by S. T. Joshi
The directorship was good as hers, via the one route open to her, and as her mind’s eyes lifted toward that busted glass ceiling, her actual eyes hove toward a horsefly on the wall, so incongruous with the snowscape outside, the Arctic draft leaking in from the skylight. The horsefly was inert as if in shock at hatching in this hostile season, or at reflecting, perhaps, it hadn’t been a horsefly yesterday?
What a mad supposition, but why leave anything about her elevation to chance, risk defeat bursting from the jaws of victory? The fly might take wing anytime. Meanwhile, the orderly was exerting no more of a presence than the fly, doubtless praying she’d send him for in-house reinforcements, or to phone the cops, anything to be elsewhere. Fine. She issued her first command as acting director. “Get me a flyswatter, please. Or a rolled-up magazine will do. What are you waiting for?”
He skedaddled, and before smiling more brazenly at the wreckage of her ex-boss, she made a mental note to give her insubordinate drudge a severe dressing down. How dare he look at her sidelong as if she was the crazy one?
Oude Goden
LYNNE JAMNECK
Lynne Jamneck is a fiction writer and editor. She has been nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda Awards and holds an M.A. in English literature. Her fiction has appeared in Jabberwocky, H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Something Wicked Magazine, Fantastique Unfettered, Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention, and Black Wings of Cthulhu 5. Forthcoming work will appear in Nemesis (Hippocampus Press) and Skelos. She has edited Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (Dark Regions Press, 2016) and, with S. T. Joshi, Gothic Lovecraft (Cycatrix Press, 2016).
JUPITER AND I STARTED OUT AS BEST FRIENDS because I never mocked her for being named after a planet. Her father had been an amateur astronomer, her mother a woman who knew how to pick her battles.
Our bond started as friendship and became devotion. We were never afraid, of anything. I lie awake at night when the darkness gets too close, wishing we had been. Then Jupiter might still be alive and I wouldn’t have discovered the world can be a malicious place, dictated as it is by humanity.
The roaring twenties didn’t quite make the same noise in Snohomish City as they did in New York and Chicago. Only had about 3000 people at any given time, considering there were always some arriving and others leaving, a trend some people said made us look like a community hellbent on avoiding the looming future.
Snohomish has all the modern conveniences they’re so proud of in the northeastern states. And even there, in states like Vermont, it sometimes feels as if you’ve walked straight into some archaically preserved flood of old things.
Living in a small town has its perks. One being that it’s easier to cotton on when something is wrong, even when everyone turns a blind eye.
Also, helps if you’re a witch.
I’m a Dutch immigrant on my mother’s mother’s side, all the way from Roermond, where the family line courses back further than the witch trials of 1613. Even a hundred years earlier, the women of Roermond were already being burned alive for gathering in the woods, shapeshifting into cats, and having sex with the devil.
It sounds outlandish, but a lot of it is true, regardless of how much the Pennsylvania Dutch will try to convince you otherwise. Warped to some degree, possibly. Still. In the current modernity, humanity’s first beliefs have been so watered down they seem perplexing, comical even. What hasn’t changed is that the devil is still being blamed for insolence, which is never truer than when a woman’s involved.
Call me a devil-child, then. Others have. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve based my entire life on cheek and insolence. That’s how I got to know Sidha. A six-foot Rajput who had once been a soldier in the British Indian Army until a bullet took his leg, Sidha owned the big grocery store on First Street, next to the Eastman Dry Plate Company, who still sold their own photographic plates, belligerently staving off that new Kodak company.
It seems whenever they find an opportunity, the rest of Snohomish likes to tell me that a “nice girl like me” shouldn’t talk to “dangerous gooks.” Snohomish men allowed their wives to buy from Sidha because his produce was the freshest and his meats of an outstanding quality. Insult a man to his face, yes, but pay him well for his capitalist efforts. Sidha didn’t care; he laughed at their idiocy.
