Creatures High and Low: The Monsters of Manly Wade Wellman

Manly Wade Wellman (1905-1986) started his writing career during the hey-days of the Pulps, finding himself at home both in the science fiction magazines (Astounding) and the horror titles (Weird Tales, Strange Tales). But it wasn’t until the Pulps were dying out that Wellman created his most famous character, John, the country guitar-playing balladeer who has no last name. The original John stories appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, starting with “O Ugly Bird!” in December 1951 and ending with the set of vignettes entitled “Wonder as I Wander” in March 1962. The John stories were collected a year later by Arkham House under the title Who Fears the Devil? The answer to that question: certainly not John.

Wellman would leave John for twenty years to write of other things, science fiction novels like Sherlock Holmes’ War of the Worlds (with his son, Wade) as well as books on American History, in particular, the Civil War, for which he was nominated for a Pulitzer. During this time no new John stories appeared but two stories were filmed with the book’s title Who Fears the Devil? (1972). Retitled and re-released as The Legend of Hill-Billy John, it was a disappointing way of saying good-bye to a good friend like John.

But Manly would find the Balladeer difficult to leave behind. The Old Gods Awaken (1979) was the first of five novels featuring “Silver John” as some of his friends were apt to call him. After Dark (1980), The Lost and the Lurking (1981), The Hanging Stones (1982) and The Voice of the Mountain (1984) followed along with several short stories. All the John short stories were collected, including “Where Did She Wander?” a story completed days before Wellman’s death in 1986, in a volume entitled John the Balladeer (1988).

The creatures of Wellman’s tales are often unusual and clever, based on the folklore of the United States or Native American Indian legends, as well as the occasional science fictional creature. This article will highlight some of the better realized of Wellman’s monsters from the John canon.

SCARCE ANIMALS

In “Desrick on the Yandro”(F&SF, June 1952) John describes an entire catalogue of “Scarce animals”, creatures like no longer recognized by sophisticated and ignorant city folk. These scarce animals dwell in lonely places like the peaks of Yandro and Cry Mountain.

The first of these is the Bammat: “… The Bammat’s something hairy-like, with big ears and a long wiggly nose and twisty white teeth sticking out of its mouth …” The observant will notice that the Bammat’s description is exactly that of a mammoth, the prehistoric elephant that lived in North America, except this Bammat seems to have nothing better to do than jump unwary travelers.

Another hunter, the Culverin: “… can shoot pebbles with its mouth.. the Culvern hoved itself half into sight on its many legs. It pointed its needle-shaped mouth and spit a pebble. I heard the pebble ring on Mr. Yandro’s head …”

The Behinder is another creature which few if any can describe since only John has seen one and lived. He chose not to tell us more. “The Behinder flung itself on his shoulders. Then I knew why nobody’s supposed to see one. I wish I hadn’t. To this day I can see it, as plain as a fence at noon, and forever I will be able to see it …” Still, John gives his protection from a Behinder in The Voice of the Mountain. “I reckoned what to do, if it got close, would be all a sudden to whip round and look it betwixt the eyes (if a Behinder truly has what we understand eyes to be) and say, ‘All right, what the hell do you figure to do?'”

The Flat “… lies level with ground, and not much higher. It can wrap you like a blanket …”When it is moving: “On the ground, across the crumpled root of a tree, something black and fuzzy seemed to slip, like the biggest caterpillar you air saw in your dreams.” Related to the Flat is the aerial version called The Skim “… it kites through the air” enveloping its prey in a similar fashion.

The Toller flies like the Skim: “… Up high somewhere, I heard something I couldn’t make out to see. It went gong-gong, gong-gong. That had to be a Toller, what you hear tell is the biggest thing that flies …”

The Gardinel

In the short list of scarce animals, no other beast receives more description than the sinister Gardinel, being featured in four stories. Though a supernatural creature, Wellman explains the Gardinel with a biologist’s (or a science fiction writer’s) love of logic.

Our first glimpse of the Gardinel comes in an early story called “Sin’s Doorway” (Weird Tales, January 1946) in which a traveler — suggested by Wellman to be a younger, guitarless John — receives a dead man’s property. When the young man goes up to Dravot Ridge to see the cabin he has inherited, the traveler is coerced and pressured to assume Brett’s position and eldritch activities. The house, which possesses the literal (if not figurative) Sin’s Doorway, is explained: “A gardinel only looks like a house … and it can only be used like a house, by a few people. There’s lots of gardinels … in towns sometimes, and sometimes in off-way country places like this one.”

