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

  My stomach began to feel heavier, like that stone was growing in my body, weighing me down like a cat in a sack ready to be drowned. Sweat filmed my forehead and neck, despite the fact that I was shivering. I wanted to run, but where to? It occurred to me that even with this egg, I had no idea how to return to earth. My tongue was dry and heavy; my mouth filled with old meat.

  Tor looked from Sullivan to me, his face twisted in thought, then turned away from us and unlatched the closet. The doors fell open, revealing a gauzy mist. On the interior walls were strange maps, marked here and there with rusted pins. “Well, you won’t need these, you’re going off-map,” he said as he fiddled with the tacks, moving them about until they formed a small pattern on the very edge of the map, in a blank and empty nowhere. “This won’t be cheap,” he added over his shoulder.

  “I expected as much.” Sullivan leaned against one smoky wall and chewed at his thumbnail. “You want something from Mundus, right?”

  “Yes, and nothing too common, you hear? I’m taking a risk with you, cuckoo-stone or no.”

  “Cuckoo stone?” I’d found my voice.

  “This.” Sullivan twisted his hand, palming the little egg and bringing it up toward my face. It was identical to mine in every way, down to the faint speckled pattern. “See,” he said, and he took my hand in his free one, his palm hot and dry and comforting against my skin. He clasped his fingers in mine, like we were lovers. “I’m not exactly allowed into Mundus. Or, at least, my body isn’t.” He clapped his hand over his mouth, and his throat worked as he swallowed his own cuckoo stone dry.

  The feeling started in my stomach. My actual stomach, not my guts. A sudden hot pain like an ulcer. I doubled over, trying to pull myself free of Sullivan’s grip but he only held tighter. I was sure his fingers were going to leave bruises between my knuckles. I wrenched harder but his hand was like iron.

  No, like my own skin. It felt like trying to tear off a piece of my own flesh. I twisted, looked up at him.

  His face shifted.

  Every bone in my body cracked, snapped, lengthened and thickened. I felt myself growing heavier and taller and different.

  And Sullivan grew smaller, his pretty-Jesus mask disappearing into a face I have grown up with, grown bored with, learned to almost-tolerate.

  “What the shit?” I said slowly, and my voice was deeper, rough like smoke and barbed like wire. Sullivan’s voice.

  “Cuckoo stone,” said Tor, helpfully. “He’s kicking you out of your flesh-nest.” He was still standing at the open closet. Behind him the gauzy portal-thing had started to thin, and I could just make out a huge onion-bulbed dome of a building. “Right by The Circus,” he added, to Sullivan. To Sullivan, who looked exactly like me. A plainjane, a nothing, a forgettable face, one that would attract the attention of no-one. “Couldn’t have asked for a better place. Right in the thick of it.” Tor grinned. His teeth were small and even and yellowed. “I better get something good out of this, Sully, old lad.”

  “Call me Mia,” the girl said. My voice sounded higher and sweeter than I’d thought it actually did. Like hearing myself recorded. Mia let go of my hand and I fell backwards, all the strength out of me. I was left crumpled on the floor, barely able to move.

  That’s not me. It didn’t matter what I thought—it looked like me, down to the swollen scratch on my neck where I’d been bitten by a mosquito last night. It was me. Without any actual me-ness inside it.

  The Mia-Sullivan-thing dusted its hands down its new body and frowned momentarily before its face brightened. “Excellent.” Flushed with an eager light, it stepped toward the portal and brushed its fingers down the thinning veil. The grey mist parted, rolling back to reveal the onion-dome building clearly. From what I could tell the portal had opened in a doorway in a narrow street. It was shaded, and humid air seemed to seep into Tor’s little room.

  “Mundus,” Mia-Sullivan said. “Oh, you beauty.” And stepped through.

  §

  Now I walk the Long Road in a skin that is prettier than any I have ever owned. Sullivan’s face and voice plastered over me. I walk it alone. Except for the mute Butcher Boys, who recognize something in me, some seaside speck of a city they half-remember. They cannot talk to me, and no-one else will. With my pretty-Jesus face, with my long artist’s hands, I am not welcome in Jarry. I try to follow the caravans of the Dreamers, hoping that one of them will dream me a way back home, but the years crawl past and I have forgotten the shapes of the kelp language and the spell I want to draw me once more to my ocean.

