There is probably no one more associated with the idea of a ghost story or horror tale set in the North than Algernon Blackwood. He did write “The Wendigo”, after all in 1908. There was another story that predates Blackwood’s tale of the evil spirit of the Quebec woods., “Skeleton Lake, An Episode in Camp”. This one has the same setting, and was published two years earlier in his first collection, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906).
The plot of the story is simple: a group of moose hunters are joined one night by a man from a rival group. He is desperate to tell what happened to him and his guide, Jake the Swede. The people at the camp seem almost desperate not to listen to him, but in the end he tells that an accident happened and Jake was killed. Their boat capsized in a large lake and Jake was drowned. No one really believes him. He repeats the story over and cracks begin to show. The narrator shares a tent with him but must vacate for the man’s talk in his sleep is violent and self-incriminating. The canoe that had been supposedly cut for hand holds contradicts his lies. The final evidence is the body of Jake, bearing a guilt-pointing ax wound.
What is not so simple is the Poesque beauty with which Blackwood tells this story. It’s not a ghost story in the way that “Keeping His Promise” or many other Blackwood tales are. It is a genuine Poe-like examination of how guilt plays out in the human mind and behavior. This story belongs with Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” or Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Markheim”. The killer, a man described as a “noisy, aggressive Yankee” is named Rushton. The narrator is happy at the beginning when Rushton and Jake the Swede go their own way to look for Moose.
Blackwood does two things to set all of this up. First he has the hunters camped beside Skeleton Lake. He explains how names in the wood are either named after someone who did something like “Smith’s Ridge” or by something physical or an obvious fact about the place like “Long Lake” or “Loon Lake”. So Skeleton Lake has a history, probably not a nice one, but the narrator has no recollection of what that is. This suggests the story will deal with the abnormal or supernatural in some way. He adds other Gothic touches like: “Something moved secretly between his words, a shadow veiling the stars, destroying the peace of our little camp, and touching us all personally with an undefinable sense of horror and distrust.”
Second, before the action begins, the narrator is with the other hunters in his party. Of the visitors there is a professor and his wife and the narrator. Each has a guide. None of them are named. Only Rushton and the guides are named. The professor is boring the narrator to distraction prattling on about why hunting in twos is a faulty system. Just as he is about to be interrupted by the discovery of Rushton, he says: “If an accident happened to one of them…the survivor’s story when he returned to camp would be entirely unsupported evidence, wouldn’t it? Because, you see–“
We disregard the man because he is a bore who enjoys the sound of his own voice but he is also the author telling us what is about to happen. One man is about to return without the other. One man is about to give evidence. One man is about to try and sell a lie:
But what struck me most, as it struck us all, was the limp exhaustion of his body compared to the strength of his utterance and the tearing rush of his words. A vigorous driving-power was there at work, forcing out the tale, red-hot and throbbing, full of discrepancies and the strangest contradictions; and the nature of this driving-power I first began to appreciate when they had lifted him into the circle of firelight and I saw his face, grey under the tan, terror in the eyes, tears too, hair and beard awry, and listened to the wild stream of words pouring forth without ceasing.
Here is Blackwood’s ghost. Rushton will not eat or drink before he tells the story he has rehearsed for days. And like a haunting specter he doesn’t stop after one recital but tells it again and again, as its lie unravels.
Another tool in Blackwood’s belt is the use of atmosphere. He builds on this with more description you would find in a Gothic story. And as an added bonus he works in some lovely details that only a Northern could have:
In spite of all our devices he somehow kept himself the centre of observation. When his tin mug was empty, Morris instantly passed the tea-pail; when he began to mop up the bacon grease with the dough on his fork, Hank reached out for the frying pan; and the can of steaming boiled potatoes was always by his side. And there was another difference as well: he was sick, terribly sick before the meal was over, and this sudden nausea after food was more eloquent than words of what the man had passed through on his dreadful, foodless, ghost-haunted journey of forty miles to our camp. In the darkness he thought he would go crazy, he said. There were voices in the trees, and figures were always lifting themselves out of the water, or from behind boulders, to look at him and make awful signs. Jake constantly peered at him through the underbrush, and everywhere the shadows were moving, with eyes, footsteps, and following shapes.
And this is why Blackwood is the king of the strange Northerns. He has sat out in the woods and listened to wolves howl, to wind in the trees. He knows its beauty and its dangers first hand.
William I. Lengeman III, a writer I respect from our old Flashing Swords days, wrote a review of Blackwood’s entire book for Black Gate. Of this story he said: “Great scene setting and atmosphere again but the climax doesn’t quite behave like a climax. Blackwood seems to fizzle out at the end, something that happens in a few other stories in this book.” But I have to disagree here. Blackwood ends the story because there is no more to be said. Rushton lied, the people in the camp know he lied, and here is the final proof he lied. The point of the story is not some Lovecraftian detail in italics. It is a man trapped in a lie, and what is interesting is how he acts in that trap, how those who surround behave. It’s all very Edgar Allan Poe. If written to understand human psychology it comes out “The Telltale Heart”, if written to be a tale of ratiocination it is “The Murder in the Rue Morgue”. (If Blackwood had had the Mystery writer’s bent, he might have added a line about Rushton hanging in a Canadian prison.) It was never going to be Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”. If you want that kind of fun, you’ll just have to read “The Wendigo”.