The evil Shonokins also use the Gardinel as a lodging. In the Immer Settlement mentioned in the Silver John novel After Dark, John encounters an entire village of Gardinels. Since the Shonokins have tamed them into acting as homes, John does not immediately recognize them. His first clue that they are not houses is that they don’t have chimneys. As he gets closer he gets a good look at their exteriors:

That nearest house … was more or less a plumb ruin to see. It looked bent thisaway and that by time’s heavy hand … I put my eyes on the house. It didn’t show logs in the building of it; it was smooth, like brown plaster. What had at first look seemed to be shingles on the roof weren’t like the shingles I rightly knew. More like flattened-out lumps, to remind me of the lichens you see a-growing out on dead trees and rocks. They could have been some kind of wood slabs, they could have been grass bundles, or either something else. And the whole roof, instead of squared off lines, had a sag to it, a roundness to the edges of it, more or less like the cap of a toadstool. And, as I’ve said, no chimney to it. The windows weren’t like windows, either. More like eyes, drooped under cross-bars like eyelids. Secret eyes you can’t see into … The house, I made out to see by now, didn’t have a true door, just a sort of drape hung there, of what dark stuff I couldn’t make out. If I walked to it, I could push it aside easy and go in. But I wasn’t about to do that.

“Come Into My Parlour”(1949), a story not featuring John, shows what happens when someone enters its doors. Wellman begins by making a comparison to pitcher plants, (a true biological gardinel) in the beginning of the story. The protagonist ignores the wise advice of his black gardener, who tells him to avoid the Gardinel Swamp. But the employer is set on seeing the pitcher plants that live there:

… In their juicy waterside loam they grew, belt beyond belt, lifting their yellow blooms like signal lanterns above their array of leaf-tubes, the pitcher plants … with umbrella-like blooms and upright tubular leaves, each furnished with a frilly lidlike tip above the upper opening … I caught a whiff of rotten stench. I gingerly lifted the canopy-tip and peered in; the hollow was almost full of insect corpses, stacked to within short inches of the top …

Later we meet the man-devouring version of the pitcher plant and the protagonist enters it to avoid a nasty downpour. Once inside:

… My first impression was a feeble pinkness, and an inner shape without corners or planes, a sort of egg-shaped hollow … The substance of the wall was elastic and clammy, like dead meat … Sweatlike moisture had sprung out where I had touched the fleshy-seeming material, a patch the size and shape of my open hand. And there, at least the expanse was not porous, but seemed to be covered with bristly hair, the dead pinkness of the rest of the compartment. I investigated with a fingertip, and pulled it back with a cry. The hairs had seemed to dart at that fingertip, and it ran blood … It was damp around my feet. A little frothy pool, like sea foam, had sprung up there … The stuff burned my skin like acid …

Caught inside the great digestive system of the gardinel, the man survives only because of his trusty gardener, who cuts him out at the last minute. The vanquished monster flees into the swamp to hunt another day.

TWO PORTENTS

The MURDER Bull

The MURDER Bull doesn’t appear in any of Wellman’s stories but is featured in a scary song that John sings in After Dark (1980). The song tells of two cattlemen in Texas who murdered each other in 1884 over an unbranded bull calf. The other cowboys branded the word MURDER on the animal and drove it away. The bull wanders and grows to become “big and terrible”. The last two stanzas of the song explain what happens to those who see the MURDER BULL:

While you sit in there, watching
The fire that dulls and dies,
He’ll come up to the window
With MURDER in his eyes.

Then turn and look the other way
And hold your frightened breath,
For if you face the Murder Bull
His eyes will give you death.”

The Little Black Train

Like the MURDER Bull, another portentous phantom is the Little Black Train, which takes the souls of the damned to Hell.

I heard a voice a warning,
A message from on high,
“Go put your house in order
For thou shalt surely die.

Tell all your friends a long farewell
And get your business right —
The little black train is rolling in
To call for you tonight.

In “The Little Black Train”(F&SF, August 1954) it is Donie Carawan who must worry about the phantom express, for her sins: seducing a lover to kill her husband. Even selling the railroad she inherits cannot stop the Little Black Train for its rails are as unearthly as the train. Robert Bloch used a similar legend in his Hugo winning story “That Hell-Bound Train”(1958).

FAMILIARS

Witches in the John stories often have unidentifiable animal familiars. Hazel Techeray in After Dark owned: “A little black dog? No, and not a cat either. It might have been a groundhog or a big weasel thing … It had big eyes, that shone, pale and ugly, and it had teeth bare in its mouth, pale and ugly, too. Those eyes and teeth like chips of feldspar…” The familiars of the witch-folk of Wolver in The Lost and the Lurking resemble other things: “…One had horns like a goat, ears like a jack-ass. Another might could have been a black bear, a-trying to decide whether to walk on two feet or four. Another stirred as it crept along, and I made out that it had leathery wings of some sort, though it didn’t fly just then, just looked like as if it was a-getting ready to.”