  I walk the purgatory ring-road between the sound of the sea and the promise of a stranger heaven, my phone held out before me, waiting for some signal to shine in its black face. But I already know the dream is ended.

  Our Lady of Arsia Mons

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

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  None of the four women and men assembled in the octagonal conference room were present when the chamber below the southwestern flanks of Arsia Mons, more than one hundred meters below the extinct caldera, was opened. Not one among them are field, though all have been trained for field work. They are each kept safe from the dirt and grime, from ionizing radiation, pathogens, the hazards of low gravity and decompression. The various perks of their position within the Conglomerate include this sanctuary. They keep their hands clean. They do not have to spend long hours in decontamination or worry about cave-ins. Here in their ivory tower, they gather twice daily to examine and discuss the fruits of their numerous subordinates’ daily labors. On Mars, there are no Sundays off or holidays. On Mars, there are no unions and precious little in the way of safety regulations.

  “I’m guessing we still don’t know how the security protocols were breached,” says the woman at the head of the long table molded from the same translucent Makroclear as the visors of the SAS walkabouts worn by the field scientists. Her name is Sayles, Chief Warrant Officer Tine Sayles, and she speaks with only the faintest hint of an Australian accent. Sayles makes no attempt to hide the salt-and-pepper of her long dreadlocked hair. Her clothing is immaculate, stylish, shipped all the way from the finest shops of the Carousel du Louvre and Dry Manhattan.

  “Not an inkling,” replies the man on her left. “It was a clean inbound hit. Whoever made the slice, the crackers left nothing whatsoever behind. So there’s not much hope of a backtrace. Access Control is still double-shifting, but, you ask me, I think the best news we’re going to get is that the mesh suffered no permanent damage.”

  “It’s a goddamn PR nightmare,” mutters the man to the right of Sayles, and it may be he’s muttering only to himself. “That’s what it is, and who gives a shit how the worm got through. It got in, and it got out again, and even if the crackers are found, nothing’s going to undo the damage.” The man is the youngest of the bunch, the true color of his eyes concealed behind turquoise contact lenses. On Earth, he oversaw digs in Pakistan and the Zagros Mountains of Iran; on Mars, he’s never even left HQ. He was born in Turkey on the final day of the bloody Ekmek Savaşları.

  The fourth and final member of the Division is a slight woman in a banana-yellow suit. Her name is Emily Liang. Centered perfectly between her eyes is a tattoo she got while still in college—the kanji 兵—because she’d intended to sign up with the US Navy after graduation, but instead took a prestigious research position at Yale Geology. She stares at the headlines scrolling by on the feed suspended above the translucent table.

  “‘Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the King,’” she says and chews the tip of a stylus.

  “What?” asks Sayles, leaning slightly towards Dr. Liang. “What did you say?”

  Liang points at the news crawl. “All these press comparisons between the Jeanne temple and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen,” she replies. “I’m surprised none of the casters have decided to run with the Curse of the Pharaohs angle. The deaths of Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon and the others who financed
the excavation and opened the tomb. Now, wanna talk about drumming up ratings? That would do the trick.”

  “Right now,” says Sayles, “I think they’re plenty enough happy with talk of aliens.”

  “Still, she’s right. Pissing off the Gods of the Red Planet,” says the man on Sayles’ left, after permitting himself a quiet, brittle sort of laughter. His name is Jack Doran, and he’s a Conglomerate man, through and through. One of the cut-and-dried, petri-custom-grown for the job under the IVF program instituted in 2152 after all those chatty androids proved unreliable. “Here we are, arrogantly angering the very God of War. What would the wrath of the Kings of Egypt be by comparison?”

  No one answers the question, which all four understand is entirely rhetorical, and neither do any of the other three laugh. There’s maybe half a minute’s worth of silence, and then CWO Sayles sighs and says, “So we put this mess behind us, and we get on with the work. The work is all that matters.”

  There’s a general murmur of agreement from her colleagues. Still, Doran points out there will be a formal inquiry; there’s simply no way around that.

  “We cross that bridge when we come to it,” Sayles tells him. Sayles is given to clichés. “Right now, we stay focused on what Exploratory’s bringing up from the temple.”

