Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Read online

  He flung it aside, quickly, on the river sand. Then, lifting Arpad in his arms, he lurched and staggered toward the remaining boat. Alternately carrying and dragging his burden, Tefere reached the boat at last. With the remainder of his failing strength he propped Arpad in the stern against the pile of equipment.

  Tefere’s fever was mounting apace. After much delay and with tedious, half-delirious exertions, he pushed off from the shore and rowed intermittently until the fever mastered him wholly and the oar slipped from oblivious fingers…

  Tefere awoke in the yellow glare of dawn, his senses comparatively clear. His illness had left a great languor, but his first thought was of Arpad. He twisted about and sat facing his companion.

  Arpad still reclined, half sitting, half lying against the pile of blankets. His knees were drawn up, his hands clasping them as if in rigor. His features had grown as stark and ghastly as those of a dead man; however, the thing that caused Tefere to gasp with horror was –

  During the interim of Tefere’s delirium and his lapse into slumber, the monstrous plant bud had grown again with rapidity from Arpad’s head. A loathsome pale-green stem was mounting thickly and had started to branch like antlers after attaining a height of six or seven inches.

  More than this, similar growths had issued from the eyes and their stems, climbing vertically across the forehead, had entirely displaced the eyeballs. They were branching like the thing from the crown. The antlers were all tipped with pale vermilion. They quivered, nodding rhythmically in the warm, windless air. From the mouth another stem protruded, curling upward like a long and whitish tongue. It had not yet begun to divide.

  Tefere closed his eyes to shut out the sight. In his mind’s eye, he still saw the cadaverous features, the climbing stems that quivered against the dawn like ghastly hydras. They seemed to be waving toward him, growing and lengthening as they did so. His eyes snapped open with a start of new terror—that the antlers were actually taller than they had been a few moments previous.

  After that he sat watching them in a sort of baleful hypnosis. The illusion of the plant’s visible growth and freer movement increased upon Tefere. Arpad, however, did not stir and his parchment face appeared to shrivel and fall in, as if the roots of the growth were draining his blood, devouring his very flesh in their hunger.

  Tefere wrenched his eyes away and stared at the river shore. The stream had widened and the current had grown more sluggish. He tried to figure out their location, looking vainly for some familiar landmark in the monotonous dull-green cliffs of jungle that lined the margin.

  His mind began to wander with an odd inconsequence, coming back always, in a sort of closed circle, to the thing that was devouring Arpad. With a flash of scientific curiosity he found himself wondering to what genus it belonged. It was neither fungus nor pitcher plant, nor anything that he had ever encountered or heard of in his explorations. It must have come, as Arpad had suggested, from an alien world: it was nothing that the earth could conceivably have nourished.

  He felt, with a comforting assurance, that Arpad was dead. That, at least, was a mercy. But even as he shaped the thought Tefere heard a low, guttural moaning and peering at Arpad, he saw that his limbs and body were twitching slightly. The twitching increased and took on a rhythmic regularity, though at no time did it resemble the agonized and violent convulsions of the previous day. It was plainly automatic and Tefere saw that it was timed with the languorous swaying of the plant. The effect on the watcher was insidiously mesmeric and once Tefere caught himself beating the rhythm with his foot.

  He tried to pull himself together, groping desperately for something to which his sanity could cling. His illness returned: fever, nausea, and revulsion… But before he yielded to it utterly, he drew his loaded revolver from its holster and fired six times into Arpad’s quivering body. He knew that he had not missed, but after the final bullet Arpad still moaned and twitched in unison with the swaying of the plant, and Tefere, sliding into delirium, heard still the ceaseless, automatic moaning.

  There was no time in the world of seething unreality and shore-less oblivion through which he drifted. When he came to himself again, Tefere could not know if hours or weeks had elapsed. But he knew at once that the boat was no longer moving; lifting himself dizzily, he saw that it had floated into shallow water and mud and was nosing the beach of a tiny, jungle-tufted isle in mid-river. The putrid odor of slime was about him like a stagnant pool and he heard the strident humming of insects.

