Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (11 page)

“Ah.” He lowered his hand, held it out to me. “I'm Sullivan. And I can get you there.”

Pretty Face, Pretty Hands. Long fingers. Elegant. Fingers that could draw the strange, the magical. Of course I shook his hand. “Euphemia,” I said. “Shut up, my parents were weird, you get used to it. Call me Mia if the whole thing is too much.”

“Euphemia.”

“Exactly.”

“It sounds like a drug.”

I laughed. “Oh, hang on, is that what this is? Is Jarry a trip?”

“Yes,” said Sullivan. “The best.” Then he shook his head. “It's not—it's better than drugs. It's marvelous.”

I'm not even going to pretend I wasn't having massive second-thoughts by this point.

“There are still ways into Jarry, there always are, but the main portico collapsed, so everyone ape-side is trying to find a new way back and it's all a bit chaotic right now.…” He waved his Pretty Hands around.

“Ape-side?”

“Where the humans live.”

“Ah.” I edged sideways. It was too cold out here anyway. Chatting with Pretty Face Sullivan had been entertaining, but we were now steering the Good Ship Conversation far past the Harbor of Mildly Amusing into the uncharted Seas of Uncomfortably Weird. “Perfect.”

“You can't help being human,” and he said it so sincerely. Perhaps it was his voice. I was being hypnotized. That's it. Totally hypnotized. “It's not your fault.”

“Ah.” My conversational train had derailed. I didn't exactly have a lot of responses ready for this sort of thing. “What are you then?”

“A go-between.” When he smiled, I swear it all made sense. “Now, come on. There's supposed to be a slipway to Jarry here, but it's temperamental at best. Takes a bit of thumping before it works.”

“And you know this how?” I followed him, every molecule of my brain screaming, but damn me, I followed him anyway. “I thought you'd only used the Old Way.”

“An angel told me.”

“Right. Angel.” I nodded.

“Yes, exactly. Zaile. He was drunk at the time and I had to trade him a starling-bowl for the information, but Zaile's Mundus-born.” He was smiling again. “It will be there, and we will get it to work.”

“Okay.” I was fumbling with my phone, sending a message to Sav.
Near Hole. Chatting up weirdo. Pretty weirdo. Possible serial killer. Pretty serial killer. Not home in twenty send heavily-armed men.
“So how far is this doorway-thing?”

He stopped. We were literally half a block from the
Hole
. I could still see people lounging on the pavement, leaning against the walls, talking shit and smoking and drinking their craft beers. Safe. “Right here.”

I tilted my head. Someone had stuck a poster to the wall. It was for a circus. Last year. Most of the poster was gone. Some scrawled graffiti, a damp patch that smelled like urine and a few weeds growing through the cracks. “It's… wonderful,” I said. “I'm truly lost for words.”

Sullivan slammed his open palm into the center of the crumbling brick wall, and I jumped. Beneath his hand, the wall shivered. Sullivan grinned.

And I saw Jarry.

§

It was night over the city and the stars hung in garlands across the sky, stars of silver and blue and red and green, like distant fireworks. The buildings were tall and narrow teeth, blackened in the indigo maw of the sky. It wasn't the sight of Jarry that made me draw a deep breath, like an infant's first, but the smell.

Incense and jungle green and parrot feather sweetness and a cinnamony musk, the air of a different world. Behind me, the
Hole
and the stink of beer and cigs, salt and stale fish faded, the empty ocean night falling away. I didn't even have to wait for Sullivan to speak, I stepped forward before anyone or anything could stop me.

The air was thicker here and my lungs had to work harder to draw oxygen from it. I took gulping breaths, filling my chest with a sweet taste that reminded me of pears soaked in whisky.

“Jarry,” said Sullivan, and his voice was loaded with emotion. I tried to place it. Relief? Perhaps. It was flooded with something close to tears, like it had been years since he had seen the city and was finally coming home.

“Oh my god,” I said. “It's real. It's really real.”

Sullivan didn't acknowledge me, probably because yes, it was really real and I was stating the fucking obvious. In my hand, my phone had gone dead—not just out of signal range or emergency call only, but utterly black. I thumbed the power button a few times, but nothing happened. With a short sigh of irritation I slipped the phone back into my pocket. Of course I wanted to Instagram this shit; it was the most exciting thing to happen to me since forever.

The skyline grew clearer as my eyes adjusted to the new world and the strange starlight. One of the buildings towered over the other, a huge window like a rose flowering on one side. We might not have churches quite like that in South Africa, but I'd have to be completely illiterate to not know a cathedral when I see one. It was massive though, far larger than anything I'd ever imagined.

“So the church even made it to other worlds?” I said, one finger pointed to the monstrosity. As if Sullivan wouldn't know what I was talking about.

He laughed. “The Cathedral still hangs on to its dreams of a new Jesus, but they're waiting for nothing.”

“You know that personally, do you? The Almighty drop you a line?”

Sullivan took my arm. “Even if there is one, he won't bother coming here. This is just a way-stop, a place where the lost souls drift. Purgatory, if you will.”

