Sea Serpents

by Gardner Dozois

  Glenway shouted; the helmsmen put the helm over and spilled the wind out of her sails. There was always a boat ready to be lowered at record speed. Two men were at the oars, Glenway took the tiller, and I stood in the bows looking for Geisecker, who could be no more than two or three hundred yards away.

  The night was clear beyond all description. The enormous, smooth swells gleamed and flashed under the moon. The yacht, when we had drawn away from it, stood up like a snowy Alp on the water, and when at the top of each swell, the men lifted their oars for a moment, it was a moment of unbelievable silence, as if some tremendous creature was holding its breath.

  Then I saw Geisecker. We were lifted high on one of the great, glassy hills of sea, and he was beginning to slide down the slope of another. He had the life belt. I couldn't see his real features at that distance, but the white moonlight gave him such great, hollow, black eyes, and made such a crater of his open mouth, that I got the picture of a clown in comic distress. Then he went down, and we went down, and two or three ridges ten feet high humped themselves between us.

  I said, "He's ahead of us; a couple of hundred feet. You'll see him from the top of the next one."

  But we didn't. I began to wonder do a man and a life belt rise and fall faster or slower on a rolling sea than a fourteen-foot boat. Before I could work out the answer, we had gone up and down again and had arrived at a spot which certainly was extremely close to where I had seen him.

  "You misjudged the distance," said Glenway, after perhaps half a puzzled minute.

  "I must have. Anyway, he's got the life buoy. He'll be all right. Let's row around in a circle."

  One of the men put out a bailing can as a marker. The giant swells were so smooth that, ballasted with a couple of inches of water, the can floated up and down without shipping another drop. We went round it on a hundred-foot radius and then at a hundred-and-fifty feet. Geisecker was not to be seen. And we could see, at one time or another, every square foot of water where he could possibly be.

  "He's sunk!" said Glenway. "A cramp . . . A shark . . ."

  "No shark would have taken the life belt down. It'd be floating right here. We'd see it."

  The words were scarcely out of my mouth when we saw it. It breached up, right out of the water—it must have come up from god knows how many fathoms—and it fell back with a splash just a boat's-length ahead of us. Next moment, it was beside our bow and I reached out and lifted it aboard. I turned, holding it in my hands, and showed it to Glenway. It was easier than speaking, and not so silly. We both knew perfectly well that no known creature, except possibly a sperm whale, could have taken Geisecker and the life belt down to that sort of depth. And we knew that what I had seen, and what the men had seen, was not a sperm whale.

  We rowed around in circles for a little longer, and then we pulled back to the yacht. When we were aboard again, I said to Glenway, "You didn't so much as touch him. You didn't even mean to touch him. You didn't even raise your hand."

  "And some of the men were watching," said Glenway with the utmost calm. "They can testify to that."

  If not the railway tycoon, his great-grandfather, it might certainly have been his grandfather, the banker, speaking. He saw my surprise, and smiled. "From the most scrupulous legal point of view," said he, "it was a pure accident. And we'll make a report accordingly. Of course, I killed the man."

  "Now, wait a minute," said I.

  "Excuse me," said he. We were near the wheel. He took it from the man who was steering, and said something to him, and the man ran forward calling to the rest of the crew who were still on deck. Next minute, the helm went up, the booms swung over, the sails bellied out on the other side, and the great boat jibbed and sweeping round on to a new course.

  "Where are we heading now?" said I to Glenway.

  "Due east," said he. "To San Francisco."

  "To make the report? Can't you . . . ?"

  "To put the boat up for sale."

  I said, "Glenway, you're upset. You've got to see this business in proportion."

  He said, "He was alive and enjoying himself, and now he's dead. I didn't like him—I detested him. But that's got nothing to do with it."

  I said, "Don't be completely psychologically illiterate. It's got everything in the world to do with it. You hated his guts, a little too intensely, perhaps, but very understandably. You wished he was dead. In fact, you more or less said so. Now you've got guilt feelings. You're going to take the blame for it. Glenway, you're an obsessive type; you're a Puritan, a New Englander, and Early Christian. Be reasonable. Be moderate."

