Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

or four days. Only a few years earlier I had carried

  heavier camping loads than this without trouble, but

  now I was blown, a stitch beginning in my side. My

  wristwatch said only nine o’clock.

  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

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  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 1 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

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  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

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  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 lo
ud. 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.

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  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 Long-

  tooth 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

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  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 stubbomess. 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.

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  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 ouf 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, a
nd an individual, male, of unknown identity, while himself temporarily

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  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 (1852-1930)

  Luella Miller

  M ary 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 M edal 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 O rne 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 o f which w ere 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 M iller" 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. O ne must gauge

  the narrator’s prejudices. It is an interesting contrast to

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  Violet Hunt, Madeline Yale Wynne, and at an opposite pole