“So why the hell did you want to get back?”

“There's something I need.” He fumbled in his coat. “Listen, it's not exactly safe for you here. Stay too long and you'll forget you were ever anywhere else, and then you'll become part of the Long Road and never get back home.”

“Whoa—wait. What?”

He took a small blue egg out of his pocket and cradled it in his palm. “I can anchor you to earth, but you'll need to swallow this.”

“You're kidding.”

“Hardly.” He pressed the egg into my hand.

It wasn't actually an egg, just a tiny pale stone, no bigger than the nail of my pinkie. I closed my fist around it. Cold. And hard. Small enough to swallow whole. “And you want me to actually put this in my mouth—” I began.

“The sooner the better.” His eyes were fierce and dark here under the rainbow stars. “You really don't have much time.” His look softened. “Sorry, Mia. I'm worried. If you're trapped here, it would be on me, all that guilt. I simply took you, didn't warn you or anything. Please, for your own safety.”

The egg tasted of nothing. Just a moment's flinty coolness, and then I swallowed it down like I was taking a handful of painkillers the morning after the night before, dry and desperate.

I imagined that it sat heavy in my stomach, connecting me back to earth, but in reality I could feel nothing at all. “You're sure it will work?”

“Yes,” he said and his smile grew warmer, grateful almost. “Beyond certain.” He grabbed my arm. “And now, we'd best move, if I'm to make my appointment.”

I shook off his grip, but followed him anyway. Sullivan was walking briskly down a narrow road edged on either side by delicate spindly buildings draped in what looked like fairy lights. As I passed, I saw that they were all mismatched—some antique glass bulbs that looked older than dust, and some new and cheap, the kind you get at China Town for a couple of twenties.

“Detritus,” said Sullivan. “Stolen dreams.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Some of the more unusual residents can slip off the Long Road, into what they call Dreaming. Back into your world. And it is your world, to an extent.” He glanced back at me. “It was your world.”

“They… go back in time?”

“About fifteen minutes or so behind, yes. They take what they can, and bring it back here to trade. There are also a few doorways that do the same thing, but they're expensive to use.”

“Oh.” I didn't really have anything intelligent to say, I realized, but just about none of this made any sense. It had all the logic of a dream. I wasn't convinced that I was not actually dreaming. The whole thing had taken on a menacing eeriness: things brought back from the past, dream-nonsense and doorways to other worlds.

We walked the city of Jarry, heads bowed as though we didn't want anyone to take notice of us. I saw things, of course. I couldn't help staring. Women dressed in bearskins, their great ursine heads like bizarre frightening helmets, men in sackcloth and ashes, wearing gilded crosses almost as big as my hand, people with thin faces, their eyes like shifting mist. Three ashy figures wearing curling horns, naked, their mouths sealed. Butchers. They nodded at me as I past, their black eyes full of secrets they couldn't tell me.

I didn't think I liked Jarry very much. My hand pressed against my stomach, just under my ribs. Staying here was becoming less and less appealing. Sullivan's egg had better work.

Finally, Sullivan led me to a small arched door sunk halfway into the ground, down a little half-flight of stairs marked in a checkerboard pattern. There was a painted wooden sign just above the door, swinging idly in the faintly perfumed breeze.

Die Eend en Esel.

“Tell me purgatory is not full of repressed Afrikaans Calvinists,” I said. “The Duck and Donkey? Really?”

“It's as good a name as any, and besides, you can be sure that no-one here even remembers what it means. It's gibberish from the past. Probably stolen,” Sullivan added. He stepped down and pushed the door open. Chatter and smoke and the rapid scrape and whine of a fiddle spilled out into the night. “Come along,” he said. “We're letting the stink out.”

Inside
Die Eend en Esel
the crowd were mussels in a tide pool, shoulder to shoulder, pressed thick and black and salty, their voices and laughs braying and rolling. People were dressed in mismatched fashions, like they'd raided a garage-sale black bag of unwanted clothes and tried them on with no regard for style or color or, indeed, anything. One tall woman was wearing a curtain tie-back as a necklace, the tassel hanging between her breasts like a tired dancer.

Sullivan elbowed his way toward the back of the pub, and I trailed in his wake, muttering
excuse-mes
to no-one who was listening.

Finally, we came to another door, this one closed. A few raps and a hurried exchange, and we were in, the door shut behind us and the noise muffled.

“No,” said a small man, sitting on a stool in front of a large wardrobe. “It doesn't matter what you pay me, it's not going to work. Passage to Mundus is beyond your reach, not with that face.” He took off the long top hat he was wearing and squinted. “What's this you brought?”

“Tor.”

“Sullivan.” The man rolled his hat in his hands, his eyes glinting as he looked at me. “Answer the question.”

“A way in.”

He shook his head. “Oh no. The gates won't open for you and you know it. Mundus is closed to your signature.”

Sullivan shrugged. “I'm aware of that. I'm also an avid reader, and a great follower of various Mundus-collectors and what they keep in stock.” He pulled a second little blue egg stone out of his jacket pocket, and held it out between finger and thumb.

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.”