  "Suppose you were driving a car," said Glenway, "and you knocked a man down and killed him?"

  "I'd be very sorry, but I think I'd go on driving."

  "If you were a speed demon, and it was because of that? Or a drunk? Or if there was reason to believe you were mentally unfit to handle a car?"

  "Well . . ." I said.

  But Glenway wasn't listening. He beckoned the man who had been steering, and turned the wheel over to him. He gave him the course and told him who was to relieve him in each watch. Then he turned away and walked forward. He walked like a passenger. He walked like a man walking on a street. He was walking away from his mania, and in the very hour of its justification.

  I followed him, eager to bring him back to himself, but he walked away from me, too.

  I said to him considerably later, "I've found out something very interesting, talking to the men. Shall I tell you?"

  "Please do," said he.

  I said, "I thought they rather liked Geisecker because he made them laugh. But they didn't. Not a bit. Are you listening?"

  "Of course," said he as politely as a banker who has already decided not to make a loan.

  I said, "They hated him almost as much as you did, and for the same reason—for making fun of It. They believed in It, all the time. They've all got different names for It, according to where they come from. Almost every man's got an uncle who's seen It, or a wife's grandfather, or someone. And it's quite clear It's the same sort of beast."

  Glenway said, "I've decided I'm going to buy a farm or a ranch as far from the ocean as I can get. I'll breed cattle or hybridize corn or something."

  I said, "You've been over seven years on this boat with these men, or most of them. Did you know they believed in It?"

  "No," said he. "Or I might go in for soil biology. There 's still a tremendous amount to be discovered in that field."

  This made me feel very sick. I felt Glenway was indeed different—different from me, different from himself. The beautiful Zenobia was to be sold, the crew disbanded, and the large marine saurian left to dwindle into a figure on an old map, distant and disregarded in its watery solitude. As for myself, all my friendship with Glenway had been aboard the boat—I was part of it; I was one of these things. I had been nothing but the accomplice of his obsession, and now he was, in a way I didn't like, cured. I felt that I, too, was up for sale, and we talked amiably and politely and quite meaninglessly all the way back to San Francisco, and there we said good-bye to each other and promised to write.

  We didn't write in over three years. One can't write to the ghost of a banker, nor expect a letter from one. But, this summer, when I was in New York, I got home one night and found a letter awaiting me. The postmark was Gregory, South Dakota, which is about as far from either ocean as you can get.

  He was there; he wondered if I knew those parts; he wondered if I was likely to be free; there were some interesting things to talk about. The lines were extremely few, but there was all the more space to read between them. I took up the telephone.

  It was nearly midnight, but, of course, it was two hours earlier in South Dakota. All the same, Glenway was a very long time coming to the phone. "I hope I didn't get you out of bed," I told him.

  "Heavens, no!" said he. "I was on the roof. We get wonderful nights here; as clear as Arizona."

  I remembered that clear night in the Pacific, and the flash and gl
itter of the enormous, glassy waves, and the silence, and the boat rising and falling so high and so low, and the yacht like a hill of snow in the distance, and the little bailing can visible at over a hundred feet. I said, "I'd like to come out right away."

  "I rather hoped you would," said Glenway, and began to tell me about planes and trains.

  I asked him if there was anything he wanted from New York.

  "There most certainly is," said he. "There's a man called Emil Schroeder; you'll find his address in the book; he's out in Brooklyn; he's the best lens grinder that ever got out of Germany, and he's got a package for me that I don't want sent through the mail because it's fragile."

  "What is it?" I asked. "A microscope? Did you go in for soil biology after all?"

  "Well, I did for a time," said Glenway. "But this is something different. It's lenses for a binocular telescope a fellow's designed for me. You see, a single eyepiece is no good for following anything that moves at all fast. But this binocular thing will be perfect. I can use it on the roof, or I can set in a mounting I've had built into the plane."

  "Glenway, do you mind telling me what the hell you're talking about?"

  "Haven't you read the government report on unidentified flying objects? Hello! Are you there?"

