Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (33 page)

I set the torch into a rusty iron holder quivering upon the wall. From afar, the rock spasmed. Eerie sounds echoed down the long, lonely corridors into the cave where I cuddled on mushroom mold. The filaments were soft and thickly knitted. They cradled me.

I slept soundly, and when I awoke, took my torch, which had burned down to the hilt, and made my way back through the tunnels.

Every night for weeks, maybe months, I crept off to my special cave, and I fell asleep to the rocking of the tunnels, the echoes, and the comforting softness.

I was dizzy from the injections and the wine, with my belly full of mushrooms, when one day, while staggering toward Andre’s bar, I heard something odd.

It was my song. But I wasn’t singing it.

Never let me go,

treat me kind,

and you will find

in my eyes

a rainbow.

Men laughed. “Aw, knock it off, would ya? We prefer the girl. Wait till you hear the girl.”

I lurched around a corner. I entered the bar.

The stars have died,

the men have lied,

the moon is dead,

the sky is lead.

My head reeled. “That’s my song!” I cried.

“No. It’s
my
song. You were only borrowing it.”

I recognized the voice.

I recognized the whiff of whiskey and the body stink.

“No,” I screamed, “it can’t be you! How can it be
you
?” Surely, I was hallucinating. Daddy couldn’t be here. Daddy had escaped the war by running far, far away. He’d told me so himself. And yet, many men had clearly hid from the war here in this subterranean hell. Andre had confirmed that his father had done the very same thing. So maybe, just maybe…

But Daddy left me to die.

Daddy left me to this fate, a whore to sick, old men, a singer in an underground bar, a drug addict, a drunk.

Just like my mommy.

Drunk.

Drug addict.

Whore.

He’d told me so himself.

My mind whirling, I snatched a torch from the wall and dashed back into the tunnels.
Daddy Daddy Daddy
, I would escape from this Daddy, this fake Daddy, this can’t be Daddy.

I crashed from one side of the tunnel to the other, and the rock was hard and bruised my arms and legs. I was so intoxicated that I barely noticed. The pain registered as dull throbbing. What hurt more was that Daddy was here, making me remember that I’d been born with no life in front of me.

I glanced over my shoulder, saw the chipped teeth in the glow of a torch held high to his face. His laughter echoed through the tunnels, cascaded off the walls around me like the thunder of water from a cliff.

I ran more quickly.

I bashed my leg badly against the rock.

For a moment—
just a moment
—I stopped, cringed, and turned to look…

Daddy had mangled himself into pretzel shape, his limbs twisted backward at the joints. He hurled himself down the tunnel after me, his body whirling from hand to foot to foot to hand like a wheel with spokes.

I screamed and fled. I ignored the pain in my leg and careened past “
No 2 1917 Verdun
.”

Mangled Daddy whirled after me.

I passed the cartoon etching of the man with the chicken head.

A tremor in the tunnels, and Daddy cussed loudly. I peeked: Daddy mangled on the wall. Daddy’s limbs unfurling from twisted shape. Daddy upright. Daddy twisting back to wheel form…

My
heart
was mangled.

My
mind
was twisted.

All Daddy’s fault. Not my fault, not any of it.

And yet, even knowing what he was, all I really wanted was for Daddy to love me.

How could I make him love me?

I passed “
No 3 1917 Marmitte a Popol et Grenier de Mommartre
.”

I crouched and slid into the cave where I slept. The black filaments, sawdust, and mold padded all sides of the cave in lush softness. The brown mushrooms trembled on their stalks. The room was my womb. The harmonic rasping trilled up, then fluttered down, then rose again in lavish melodies.

I set my torch into the rusty iron holder.

Daddy whirled to a halt at the entrance to my womb. He ducked, his head poked in, the grin widened, the black eyes chiseled in on me.

He snapped his legs backward so they were straight against his body. He fell to the floor and wriggled into the cave. The legs snapped back into normal position, and he stood over me.

“Daddy, please…”

No answer.

“Daddy, please don’t hurt me.”

“And why would I hurt you?”

Because I ran from you. Because I was happy without you. Because you need to control me. Because you’ll never let me go.

“Because you always hurt me,” I said.

“I sneaked to town, Madame told me she sent you here, I came to get you. How is that hurting you?”

You hurt me because you turned me into a drunk, a drug addict, a whore. Did you kill Mommy, too?
I didn’t have the courage to say any of it.

He leaned, grabbed my arm, and wrenched me up. At first, I cowered, but then I drew myself up. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“What’s wrong, Clarisse? Nothing to say? You’re my girl. You’ll do what I want.”

“You don’t own me.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” and then he jerked my arm again. This time, I cried out from the pain. I couldn’t help it.

He blew out his torch and set it on the thick filament padding. He grabbed my wrist in one hand while continuing to jerk my hurt arm with the other. I squirmed, felt so low, so meaningless. Tears of shame burned in my eyes.

I steeled myself.

I would not let him have the satisfaction
.

I kicked his kinked, sick legs as hard as I could. He screamed as his legs folded back. He collapsed and his body ratcheted around, parts grinding, bones popping into weird pretzel places.

His tough-skin fists clamped my legs. I fell backward, hitting the filament padding. A poof of dust and mold rose, and I coughed and squeezed my eyes shut. He yanked me toward him, and now his foul mouth was inches from mine. I could smell how close he was even before I opened my eyes.

My right hand found his dropped torch. It was warm but not hot, and the fire was gone.

I didn’t even pause.

I slammed the torch into his head, right on top where the greasy hair clumped. His face sagged, his eyes shut, and he toppled flat over me. I shoved him off, leapt to my feet, and raised the torch as high as I could. Smashed it back down, this time cracking it into his face.

He was out.

Blood streamed from a gash on his forehead. It flowed down both sides of his face into the filaments and mold beneath us. I’d also broken his nose, and I couldn’t tell through the blood, but maybe his mouth was crushed into his teeth, too.

I didn’t care. I was glad, and I laughed.

But as I stared at him, I began to fear that I’d killed him, so I leaned in closely and smelled the foul breath puffing from his mashed lips.

He was still alive. This was good.

I would teach him to love me.

All the men loved me, didn’t they, so why not Daddy?

I injected him with my euphoria drug, and leaving him alone in the dark cave, I took both torches with me.

Later, I brought him white mushrooms and forced him to eat a few. He had trouble chewing. His mouth was a mess.

I injected him again.

Blood gurgled from his lips. The black of his eyes slipped beneath his upper lids.

I gave him an extra shot of dope, and I let the euphoria float him out nice and good.

“I love you, Daddy,” I said.

Then I held up one of his feet and twisted his leg. I cranked it round and round until it snapped where the thigh met the crotch. I did the same thing to his other leg. If he hadn’t been a contortionist, I wouldn’t have had the strength, but as I figured it, a whirling man takes his chances, right?

He was so high on the drugs that he didn’t react to the pain.

Well, maybe he twitched oh-so-slightly, but that was all.

I told myself it was all fine, and I returned to the bordello and the bar, the men and Andre, the whoring, the drinking, the singing. At night, I came to my Daddy and fed him mushroom bits with sips of wine. His lips didn’t work well, and the mushroom and purple wine dribbled down his face and chin.

Everything—mushrooms, wine, blood, urine—eventually sank into the mat of filaments and mold beneath him.

We continued, he and I, in this manner for what must have been weeks. I have to say, in all honesty, that this was the happiest time of my life. It was a time when the struggles of being human didn’t matter. It was a time when all seemed right in the world, at peace. It was a time carved out from ordinary time.

One night, as I was singing for the men, my voice cracked. I couldn’t restart it, couldn’t reach my high notes or use the sultry tones Andre loved so much. My whore performance was mediocre, and even the oldest men, the ones who couldn’t get it up under any circumstances, complained about me to Andre.

“Daddy, it’s not fair. I don’t understand.”

He didn’t answer me. He couldn’t.

He lay upon the thick blackness with his legs shattered and twisted in bizarre formations. I tried to lift his right arm, but it was too stiff to move. His other arm was also stiff.

My own body had grown scary-thin. I felt a soreness in my legs and arms, a stiffness when I tried to bend.

The filaments were thicker and heavier. They hung in whorls from the walls and ceiling. They looped in elaborate patterns over our faces as we lay there, side by side, on the mushroom-mold floor.

The tunnels shuddered. The floor heaved once, then dropped back into place. Beside me, Daddy jerked up then thumped down. His body was rigid, hard like the wood of Andre’s bar.

Around us, the filaments twitched and grew, a black-gray kaleidoscope of whorls with huge brown mushrooms poking out everywhere, bobbing to some lunatic tune that keened from the filaments themselves.

The entire cave pulsed.

Breathing.

Keening.

Rasping.

It was hard to pull away from the rhythms, the harmonies, the womb of my cave. It took all of my strength, but finally, I fumbled in my pocket for the hypos, injected Daddy and me, triple doses each, and then I slipped away.

The following day, my singing grew hoarse like the croaking of a frog. Andre was furious. “Your heart isn’t in it anymore, Clarisse. The men complain. You no longer please them. The other girls do so much better.”

Isn’t this what Madame had said right before she threw me out and sent me to Andre?

A trill of fear swept through me.

“But where—”

And isn’t this what I said in response to Madame?

“There is nowhere else you can go after you’ve been here, Clarisse.” Andre rubbed a dirty cloth around a glass. The tiny gold loop on his ear blazed light into my eyes. I knew this was impossible, that I must be seeing things. His whiskers gently undulated on his cadaver-pale skin.

I begged. “Let me sing again tomorrow. I’ll do better, I promise. Let the men take me tomorrow. I’ll do all of them, I swear.”

He set the glass on the bar, lifted a bottle of wine, and poured. He took a sip, pursed his lips. He studied my face. I shifted my feet and looked down. What if he said no? Where would I go? Finally, he said, “One more chance, but I don’t need this kind of headache. Please my men tomorrow, and you can stay.”

I ran off to tell Daddy.

But nothing I said seemed to register. Daddy still couldn’t speak. I sat beside him in our special cave immersed in the harmony of a life we shared. We breathed in rhythm with the filaments. The rock spasmed, tremors shook the floor, and the filaments sang their unearthly tune. I sang with them, my voice rasping but fitting in just fine with the voices of the cave.

I fed Daddy. I gave him sips of wine. “I’ll take care of you,” I said. “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll never leave you.”

And still, he didn’t respond. There was no smile, no hug, no reassurance that Daddy appreciated me, much less loved me.

What would it take?

No matter how nice I was to Daddy, he gave nothing back.

I lay beside him, snuggled close. I was having a hard time moving my arms and legs. We lay there, like two stiff boards, side by side. Father and daughter, the same. The thought made me happy, and I drifted to sleep.

Later, with stiff hands, I injected him with a heavy dose. As the drug kicked in, I thought I saw a flicker of warmth in his eyes. Just a flicker, for as soon as I saw it, it disappeared. But I
saw
it, I
swear
I did, and my heart soared. Finally, my Daddy loved me.

I lurched through the trembling tunnels, my mind reeling. Who knew how vast the tunnel system was? Who knew how many caves were down here? Just from the labyrinthine system I’d already discovered, I figured there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of caves. There must be water somewhere, too, else the mushrooms wouldn’t have sprouted. I’d never asked Andre. It had slipped my mind. It didn’t matter. I never saw Andre deep within the system. Like everyone else, he never ventured past the bar and bordello.

Were they afraid of the world beyond what little they knew?

These were men who feared the war, who lived beneath the ground rather than face reality. These were weak men.

But I wasn’t weak. I would find the water, and together, Daddy and I would seek refuge many kilometers into the cave system, far from Andre and the men, far from the war. If I found the water, we would survive, and when the war ended, we’d emerge and live happily together in a beautiful city.

Yes. This is what we would do.

Back in the bar, I sang my best, but the men didn’t want to hear me. They covered their ears. They screamed at Andre to shut me up.

But I sang with the harmonics of the caves, and it was so beautiful… how could they not love it?