The trees thinned out as he had promised, and here the land rose in a long slope to the north. I looked up across a tract of eight or ten acres, where the devastation of stupid lumbering might be healed if the hurt region could be let alone for sixty years. The deep snow, blinding out here where only scrub growth interfered with the sunlight, covered the worst of the wreckage. “Good place for wild ras’berries,” Harp said quietly. “Been time for ’em to grow back. Guess it was nearer seven years ago when they cut here and left this mess. Last summer I couldn’t hardly find their logging road. Off to the left—” He stopped, pointing with a slow arm to a blurred gray line that wandered up from the left to disappear over the rise of ground. The nearest part of that gray curve must have been four hundred feet away, and to my eyes it might have been a shadow cast by an irregularity of the snow surface; Harp knew better. Something had passed there, heavy enough to break the crust. “You want to rest a mite, Ben? Once over that rise I might not want to stop again.”
I let myself down on the butt of an old log that lay tilted toward us, cut because it had happened to be in the way, left to rot because they happened to be taking pine. “Can you really make anything out of that?”
“Not enough,” said Harp. “But it could be him.” He did not sit by me but stood relaxed with his load, snowshoes spaced so he could spit between them. “About half a mile over that rise,” he said, “there’s a kind of gorge. Must’ve been a good brook, former times, still a stream along the bottom in summer. Tangle of elders and stuff. Couple, three caves in the bank at one spot. I guess it’s three summers since I been there. Gloomy goddamn place. There was foxes into one of them caves. Natural caves, I b’lieve. I didn’t go too near, not then.”
I sat in the warming light, wondering whether there was any way I could talk to Harp about the beast—if it existed, if we weren’t merely a pair of aging men with disordered minds. Any way to tell him the creature was important to the world outside our dim little village? That it ought somehow to be kept alive, not just shot down and shoveled aside? How could I say this to a man without science, who had lost his wife and also the trust of his fellow men?
Take away that trust and you take away the world.
Could I ask him to shoot it in the legs, get it back alive? Why, to my own self, irrationally, that appeared wrong, horrible, as well as beyond our powers. Better if he shot to kill. Or if I did. So in the end I said nothing, but shrugged my pack into place and told him I was ready to go on.
With the crust uncertain under that stronger sunshine, we picked our way slowly up the rise, and when we came at length to that line of tracks, Harp said matter-of-factly, “Now you’ve seen his mark. It’s him.”
Sun and overnight freezing had worked on the trail. Harp estimated it had been made early the day before. But wherever the weight of Longtooth had broken through, the shape of his foot showed clearly down there in its pocket of snow, a foot the size of a man’s but broader, shorter. The prints were spaced for the stride of a short-legged person. The arch of the foot was low, but the beast was not actually flat-footed. Beast or man. I said, “This is a man’s print, Harp. Isn’t it?”
He spoke without heat. “No. You’re forgetting, Ben. I seen him.”
“Anyhow, there’s only one.”
He said slowly, “Only one set of tracks.”
“What d’you mean?”
Harp shrugged. “It’s heavy. He could’ve been carrying something. Keep your voice down. That crust yesterday, it would’ve held me without no web feet, but he went through, and he ain’t as big as me.” Harp checked his rifle and released the safety. “Half a mile to them caves. B’lieve that’s where he is, Ben. Don’t talk unless you got to, and take it slow.”
I followed him. We topped the rise, encountering more of that lumberman’s desolation on the other side. The trail crossed it, directly approaching a wall of undamaged trees that marked the limit of the cutting. Here forest took over once more, and where it began, Longtooth’s trail ended. “Now you seen how it goes,” Harp said. “Anyplace where he can travel above ground he does. He don’t scramble up the trunks, seems like. Look here—he must’ve got aholt of that branch and swung hisself up. Knocked off some snow, but the wind knocks off so much, too, you can’t tell nothing. See, Ben, he—he figures it out. He knows about trails. He’ll have come down out of these trees far enough from where we are now so there ain’t no chance of us seeing the place from here. Could be anywhere in a half circle, and draw it as big as you please.”
“Thinking like a man.”
“But he ain’t a man,” said Harp. “There’s things he don’t know. How a man feels, acts. I’m going on to them caves.” From necessity, I followed him . . .
I ought to end this quickly. Prematurely I am an old man, incapacitated by the effects of a stroke and a damaged heart. I keep improving a little—sensible diet, no smoking, Adelaide’s care. I expect several years of tolerable health on the way downhill. But I find, as Harp did, that it is even more crippling to lose the trust of others. I will write here once more, and not again, that my word is good.
