by Gene Wolfe
The old man’s cane fell with a sudden, dry rattle. For a moment as he picked it up, the Nebraskan glimpsed Sarah’s pale face on the other side of the doorway.
“So I snuck out on the stoop. I bet it was a hundred easy, but it felt good to me after bein’ inside there. That was when I seen it comin’ down the hill t’other side of the road. Stayed in the shadow much as it could, an’ looked like a shadow itself, only you could see it move, an’ it was always blacker than what they was. I knowed it was the soul-sucker an’ was afeered it’d git my ma. I took to cryin’, an’ she come outside an’ fetched me down the spring fer a drink, an’ that’s the last time anybody ever did see it, far’s I know.”
“Why do you call it the soul-sucker?” the Nebraskan asked.
“’Cause that’s what it does, Mr. Cooper. Guess you know it ain’t only folks that has ghosts. A man can see the ghost of another man, all right, but he can see the ghost of a dog or a mule or anythin’ like that, too. Waul, you take a man’s,’cause that don’t make so much argyment. It’s his soul, ain’t it? Why ain’t it in Heaven or down in the bad place like it’s s’pposed to be? What’s it doin’ in the haint house, or walkin’ down the road, or wherever’twas you seen it? I had a dog that seen a ghost one time, an’ that’n was another dog’s, do you see? I never did see it, but he did, an’ I knowed he did by how he acted. What was it doin’ there?”
The Nebraskan shook his head. “I’ve no idea, Mr. Thacker.”
“Waul, I’ll tell you. When a man passes on, or a horse or a dog or whatever, it’s s’pposed to git out an’ git over to the Judgment. The Lord Jesus Christ’s our judge, Mr. Cooper. Only sometimes it won’t do it. Mebbe it’s afeared to be judged, or mebbe it has this or that to tend to down here yet, or anyhow reckons it does, like showin’ somebody some money what it knowed about. Some does that pretty often, an’ I might tell you ‘bout some of them times. But if it don’t have business an’ is jest feared to go, it’ll stay where’tis—that’s the kind that haints their graves. They b’long to the soul-sucker, do you see, if it can git’em. Only if it’s hungered it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight or die.” The old man paused to wet his lips with lemonade, staring across his family’s little burial plot and fields of dry cornstalks to purple hills where he would never hunt again. “Don’t win, not particular often. Guess the first’un was a Indian, mebbe. Somethin’ like that. I tell you how Creech shot it?”
“No, you didn’t, Mr. Thacker.” The Nebraskan took a swallow of his own lemonade, which was refreshingly tart. “I’d like very much to hear it.”
The old man rocked in silence for what seemed a long while. “Waul,” he said at last, “they’d been shootin’ all day. Reckon I said that. Fer a good long time anyhow. An’ they was tied, Colonel Lightfoot an’ this here Cooper was, an’ Creech jest one behind ‘em.’Twas Creech’s time next, an’ he kept on sayin’ to stay fer jest one more, then he’d go an’ they’d all go, hit or miss. So they stayed, but wasn’t no more crows’cause they’d ‘bout kilt every crow in many a mile. Started gittin’ dark fer sure, an’ this Cooper, he says, Come on, Lab, couldn’t nobody hit nothin’ now. You lost an’ you got to face up.
“Creech, he says, Waul, ‘twas my mule. An’ jest’bout then here comes somethin’ bigger’n any crow, an’ black, hoppin’’long the ground like a crow will sometimes, do you see? Over towards that dead mule. So Creech ups with his gun. Colonel Lightfoot, he allowed afterwards he couldn’t have seed his sights in that dark. Reckon he jest sighted’longside the barrel.’Tis the ol’ mountain way, do you see, an’ there’s lots what swore by it.
“Waul, he let go an’ t fell over. You won, says Colonel Lightfoot, an’ he claps Creech on his back, an’ let’s go. Only this Cooper, he knowed it wasn’t no crow, bein’ too big, an’ he goes over to see what’twas. Waul, sir, ‘twas like to a man, only crooked-legged an’ wry-neck.’Twasn’t no man, but like to it, do you see? Who shot me? it says, an’ the mouth was full of worms. Grave worms, do you see?
