Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (26 page)

I am not worried. I have no reason to be. Not yet.

We are all gasping as we run up the side of a low hillock, even me, long used to ascents. I am weighted down with most of our gear and our water reserve, and that, I am less used to, though the last month has hardened me considerably.

“Come
on
, Bridget!” shouts Dr. Sangare, pelting pell-mell down the side of the hill, nearly slipping on the waving grasses. One hand keeps her tattered, dusty bowler in place against the gusts, the other windmills her back into balance as her pack slams hard on her hip. Her tweed jacket flies open, revealing the knives strapped across her chest. She is good with them, but not good enough to stop a pack of ravenous dogs from rending us limb from limb. “We must get to that… thingy!”

The
thingy
is a rocky prominence in the distance. If we were closer to home, I would think it was a cairn to mark the path for travelers. But we are not close to home, and here there are no marked paths. Or travelers, for that matter.

“I don’t think,” gasps Bridget, “we’ll make it.” She is struggling too, nearly tripping as her skirts whip and snap around her ankles like a prayer flag. The leather-and-bronze hip holster glimmers bright as her flaming hair; she is an excellent shot, but the dogs are too many, too quick to make her superb marksmanship useful.

“We
must
make it,” says Dr. Sangare. Her fierce determination steadies Bridget. They are a good team, they complement one another.

Neither calls to me. Why should they? I have proven myself strong and reliable time and again, and besides, I cannot return their encouragement. Anyway, I was not hired to cheer them onward. I was hired to carry into Leng what they could not manage by themselves, and haul back what they raided from the barrows of her ancient queens.

As we keep running, the spire in the distance takes on new details. To my surprise, it does appear to be a cairn—but an enormous one. Vaguely pyramidal in shape, wind and rain has smoothed away the rougher edges of the piled boulders; some have tumbled from the heights and lie scattered about the base.

“It’s too far.” Bridget is lagging behind her companion, I can see her legs are shaking with fatigue. “Dily… I… I don’t think we’ll be dying rich.”

“What’s our plan once we’re there?”

Dr. Sangare’s question distracts Bridget from her worries; she is already assessing the tactical possibilities, and runs the faster for it. “To the top,” she says. “High ground. We’ll each take up a station, pick off as many as we can with boulders, rocks, my pistol, whatever we can find. Maybe if we keep them at bay for long enough they’ll get bored.”

“All right,” says Dr. Sangare. Sweat gleams on her dark forehead, it glistens like stars against the night sky. “Got that, Krishna?”

She looks back. I nod.

“He’s
smiling
,” observes Bridget, as we redouble our pace. “The fuck is he smiling about? Doesn’t he know we’re in danger?”

“Try asking him,” says Dr. Sangare.

“
Right
,” says Bridget.

If I could, I would tell them that we are in danger… but not in danger of dying. I would know. But I cannot tell them, so I do not, and we run on in silence.

Though they carry less than I, they have more trouble climbing up the slippery rocks when we reach them. Well, neither grew up trekking from village to village over dangerous passes, or scrambling up escarpments to get at berries or birds’ eggs.

As the jackals bound closer, a slavering, yipping, howling mass of furry, toothy hunger, Bridget slips a second time. I sling off my pack and go down to help her up.

“Thanks, Krishna,” she wheezes, as she clambers up beside me, now marginally safer.

Unlike many visitors to my home village, Bridget and Dr. Sangare have always been polite. I nod in response to her thanks, and shouldering the pack, I point higher.

Dr. Sangare has gotten above us, squatting on the top of the rock pile. The sun has risen, and she tips up the brim of her bowler, squinting in the dawn light.

“There’s an awful lot of them,” she observes.

“We’ll do what we can. I mean, we’ve made it this far.” Bridget hauls herself onto a flattish boulder and sets to looking over her pistol. “Krishna, anything to add?”

I shrug.

“Even facing down death, still silent as the grave?” Bridget shakes her head. The handful of ruddy curls that have escaped her tight bun bounce.

