"It wasn't my doing," growled Lamar. "Some resort company did it, to make a lake amongst the summer cottages they're building for visitors. You remember how this place of mine was set—high above the little creek down in the hollow, safe from any flood. I wouldn't sell out, but that company bought up all the land round about and put in a dam, and here it is, filled in. I'm like Robinson Crusoe on my island, but I'm not studying to go ashore till tomorrow."
Cobbett drank again. "Because of what?"
"Because of one of those same old tales that makes a noise like the truth." Lamar showed his gold-wired teeth. "The Dakwa," he said again. "It's in those books I asked you to fetch along with you."
"And I said they're across that water that scares you," said Cobbett. "What," he asked patiently, "is the Dakwa?"
"It's what tried to grab you just now," Lamar flung out. "It used to be penned up in the little creek they called Long Soak, penned up there for centuries. And now, by God, it's out again in this lake they've dammed up, a-looking for what it may devour." His face clamped desperately. "Devour it whole," he said.
"You say it's out again," said Cobbett. "What do you mean by again? How long has this been going on?"
"Centuries, I told you," said Lamar. "The tale was here with the Cherokee Indians when the first settlers came, before the Revolutionary War. And the Dakwa's hungry. Two men and a boy—Del Hungant and Steve Biggins and a teenager from somewhere in the lowlands named McIlhenny—they just sort of went out of sight along this new lake. Folks came up from town and dragged for them, and nothing whatever dragged up."
"Not even the Dakwa," suggested Cobbett.
"Especially not the Dakwa. It's too smart to be hooked."
"And you believe in it," said Cobbett.
"Sure enough I believe in it. I've seen it again and again, just an ugly hunch of it in the water out there. I've heard it humming."
"So that's what I heard," said Cobbett.
"Yes, that's what. And once, the last time I've ever been out in the boat at night, it shoved against the boat and damn near turned it over with me. You'd better believe in it yourself, the way it rasped your skin like that."
Cobbett went over to the bookshelf and studied the titles. He took down Thompson's Mysteries and Secrets of Magic and leafed through the index pages.
"You won't read about it in there," Lamar told him sourly. "That's only about old-world witches and devils, with amulets and charms against them, and all the names of God to defeat them. The Dakwa doesn't believe in God. It's an Indian thing—Cherokee. Something else has to go to work against it. That's why I wanted those books, hoping to find something in them. They're the only published notices of the Dakwa."
Cobbett slid Thompson's volume back into place and went to the door and opened it.
"You fixing to do something foolish?" grumbled Lamar.
"No, nothing foolish if I can help it," Cobbett assured him. "I just thought I'd go and look at the stars before bedtime."
He stepped across the threshold log into grass. Dew splashed his bare feet. He paced to the dock and gazed up at the moon, a great pallid blotch of radiance. Gazing, he heard something again.
Music, that was all it could be. Perhaps it had words, but words so soft that they were like a faint memory.
Out upon the dock he stepped. Ripples broke against its supporting poles. Something made a dark rush in the water, close up almost to the boat. Whatever it was glinted shinily beneath the surface. Cobbett stared down at it, trying to make out its shape. It vanished. He turned and paced back to the cabin door, that faint sense of the music still around him.
"All right, what did you find out there?" Lamar demanded.
"Nothing to speak of," said Cobbett. "Now then, I had a long uphill trudge getting here. How about showing me where I'll sleep?"
"Over yonder, as usual." Lamar nodded toward the cot.
"And we'll get up early tomorrow morning and go get my gear and those books of yours."
"Not until the sun's up," insisted Lamar.
"Okay," grinned Cobbett. "Not until the sun's up."
When Cobbett woke, Lamar was at the oil stove, cooking breakfast. Cobbett got into the robe, washed his face and hands and teeth and unclasped the banjo case. He took out Lamar's old banjo, tuned it briefly and softly began to pick a tune, the tune he had heard the night before.
"You cut that right out!" Lamar yelled at him. "You want to call that thing out of the water, right up to the door?"
