McClellan continued, musing. “Aren’t we more at risk of underestimating them if they’re small?”

  Bream looked at the man sharply. He had only met him a month earlier, at the market in the nearest village. A fellow white man. What was he, though, some kind of fanatic? “Are you a preacher or something?” he asked. “Nobody really talks about gods.”

  “Hardly,” McClellan said, setting his scotch down next to an ant, which he brushed away. “I’m just a curious man following his own curiosity. I’ve always been interested in cultures and beliefs, and I have a small inheritance so I can do as I please. I heard, years ago, rumors about an old religion here, geared to insects, and started learning the language. But they speak an old dialect, so I’ve been making my way solely by picking up what I can.”

  “Insect religions?” Bream said in disgust. His skin crawled at the thought of it.

  “Old religions are often animistic,” McClellan said easily. “And why not insects? They’re everywhere. They’re older than we are. I believe cockroaches predate dinosaurs. The first creatures on the land were insects. They have a remarkable capacity to survive, if you think about it. Older than we are.” His voice was a little thrilled.

  Bream scowled. He was stuck with McClellan, if he wanted to have any kind of intelligent conversation. The natives seemed to speak no English or else they just had a habit of staring at him, even the women. Especially the women; he wasn’t used to that. There was a disturbing sense that nothing was in its rightful place here.

  McClellan accepted everything about this hellish place with interest, even the maddening ants. They could very well be a god of some kind, Bream thought, a nasty god, the kind of thing these staring natives conjured up to rid themselves of men like him. The incessant rain was maddening, but the ants were even worse. They came in black and brown and red and some were half one color and half another. They bit and they stung.

  McClellan seemed impervious to the rain and to the ants. He was a red-haired man whose skin flaked off when the sun was out, hanging in strips off his face like cobwebs, whose eyes had brightened when the first rains finally came. According to McClellan, the ants had no choice but to march incessantly around the house. There was very little dry land, after all. The rivers had swelled and covered the earth. The house had been built on stilts to anticipate the height of the water, and the ants had to go somewhere.

  Bream had come from a drier land, a land with grass and slopes and trees that stood respectfully back. During the dry season he had burned down acres of trees to make a clearing around his house, and he claimed land along the river and was intent on burning down acres and acres of forest, since he wanted to raise grains or cattle. But he wasn’t a good farmer; he couldn’t accept that there would always be flooding that would imperil his crops. Sometimes he burned trees simply because he couldn’t see anything but trees and vines and more trees and vines. He wanted an open prospect.

  It was impossible to see any distance in the rains. He had burned down the trees around him and planted grass seed sent from the north, but the grasses drowned as the river rose. He had the natives rope balsam saplings together so he could lay down dirt on them and seed them and have them float with the floods. If a man wanted a lawn, then he should have a lawn. In the wetness his house began to grow vines and leaves and he could hear the planks and walls move at night, sending out roots that clutched at chairs and tables. His dishes were covered in green slime, which returned mere minutes after being washed and wiped dry. Wiped dry? Nothing was dry. Even the innermost rooms began to drip moisture, tears that gathered and slid down every surface. The imported rugs were sponges that rotted and then kept wet; he left indented footprints where he walked.

  Recently, an Indian had come by in a canoe and offered him freshly killed meats, but Bream thought he saw a glint of gold rock in the bottom of the canoe and he pointed to that instead. The Indian shook his head no. Bream couldn’t understand what he was saying, and McClellan wasn’t around. Finally, as the Indian started to push off, Bream drew his gun out of frustration and shot him in the hand. He had meant it only as a warning, and it was merely an accident. He had wanted the rock and information about it. If there was gold here, he meant to get it. He was more used to shooting now; he would not make that mistake again. His patience was waning, though McClellan said he must have been wrong about the gold leaves. He said the gold was in the mountains.

  McClellan had a way of saying things, blandly but somehow pointed. Still, he was often right, and he spoke quite a lot of the native language. He was irritating but useful.

  The rain, on the other hand, was irritating beyond measure. The constant wet made his hands swell. He looked at his fingers one day and saw he had no fingerprints, just plump digits like grubs. His floating lawn began to rot, the wood on which the grasses were grown threw roots out like mats, with the grasses falling through them, ants crawling on top of them. Always and everywhere: ants.

  Bream hired natives whose sole job was to move about the house, killing ants. But the ants were quick, and endless.