Parway

The dead wizard, Levi Brett, in “Sin’s Doorway” has a familiar which the other witches try to pass onto John who acts as a “sin-eater”, one who claims the belongings and sins against the soul of the departed. The familiar is not any recognizable animal but:

“It lay prone by the coffin, brown and motionless. At first I thought it was a hound, then I thought it was not. It was hound-size, and lean like a hound; but its feet were all wrong, big and furry, and its low, close-drawn way of lying on its belly was more like a weasel. Its eyes did not falter as mine met them. I never saw a dog with ears like those, and the face, what I could see between the wide forepaws, was strange …His teeth bared, he crouched low on his rear haunches and lifted his forelimbs. His paws spread their toes, like clumsy hands to strike or grasp… and Parway emitted the one sound I heard from him in all the incident. It was like a sound, human in quality but wordless.

The Ugly Bird

Mr. Onselm in “O Ugly Bird!”(F&SF, December 1951), the very first official John story, has a different kind of familiar, a strange bird-like creature that terrorize the gentle folk of mountains:

“First out I saw it was dark, heavy-winged, bigger than a buzzard. Then I saw the shiny gray-black of the body, like wet slate, and how it seemed to have feathers only on its wide wings. Then I made out the thin snaky neck, the bulgy head and long stork beak, the eyes set in front of its head — man-fashion in front, not to each side… I saw teeth, sharp and mean, like a garpike’s teeth.

John destroys the Ugly Bird by swinging his silver-strung guitar at the flying beast. The strings cut into the thing, killing it. The death of the familiar is the fate of its master. Onselm dies too. “Makes me think of something I heard somebody say about hoodoo folks … How the hoodoo folks sometimes put a stuff out, mostly in dark rooms. And it’s part of them, but it takes the shape and mind of another person — once in a while, the shape and minds of an animal … Maybe the shape and mind of a bird …”

Familiars are used as a guard animals as well as guides and spies.

LONESOME LURKERS

Many of Wellman’s stories concern lonely places that people avoid. Sometimes the evil inhabitants of those locales are not well-defined but here are some of the best described:

One Other

At the top of Hark Mountain is the Bottomless Pool, which covers the entire mountaintop, about the size of a farmyard. Within the pool can be seen a strange light, where there exists a doorway into another dimension. In “One Other” (F&SF, August 1953) Mr. Howsen, a warlock traps John and Miss Annalinda beside the pool. They must wait until the dweller in the pool, One Other, appears. Miss Annalinda has used One Other’s power to try and love-charm John. The monster always extracts a price for his services (in Howsen’s case, an eye).

One Other comes:

… something hiked up like a wet black leech, but much bigger by a thousand times. It slid and oozed to the top of a rock and as if it waited a second, wet and shiny in the firelight, it looked as if somebody had flung down a wet coat. Then it lurched and swelled, and its edges came apart…It was a hand, as broad in the back as a shovel, with fingers as long as a hayfork’s tines … The shoulder was a cypress root humping out of water, and the head was a dark pumpkin, round and smooth and bald, with no face, only two eyes. They were green, not bright green like cat eyes or dog in the night. They were stale rotten green, like something spoiled… One Other was twice as tall as a tall man, and it was sure enough true that he had only one arm and one leg. The arm would be his left arm, and the leg his left leg … He made a sure hop toward us on his big single foot, big and flat as a table top …

John defeats One Other with fire, an element unknown to its dimension. Wellman, ever the science fiction writer, gives John’s version of a multi-dimensional universe, using a bubble analogy, to explain where the Bottomless Pool goes:

“… The Science man said our whole life, what he called our universe, was welling and stretching out, so that suns and moons and stars pull farther apart all the time. He said our world and all the other worlds are inside that stretching skin of suds that makes the bubble. We can’t study out what’s outside the bubble, or either inside, just the suds part. It sounds crazyish, but when he talked it sounded true … You believe in a God blew only one lone soap bubble.

The Guardian of the Ancients

Many of Wellman’s creatures can be found in folk tales and songs, but The Ancients are an example that might actually exist. In the mountains of North Carolina are caves that have been attributed to a race that inhabited the land before the Indians. Very little is known about The Ancients though legends and stories abound, including tales of the Spanish burying Inca gold in the old caves. Karl Edward Wagner, friend of Manly Wade Wellman and fellow horror writer, used the Ancients in his own fiction, in the short story “.220 Swift”(1980) and his Kane novel Bloodstone (1975).