Cobbett put the banjo away and came to the table. Breakfast was hearty and good—flapjacks drenched in molasses, eggs and home-cured bacon, and black coffee so strong you'd expect a hatchet to float in it. Cobbett had two helpings of everything. Afterward, he washed the dishes while Lamar wiped.
"And now the sun's up," Cobbett said, peering at it through the window. "It's above those trees on the mountain. What do you say we get me back into my clothes?"
Wearing the golden gloves bathrobe, he walked out to the dock with Lamar. He had his first good look at the boat. It was well made of calked planks, canoe style, pointed fore and aft, with two seats and two paddles. It was painted a deep brown.
"I built that thing," said Lamar. "Built it when they started in to fill up the hollow. Can you paddle? Bow or stern?"
"Let me take stern."
Getting in, they pushed off. Lamar, dipping his paddle, gazed at something far out toward the middle of the lake. Cobbett gazed too. Whatever it was hung there on the water, something dark and domed. It might have been a sort of head. As Cobbett looked, the thing slipped underwater. The light of the rising sun twinkled on a bit of foam.
Lamar's mouth opened as if to speak, but closed again on silence. A score of determined strokes took them across to a shallow place. Cobbett hopped ashore, picked up his clothes and pack and blanket roll, and came back to stow everything in the waist of the boat. Around they swung and headed back toward the island. Out there across the gentle stir of the water's surface, die dark, domed object was visible again.
"Whatever it is, it's watching us," ventured Cobbett. "It doesn't seem to want to come close."
"That's because there's a couple of us," grunted Lamar, paddling. "I don't expect it would tackle two people at a time, by daylight."
That seemed to put a stop to the conversation. They nosed in against the dock. Tying up, Lamar helped Cobbett carry his things into the cabin. Cobbett rummaged in the pack.
"All right, here are those books of yours," he said. "Now, I'll get dressed."
While he did so, Lamar leafed through Mooney's book about Cherokee myths.
"Sure enough, here we are," he said. "Dakwa—it's a water spirit, and it used to drag Cherokee hunters down and eat them. It's said to have been in several streams."
"Including Long Soak," supplied Cobbett.
"Mooney doesn't mention Long Soak but, yes, here too." Lamar turned pages. "It's still here, and well you know that's a fact." He took up two smaller volumes. "Now, look in this number two book of Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. Hmmm," he crooned.
"More Dakwa?" asked Cobbett, picking up the other book he had brought.
"Skinner titles it, 'The Siren of the French Broad.' This time it's not as grotesque as in Mooney. It's supposed to be a beautiful naked woman rising up to sing to you. So, if you're a red-blooded American he-man, you stoop close to see and hear better and it quits being beautiful, it suddenly has a skull and two bony arms to drag you down." He snapped the book shut. "I judge the white settlers prettied the tale up to sound like the Lorelei. But not much in any of these books to tell how to fight it. What are you reading there in The Kingdom of Madison?"
"I'm looking at page thirteen, which I hope isn't unlucky," replied Cobbett. "Here's what it says about a deep place on the French Broad River: 'There, the Cherokees said, lurked the dakwa, the gigantic fish-monster that caught men at the riverside and dragged them down, swallowed them whole.' And it has that other account, too: 'The story would seem to inspire a
nother fable, this time of a lovely water-nymph, who smiled to lure the unwary wanderer, reached up her arms to him, and dragged him down to be seen no more.'"
"Not much help, either. That's about what Mooney and Skinner say, and it's no fable, no legend." Lamar studied his guest. "How do you feel today, after that gouging it gave you in the water last night?"
"I feel fine." Cobbett buttoned up his shirt. "Completely healed. It didn't hurt me too much for you to cure me."
"Maybe if it had been able to get you into its mouth, swallow you up—"
"Didn't you say that was an old Indian preparation you sloshed on me?"
"It's something I got from a Cherokee medicine man," said Lamar. "A valued old friend of mine. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, but he worships his people's old gods, is afraid of their evil spirits, carries out their old formulas and rituals, and I admire him for it."
"So do I," said Cobbett. "But you mentioned certain plants in that mixture."
