Illustration by Frank Utpatel.
At last he was able to scream. His shriek of agony transfixed me. It was heard all over the township of Juniper Hill—and beyond. It would be useless for me to attempt to convey the torment and terror which that cry contained. I cannot. The writhing thing ascended slowly. As it rose, Henry almost disappeared within the hideous seething tangle of the creature. But as it glided off, away from the knoll, out over the tops of those enormous trees, that terrible shriek rang on and on.
The fearful intruder, flickering with fire, finally vanished in the night, its progress marked by a tiny bit of blue flame.
I have no recollection of how I groped my way out of the woods and reached home. When Dave Baines stopped in the next morning, I was still sitting in the chair, staring at the wall. He told me later that he feared I was in shock.
At length, however, I was able to relate the events I had witnessed just a few hours before.
Dave listened without comment, interrupting only once to tell me that Henry’s final scream had awakened people all over the town.
I finished weakly, grateful for the flask of whiskey which Dave had produced.
He removed his glasses and polished them very carefully. “We’ll never see Henry alive again—and maybe not dead either!”
I set down my glass. “But, Dave, what was it? I was sober and in my right mind—and yet my brain refuses to accept what it tells me I saw.”
Dave helped himself to the whiskey. “Henry was tampering with malign forces, entities which probably existed when the earth was young. Nature, you know, was an experimenter with many life forms—and not all of those life forms were necessarily on the physical plane, or at least not as we know it. Some of them probably existed and passed away, and the tenuous elements of which they were composed left no traces—certainly nothing like heavy skulls and body bones which could survive physically for millions of years.
“I think Henry summoned up, as it were, an early form which we now vaguely refer to as an ‘elemental.’ In a sense, it still exists—but in another time, you might say another dimension. From what you’ve described, it was quite probably looked on as a god to be worshipped by earlier inhabitants of this planet. What those inhabitants were—or who they were—I can’t say. Perhaps the present location of the knoll and the hemlock wood was the place of worship. And quite possibly those early worshippers offered up sacrifices to the thing which they venerated and feared.”
Dave shook his head. “I don’t know—it’s speculation. But that’s all that I can offer. I believe that old Hannibal Trobish was somehow involved in the business. I think both that Latin book and Henry’s ring belonged to him. He may have invoked that damnable entity and survived. Probably he knew how to keep out of its clutches once it appeared. Poor Henry learned just enough Latin to chant those incantations and summon up the thing, but, obviously, he had no idea how to escape it, or dismiss it, once it was evoked.
“That ring may have been a protective talisman. But chances are the ring itself was of no help unless the intruder was placated or its powers nullified by various sacrifices and/or specific formulas. I imagine these formulas were contained somewhere in the book, but that Henry had not learned enough Latin to avail himself of them.
“The great fern-tree forest you thought you saw—well, I don’t know. It may have been a sort of telepathic image projected from the past—possibly, even, from the organ which served that creature as a brain. Even if the thing existed in another plane or time continuum, Henry’s chants undoubtedly enabled it to slip through—temporarily at least—to the present.”
Old Dave got up and moved toward the door. “If you’d ever lived in the far north—as I did at one time—you’d know the legend of the wendigo. A lot of people today think it is sheer nonsense. But they haven’t sat around a campfire at midnight and heard the best guide in Canada swear by all the saints that he had glimpsed such a thing! I don’t say that Henry’s nightmare, necessarily, was just that—but it appears to have been a related entity.”
A week later, in a cornfield more than twenty miles from the northern edge of the township of Juniper Hill, a farmer found a bundle of bones which appeared to have passed through a blast furnace. The bones were burned to the marrow. The ghastly skeleton might have remained forever unidentifiable save for one thing—on the brittle finger bone of one hand a peculiar-looking ring was found. In spite of the condition of the skeleton, the ring was undamaged by the fire. The shining band was shaped out of a metal which resembled silver, fretted with tiny veins of blue which glowed faintly. The ring’s stone was black, flat-cut and dull in luster.
The burned remains of Henry Crotell were borne back to Juniper Hill and buried. The ring was left on the finger bone.
A few weeks later, on orders of Dave Baines, the cellar hole of the old Trobish house was filled in and leveled off.
The willow tower went down under high winds during the winter. In the spring, as improved highways were planned in Juniper Hill, a track was cut through the hemlock woods and the entire knoll which held the willow platform was bulldozed away in order to secure its stone and gravel for the new roadbeds.
The Latin book which led Henry to his doom was never located. I think it safe to assume that it was reduced to ashes by the same terrible fires which consumed him.
THE DAKWA
by Manly Wade Wellman
Manly Wade Wellman’s nonfiction has earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination and his fantasy work a World Fantasy Award. His tales of John, the wandering ballad singer of the Southern mountains, were collected by Arkham House under the title of Who Fears the Devil (which served as a basis for a movie that did not succeed in capturing the flavor and meaning of Manly’s John). Others of his stories have seen translation to television on such shows as “Twilight Zone” and “Night Gallery.” Manly’s fiction deals with authentic folklore and the real people from our Southern mountain heritage. He, as he is wont to say, was invited to the firesides and tables of these people and from them learned their ways and legends. They are a noble people and Manly always gives them a place of honor in his tales, one they have earned. This story is based on authentic legend of the Cherokee Indians. The books mentioned really exist and are, to the author’s knowledge, the only published considerations of the Dakwa, until this tale . . .
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!”