Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

“What else can you do on a dead boojum?” Hester demanded.

  “Maybe,” Cynthia said after a moment. “Maybe they weren’t here for salvage in the first place. Maybe they needed a hospital. Not all doctors are as laissez-faire as Captain Diemschuller.”

  “The Calico’s too small for piracy,” Meredith said, “but I agree with your general principle. If they aren’t here for salvage—how do we find the operating theaters?”

  Her question went unanswered as they came to a corridor junction and caught sight of another human being.

  He was in shirtsleeves rather than a pressure suit, wearing the uniform of the Interplanetary Ambulance Corps, dark blue with red piping and CDW embroidered on his sleeve. Across his chest were blazoned a row of symbols including a caduceus, a red crescent, and the Chinese ideogram for “heart.” Despite being distracted by the medical symbols, Cynthia knew there was something wrong with him several seconds before she was able to identify why she thought so. And the man—youngish and tall, his skin fishbelly pale in their floodlights—stood and stared at them, his face so perfectly blank that Cynthia finally realized that was the problem. No relief, no anger, no fear—not even curiosity.

  “Hello!” she said, starting forward and forcing brightness into her voice as if she could compensate for his nullity. “I’m Dr. Feuerwerker with the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. Is your captain—” And then she was close enough to see him clearly, close enough to see that the shadow at his midsection was not a shadow but a hole, jagged-edged and gaping, where his stomach used to be, close enough to see the greenish tinge to his pale skin.

  Her voice was thin and screechy in her own ears when she said, “He’s dead.”

  “What?” said Hester

  “He’s dead. He’s been dead for weeks.”

  “But he’s standing up. A dead body couldn’t…” Hester’s voice dried up with a faint click as the dead man turned, giving them a good view of his disemboweled torso, and started walking down the hall away from them. His locomotion wasn’t perfect, but it was damn good for someone who’d probably been dead for three months.

  Hester started to blaspheme, and Meredith urgently hushed her. This was not the place to be attracting that kind of attention.

  “It might be a parasite,” Cynthia said, having run frantically through her knowledge of what could animate a corpse. “Something that got through a gap in spacetime when the Charles Dexter Ward died. We have to tell the Jarmulowicz Astronomica”—surprised, Cynthia realized her concern was not for herself, stuck here in the belly of a dead boojum, but for Jaime and the shy children and the cheshires Cynthia couldn’t count—“can we call them from here? How far back—”

  “Calm yourself, Dr. Feuerwerker,” said Wandrei. “What you see is not the work of a parasite. It is the pursuit of knowledge.”

  That brought her up short. She looked at him, calm and sweating behind the faceplate of his pressure suit, and swallowed against a curl of bright nausea. “You knew about this?”

  The twitch at the corner of his lips was more disturbing than the dead man striding away from them. Hastily, Cynthia turned her attention forward again. There were medical-school stories of the horrors Arkhamer doctors got up to. Cynthia had never credited them, considering them part of the general anti-Arkhamer bigotry that permeated so many institutions of higher learning—and so many spacedock taverns.

  Now she wondered if she had been too willing, in her conscientious open-mindedness, to assume there was no truth behind the slander. Ooh, ethics now, Dr. Feuerwerker? That’s a new look on you.

  She stepped forward, following the dead man. Wandrei and the other women jogged to catch up, their pressure suits rustling with the sudden movement. As Wandrei fell back into stride beside Cynthia, she said, “So when did the Charles Dexter Ward sign on an Arkhamer doctor?” Wandrei remained silent, though she waited after each sentence before adding the next. “That’s what got the ship killed, isn’t it? That’s the real motive behind coming here.”

  “Reanimation isn’t a topic we commonly pursue,” Wandrei said. “But if… if someone has made it work—think of the advance to human understanding. To medicine.”

  “To shipping,” Meredith said.

  “There are a number of applications,” Hester was beginning, when Cynthia almost-shouted, “Are you fucking nuts? Every scare story I’ve ever heard about raising the dead says that either dying or coming back drives people mad. Are you really suggesting —”

  “Are you a scientist, Dr. Feuerwerker?” Wandrei asked. “Then I suggest you wait for the data.”

