If Mortensen had not been elated by his success to the point of anesthesia, he would have seen the gnole stiffen, he would have heard him hiss, when he went over to the cabinet. All innocent, Mortensen opened the glass door, took the twin eyes out, and juggled them sacrilegiously in his hand; the gnole could hear them clink. Smiling to evince the charm of manner advised in the Manual, and raising his brows as one who says, “Thank you, these will do nicely,” Mortensen dropped the eyes into his pocket.
The gnole growled.
The growl awoke Mortensen from his trance of euphoria. It was a growl whose meaning no one could mistake. This was clearly no time to be doggedly persistent. Mortensen made a break for the door.
The senior gnole was there before him, his network of tentacles outstretched. He caught Mortensen in them easily and wound them, flat as bandages, around his ankles and his hands. The best abaca fiber is no stronger than those tentacles; though the gnoles would find rope a convenience, they get along very well without it. Would you, dear reader, go naked if zippers should cease to be made? Growling indignantly, the gnole fished his ravished eyes from Mortensen’s pockets, and then carried him down to the cellar to the fattening pens.
But great are the virtues of legitimate commerce. Though they fattened Mortensen sedulously and, later, roasted and sauced him and ate him with real appetite, the gnoles slaughtered him in quite a humane manner and never once thought of torturing him. That is unusual, for gnoles. And they ornamented the plank on which they served him with a beautiful border of fancy knotwork made of cotton cord from his own sample case.
Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) was an American writer born in Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), where his father was stationed as a medical officer. As a child, he attended school in Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City, then college in Kansas and law school at Columbia University in New York. He published his early stories in Weird Tales, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and other pulps, writing under a variety of names and in numerous genres, including westerns and crime fiction; he also wrote comic books, including the first issue of Captain Marvel. As the pulps began to die out, he transitioned to writing more historical fiction and nonfiction, as well as mystery stories, winning the first Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine award in 1946, beating out William Faulkner. His history of five Confederate soldiers, Rebel Boast (1956), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and he wrote a biography of his namesake, the Confederate general Wade Hampton, Giant in Gray. He won the World Fantasy Award for his collection Worse Things Waiting (1973) and the 1980 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. During the 1930s, he became friends with scholars and musicians of the Ozarks and moved to North Carolina in 1951, which soon had an influence on his writing. “O Ugly Bird!” is the first of a series of stories about John the Balladeer, a wandering minstrel in Appalachia. The stories were first collected in Who Fears the Devil? (1963), which was dedicated to the musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882–1973); John the Balladeer (1988) adds later stories. Wellman’s influence on other writers of fantasy has been significant, including on his friend David Drake, whose tales of Old Nathan (as with “The Fool” seen later in this anthology) are deliberate homages to Wellman.
O UGLY BIRD!
Manly Wade Wellman
I SWEAR I’M LICKED before I start, trying to tell you all what Mr. Onselm looked like. Words give out sometimes. The way you’re purely frozen to death for fit words to tell the favor of the girl you love. And Mr. Onselm and I pure poison hated each other from the start. That’s a way that love and hate are alike.
He’s what folks in the country call a low man, meaning he’s short and small. But a low man is low other ways than in inches, sometimes. Mr. Onselm’s shoulders didn’t wide out as far as his big ears, and they sank and sagged. His thin legs bowed in at the knee and out at the shank, like two sickles put point to point. His neck was as thin as a carrot, and on it his head looked like a swollen-up pale gourd. Thin hair, gray as tree moss. Loose mouth, a little bit open to show long, straight teeth. Not much chin. The right eye squinted, mean and dark, while the hike of his brow stretched the left one wide open. His good clothes fitted his mean body as if they were cut to its measure. Those good clothes of his were almost as much out of match to the rest of him as his long, soft, pink hands, the hands of a man who’d never had to work a tap’s worth.
You see now what I mean? I can’t say just how he looked, only that he looked hateful.
