Demons

by Gardner Dozois

  "But without the magic, just using human psychology, knowing a man's weaknesses, playing on them, I made a syrup-voiced old bandit endow the very research he'd tabooed, and do more good for humanity than he's done in all the rest of his life. I was right, Snulbug. You can't lick Man."

  Snulbug's snakes writhed into knots of scorn. "People!" he snorted. "You'll find out." And he shook his head with dismal satisfaction.

  One Other

  by

  Manly Wade Wellman

  Manly Wade Wellman, who was born in Angola and raised in Portuguese West Africa, has been writing dark fantasy or supernatural horror tales for some fifty-eight years, and is considered to be one of the genre's finest practioners. He is probably best known for his vivid and evocative series of regionalist stories and novels about John the Minstrel or "Silver John," who wanders through the remote mountain country of Southern Appalachia, combating the dark forces of magic and encountering the ancient creatures of legend and folklore. The Silver John stories have been collected in Who Fears the Devil?, Wellman's most influential—and probably his best—book. His Silver John novels include The Old Gods Waken, After Dark, The Lost and the Lurking, The Hanging Stones, and The Voice of the Mountain. His non-Silver John stories have been assembled in the mammoth collection Worse Things Waiting, which won the World Fantasy Award as the Best Anthology/Collection of 1975. Wellman himself won another World Fantasy Award, the prestigious Life Achievement Award. His nonfiction has been nominated for a Pulitzer prize.

  In the chilling story that follows, Wellman shows us that if you try to conjure up a demon, you'd better really really want it to arrive. . . .

  Up on Hark Mountain I climbed all alone, by a trail as steep as a ladder and no way near as easy to hold to. Under my old army shoes was sometimes mud, sometimes rock, sometimes rolling gravel. I laid hold on laurel and oak scrub and sourwood and dogwood to help me get up the steepiest places. Sweat soaked the back of my hickory shirt through and hung under the band of my old hat. Even my silver-strung guitar, bouncing on its sling cord behind me, felt as weighty as an anvil. Hark Mountain's not the highest I ever went up, but it's sure enough one of the steepiest.

  I reckoned I was getting close to the top when I heard a murmuring voice up there, a young-sounding woman's voice. All at once she yelled out a name, and the name was mine.

  "JOHN!" she said, and murmured lower again, and then, "JOHN . . ."

  Gentlemen, you can wager I purely sailed up the last stretch of that trail, on my hands and knees, to the very top.

  On top of Hark Mountain's tipmost top was a pool.

  Hush, gentlemen, without ary stream or draw or branch to feed it, where no pool should ought by nature to be expected, there was a clear blue pool, bright-looking but not just exactly sweet-looking. The highest place on Hark Mountain wasn't any much bigger than a well-sized farmyard, and it had room for hardly the pool and its rim of tight-set rocks. And the trees that grew betwixt those tight rocks at the rim looked leafless and gnarly, but alive. Their branch-twigs crimped and crooked, like claw-nails ready to seize on something.

  Almost in reach of me, by the edge of the pool, burnt a fire, and to tend it kneeled down a girl.

  She was a tall girl, but not strong built like country girls. She was built slim, like town girls, and she wore town clothes—a white blouse-shirt, and dark pants tight to her long legs all the way up and down, and soft shoes like slippers on her feet. Her arms and neck were as brown as nut meat, the way fashiony women seek to be brown. Around her head was tied a blue silk handkerchief.

  Kneeling, she put a tweak of stuff on the fire, and I saw her long, sharp, red fingernails. She spoke again, singing almost, and my name rose out of what she said:

  "It is the bones of John that I trouble. I for John burn this laurel."

  On the fire she put some laurel leaves and they sent up steam.

  "Even as it crackles and burns, even thus may the flesh of John burn for me."

  In went something else.

  "Even as I melt this wax, with One Other to aid me, so speedily may John for love of me be melted."

  She took up a little clay pot and dripped something. Drip, the fire danced. Drip, it danced again, jumping up. Drip, a third jump-up dancing flame.