  It was either late morning or early afternoon, for the sun was high. Lianas were drooping above him from the island trees like uncoiled serpents and orchids, marked with mottling, leaned toward him from lowering boughs. Immense butterflies went past on sumptuously spotted wings.

  He sat up, feeling very giddy and lightheaded, and faced again the horror that accompanied him. The thing had grown incredibly: the three-antlered stems mounting above Arpad’s head had become gigantic and had put out masses of ropy feelers that tossed in the air, as if searching for support. In the topmost antlers a prodigious blossom had opened—a sort of fleshy disk, broad as a man’s face and white as leprosy.

  Arpad’s features had shrunk until the outlines of every bone were visible. He was a mere death’s head in a mask of human skin and beneath his clothing, his body was little more than a skeleton. He was quite still now, except for the communicated quivering of the stems.

  Tefere wanted to hurl himself forward in a mad impulse to grapple with the growth. But a strange paralysis held him back. The plant was like a living and sentient thing—a thing that watched him, that dominated him with its superior will. And the huge blossom, as Tefere stared, took on the dim semblance of a face. It was somehow like the face of Arpad, but the lineaments were twisted all awry and were mingled with those of something inhuman. Tefere could not move—he could not take his eyes from the abnormality.

  By some miracle, his fever had left him and it did not return. Instead, there came an eternity of frozen fright and madness in which he sat facing the plant. It towered before him from the dry, dead shell that had been Arpad, its swollen, glutted stems and branches swaying gently, its huge flower leering at him with its travesty of a human face. He thought that he heard a low, singing sound, ineffably sweet, but whether it emanated from the plant or was a mere hallucination of his overwrought senses he could not know.

  The hours went by and a grueling sun poured down its beams like molten lead. His head swam with weakness and heat, but he could not relax the rigor of his posture. There was no change in the nodding monstrosity, which seemed to have attained its full growth above the head of its victim. After a long interim, Tefere’s eyes were drawn to the shrunken hands of Arpad, which still clasped drawn-up knees in a spasmodic clutch. Through the ends of the fingers, tiny white rootlets had broken and were writhing slowly in the air, groping, it seemed, for a new source of nourishment. Then from the neck and chin, other tips were breaking and over the whole body the clothing stirred in a curious manner, as if with the crawling of hidden lizards.

  At the same time the singing grew louder, sweeter, and the swaying of the great plant assumed an indescribably seductive tempo. It was like the allurement of voluptuous sirens or the deadly languor of dancing cobras. Tefere felt an irresistible compulsion: a summons was being laid upon him and his drugged mind and body must obey it. The very fingers of Arpad, twisting, seemed to beckon him. Suddenly he was on his hands and knees in the bottom of the boat. Inch by inch, terror and fascination contending in his brain, he crept forward, dragging himself over the disregarded bundle of orchid plants until his head was against the withered hands of Arpad, from which hung the questing roots.

  Some spell had made him helpless. Tefere felt the rootlets as they moved like delving fingers through his hair and over his face and neck, and started to strike in with agonizing, needle-sharp tips. He could not move; he could not even close his eyelids. In a frozen stare, he saw the gold and carmine flash of a hovering butterfly as the
roots began to pierce his pupils.

  Amid the ever-growing web of the bloated and colossal plant in its upper branches, through the still, stifling afternoon, a second flower began to unfold.

  The Woman in the Hill

  Tamsyn Muir

  November 11, 1907

  Elm Cottage, Turanga

  Waikopua Creek, New Zealand

  Dear Dorothy,

  This is the last time I intend ever to write to you. Though you may take this letter as a freak or crank, I ask that you reconsider how likely it is that I would write such madness—that is, unless I knew it were the truth. In my need to convince you I will lay out the events using only fact—what I saw with my own eyes and have subsequently acted upon based on rational belief—and at the last, pray to God you believe me.