It was noon when we reached the gorge. In that place some melancholy part of night must always remain. Down the center of the ravine between tangles of alder, water murmured under ice and rotting snow, which here and there had fallen in to reveal the dark brilliance. Harp did not enter the gorge itself but moved slowly through tree cover along the left edge, eyes flickering for danger. I tried to imitate his caution. We went a hundred yards or more in that inching advance, maybe two hundred. I heard only the occasional wind of spring.
He turned to look at me with a sickly triumph, a grimace of disgust and of justification too. He touched his nose and then I got it also, a rankness from down ahead of us, a musky foulness with an ammoniacal tang and some smell of decay. Then on the other side of the gorge, off in the woods but not far, I heard Longtooth.
A bark, not loud. Throaty, like talk.
Harp suppressed an answering growl. He moved on until he could point down to a black cave mouth on the opposite side. The breeze blew the stench across to us. Harp whispered, “See, he’s got like a path. Jumps down to that flat rock, then to the cave. We’ll see him in a minute.” Yes, there were sounds in the brush. “You keep back.” His left palm lightly stroked the underside of his rifle barrel.
So intent was he on the opening where Longtooth would appear, I may have been first to see the other who came then to the cave mouth and stared up at us with animal eyes. Longtooth had called again, a rather gentle sound. The woman wrapped in filthy hides may have been drawn by that call or by the noise of our approach.
Then Harp saw her.
He knew her. In spite of the tangled hair, scratched face, dirt, and the shapeless deer pelt she clutched around herself against the cold, I am sure he knew her. I don’t think she knew him, or me. An inner blindness, a look of a beast wholly centered on its own needs. I think human memories had drained away. She knew Longtooth was coming. I think she wanted his warmth and protection, but there were no words in the whimper she made before Harp’s bullet took her between the eyes.
Longtooth shoved through the bushes. He dropped the rabbit he was carrying and jumped down to that flat rock snarling, glancing sidelong at the dead woman who was still twitching. If he understood the fact of death, he had no time for it. I saw the massive overdevelopment of thigh and leg muscles, their springy motions of preparation. The distance from the flat rock to the place where Harp stood must have been fifteen feet. One spear of sunlight touched him in that blue-green shade, touched his thick red fur and his fearful face.
Harp could have shot him. Twenty seconds for it, maybe more. But he flung his rifle aside and drew out his hunting knife, his own long tooth, and had it waiting when the enemy jumped.
So could I have shot him. No one needs to tell me I ought to have done so.
Longtooth launched himself, clawed fingers out, fangs exposed. I felt the meeting as if the impact had struck my
own flesh. They tumbled roaring into the gorge, and I was cold, detached, an instrument for watching.
It ended soon. The heavy brownish teeth clenched in at the base of Harp’s neck. He made no more motion except the thrust that sent his blade into Longtooth’s left side. Then they were quiet in that embrace, quiet all three. I heard the water flowing under the ice.
I remember a roaring in my ears, and I was moving with slow care, one difficult step after another, along the lip of the gorge and through mighty corridors of white and green. With my hard-won detached amusement I supposed this might be the region where I had recently followed poor Harp Ryder to some destination or other, but not (I thought) one of those we talked about when we were boys. A band of iron had closed around my forehead, and breathing was an enterprise needing great effort and caution, in order not to worsen the indecent pain that clung as another band around my diaphragm. I leaned against a tree for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, I don’t know where. I knew I mustn’t take off my pack in spite of the pain, because it carried provisions for three days. I said once: “Ben, you are lost.”
I had my carbine, a golden bough, staff of life, and I recall the shrewd management and planning that enabled me to send three shots into the air. Twice.
It seems I did not want to die, and so hung on the cliff edge of death with a mad stubborness. They tell me it could not have been the second day that I fired the second burst, the one that was heard and answered—because they say a man can’t suffer the kind of attack I was having and then survive a whole night of exposure. They say that when a search party reached me from Wyndham Village (eighteen miles from Darkfield), I made some garbled speech and fell flat on my face.
I woke immoblized, without power of speech or any motion except for a little life in my left hand, and for a long time memory was only a jarring of irrelevancies. When that cleared, I still couldn’t talk for another long deadly while. I recall someone saying with exasperated admiration that with cerebral hemorrhage on top of coronary infarction, I had no damn right to be alive; this was the first sound that gave me any pleasure. I remember recognizing Adelaide and being unable to thank her for her presence. None of this matters to the story, except the fact that for months I had no bridge of communication with the world; and yet I loved the world and did not want to leave it.
One can always ask: What will happen next?