In “Shiver in the Pines”(F&SF, February 1955) John and his friends, Hoje, Eddy and Eddy’s son, Clay, agree to help a wizardly man named Reed Barnitt find the treasure of the Ancients. The men enter Black Pine Hollow, watching a witch light, which will go out when the holder has found what they wish. They find treasure and a fake monster designed to scare them away (part of a scam to get a hold of the local men’s land). Unfortunately for the villains they did not count on meeting:

… That third one looked at first glimpse like a big, big man wearing a fur coat; until you saw the fur was on his skin, with warty muscles bunching through. His head was more like a frog’s than anything else, wide in the mouth and big in the eye and no nose. He spread his arms and put them quiet-like round the shoulders of Reed Barnitt and Aram Harnam, and took hold with his hands that had both webs and claws.

The guardian does not prove to be a man-eater, but when John and the other return to the cave to put the gold back, coins covered with “men with horned heads and snaky tails”, Barnitt and Harnam are returned in a ghastly condition:

Their eyes picked up the lantern light and shone green, like the eyes of dogs. One of them … made a little whimpering cry with no words in it. They ran from me into the dark, and I saw their backs bent more than I’d thought possible … As I watched they sort of fell forward and ran on hands and feet. Like animals. Not quite sure of how to run that way on all fours; but something told me, mighty positive, that they’d learn better as time went by.

The men think at first that the guardian is an Ancient, but Clay sets them right: “‘The Ancients are dead. Way I figure, what’s in there isn’t Ancients — just something Ancients left behind…” Only the pictures on the odd coins give us any idea what the Ancients looked like.

Kalu

In “Nine Yards of Other Cloth”(F&SF, November 1958), the wizard Shull Cobart summons the mysterious creature known as Kalu, who has lived at Hosea’s Hollow. Kalu has lived there since the Indian days, but had disappeared when a man named Hosea Palmer went there to defeat it. Evadare, John’s future wife, lives in the hollow, where Palmer’s grave is found. She is trying to escape Cobart, a typically manipulative witch-man. Cobart brings the monster, and forces John to meet it, with an enchanted violin, given to him by Satan. The results aren’t what Cobart thinks:

Gentlemen, don’t ask me to say too much what Kalu was. Bones, yes — something like bear-bones, or big ape bones from a foreign land. And a rotten light to them, so I saw for a moment that the bones weren’t empty. Inside the ribs were caged puffy things, like guts and lungs and maybe a heart that skipped and wiggled. The skull had a snout like I can’t say what, and in its eye-holes burned blue-green fire. Out came the arm-bones, and the finger-bones were on Shull Cobart.

Cobart’s end is not pleasant. John destroys the evil instrument and realizes something about the digger of Palmer’s grave: “It was Kalu … Remember the story, all of it. Hosea Palmer said he knew how to stop Kalu’s wickedness. Folks think Hosea destroyed Kalu some way. But what he did was teach him the good part of things. They weren’t enemies. They were friends.” Wellman’s only other mention of Kalu is in The Lost and the Lurking. Kalu is mentioned in a Satanist tome along with other demons: “Imbra and Loki and Kalu, and Tetragrammaton …”

Wellman used another bone monster in the story, “Can These Bones Live?”(1981) in which the remains of a Biblical giant are reanimated by music. The ghostly body is put-down by reversing the process and singing the old song “Connect the Bones”. “The toe bone is connected to the foot bone…”

The Man in the Oak

Wellman transplanted an English fairy creature for the Druidic novel The Old Gods Waken. The Man in the Oak, an evil spirit remains largely unseen:

… while I stood under the branches of the oak tree and tried not to look up into them at what moved itself round in them. I dared only one quick peek. I had a sense of something my size or thereabout, dark-colored; but whether it had fur like an animal or scales like a snake, I didn’t make out. I did think it could grip wit its feet as well as its hands …

The near invisible Man in the Oak does nothing more than spy on John and the Forshays, supplying the druids, Brummitt and Hooper Voth with information. At the end of the book, the oak outside the Voth’s house is decimated by a thunderbolt leaving:

“The branches of the big fallen-down oak made a fire redder and hotter than a furnace, but deep in amongst them, in the very fiery heart of the business, lay wedged another shape … It seemed to have arms and legs, and the hair all over it was a-burning grass … Sure enough, there’d been talk about him. About what he really was, how he might have been that old man by the name of Gibb, changed by death into something nasty and scrambly …

Wellman suggests that the Man in the Oak may be undead or a ghostly spirit of a wicked individual, John Gibb, the previous owner of the Voth’s property. Gibb had a similarly unsavoury reputation and may have been a druid once, too.

