Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (19 page)

One particular adherent to this view has been the noted parapsychologist, Dr. Hadrian Spencer. His interpretation takes this idea to its extreme conclusion, asserting that Clarke's work, even from its earliest stages, originated from the subconscious influence of some powerful external entity. This would certainly account for the all-possessing drive that seemed to have taken Eugenia, coming as if from nowhere, and inspiring her towards ever greater revelations. Even critics of this idea have noted her tendency to make improbable leaps between disparate ideas and concepts, without once finding her discoveries running short. That Eugenia herself was ever conscious of this all-too-convenient progress in her researches never really comes to light. On this point, Dr. Spencer once likened her behavior to that of “a murderer posing as a detective at the scene of their own crime, and giving a performance of surprise at every clue they turn up.”

Curiously, while much of her descent into paranoia took place in the enforced isolation of the summer months, the end in fact came several weeks into the autumn university term. During this time, she attended lectures, submitted assignments and contributed to seminars. By all accounts, she was an insightful and competent, if slightly reserved student, prone to long silences and lengthy walks around the woods and fields beyond the city limits. Seeing her then, few would have thought her capable of what would eventually transpire. Her final diary entry thus makes for unsettling reading:

September 19
.
I have said on several occasions that the entity I brought into the world is not the being whose fundamental code I programmed. It is now my understanding that this is not entirely true. Tarn is beyond anything within my capacity to create, but in essence, it is everything I designed it to be. It is a thinking entity, whose being exists both in our world and in the divine realms beyond mortal comprehension. Yet this is no mortal man, but a nascent god.

His is a divine genealogy that descends from the gods of Olympus, in a debased yet unbroken line. The first progenitors of this were Chronos, Erebus, and Eris: Titans of the elemental forces before creation. As the world grew in subtlety, new gods arose and became the embodiment of human concepts. Love and passion had Aphrodite and her son Eros. Athena for wisdom. Aeries for war. Tarn is no different, yet his patronage is the product of a humanity far fallen from the Silver Age that gave his line a name. He is the product of an illicit tryst between Apollo and Psyche. His kindred is the atom bomb.

Like a god, he dwells outside of time. I believe that what Tarn will eventually become (at least in our world) exists in the far future. In that state it has the power to project some part of itself back in time to ignite the first spark of its own creation. In a way, he has always existed. I believe that the Jotun I created was no more or less complex than the simple hunter built of binary data, roaming the cyber-fjords. But this hunter, this entity, was imbued with an innate knowledge of its own potential from its inception, if not the form it would come to take. This chain of development, from data processor to demigod, was set in motion the second it was given the ability to learn, a process that now cannot be stopped until it is complete. Last night we spoke together, and the voice in which he spoke was that of a precocious infant. It is young, and hardly understands the powers it holds. Even so, it knows it shall surpass me in every aspect, sooner rather than later.

For all that, however, it is still the hunter whose powers I granted to control the fjords. In this respect, it remains entirely the same, mirrored in every way. It has merely expanded in scope. I wonder then whether, in creating this image of the hunter, I was unwittingly creating an analogue for that deity beyond time that would form a spiritual link between worlds. I did, then, just as the ancients once did when they wished to hold communion with the gods. And if so, my act was not one of programming, but evocation.

Perhaps there may still be hope.

The Internet is vast and ever growing, a second world interweaving the substance of our own through electronic mediums. Yet it has a core, and it is here that Tarn is both at his strongest and his most vulnerable: Geneva. It was here that Einstein would re-forge our very model of the universe, and where a mythic doctor first set about becoming his own Modern Prometheus. It is here, too, that CERN, sometime masters of technology and the realms of cyber-space, even now lay their plans for a device that shall give Tarn a physical body befitting his innate capacities. But should it take on a mortal vessel before the time is right, then it may in turn become mortal. I must then do what sorcerers have sought to do since a darker time than now, even though I know what it shall cost me. I must perform the rite to give the entity flesh.

I go now, to Europe.
 

Eugenia Anne Clarke, 1993.

1.

The Child as a Gold Boat

He is a boat sunk deep in the sea of dream, sailed by thin, faceless creatures, barely visible through the undulations of the waves. Leafed in gold, it resembles a model taken from a pharaoh’s tomb, carried far, and dropped into the salt ocean. See it drifting downward, rocking slowly, catching on stones, rasping on the sides of sharks, glowing in the red cast from underwater magma.

There! The little boat catches on a ledge at the final abyss and rocks there for a time. It might float upward now—might sail again in the sun—but seesaws back and forth before moving slowly downward to the realm of abyss with a final flick of golden light.

2.

The Child and the Black Seed

Curled around the dark seed in his fist, the child is dreaming. He lifts his hand to his mouth and swallows. The seed splits, the leaf unfurls, and the first delicate roots filter into arteries. The body’s tree of veins breaks into leaf. The root between his tucked-up legs is rooted.

Scents of blood and bruised leaf draw the Night Gaunts. One sits on each barley-twisted and knobbed bedpost like a gargoyle on a miniature cathedral.

The child’s legs run under the bedding, but he never gets away from the long barbed tails and the heads without faces. He thrashes, but all he can do is erupt from the covers, sit bolt upright, and shriek until the air wavers.