  I know you heard the gossip and the insinuation surrounding my young friend Elizabeth W–. I will emphasise again her workaday nature and good common sense, not at all given to the morbid or fantastic, the model of a farmer’s wife. This concerns last April, when she had been recently married and had moved to the property opposite the old Broomfield slip. Regarding my silence on the scandal that surrounded her afterward, I may only defend myself by saying I thought it none of my business to relate.

  It must have been eleven o’clock one summer’s night when I was startled from sleep by a fearful knocking. It was such a frenetic scraping and hammering that I would have been up and dressing at that alone, and with Kenneth’s gun, even had I not recognised Elizabeth calling for help. Her voice was so slurred that for a moment I thought her drunk, and when I let her in I thought worse. She was shivering and febrile in my kitchen for a long time—so unable to talk and so fearful that I half-convinced myself that the foolish rumours were true and we were under invasion by the Māori. After a strong cup of tea and some whisky she told me this:

  An old friend of hers had lived on the Peninsula and her sad story was well-known there. The husband worked in transporting wood down to the estuary and was often away and she left alone. This friend, Alice N—, missed a visit to Elizabeth one day, and the postman found the house empty. Everyone thought she had been called away and thought too little of it, but then the husband came back months later and found his wife gone and being a grim and miserable man made any number of accusations. It was a sad, short scandal. I did not think it unusual in this country, where English brides come to marry and then regret, but Elizabeth found it uncharacteristic and went herself to the Peninsula cottage. The house was shut up by then. The husband had left for Auckland and no trace of Alice remained. But the whole preyed on Elizabeth’s mind and she found something so unwholesome about the mystery that she determined to investigate.

  It being early in the day, she took to the bush behind the house. I acknowledge that this would be foolish for most, but in Elizabeth’s defence it was dry weather, no chance of slips. She had enough bush-sense to know when she had to turn back. She was sufficiently suspicious but not so alarmed as to get assistance. She knew there was no danger in Clifton and certainly not from the local tribes. I cannot blame her for it now. She examined the back of the property and past the Waikopua into the hills. There was nothing of Alice—or it seemed so—and here, Elizabeth quit her story and let out a trill of laughter.

  It made me jump; Dorothy, it was the awful laughter of a hysteric. She would not be calmed until I locked the door and lit the fire. When she looked at me her eyes were red as though she had been weeping, but there was not a tear-stain on her face. When more composed she told me that, deep in a hot and untidy part of the valley, she had seen a door in the hill—not the remnants of a pā or even an old raupō hut—but a door.

  When I questioned her on this she described a portal—a cave entrance that had been propped with slabs of stone, one atop two others like a mantel, and that the stone had been crudely worked. The carvings did not resemble native carvings and Elizabeth could not really describe what they did resemble, except that they were ugly and looked as though they had been done in violence: as though someone had taken a chisel and scored cuts to no purpose. I gave her another blanket and I asked if she had gone inside.

  Yes, naturally. She had prowled around the outside and found that the earth around did not crumble, and that the doorway was wide and tall and could have easily taken a man twice her breadth and size. I did not chide her for going inside, for I was too appalled and bewildered and she continued in a mutter and did not look up from her tea:

  She had gone inside. She had found the passage quite spacious. She had meant to turn back once reaching the end of this corridor, but that it had made a steep turn and she had seen a light at the end: not torchlight, but the sickly radiance one sees in the Aranui grottoes. And it was not a cavern at all, she said, but made. I questioned her on this. Elizabeth did not answer. There were many corridors leading off from a main chamber and her assumption at this point was that she had found some horrid smuggling cave or tuckaway. There were things in the alcoves but she said she had not touched them and repeated this as though it was important, that she had not touched them.

  All this time she had been calling for Alice and not listening, and then she became aware of a sound. It was the incessant lapping of water on stone. She pushed on down until she reached the cathedral-room of this catacomb, very high and square, and here there was a great pool of slow-moving water sloshing up against the rock. Here also there was a stone block she described as being about hip height and an enormous basin. Standing there was Alice, said Elizabeth. And after that she fled.