Molech

In “Owls Hoot in the Daytime”(1980) tells of a strange dwarfish man, Maltby Sanger, and his giant opossum pet who guard an evil portal into the underworld. Sanger thinks the creature is Molech who is mentioned in the Bible. The monster dwells inside a cave, its glowing red eyes its only discernible feature:

… Sure enough it was a cave in there, what looked like a house outside was just a front, built on by whatever had built it for whatever reason. The cave was hollowed back into the mountain and it had a smooth-looking floor, almost polished, of black rock. Inside, the space slanted inward both ways, to narrowness farther in. It was more like a throat than anything I could say for it. A great big throat, big enough to swallow a man, or more than one man …

Molech tries to lure prey in with his illusions of wealth, rubies and gold heaped up inside the door. John almost falls for this trick and sees his opponent fully:

… There he was, dark and a standing two-legged like a man, but he was taller than I was, by the height of that round head with the red eyes. And no hair to his black hide, it was as slick as a snake. Long arms and pitchfork hands sort of pawed out toward me, the way a praying mantis does. The head cocked itself. I saw that it had something in it besides eyes, it had a mouth, open and as wide as a gravy boat, wet and black, like a mess of hot tar… Those legs straddled. Their knees bent backwards like a frog’s. The feet slapped flat and wide on the floor of the cave, amongst more jewels everywhere … His fingers were lumpy-jointed and they had sharp claws, like on the feet of a great big hawk… On the other side of the door he made a noise. It was a whiny buzz, what you’d expect from a bee as big as a dog …

Sanger explains Molech’s motivation in a semi-scientific way: “‘Science allows this here whole earth started out just a ball of fire. The outside cooled down. Water come into the sea, and the trees and living things got born onto the land. But they say the fire’s still inside. And fire’s got to have something to feed on.'” John defeats Molech with the cross built into the door of the cabin facade.

FREQUENT VILLAINS

There are several kinds of villains that John meets and defeats through the stories. Villains are nothing new to fiction but Wellman had a way of adding a special nuance or twist to many of them.

Witches and Other Spell Casters

The most common villains in John’s mountains are witches and their familiars. The witch folk include singular, evil individuals who try to terrorize those around them, men like Mr. Onselm, Mr. Loden, Mr. Howsen, and Shull Cobart. Others like Jackson Warren and Simon Latchney are men who have knowledge of magic but use it for good. By defeating witches John has won the title of “witch-master” or one who masters all witches.

Of the other half of the race, the women John has encountered women of various degrees of evil, often being savable from their sins like Hazel Techerey and Miss Annalinda. The prime exception to this is the witch-mistress, Tiphaine from The Lost and the Lurking. In this novel, John is asked by the U.S. government to investigate the town of Wolver, which is the center of The Old Gods Waken concerns druids. Wellman’s interpretation of druids and druidism is not friendly. In much the same way that he views witches, he sees the druids as evil, human-sacrificing villains. The Voth brothers are planning to pair their druidic powers to the ancient forces of the Native Indian spirits, which would double their power and establish druidism in America. Like most Wellman stories, and particularly the John stories, the Bible and Christianity are strongly condoned. In the character of Reuben Manco, the Cherokee wisdom and beliefs are also given equal or better standing.

Werewolves

Werewolves appear in many Wellman stories, in particular his first Weird Tales sales, classics such as “The Werewolf Snarls”, and “The Hairy Ones Shall Dance”. The Hanging Stones (1982) features werewolves, a grisly lot of pathetic bushwhackers who pray on the weak. Wellman’s lycanthropes aren’t moon-curse victims, but evil individuals who shape their own ectoplasm to alter their form (ala Algernon Blackwood’s “Camp of the Dog”). Though dangerous in large groups, these werewolves are not a threat to any man with a pure heart and a strange arm.

Wellman wrote many stories about werewolves that were also vampires for Weird Tales, stories like “The Undead Soldier”. But only one John story features a vampire/werewolf-like creature, in the vignette called “You Know the Tale of Hoph”(F&SF, March 1962). A woman folklorist in search of material approaches a strange-looking man, asking about Hoph, a wicked creature with only one, continuous eyebrow.

…”I hear you know the tale of Hoph. How sailors threw him off a ship in a terrible storm a hundred years ago, but the sea swept him ashore and then he walked and walked until he reached these mountains. How he troubled the mountain people with spells and curses and sendings of nightmares … His food was the blood of pretty woman … Each year he made them give up a pretty woman. When she died at the year’s end, with the last drop of her blood gone, he made them give him another.”

