Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Page 39

  I stumbled up the steps, jiggled the knob. It gave. I thrust it open with my shoulder and slammed it shut behind me, then felt for the deadbolt and twisted it with all my strength. It should’ve been rusty; it should’ve been broken. But against all reason, the bolt slid and the door locked behind me.

  I whirled around, waiting until my eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Outside, the sloshing sounds grew nearer and nearer. Whatever I did, I couldn’t stand there. I shrank down against the floor, prayed the building wasn’t full of snakes, and crept toward the belfry.

  Eventually my eyes adjusted. Pale light floated through the chinks between the boards. The pews were still lined up, heaped with refuse from the collapsing ceiling. A thick miasma of mouse urine and dust filled the air, and rodents skittered unseen in the rafters. All I could hear was the roar of the rain on the roof and the jingling of my spurs.

  Then something wet slapped on the wall. Another joined it, and another, until uncountable creatures drummed together with uncoordinated limbs. The building groaned; a window cracked; dust hissed from the ceiling.

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted.

  But the drumming only intensified, and as did the unspeakable babbling. I clapped my hands over my ears and screamed back at them: swear words, Bible verses, a few lines from classics. Lightning burst nearby and illuminated the church in broken slashes. Printed painstakingly on the wall in magic marker were careful squares filled with hieroglyphs, written by an unknown hand. In the shifting blue light, each thick squiggle was a worm twitching. The more I looked at them, the hazier and uglier I felt. A weird effect passed over me: I could almost imagine a deep, chanting voice, in a guttural language unlike any from a human throat.…

  I whirled and stumbled—fueled solely by terror, and not by conscious thought—up to the belfry. I registered the cold and wet only dimly, as though from a memory, and my movements grew sluggish and poorly defined. The world seemed unfocused and I had the odd sensation that my consciousness was off-kilter from my body. Worst of all, the chanting I thought I had imagined was growing louder, so deep that it vibrated through my body. I jumped when I heard the bell tolling—an awful, warped, discordant sound!

  In that instant, I totally despaired. My tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. In the Pentecostal tradition, I should’ve been able to use the name of God like a hammer, but never before had he seemed so inadequate. I longed for the solid grip of my gun.

  When I stepped up into the belfry, I crunched over the abandoned owl’s nest and was stricken silent. An uncountable horde of River Things swayed around the church, and just past them… Let’s just say that the church as I had known it was out in the middle of nowhere, a broken edifice with boarded windows. Somehow, during my headlong flight up to the belfry, a small town had sprouted around us. I could just see the hints of right angles, the rooftops of amateur shanties, and the glitter of manmade lights. Shadows in the shapes of men wavered down unseen roads, hunched beneath invisible burdens.

  When the lightning flickered again, I thought I saw the entire countryside overgrown with the specters of long-abandoned farmhouses and churches and post offices and grain silos and Comanche tipis, some juxtaposed over each other and semi-transparent, all crumbling and half-dead in the dark. It was as though I stood over some terrible vision of the past and the present and the future, all coinciding in the same space.

  I rushed back down into the church. To my horror, I stepped into the dull yellow heat of some other time. The interior had been swept, the roof patched, the windows covered with tarps. The pews and pulpit had been stacked on top of one another and thrust to the walls. There in the center of the room, bulging grotesquely and stinking of rot, was a throbbing, humming mass of flesh. By its blackened head and miserable eyes, I recognized the monster hog, but something terrible had happened to its body.

  God, the smell! Like burning hair and burning meat and burning plastic. The sound! A steady, omnipresent pounding, a series of singular words chanted below a level I could detect. As for what it looked like, I can’t quite tell you. The texture was a confusing patchwork of prickly, smooth, hairy, and feathered, all tarred down. It was a bulbous shape, a fat swollen boil—a heart? A tumor? A fetus? If a fetus, it was doubled up within a thick translucent sac, many-limbed, many-faced, and sported a dozen oblong black shapes that suggested undeveloped eyes. If a tumor, it bubbled all over with irregular growths—cauliflower-like, fluid-filled bubbles heaping ten feet high. If a heart, it sprouted with rubbery arterial branches and pulsed in regular beats, roughly and with great struggle. The chanting I had heard seemed to originate from the torn arterial mouths. As for the hog himself, he heaved with uneven breaths and uttered nothing.

  Lying beside that heaving alien mass were carefully arranged organs and limbs and hides, laved in that peculiar tarlike substance I’d seen bleeding from the rocks near the river. Piles of the selfsame rocks had been heaped in that room as well, cracked open with hammers. Here and there a fleshy organic substance jutted out of a broken stone. Other samples of their kind were stitched together like living carpets, quivering in terrible synchronicity with the mass in the center of the room.

  Squatting near the door was a group of River Things, sopping wet and singing. Some were stitching up the fleshy pieces with big bone needles and hemp rope, both they and the fleshy pieces twitching with every jab; others were bathing organs in black soup; still more were pouring buckets of water on their fellows in an assembly-line fashion. They throbbed in time with the beating tumor, thrown into shadow by its weird yellow glow.