I first met him when I was coming down from that high mountain’s comb, along an animal trail—maybe a deer made it. I was making to go on across the valley and through a pass, on to Hark Mountain where I’d heard tell was the Bottomless Pool. No special reason, just I had the notion to go there. The valley had trees in it, and through and among the trees I saw, here and there down the slope, patchy places and cabins and yards.
I hoped to myself I might could get fed at one of the cabins, for I’d run clear out of eating some spell back. I didn’t have any money, nary coin of it; just only my hickory shirt and blue jeans pants and torn old army shoes, and my guitar on its sling cord. But I knew the mountain folks. If they’ve got anything to eat, a decent-spoken stranger can get the half part of it. Town folks ain’t always the same way about that.
Down the slope I picked my way, favoring the guitar just in case I slipped and fell down, and in an hour I’d made it to the first patch. The cabin was two rooms, dog-trotted and open through the middle. Beyond it was a shed and a pigpen. In the yard was the man of the house, talking to who I found out later was Mr. Onselm.
“You don’t have any meat at all?” Mr. Onselm inquired him, and Mr. Onselm’s voice was the last you’d expect his sort of man to have, it was full of broad low music, like an organ in a big town church. But I decided not to ask him to sing when I’d taken another closer glimpse of him—sickle-legged and gourd-headed, and pale and puny in his fine-fitting clothes. For, small as he was, he looked mad and dangerous; and the man of the place, though he was a big, strong-seeming old gentleman with a square jaw, looked scared.
“I been right short this year, Mr. Onselm,” he said, and it was a half-begging way he said it. “The last bit of meat I done fished out of the brine on Tuesday. And I’d sure enough rather not to kill the pig till December.”
Mr. Onselm tramped over to the pen and looked in. The pig was a friendly-acting one; it reared up with its front feet against the boards and grunted up, the way you’d know he hoped for something nice to eat. Mr. Onselm spit into the pen.
“All right,” he said, granting a favor. “But I want some meal.”
He sickle-legged back toward the cabin. A brown barrel stood out in the dog trot. Mr. Onselm flung off the cover and pinched up some meal between the tips of his pink fingers. “Get me a sack,” he told the man.
The man went quick indoors, and quick out he came, with the sack. Mr. Onselm held it open while the man scooped out enough meal to fill it up. Then Mr. Onselm twisted the neck tight shut and the man lashed the neck with twine. Finally Mr. Onselm looked up and saw me standing there with my guitar under my arm.
“Who are you?” he asked, sort of crooning.
“My name’s John,” I said.
“John what?” Then he never waited for me to tell him John what. “Where did you steal that guitar?”
“This was given to me,” I replied to him. “I strung it with the silver wires myself.”
“Silver,” said Mr. Onselm, and he opened his squint eye by a trifle bit.
“Yes, sir.” With my left hand I clamped a chord. With my right thumb I picked the silver strings to a whisper. I began to make up a song:
“Mister Onselm,
They do what you tell ’em—”
“That will do,” said Mr. Onselm, not so singingly, and I stopped with the half-made-up song. He relaxed and let his eye go back to a squint again.
“They do what I tell ’em,”
he said, halfway to himself. “Not bad.”
We studied each other, he and I, for a few ticks of time. Then he turned away and went tramping out of the yard and off among the trees. When he was gone from sight, the man of the house asked me, right friendly enough, what he could do for me.
“I’m just a-walking through,” I said. I didn’t want to ask him right off for some dinner.
“I heard you name yourself John,” he said. “Just so happens my name’s John, too. John Bristow.”
“Nice place you got here, Mr. Bristow,” I said, looking around. “You cropping or you renting?”
“I own the house and the land,” he told me, and I was surprised; for Mr. Onselm had treated him the way a mean-minded boss treats a cropper.
“Oh,” I said, “then that Mr. Onselm was just a visitor.”
“Visitor?” Mr. Bristow snorted out the word. “He visits ary living soul here around. Lets them know what thing he wants, and they pass it to him. I kindly thought you knew him, you sang about him so ready.”
“Oh, I just got that up.” I touched the silver strings again. “Many a new song comes to me, and I just sing it. That’s my nature.”
“I love the old songs better,” said Mr. Bristow, and smiled; so I sang one:
“I had been in Georgia
Not a many more weeks than three
When I fell in love with a pretty fair girl
And she fell in love with me.
“Her lips were red as red could be,
Her eyes were brown as brown,
Her hair was like a thundercloud
Before the rain comes down.”
Gentlemen, you’d ought to been there, to see Mr. Bristow’s face shine. He said: “By God, John, you sure enough can sing it and play it. It’s a pure pleasure to hark at you.”
“I do my possible best,” I said. “But Mr. Onselm doesn’t like it.” I thought for a moment, then I inquired him: “What’s the way he can get ary thing he wants in this valley?”
“Shoo, can’t tell you what way. Just done it for years, he has.”
“Doesn’t anybody refuse him?”
“Well, it’s happened. Once, they say, Old Jim Desbro refused him a chicken. And Mr. Onselm pointed his finger at Old Jim’s mules, they was a-plowing at the time. Them mules couldn’t move nary hoof, not till Mr. Onselm had the chicken from Old Jim. Another time there was, Miss Tilly Parmer hid a cake she’d just baked when she seen Mr. Onselm a-coming. He pointed a finger and he dumbed her. She never spoke one mumbling word from that day on to the day she laid down and died. Could hear and know what was said to her, but when she tried to talk she could only just gibble.”
“Then he’s a hoodoo man,” I said. “And that means, the law can’t do a thing to him.”
“No sir, not even if the law worried itself up about anything going on this far from the country seat.” He looked at the meal sack, still standing in the dog-trot. “Near about time for the Ugly Bird to come fetch Mr. Onselm’s meal.”
“What’s the Ugly Bird?” I asked, but Mr. Bristow didn’t have to tell me that.
It must have been a-hanging up there over us, high and quiet, and now it dropped down into the yard, like a fish hawk into a pond.
First out I could see it was dark, heavy-winged, bigger by right much than a buzzard. Then I made out the shiny gray-black of the body, like wet slate, and how the body looked to be naked, how it seemed there were feathers only on the wide wings. Then I saw the long thin snaky neck and the bulgy head and the long crane beak. And I saw the two eyes set in the front of the head—set man-fashion in the front, not bird-fashion one on each side.
The feet grabbed for the sack and taloned onto it, and they showed pink and smooth, with five grabby toes on each one.
Then the wings snapped, like a tablecloth in a high wind, and it went churning up again, and away over the tops of the trees, taking the sack of meal with it.
“That’s the Ugly Bird,” said Mr. Bristow to me, so low I could just about hear him. “Mr. Onselm’s been companioning with it ever since I could recollect.”
“Such a sort of bird I never before saw,” I said. “Must be a right scared-out one. Do you know what struck me while I was a-watching it?”
“Most likely I do know, John. It’s got feet look like Mr. Onselm’s hands.”
“Could it maybe be,” I asked, “that a hoodoo man like Mr. Onselm knows what way to shape himself into a bird thing?”
But Mr. Bristow shook his gray head. “It’s known that when he’s at one place, the Ugly Bird’s been sighted at another.” He tried to change the subject. “Silver strings on your guitar; I never heard tell of aught but steel strings.”
“In the olden days,” I told him, “silver was used a many times for strings. It gives a more singy sound.”
In my mind I had it made sure that the subject wasn’t going to be changed. I tried a chord on my guitar, and began to sing:
“You all have heard of the Ugly Bird
So curious and so queer,
It flies its flight by day and night
And fills folks’ hearts with fear.”
“John—” Mr. Bristow began to butt in. But I sang on:
“I never came here to hide from fear,
And I give you my promised word
That I soon expect to twist the neck
Of the God damn Ugly Bird.”
Mr. Bristow looked sick at me. His hand trembled as it felt in his pocket.
“I wish I could bid you stop and eat with me,” he said, “but—here, maybe you better buy you something.”
What he gave me was a quarter and a dime. I near about gave them back, but I saw he wanted me to have them. So I thanked him kindly and walked off down the same trail through the trees Mr. Onselm had gone. Mr. Bristow watched me go, looking shrunk up.
Why had my song scared him? I kept singing it:
“O Ugly Bird! O Ugly Bird!
You spy and sneak and thieve!
This place can’t be for you and me,
And one of us got to leave.”
Singing, I tried to recollect all I’d heard or read or guessed that might could help toward studying out what the Ugly Bird was.
Didn’t witch folks have partner animals? I’d read, and I’d heard tell, about the animals called familiars. Mostly they were cats or black dogs or such matter as that, but sometimes they were birds.
That might could be the secret, or a right much of it. For the Ugly Bird wasn’t Mr. Onselm, changed by witching so he could fly. Mr. Bristow had said the two of them were seen different places at one and the same time. So Mr. Onselm could no way turn himself into the Ugly Bird. They were close partners, no more. Brothers. With the Ugly Bird’s feet looking like Mr. Onselm’s pink hands.
I was aware of something up in the sky, the big black V of something that flew. It quartered over me, half as high as the highest scrap of woolly white cloud. Once or twice it made a turn, seemingly like wanting to stoop for me like a hawk for a rabbit; but it didn’t do any such. Looking up at it and letting my feet find the trail on their own way, I rounded a bunch of mountain laurel and there, on a rotten log in the middle of a clearing, sat Mr. Onselm.
His gourd head was sunk down on his thin neck. His elbows set on his crooked knees, and the soft, pink, long hands hid his face, as if he felt miserable. The look of him made me feel disgusted. I came walking close to him.
“You don’t feel so brash, do you?” I asked him.
“Go away,” he sort of gulped, soft and tired and sick.
“What for?” I wanted to know. “I like it here.” Sitting on the log next to him, I pulled my guitar across me. “I feel like singing, Mr. Onselm.”
I made it up again, word by word as I sang it:
“His father g
ot hung for hog stealing,
His mother got burnt for a witch,
And his only friend is the Ugly Bird,
The dirty son—”
Something hit me like a shooting star, a-slamming down from overhead.
It hit my back and shoulder, and it knocked me floundering forward on one hand and one knee. It was only the mercy of God I didn’t fall on my guitar and smash it. I crawled forward a few quick scrambles and made to get up again, shaky and dizzy, to see what had happened.
I saw. The Ugly Bird had flown down and dropped the sack of meal on me. Now it skimmed across the clearing, at the height of the low branches. Its eyes glinted at me, and its mouth came open like a pair of scissors. I saw teeth, sharp and mean, like the teeth of agar fish. Then the Ugly Bird swooped for me, and the wind of its wings was colder than a winter tempest storm.
Without thinking or stopping to think, I flung up both my hands to box it off from me, and it gave back, it flew back from me like the biggest, devilishest humming bird you’d ever see in a nightmare. I was too dizzy and scared to wonder why it pulled off like that; I had barely the wit to be glad it did.
“Get out of here,” moaned Mr. Onselm, not stirring from where he sat.
I take shame to say, I got. I kept my hands up and backed across the clearing and to the trail on the far side. Then I halfway thought I knew where my luck had come from. My hands had lifted my guitar up as the Ugly Bird flung itself at me, and some way it hadn’t liked the guitar.
Reaching the trail again, I looked back. The Ugly Bird was perching on the log where I’d been sitting. It staunched along close to Mr. Onselm, sort of nuzzling up to him. Horrible to see, I’ll be sworn. They were sure enough close together. I turned and stumbled off away, along the trail down the valley and off toward the pass beyond the valley.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 11
