For once, I seemed to hear the sound before the wolves heard it. And all at once they stopped short, like forms suddenly stricken to stone. Slowly they turned their heads. They seemed to have forgotten me. The hair was erect upon their necks, and they were growling in an uneasy fashion in their throats. They turned, advancing to meet the newcomer.
It was a moment’s interlude; and exhausted beyond words to tell, I sank back prone. The shadows of unconsciousness began to gather and deepen. And only in some outer realm of my thought was I aware that great forces were ranged against each other in the thicket beyond; and I was the subject of the conflict.
The growls rose to furious, angry barks; and in between I heard queer, chattering, snarling noises that I was too tired and dazed to try to name or trace. Animals always fought over their food . . . Some greater beast had come from the far stretches of the Dark Cañon to fight these wolves for their meat. It did not matter which won. The teeth of one would be no less sharp, no less remorseless than those of the other. And then I began to drift away into unconsciousness.
Once I was wakened out of it by the death-ery of a wolf—a strangling scream ending in a sob that was almost human. The strange dark fight went on. Another wolf howled in agony, and it seemed to me from time to time that I heard the pit-pat—pit-pat of feet that hastened in flight up the trail.
I heard the spring of bodies, and the snap of teeth that missed their hold, and now and then the terrible tearing of flesh. I heard all these things as in a dream, as things not particularly mattering one way or the other. And then the feet of the vanquished party pattered on the trail.
“ ‘Pat—pat—pat’ wins, and ‘pit-pat’ is beaten,” I thought as the darkness grew around me. And all at once there was silence in the Dark Cañon, except for the ever-fading patter of fleeing feet. I tried to probe the shadows, to see what kind of thing had come and had fought for my helpless body. But I could not see. The curtain of unconsciousness dropped between.
What occurred between this moment and the moment when I opened my eyes again, I can never be quite sure. I can only tell of the impressions that I had through the mists of delusion and delirium; and they don’t make particularly good sense. I only know this—that some living creature took me up as tenderly as a baby and carried me over that awful trail to the mouth of the Dark Cañon up above.
A mountain-lion can be tender, in a terrible way. It is tender as is a cat with a mouse, striking just hard enough to agonize and not to kill. It can seize its prey between its teeth, and with an excruciating tenderness carry it away to torture. But this was not the kind of tenderness with which I was carried. I did not feel the slightest sense of pain. And I felt as secure, as safe, as when long ago my mother bore me in her arms.
I am a fair-sized man, physically—weighing one hundred and sixty pounds. The trail was straight up and down. It was a bare foothold in bright day, to be aided with empty hands and the strength of an unloaded back. And yet the creature on whose back I hung bounded up the trail with me easily.
If I had not heard it breathing, it wouldn’t have seemed a thing of flesh at all—so securely I rode, so free from jar. My senses were blurred by pain and the shadow of unconsciousness; and besides the trail was lost in darkness; so I could not see even the outline of the thing that carried me.
We reached the top of the cliff, and through my half-closed eyes I could see the full moon. We darted through shadow, out of the shrubbery, and at the boundary of what Jelt called his South Lot. We seemed to move like the wind—and the only sound was the swift pat—pat—pat of its feet on the trail. It was a distance of six hundred yards from the top of the cliff, and it seemed to me we covered it between sixty beats of my heart.
And then, in the grass of the South Lot, the creature laid me down. Never was motion more gentle, more tender; and so near was its body to me that at first I could not open my eyes and see it. And then the thing threw back its head and called.
It stood on its hind feet, and I saw it plain. The bright moon was on it. I could see every line, every feature. I could see the nails on its paws. I was not unconscious. Every detail of the scene, the huge moon above, the Dark Cañon spreading in mystery below the house with its lighted windows, the tall pines were all remarkably plain. I was not delirious. As often after the channel of unconsciousness has been crossed, my senses seemed abnormally acute and sharp. Every mist that pain and fear had brought had passed away, and only a great awe remained.