  "Yes, I'm here, Glenway. And you're there. You're there, sure enough!"

  "Listen, if you haven't read that report, do please get hold of it first thing tomorrow, and read it on the way out here. I don't want to hear you talking like that unfortunate fellow fell overboard that night. Will you do that? Will you read it?"

  "All right, Glenway, I will. I most certainly will."

  The Dakwa

  by

  Manly Wade Wellman

  The late Manly Wade Wellman was one of the finest modern practitioners of the "dark fantasy "or "supernatural horror" tale. He was probably best known for his stories about John the Minstrel or "Silver John," scary and vividly evocative tales set against the background of a ghost-and-demon haunted rural Appalachia that, in Wellman's hands, is as bizarre and beautiful as many another writer's entirely imaginary fantasy world. The "Silver John" stories have been collected in Who Fears the Devil, generally perceived as Wellman's best book. In recent years, there were "Silver John" novels as well: The Old Gods Waken, After Dark, The Lost and the Lurking, The Hanging Stones, and, most recently, Voice of the Mountain. Wellman's non-"Silver John" stories were assembled in the mammoth collection Worse Things Waiting, which won a World Fantasy Award as the Best Anthology/Collection of 1975. Wellman himself has won the prestigious World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. He died in 1986 at the age of 82. His most recent book is the posthumously published collection Mountain Valley Stories.

  Here he gives us the kind of story he did best: one lone, unflinching man pitted against evil, forced to rely only on his own brains and muscle and courage, face to face and grip to grip with the forces of darkness . . .

  Night had fallen two hours ago in these mountains, but Lee Cobbett remembered the trail up from Markum's Fork over Dogged Mountain and beyond. Too, he had the full moon and a blazing skyful of stars to help him. Finally he reached the place where Long Soak Hollow had been, where now lay a broad stretch of water among the heights, water struck to quivering radiance by the moonlight.

  Shaggy trees made the last of the trail dark and uneasy under his boot soles. He half-groped his way to the grassy brink and looked across to something he recognized. On an island that once had been the top of a broad rise in the hollow stood a square cabin in a tuft of trees. Light from the open door beat upon a raftlike dock and a boat tied up there.

  Dropping his pack and bedroll, Cobbett cupped his big hands into a trumpet at his mouth.

  "Hello!" he shouted. "Hello, the house, hello, Mr. Luns Lamar, I'm here! Come over and get me!"

  A shadow slid into the doorway. A man tramped down to where that dock was visible. He held a lantern high.

  "Who's that a-bellowing? " came back a call across the water.

  "Lee Cobbett—come get me!"

  "No, sir," echoed to his ears. "Can't do it tonight."

  "But—"

  "Not tonight!" The words were sharp, they meant that thing. "No way. You wait there for me till sunup."

  The figure plodded back to the doorway and sat down on the threshold with the lantern beside it.

  Cobbett cursed to himself, there on the night shore. He was a blocky man in denim jacket and slacks, with a square, seamed face and a mane of dark hair. Scowling, he estimated the distance across. Fifty yards? Not much more than that. If Luns Lamar wouldn't come, Lee Cobbett would go.

  He put the pack and roll together next to a laurel bush and sat on them to drag off his boots and socks. He stripped away slacks, jacket, blue shirt, underwear, and stood up naked. Walking to the edge of the lake, he tested it with his toe. Chill, like most mountain water. He set his whole foot in, found bottom, and waded forward to his knees. Two more steps, and he was waist deep. He shivered as he moved out along the clay bottom until he could wade no longer. He struck out for the light of the cabin door.

  The coldness of the water bit him, and he swam more strongly to fight against it. Music seemed to be playing somewhere, a song he had never heard, like a muted woodwind. A hum in his head—no, it came from somewhere away from the cabin and the island, somewhere on the moonbright water. It grew stronger, more audible.

  On he swam with powerful strokes. His body glided swiftly, but a current sprang up around him, more of a current than he had thought possible. And the melody heightened in his ears, still nothing he could remember, but tuneful, haunting.

  Then a sudden shuddering impact, a blow like a club against his side and shoulder.