  The walking cadaver did not move particularly fast. When she caught up to him, he turned to her, jaw moving. If he was trying to say something, the lack of lungs and diaphragm impeded the process. Upon closer inspection, he was a Major and a registered nurse. The name on his shirt pocket read Ngao. His eyes, dull and concave where the ship’s environment had begun dehydrating them, fastened on Cynthia’s face through the helmet.

  His jaw worked again.

  Was he conscious? she wondered, the chill running up her back so real that her head wrenched to one side. Did he know he was dead? Eviscerated? Did he ever try to touch his stomach and have his fingers brush his spine? She wanted to apologize, even though Major Ngao’s fate was none of her doing. But she, too, had sought after forbidden knowledge—not reanimation, at least the irony wasn’t that cruel. She’d muttered those same words about science and the pursuit of knowledge and told herself that Chen and Derleth would be pleased. That Galileo would be pleased.

  Had it been a lie? She didn’t know. Chen and Derleth and Galileo had been dead for centuries. She couldn’t ask them—and even this lunatic on the Charles Dexter Ward couldn’t bring them back. She remembered her burning certainty that the truth was there, attainable and valuable beyond any price—and she remembered Captain Nwapa’s expression, too, that one flicker of horror before the captain got her game-face back. It took a lot to rattle a boojum captain, and Cynthia was not proud of the achievement.

  Wandrei said crisply, “Take us to Dr. Fiorenzo,” before Cynthia could find any words that weren’t trite and false—and probably pointless, really, Dr. Feuerwerker, the man’s missing nine-tenths of his vital organs, do you think he has any attention to spare for you? And if nothing else, Cynthia thought grimly, now at least she had a name to hang the nightmare on.

  §

  The corridors of the Charles Dexter Ward were dark and silent as Cynthia followed the Arkhamers following the dead man. From time spent on the Richard Trevithick and other boojums, she knew a little about their internal architecture, and she’d done her best to stay oriented, so she was fairly sure that they were heading away from the rending plates and tearing diamond teeth of the Charles Dexter Ward’s mouth (and she couldn’t help wondering if his crew had called him Charlie, the same way the Richard Trevithick’s crew always referred to their boojum as Ricky—it was a stupid thought and wouldn’t be banished). The anatomy of boojums adhered to no principle that Terran mammals abided by, including bilateral symmetry, but if you were headed away from the mouth, you were probably headed toward the cloaca. And most ships’ systems were stuck as deep in the bulk of the boojum as the bioengineers could get them.

  The Charles Dexter Ward being a hospital ship, there was not one specific area that Cynthia would have identified as the sickbay. Rather she and the others had passed corridor after corridor of clinical chambers and wards, rooms that Cynthia was sure would have reeked of disinfectant and that eternal powdery medicinal smell were it not for the eye-watering putrescence overwhelming everything. They found the operating theaters, which looked as if they’d been the scenes of intense guerrilla fighting, and Cynthia’s pace slowed automatically, trying to reconstruct what had happened, where the defenders had been, how the line of attack had run, whether that was all human blood in horrible sticky pools, or if some of it was other colors.

  “Dr. Feuerwerker,” Meredith said, pointing, and she saw that farther down the corri
dor, in the direction that Major Ngao was plodding, uninterested in what might have been the site of his own death, there was, for the first time in hours, a gleam of light that they hadn’t brought with them from the Caitlín R. Kiernan.

  And as they followed the dead man—he dripped, occasionally, an irregular trail of brownish fluid on the floor—around the bend in the dead boojum’s corridor, Cynthia saw an open pressure hatch, a slice of light spilled across the floor, and a glimpse of one of the medical labs.

  Within it, she could just make out some white-coated movement.

  She followed Wandrei, she thought, because she had so little idea what else to do. This is how war crimes happen. People get overwhelmed and follow orders. If you were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, you’d know what to do besides whatever Wandrei tells you.

  And then she bit her lip inside the helmet and thought, If I were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, the Richard Trevithick might be as dead as Charlie here.

  That thought chilled whatever part of her the quietly guiding dead man had missed.