“Who shot me? An’ Cooper, he said Creech, then he hollered fer Creech an’ Colonel Lightfoot. Colonel Lightfoot says, Boys, we got to bury this. An’ Creech goes back to his home place an’ fetches a spade an’ a ol’ shovel, them bein’ all he’s got. He’s shakin’ so bad they jest rattled together, do you see? Colonel Lightfoot an’ this Cooper, they seed he couldn’t dig, so they goes hard at it. Pretty soon they looked around, an’ Creech was gone, an’ the soul-sucker, too.”
The old man paused dramatically. “Next time anybody seed the soul-sucker, ‘twas Creech. So he’s the one I seed, or one of his kin anyhow. Don’t never shoot anythin’ without you’re dead sure what’is, young feller.”
Cued by his closing words, Sarah appeared in the doorway. “Supper’s ready. I set a place for you, Mr. Cooper. Pa said. You sure you want to stay? Won’t be fancy.”
The Nebraskan stood up. “Why, that was very kind of you, Miss Thacker.”
His granddaughter helped the old man rise. Propped by the cane in his right hand and guided and supported by her on his left, he shuffled slowly into the house. The Nebraskan followed and held his chair.
“Pa’s washin’ up,” Sarah said. “He was changin’ the oil in the tractor. He’ll say grace. You don’t have to get my chair for me, Mr. Cooper, I’ll put on till he comes. Just sit down.”
“Thank you.” The Nebraskan sat across from the old man.
“We got ham and sweet corn, biscuits, and potatoes. It’s not no company dinner.”
With perfect honesty the Nebraskan said, “Everything smells wonderful, Miss Thacker.”
Her father entered, scrubbed to the elbows but bringing a tang of crankcase oil to the mingled aromas from the stove. “You hear all you wanted to, Mr. Cooper?”
“I heard some marvelous stories, Mr. Thacker,” the Nebraskan said.
Sarah gave the ham the place of honor before her father. “I think it’s truly fine, what you’re doin’, writin’ up all these old stories’fore they’re lost.”
Her father nodded reluctantly. “Wouldn’t have thought you could make a livin’ at it, though.”
“He don’t, Pa. He teaches. He’s a teacher.” The ham was followed by a mountainous platter of biscuits. Sarah dropped into a chair. “I’ll fetch our sweet corn and potatoes in just a shake. Corn’s not quite done yet.”
“O Lord, bless this food and them that eats it. Make us thankful for farm, family, and friends. Welcome the stranger’eath our roof as we do, O Lord. Now let’s eat.” The younger Mr. Thacker rose and applied an enormous butcher knife to the ham, and the Nebraskan remembered at last to switch off his tape recorder.
Two hours later, more than filled, the Nebraskan had agreed to stay the night. “It’s not real fancy,” Sarah said as she showed him to their vacant bedroom, “but it’s clean. I just put those sheets and the comfortable on while you were talkin’ to Grandpa.” The door creaked. She flipped the switch.
The Nebraskan nodded. “You anticipated that I’d accept your father’s invitation.”
“Well, he hoped you would.” Careful not to meet his eye, Sarah added, “I never seen Grandpa so happy in years. You’re goin’ to talk to him some more in the mornin’? You can put the stuff from your suitcase right here in this dresser. I cleared out these top drawers, and I already turned your bed down for you. Bathroom’s on past Pa’s room. You know. I guess we seem awful country to you, out here.”
“I grew up on a farm near Fremont, Nebraska,” the Nebraskan told her. There was no reply. When he looked around, Sarah was blowing a kiss from the doorway; instantly she was gone.
With a philosophical shrug, he laid his suitcase on the bed and opened it. In addition to his notebooks, he had brought his well-thumbed copy of The Types of the Folktale and Schmit’s Gods Before the Greeks, which he had been planning to read. Soon the Thackers would assemble in their front room to watch television. Surely he might be excused for an hour or two? His unexpected arrival later
in the evening might actually give them pleasure. He had a sudden premonition that Sarah, fair and willow-slender, would be sitting alone on the sagging sofa, and that there would be no unoccupied chair.