It was not a large form. It did not stand quite erect, and its arms dropped down in front of it like the arms of an ape; but I judged it must be about six feet from extremity to extremity. It was slender as a panther. It was terribly wrinkled, and seemingly older than the hills themselves. It opened its mouth like a beast and I saw its white teeth; and the thing was hideous beyond the power of words to describe. Something gray and tenuous hung wild about its shoulders. I could see now the thing that held me on its back. It was a hand, brown and long-nailed and strong as a thing of steel. It wore a strip of fur about its body, in remembrance of an instinct almost forgotten. And the cry that it uttered was the long, wild, rising and falling scream of the Flying Lion.
It stood with head thrown back a long moment before it darted back toward the Cañon. It was too plain to mistake. I would love to say that it was something else than what it was; I would have loved to believe that my eyes were lying to me, as I lay at its feet.
I can do neither.
It was the Flying Lion at last; and true, it was a beast in posture and voice. But it had not been born a beast. As surely as old Jelt was at that moment emerging from his house with his rifle, the Flying Lion had been born a woman.
This is the story. I carry a limp from the fall. And anyone has the liberty of believing I have given a wrong interpretation to the events—or forgetting them.
There are three considerations, however, that should be remembered.
One of them is that a legend has been passed down, and the name of the ranch seems to bear it out, that in a long-forgotten spring a girl-papoose wandered away from the side of a dead squaw, and was carried off to a cougar’s cave.
The second is that a human being, even growing up among the lions, living the way the lions lived, climbing the same trees and eating the same meat, attaining a lion’s strength—a strength so formidable that not even a pack of wolves remained to fight after one of their number had been slain—might not descend so far but that a spark of humanity, an instinct of tenderness and protection and motherhood toward its own kind, might linger in its savage heart.
The third point is that the naked foot of a human being, with long-nailed toes that had never been confined in shoes and long from climbing trees, makes a track not greatly different from that of the most amiable of the forest people, the small black bear.
* * *
GRETTIR AT THORHALL-STEAD by Frank Norris
* * *
Frank Norris is acknowledged to be one of the great transitional figures in American literary history. Even earlier and more effectively than Theodore Dreiser, he paved the way for naturalism in serious American novels and helped sound the literary equivalent of “taps” on the vogue for excessive sentimentalism.
The work that brought him his greatest reputation was The Octopus, published in 1901, a powerful novel of the struggle of the ranchers against the railroads in the West. The novel was criticized for the ambivalence of the author in failing to present a simplistic situation of good against evil, but instead showing that the forces at work were far more complex than commonly believed. Despite the hailing of The Octopus as a triumph of realism, there was a strain of mysticism in which the wheat crop of the West is invested with an awareness of itself as an entity and through virtual self-determination wills itself to grow and to be ultimately consumed for food.
A strain of fantasy touching upon real horror had run through Norris’ work previously. There was an almost baroque distortion in the literary techniques utilized in McTeague (1899),
an early success telling of a dentist warped by heredity and environment, who degenerates into an alcoholic, becomes the murderer of his wife, and in flight from justice retreats physically as well as psychologically to the region of his youth.
The grim masterpiece to come from his pen was Vandover and the Brute, begun in 1894 and when finished lost in the San Francisco fire, and never recovered and published until 1914. “The most revolting story of lycanthropy,” was the description given the novel by Dorothy Scarborough in her book The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917). Vandover and the Brute tells of the gradual disintegration of the personality of a fine, sensitive young man who consistently takes the course of least resistance, to finally end up naked and insane, crawling on all fours and barking the word “Wolf!”