  Emily isn’t comfortable with the assumption that the discovery below the skylight is a temple, and she’s said so repeatedly. But, as Sayles might tell her, now is not the time to beat a dead horse, so Liang doesn’t press the matter.

  Sayles motions to the greenish stone artifacts arranged in a neat circle at the center of the table, each one supported on its own molded pedestal of Makroclear. Then she uses the same hand to shut off the feed above the table.

  “This morning I received a directive to switch our attention from the general layout and architecture of the tomb to particular relics recovered from the site.”

  “And it came from—?” asks the man with turquoise contact lenses. His name is Kağan Çetinkaya.

  “Not that the directive’s provenance actually matters, but it came from Dominic in corporate. Now, can I continue?”

  “Please do,” he says. He and Liang exchange scowls that are not missed by Sayles.

  “As you know from the reports, all seven of these were recovered a week ago from niches in the north wall of Tier Four, Quadrant Twenty-Seven. One of the chief ways, of course, that they are remarkable is that none were the least bit dusty. Another is that each is carved from porphyry, which as you should also know has, surprisingly, yet to be discovered onworld by the survey’s teams. It certainly should be here somewhere, given the requisite dynamothermal metasomatism certainly occurred at various times in the past. Indeed, preliminary isotopic analyses indicate the rock is native, and I’ve been asked to set aside the fact that porphyry deposits have not yet been located.”

  Liang adds, “And the sculptures are being considered as a priori evidence that they eventually will be found.”

  “Precisely,” continues Sayles. “Plus, we’ve covered the petrological curiosities exhibited by the constituent talc, chlorites, and amphiboles, relative to terran porphyry. Deviations from the expected refractive index, pleochromism, specific gravity, diaphaneity, and etcetera. Old news. But. Now, look at them a moment, and afterwards I’m going to stress some of the highlights from today’s dossier.”

  “Look at them? What the hell for? Have they changed since yesterday?” asks Çetinkaya. “Because, if not, I’ve seen enough of the damn things to last me a lifetime.”

  “Kağan, trust me,” Sayles tells him “Your previous reactions have been duly noted and logged. Now, shut up and look at them anyway.”

  “You having bad dreams again?” Liang asks Çetinkaya.

  “Fuck you,” he mutters.

  But he does as he’s been told—they all do as they’ve been told—and sit silently staring at the objects from the tomb. After five minutes Sayles breaks the silence.

  “Excellent. Now, have a look at the briefing, second page.”

  Liang, Doran, and Çetinkaya each pull up page two. Doran is the first to speak, and he only whispers “Extraordinary.”

  “Fuck all,” Çetinkaya says and looks at Tine Sayles. “What is this bullshit. Is this some sort of joke, payback from corporate over the security leak?”

  “We had nothing to do with the leak,” Liang says, speaking almost as softly as had Jack Doran.

  “You think the swells give two shits who was responsible?”

  “The Board has many fine qualities,” Sayles chimes in, “but I haven’t found a sense of humor to number among them. The report’s genuine. You can check the references if you think otherwise. A shame one of you isn’t an art historian.”

  Jack Doran laughs again and magnifies one of the images in the dossier. “They’re almost indistinguishable.”

  “To be precise,” says Sayles, “if you check Table 7, you’ll see that laser sweeps turned up mean deviations of less than .052 percent on every one of them, which is, in and of itself, rather remarkable.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not buying any of this,” Çetinkaya declares and pushes his chair away from the table, turning to look out one of the clear walls at the vast expanse of the Tharsis. He gazes in the direction of Arsia Mons and the cavern skylights, mercifully much too far away from HQ to see with the naked, unaugmented eye.

  Liang shakes her head, more in amazement than disbelief. Since the discovery of the temple, she’s learned to accept an awful lot of strange shit. “You’re asking us to believe a man carved essentially identical versions of these things two and a half centuries ago on Earth.”

  “No. For now, I’m only asking you to consider this… anomaly.”

  “Anomaly,” mutters Çetinkaya. “I need a drink.”