The woman asks when Hoph died. To this the stranger reveals: “He didn’t die. They didn’t know that he had to be shot with a silver bullet.” The stranger is of course Hoph about to attack the folklorist, but John, who is hidden in a dark corner, shoots Hoph with the prescribed silver bullet.

Ghosts

Ghosts appear in many different variations, sometimes the lingering spirit of an evil wizard, sometimes as figures from the past called to a future time. In “Vandy, Vandy”(F&SF, March 1953) the wizard Mr. Loden’s spell to destroy John conjures up Loden’s ancient enemy, George Washington. “Old Devlins A-Waiting”(F&SF, February 1957) does a similar thing when a man bad-mouths the old Hatfield clan. The figure of Devil Anse Hatfield is terrifyingly real, a man transported through time. John traps the vengeful spirit (in the form of a greasy smoke) of Forney Meechum in a bottle so that Lute Meechum and her ghostly lover can finally find peace. Wellman’s ghosts are not inherently evil, but reflect the personality of the person when alive.

In “Nobody Ever Goes There”(1981) strange ghostly creatures haunt the far side of the river, where a mill once sat. “… something drifted from between those dubious houses, a murky series of puffs, like foul smoke. He thought, for a moment hoped, that it might be fog; but it gathered shapes as it emerged, shadowy, knobby shapes. Headlike lumps seemed to rise, narrow at the top, with … great loose mouths. Wisps stirred like groping arms …” Perhaps vampiric, John banishes them with music. Like vampires, they seem unable to cross running water.

INDIAN SPIRITS

The Native Indian spirits, or anisgina in Cherokee, are John tells us, “different kinds of pure down bad creatures. It doesn’t mean only the ghosts of dead folks a-using round to get into mischief, but likewise other sorts of things that aren’t ghost exactly, but aren’t a natural kind of thing either. Evil spirits, I should reckon, is like enough as good a word as you can say for it in the American language.”

The anisgina “…or you might call them half-men, that science folks thought had been in America all those long-ago ages back yonder. Half-man things would naturally hate true men; maybe because they were too close the same in some ways, too far apart in others. I tried to study what it had been like in those early times, with wars betwixt men and half-men. They would have had to be pure down terrible wars, fought till one side or the other won …”

Dakwa

The Dakwa appears only briefly in The Voice of the Mountain. John tells us, like the British water spirit Jenny Greenteeth or the Greek Sirens:

… Half hidden amongst the green stuff, it looked like a woman under the water, a pretty woman naked as a jaybird, with streaming brown hair and two eyes fixed on me. If that’s truly what it was, she shifted down there and her naked arms reached up towards me. That’s when I moved right out and up past another cataract, to where the stream was narrower and faster and, as I reckoned, safer to rest by. I’d heard tell of the Dakwa, the water-spirit of the Cherokees, that tempts you to within grab reach and drowns and eats you …

Khongbassi

“Frogfather” (Weird Tales, November 1946) is the other story that Wellman sometimes claimed as an early John story. The story centers on Ranson Cuff, “the sort of man who shoved himself into your mind, like a snake crawling into a gopher hole.” Cuff and the young Johnny are hunting frogs along with an old Indian man. When the Indian warns the hunters: “Khongbassi … The Frogfather. He’s lived there since the world was made. The oldest ones say he dug the waterways and planted the trees along them. And the frogs are his children.” Cuff makes the old man swim out of the boat, not even taking him to shore. Cuff goes back to killing frogs. It isn’t long before the Frogfather appears:

“From elbow to fingertip it was visible above the thwart … The ordinary human arm is eighteen inches long … This was longer than that. Two feet at least, and probably more. It was muscled smoothly and trimly from the neat point of the elbow to the slender, supple wrist, and beyond this stretched slim, pointed fingers, but not enough. The hand spread, and it had three fingers and a thumb, with no gap where the other finger had been lost. Between them was a shiny wet web, and it was dead gray, where the arm was covered with sleek green skin blotched twice or three times with brown-black spots as big as saucers… The lantern-light caught the eyes first, great popped-out eyes of every jewel-flashing color … They were set in a heavy blunt head the size of a fish-basket … But it had no bony nose, no nose at all, and the mouth was a long curved slit like a tight-closed Gladstone bag. Under the mouth, where the chin ought to be, the white throat dipped in and out, breathing calmly … All blotchy green and brown, with a white belly and a wet smoothness, it was a frog. But it was larger than a man by twice, I suppose.”