Also, a nice girl like me shouldn’t wear pants. Which I did, along with coarse flannels reserved for men and which were much warmer than a flimsy damned dress during the wet Pacific Northwest winters.
Model Ts were parked on opposite ends of First Street throughout the week except Sunday. Today was Wednesday and I’d been awake since 5:00. Troubled sleep. I get angry each time a mother tells a child to pay nightmares no mind. No wonder so many people grow up unprepared for what they run up against when they’re awake.
A small group of young men in scuffed boots and dust-covered overalls stared in agreement as I walked past and into Sidha’s store. They’re the types who don’t like how cities like Seattle are turning into artist-friendly hubs. During the day they intimidate; at night they cover their faces in white hoods, meet at the community hall, and get up to worse.
“Morning.” Sidha was behind the shop counter, unboxing something wrapped in several sheets of newspaper, one of which, slowly expanding, read: WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE A VOTE OR A HUSBAND?
“Those boys are still loitering outside in the street. You have to protect yourself, Sidha.”
“I shoot anybody in this town I’ll be good as dead myself. Don’t worry. You and me know how to take care of ourselves.”
“I wish Jupiter and I had been more careful.” It’d been a few years, but it still stung.
“Jupiter was not your fault.”
“And now more of us queers have disappeared. Bobby and Carl who live by the river—I haven’t seen them in weeks. And Florence I used to see at least once a week, but it’s been a month. They’re not my fault either, but if I don’t do something about it, I might be next. Then it will be my fault.”
“You’re what my mother would have called ‘tenacious.’”
“And my mother probably would’ve agreed.”
In addition to Sidha’s groceries, he also traded in more exotic objects. His under-the-counter-business was, however, mainly conducted with the Lushootseed people and, sometimes, visiting Tlingit traders. He had helped me many times, most often to track down books using his vast knowledge of Oriental mysticism. My witch-behaviour often required nothing so much as the right words.
“You seen that cultist arrived on the steamer a few days ago?”
“Sure did. Came in here day before last. Tried to use magic on me, but he ended up messing with the wrong gook.” Sidha smiled broadly. “You should have seen his face when I turned his own tricks against him. He started babbling about bananas and billy goats.”
“He say anything useful?”
“I think so.” Sidha opened his cash register and took out a square of white paper from the drawer. He gave it to me, and I read the word written on it. Ghatanothoa.
“Can’t say I know what that is.”
“Me neither.”
I shoved the paper in my coat pocket. “Then I’m probably going to need some help.”
Sidha reached behind the counter and gave me a transparent phial containing a sinister-looking liquid. “Don’t suppose someone’s found a way of making this stuff taste better?”
Sidha dismissed my complaint. “Be grateful it’s been pulverised into a juice. Seeing that thing in solid form is something you’ll never unsee.” He reached behind the counter again and placed a scuffed silver flask down in front of me. “Chase it down with a shot of Tinglit moonshine. Destroys your guts, sure, but it will also annihilate the charred aftertaste. Take it, just pay for the hoodoo.”
Outside in the street the sun bore down and reflected in sharp cuts from bright surfaces. The group of young men had been joined by a counter-cluster o
f women, playing at a host of tactics to attract male interest. Distracted by my appearance, they stared when I took a pouch of tobacco from my shirt pocket to roll a cigarette, lit it, and proceeded to cross the street, at least one choice bit of calico acting coy when I winked in her direction.
* * *
Ghatanothoa!
The thing with a thousand eyes
Ghatanothoa!
Don’t listen to his lies
* * *
I woke with a start, prostrate on an unmade bed. The rest of my body struggled to catch up to my brain, where electricity linked uneasy images from fading dreams, heavy and profuse. Beyond the open curtain twilight set in. New Englanders talk about how whippoorwills make them nervous; they haven’t heard the loud and incessant yipping of black-necked stilts, as if disturbed, warning anyone who will listen.