Knowing the early genesis of this novel and its subject matter, it is easier to understand why the man who continued the trend toward naturalism in America started by Stephen Crane, and helped perpetuate it by the discovery of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie in a slush pile of manuscripts while working as a first reader for Doubleday, could have produced a number of short works of the supernatural. Among them, “Grettir at Thorhall-Stead” is a particularly remarkable tale of possession and the animation of the dead by another will. It first appeared in Everybody’s Magazine for April, 1903 with eight illustrations plus page ornamentations by the artist J.J. Gould. The story is set in ancient Iceland, a background so bleak and dour that it is strange it has not been used more frequently for tales of horror and the supernatural. Told with some of the flavor of the Norsemen, the story upon this reprinting will be recognized as a neglected masterpiece of the art of the macabre.
In the same issue, Everybody's ran Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman’s supernatural classic, The Southwest Chamber. The magazine would run the entire contents of what was to become one of the most coveted books in the genre, The Wind in the Rose-Bush (Doubleday Page & Co., 1903), and the volume would be illustrated by the work of artist Peter Newell which adorned the stories in their original publication.
It is not generally recognized, but in the ten years preceding and following 1900, the United States produced a small but outstanding body of horror fiction which included, in addition to the works of Frank Norris previously discussed, and Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, such masters as Robert W. Chambers, W.C. Morrow, Henry James, Ralph Adams Cram, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, Jack London, J. Marion Crawford, Edward Lucas White, and Gertrude Atherton. It raises the question as to whether or not the American contribution to horror fiction in this era has not been greatly underrated.
GRETTIR AT
THORHALL-STEAD
* * *
by
FRANK NORRIS
I / GLAMR
Thorhall the bonder had been to the great Thingvalla, or annual fair of Iceland, to engage a shepherd, and was now returning. It had been a good two-days’ journey home, for his shaggy little pony, though sure-footed, was slow. For the better part of three hours on the evening of the second day he had been picking his way cautiously among the great boulders of black basalt that encumbered the path. At length, on the summit of a low hill, he brought the little animal to a standstill and paused a moment, looking off to the northward, a smile of satisfaction spreading over his broad, sober face. For he had just passed the white stone that marked the boundary of his own land. Below him opened the little valley named the Vale of Shadows, and in its midst, overshadowed by a single Norway pine, black, wind-distorted, was the stone farmhouse, the byre, Thorhall’s home.
Only an Icelander could have found pleasure in that prospect. It was dreary beyond expression. Save only for the deformed pine, tortured and warped by its unending battle with the wintry gales, no other tree relieved the monotony of the landscape. To the west, mountains barred the horizon—volcanic mountains, gashed, cragged, basaltic, and still blackened with primeval fires. Bare of vegetation they were—somber, solitary, empty of life. To the eastward, low, rolling sand dunes, sprinkled thinly with gorse, bore down to the sea. They shut off a view of the shore, but farther on the horizon showed itself, a bitter, inhospitable waste of gray water, blotted by fogs and murk and sudden squalls. Though the shore was invisible, it nonetheless asserted itself. With the rushing of the wind was mingled the prolonged, everlasting thunder of the surf, while the taint of salt, of decaying kelp, of fish, of seaweed, of all the pungent aromas of the sea, pervaded the air on every hand.
Black gulls, sharply defined against the gray sky, slanted in long tacking flights hither and thither over sea and land. The raucous bark of the seal hunting mackerel off the shore made itself occasionally heard. Otherwise there was no sign of life. Veils of fine rain, half fog, drove across the scene between ocean and mountain. The wind blew incessantly from off the sea with a steady and uninterrupted murmur.
Thorhall rode on, inclining his head against the gusts and driving wind. Soon he had come to the farmhouse. The servants led the pony to the stables and in the doorway Thorhall found his wife waiting for him. They embraced one another and—for they were pious folk—thanked God for the bonder’s safe journey and speedy return. Before the roaring fire of drift that evening Thorhall told his wife of all that had passed at the Thingvalla, of the wrestling, and of the stallion fights.
“And did you find a shepherd to your liking?” asked his wife.
“Yes, a great fellow with white teeth and black hair. Rather surly, I believe, but strong as a troll. He promised to be with me by the beginning of the winter night. His name is Glamr.”
