Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Page 15

  5.

  The Terror by Night

  They wear crowns.

  In the dream, the Night Gaunts have crowns on their faceless heads, and each carries a mace and scepter cast in gold and adorned with gems. They are queens and kings of the land. Everyone bows down to them and worships except the child, whose legs race under his covers and whose eyes are tight clenched in sleep as always but who never escapes. The Night Gaunts are indifferent to his flight. They turn their faceless faces away. They confer over the great, mysterious business of Night Gaunts.

  The Night Gaunts shake with a kind of mouthless laughter. Oblivion makes them shake, the empty pleasure and the downright restfulness of it. A piece of the abyss is in them in the place where a man or woman or child would have a soul. The fragment stirs them into motion, though not as a human being can be stirred by the strange swayings and longings of a soul. But oblivion is in the childlike panic, fierce and rising, so that his legs cannot be still but always have to move under the quilts and blankets and sheets, no matter how much covering is piled on top of him.

  He will not bow down before them because they are ruthless and without pity, because they pluck out the mind with their clawed hands. No, he will not be a slave to their rule. He will dream the truth at night and hold it close so that he can write the words down in his foolscap notebook in the day.

  6.

  The Child Dreams of His Death

  First, know that he accepts it.

  Soon, very soon it won’t hurt anymore, the child thinks. In his dream, he is grown to be a man. The man has been in very great pain for a long time.

  He wants to dream a dream of his mother and father and all his lost family coming to welcome him into the next life where there is no poverty or madness or hurt, but the Night Gaunts stand in the way and will not let him see his people. He wants a dream like Christmas Day with the stable spilling with light and the God who was a child like himself, but he cannot believe that the Holy Child would take him by the hand and give him a gift. Somehow he cannot think of the words to ask. Yet he wants an angel to hover overhead, shedding golden notes that slip through his skin and sing in the very cells of his body, lighting up the tree that is his veins and sinking into the marrow of his bones. In one bright instant, he longs for all these.

  But the Night Gaunts block his sight, and so everything he sees is black and lightless, clawed and barbed. The only wings are not made of moonbeams or swansdown and peacock feathers but are like the wings of bats.

  Then the Night Gaunts fly him to their island and mountain and lock him in a parasomniac room made of great blocks of basalt with a roof constructed of a single, high-pitched piece of ruby-colored glass. His bed is a fallen monolith, his chair a stone. He perceives that, once again, he has been abandoned to loneliness. Worn from poverty and suffering, he sinks down on the rock bed and sleeps.

  There in the red-tinted darkness, he dreams. And now he dreams mightily, creating such spiked, barbarous horrors that the Night Gaunts wake to his dreams and sweat a substance resembling tears. It gathers slowly like the drops of dew on blades of grass when morning approaches.

  The black and red chamber begins to sing, emitting a sound like the sea trapped in a shell. The song strengthens until the red-hued ceiling of glass trembles and hums. Restless, the Night Gaunts climb into the sky and whirl like dry leaves on the gyring wind currents around the island.

  They begin at last to have faces.

  All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts

  Sonya Taaffe

  For all the family he had watched go down to the sea, Anson had never before seen anyone trying to drown.

  He had dozed most of the way from Boston, slid awkwardly against the graffiti-scratched window as the commuter train rattled its way from North Station to Gloucester and the winter-tinted world passed like a show of lantern slides every time he blinked awake. Strung between his dreams, Fenway-green cantilevers of bridges had given way to post-industrial warehouses clinging with snow like ghost signs, the sudden white-and-blue dazzle of salt marshes where islands of cordgrass rusted in sepia tone, all under a bleach-silvered sky, and he stepped down onto the platform with a waking jolt, half expecting to find himself still in his tangle of blankets in Allston and the ground line blessedly quiet all night. He was standing in a slush-piled parking lot with the train pulling on to Rockport behind him; he had the address Tony had left him and a backpack of convenience groceries from the Tedeschi’s across the street from his apartment and a name that he more than half-hoped was a mistake. Even in February, the salt damp of the harbor came off the wind like iridescence off a scale. But the house was real enough, steep-roofed and shingle-sided in two shades of off-cream, almost exactly a mile’s hike from the station, and there were second-floor keys in the mailbox like Tony had promised, and he felt like an idiot calling “Hello?” up the carpet-runnered stairs like the first girl in a slasher flick, but he did not want to find himself on the wrong end of a 911 call, either. There was no one in the living room with its uncurtained windows, no one sitting at the magazine-piled coffee table or sleeping on the sagging fawn-colored couch. He tapped at the door that looked like a bedroom, jammed half open with an ankle-winding jumble of clothes; he glanced into the kitchen with its dark-paneled cabinets and a refrigerator that hummed like a broken fan belt. Cold hung in the air like dust, as if no one had bothered with the heat in days. When he found the bathroom, he thought he was opening a closet door.