  Because Bream trusted no one, he insisted that the natives bring him the dead b
odies of ants, as proof they were doing their job. He had seen them himself, bowls of dead ants, which he tossed into the waters to make sure they weren’t simply bringing him the same dead ants. McClellan had witnessed this and said, “You know, if you put all the ants in the world on one side of a scale, and humans on the other, I’ve heard that the ants would outweigh us by a factor of ten. They’re everywhere, in the deserts, in the arctic, in the walls of our houses. I don’t know if they’ve only counted the ants on the ground. Did they think about the ones below ground, crawling through their tunnels and their mounds? Quite architectural, those ants. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  Bream grunted. “My thoughts about them are not so philosophical.” He began to feel that somehow McClellan wasn’t completely on his side; that he kept an entirely too objective interest in what Bream did, and what the natives did, and what the ants did.

  Those miserable creatures found Bream every night and bit him. The bites itched and burned and suppurated. He had the servants check his bed each night, pulling off damp sheets, replacing the matting, and still the ants found him. They bit his eyebrows, his ankles, his ears. One night, he felt one bite his eyelid and froze, afraid to open his eyes, picking gently at his eyelid. His fingertips searched for an insect body, but it was too late. It had moved elsewhere. He could almost feel a small burst of insect contempt.

  The next day, his eye swollen, he and McClellan enlisted a native to take them to the nearest town of Yaquitos. He would purchase every last rusted can of insecticide the town held. He sat stiffly in the boat as the servant started the small motor. McClellan smoked a cigarette. There was only a small rain, which held steady as they reached their destination.

  They walked up and down the long street of Yaquitos, going into the small one-room stores, buying anything Bream could find with a skull and crossbones on it. Half of the spray cans said insectivo or the like, but the rest of them were nonspecific. Bream didn’t care what he killed. Kill the vines that crept through the house, kill the ants, kill the massive, noisy spiders—kill everything that lived in this infernal place. When the rains ceased, he would tear down, burn down everything that grew. He wanted to see a horizon, he wanted to look outside and see distance. There could be something hiding behind every tree in the Amazon, and no doubt there was—bugs, snakes, natives, big cats, alligators. Ants.

  The rain picked up as he added cans of insecticide to the bundle in his backpack. McClellan had a habit of hanging slightly behind him and observing what Bream did. Annoying. A wasp circled around Bream’s head and he took a can and sprayed it. They followed the street to the outdoor market beside the river, where Indians sold their Indian goods. McClellan had pointed out that there were two markets, really: one for the town natives and one for the jungle natives. Of course, he hadn’t used those terms. But just as there was more than one kind of ant, there was more than one kind of native. Was this a necessary piece of knowledge? Bream doubted it. Still, it amused him to think that one bunch of them was more sophisticated, more “civilized,” than the other.

  The town market was drenched. The fruits on display were rotting. The bins of fish disclosed obscene distortions, with pink lips and hairy ears. Were they truly fish? Vendors eyed him suspiciously. “What is it with them?” he asked McClellan abruptly.

  “Ah,” McClellan said, his voice carefully indifferent. “From their point of view, of course, people have vanished since your arrival. Workers, for instance.”

  “They forget the good I do for them,” Bream said. “I give them jobs. I’m providing for their future, too. They would starve without me.”

  McClellan was silent.

  “Of course there are accidents in physical labor,” Bream continued with a grunt. “I bet they lose a couple of boys a year when they go out hunting for their meat.”

  “These particular people eat more fish than meat,” McClellan answered. “And the fish have started to look different. They think you’re doing something to the water.”

  “I do nothing to the water,” Bream scoffed. “This place is its own kind of hell; I’m not surprised the fish are monstrous. I’m doing my best to improve things around here. Things they’re not familiar with. Sanity. Cleanliness. An end to the relentless jaws of everything here, big and small. Blame me because the fish look funny? Blame God or science or civilization itself. Blame the nature of things. I’m merely advancing civilization. They’ll thank me someday.”

  Still, the natives watched him silently with their baskets or tables of goods. Bream decided that silence must be part of the way they did transactions, perhaps to make the buyer uneasy. Bizarre, against natural expectation. They watched him as lizards did, ready to dart away or flick their tongues out.