"Well, for the most part there were smashed-up seeds of viper's bugloss and some juice of campion, what the country folks call rattlesnake plant!"
Both of those growths had snake names to them, reflected Cobbett. "I think you might have mentioned to me why you wanted these books," he said.
"Why mention it?" groaned Lamar, adjusting his spectacles. "You wouldn't have believed me then. Anyway, I don't see how this extra information will help. It doesn't do more than prove things, more or less. Well, I've got errands to do."
He walked out to the dock. Cobbett followed him.
"I'm paddling across and going down the trail to meet old Snave Dalbom," Lamar announced. "This is his day to drive down to the county seat to wag back a week's supplies. He lets me go with him to do my shopping."
He got into the boat and began to cast off.
"Let me paddle you over," offered Cobbett, but Lamar shook his head violently.
"I'll paddle myself over and tie up the boat yonder," he declared. "I'm not a-going to have you out on this lake, maybe getting yourself yanked overboard and down there where they can't drag for you, like those three others who never came up."
"How do you know I won't go swimming?" Cobbett teased him.
"Because I don't reckon your mother raised any such fool. Listen, just sit around here and take it easy. Snave and I will probably get a bite in town, so fix your own noon dinner and look for me back sometime before sundown. There's some pretty good canned stuff in the house—help yourself. And maybe you can read the whole tariff on the Dakwa, figure out something to help us. But I'm leaving you here so you'll stay here."
He shoved out from the dock and paddled for the shore opposite.
Cobbett strolled back to the cabin, and around it. Clumps of cedar brush stood at the corner, and locusts hung above the old tin roof. The island itself was perhaps an acre in extent, with cleared ground behind the cabin. A well had been dug there. Lamar's well-kept garden showed two rows of bright green cornstalks, the tops of potatoes and tomatoes and onions. Cobbett inspected the corn. At noon he might pick a couple of ears and boil them to eat with butter and salt and pepper. On the far side of the garden was the shore of the island, dropping abruptly to the water. Kneeling, Cobbett peered. He could see that the bottom was far down there, a depth of many feet. Below the clear surface he saw a shadowy patch, a drowned tree that once had grown there, that had been overwhelmed by the lake.
That crooning music, or the sense of it, seemed to hang over the gentle ripples.
He returned to the cabin and sat down with Mooney's book. The index gave him several page references to the Dakwa and he looked them up, one by one. The Dakwa had been reported where the creek called Toco, and before that called the Dakwai, flowed into the Little Tennessee River. Again, it was supposed to lurk in a low-churned stretch of the French Broad River, six miles upstream from Hot Springs. There were legends. A hunter, said one, had been swallowed whole by a Dakwa and had fought his way out to safety, but his hair had been scalded from his head. Mooney's notes referred to Jonah in the Bible, to the swallowing of an Ojibwa hero named Mawabosho. That reminded Cobbett of Longfellow's poem, where the King of Fishes had swallowed Hiawatha.
But Hiawatha had escaped, and Jonah and Mawabosho had escaped. The devouring monster of the deep, whatever it might be, was not inescapable.
Again he studied the index. He could not find any references to the plants Lamar had mentioned, but there was a section called "Plant Lore." He read it carefully:
. . . the cedar is held sacred above all other trees . . . the small green twigs are thrown upon the fire in certain ceremonies . . . as it is believed that the anisgina or malevolent ghosts cannot endure the smell . . .
Below that, a printed name jumped to his eye:
. . . the white seeds of the viper's bugloss (Echium vulgara) were formerly used in many important ceremonies . . .
And, a paragraph or so beyond:
The campion (silene stellata) . . . the juice is held to be a sovereign remedy for snake bites . . .
He shut up the book with a snap and began to take off his clothes.