Cuff’s fate is justly cruel:

“… That part of the Swamps must have been the deepest and many times my length below I could make out old drowned tree-trunks, a lost forest from some ancient time of storm and washaway. They were mixed up together as if something had tried to make a hut or nest of them, and I suppose coming from it, and down toward that hole swam a long green shape, nine feet at least from its blunt head to the heels of it flipping webbed feet. Under one arm it carried Cuff, tucked like a stolen baby, and the other hand helped swim it along.”

Unlike most of Wellman’s anisgina, Khongbassi is, as the Indian explains, not djibaw, an evil spirit, but “a part of nature, that defends nature’s weak things. Men should be a part of nature, too, and perhaps they would escape what Mr. Cuff has not escaped.”

The Raven Mockers

Among the anisgina are the monkey-bat-like Raven Mockers in The Old Gods Waken. The Raven Mockers seen first in effigies of rock: “Big stones, boulders you might say, had been fetched together to make the outline. I should reckon it would be forty feet up and down the slope and twenty from side to side, a chunky body of bunched stones and a head on top and short legs and long arms a-hanging down …” These ancient rocks were built before the coming of the Indians.

Reuben Manco tells John about the Raven Mockers:

“They were given that name because they can fly if they want to, and when they fly, they make a noise like a raven … kraa-kraa, a pure down ugly noise. They make it their chief business to help a man to die … If somebody gets down flat on his back, bad sick or wounded, the Raven mockers fly in and crowd all round and over him like a bunch of, well, like ravens. Most times they make themselves right hard to see by air real man or woman except maybe a wise old Cherokee medicine man …”

This is good for the Raven mockers are not nice to look at:

… they stood up but weren’t right tall. maybe five feet or so … They looked to be draped and folded round about, like as if they had on cloaks or blankets, like old-timey Indians. Their heads were round and dark, with a knobby look all over them, and the heads and those wrappings were the same sooty-looking color … might could have been a deep, dirty brown … they stood and looked on us with eyes like coals of fire that had died down to a scummy pink… It had that monkeyish look to it, not just monkey, either. Monkeys are funny, and this wasn’t funny … the skull was squashed low and shallow above and its jaw was wide and shallow below. Its mouth hung loose and ugly and went all the way across, and its two pink-shining eyes hung deep back in it, in hollows like pits under two big bony brows like jackknife handles… I could see a dimness of the moon’s bright like that soaked through that stretched-out stuff. That stuff was a kind of skin. It grew downward from the wrists and elbows of the long arms, it was fast to the two sides of the squatty body, all the way down to the ankles of the short, chunky legs. It was like the spread of an umbrella, or of the wings of a bat. Only it had no ribs to it, just the wide-pulled stretch of it you could see the moonlight through… With the wing-things spread out tight on the arms, I could make out that it had hands, too, held open. The fingers were long and knobby-jointed, like stalks of dry cane. They had the meanest-looking claws spread out at their tips. Its head tilted to one side, and I had a better look at the monkey face. Its brows were pulled together into a frown, the mouth stretched into a grin, and in the mouth were great big teeth, ragged and stale-looking in a ray of the moon …”

When the Raven Mockers surround John and his Indian friend, Reuben Manco, they make a “sigh of sound, oooh, oooh” which turns to the nastier kraa-kraa as they attack. Unlike natural flesh, the Raven Mocker’s body is not composed of blood and bone. Reuben and John, armed with cedar and ash, strike at the evil enemies:

” … It slammed right straight in at the Raven Mocker’s knobby dark head, but it didn’t hit against aught that was rightly solid. It felt the way it would have felt if I’d smacked it into fast-flowing water, it bobbed in my hand was all … The ash wood just drove and sank on through whatever that ugly dark body was, went right on through like through a bucket of slush.

The Shonokins

The Shonokins (an Indian word meaning “pine man”) or the Pineys are Wellman’s greatest adversaries. First used in a series of John Thunstone adventures, Wellman would find new and devious ways to utilize them again and again. In “The Pineys”(Weird Tales, September 1950), a story that doesn’t feature John, the Shonokins are still in their natural state, living in a haunted forest, called the Devil’s Croft. “… strong longleaf pines that rose like pillars in a big church or auditorium or warehouse, and mixed their tufts of span-long needles overhead into a gloomy roof… It was supposed to belong to evil spirits, who’d stay there and leave the rest of the ground alone.”

In After Dark the xenophobic Shonokins have come out of thousands of years hiding to claim what they feel is theirs. Shonokins can date their heritage to the Silurian age, long before man evolved. Brooke Altic, the leader of the Shonokin group, in trying to raise money for a Supreme Court appeal, says: “Our wisdom is the oldest and greatest on Earth … we Shonokins are ancient and great. We had power and wisdom when your forefathers were still wild brutes.” Altic reinforces this claim by pointing out that Shonokins are not men: “Two different creature … Man has descended one way, the Shonokins another. They’re similar, but they’re distinct.”