  "Thrice I pour libation," she said. "Thrice, by One Other, I say the spell. Be it with a friend he tarries, with a woman he lingers, may John utterly forget and forsake them."

  Then she stood up, slim and tall, and held out something red and wavy that I knew.

  "This from John I took, and now I cast it into—"

  But quick and quiet I was close beside her, and I snatched that red scarf away.

  "It's been wondering me where I might could have lost that," I said, and she turned and faced me.

  Just some slight bit I felt I knew her from somewhere. She was yellow-haired, blue-eyed, brown-faced. She had a little bitty nose, and a mouth as red as red wine. Her blue eyes widened out almost as wide as the blue pool itself, and she smiled. Her teeth were big and white and even in her smile.

  "John," she said my name softer, halfway singing it to me. "I was saying the spell for the third time, and you came here to my call." She licked those red lips of hers, and they shone. "Just the way Mr. Howsen promised you'd come."

  I never let on to know who Mr. Howsen might possibly be. I wadded up the red scarf into the hip pocket of my blue jeans pants.

  "Why were you witch-spelling me?" I inquired her. "What did I ever do to you? I even disremember where it was I met you."

  "You don't remember me?" she said, smiling. "But do you remember Enderby Lodge, John?"

  "Why, sure."

  A month back I'd strolled through those parts with my guitar. Old Major Enderby had bade me rest my hat a while. He was having a dance, and to pleasure him and his guests I'd picked and sung for them.

  "You must have been there," I said. "But what was it I did to you?"

  Her lips tightened, and now they looked as red and hard and fiharp as her painted nails. "Nothing at all, John," she told me. "Not a thing. You did nothing. You ignored me. Doesn't it make you furious to be ignored?"

  "Ignored? No, ma'am, it never makes me furious, or I'd be furious a big part of the time."

  "It makes me furious. I don't often look at a man twice, and usually they look at me at least once. I don't forgive being ignored." Again she licked her mouth, like a cat over a basin of milk. "I'd been told my charm can be said three times, beside the Bottomless Pool on Hark Mountain, to burn a man's soul with love. And here you came when I called you. Don't shake your head like that, John. You're in love with me."

  "I'm sorry, ma'am, I ask your pardon humbly. I'm not in love with you any such thing."

  She smiled in pride and scorn, the smile you'd give to a liar. "But you climbed up Hark Mountain to me."

  "I reckoned I'd like to have a look at the Bottomless Pool."

  "People don't know Bottomless Pool is up here. Only Mr. Howsen and his sort come here. When you talk about bottomless pools, you mean the ones near Lake Lure, on Highway 74."

  "Those aren't rightly bottomless," I said. "Anyway, this one, the real one, is sung about in a country song."

  Pulling my guitar around, I picked chords and sang:

  "Way up on Hark Mountain

  I climb all alone,

  Where the trail is untravelled,

  The top is unknown.

  "Way up on Hark Mountain

  Is the Bottomless Pool.

  You look in its water

  And it shows you a fool."

  "You're making that up," she charged me.

  "No, ma'am, it was made up long before my daddy's daddy was born. Most country songs have got truth in them. It was the song fetched me here, not your witch-spell."

  She laughed, short and sharp; she almost yelped her laugh. "Call it the long arm of coincidence, John. You're here, anyway. Go look in the water and see whether it shows you a fool."

  Plainly she didn't know the
next verse, so I sang that, too:

  "You can boast of your knowledge

  And brag of your sense,

  It won't make no difference

  A hundred years hence."

  Stepping one foot on a rock of the rim, I looked down.

  The water didn't show me a fool nor either a wise man. I could see down forever and forever, and I recollected all I'd ever heard tell about the Bottomless Pool. How it was as blue as the blue sky, but it had a special light of its own; how no water ever ran into it, excusing some rain, but it always stayed full; how you couldn't measure its bottom, if you let down a sinker on a line it would go down till the line broke of its own weight.

  Though I couldn't spy out the bottom, it wasn't rightly dark down there. Like a man looking up into the blue sky, I looked down into the blue water, and in the blue, far away down, was a many-colored shine, like lights deeper than I could tell you.