  The hog’s mouth opened and exhaled; the three mouths hummed something low, too low for me to hear, and all of those River Things looked up and regarded me at the same time. You know how old medieval artists depict saints with haloes as a sign they’ve been touched by god? Well, that monster hog and those River Things had some kind of halo, something I couldn’t see but could feel, like they had been touched by some baleful intelligence.

  I flipped out my pocketknife and backed up the stairs. Ha! Like threatening a bull with your pinky finger!

  The front door broke open and two River Things slithered into the building. They dragged with them the poor broken body of their brother, the one I had shot. When it saw me, it raised its pathetic arms to me, turned two strikingly human eyes to mine, and said in a strangled voice that I still recognized: “Ms. Byrd! Please don’t be afraid.”

  The unspoken truce broke. River Things dropped their burdens and charged, and I spun on my heels and raced up into the belfry. Crunching through the owl’s nest, I ducked through the open window and jumped out onto the roof, which had been hastily patched with black garbage bags and rusty tin squares. I saw two things in a flash: first, that there was a truck roaring along the road, the phantom buildings rippling around it like mirages. Second, that dozens of River Things were sluicing out of the belfry like a swarm of octopi.

  I sprinted across the roof, tiles splintering underneath my heels. Over my shoulder breathed an overpowering musk; the whole building shuddered beneath dozens of beating feet. My heel stabbed through the roof and I staggered. Wet, burning cords lashed around my wrist and calf, but I dragged my captors with me through sheer force. From behind me, another familiar voice called out.

  “Wait! Wait! Come back!” it said.

  Terror jagged through me. I didn’t dare stop to think about it. Instead, propelled by sheer terror, I drove forward, over the church roof, and sprang free. For a second I hovered over a rolling black sea of arms and legs. The next, the cords snapped taut and I swung back toward the building. I smashed into the church wall. At the same time, the River Things fished for me with long, ropy arms, snagging me ’round my arms and legs and throat. I clawed madly for handholds under the eaves and jammed my boots into the overhang. It didn’t matter. Inch by inch, they pried me out.

  They had just managed to jerk my legs up onto the roof when someone leaned on their car horn.

  I lifted my head. It was the truck
I had seen from the top of the church, parked half in the ditch. Illuminated by an unseen sun, Shelly Ross stood out in the unreal darkness, substantial in jeans and faded flannel. Up went her rifle, relaxed against her shoulder.

  The muzzle flashed. Thunder rumbled.

  A wet pop. The River Things recoiled altogether, the cords loosed, and hot tar sprayed over my back. There are no words for how hot that was. Like lying on a stovetop. But the shot was the distraction I needed; the River Things released me. I rolled over the roof, hit the ground, and staggered straight for the fence.

  The rifle cracked out again. Seven yards away, a River Thing went down in a blossom of black syrup. I felt that shot all the way through my back and staggered back from the force of it. Around me, River Things reeled. A wordless hate rolled out of the church, followed by a low moaning sound like an organ out of tune. But I kept going. Even as Ms. Ross fired into the horde over and over again, and I felt the phantom bullets ripping through my spine, I kept going. River Things parted around me, darting in every direction, fleeing to the river. I was forgotten.

  White-faced, I lunged to the fence-line. Two bedraggled coyote skins hung there, facing inward; with a start, I saw them not as lifeless skins, but two grinning gatekeepers. The illusion faded as swiftly as it had materialized. I became aware of a growing light and warmth; I vaguely recall tumbling over the fence and being bundled into the warm cab of a truck.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” Ms. Ross asked.

  I would’ve been glad to tell her, honestly, but I passed out instead.

  §

  I had terrifying dreams, most of which I forgot before waking up. The ones I recall include vivid images of the Brazos River valley, black and lonely, viewed from a dozen different viewpoints at once; nervous hogs stared at me from the riverbank. My hunger and emptiness were bottomless, and I blazed with flame from the center of my soul to the tips of all my fingers.

  I was in the hospital a long time. I won’t bore you with the details. The real story is the black goop that had hit me in the back. The doctors couldn’t wash it off—in fact, water only seemed to encourage it. It stretched out dozens of groping fingers and clung to everyone who touched me. That’s how I had all the skin chopped off from the back of my neck down to my shoulder blades. My surgeon complained that it had been spreading faster than he could operate and sent several samples up north for study. I never did hear back about the test results.

  Here’s the clincher: afterward, everyone told me I hadn’t been gone for a Saturday afternoon jaunt, but for two weeks. Pistol had raced home with both an empty saddle and holster, and everyone feared the worst. They had been combing the countryside for me ever since—including several large parties that had gone riding down to the river itself. I couldn’t begin to account for it. I started combing through my memories, trying to fit days into minutes.

  It only got worse when I asked about Dr. Peaslee.