  Something brushed Cynthia’s right glove, then grabbed it. Her throat closed with fright, and she turned as she tried to pull away, looking down to see what horrible thing had caught her. But it was a suit gauntlet, tight against her own, and when she looked up again, she met Hester’s gaze dimly, through two helmet bubbles glazed with the reflected light of the lab up ahead. She’d stopped, lost in thought. The idea of being left out here in the dark with the stars knew what made her heart jump like a ship’s rat in the claws of a cheshire.

  She squeezed back and caught a flash of Hester’s teeth, bright against the darkness of her face. They moved forward together, though any comfort from the other woman’s presence was abrogated by a series of scraping sounds that Cynthia’s medical ear easily identified as metal on bone.

  Five more steps brought them into the lab. Cynthia found herself fascinated by the way the light—clip-on work lighting trailing to batteries, and not biolume—caught on the scratches on Meredith’s and Wandrei’s pressure suits as they stepped out of the shadows of the corridor. She was avoiding looking past them, at whatever the lab contained, and their broad shoulders mercifully blocked most of the view.

  Then Wandrei stepped to one side, to make room for her and Hester, and raised both hands to open the catches on his helmet. As he lifted it off, Cynthia had to fight the urge to reach out and slam it back into place—as if a standard, somewhat worn pressure suit was any protection in a situation like this.

  Cynthia stayed on suit air anyway. It made her feel a little better, and she noticed Meredith and Hester were in no hurry to uncouple their helmets either.

  “Dr. Fiorenzo,” Wandrei said pleasantly. “Allow me to introduce my colleagues. I take it you’ve had some success?”

  “Limited,” Fiorenzo answered in a light contralto, turning from a dissection table upon which the twitching remains of something that couldn’t possibly still be alive were pinned. She did not seem at all surprised to see them—and Wandrei apparently did not need to introduce himself. “I’m pleased you’re here. After the accident… Charlie dead and all the crew…”

  Her face revealed grief, tension, relief. What would it be like, trapped alone parsecs off any shipping lane, inside an enormous dead creature slowly rotting around you?

  The introductions were a scene of almost surreal cordiality. Fiorenzo was a narrow-shouldered, olive-skinned woman. Her face was smooth everywhere but at the corners of her eyes as she smiled, and she wasn’t old enough to be going salt-and-pepper yet, though what few strands of grey there were stood out like silver embroidery on black velvet against the darkness of her hair. She wore it in a pixyish crop, like a lot of practical-minded spacers.

  I thought you’d be older, Cynthia didn’t say, in the hellish mundanity of pleasantries carried out while the relic of Major Ngao stood against the far bulkhead, arms folded across his chest, watching cloudy-eyed but seemingly intent, as if he were following the conversation. She was spared from having to shake hands because Fiorenzo was gloved, and she was spared from having to come up with something else to say when Fiorenzo paused at her name, frowned, and said, “Feuerwerker. They threw you off the Richard Trevithick just before— Damned shame. That was good research. It’s about time somebody found out what’s in one of those biosuspension canisters!”

  Cynthia managed not to step back, rocked by a peculiar combination of the warmth of a fellow scientist’s regard and the horror of who, exactly, was praising her. Her jaw was still working on an answer when Fiorenzo continued, “Well, you’re welcome here now. We’ll find some things out, you and I! Maybe even a thing or two about the Mi-Go!”

  “Thank you,” Cynthia said weakly. She let Fiorenzo, Meredith, and Wandrei step away. Hester crowded close and leaned their helmets together in order to whisper: “What did you do?”

  “I thought everybody knew already.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Cynthia couldn’t quite figure out where to start. She was still fumbling when Hester broke and asked outright, “You were trying to reverse-engineer a Mi-Go canister?”

  “A vacant one,” Cynthia said in weak protest. “Not one with somebody inside.”

  “Sweet breathsucker,” Hester said. “Haven’t you heard about what happened to the Lavinia Whateley?”

  A boojum privateer. Vanished without a trace after pirating a cargo of the Mi-Go’s canisters of disembodied brains. Rumor was that all hands and even the ship herself had wound up disassembled and carted off to the outer reaches of the solar system, living brains forever locked in metal tins, going immortally mad.

  Cynthia nodded tersely, lips thin. “I didn’t say it was a good idea.”

