Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She can still recall their titan feet and paws raising a pall the color of rust as they stomped along. And that she perceived a malevolent, triumphant joy in their every movement. She stood there alone, the howling wind tugging at her soft suit. The wind sang an old, old song she’d never heard, and yet she knew it was an old, old song. Hey, Jude, don’t be afraid…

  They marched, and she watched and listened.

  Somehow, the abominations were linked to what the team had found beneath Arsia Mons. No, not somehow. Not somehow at all. It was the likenesses of these creatures that whoever had carved the seven sculptures had been trying—and largely failing—to capture. Perhaps they’d failed on purpose, she thought. Perhaps it was better that way.

  They were led by a rough approximation of the idol that Yamashita was calling the “octopotamus.” The thing was so enormous its bulbous head seemed to scrape the sky. And she thought, A mountain walked or stumbled, her mind struggling to make sense of the spectacle. And Mary heard a second song then, a chant rising up from the parade: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. It wasn’t any language she recognized; indeed, it was so guttural, it hardly seemed like a proper language at all.

  Iä! Iä! Cthulhu!

  Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!

  As the Martian day faded to Martian twilight, she watched as they passed.

  And she awoke, sweat-soaked and shivering; Mary Nzeogwu barely made it to the toilet before vomiting. By the time her belly was empty, most of the dream was hardly more than the dim echoes of memories.

  She sits now before the mirror at the foot of her bed, staring back at her face, the cheekbones she inherited from her African mother and the blue eyes of her American father. There is an aspect of her face that has been altered by the dream, even if she can’t put her finger on it, something more than expression. Something physical. The holo flickering between her hands reminds her, each time she dares to glance at it, that her discharge has been denied. When she first received the news, Mary fleetingly entertained an attempt at faking a psychotic break, but the neuros would almost certainly have revealed the lie, and even if they had not she knows too much about what goes on in the ward to which Dr. Clay has already been confined to condemn herself to that fate. Mary Nzeogwu is not insane, even after what she’s seen below the volcano and what she’s dreamt afterwards, and that’s the most damning fact of all.

  Baby, you’re sure you want to do this? she hears her mother ask. You’re sure there’s not another option?

  “Yeah, Momma. I’m sure.”

  Maybe if you…

  —and—

  Possibly…

  —and—

  Have you considered…

  Mary has an answer at the ready for every one of the desperate suggestions she imagines her mother’s voice asking her to please, please consider.

  “No, Momma. Nothing else will make it stop.”

  Then, Baby, you do what you need to do. But do it fast. Don’t hurt. You’ve already hurt enough for two lifetimes.

  “It’ll be quick. I’ve made sure it’ll be quick.”

  A mountain walked or stumbled.

  … don’t be afraid, take a sad song…

  Which is the truth. She’d already planned and prepared for the suicide before the dream. She’d only needed one last push. One final, gentle shove. On the table beside her bed is a thin-walled glass ampoule of potassium cyanide. No, it wouldn’t be painless, but it would be quick. She switches off the holo, sets the pad aside, and asks the computer to play Henryk Górecki’s Symphony Number 3, Opus 36, and she stops staring at her face in the mirror. Mary takes the cyanide from the table, and she listens to the music until the second movement has begun before she places it in her mouth and crushes it between her teeth.

  01010011 01100101 01110110 01100101 01101110

  The two women and two men assembled in the octagonal conference room at the long Makroclear table take the time they need to read through the morning’s dossier: Sayles with her greying hair, Liang and her kanji tattoo, the vatter Doran, and Çetinkaya with his turquoise-tinted eyes. The seven pedestals still form a tidy ring at the center of the table, but the seven idols no longer sit atop them. Only Sayles knows for sure where they’ve gone, and the remaining three know she’ll never tell them where they’ve been put. Even if she were asked. And none of them will ever ask, as none of them wants to be shuttled, unemployed and likely blacklisted, back to Earth.

  “As you can see,” Sayles says, with even more than her usual air of authority, “Central has initiated a complete redact of the findings. When they’re done, access to the castle at La Napoule will be impossible. The site is being sealed and will have so many perimeter triggers a moth can’t fly over or a mole tunnel under without being detected and neutralized.”

  “I’m surprised they haven’t decided to level the castle,” says Liang, still looking at the files, and she shakes her head.

  “Trust me, Emily. It was discussed, but the idea was rejected as it might draw undue attention. As for the remaining works of Harry Clews, Jr., those have been removed to a vault at Cheyenne Mountain.”

  “I’m astounded they’re being trusted to NORAD,” Çetinkaya says.

  “Wonders never cease,” Sayles replies without looking at him. “Also as you can see, all documents pertaining to Clews are being destroyed or otherwise confiscated. His ashes were removed from La Napoule before the lockdown and have been placed in the same vault at Cheyenne. In short, as thoroughly as possible, Mr. Clews is being systematically erased from the consciousness of humanity. And since, fortunately, none of these files were contained in the leak, that’s not a concern.”

  Çetinkaya massages his temples. He takes a deep breath and exhales it slowly. “And the entire project is going to be shut down?” he asks. He sounds as if he’s been losing sleep.