  Liang extends her right hand, actually reaching for the artifact designated KSZ7812, though handling the objects is strictly forbidden. Her fingers stop only millimeters from receiving a painful shock from the electric barrier encircling the seven pedestals. She pulls her arm back, stares a moment at her fingers, then begins reading the dossier more closely.

  “We’ll reconvene after lunch,” says CWO Sayles and stands up. But she’s the only one of the four who leaves the octagonal room.

  01001111 01101110 01100101

  Excerpt from TXO Brief TM/ex2/ Sol 298/Nevada 28-7-2141:

  EYES ONLY/CTS

  RE: recoveries KSZ7818-KSZ7814 (T4/Q27)

  Fr: “THE QUIRKY QUIXOTIC KINGDOM OF HENRY CLEWS JR.” [Lannie Goodman, The Sienese Shredder, 2007]—

  {=In the complex cosmology of the world according to Clews, this particular species is the fallen aristocrat of the roaring twenties—a debauched alcoholic gambler, portrayed as a smirking hippo head with half-closed eyes whose curvaceously feminine body of feathers is supported by hideous clawed legs.

  Typically, Henry Clews’ thinly disguised pun on “hypo-critter” reflects the autodidactic artist’s approach to all his creations, whether sculpture or literary drama––the use of wit and neologisms to spin out his complex web of personal obsessions. As a renegade from the stultifying 1890s high society of “Old New York” (as described by his contemporary, Edith Wharton), Clews evolves from an erratically brilliant prankster and college flunky into a self-appointed philosopher on the moral weaknesses of humanity. Both childlike and vituperative, Clews reigns with wicked glee over his own private Eden within the fortressed walls of La Napoule, which he recreates stone by stone, engendering an entire family of modern gargoyle demons and spirits.

  These creatures, carved in precious blocks of pink, grey and green porphyry, also reappear in the columns of the cloister, the walnut arches of the dining room, and various other unexpected nooks and crannies all over the castle. Reminiscent of the hybrid animal kingdoms of Hieronymus Bosch, Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss, they comprise a stylized mix of cultures and species: Oriental, Hindu, Inca and African-featured crossbreeds of fish, crustaceans, birds, reptiles, monkeys and predato
ry beasts. Among the zoomorphic cast of characters, for example, are the Shug (a parrot with elephant feet and a lizard’s tail); the Og of Octopi (a long-tentacled half bird, half octopus); the Shat of Snakes; the Doodles of Dukes; the friendly Gilk of La Napoule; the wrinkled Goohoo of Frogs; the Gamanyune, bird of illomen; and the ubiquitous Jins, laughing gnomes who haunt the chateau.=}

  Recorded: 10

  Indexed: 63

  KLP/plm; OFFWORLD TRANS CODE 2973-HD3-15-ZONE-RED

  All information contained herein is CLASSIFIED TS/EYES ONLY®&™ + (but not limited to) Juémì, Sirriy lil-Ġāyah, סודי ביותר, Совершенно Секретно™, Streng Geheim, et Très secret defense.

  Dispersal FORBIDDEN by International and Interplanetary Accord/Violation punishable with utmost prejudice. EYES ONLY

  01010100 01101000 01110010 01100101 01100101

  WHERE I END AND YOU BEGIN (THE SKY IS FALLING IN)

  No one makes it to Mars, or any sort of cherry position within the Conglomerate, unless they are the best that can be bought. No one retains those positions for very long unless they continue to perform, or preferably exceed, the acumen displayed when they were promoted from this or that grunt status. This fact has often been a source of both pride and motivation to Dr. Tannishtha Bandopadhyay. She escaped the floating slums of Calcutta when she was seventeen, won a scholarship to Oxford, and she’s never once looked back. Her parents are dead, so there isn’t much back there, anyway. All the better. She’s been Marside for almost two Earth years, and she figures, with luck and continued hard work, plus her name on just the right publications in only the most prestigious journals, and she can retire in another ten years.

  None of this is to say that she wanted to come to Mars, and none of this is to say that she’s grown any more comfortable being here than the day her ferry landed at the Tharsis docks. But you do what you have to do, right? You do what it takes. You don’t question opportunity. You certainly don’t tell the bigwigs in personnel you’d be happier staying in Nevada or California or Texas. She went where they sent her, like a good little soldier, and she’s doing her time as if it were a reward. Because it is.