  "I didn't need to use that stolen scarf," she said at my elbow. "You're lying about why you came here. My spell brought you."

  "I'm sorry to say, ma'am," I replied, "I can't even call your name to my mind."

  "Do names make a difference if you love me? Call me Annalinda. I'm rich. I've been loved for that alone, and for myself alone."

  "Well, I'm plain and poor," I told her. "I was raised hard and put up wet. I don't have ary cent of money in these old clothes of mine. It sure enough wonders me, Miss Annalinda, why you think you need to bother yourself about me."

  "I'm just not used to being ignored," she said again.

  Down there in the Bottomless Pool's blueness wasn't a fish or a weed of grass. Only that deep-away sparkly flash of lights, changing as you see changes on a bubble of soap blown by a little baby child.

  Somebody cleared his throat and said, "I see the spell I gave you worked, ma'am."

  I knew Mr. Howsen as he came up the trail to the top of Hark Mountain.

  He was purely ugly. I'd been knowing him ten years, and he looked as ugly that minute as the first time I'd seen him, with his mean face and his great big hungry nose and the black patch over one eye. When he'd had his two eyes, they were put so close together in his head you'd be sworn he could look through a keyhole with the two of them at once.

  "Yes," said Miss Annalinda. "I want to pay you what I owe you."

  "No, ma'am, you pay One Other," said Mr. Howsen, and put his hands in the pockets of the long black coat he wore summer and winter. "For value received, ma'am. I only passed along his word to you."

  He tighted his lips at me, in what wasn't anything like a smile. "John," he said, "you relish journeying. You've relished it ever since you was just a chap, going what way you felt like going. You've seen a right much of this world. But she toled you to her, and now you'll stay with her, and for that you can be obliged to One Other."

  "One other what?" I inquired him.

  Though that was just a defy at him. Of course, a-hearing of Hark Mountain and the Bottomless Pool, I'd sure enough heard of One Other. How mountain folks swear he's got the one arm and the one leg only, that he runs fast on the one leg and grabs hold with the one arm, and whatever he grabs goes with him into the Bottomless Pool. And that it's One Other's power and knowledge that lets witches do their spells up there by the Bottomless Pool.

  "Be here with the lady when One Other asks payment," said Mr. Howsen. "That there spell was good a many years before Theocritus written it down in old Greek. It'll still be good when English writing is as old as Greek writing. It toled you here."

  But for the life of me I couldn't recollect seeing Miss Annalinda at Major Enderby's. "My own wish and will brought me here, not hers," I said. "I wanted to see the Bottomless Pool. I wonder at that soap-bubble color in it."

  "Ain't any soap in there, John," said Mr. Howsen. "Soap bubbles don't never get so big as to have all that much color."

  "You rightly sure about how big soap bubbles get, Mr. Howsen?" I asked. "Once I heard a science doctor say how this whole life of ours, the heaven and the earth, the sun and moon and stars and all, may be holding a shape like a big soap bubble. He said it stretched and spread like a soap bubble, with all the suns and stars and worlds getting farther off apart as time passes."

  "Both of you stay here where you are," Mr. Howsen bade us. "One Other's going to want to find the both of you here."

  "But—" Miss Annalinda made out to begin.

  "Both of you stay," Mr. Howsen said again, and with his shoe toe he scuffed a mark across the head of the trail. Then he hawked, and spit on the mark. "Don't cross that line. It would be. worse for you than if fire burnt you behind and before, inside and out."Like a lizard he bobbed over the edge and away down the trail.

  "Let's us go too," I said to Miss Annalinda, but she stared at the mark made by Mr. Howsen's shoe, and the healthy blood had paled out from under the tan on her face.

  "Pay him no mind," I said. "Let's start, it's coming on to sunset."

  "He said not to cross the mark," she reminded me, scared.

  "I don't care a shuck for aught he said. Come on, Miss Annalinda," and I took her by the arm.

  That quick I had her to fight. Holding to her arm was like holding the spoke of a runaway wheel. Her other hand came up and her sharp red nails racked hide and blood off my cheek, and she tried to bite. I couldn't hold her without hitting her, so I turned her loose, and she sat down on a rock by the poolside and cried into her hands.

