Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (10 page)

The feeling was sudden and intense: that if I took a moment, I could read this sea-writing and know the secrets that came from the deep. A cold sharpness, marrow-deep, and it passed so quickly that I had to laugh in case I thought I was going mad. I had to mock myself. Not that it made me feel any better, but there's something about getting in the first hit against yourself that's always felt satisfying to me. No-one can tear me down more than I do myself. It's an idiot's armor against the world.

In trying to escape my mother's stupid call, I'd walked almost to the river mouth. A handful of cuttlefish bones were scattered near the shoreline and a dead gannet lay with its beak pointing to the sky like a bleached sentinel.

No roving gangs of murdering children, though. So that was a bonus.

The river-water here was grit-filled, dirty with silt, but even so, I hopped off the edge of the crumbing sand bank and stood thigh deep in the cold rush of the estuary flow. I'd stepped into some other world. Not here, not there. Not anywhere.

I wished I could stay.

With a deep breath I turned around to walk back home and the mist billowed like a new sail, revealing three shapes staggering a little way from me, leaning against the wind as they crossed the dunes. I yelped in fear, and one ash-grey figure turned his muted face to me, his horns iron dark, curling like a ram's. I'd seen these three figures before, still and naked and robbed of speech, sitting on a bench in the art gallery.

My heart stuttered. Some kind of Cape Town artistic statement, like the cowled death in a boat on Liesbeek River. A bunch of university brats dressed up as the Butcher Boys.

Fuck them. I had to get home and catch a train into town. I still had the afternoon shift to prep for. Even here in the long lonely places, I wasn't going to get to run away from myself.

§

It was in the news the next morning. How unknown thieves had broken into the gallery and somehow made off with the Butcher Boys. Everyone seemed bewildered by the why as much as the how.
Students
, I thought again, and spent the rest of the week running coffees and cakes for sweating tourists with wide American accents, dressed in safari gear in an air-conditioned shopping mall. I didn't have the time or energy to notice any more talk about the stolen sculpture.

I heard about Jarry on the train a few days later. The Southern line had broken down just outside Dieprivier, and I was packed in with a million other sweaty souls, wondering if this was hell or purgatory and deciding it was probably purgatory because hell would smell like brimstone not sun-warm piss and cheese Nik-Naks and dead things. The weather had turned strangely humid for summer, making everyone sticky-tired and mildew-scented. A constant shrieking hum razored the air like an army of invisible cicadas, fungus growing in odd places. Just the other day I had opened my tea tin to find a collection of silvery pearls—snail eggs—buried in among the composting oolong.

Now I was crushed on a graffitied seat on the train, hugging my laptop bag to my chest, my earphones buried in my ears like a protective ward against unwanted conversation and the interminable buzz, trying to avoid breathing too deeply, and half-listening to the jabber around me.

A million different languages spilling like warm wax, and the word that hooked me, that made me sit up a little straighter and almost forget the stench and the lateness and the sweat gathering like slug slime under my T-shirt, the word that almost made me forget about my shitty life—the word was
Jarry
.

Two men were standing close to me and their voices were a little different from everyone else's. Maybe that's what caught my attention. They spoke English like a foreign language, with a lilt and cadence I'd never heard before. I tried to place them. Tourists, certainly. From where?

“The old way into Jarry is closed now,” said the one with his back to me. “The dream is ended.”
His companion, who had eyes like bright dark fish, looked like he was having stomach troubles. He winced. “There will be other ways in. I'm sure of it.”

“And if there were—do we want to go back? How long before we forget who we are, become part of the Long Road and see nothing more of this world? Perhaps it's better to stay here with the apes.”

Were they rehearsing some kind of play? That had to be it. Actors using the wasted time on a stuck train to learn their lines.

The dream is ended.
I wondered what the play was about.

Then a screech, a lurch, and the
chuff-chuff-chuff
of the groaning train as we set on our way once more. I glanced down at my watch. Forty-five minutes late. When I looked up, the men were moving, pushing their way through the crowd toward the end of the carriage. No more talk of Jarry and the Long Road. I settled back and closed my eyes. Maybe I'd catch some sleep before Valsbaai.