In the kitchen, I took Sidha’s phial from the fridge (slightly less revolting cold) and brought it with me into the sparsely furnished lounge. My grandmother used to say, “Live thinly, because the world will try to box you in.” Along with my parents, ouma had been this-world-dead for a long time. Maybe I would see them again tonight.
Like my mother and grandmother and the other toverdokters before them, I also had a mascot that made flesh not only my own past, but the histories of generations bound by blood, sacrifice, and community, a curated collective memory. My talisman despised direct sunlight; during the day, he made me cover the open crate he chose to sleep in with a blanket.
Outside, the last of the sun disappeared behind the horizon. I lit some candles, then gently removed the blanket from the wooden crate.
To the untrained eye, Cornelius was a blue Flemish Giant, a rabbit with a dense, glossy charcoal coat. Inside his skin, however, there resided a verteller. Several hundred years ago, Cornelius had been a historian from Ghent, in Belgium. After he died, Cornelius’s ghost had been entrusted to recording the occult histories of a witch—me, in his case. Regular history books often leave out very important details.
Cornelius was irritable about being woken up.
“Come on, Rip Van Winkle. We got work to do.”
His fur bristled and he curved into a lowdown stretch. The rabbit’s hefty ears slowly perked and he eyed me up with his small black eyes. “Munsterkerk?” His gravelled voice sounded tight, as if it needed a good stretch too. I sat down cross-legged on the wooden floor. Cornelius hopped down from the table on which his crate stood and settled his furry body in my lap.
“Before we start,” I said, “does the word ‘Ghatanothoa’ mean anything to you?”
He eyed me up again. “Swallow that filthy poison; this is difficult work and I want to get back to sleep.”
Curmudgeon.
I tipped the phial against my lips, trying to ignore the grimy texture of the liquid as it steeled under my tongue, where I held it for a moment, giving it time to be absorbed straight into my bloodstream. Soon the concoction initiated its time-altering physics inside my body. There was a viciously sadistic rush as a slew of past events passed through, emotional quantifiers stirring me for seconds only but nonetheless imparting distressing shocks, all of which gave rise to strong nausea in the pit of my stomach. The lounge began axing itself into puzzled sections, devolving into a state that relaxed all known metric requirements; lines curved away from one another and increased in distance, creating an empty-yet-overflowing space, common perpendiculars reshaping into ultraparallels. The omnipresent past bloomed like a million unknown flowers in a suspended desert, creating a now that was all-encompassing, Cornelius and I its anchors as the bifurcating potion continued to addle my atoms.
We glided through the arched entrance of Roermond’s Munsterkerk, the cathedral’s lengthy Romanesque towers spearing brusquely into a starless sky. At the church altar we were anchored in place. A drawn-out static noise invaded the space, buttressed—one could only imagine—by an ominous, ceaseless void. The tesseract would not hold long. But those I had come to speak to were already there.
Toverdokters. In my reality, they had all long since died; in this world, they offered wisdom to those willing to seek them out.
A disembodied voice expanded within the confines of the church. “Speak fast.”
“Someone in my world seeks Ghatanothoa.”
“The one that is both,” the disembodied voice said.
“Both?”
“Ghatanothoa comes from out the aeons.”
“Is Ghatanothoa to blame for those like me disappearing?” I stopped short of asking about Jupiter.
I’d been hoping to see my mother, my grandmother. But the sea of faces before me was already fading. Cornelius was on his hind legs, between my legs, his black eyes twice their normal size. He shook like a child woken from a nightmare. His small body had to handle a lot. Again I was surprised by his absolute strength.
“Ghatanothoa comes when called.”
A strong vibration started deep beneath the ground and quickly began bubbling to the surface, juddering the robust walls of the cathedral. I was out of time. “How do I find Ghatanothoa?”
“The Old One can only be found through pain.”