  He almost whirled under. He kicked at whatever it was, shouting aloud as he did so. Next moment he was at the poles that supported the dock, grabbing at them with both hands. Luns Lamar stooped above him and caught his thick wrists.

  "You damned fool," grumbled Lamar, heaving away.

  Cobbett scrambled up on the split slabs, kneeling.

  "Whatever in hell made you swim over here?" Lamar scolded him.

  "What else was there for me to do?" Cobbett found breath to say. "You said you wouldn't come and fetch me, even when you'd written that letter wanting me to bring you those books. I don't know why I should have moped over there until tomorrow, not when I can swim."

  "I wouldn't go out on this lake tonight, even in the boat." Lamar helped Cobbett to his feet. "Hey, you're scraped. Bleeding."

  It was true. Cobbett's sinewy shoulder looked red and raw.

  "There's a log or snag right out from the dock," he said, heading for the cabin's open door.

  "No," said Lamar. "That wasn't any log or snag."

  They went inside together. The front half of the cabin was a single room, raftered overhead. Cobbett knew its rawhide-seated chairs, the plank table, the oil stove, tall shelves of books, a fireplace with a strew of winking coals and a glowing kerosene lamp on the mantel board. Against the wall, an ancient army cot with brown blankets. In a rear corner, a tool chest, and upon that a scuffed banjo case. Lamar brought him a big, frayed towel. Cobbett winced as he rubbed himself down.

  "That's a real rough raking you got," said Lamar, peering.

  He, too, was known to Cobbett, old and small but sure of movement, with spectacles closely set on his shrewd face. He wore a dark blue pullover, khaki pants, and scuffed house slippers.

  "We'd better do something about that," he said and went to a shelf by the stove. He took down a big, square bottle and worried out the cork, then came back. "Just hold still."

  He filled his palm with dark, oily liquid from the bottle and spread it over the torn skin of Cobbett's ribs and shoulder.

  "What's in that stuff?" Cobbett asked.

  "There's some sap of three different trees in it," replied Lamar. "And boiled tea of three different flowers, and some crushed seeds, and the juice of what some folks call a weed, but the Indians used to prize
it."

  He brought an old blue bathrobe with golden gloves in faded yellow letters across the back. "Put this on till we can go over tomorrow and get your clothes," he said.

  "Thanks." Cobbett drew the robe around him and sat down in a chair. "Now," he said, "if that wasn't a log or snag, what was it?"

  Lamar wiped his spectacles. "You won't believe it."

  "Not without hearing it."

  "I asked you to fetch me some books," Lamar reminded.

  "Mooney's study for the Bureau of Anthology, Myths of the Cherokee," said Cobbett. "And Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. And The Kingdom of Madison. All right, they're over yonder in my pack. If you hadn't flooded Long Soak Hollow, I could have brought them right into this cabin without even wetting my feet. If you'd come with the boat, they'd be here now. Why don't you get to telling me what this is all about?"

  Lamar studied him. "Lee, did you ever hear about the Dakwa?"

  "Dakwa," Cobbett said after him. "Sounds like Dracula."

  "It's not Dracula, but it happens to be terrible in its own way. It's what rubbed up against you while you were out there swimming." Lamar scowled. "Look here, let's have a drink. I reckon maybe we both need one."

  He sought the shelf again and opened a fruit jar of clear, white liquid and poured generous portions into two glasses. "This is good blockade whiskey," he said, handing a glass to Cobbett. The liquid tingled sharply on Cobbett's tongue and warmed him all the way down.

  Lamar sipped in turn. "It's hard to explain, even though we've known each other nearly all our lives."

  "You've known me nearly all my life," said Cobbett, "but I haven't known you nearly all yours. I've heard that you studied law, then you taught in a country school, then you edited a little weekly paper. After that, I don't know why, you quit everything and built this cabin. You don't ever come out of it except to listen to mountain songs and mountain tales, and sometimes you write about them for folklore journals." Cobbett studied his friend. "Why not start by telling me what you've done, drowning Long Soak Hollow like this?"