§

Jarry crawled into my head after that. I looked for it in dreams, in books abandoned yellowly in the leaf-clogged gutters, in the calligraphy of dead jellyfish, in the seal corpses that washed up stinking from the storms. But Jarry, whatever it was, remained as incomprehensible as the strange weather. My mother called two days after my birthday to ask if I could look something up on “the Google” for her. Instead I searched for Jarry, for a play about dreams, but there was nothing.

I forgot.

It was almost a month later when I saw the girl with the sign. Normally, I ignore people-with-signs. It's not that I'm a complete shit, it's just that I have only so many R5 coins to give out and after a while the eye contact makes me feel guilty. And, sure, I am guilty. Too rich in a world where most people are pretty much starving.

The girl was standing in the middle of the road, on the yellow-painted island, the sign around her neck on a piece of twine. She was staring blindly ahead and the wind from the passing cars whipped her hair around her head in a fury.

She wasn't asking for money or hand-outs or anything. The sign just said:

JARRY!!!

FIND A NEW ROAD
BEFORE THE JESUS COMES

JARRY!!!

Normally, I'd hurry past people like her, with her grime and her sour smell and her madness like a blanket all tucked up around her, but instead, I waited for the lights to turn red, then darted through the stalled traffic. She didn't flinch as I came close, didn't flinch or wheedle or beg. She ignored me.

“Hi,” I said. “Um, so, Jarry?”

The lights changed, cars revved and roared, rubbish smacked around our heels. Someone yelled something out of his car window as he passed us, but the wind dragged it away.

“On your sign?” I tapped the word. The first Jarry with its eleventy-billion exclamation marks, each drawn with a meticulous neatness in purple kokie pen. “What is it? Like, a place or something?”

I was starting to feel more than a little stupid. Her pale eyes were turned to the horizon and she didn't blink. What the hell had possessed me to come and make idle chit-chat to some weirdo with a sign anyway? A Jesus-freak with a sign, I should clarify. At least she wasn't trying to convert me or get me to repent or cower from some non-existent end-times.

“Yeah,” I said. “Never mind.” And just because I guess I wanted to throw her a little, to get some kind of reaction I said: “The dream has ended, anyhow.”

She moved so fast I didn't even have time to stumble backwards or dodge. Her hand shot out and caught my wrist, fingers cold and tight like the rusted jaws of a pair of old pliers. “What do you know about Dreaming?” Her breath was cold. We were standing on a traffic island under a baking Cape Town summer sun and her breath was ice.

“Nothing.” I shook my hand free. “Nothing, forget it, lady.”

She shoved me hard in the chest, almost sending me backward into the traffic. “Stay away from Jarry, ape,” she said. “Stay in your own stinking shit and misery.”

I didn't have time for this. All I'd wanted was a liter of milk and a pack of Camels and to get back to my apartment where it was marginally cooler and I had a lifetime supply of illegally downloaded TV series that would probably only make it to South Africa in 3011. Jarry, cold breath and the Jesus. Apes. Just… nonsense words. Meaning nothing. I shook it away and ran.

By the time I got home, I'd played that damn encounter in my head a million times. It wasn't like I could talk to anyone about it. Savvie was at work and she'd probably call me an idiot for “making first contact” anyway.

I could Tweet about how some crazy on the street just about gave me a one-way trip to the Saviour himself, or I could see if any of my friends were online and maybe I could mention something, because I couldn't get her words scraped out from my skull.

Not nonsense. True words.

I knew nothing about dreaming. I never remembered mine. So instead of talking to anyone, I smoked cigarettes because a girl has to have vices and I watched a show I'd already seen because the actors were adorable and the hoyay was strong, and I Instagrammed Savvie's cat because it was Saturday.

My hands shook. I smoked more cigarettes and pretended everything was okay.

What else was I supposed to do?