Sometime in what they said was June my memory was (I think) clear. I scrawled a little, with the nurse supporting the deadened part of my arm. But in response to what I wrote, the doctor, the nurses, Sheriff Robart, even Adelaide Simmons and Bill Hastings, looked—sympathetic. I was not believed. I am not believed now, in the most important part of what I wish I might say: that there are things in our world that we do not understand, and that this ignorance ought to generate humility. People find this obvious, bromidic—oh, they always have!—and therefore they do not listen, retaining the pride of their ignorance intact.
Remnants of the three bodies were found in late August, small thanks to my efforts, for I had no notion what compass direction we took after the cut-over area, and there are so many such areas of desolation I couldn’t tell them where to look. Forest scavengers, including a pack of dogs, had found the bodies first. Water had moved them, too, for the last of the big snow melted suddenly, and for a couple of days at least there must have been a small river raging through that gorge. The head of what they are calling the “lunatic” got rolled downstream, bashed against rocks, partly buried in silt. Dogs had chewed and scattered what they speak of as “the man’s fur coat.”
It will remain a lunatic in a fur coat, for they won’t have it any other way. So far as I know, no scientist ever got a look at the wreckage, unless you glorify the coroner by that title. I believe he was a good vet before he got the job. When my speech was more or less regained, I was already through trying to talk about it. A statement of mine was read at the inquest—that was before I could talk or leave the hospital. At this ceremony society officially decided that Harper Harrison Ryder, of this township, shot to death his wife, Leda, and an individual, male, of unknown identity, while himself temporarily of unsound mind, and died of knife injuries received in a struggle with the said individual of unknown, and so forth.
I don’t talk about it because that only makes people more sorry for me, to think a man’s mind should fail so, and he not yet sixty.
I cannot even ask them: “What is truth?” They would only look more saddened, and I suppose shocked, and perhaps find reasons for not coming to see me again.
They are kind. They will do anything for me, except think about it.
Mary Wilkins Freeman
Luella Miller
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was in her day one of the best-known American writers. She was championed by William Dean Howells for her literary value and awarded the Howells Medal for fiction of the American Academy in 1926. Her reputation however, and her work, declined after entering an oppressive marriage in 1902. Like Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others, she has been consigned to the ghetto of “local colorists” by critics for most of this century. Primarily a short story writer, Freeman was popular and prolific, but produced only eleven supernatural stories, six of which were collected in her volume, The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903), which is, according to Everett Bleiler, “of greater critical and historical importance than its uniqueness might suggest. It is one of the very few bodies of work that combine domestic realism with supernaturalism, and it has been the founding document of a minor school within supernatural fiction (notably August Derleth and his followers).” Derleth ranked her as one of the four “absolute formative masters” of the horror genre following the Gothic vogue. His press, Arkham House, released the definitive Collected Ghost Stories (1974), with a useful introduction by Edward Wagenknecht. “Luella Miller” is her most horrific tale. Told by an unreliable narrator, it is at the same time an attack on the helpless child-woman and paradoxically on the independent single woman, the outsider. It is a ghost story and a vampire story at once. One must gauge the narrator’s prejudices. It is an interesting contrast to Violet Hunt, Madeline Yale Wynne, and at an opposite pole from Le Fanu, M. R. James, and the Lovecraftians. It is perhaps one of the ancestors of Ray Bradbury.
Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their wont around an untenanted building. Not a window in the old Miller house was broken: the panes reflected the morning sunlight in patches of emerald and blue, and the latch of the sagging front door was never lifted, although no bolt secured it. Since Luella Miller had been carried out of it, the house had had no tenant except one friendless old soul who had no choice between that and the far-off shelter of the open sky. This old woman, who had survived her kindred and friends, lived in the house one week, then one morning no smoke came out of the chimney, and a body of neighbours, a score strong, entered and found her dead in her bed. There were dark whispers as to the cause of her death, and there were those who testified to an expression of fear so exalted that it showed forth the state of the departing soul upon the dead face. The old woman had been hale and hearty when she entered the house, and in seven days she was dead; it seemed that she had fallen a victim to some uncanny power. The minister talked in the pulpit with covert severity against the sin of superstition; still the belief prevailed. Not a soul in the village but would have chosen the almshouse rather than that dwelling. No vagrant, if he heard the tale, w
ould seek shelter beneath that old roof, unhallowed by nearly half a century of superstitious fear.
There was only one person in the village who had actually known Luella Miller. That person was a woman well over eighty, but a marvel of vitality and unextinct youth. Straight as an arrow, with the spring of one recently let loose from the bow of life, she moved about the streets, and she always went to church, rain or shine. She had never married, and had lived alone for years in a house across the road from Luella Miller’s.
