one other time with a silver quarter, I ’d scared Mr. Onselm
almost out of the black art. So Mr. Loden was a witch man,
too, and could be scared the same way. I reckon I was foolish
for the lack of sense to think it would be as easy as that.
I walked outside, leaving Mrs. Millen and Vandy to do the
Vandy, Vandy
431
dishes. The firelight showed me the stoop log to sit on. I
touched my guitar strings and began to pick out the Vandy,
Vandy tune, soft and gentle. After while, Calder came out
and sat beside me and sang the words. I liked the best the
last verse:
“ Wake up, wake up! The dawn is breaking.
Wake up, wake up! It’s almost day.
“ Opeh up your doors and your divers windows,
See my true love march away. . . . ”
“ Mr. John,” said Calder, “ I never made sure what divers
windows is.”
“ That’s an old-timey word,” I said. “ It means different
kinds of windows. Another thing proves it’s a right old song.
A man seven years in the army must have gone to the first
war with the English. It lasted longer here in the South than
other places—from 1775 to 1782. How old are you, Calder?”
“ Rising onto ten.”
‘ ‘Big for your age. A boy your years in 1692 would be a
hundred if he lived to 1782, when the English war was near
done and somebody or other had been seven years in the
army.”
“ Washington’s army,” said Calder. “ King Washington.”
“ King who?” I asked.
“ Mr. Loden calls him King Washington—the man that hell-
drove the English soldiers and rules in his own name town.”
So that’s what they thought in that valley. I never said that
Washington was no king but a president, and that he’d died
and gone to his rest when his work was done and his country
safe. I kept thinking about somebody a hundred years old in
1782, trying to court a girl whose true love was seven years
marched off in the army.
“ Calder,” I said, “ does the Vandy, Vandy song tell about
your own folks?”
He looked into the cabin. Nobody listened. I struck a chord
on the silver strings. He said, “ I ’ve heard tell so, Mr. John.”
432
Manly Wade Wellman
I hushed the strings with my hand, and he talked on:
“ I reckon you’ve heard some about it. That witch child
that lived to be a hundred—he come courting a girl named
Vandy, but she was a good girl.”
“ Bad folks sometimes try to court good ones,” I said.
“ She wouldn’t have him, not with all his land and money.
And when he pressed her, her soldier man come home, and
in his hand was his discharge-writing, and on it King Washington’s name. He was free from the war. He was Hosea Tewk, my grandsiie some few times removed. And my own
grandsire’s mother was Vandy Tewk, and my sister is Vandy
Millen.”
“ What about the hundred-year-old witch man?”
Calder looked round again. Then he said, “ I reckon he
got him some other girl to birth him a son, and we think that
son married at another hundred years, and his son is Mr.
Loden, the grandson of the first witch man.”
“ Your grandsire’s mother, Vandy Ttewk—how old would
she be, Calder?”
“ She’s dead and gone, but she was bom the first year her
pa was off fighting the Yankees.”
Eighteen sixty-one, then. In 1882, end of the second hundred years, she’d have been ripe for courting. “ And she married a Millen,” I said.
“ Yes, sir. Even when the Mr. Loden that lived then tried
to court her. But she married Mr. Washington Millen. That
was my great grandsire. He wasn’t feared of aught. He was
like King Washington.”
I picked a silver string. “ No witch man got the first
Vandy,” I reminded him. “ Nor yet the second Vandy.”
“ A witch man wants the Vandy that’s here now,” said
Calder. “ Mr. John, I wish you’d steal her away from him .”
I got up. “ Tell your folks I ’ve gone for a night walk.”
“ Not to Mr. Loden’s .” His face was pale beside me. “ He
won’t let you come.”
The night was more than black then, it was solid. No sound
in it. No life. I won’t say I couldn’t have stepped off into it,
Vandy, Vandy
433
but I didn’t. I sat down again. Mr. Tewk spoke my name,
then Vandy.
We sat in front of the cabin and spoke about weather and
crops. Vandy was at my one side, Calder at the other. We
sang —Dream True, I recollect, and The Rebel Soldier. Vandy
sang the sweetest I ’d ever heard, but while I played I felt that
somebody harked in the blackness. If it was on Yandro
Mountain and not in the valley, I ’d have feared the Behinder
sneaking close, or the Flat under our feet. But Vandy’s violet
eyes looked happy at me, her rose lips smiled.
Finally Vandy and Mrs. Millen said good night and went
into a back room. Heber and his wife and Calder laddered
up into the loft. Mr. Tewk offered to make me a pallet bed
by the fire.
