“Ladies in Waiting” (1975)

[spoilers] I recently reread Hugh B. Cave’s epic long story “Murgunstrumm,” which put me in the mood for some more of his luscious pulp—I understand it’s all he wrote and he wrote for decades. The premise in this one is that, a few months earlier, our young couple had visited a house in the New England countryside. They were shopping to buy, the realtor handed off the key to them, and they had been trapped there overnight in a freak snowstorm. It was plainly a traumatic experience but now it is August and they want to look at it again. Or the wife does—is quite insistent, in fact. The experience in April was harder on her and the husband can’t understand why she wants to look at it again. Maybe we can guess? I love how Cave piles on with the heavy-handed foreshadowing about this so-called Creighton house: “The Creightons had lived here for generations, having come here from Salem where one of their women in the days of witchcraft madness had been hanged for practicing demonolatry.” Clang clang clang! I love the word “demonolatry.” I mean, what do you think is going to happen? The thing is that this is Hugh B. Cave and it is the ‘70s, with sexual liberation in the air. Skyrockets in flight—afternoon delight! So that’s what happens and in its way it is beautiful:

He lay on his back, naked, with his nameless partner half beside him, half on him. He saw her scaly, misshapen breasts overflowing his chest and her monstrous, demonic face swaying in space above his own. And as he screamed,, he saw that she did have more than two hands: she had a whole writhing mass of them at the ends of long, searching tentacles.

The last thing he saw before his scream became that of a madman was a row of three others like her squatting by the wall, their tentacles restlessly reaching toward him as they impatiently awaited their turn.

Tentacles, yes! Note that this extended quote is the actual end of the story. It’s really the only appearance of tentacles, reserved by Cave to shock and pretty good at it. He is setting us up to think of witches which I believe are not usually associated with tentacles. Very Lovecraft in a way, very ‘30s and very ‘70s at once, and very Hugh B. Cave. Bravo.

Hugh B. Cave, Murgunstrumm and Others
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Story not available online.