originally published Weird Tales, May 1951
Poor Willie Osborn. Orphaned at an early age and left in the care of an elderly grandmother out in the back-back-backwoods of New England (somewhere sort of near Arkham), he grew up hearing her spooky stories about creepy things that lived in the woods - especially what she calls them ones - mysterious and fearsome entities that live even farther back in the woods and hold weird ceremonies, especially at Halloween.
Well, granny up and shuffles off and Willie ends up living with his aunt and uncle who live ... even farther back in the woods - like, in them ones neighborhood.
Aunt and Unc are nice enough, but Willie (who's a pretty smart kid) notices little details - like they lock the doors tight at night, and there's no animal life in the woods around their remote home. One afternoon playing in those deserted woods, he hears something come stomping along, something that hangs around for a bit, allowing Willie, who's hiding and doesn't see it, to nonetheless smell it (bad!) and hear it chanting - something involving "Shub-Niggurath" and "shoggoth". It leaves behind pools of slime and prints like giant hooves. That night, Willie begins having dreams about the encounter in which he sees the creature as mass of ropy tentacles and mouths, shaped almost like a tree.
Aunt and Unc get a telegram via Cap, the mailman who comes up by horse and buggy once a week, saying that a cousin, Frank Osborne, is coming for a visit. Lots of excitement. But Unc rides into town ... and never comes back. His horse and buggy eventually do, though. The horse in a state of terror, the buggy empty. Willie dreams of his Aunt being taken in the night by strange men. The next morning, she's gone.
Frank shows up, all city-slicker condescension, and Willie soon spots him for an impostor. And that he's trying to keep Willie from leaving. Willie manages to escape with Cap, who believes what he's telling him and seems to know way more about the weird happenings in the wood than he's letting on.
Cap and Willie encounter a ropy gloop monster on the road, and the buggy gets turned over. Cap and the horse get eaten. Willie escapes into the woods and finds a clearing where cultists are sacrificing cattle, and people. The ropy horror from his dreams is also in attendance. Willie runs away, back to the cabin, barricades himself in, and starts writing down the whole experience. But even as he's writing, he can hear "Cousin Frank" and others, some less-than-human sounding, talking outside and preparing to break in...
Woo hoo! I've given old Bob Bloch a bit of a hard time about his early, amateurish Cthulhu'd tales, but his few later ones are pretty great. Even Ramsey Campbell cited "Notebook" as one of the scariest Lovecraft-influenced tales and man, he is right. I remember first reading it in daylight on a bright spring day, and read it today sitting on my front porch on a bright October day and it still packs the chill.
It works, I think, because like Davis Grubb' Night of the Hunter, or Alan Moore's "Kamara" stories in his 80's run on Swamp Thing, it is a child's nightmare. Bloch remembers how scary the world is when you're a kid, and the nagging fear that the grown-ups may not be able to protect you - or worse - may be out to harm you themselves. Being told straight from a young boy's P.O.V. and in his own words - but a young boy - not a stupid one - the language is simple enough that this could almost be a children's story. A particularly sinister one.
It's not perfect. The next to last line is either a dumb joke (Bloch was prone to injecting humor into his stories), or is just dumb. But its not enough to dispel the darkness of this one. The very last line is one of those "the narrator writes out his last words just as the monster eats him" sort of moments but in this case I think Bloch (a) pulls it off and (b) it makes sense and is believable in the overall context of the story. So we have a winner here.
No comments:
Post a Comment