  "Then I'll have to go alone," I said, and took a step.

  "John!" she called, loud and shaky as a horse's whinny. "If you step across that mark, I'll throw myself into this Bottomless Pool!"

  Sometimes you can tell when a woman means the thing she says. This was one of the times. So I walked back to her, and she was a-looking to where the down-sinking sun made the edge of the sky turn red and fiery. It would be cold and dark when that sun was gone. With trembling hands she smoothed the tight pants tighter to her legs.

  "I'll just build up the fire," I said, and tried to break off a branch from a claw-looking tree.

  But it was tough and had thorny stickers. So I went to the edge of the open place, off from where Mr. Howsen had drawn his mark on us, and gathered up an armful of dead-fallen wood. I brought it back and freshened the fire she'd made for her witching. It blazed up red, the color of the sun that sank down. High in the sky, that turned pale before it would turn dark, slid a great big old buzzard. Its wings flopped, slow and heavy, spreading out their feathers like long fingers.

  "You don't believe all this, John," said Miss Annalinda, in a voice that sounded as if she was just before freezing from the cold. "But the spell was true. The rest of it's true, too, about One Other. He must have been here since the beginning of time."

  "No, that's one thing peculiar enough to be the truth," I answered her. "There's not much been told about One Other till this last year or so. About his being here at the Bottomless Pool, or about folks being able to do witch things with his help, or how he aids the witches and takes payment for his aid. It's no old country tale, it's right new and recent."

  "Payment," she said after me. "What kind of payment?"

  I poked up the fire. "That all depends. Sometimes one thing, sometimes another. You notice how Mr. Howsen goes around with only the one eye. I've heard it said that One Other took an eye from him. Maybe he won't want an eye from you, but he'll want something. Something for nothing."

  "What do you mean?" and she frowned her brows at me.

  "You put a witch-spell on me to make me love you, but you don't love me. You did it for spite, not love."

  "Why—why—"

  Nothing devils a woman like being caught in the truth. She laid hold on a poolside rock next to her.

  "That will smash my head or either my guitar," I gave her quick word. "Smash my head, and you're up here on the mountain, all alone with a dead corpse. Smash my guitar, and I'll go right down the trail."

  "And I'll jump in the pool."

  "All right, you can jump. I won't stay wher
e folks fling rocks at me. Fair warning's as good as a promise."

  She let go the rock again. She was ready to start crying. I came and set my foot at the edge of the pool and looked down into the water.

  By now the sky was a-getting purely dark, but low down and away was that soap-bubble shiny light. I brought back to mind an old tale they say came from the Indians who owned the mountains back before the first white folks came. It was about people living above the sky and thinking their world was the only one, till somebody pulled up a great long root, and through the hole they could see down to another world below, where people lived. Then Miss Annalinda began to talk.

  She was talking for the company of her own voice, and she talked about herself. About her rich father and her rich mother, and all her rich aunts and uncles and rich friends, the money and automobiles and land and horses they owned, and the big chance of men who wanted to marry her. One was the son of folks as rich as her folks. One was the governor of the state, who was ready to put away his wife if Miss Annalinda said the word she'd have him. And one was a noble-born man from a foreign country.

  "And you'd marry me, too, John," she said.

  "I'm just sorry to death," I said. "But I wouldn't."

  "Now you're lying, John."

  "I never lie, Miss Annalinda."

  "Everybody lies. Well, talk to me, anyway. This isn't any sort of place to keep quiet in."

  So I talked in my turn, about myself. How I'd been born next to Drowning Creek and baptized in its waters. How my folks had died in two days of each other, how an old teacher lady had taught me to read and write, and I'd taught myself how to play the guitar. How I'd roamed and rambled. How I'd fought in the war, and a thousand had fallen at my side and ten thousand at my right hand, but it hadn't come nigh me. I left out some things, like meeting up with the Ugly Bird, because she was nervous enough. I said that though I'd never had aught and never rightly expected to have aught, yet I'd always made out for bread to eat and sometimes butter on it.