  “Yeah, I remember a Dr. Peaslee,” said Ms. Ross. “Sometime in ’71, I think? He wanted to see the stones down by the river. Last sign we found of him was his car sitting in front of an open gate. Strangest thing was that he’d left his shoes in the cab. We had no idea what to tell his family.” She’d narrowed her eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  She was the first person I told the full story to.

  Not long afterward, Ms. Ross burned the church down. Sometime later, I heard she went down to the Brazos with dynamite. Nobody will tell me what happened after that. I’m not sure anybody actually knows, but I’ve got my theories.

  I’ve since moved far away from that rural wasteland, but it has never moved away from me. The dreams came back in later years, and sometimes I am possessed by an intense longing to head down to the river and check on the rocks.

  As bad as that is, nothing haunts me more than the memories I have of that voice I heard on the church roof. No, it wasn’t Dr. Peaslee—although it was definitely his voice I’d heard in the sanctuary. It was my voice that I had heard on the rooftop. It was my own voice, calling me back to the patchwork god. There’s work to be done, it says, before the Lord can swim down to the gulf. There are bones to splint and there are muscles to weave and there is a coat to stitch. There’s so much work to do before the third gate opens.

  So much work. So little time.

  Author Biographies

  Joyce Carol Oates is an established and highly prolific writer who has written dozens of novels, shorts story collections, young adult fiction, plays, poetry and essays. Her first published book was the 1963 story collection By the North Gate, followed by her debut novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Other notable works among many include National Book Award winner them (1969) and her 26th novel, We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). The novels The Falls (2004) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) were both New York Times bestsellers, while 2012’s Patricide was published as an eBook novella. Oates has also written suspense novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, Oates has won many of awards over the course of her career, including the Prix Femina Etranger and the Pushcart Prize.

  Colleen Douglas, a graduate in Creative Writing, has a South American background. She hails from the former British colony of Guyana and has lived in London for over two decades. She has always enjoyed works with some form of darkness, be it the gradual creeping or more blatantly obvious kind. Her interest in writing began at the age of 14, when she wrote her first horror story, after reading her father’s copy of Burial: The Manitou by Graham Masterton. She listens to rock music when writing fight scenes and haunts cafés when she begins and completes a project. The latter may be a frame narrative habit, she cannot honestly account for the former. As a writer, she has always been drawn to the unconventional. She writes dark fantasy with elements of horror and science-fiction. She loves her eclectic disposition and storytelling diversity, as it places her in a unique atmosphere, with new challenges to conquer each time she writes.

  Tamsyn Muir is a writer from Auckland, New Zealand, currently based and teaching in the United Kingdom. Her short-form horror fiction has appeared in such publications as Nightmare Magazine, Weird Tales and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Cat Hellisen is a South African-born writer of fantasy for adults and children. Her work includes the novel When the Sea is Rising Red and short stories in Apex, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction, Shimmer Magazine, and Tor.com. Her latest novel, Beastkeeper, is a fairytale for the loveless.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and the New York Times has declared her “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in twelve volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she is editing her thirteenth and fourteenth collections – Beneath an Oil Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume 2) for Subterranean Press and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales for Centipede Press. She has recently concluded Alabaster, her award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics. She will soon begin work on her next novel, Interstate Love Song, based on “Interstate Love Long (Murder Ballad #8).” She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Lucy Catherine Brady grew up as a scruffy metal-head boy from St Albans, Hertfordshire. At age seventeen she discovered the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and has spent the subsequent decade exploring Weird in all its many forms (during which time it also transpired that she was a woman). In 2006 she moved to Norwich to study English at the University of East Anglia, graduating in 2010 with an MA in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Most recently, she has become a contributing editor for Project Praeterlimina, a speculative fiction blog, which she produces in collaboration with a number of artists and writers from Norwich and Brighton. Her interest
s include Latin, early modern philosophy, and the music of Fields of the Nephilim.

  Marly Youmans writes in a number of forms, small and large. She writes poems. She once was mad enough to write an epic poem. She writes novels, though people say (sometimes disapprovingly!) that she never does the same thing twice. And she writes Southern fantasy novels for children veering toward adulthood; she hadn’t planned on that one, but unexpected things happen after children are born. Her collaborations with artists include work with painters Makoto Fujimura, Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Wales), Graham Ward (England), Lynn Digby (Ohio, US), and composer Paul Digby (UK-born but now an Ohioan).

  Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), as well as in various anthologies including The Humanity of Monsters and Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.

  Gemma Files is a former film critic and teacher turned award-winning horror author, best-known for her Hexslinger Series of Weird Westerns (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones, all from ChiZine Publications). She has also published two collections of short fiction, two chapbooks of speculative poetry and a story cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven, CZP). Her new novel, Experimental Film, will be available as of November, 2015. To learn more, check up on her at http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca, or follow Gemma on Twitter, Tumblr or Livejournal.