Like the walls of my lounge, Munsterkerk began breaking down, devolving into a maelstrom of collapsing pews, drifting colonettes, and shattered spinning stained glass. My hand went instinctively to Cornelius, who buried his nose in the hollow of my knee as the temporary construct faded into rapidly diminishing fragments and then—the strong pull of time— disorienting, heart beating hard in my chest followed by— inertia! Rigid to the point of mortis and beading sweat from every pore, I stared at the inside walls of my house, re-forming themselves into my everyday assembly of life.
* * *
The sun was about to rise. I gave Cornelius something to eat and a bowl of hot milk with a dollop of gin, the way he’d liked it in human form.
“Cornelius, when I asked you before, about Ghatanothoa, did you recognise the name?”
“I’m old. I recognise a lot of things. I wanted to hear what the witch-folk said.”
“Not a lot that seems helpful right now.”
Cornelius eyed me up. “Maybe not yet.”
It wouldn’t do any good to push him for answers.
“I’m going back to sleep now. Don’t wake me.” He headed for his crate, stopped, and looked at me, licking his lips in that rabbitty way. “Fine! Stroke my left ear twice from the bottom, to the top.”
I did as he instructed.
“Now go to sleep.”
So we did.
* * *
Jupiter? Is that you?
She was framed against a black curtain.
What happened? Where are you?
With the Old One. His thousand eyes hold me.
I wanted to get closer to her but the dreamland wouldn’t allow it. Why did he take you?
I asked him to. Like the others.
I don’t understand.
Ghatanothoa accepts us. Ghatanothoa is balance.
I tried to move again but stayed stuck. I accepted you, Jupiter. We accepted each other.
The black curtain behind her seemed to blink softly; stars taking leave of the sky at the failing dark of night.
I cared about you so much.
Ghatanothoa loves us. The Old Ones seek to restore balance. We were never meant to thrive. Be with us, my love. The priest will show you how to find us.
Something about the dream projection was beginning to feel very wrong. I became aware of a kind of pull inside me, a thing or a thought, like a coiled snake that had been waiting and was now ready to strike.
Leave the pain behind.
I understood then.
But I’m strong, Jupiter.
We can be together.
The black curtain and its brightly glowing points of light abruptly bulged, followed by a sequence of grotesque movements, like a large, struggling upside-down spider. I saw—realised—that they had never been stars, but the stunning gleam of scores of eyes, all now sharply focus
ed on me. Jupiter was pulled into the arachnid-thing’s ink-stained folds and no matter how I tried to break free from the force holding me, all my efforts proved futile. The thing’s contours began bubbling in a froth of balloon-like aggregations; it twisted and turned and spat as it came closer, and as it continued its march of ever-changing shapes, I distinctly saw that it had both male and female genitalia.
For an instant, I thought I felt the snake strike. I was enthralled by the unexpected beauty of this cosmic intersex life form, a perfect synthesis of universality.
—Like a bolt of lightning, quicker and stronger than the metaphysical serpent within me, some influence yanked me from my stupor. For an instant there was a deep and warm smell, one I associated with my childhood. Ouma’s kitchen.
As the lounge with Cornelius’s crate approached at speed in the oncoming distance, I slammed into the part of myself that had almost given into temptation. I was intact, outside the dreamlands. More importantly, I was whole.
Once again the Old Ones were setting their sights on us. Manipulating those who lived in fear for their own gain.
Well, not me, godverdomme. Too many witches had been drowned and burned alive with the help of their acolytes, the masses oblivious they were murdering the only ones able to protect them from cosmic destruction. Whether Ghatanothoa took pain away or not, it still only gave death in return. One, it seemed, in which it fed off the energy of those already taken to reach out to more.
Someone needed to put a stop to its bullshit. Cheek and insolence. That’s what we needed. Cornelius was going to be pissed.
* * *
My favourite of the books Sidha had found for me was a collection of verses, captured together under the title Dhol Chants. “Captured” in the precise sense of the word; open the book without casting the necessary protective charm and the chants inside can escape, wreaking havoc. This had already happened a few times; no wonder the custodian at Miskatonic had agreed to trade Sidha the original for an excellent reproduction. Students should never be trusted.