In “The Pineys” the campers discuss the Pineys:

… The earliest Indians used to say that the Pineys came before the Indians, and that the Pineys learned from the Indians to imitate the looks and ways of men. They’re supposed to be rather smallish — say five feet tall, and slender — and they stand on short legs and their arms are long and knobby. Some folks claim they wear clothes made of pine straw, some say their bodies are shaggy, like a dog’s. They have long heads with sharp faces, like a possum. And their hands have funny fingers. The third finger — what you call the ring finger — is longer than the middle one.”… A great uneven loop of them, knobby shoulder to knobby shoulder — a head shorter than the average man, standing up on scrawny, crooked legs, their bodies shaggy with what might be thick, coarse hair or a jacket of pine straw. And low skulls, sharp pointed ears, jutting possum noses, glowing eyes like tiny bits of coal.

Brooke Altic has the typical Shonokin/Piney hands: “He peeled off his left glove and held out his hand. It was a slim, smooth hand, and again I recollected how strong it could take hold of you. Sure enough, the third finger was the longest. I saw that his nails were narrow and as dark as iron and came to lean, sharp points. More like claws than nails.”

Shonokin have maple-colored skin, oily black hair and eyes that have cat-like pupils in the darkness. Because of their eyes and a general dislike of sunlight Shonokins sleep during daylight hours, though the light doesn’t actually harm them. Brooke Altic, when moving around during the brighter hours, wears sunglasses. Strangest of all, there are no female Shonokins. Human mothers must foster the Shonokin child. The Shonokins consider this labor an honor.

The Shonokins have a ruler, a king who is bigger than any of his subjects. He’s able to disguise himself as a man and go out into the world to spot dangers for the Pineys. Occasionally he leads unsuspecting humans to the Piney’s home. Little is known about the Shonokins’ home away from Mankind. They might live underground or in hollow trees. Humans who have proven too curious and invaded their homes, places like Devil’s Croft, “… disappear and never show themselves again.”

The Shonokins are magical creatures. They can use gardinels as houses, like powerful witch-folk. They have a technology/sorcery unknown to mankind. Brooke Altic even claimed “they command life or death” (This is unlikely for they were unable to keep the Indian Peoples from pushing them into hiding long before the Europeans came.) It is not unknown for Shonokins to use their odd plants and herbal knowledge to help humans, though these efforts are largely to generate good PR or in return for services. The Shonokins need human go-betweens (usually greedy men or spiteful witches) for certain jobs, like removing of their dead and influencing people.

The Pineys possess some bizarre apparatus, including mystical stones. These stones have been found in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, as well as North Carolina. Jackson Warren relates one of John Thunstone’s incidence which suggests some interesting possibilities: “

… The Shonokins tried hard to give him a rather peculiar jewel, and he managed to destroy it. Thunstone connected the matter with something that happened long ago in Connecticut, back in the 1850’s, when a woman named Mary Staplies had two brightly shining jewels she said were gods of some savage sort.

John discovers an odd Shonokin devise:

They were a great big rock on a little one … The bottom was maybe the size of a dishpan turned upside down, and on it was a round boulder that must have been six feet through. I reckoned it would weight tons. It would have taken a derrick to get it thataway … That boulder had a ribbed, green look that reminded me of some sort of melon. I couldn’t rightly say what kind of rock it was … I put out my hand to touch the big top rock… That boulder had sent a stabbing shock through me like electricity. As I stepped away, I saw that it bobbed, swaying back and forth …

Using strange machines like this, the Shonokins are building a “strange, straight track” like the “Old Straight Track” theorized in England by Alfred Watkins. When John steps on the odd, hard pathway: “He told us that he’d felt a jangle inside himself when he walked that track. he thought it was just only a slight churning in the blood, maybe the sort of thing he’d feel if he was getting a little electric shock, or either the jiggle you have on one of those electric beds in hotels here and there.”

Later, when Ben Gray kills a Shonokin, its body is found on the track. John discovers: “As I did so, I had a feeling, or rather I missed a feeling. No jangle in my blood, in my nerves, right here. The power, whatever it was, didn’t work where the body was.”

This relates to an oddity about the Shonokins and an explanation as to how the Indians defeated them. The Shonokins fear their own dead. This peculiar nullifying effect may explain why. With only a single dead Shonokin body the Indians would have had little trouble keeping them away.