He searched a pair of bathing trunks out of his pack and put them on. Next, he explored Lamar's tool chest. Among the things at the bottom he found a great cross-hilted hunting knife and drew it from its riveted sheath. The blade was fully a foot long, whetted sharp on both edges. Then he went out to the woodpile and chose a stafflike length of hickory, about five feet in length. There was plenty of fishing line in the cabin, and he lashed the knife to the end of the pole like a spearhead. From the shelf he took the bottle of ointment that had healed him so well and rubbed palmsful on himself from head to foot. Remembering the Indian warrior who had been swallowed and came out bald, he lathered the mixture into his dark, shaggy hair. He smeared more on the blade and the pole. When he was done, the bottle was two-thirds empty.
Finally he walked out with his makeshift spear. He paused at the corner of the cabin, gazing at what grew there.
Those cedar bushes. The anisgina or malevolent ghosts cannot endure the smell, Mooney had written, and Mooney, the scholarly friend of the Cherokees, must have known. Cobbett found a match and gathered a sheaf of dry twigs to make a fire. Then he plucked bunches of the dark green cedar leaves and heaped them on top of the blaze. Up rose a dull, vapory smoke. He stood in it, eyes and nose tingling from the fumes, until the fire burned down and the smoke thinned away.
Spear in hand, he paced around the cabin and past the garden and to the place where the margin shelved steeply down into the lake.
He gazed at the sunken tree, then across the lake. No motion there. He looked again at the tree. He could see enough of it to remember it, from times before Long Soak was dammed up. It was a squat oak, thick-stemmed, with sprawling roots driven in among rocks, twenty feet below him.
Yet again he looked out over the water. Still no sign upon it. He began to hum the tune he had heard before, the tune Lamar had forbidden him to pick on the banjo.
Humming, he heard the song outside himself, faint as a song in a dream. It made his skin creep.
From the deep shadowy bottom something came floating upward, straight toward where he knelt.
A woman, thought Cobbett at once, certainly a woman, certainly what the myth in Skinner's book said, not terrible at all. He saw her streaming banner of dark hair, saw her round, lithe arms, her oval, wide-eyed face, and her plump breasts, her skin as smooth and as richly brown as some tropical fruit. Her eyes sought him, her red lips moved as though they sang. Closer she came. Her head with its soaking hair broke clear of the water. Her hand reached to him, both her hands. Those beautiful arms spread wide for him.
He felt light-headed. He almost leaned within the reach of the arms when she drew back and away, still on the surface. His homemade spear had drooped between them. Her short, straight nose twitched as though she would sneeze.
A moment, and then back she came, to the very brink. And changed suddenly. Her eyes spre
ad into shadowed caverns, her mouth opened to show stockades of long, stale teeth. Her arms, round and lithe no longer, drove a taloned clutch at him.
He thrust with the spear, and again she slid swiftly back and away. Off balance, Cobbett fell floundering into the water.
He plunged deep with the force of his fall. In the shimmering blur above him he saw a vast, winnowing shape, far larger than the woman had seemed. It was dark and somehow ribbed, something like a parachute fluttering in a gale. He rose under it, trying to stab and failing again. He could not dart a swift thrust under that impeding water. He clamped the hickory shaft so that it lay tight along his forearm and made a pushing prod with it. The point struck something, seemed to pierce. The broad shape slid away with a flutter that churned the lake all around. Cobbett rose to the surface, gratefully gulping a mighty lungful of breath.
The Dakwa, whatever it was, whatever it truly looked like, had dived out of sight as he came up. Cobbett swam for the shore, one-handed, as another surging wave struck him. He dived deeply, as deeply as he could swim without letting go of his spear.
There it was, stretched overhead again. The dimness of the water, the hampering slowness put upon his movements, seemed like a struggling nightmare. He turned over as he swam. The dark blotch extended itself and came settling down upon him, like a seine dropped to secure a prey. Clamping his spear to his right arm from elbow to wrist, he stabbed, not swiftly but powerfully. Again he felt something at the point. He slid clear and swam upward until his head broke the surface and he could breathe.
He thought no longer of winning to shore. He was here in the lake, he had to fight the Dakwa, do something to it somehow. Underwater was best, where he could see his adversary beneath the surface. Huckleberry Finn had counted on a whole minute to swim without breath under a steamboat. He, Lee Cobbett, ought to do better than that.
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