"Sticks"

 by Karl Edward Wagner 

Originally published Whispers #3, March 1974

Colin Leverett is an artist, apparently associated with the pulps ala Weird Tales.  In 1942, he's on a fishing trip in the Adirondacks, preparing to ship off to the Big War.  

He comes across a collection of bizarre formations built from sticks, surrounding a collapsing, dilapidated old house in the middle of nowhere.  Inside the walls are covered with drawings similar to the stick formations.  In the darkened basement, he finds a mummified corpse.  A very lively one, which proceeds to grab him.  Leverett lashes out with his only weapon, an iron frying pan, bashes the thing's head in and runs for it.

Leverett goes off to war, never telling a soul about the encounter or the house.  He comes back, establishes himself as an artist.  Still haunted by his experience, his work becomes more morbid and disturbing, and his career falters.  He remains alone.

Now in the 1970's, he's contacted by an old pulpster colleague, Prescott Brandon, now head of an Arkham House-ish publisher called Gothic House, who's in the process of putting together a three-volume collection of the works of pulp horror author H. Kenneth Allard, an old fave of Lev's, who seems to be (unsurprisingly) Lovecraft-ish.  Brandon wants Lev to take off the gloves and really give him something potent, and different.  Leverett starts including the stick formations, based on sketches he made back in the old house in 1942.  Brandon is thrilled by the drawings and writes him asking where the stick formations came from.  Leverett finally tells the tale of finding the stick formations and the old house, though he omits the encounter in the basement, which he now has convinced himself was a hopeless derelict whom he killed out of shock and fear after being grabbed.

Brandon is intrigued by the stick formations and the story and relays the whole thing to a friend of his, an archaelogist named Alexander Stefroi who's studying ancient, bronze-age megalith structures found in the US, which he believes are connected to an ancient cult that worshiped "The Old Ones".  A cult that is not defunct, either, since these sites have been linked to a cult active in the 1700's, whose members had their bodies preserved on stone tables in anticipation of being revivified by the "Old Ones" upon their return.  Lev is now starting to freak out.

Lev makes his way back to the Adirondacks, but the house and the stick structures are all now gone, seemingly washed away in floods long ago.  He writes to Stefroi about his non-findings.  Stefroi writes back that he is disappointed but not surprised.  The Mann Brook area is "weird and wild country," he writes, "and doubtless there is much we shall never know."  Then he drops the bomb.  Three nuts broke into Brandon's office, and murdered him viciously. Police figure they were drug addicts, but Lev has his own suspicions.  Not long before, Brandon had written that he was getting some odd and uncomfortable inquiries about Lev's art, and particularly the stick formations depicted therein.

Soon after Lev receives an unexpected visit.  Dana Allard, a previously unknown nephew of H. Kenneth.  With a briefcase full of previously unknown Allard stories, which he intends to publish himself, due to Brandon's unfortunate demise.  And he wants Lev to illustrate this collection, too.  No holds barred. Lev naturally can't turn the job down.  He goes to work.

Still, the work, the stories, the revelations and the murder haunt him.  He begins to have strange dreams involving the old house, the sticks, and the mummified thing, which still has its head caved in from being whacked with that iron pan. He gets a frantic letter from Stefroi- it seems he has found not only a profound megalithic site, surrounded by stick structures, and a still-active cult connected to it.  He intends to make contact with them and interview them about their beliefs and practices.  

And then Stefroi turns up dead, crushed beneath a huge rock at the megalith site.

Lev is now starting to seriously freak out. Especially after he wakes from a nightmare about joining a human sacrifice and finds himself covered in blood and with a heart still in his hand.  Ack!!

Lev makes his way to Dana's place to tell him they don't dare publish the book.  The cult is obviously trying to suppress info and will doubtless come after both of them.  Dana tells him he's overwrought, plus its too late.  He's got pallets full of copies in the basement, ready to ship off tomorrow.  In fact, he'll autograph a copy.  Lev's head is still spinning when Dana hands him his signed copy, and he notices its been autographed "H. Kenneth Allard".  And H. Kenneth explains that, far from suppressing the book, Lev's illustrations will help to spread the power of the Old Ones by embedding it in the imaginations and consciousness of readers everywhere.  And he brings in a friend of his, Althol, whom Lev has met before, back before the war.

Ohmanohmanohman. My first encounter with Karl Edward Wagner was in a very essential anthology from 1980, Dark Forces, which introduced me to authors such as Dennis Etchison, T.E.D. Klein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Russell Kirk, Charles L. Grant, Manly Wade Wellman and, yepper, Karl Edward Wagner.  Not just their stories therein, but the lengthy story introductions that provided me with a reading list that carried me through the 80's.  It was the intro to Karl's story that made me aware of the Kane books (woohoo!) and "Sticks", which I then came across about a year later in the First World Fantasy Awards anthology which I found at my local library (woohoo!!).  "Sticks" is Wagner's most famous story and deservedly so, cause he hits every checkbox.  It's funny (lots of sly in-joke humor for the Weird Tales devotee), and legitimately spooky/scary in the best way.  Not in the grim, gruesome, I-think-I'll-go-kill-myself manner of too much modern horror fic (although at 40+ years old, I suppose "Sticks" isn't "modern" anymore), but in the way that, well ... here I was re-reading this the other day at lunchtime in my bright, sunlit house on a warm (80+) late spring day, with birds singing and kids playing loudly in the schoolyard behind my house, and I still felt the chill as the noose began to close in on poor Colin Leverett.  

What can I say - I wish there were more like this out there.  Wagner, at his best, was one of the best.  RIP.