  “Isn’t that what it says?” asks CWO Tine Sayles.

  “Yeah, that’s what it says. But I’m having trouble believing we’re going to see that much currency flushed away—five years’ allocation—and a cover up of this magnitude, because a few Conglomerate executives are getting cold feet. What did they think we’d find down there?”

  “The vote was unanimous, Kağan.”

  “We can file an appeal.”

  “It’s a waste of time, and don’t think there are people down there already considering scrubbing this entire division.”

  Çetinkaya stops rubbing his temples and glares at Sayles. “What the hell did they think they’d find?” he asks her again. “When the layout and extent of the vacuity was determined, what were the bastards expecting?”

  “Evidence of an alien civilization,” she replies. He might say she replies coldly, but, in truth, there’s very little emotion whatsoever in her voice. “Not the Henry Clews conundrum. Not an enigma they could never risk some cracker digging up and spreading like a plague.”

  “But word of the find’s already reached Earth—”

  “Along with an announcement that the structure has collapsed, destroying everything inside. Moreover, there has been a terrorist incident in Moscow that should distract both the media and the public long enough that most of their short attention spans move along to the next sensation.”

  “A terrorist incident. Right. Conducted by the—

  “Çetinkaya,” says Liang very softly, interrupting him. “You need to stop. The decision’s been made. It’s not our place to question it.”

  Doran leans close to Sayles’ right ear and whispers something. She chews at her lower lip. The other three have never trusted the IVF. It’s no secret one reason for the IVF program’s approval was so that the Conglomerate would be provided with a reliable web of overseers and spies. Sayles might be the division’s titular head, but no doubt, at the end of the day, she’s answerable to Doran.

  “And Team B, we wipe them. Just like that. We wipe them, and—”

  “—split the crew, reassign them to other projects, and see that they n
ever leave the planet. Though, Clay is obviously probably not a problem, and we don’t have to worry about Dr. Nzeogwu. She took her own life last night. Regardless, it would be advisable if you cease this line of questioning.”

  “Though, in point of fact,” says Jack Doran, “You, Dr. Liang, and Dr. Sayles will also submit to memory reconfigurations. Same with Dr. Bandopadhyay and Dr. Chase’s people and anyone else even tangentially connected with the incident. I know it’s not in the briefing, but we’ve little choice in the matter. The danger is simply too great.”

  “And earthside?”

  “The wipes will be more selective,” answers Jack Doran.

  Çetinkaya laughs, and Liang rises and leaves the octagonal boardroom.

  “Should I go after her?” asks Jack Doran.

  Sayle’s shakes her head. “Let security handle it,” she says. “She’s not going to put up a fight. Frankly, I think once the initial shock wears off, she’ll be glad to be relieved of any recollection of this affair. I know I will. Now, though I hate to proceed without Emily, you will both note that we do have other important items on today’s agenda, beginning with…”

  For Lee Moyer

  The Body Electric

  Lucy Brady

  The events surrounding the death of Eugenia Clarke are mired in obscurity and speculation. To many, her story is one of a promising young student of mathematics at the University of Nottingham, whose tragic demise was one wrought upon herself in a dingy Geneva hotel room in October of 1993. Fewer may remember her as a philosophical visionary, whose legacy would unite Theology and Artificial Intelligence (one of the world’s oldest sciences, and one of its most recent) and bring them together in a common cause: the pursuit of the human soul. Yet it is this aspect of her life and work that has held the most enduring fascination.

  Hers was not the first attempt to find common ground between these two profoundly different disciplines. Numerous thinkers in the later decades of the 20th century sought to apply the principles of theology to the spheres of computer science. Yet these were principally confined to the fringes. Perhaps their most notable proponent was Dr. Henry Gethen of Antioch University, California. His treatise, God, Man and the Machine focused on the work of Alan Turing, and sought to argue that his advances in mathematics and computing were to serve an ultimately theological goal. For Turing, Gethen argued, computers were a path back to God, a means of transcending the material world and re-defining humanity as spiritual beings in a divine universal scheme. In the final chapter of his treatise, Gethen openly upholds the manner of Turing’s death as evidence of this intent. That he so explicitly interpreted the great mathematician’s ingestion of a cyanide-laced apple as a kind of spiritual apotheosis, in evocation of the Book of Genesis, and not an act of tragic self-destruction, has accounted for much of Gethen’s subsequent unpopularity.

  To mainstream science, the two disciplines would appear to be at something of an ideological impasse. Had the revolutionary achievements of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage come into the world amid the fervent, yet analytical religiosity of the 17th century, and not the materialist, post-enlightenment world of the 19th, then science as we know it might have taken a decidedly different bent. Indeed, it was only by the sheerest accident that Eugenia Clarke’s own endeavors would ever veer into the realms of theology.

  Clarke is marked out from her predecessors by two principal factors. Unlike Dr. Gethen, her work was not merely confined to the purely theoretical business of philosophy. Where others speculated on its limitless possibilities, her work was to bring the concept of computational theology into physical application. Secondly, Gethen spoke at length of the wonder of such endeavors, seeing AI as a gateway to the divine. In the earliest days of her work, Clarke may too have shared this sense of wonder. Towards the end, however, her work was to take place against a background of mounting delusion and paranoia. This growing madness took the form of imagined persecution at the hands of an entity known as ‘Jotun’.