There was an unoccupied chair in the room, however; an old but sturdylooking wooden one with a cane bottom. He carried it to the window and opened Schmit, determined to read as long as the light lasted. Dis, he knew, had come in his chariot for the souls of departed Greeks, and so had been called the Gatherer of Many by those too fearful to name him; but Hop Thacker’s twisted and almost pitiable soul-sucker appeared to have nothing else in common with the dark and kingly Dis. Had there been some still earlier deity who clearly prefigured the soul-sucker? Like most folklorists, the Nebraskan firmly believed that its themes were, if not actually eternal, for the most part very ancient indeed. Gods Before the Greeks seemed well indexed.
Dead, their mummies visited by An-uat, 2.
The Nebraskan nodded to himself and turned to the front of the book.
An-uat, Anuat, “Lord of the Land (the Necropolis),” “Opener to the North.” Though frequently confused with Anubis, to whom he lent his form, it is clear that An-uat the jackal-god maintained a separate identity into the New Kingdom period. Souls that had refused to board Ra’s boat (and thus to appear before the throne of the resurrected Osiris) were dragged by An-uat, who visited their mummies for this purpose, to Tuat, the lightless, demonhaunted valley stretching between the death of the old sun and the rising of the new. An-uat and the less threatening Anubis can seldom be distinguished in art, but where such distinction is possible, An-uat is the more powerfully muscled figure. Van Allen reports that An-uat is still invoked by the modern (Moslem or Coptic) magicians of Egypt, under the name Ju’gu.
The Nebraskan rose, laid the book on his chair, and strode to the dresser and back. Here was a five-thousand-year-old myth that paralleled the soul-sucker in function. Nor was it certain by any means that the similarity was merely coincidental. That the folklore of the Appalachians could have been influenced by the occult beliefs of modern Egypt was wildly improbable, but by no means impossible. After the Civil War the United States Army had imported not only camels but camel drivers from Egypt, the Nebraskan reminded himself; and the escape artist Harry Houdini had once described in lurid detail his imprisonment in the Great Pyramid. His account was undoubtedly highly colored—but had he, perhaps, actually visited Egypt as an extension of some European tour? Thousands of American servicemen must have passed through Egypt during the Second World War, but the soul-sucker tale was clearly older than that, and probably older than Houdini.
There seemed to be a difference in appearance as well; but just how different were the soul-sucker and this Ju’gu, really? An-uat had been depicted as a muscular man with a jackal’s head. The soul-sucker had been …
The Nebraskan extracted the tape recorder from his pocket, rewound the tape, and inserted the earpiece.
Had been “like to a man, only crooked-legged an’ wry-neck.” Yet it had not been a man, though the feature that separated it from humanity had not been specified. A dog-like head seemed a possibility, surely, and An-uat might have changed a good deal in five thousand years.
The Nebraskan returned to his chair and reopened his book, but the sun was already nearly at the horizon. After flipping pages aimlessly for a minute or two, he joined the Thackers in their living room.
Never had the inanities of television seemed less real or less significant. Though his eyes followed the movements of the actors on the screen, he was in fact considerably more attentive to Sarah’s warmth and rather too generously applied perfume, and still more to a scene that had never, perhaps, taken place: to the dead mule lying in the field long ago, and to the marksmen concealed where the woods began. Colonel Lightfoot had no doubt been a historical person, locally famous, who would be familiar to the majority of Mr. Thacker’s hearers. Laban Creech might or might not have been an actual person as well. Mr. Thacker had—mysteriously, now that the Nebraskan came to consider it—given the Nebraskan’s own last name, Cooper, to the third and somewhat inessential marksman.
Three marksmen had been introduced because numbers greater than unity were practically always three in folklore, of course; but the use of his own name seemed odd. No doubt it had been no more than a quirk of the old man’s failing memory. Remembering Cooper, he had attributed the name incorrectly.
By imperceptible degrees, the Nebraskan grew conscious that the Thackers were giving no more attention to the screen than he himself was; they chuckled at no jokes, showed no irritation at even the most insistent commercials, and spoke about the dismal sitcom neither to him nor to one another.
Pretty Sarah sat primly beside him, her knees together, her long legs crossed at their slender ankles, and her dishwater-reddened hands folded on her apron. To his right, the old man rocked, the faint protests of his chair as regular, and as slow, as the ticking of the tall clock in the corner, his hands upon the crook of his cane, his expression a sightless frown.
To Sarah’s left, the younger Mr. Thacker was almost hidden from the Nebraskan’s view. He rose and went into the kitchen, cracking his knuckles as he walked, returned with neither food nor drink, and sat once more for less than half a minute before rising again.