  I was greatly puzzled, Dorothy. When I asked her to explain, Elizabeth began to shake again and would not drink, and she pushed off the blanket as though she were hot. She kept muttering catches of nonsense. She said that Alice was not right. Unwell, I asked, or somehow injured? No; but all the same she was not right. The two had talked, and Alice had claimed—and I confess the word gave me a thrill of strange horror—that she was imprisoned. Elizabeth could not say any more. Now indeed I thought that I had unearthed the source of all her misery—that in an uncharacteristic terror she had fled back out into the bush and the upper air, and left her friend behind. Now she was consumed by guilt and shame. I told her that I would fetch the men from Whitford Hall and we would go to the cave at once.

  Dorothy, here Elizabeth screamed. Her voice was the idiot squeal of an animal. No! she said, no! It was too late, Alice had gone now. Elizabeth crawled from her chair and kneeled in front of me and clawed at my floorboards beyond reason until I saw her fingernails split, and she cried out again and what she said made me afraid in all the ways it should have made me pity her hysteria:

  “But I’m here—tell me I’m here, Caroline—for the love of God, keep me here!”

  I gave her what comfort I could give a madwoman, put her in the spare bedroom and sent for her husband at first light. Come morning she was so weary that she was biddable, though also hollow-eyed and stupid, like a dreamer waking in a strange room. Looking back—the madness in me to let her go!—but what choice did I have? It was nonsense. She had experienced a cruel scare for someone else’s benefit, or a nightmare of the subconscious, or some other sad and inexplicable reason that would come to light eventually. She needed rest and not pandering. Yet as she was led away my palms were tight and hot, for there was a look in her eyes that is inane to describe, yet I must describe it: it was the dead terror of a man before the Pit.

  Time lulled me into an uneasy security. My evenings never recovered. I had even ventured with Elizabeth one hot day to the Peninsula, in order to lay her fears to final rest, though she startled like a white-eyed colt the whole venture. Naturally, there was no door. We retraced her steps and found the valley she had come to in her story, and there was nothing but dead trunks of the rough tree fern where a door had been in her memory. I even pushed hard at the earth and scrabbled around at the rocks to show there was nothing beneath, but at this she shuddered and pulled at my sleeves to stop.

  “Don’t! Lord, don’
t, Caroline,” she said lowly. “We’ll find nothing.”

  The next three months I heard from her seldom and after six I heard nothing at all. She had grown increasingly withdrawn and was “out” to callers when neighbours knew perfectly well she was in, and would plead migraines when it came to the monthly church meeting, even though she had been such a pillar of the Christian Women’s Society. She returned my letters in a cursory fashion, then stopped altogether, and I felt such a curious admixture of rebuff and relief that I became derelict in my duty and quit all attempts. I had not written for two months before I realised she was gone. Her husband had been too mad with worry and pain to think of singling me out in the scandal. His mare had returned without her on it, rolling its eyes and nearly dead with sweat, and that was all he knew.

  How could I voice my suspicions? I could barely voice them to myself. It seemed the saddest and most likely happenstance was that Elizabeth, wasted from months of nerves, had come to grief alone in the Bush; that spectres and nightmares had led to her death, but the sort that were immaterial, borne from anxiety. I told this to myself every evening and morning and scourged my thoughts of that benighted valley—that squatting, phylacteric depression, that mad hallucination of a waiting door—ready for grief to take its rightful place and forgetfulness to come after.

  Grief and distance did not mount their rightful thrones. My nights were pitiable, Dorothy, my days worse. I have lived forty years and not let morbidity touch me, I have never maundered or taken freaks, yet I could not escape imaginings of a darkened door, Elizabeth struggling down filth-smeared corridors in the dark, Elizabeth as waxen and afraid as she was the day I set to the side of the hill. I was sleeping with the door barred and with Kenneth’s gun. I would wait by the window in the most profound darkness and watch for some figure to crest the hill—Elizabeth’s, or faceless Alice’s, they were all one. Perhaps you are now saying to yourself, “Caroline, you should have sent for the doctor and diagnosed a guilty conscience.” But guilt had never troubled me either.