I met The Jesus in a bar, while I was busy turning wine into water. Snap. I was there alone because Sav had bailed on me, claiming that working in a bar had put her off them for life. Odd thing. So I'd left her with the cat and headed down the road to the only-mildly grotty
Hole
, got drunk enough to not care that I was a frumpy mother's failure, and found myself a skinny, pretty Jesus.

He was haloed under a lamp that curved down like a curious tulip, drinking something clear and sparkly from a glass frosted with tiny droplets. It's not like I was at the
Hole
trying to get laid, of course. More like I was open to the opportunity if it arose. Ha-ha, so many terrible puns. But that's the reason I noticed him. I'm a sucker for a pretty face. Envy, maybe.

And he was all Pretty Face. One of those boys that looks like he's just waiting for the ’80s to resurface so that he can dig out his mother's clothing. A long face and hair that stood out in every direction, a perfect collusion of natural curl and expensive product.

He was sketching. And it should have felt so put-on, so damnably coy and pretentious. So
look-at-me
. Somehow it didn't. I took a seat close to him and ordered another glass of the house red (boxed; I'm no fool, but then again I don't come to the
Hole
to satisfy my exquisitely refined palate) and watched as his pencil danced across the paper, leaving a shadowy image behind.

“Did you draw that from your head?” Stupid question. It must have been. It's not like there was a three-headed dog sprawled out on the bar-counter.

Pretty Face looked up and he had a startled look like I imagined a deer would have, if I'd ever seen a deer. I saw a porcupine once. It's not quite the same thing, saying someone had a startled look like a porcupine. That's a totally different kind of startled.

One where you get a face full of black and white spines.

“I—” He just sort of sat there. Looking for an escape route, possibly. There would have been an awkward silence. Instead there was just an awkward mumbly indie guitar with whispery vocals.

So, All Pretty Face and No Pretty Brains. I was already spilling over with disappointment. At least the wine was good. What am I saying—the wine was terrible.

“No,” he said.

Terrific. Forward motion on the conversation train. I put down my glass. “Uh-huh.”

“I saw one once.”

I wanted to laugh at him, to mock him before he could mock me, but he had this serious cast to his face, a sweet sort of innocence that made me bite back on whatever scathing retort I was fermenting. “In your dreams?” I said instead.

He laughed. It was a nice sound, all smoky and warm, like the last hour of a good party. “In the Dreaming.”

“In Jarry,” I snapped back, like the word had been sitting curled up on the back of my tongue, just waiting for the moment I would let it free.

“Yes,” he said.

After a few seconds he closed his sketchbook, downed the last of his drink and took my hand. I let him, not because I'm an idiot, but because Jarry had already eaten into my dreams and I desperately wanted to go there.

We walked out into a night that had turned shivery; a cold front blowing in from the ocean. I rubbed my hands along my arms and watched him, watched his breath smoking. He was real. I didn't even know his name. I was drunk. Maybe.

Probably.
You should phone Sav
, I told myself.

“So,” I said. “You know how to get to Jarry.”

He was fiddling with his jacket zip. It had got caught in the strap of his little flat portfolio bag. “I did once,” he muttered.

“But the old ways are closed.”

“Yes.” He looked up at me, frowning. He was even prettier when he frowned. It gave him the air of a confused lizard. “How do you know?”

I shrugged.

“Because you don't smell like someone who has been to Jarry.”

“I do this thing. It's called bathing.”

“No—” He brought one hand to his face, and covered his right eye. The other one stared at me unblinking. A little creepy, I'll admit. But we were still standing outside the
Hole
. There were people around. “You look wrong.”

“Nice. I already get that shit from my mother, I don't need it from you.” I turned to stagger back and he caught my arm, gently pulling me to him.

“Not—not like that.” He smiled, shy as a schoolboy on a first date. “Your face is perfect.”

Perfect.
I'm an idiot, but it was still nice to hear a little flattery for a change.

“I meant,” he said, “that you don't look like someone who has seen Jarry.” His hand was melting-warm on my cold arm, and just for once, I wanted to hold on to the idea that something about me was worthwhile, even if I knew he was lying. And I wanted to know more. So sue me. “I haven't.” I sighed. “Obviously.”