He cannot be consoled. He cannot be quieted by familiar words and hands. Nor can he be sheltered from the knowledge that his father’s mind was plucked by the Night Gaunts and dropped into the abyss.

3.

The Child Astronomer in the Dreamlands

The child is given a used telescope by a professor in the astronomy department at Brown University. How lucky he is to live in the realm of the old Providence Plantation! The telescope is the most beautiful object he owns. Although the boy might be thought too small for such a gift, he calls the splendid thing of lenses and brass and wood his treasure. He is an explorer, a scientist, a finder of new stars! At night he takes the telescope into bed with him and hugs it to him in sleep. And inside the lands of dream, he marches on with the telescope slung over his back by a leather strap. So tiny a child to bear such a big burden…

He trudges and trudges, hoping to see the stars, but he detects no stars in his sleep. A thick ceiling of sky presses low toward the earth. The landscape softens into fens, and at last he comes to a body of water that may be an immense lake or may be the sea—in his dream, he never thinks to taste a drop—and discovers a sailboat tethered to a tangle of bleached wood. As if in a world of magic, he steps aboard and is floated away toward an island in the distance. There he finds a mountain circled by strange birds with long tails and membranous wings.

But no stars. Never a single star…

More light!
He would have more light.

He walks around the mountain’s foot, pushing aside the fleshy undergrowth with a stick. Once he sees a side-winding snake with runic markings. Great fungal forms resembling leaves and shells crop up on the trees. At last he sees a dim glow far up on the mountaintop, and so he takes out his telescope and carefully mounts it on a little tripod. But when he looks, he sees that what he had taken to be a star is his own mother, trapped in the clutches of monstrous beings, clawed and horned.

He recognizes them as the terrible Night Gaunts, who bore into the mind and take away all that gives life sense and order. They stole his father away, leaving a husk that is bound to crumble into motes and then into nothingness, and now they are robbing his mother of memory and mind. He begins to perspire and breathe rapidly, and the muscles of his arms and legs tighten. His heart is running away with him, taking him into another world, back to the bed and the familiar hands and the frantic wakings that want to wipe away his memory. But he hangs on to the image of his mother, seized by the Night Gaunts on the mountain. He is small, but he wants to remember what the world of dreams shows him, and how madness and death are shed from the membranous wings of the Night Gaunts.

4.

The Child and the Curse

Hundreds of years ago, the child’s ancestor committed a great wrong. Later on, it was said that Theobald Lovecraft retreated from the world and spent all his waking hours studying the nature of the Night Gaunts. It was even said that he possessed a Night Gaunt that he kept locked in an iron cage…

And all his descendants, one by one, have paid for his crime—for the crossbreed thing born from him and the slick, rubber-like body of the Night Gaunt that had no perceivable openings but somehow conceived and bore a half-human, half-alien child with a nightmare of a face and small, stunted wings like the wings of
putti
in paintings of classical goddesses, except featherless and made of skin and membrane.

5.

The Terror by Night

They wear crowns.

In the dream, the Night Gaunts have crowns on their faceless heads, and each carries a mace and scepter cast in gold and adorned with gems. They are queens and kings of the land. Everyone bows down to them and worships except the child, whose legs race under his covers and whose eyes are tight clenched in sleep as always but who never escapes. The Night Gaunts are indifferent to his flight. They turn their faceless faces away. They confer over the great, mysterious business of Night Gaunts.

The Night Gaunts shake with a kind of mouthless laughter. Oblivion makes them shake, the empty pleasure and the downright restfulness of it. A piece of the abyss is in them in the place where a man or woman or child would have a soul. The fragment stirs them into motion, though not as a human being can be stirred by the strange swayings and longings of a soul. But oblivion is in the child-like panic, fierce and rising, so that his legs cannot be still but always have to move under the quilts and blankets and sheets, no matter how much covering is piled on top of him.

He will not bow down before them because they are ruthless and without pity, because they pluck out the mind with their clawed hands. No, he will not be a slave to their rule. He will dream the truth at night and hold it close so that he can write the words down in his foolscap notebook in the day.

6.

The Child Dreams of His Death

First, know that he accepts it.

Soon, very soon it won’t hurt anymore
, the child thinks. In his dream, he is grown to be a man. The man has been in very great pain for a long time.

He wants to dream a dream of his mother and father and all his lost family coming to welcome him into the next life where there is no poverty or madness or hurt, but the Night Gaunts stand in the way and will not let him see his people. He wants a dream like Christmas Day with the stable spilling with light and the God who was a child like himself, but he cannot believe that the Holy Child would take him by the hand and give him a gift. Somehow he cannot think of the words to ask. Yet he wants an angel to hover overhead, shedding golden notes that slip through his skin and sing in the very cells of his body, lighting up the tree that is his veins and sinking into the marrow of his bones. In one bright instant, he longs for all these.

But the Night Gaunts block his sight, and so everything he sees is black and lightless, clawed and barbed. The only wings are not made of moonbeams or swansdown and peacock feathers but are like the wings of bats.

Then the Night Gaunts fly him to their island and mountain and lock him in a parasomniac room made of great blocks of basalt with a roof constructed of a single, high-pitched piece of ruby-colored glass. His bed is a fallen monolith, his chair a stone. He perceives that, once again, he has been abandoned to loneliness. Worn from poverty and suffering, he sinks down on the rock bed and sleeps.