But the summer passed, the sun dipped below the horizon not to reappear for six months, the winter night drew on, snow buried all the landscape, hurricanes sharp as boarspears descended upon the Vale of Shadows; in their beds the dwellers in the byre heard the grind and growl of the great bergs careering onward through the ocean, and many a night the howl of hunger-driven wolves startled Thorhall from his sleep; yet Glamr did not come.
Then at length and of a sudden he appeared; and Thorhall on a certain evening, called hastily by a frightened servant, beheld the great figure of him in the midst of the kitchen floor, his eyebrows frosted yet scowling, his white teeth snapping with cold, while in a great hoarse voice, like the grumble of a bear, he called for meat and drink.
From thenceforward Glamr became a member of Thorhall’s household. Yet seldom was he found in the byre. By day he was away with the sheep; by night he slept in the stables. The servants were afraid of him, though he rarely addressed them a word. He was not only feared, but disliked. This aversion was partly explained by Glamr’s own peculiar disposition—gloomy, solitary, uncanny, and partly by a fact that came to light within the first month of his coming to the Vale of Shadows.
He was an unbeliever. Never did his broad bulk darken the lich-gate of the kirk; the knolling of matin and vesper-bell put him in a season of even deeper gloom than usual. It was noticed that he could not bear to look upon a cross; the priest he abhorred as a pestilence. On holy days he kept far from home, absenting himself upon one pretext or another, withdrawing up into the chasms and gorges of the hills.
So passed the first months of the winter.
Christmas day came, and Christmas night. It was bitter, bitter cold. Snow had fallen since second cockcrow the day before, and as night closed in such a gale as had not been known for years gathered from off the Northern Ocean and whirled shrieking over the Vale of Shadows. All day long Glmr was in the hills with the sheep, and even above the roaring of the wind his bell-toned voice had occasionally been heard as he called and shouted to his charges. At the candlelighting time he had not returned. The bonder and his family busked themselves to attend the Christmas mass.
Some two hours later they were returning. The wind was going down, but even yet shreds of torn seaweed and scud of foam, swept up by the breath of the gale, drove landward across the valley. The clouds overhead were breaking up, and between their galloping courses one saw the sky, the stars glittering like hoar frost.
The bo
nder’s party drew near the farmhouse, and the servants, going before with lanthorns and pine torches, undid the fastenings of the gate. The wind lapsed suddenly, and in the stillness between two gusts the plunge of the surf made itself heard.
Then all at once Thorhall and his wife stopped and her hand clutched quickly at his wrist.
“Hark! what was that?”
What, indeed? Was it an echo of the storm sounding hollow and faint from some thunder-split crag far off there in those hills toward which all eyes were suddenly turned; was it the cry of a wolf, the clamor of a falcon, or was it the horrid scream of human agony and fury, vibrating to a hoarse and bell-like note that sounded familiar in their ears?
“Glamr! Where is Glamr?” shouted Thorhall, as he entered the byre. But those few servants who had been left in charge of the house reported he had not yet returned.
Night passed and no Glamr; and in the morning the search-party set out toward the hills. Half way up the slope, the sheep—a few of them—were found, scattered, half buried in drifts; then a dog, dead and frozen hard as wood. From it led a track up into the higher mountains, a strange track indeed, not human certainly, yet whether of wolf or bear no one could determine. Some had started to follow when a lad who had looked behind the shoulder of a great rock raised a cry.
There was the body of Glamr. The shepherd was stretched upon his back, dead, rigid. The open eyes were glazed, the face livid; the tongue protruding from the mouth had been bitten through in the last agony. All about the snow was trampled down, and the bare bushes crushed and flattened out. Even the massive boulder near which the body had been found was moved a little from its place. A fearful struggle had been wrought out here, yet upon the body of Glamr was no trace of a wound, no mark of claw or hand. Only among his footprints was mingled that strange track that had been noticed before, and as before it led straight up toward the high part of the mountains.
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