  Up ahead, he saw a kind of alcove formed by huge palm leaves bound together. No doubt it was the jungle native’s market. Within it, a half-naked old crone with a thick black band on her upper arm said something menacing as he stopped to inspect her wares—twisted roots, leaves with sharp edges, bones. She had packets shaped from folded leaves as well, holding something. An unspotted orchid with a rotting stench stood up from the strip of bark that formed her rickety table. The orchid’s fingerlike white roots gripped the edge of the bark like claws.

  “What did she say?” he asked McClellan.

  “Something about your insecticide,” McClellan answered. “You know you’re still holding it, don’t you?” He was bemused.

  The old woman frowned slightly, and that irritated Bream beyond measure. An ant crawled across his neck and he reached back with two fingers of his free hand and pinched it. He flicked it away. He did not intentionally flick it at the old woman.

  She hissed and spoke again. He turned to McClellan, his eyebrows raised. A crack of thunder sounded in the distance.

  “She didn’t like that, I don’t think. Accused you of killing her daughter or something. Of course daughter is a kind of generic word around here,” he continued. “The trees are daughters, the rivers are daughters, perhaps even the ants are daughters. I wouldn’t be surprised. They believe the natural world has rights. Maybe even intelligence. I think they paint spiders for some of the festivals. To amuse them.” He grinned. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

  It began to rain harder (ah, had it eased up then, Bream wondered—eased up and he hadn’t noticed it?) and there was an eerie silence behind the sound of rain hitting leaves, and natives whispering, and boats not far away, and bowls and tables—the detritus of daily life. The insects were silent, waiting for some sign that there was a reason to announce themselves. The old woman stared at him fixedly. The rain ran rivulets down her shoulders. Bream swiped at water sourcing down his nose and into his mouth. He had the feeling that everything he did was momentous; maybe it was because everyone was still watching him. He couldn’t just turn and leave, because that would have been weakness. He wanted to show them his authority. He wanted to show them he was important.

  “Tell her I’ll buy all her things,” he said abruptly. His first impulse had been to smash all her shabby goods, run them off the table, kick anything in the baskets next to her. But he felt the eyes around him, heard the insect silence, and fell prey to the need to exercise his disdain and his power. This woman, this poor, illiterate Indian, was subject to his whims, good or bad. McClellan was saying something or other in what he imagined was the local patois and her eyes were still on Bream as he swept everything into the bag with the insecticides and then held out money, which she didn’t take. He dropped it on the ground in front of her. She pointed to the bag he held and spoke angrily.

  “What is it? What’s she saying?” Bream asked impatiently.

  McClellan had an odd sort of half-grin on his face. He bent and picked up the money again and showed it to Bream. “She said this isn’t the right kind of offering. Or gift, maybe. I think you were supposed to give her a gift. She’s hard to understand. She has a tough dialect. But I think you might have insulted her.”

  Bream looked into the woman�
��s face, which was sharp and almost sullen. He felt eyes on him, and he looked around slowly to the other Indians at their stalls—not stalls, really, bunches of items on the ground, small piles of goods. Every native there watched him closely; they didn’t avert their eyes when he looked their way.

  The woman clicked her tongue once. Bream looked at her then. Her eyes were small and dark and intense, and very steady. It was annoying how those savages felt they could stare at him. He almost had to shake himself, that was how mesmerizing the woman’s gaze and the natives’ silence was, but he roused himself, turned, walked over to the river, and threw the bag in.

  The air in the market began to thrum with indignation.

  McClellan hurried over to him “I think you’ve done something,” he said, surprised. “I think you may have gone too far.”

  The old woman’s anger was palpable and offensive as she shouted out unintelligible words to him. Bream walked back to her, wanting to stand in front of her, just stand there and show her who he was. She should look at him with respect. Instead, she pulled herself stiffly together and held her hand out, pointing at him. To his horror, the armband—or rather, what he’d mistakenly thought was an armband—began to move and break apart in small jostling pieces of some kind. The things raced along her outstretched hand and then jumped off her fingers, straight at him.

  Ants. Some made it to him, some fell to the ground and scurried towards him. He stumbled backwards, grabbing the can of insecticide from his pocket, and sprayed.

  The market broke into shouts and wails. The old woman stepped back and away while Bream dealt with an onrush of hands grabbing at the insecticide, jabbering madly. The can disappeared into the crowd and then the crowd itself began to gather its things impetuously, bending and swooping over their small wares, collapsing all of it all into small bundles.

  McClellan pulled Bream through the crowd as the natives moved off, glancing back over their shoulders, muttering at him in their heathen language. Within minutes, the market was empty.