“Here they come,” says Dr. Sangare. Her black eyes glint as she raises a boulder the size of my head over her own. Hurling it down upon the jackals, it bounces once, twice, then strikes one in the face. Its jaw is torn off and the resulting red spray mists those next to it. The jawless jackal runs another step, then falls over twitching.

The dead jackal’s companions pause for a moment to look at the ruined corpse of their companion, then turn to look at us. One growls.

“Woo!” cries Dr. Sangare, pointing at the dogs. “That’s right, you mangy mongrels!”

Dr. Sangare turns around, looking this way and that for another rock. She spies a candidate, resting at the meeting point of two large boulders. She steps out onto the flatter, lower of the two. It wobbles beneath her foot, and tips inward.

“Dily!” cries Bridget, leaping to her partner’s side, but the doctor is already sliding, slipping into the black chasm. She screams, once, and then we hear a terrible thump.

Bridget is there, kneeling, peering down, calling Dr. Sangare’s name. There is no response. I peek over the edge; it’s impossible to see anything.

A growl turns my attention behind me. Three jackals have gained the top of the mound. One barks. Another snarls. I think about what color the snarl might have been, in my mind, before my color-sense changed. Before I could only see one color in my mind. One color that meant one thing.

They advance. I make my decision.

I push Bridget into the blackness. She screams as I jump in after. But of course, I do not make a sound as I fall.

§

I used to hear in color, and count and smell, too. The sound of Mother patting out parathas was warm golden yellow, the smell of our yak a fresh green; a pile of five stones was maroon, but a pile of seven, pale purple. I didn’t
see
these colors, not exactly… Zopa, our yak, was creamy white and warm brown, and stones were… stone-colored. Just the same, I knew the colors were there, hovering at the edges of my understanding of the world, but vital to it. When I thought hard about certain things, I could
sense
the color in my mind. It was never distracting; in fact, it often helped me remember things, like how many sheepskins I’d last seen in the barn.

All that changed when I went to see where the star struck near the base of Chomolungma, Mother of the World, which visitors call Mount Everest. The night before, we all had seen it streaking through the sky, its tail redder than the War God’s skin. Everyone was curious, of course, but some people in our village refused to go see what had fallen—the old-timers in particular said that if it had been cast out of Heaven, it was not for man to look upon. Those of us who would go went anyway, laughing at them, and at their children, sour-faced and resentful at being kept at home.

The crater was smoking like a cup of
su cha
on a cold morning when we came upon it, but in spite of all the dead trees and blackened stones the earth was not too warm to walk on. Still, the strangeness of it put off many of our party, and they stood well away from the lip of the depression.

Something did seem wrong… it was the shadows, as if the sun shone differently upon that place than elsewhere. My sister begged me not to go nearer, and many agreed we should turn around. I would not listen, and went to see, walking over the hot earth until at last I saw what lay at the center. It was a rough, vaguely spherical stone not much smaller than a wagon-wheel. I approached the steaming boulder, and saw a long fissure ran along it.

I am not sure what I thought I might see if I gazed into its depths, but gaze I did. What lurked within was of such a strange nature! I would call it a color… but it was not a color I knew.

No one else looked within, in part because I am told once I saw this sight I uttered a wordless cry and staggered back before collapsing. And the next day, when others from our village went to inspect the place, the object, and whatever had lurked within it, had unaccountably disappeared.

This was all told to me afterwards; I lay unconscious for nearly a week. And when I awoke, I found that either I or the world had changed. Whatever it was, color or something else, I had been blinded by it, in part. I still saw, but from that day forth I no longer felt the blue-green comfort of the number nine, or knew the crimson warmth of the sound of cattle lowing.

 It had also taken my voice from me. I could not say a word after waking from that strange, dreamless slumber. Before I got used to silence, I would try, only to become so overwhelmed with the memory of what I had seen that it seemed to me the world spun faster under my feet, and I was in danger of falling off it. I quickly trained myself to not speak—or think about speaking, and not long after that, I found I would rather keep silent… for I discovered that seeing what I had seen had not only taken something from me, but given me something in return.

