Free 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

of a face. It was somehow like the face of Arpad, but the lineaments were twisted all awry and were mingled with those of something inhuman. Tefere could not move—he could not take his eyes from the abnormality.
    By some miracle, his fever had left him and it did not return. Instead, there came an eternity of frozen fright and madness in which he sat facing the plant. It towered before him from the dry, dead shell that had been Arpad, its swollen, glutted stems and branches swaying gently, its huge flower leering at him with its travesty of a human face. He thought that he heard a low, singing sound, ineffably sweet, but whether it emanated from the plant or was a mere hallucination of his overwrought senses he could not know.
    The hours went by and a grueling sun poured down its beams like molten lead. His head swam with weakness and heat, but he could not relax the rigor of his posture. There was no change in the nodding monstrosity, which seemed to have attained its full growth above the head of its victim. After a long interim, Tefere's eyes were drawn to the shrunken hands of Arpad, which still clasped drawn-up knees in a spasmodic clutch. Through the ends of the fingers, tiny white rootlets had broken and were writhing slowly in the air, groping, it seemed, for a new source of nourishment. Then from the neck and chin, other tips were breaking and over the whole body the clothing stirred in a curious manner, as if with the crawling of hidden lizards.
    At the same time the singing grew louder, sweeter, and the swaying of the great plant assumed an indescribably seductive tempo. It was like the allurement of voluptuous sirens or the deadly languor of dancing cobras. Tefere felt an irresistible compulsion: a summons was being laid upon him and his drugged mind and body must obey it. The very fingers of Arpad, twisting, seemed to beckon him. Suddenly he was on his hands and knees in the bottom of the boat. Inch by inch, terror and fascination contending in his brain, he crept forward, dragging himself over the disregarded bundle of orchid plants until his head was against the withered hands of Arpad, from which hung the questing roots.
    Some spell had made him helpless. Tefere felt the rootlets as they moved like delving fingers through his hair and over his face and neck, and started to strike in with agonizing, needle-sharp tips. He could not move; he could not even close his eyelids. In a frozen stare, he saw the gold and carmine flash of a hovering butterfly as the roots began to pierce his pupils.
    Amid the ever-growing web of the bloated and colossal plant in its upper branches, through the still, stifling afternoon, a second flower began to unfold.
     



 
The Woman in the Hill
Tamsyn Muir
     
    November 11, 1907
    Elm Cottage, Turanga
    Waikopua Creek, New Zealand
     
    Dear Dorothy,
     
    This is the last time I intend ever to write to you. Though you may take this letter as a freak or crank, I ask that you reconsider how likely it is that I would write such madness—that is, unless I knew it were the truth. In my need to convince you I will lay out the events using only fact—what I saw with my own eyes and have subsequently acted upon based on rational belief—and at the last, pray to God you believe me.
    I know you heard the gossip and the insinuation surrounding my young friend Elizabeth W–. I will emphasise again her workaday nature and good common sense, not at all given to the morbid or fantastic, the model of a farmer’s wife. This concerns last April, when she had been recently married and had moved to the property opposite the old Broomfield slip. Regarding my silence on the scandal that surrounded her afterward, I may only defend myself by saying I thought it none of my business to relate.
    It must have been eleven o’clock one summer’s night when I was startled from sleep by a fearful knocking. It was such a frenetic scraping and hammering that I would have been up and dressing at that alone, and