“ I ’ll sleep at the door,” I told him.
He looked at me, at the door. And: “ Have it your way,”
he said.
I pulled off my shoes. I said a prayer and stretched out on
the quilt he gave me. But long after the others must have
been sleeping, I lay and listened.
Hours afterward, the sound came. The fire was just only a
coal ember, red light was soft in the cabin when I heard the
snicker. Mr. Loden stooped over me at the door sill.
“ I won’t let you come in,” I said to him.
“ Oh, you’re awake,” he said. “ The others are asleep, by
my doing. And you can’t move, any more than they can.”
It was true. I couldn’t sit up. I might have been dried into
clay, like a frog or a lizard that must wait for the rain.
“ Bind,” he said above me. “ Bind, bind. Unless you can
count the stars or the ocean drops, be bound.”
It was a spell saying. “ From the Long-Lost F riend}'' I
asked.
“ Albertus Magnus. The book they say he wrote.”
“ I ’ve seen the book.”
“ You’ll lie where you are till sunrise. Then—”
I tried to get up. It was no use.
“ See this?” He held it to my face. It was my picture,
434
Manly Wade Wellman
drawn true to how I looked. He had the drawing gift. “ At
sunrise I ’ll strike it with this.”
He laid the picture on the ground. Then he brought forward
his gold-headed cane. He twisted the handle, and out of the
cane’s inside he drew a blade of pale iron, thin and mean as
a snake. There was writing on it, but I couldn’t read in that
darkness.
“ I ’ll touch my point to your picture,” he said. “ Then
you’ll bother Vandy and me no more. I should have done that
to Hosea Tewk.”
“ Hosea Tewk,” I said after him, “ or Washington Mil-
&
nbsp; len.”
The tip of his blade stirred in front of my eyes. “ Don’t
say that name, John.”
“ Washington M illen,” I said it again. “ Named for George
Washington. Did you hate Washington when you knew him?”
He took a long, mean breath, as if cold rain fell on him.
“ You’ve guessed what these folks haven’t guessed, John.”
“ I ’ve guessed you’re not a witch man’s grandson, but a
witch woman’s son,” I said. “ You got free from that Salem
school in 1692. You’ve lived near three hundred years, and
when they’re over, you know where you’ll go and bum, forever amen.”
His blade hung over my throat, like a wasp over a ripe
peach. Then he drew it back. “ N o,” he told himself. “ The
Millens would know I ’d stabbed you. Let them think you died
in your sleep.”
“ You knew Washington,” I said again. “ Maybe—”
“ Maybe I offered him help, and he was foolish enough to
refuse it. Maybe—”
“ Maybe Washington scared you off from him ,” I broke in
the way he had, “ and won his war without your witch magic.
And maybe that was bad for you, because the one who’d
given you three hundred years expected pay—good hearts
turned into bad ones. Then you tried to win Vandy for yourself, the first Vandy.”
“ A little for myself,” he half sang, “ but mostly for—”
Vandy, Vandy
435
‘ ‘Mostly for who gave you three hundred years, ’ ’ I finished
for him.
I was tightening and swelling my muscles, trying to pull
a-loose from what held me down. I might as well have tried
to wear my way through solid rock.
“ Vandy,” Mr. Loden’s voice touched her name. “ The
third Vandy, the sweetest and the best. She’s like a spring
day and like a summer night. When I see her with a bucket
at the spring or a basket in the garden, my eyes swim, John.
It’s as if I see a spirit walking past. ’ ’
“ A good spirit,” I said. “ Your time’s short. You want to
win her from good ways to bad ways.”
“ Her voice is like a lark’s,” he crooned, the blade low in
his hand. “ It’s like wind over a bank of roses and violets.
It’s like the light of stars turned into music.”
“ And you want to lead her down into hell,” I said.
“ Maybe we won’t go to hell, or to heaven either. Maybe
we’ll live and live. Why don’t you say something about that,
John?”
“ I ’m thinking,” I made answer, and I was. I was trying
to remember what I had to remember.
It’s in the third part of the Albertus Magnus book Mr.
Loden had mentioned, the third part full of holy names he
sure enough would never read. I ’d seen it, as I ’d told him. If
the words would come back to me—
Something sent part of them.
“ The cross in my right hand,” I said, too soft for him to
hear, “ that I may travel the open land. . . . ”
“ Maybe three hundred years more,” said Mr. Loden,
“ without anyone like Hosea Tewk, or Washington Millen, or
you, John, to stop us. Three hundred years with Vandy, and
she’ll know the things I know, do the things I do.”