I first noticed it when grandmother passed me my plate of
dal bhat
one night. Her hand shook in a strange way, spilling the hot lentils on my lap. Later, when I was resentfully scrubbing out my
chhuba
, I thought about her, and how the color,
that
color, had infused the memory, clinging to her as a butterfly clings to a flower in a stiff wind. I did not understand the significance, but as long as I thought of her, the color was there.

A day later, a spasm shook her. She messed herself, and then she started making a sound halfway between a groan and a cry. There was nothing anyone could do. She wailed and grunted all night. When the dawn broke, she finally stopped, but it was because she had died.

For a time, I worried
I
had killed her. I carried the weight of it like a faggot of wood until I saw the color again, in my mind, when my father’s brother by marriage went to another village to trade, and stayed away longer than expected. A day later, a party was sent out to find him, only to discover he had been crushed beneath a falling tree while camping for the night. It was not clear when the accident had occurred, but I thought it unlikely I had caused it.

Just the same, I felt no relief, for I knew then the awful truth about what it meant to see that color in my mind. It was a terrible thing, live among those I loved, knowing when they must die.

When Dr. Sangare and Bridget arrived in our village, asking for a guide to Leng, it surprised my family when I volunteered to escort the two strange women to that dangerous land from whence few ever returned. I helped them to understand as best I could that I
wanted
to go—made the point that my knowledge of English would be a boon to their little expedition. In the end, they accepted my gestured explanations, and let me go, though reluctantly.

For the first time since I was struck dumb I was grateful that I could not communicate the truth. How could I explain that I would rather focus my attention on those whom I did not care if they died?

§

The expedition started off well enough. Dr. Sangare and Bridget were excellent travelers, willing to wake up early, help fix meals, and best of all, they kept to a reasonable pace and therefore never suffered from the altitude or the distance. They had packed more than necessary, but everyone always does; I knew that from hearing my cousins talk about guiding hikers. But my companions hadn’t taken all that much more than they needed, and they always carried some of their own gear.

They were kind and friendly, always making sure I was eating and drinking enough, and never making fun of me when they did something I found bizarre, or vice versa. I knew that trekkers were often rude to their guides, so I felt lucky. It made the journey much more enjoyable than I expected.

They knew about me only what the other English-speakers in my village had told them—that I had learned English from a monk who had come to our monastery all the way from Kathmandu, that I had often trekked through the Himalayas, and knew the pass that would take them through to Leng. They told me similarly little of themselves, but I put together a kind of history from their conversations, so I knew that Dr. Sangare had traveled to England from a country called Mali in order to study medicine. But, as women were not allowed at the university, she had learned to dress and act like an Englishman in order to earn her degree, and liked it so much she retained her suits even after she left.

Or rather, was asked to leave. After only a year. Pretending to be a man had gotten her in the door, but she could not pretend away the color of her skin. The other students had made life difficult for her, stealing her books, humiliating her in class, preventing her from accessing the various laboratories open to the student doctors. In order to get enough experience in dissecting corpses she’d ended up needing to exhume her own. When she was caught, instead of seeing her dedication for what it was, her college had shown her the door. Dr. Sangare was of the opinion they’d been only too glad to see the back of her; almost grateful to her for giving them a reason to do so, so early in her career.

Bridget was possessed of as checkered a past. She had had many trades, most of them involving some degree of law-breaking, and was possessed of many skills, the majority of them illegal. She was a survivor, cunning and wise, but kind and cheerful too.

Dr. Sangare had opened an unlicensed women’s clinic after being dismissed, helping working women with illnesses picked up in any number of common ways, as well as providing family planning services. It was there that she’d met Bridget, and while one was dark and the other fair, one educated and one world-wise, each had seen herself in the other.