  Clarke’s works never saw publication. Indeed, no attempt was ever made to bring them together in a coherent testament to her labors. This was left up to the dozens of researchers and critics who have taken up her story in the years that followed. This is not to say, however, that she was silent on the matter. At the scene of her death, Eugenia was surrounded by a curious assortment of items: a knife, a satchel of floppy disks, a phial containing a substance later identified as thallium, and the remains of a borrowed computer. When discovered, she was surrounded by disconnected computer parts, scattered around her in the suggestion of a pattern. Burn marks on her fingers and face suggest that the computer had been switched on while this perverse vivisection took place. Yet these details only provide a few clues as to the nature of her undoing, and it is from the contents of the satchel that we know most about those strange final months.

  Aside from vast swathes of coding (the last remnants of her actual programming work), the disks in the satchel contained an electronic journal, in which she had fastidiously documented her life over the course of her esoteric project. These alone comprise the entirety of the work that would preserve her legacy in the annals of fringe science.

  What Clarke set out to create, and what her project would eventually become, were two very different things. Her initial thesis was to develop a computer model that would simulate a functioning ecosystem. She based this on a book by a Dr. Stephen Loughbridge, published in 1925, which details the harsh daily realities for animal inhabitants of the Norwegian fjords. It was conceived as a diversionary measure to occupy herself during the months between the completion of her undergraduate studies and the beginning of a postgraduate course that September. Yet as her diary records, her level of involvement was intensely personal from even the earliest stages.

  Spending most of her time between her apartment in Clifton and the imposing grey concrete edifice of the University library, it would take little more than seven weeks to complete her model in its initial form. When one considers the whimsical nature of its first inception and her relatively limited experience as a programmer, the level of commitment she exhibited during those two months is remarkable.

  Her initial plan was this: she would create a map illustrating the fjords and would populate this with a number of different creatures, each of which represented different levels of the food chain. At the bottom was a green, amorphous mass of pixels representing seaweed. This would expand out in elaborate fractal patterns, whereupon its growth was checked by small linear alignments of pixels representing fish. These, in turn, were attacked by small triangles denoting seagulls, which would fly around the map until forced to land, where an unlucky few were picked off by scampering snow foxes. All this took place amidst six white squares, representing six snowbound islands in the midst of a black gulf of sea. Great grey whales, too, would drift intermittently between the boundaries of the screen, plundering the waters for fish. The premise was that the user would be able to insert a select number of creatures into a static screen and once satisfied with their dispersal, would bring the scene to life. Depending on the user’s judgment, the model would reach one of two conclusions: in one case, a stable equilibrium would be achieved, with animal numbers and competition for food guaranteeing a consistent rate of population. In the other, the population of one species would expand unchecked until it devoured its food source to extinction, then would itself go on to die from starvation, leaving the fjords a desolate wasteland.

  On the few occasions when her diary entries digress from the immediate matters of her programming, we gain some insight into the style in which Clarke worked. The popular image is one of a young woman possessed, working late into the night on a diet of stimulants and unhealthy nervous energy. Certainly, this is a fair description of the state in which she seemed to exist for the latter phases of her work, but it is not the whole picture. Her manner of working throughout May and June has echoes of the Romantic, spending hours perambulating the parks and wilder spaces of the city. In these
walks she would ruminate on her thoughts, before coming back to compose great outpourings of ideas. One entry from June 23 reads as follows:

  The old botanical gardens are so quiet now that term has ended, and the last students are either gone for the summer, or holed up in the library, exams still looming. The air is hot, and thick with pollen, lying over the place like a blanket of silence. The great fountain in the center teems with life. The tiny frogs are now fully formed, miniature likenesses of their adult kin. I peered long into its brackish depths, seeing smaller things amid the algae and weeds. Smaller things still are there, unwitting even of the dangers that lurk in the gloom beyond their simple comprehension. It’s so silent I can hear the trees creaking above the muted sounds of traffic. If one fraction of this simple beauty can be successfully replicated in my program, then it will be a success beyond measure.

  Many voices have sought to comprehend the thoughts and hidden meanings that lie within Eugenia’s diary entries, which are often rambling and oblique. Among them, one of the most prevalent questions has been: when did her mind begin to turn? Many have pointed to the last week in July of that year as the probable moment, when her computerized model of the fjords became complete (at least in the first of its two incarnations). This, unlike its illfated successor, is still extant as a functioning model.

  In spite of the apparent success of her project, her diary entries from this time convey a pervading sense of disappointment, which she seemed at pains to comprehend. The fact that she opted to keep an electronic record of her work rather than a traditional paper diary has proven an unexpected blessing to researchers, as it allows us to track the marked differences in her work and sleeping habits during this time. Rest seemed to come to her with difficulty and instead she would occupy herself throughout the early hours of the morning, running through endless cycles of life and death in her virtual ecosphere. Between July 1 and 3, she would compose two, rather uncharacteristically morbid diary entries: