Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror by Joyce Carol Oates, Nancy Kilpatrick, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Storm Constantine, Molly Tanzer, Lois H. Gresh, Gemma Files, Karen Heuler Page A

disturbed than I was by what I found: an unfamiliar calico dress, with a blouse, jacket and boots. A quick slash of another bundle proved to similarly hold a woman’s clothes, neatly folded. The next room was so peppered with niches it looked like a beehive, and each contained more of these effects. Some of the clothes were of an antiquated style. One bundle held a fibrous patterned wrapper such as some Māori still wear. My guttering lamp hinted at more chambers ahead—more chambers, and deeper, that I never visited—alcove upon alcove, and God knows they were all probably full.
    I took my lamp away from those miserable artefacts. Trophies, I thought then, pointing to some grotesque kidnapping or slavery spree.
    I continued on down the main passage. It sloped down sharply and I had to press on the ice-cold, slippery walls in order not to lose my footing. The final descent took me to an enormous chamber, Dorothy, as Elizabeth had described, only more vast and empty and black than she could ever have communicated. I set my lamp down and it shuddered and spluttered in the face of such enormous shadow. Here I became aware of the hush only a great and quiet body of water can make. My sight slowly adjusted to some dim braziers filled with what looked like greenish coals—flameless and crawling, moving independently of each other somehow—and the light cast weird ripples on a pool of wide, drear, fathomless water. The light also fell upon a great stone slab where the water sloshed down into carved channels and washed about its base, and fell on a basin big enough for a child to curl up inside it, and it fell also on my friend Elizabeth.
    But not Elizabeth’s miserable corpse: Elizabeth alive and well and living, Elizabeth as fresh as though she had come through the door with me.
    “Oh, Caroline, thank God,” she said, as naturally as ever. More naturally, even, than she had been of months previous; something like her of old, with that same familiar ease. But it was wrong, Dorothy. I cannot describe, as she could not describe either. It was dim in that room but I could see the stark whites of her eyes and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. “What a relief you came.”
    Of course I asked her if she was all right, if she was hurt in any way; she gave me a brief, almost lipless smile, and this was not an expression I had ever seen her wear. She denied injury. She was fine, she said; she’d tell me all about it later. What was important was that I could let her out.
    I asked her why she needed to be let out and she said she couldn’t get out alone. I couldn’t see why not, as it wasn’t as though the corridors were so labyrinthine and nothing seemed to bar her. The water washed close to her bare brown feet. I grew impatient. I demanded to know where had she been and by what means was she now here , in the very place she had feared most?
    “Caroline,” she said calmly, “I never left.”
    Then she walked toward me. I cannot write clearly of how she moved because every time I think of it my head pounds and my nose often bleeds. But yet she moved and the manner in which her bones shifted inside her skin, and in contrast to how you or I would move—
    I believe there is a part of the mind that decides upon courses of action without requiring conscious thought. I also believe that these are left over from the antique days when Man was preyed upon, before cities and civilization. I told you I had been sensible, Dorothy; it was a matter of conscious decision that I had brought Kenneth’s gun. But it was on this aforementioned instinct that I lifted it, took aim, and shot Elizabeth dead.
    I did not wait around to see her fall. I could rely upon my accuracy. I fled into the lapping darkness while all around me the sound of water filled my ears—deafened, driven mad by a sound I did not know if I was conjuring up, desperate to find light as a swimmer to break water. I scrambled up the narrow steps and through the angular