  Hester looked like she wanted to say something else, but Wandrei called her over. Cynthia stayed where she was, not wanting to intrude on an Arkhamer conversation.

  Although… was Fiorenzo an Arkhamer? Cynthia’d learned enough to recognize the names of the Arkhamer ships—all of them named for one of the nine that had originally set out from Earth—and Fiorenzo wasn’t one of them. But Wandrei called her Doctor Fiorenzo, and she’d introduced herself the same way—Julia Filomela Fiorenzo. No “Jarmulowicz” or “Burlingame” or “Dubois.” So either she wasn’t a Arkhamer—whom the Arkhamers treated like an Arkhamer, and Cynthia wasn’t buying that for a second—or she was an Arkhamer and her ship had disowned her.

  Well, gosh, Dr. Feuerwerker. I wonder why.

  Her ship had disowned her, but Wandrei hadn’t—and Cynthia remembered the comments about Wandrei getting in trouble, remembered the President’s suspicions, and knew that, yes, Wandrei had brought them out here, not on a mission of mercy, but to check in on Fiorenzo’s experiments. Experiments that the rest of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica did not know about, or at least did not know were still ongoing.

  Sweet merciful Buddha of the Breathsucker, Cynthia thought and looked down to discover that she’d wandered over much closer than she’d meant to get to the dissection table where Fiorenzo had been working when they came in.

  The creature on it had once been human. It should not still be alive.

  Or possibly it wasn’t. She twisted her head, forcing her gaze away from the wet holes where the thing’s face had been, and found Major Ngao watching her. Watching? Staring at? Staring through? She had to squeeze her eyes shut and bite down hard on her lip to keep the bubble of hysteria from escaping, and when she opened her eyes again, she was staring down at the dead, twitching creature’s chest.

  Where, under the blood, the words ‘Free Ship Calico Jack’ were still, just barely, legible on the scraps of its uniform.

  Cynthia stepped back, a big over-dramatic step that caught everyone’s attention, Fiorenzo’s voice dying in the middle of a sentence: “the bodies just aren’t fresh enough. I need—”

  “Dr. Feuerwerker?” Wandrei said, with that nasty snide tone that every teacher in the universe used when they’d caught you not pa
ying attention in class.

  Cynthia opened her mouth, without the least idea what was going to come out—and more than half convinced it was going to be, There’s nothing to ensure freshness like harvesting them yourself, is there, Dr. Fiorenzo? But some remnant of self-preservation interfered, and what she said was:

  “How did the Charles Dexter Ward die?”

  “What?” Fiorenzo said; Wandrei was frowning. Cynthia repeated the question.

  “Oh. There was… the mirror broke,” Fiorenzo said with a vague gesture. “And the doppelkinder came. They killed the crew and the ship.”

  “How did you escape?” Meredith asked, wide-eyed

  “Luck, I think,” Fiorenzo said with a shrug that almost looked like a spasm, and a bitter laugh. “I was the pathologist, and I was in the morgue when it happened. I think they just couldn’t smell me. And you know they don’t last very long.”

  Yes, like homicidal mayflies. They rarely lasted more than a few hours after they’d killed their primary host. Cynthia nodded and did not—did not—look at the dissection table. “And you’ve been here ever since?”

  Fiorenzo offered a sad, slanted little smile. “There’s been nowhere I can go.”

  §

  Fiorenzo wanted, she said, to transfer her most promising experiments to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. As she and Wandrei and Meredith started a discussion of how that might be accomplished, Hester caught Cynthia by the arm and dragged her grimly out into the hallway, still within the light of Fiorenzo’s rigged operating theater, but well out of earshot.

  There Hester stopped and leaned into Cynthia’s helmet again. “She’s lying.”

  “About what?” Cynthia said, her mind still stuck blankly on that poor twitching thing strapped down on Fiorenzo’s operating table.

  “Doppelkinder can’t kill a boojum. They won’t even go after one. Boojums don’t recognize their own reflections.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Doppelkinder hunt in mirrors,” Hester began with exaggerated patience.

  “Not that,” Cynthia said. She’d been terrified of doppelkinder since her first Civil Defense class when she was five. “Boojums don’t see themselves in mirrors?”