  In the tiny, curtain-darkened space wedged behind the sink and the toilet, something splashed, startled and sudden. Anson had just enough time to register the insufficient fluorescent bar over the mirror, the shadowy glint of spinal knobs as someone’s back curved palely away from him: a naked human figure climbing into the tub headfirst. Even so, it seemed such an awkward, improbable means of self-harm, it was not until the first strangling heave that he realized he should stop her.

  She fought him uncoordinatedly, but obstinately, even while her breath raled and bubbled and she coughed slippery gouts of water onto his corduroys and sweater, lung-wracked and still strong enough to land a wild fist under his ribs, so that he gulped a half-shot breath himself and slid abruptly down with his back to the slopping tub, the open door of the bathroom blocking the stretch of his legs. There was a radiator crammed beneath the towel rack, ticking and clinking faintly. Displaced water was seeping into the few dry patches left underneath him and it might have been hard rain all the way up Prospect Street for the condition his coat was in. Soaked and winded, suddenly spent enough to feel the absurdity of the situation, Anson looked over his shoulder at the woman on her hands and knees in the mostly emptied bathtub and met the pearl-black of her eyes for the first time.

  He said blankly, because Tony had not warned him, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Fuck you,” Gorgo Waite said thickly, and coughed some more.

  Under its dripping gloss of water, her skin was milky as old ice, so translucent across the promontories of cheekbone, collarbone, ribcage and hipbone that he wondered that she had not simply broken in his grasp, glassy as an abyssal fish. Bruises were already coming out under the pallor like a mottle of malachite, darkening her shoulders and the thin bracelet of her wrists. He could not tell her age; her tight hips and pale-nippled breasts could have been a starved woman’s or an unfinished girl’s, all tracks of human time wiped away with the softening of her unarmored skin, preparing itself for the scales that never came to its defense. The scarlet weals under her jaw flared raggedly, still gasping for the water her obstinate lungs refused.

  Her hair clung in wet coils to her naked skin, stranded black as calligraphy, and an old, familiar bitterness turned in his stomach, colder than anger. Save for the drowning-dark eyes, she had none of the old look about her. If he had saved her life, he had done her no favors.

  He got to his feet anyway, skidding only a little on the puddled tiles and the sodden violet bathmat; stopped himself from reaching for a handhold in the towel rack in case it
broke off. She was not looking at him, slowly pulling herself upright on the tub’s dun-colored rim. “Anson Penders,” he said into her silence. “You don’t know me. I promised my cousin I’d check in on you. He told me your name and how he met you. He didn’t tell me you were a risk to yourself.” Even his scarf was trailing damply off his neck, beading water at the ends of its brown plaid fringe. “I’d have asked for hazard pay.”

  The hawking noise she made might have been congestion or an opinion. He caught another all-black look, flicked from underneath water-weighted lashes, before she clarified it: “You’re the shittiest paramedic I’ve ever met in my life.”

  Anson snorted. “I’m an unemployed chemistry teacher. Currently canvassing for the census, which is why my cousin—who is a paramedic—thought I’d have the spare time to Samaritan you. Goes to show how much he knows about government work.” He knew how facetious he sounded; he could not think of any other way to reassure her. She kept her feet in the tub, her head turned away from him beneath the weed-black tangles of her hair; he had to lean against the doorframe to keep from looming over her. The bare curve of her back shone like a stripped shell. “He said you’ve been here since last night, is that right? You can think of it as a safe house, if you like. To be perfectly honest, I think it belongs to Tony’s girlfriend who’s out of town. I have some faint, horrible memory of being handed a bottle of vodka full of Swedish fish on that couch.”

  “Stop it.” She spoke quietly, but he heard the taut note in it. “Your creepy fucking cousin didn’t tell me anything about you or this house or why he didn’t take me to a hospital like a normal person. Just sat up with me all night, asking questions about my parents and my dreams and telling me it was going to be all right, until he had to leave for work in the morning without so much as a phone number or a forwarding address. So you’re going to tell me something I can trust, right now, or I’ll leave this house screaming and naked if I have to. Taking care of that on the list your cousin left for you?”

  Turned coldly toward him, her face looked even less human, cut sharply in from the cheekbones that broadened like fins toward her small, shallowly whorled ears: less like anyone who had ever come ashore from the black coral of Devil Reef. Anson breathed down the adrenaline skip in his throat and prayed for the least lecturing voice of his life.

  “Going by your name, you’re a direct descendant of Carleton Waite and the woman he married out of the sea and called Keziah as long as she was on land. The churchyards of Innsmouth are as lost as the rest of the town, but there were never any headstones for her or her children because she took them all back down with her after Carleton’s death. Some of them married first. Some of them left children. Either your family split off early or they really went underground after ’28, because Tony’s an amateur genealogist as well as an asshole and he had no idea there were actual, in-the-telephone-book Waites out there who weren’t either unrelated or already in touch. You dream of the sea, and of things in the sea, and you’ll drown before you let yourself die on land like your parents or grandparents.” A silvery translucence flickered across her eyes and he hesitated, waiting for the clench of her hands or the twist of her mouth, but she merely looked at him. “You can trust that I don’t know any more about you than that. You’ll have to tell me the rest. If you want to,” he finished hastily, hearing a beat too late the last sentence like a good cop or a disappointed teacher. “It’s not like we have to talk.”

  He could not read Gorgo’s expression, not even her unblinking eyes. When she finally spoke, her voice was shaded with something even less identifiable: he could not imagine that she was really amused.

  “So you’re not here to initiate me into the mysteries of the sea-mother whose faces rise and fall with the countless waves and her consort who makes the fish shoal as thick as cornfields in the fall?”

  The last time he had heard those words, his mother had still been walking, affectionately tousling her youngest child’s hair with one dry-skinned, nail-thickened hand as he asked for another story of sea-cities whose names rilled from her tongue like a net of bubbles, sea-temples sunken in a tourmaline gleam where the bright and dark weeds streamed upward from terraces and colonnades of basalt and whalebone and corals branching like veins of the human heart.

  Decades and states and losses away from the shores of that sea, Anson said in amazement, “Fucking Tony,” and heard for the first time the newest of his cousins laughing, bitter as brine.

  §

  Tony had gotten the call a little before midnight: a naked woman washed up at the foot of Bass Rocks Road, threadily alive and still trying to crawl into the silver-shifting sea as a pair of horrified boyfriends worked to stop her. Romantic beachcombers a moment before, shivering now on the windstruck shingle while one hurriedly stripped his overcoat and the other swiped at his phone—really wrong with her, she’s freezing and her eyes—no, she’s moving, she’s making noises, but it’s like she can’t tell we’re here, she just keeps clawing at the sand and struggling. I don’t know if she’s high or she’s brain-damaged or… Yes, Jason’s got her, he’s got his coat around her, but she’s not responding—and Anthony Woodhouse who was a Marsh on his mother’s side had looked at the high tide and the full moon and earnestly, unrelentingly talked his partner into agreeing to drive an unconscious, blanket-wrapped woman to a two-family Victorian on Elwell Street instead of the ER at Addison Gilbert and convincing the dispatcher it had all been a false alarm. You know they won’t know what to do with her, if I’m right. And you know I’m right. Look at her. Come on, Cau. We’ve always taken care of our own. Cláudia Rocha might have told him to fuck himself then, but in the three years she had worked with Tony, she had watched the slow changes move over him like a wave wearing its patience into sea-cliff stone, eroding a little more each time of the lanky, lantern-boned man whose hair had glittered silver and black once like mackerel scales; she said tightly, You better be right, and turned off Bass Avenue.

  Or so Anson gathered, coming blearily awake in the cold moonlight with Tony’s voice running on in his ear like the tireless line of the sea. He had forgotten his dreams, only that they were choppy and he missed Meredith’s weight in the blankets beside him; he looked to the window for the time and saw the cloud cover reflecting the skyline like bioluminescence, small warm-colored points of light and cool ones in a web of milky haze. Brighton Avenue on a weeknight was white noise beyond the dry hissing of the heat in the baseboards. The shouting four floors down in the street was almost certainly students. He said carefully, for what felt like the hundredth time, “You do know that Boston isn’t even in the same county as the North Shore?”

  “She’s one of the family, all right, Anson? She gave me her name and that clinched it. Can you just look in on her tomorrow while I’m at work?”

  “Tomorrow? Don’t you work nights?”

  Tony drew an exasperated breath that sizzled through the old receiver like a backwash of spindrift, static froth. “Most nights—and I’ll really be in the shit with Cláudia if I try to talk her into playing nursemaid to a girl she’s already thinking about reporting me for. You can drive out in the morning—”

  “Meredith’s the one with the car, and both he and it are in Chicago—”

  “—and I’ll come by for her at the end of the day. Totally domestic. You’ll be home in time for dinner. You’re dating a guy named Meredith?”

  Because it was Tony, he only sounded bright-eyed with interest, and because it was Tony, Anson said nothing. The receiver was heavily cold against his cheek, half crushed into the pillows where he had dragged it in the first adrenaline jolt of thinking it was Meredith. He had a moment’s vindictive regret that his lover had not been home to answer the phone instead—Meredith Radke looked like the amiable second lead in a Depression-era comedy, the kind who was always a beat behind the screwball and never had any luck with girls, but he was not even faintly a night person and had never had any patience with the side of Anson’s family that call
ed asking favors. He had sent pictures of breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s that morning, orange juice and an omelet with at least two vegetables Anson disliked and one he was allergic to, signed VICTORY! Sometimes Anson let himself think they might move in together; more often he remembered that he had never stuck out a relationship more than five years and the ease of the last year and a half still surprised him. He was sliding back into dreams, stone-skipping off domestic: Meredith’s heavy sunflower hair, as tousled from sleeping as though he had been in a bar fight; the way he burrowed under blankets and pillows, one arm always stuck out at improbable marionette angles. Anson hitched his chin up against the cold plastic and said very clearly, because it was the question he should have asked as soon as he realized who was on the other end of the call, “Don’t tell me you couldn’t find any other poor relations to bother in the middle of the night. Why me, Tony?”

  “Well…” He could hear the equivocation in his cousin’s voice as plainly as if he were watching Tony’s loose-shouldered shrug, not quite lying while he rummaged for the next credible thing that was not quite the truth, either, his confidence trickster’s transparent grin keeping the one real secret safe. The last time they had seen one another in person, Tony had slouched along at Anson’s elbow in an old denim jacket nearly the color of his prominent eyes, a much taller man than he let himself look; he had pointed out his favorite objects in the Peabody Essex Museum, a set of eighteenth-century brass knuckles, a greened-over figurehead with a sweet, salt-cracked smile, and insisted on paying for dinner at Okea even after Anson nearly flipped a piece of tekkadon across the table with the full-body vehemence of interrupting, No, of course not, it’s not complicated for you. They had walked silently along Derby Wharf before Tony drove him back to Boston, the last of the sunset crumbling out of the clouds in slipper-shell pinks and slaty blues. He’s family, he found himself saying to Meredith, who said as usual, So? It was one of the reasons Anson loved him.