Sarah ventured, “Maybe you’d like some cookies, or some more lemonade?”
The Nebraskan shook his head. “Thank you, Miss Thacker; but if I were to eat anything else, I wouldn’t sleep.”
Oddly, her hands clenched. “I could fetch you a piece of pie.”
“No, thank you.”
Mercifully, the sitcom was over, replaced by a many-colored sunrise on the plains of Africa. There sailed the boat of Ra, the Nebraskan reflected, issuing in splendor from the dark gorge called Tuat to give light to mankind. For a moment he pictured a far smaller and less radiant vessel, black-hulled and crowded with the recalcitrant dead, a vessel steered by a jackal-headed man: a minute fleck against the blazing disk of the African sun. What was that book of Von Daniken’s? Ships—no, Chariots of the Gods. Spaceships nonetheless—and that was folklore, too, or at any rate was quickly passing into folklore; the Nebraskan had encountered it twice already.
An animal, a zebra, lay still upon the plain. The camera panned in on it; when it was very near, the head of a huge hyena appeared, its jaws dripping carrion. The old man turned away, his abrupt movement drawing the Nebraskan’s attention.
Fear. That was it, of course. He cursed himself for not having identified the emotion pervading the living room sooner. Sarah was frightened, and so was the old man—horribly afraid. Even Sarah’s father appeared fearful and restless, leaning back in his chair, then forward, shifting his feet, wiping his palms on the thighs of his faded khaki trousers.
The Nebraskan rose and stretched. “You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a long day.”
When neither of the men spoke, Sarah said, “I’m’bout to turn in myself, Mr. Cooper. You want to take a bath?”
He hesitated, trying to divine the desired reply. “If it’s not going to be too much trouble. That would be very nice.”
Sarah rose with alacrity. “I’ll fetch you some towels and stuff.”
He returned to his room, stripped, and put on pajamas and a robe. Sarah was waiting for him at the bathroom door with a bar of Zest and half a dozen towels at least. As he took the towels the Nebraskan mumured, “Can you tell me what’s wrong? Perhaps I can help.”
“We could go to town, Mr. Cooper.” Hesitantly she touched his arm. “I’m kind of pretty, don’t you think so? You wouldn’t have to marry me or nothin’, just go off in the mornin’.”
“You are,” the Nebraskan told her. “In fact, you’re very pretty; but I couldn’t do that to your family.”
“You get dressed again.” Her voice was scarcely audible, her eyes on the top of the stairs. “You say your old trouble’s startin’ up, you got to see the doctor. I’ll slide out the back and’round. Stop for me at the big elm.”
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“I really couldn’t, Miss Thacker,” the Nebraskan said.
In the tub he told himself that he had been a fool. What was it that girl in his last class had called him? A hopeless romantic. He could have enjoyed an attractive young woman that night (and it had been months since he had slept with a woman) and saved her from … what? A beating by her father? There had been no bruises on her bare arms, and he had noticed no missing teeth. That delicate nose had never been broken, surely.
He could have enjoyed the night with a very pretty young woman—for whom he would have felt responsible afterward, for the remainder of his life. He pictured the reference in The Journal of American Folklore: “Collected by Dr. Samuel Cooper, U.Neb., from Hopkin Thacker, 73, whose granddaughter Dr. Cooper seduced and abandoned.”
With a snort of disgust, he stood, jerked the chain of the white rubber plug that had retained his bathwater, and snatched up one of Sarah’s towels, at which a scrap of paper fluttered to the yellow bathroom rug. He picked it up, his fingers dampening lined notebook filler.
Do not tell him anything Grandpa told you. A woman’s hand, almost painfully legible.
Sarah had anticipated his refusal, clearly; anticipated it, and coppered her bets. Him meant her father, presumably, unless there was another male in the house or another was expected—her father almost certainly.
The Nebraskan tore the note into small pieces and flushed them down toilet, dried himself with two towels, brushed his teeth and resumed his pajamas and robe, then stepped quietly out into the hall and stood listening.
The television was still on, not very loudly, in the front room. There were no other voices, no sound of footsteps or of blows. What had the Thackers been afraid of? The soul-sucker? Egypt’s moldering divinities?