This woman had none of the garrulousness of age, but never in all her life had she ever held her tongue for any will save her own, and she never spared the truth when she essayed to present it. She it was who bore testimony to the life, evil, though possibly wittingly or designedly so, of Luella Miller, and to her personal appearance. When this old woman spoke—and she had the gift of description, although her thoughts were clothed in the rude vernacular of her native village—one could seem to see Luella Miller as she had really looked. According to this woman, Lydia Anderson by name, Luella Miller had been a beauty of a type rather unusual in New England. She had been a slight, pliant sort of creature, as ready with a strong yielding to fate and as unbreakable as a willow. She had glimmering lengths of straight, fair hair, which she wore softly looped round a long, lovely face. She had blue eyes full of soft pleading, little slender, clinging hands, and a wonderful grace of motion and attitude.
“Luella Miller used to sit in a way nobody else could if they sat up and studied a week of Sundays,” said Lydia Anderson, “and it was a sight to see her walk. If one of them willows over there on the edge of the brook could start up and get its roots free of the ground, and move off, it would go just the way Luella Miller used to. She had a green shot silk she used to wear, too, and a hat with green ribbon streamers, and a lace veil blowing across her face and out sideways, and a green ribbon flyin’ from her waist. That was what she came out bride in when she married Erastus Miller. Her name before she was married was Hill. There was always a sight of ‘l’s’ in her name, married or single. Erastus Miller was good lookin’, too, better lookin’ than Luella. Sometimes I used to think that Luella wa’n’t so handsome after all. Erastus just about worshiped her. I used to know him pretty well. He lived next door to me, and we went to school together. Folks used to say he was waitin’ on me, but he wa’n’t. I never thought he was except once or twice when he said things that some girls might have suspected meant somethin’. That was before Luella came here to teach the district school. It was funny how she came to get it, for folks said she hadn’t any education, and that one of the big girls, Lottie Henderson, used to do all the teachin’ for her, while she sat back and did embroidery work on a cambric pocket-handkerchief. Lottie Henderson was a real smart girl, a splendid scholar, and she just set her eyes by Luella, as all the girls did. Lottie would have made a real smart woman, but she died when Luella had been here about a year—just faded away and died: nobody knew what ailed her. She dragged herself to that schoolhouse and helped Luella teach till the very last minute. The committee all knew how Luella didn’t do much of the work herself, but they winked at it. It wa’n’t long after Lottie died that Erastus married her. I always thought he hurried it up because she wa’n’t fit to teach. One of the big boys used to help her after Lottie died, but be hadn’t much government, and the school didn’t do very well, and Luella might have had to give it up, for the committee couldn’t have shut their eyes to things much longer. The boy that helped her was a real honest, innocent sort of fellow, and he was a good scholar, too. Folks said he overstudied, and that was the reason he was took crazy the year after Luella married, but I don’t know. And I don’t know what made Erastus Miller go into consumption of the blood the year after he was married: consumption wa’n’t in his family. He just grew weaker and weaker, and went almost bent double when he tried to wait on Luella, and he spoke feeble, like an old man. He worked terrible hard till the last trying to save up a little to leave Luella. I’ve seen him out in the worst storms on a wood-sled—he used to cut and sell wood—and he was hunched up on top lookin’ more dead than alive. Once I couldn’t stand it: I went over and helped him pitch some wood on the cart—I was always strong in my arms. I wouldn’t stop for all he told me to, and I guess he was glad enough for the help. That was only a week before he died. He fell on the kitchen floor while he was gettin’ breakfast. He always got the breakfast and let Luella lay abed. He did all the sweepin’ and the washin’ and the ironin’ and most of the cookin’. He couldn’t bear to have Luella lift her finger, and she let him do for her. She lived like a queen for all the work she did. She didn’t even do her sewin’. She said it made her shoulder ache to sew, and poor Erastus’s sister Lily used to do all her sewin’. She wa’n’t able to, either; she was never strong in her back, but she did it beautifully. She had to, to suit Luella, she was so dreadful particular. I never saw anythin’ like the fagottin’ and hemstitchin’ that Lily Miller did for Luella. She made all Luella’s weddin’ outfit, and that green silk dress, after Maria Babbit cut it. Maria she cut it for nothin’, and she did a lot more cuttin’ and fittin’ for nothin’ for Luella, too. Lily Miller went to live with Luella after Erastus died. She gave up her home, though she was real attached to it and wa’n’t a mite afraid to stay alone. She rented it and she went to live with Luella right away after the funeral.”
Foundations of Fear Page 109