I ’d been able to twist my right forefinger over my middle
one, for the cross in my right hand. I said more words as I
remembered:
“ . . .S o must I be loosed and blessed, as the cup and the
holy bread. . . . ”
436
Manly Wade Wellman
Now my left hand could creep along my side, as far as my
belt. But it couldn’t lift up just yet, because I couldn’t think
of the rest of the charm.
“ The night’s black just before dawn,” Mr. Loden was saying. “ I ’ll make my fire. When I ’ve done what I ’ll do, I can step over your dead body, and Vandy’s mine.”
“ Don’t you fear Washington?” I asked him, and my left
fingertips were in my dungaree pocket.
“ Can he come from the place to which he’s gone? Washington has forgotten me and our old falling-out.”
“ Where he is, he remembers you,” I said.
Mr. Loden was on his knee. His blade point scratched a
circle round him on the ground. The circle held him and the
paper with my picture. Then he took a sack from inside his
coat, and poured powder along the scratched circle. He stood
up, and golden-brown fire jumped up around him.
“ Now we begin,” he said.
He sketched in the air with his blade. He put his boot toe
on my picture. He looked into the golden-brown fire.
“ I made my wish before this,” he spaced out the words.
“ I make it now. There was no day when I have not seen my
wish fulfilled.”
Paler than the fire shone his eyes.
“ No son to follow John. No daughter to mourn him.”
My fingers in my pocket touched something round and
thin. The quarter he’d been scared by, that Mr. Tewk Millen
had made me take back.
Mr. Loden spoke names I didn’t like to hear. “ Haade,”
he said. “ Mikaded. Rakeben. Rika. Tasarith. Modeka.”
My hand worried out, and in it the quarter.
“ Truth,” said Mr. Loden. “ Hunch. Here with this image
I slay—”
I lifted my left hand three inches and flung the quarter.
My heart went rotten with sick sorrow, for it didn’t hit Mr.
Loden—it fell into the fire—
Then in one place up there shot white smoke, like a steam
puff from an engine, and the fire died down everywhere else.
Vandy, Vandy
437
Mr. Loden stopped his spell-speaking and wavered back. I
saw the glow of his goggling eyes and of his open mouth.
Where the steamy smoke had puffed, it was making a
shape.
Thller than a man. Taller than Mr. Loden or me. Wide-
shouldered, long-legged, with a dark tail coat and high boots
and hair tied back behind the head. It turned, and I saw the
brave face, the big, big nose—
“ King Washington!” screamed out Mr. Loden, and tried
to stab.
But a long hand like a tongs caught his wrist, and I heard
the bones break like dry sticks, and Mr. Loden whinnied like
a horse that’s been bad hurt. That was the grip of the man
who’d been America’s strongest, who could jump twenty-four
feet broad or throw a dollar across the Rappahannock River
or wrestle down his biggest soldier.
The other hand came across, flat and stiff, to strike. It
sounded like a door a-slamming in a high wind, and Mr.
Loden never needed to be struck the second time. His head
sagged over widewise. When the grip left his broken wrist,
he fell at the booted feet.
I sat up, and stood up. The big nose turned to me, just a
second. The head nodded. Friendly. Then it was gone back
into steam, into nothing.
I ’d said the truth. Where George Washington had been,
he’d remembered Mr. Loden. And the silver quarter, with his
picture on it, had struck the fire just when Mr. Loden was
&nbs
p; conjuring with a picture he was making real. And then there
had happened what had happened.
A pale streak went up the back sky for the first dawn.
There was no fire left, and of the quarter was just a spatter
of melted silver. And there was no Mr. Loden, only a mouldy
little heap like a rotted-out stump or a hammock or loam or
what might could be left of a man that death had caught up
with after two hundred years. I picked up the iron blade and
broke it on my knee and flung it away into the trees. Then I
438
Manly Wade Wellman
picked up the paper with my drawn picture. It wasn’t hurt a
bit, and it looked a right much like me.
Inside the door I put that picture, on the quilt where I ’d
lain. Maybe the Millens would keep it to remember me by,
after they found I was gone and that Mr. Loden came round
no more to try to court Vandy. Then I started away, carrying
my guitar. If I made good time, I ’d be out of the valley by
high noon.
As I went, pots started to rattle. Somebody was awake in
the cabin. And it was hard, hard, not to turn back when
Vandy sang to herself, not thinking what she sang:
“ Wake up, wake up! The dawn is breaking.
Wake up, wake up! It’s almost day.
Open up your doors and your divers windows,
See my true love march away. . . . ”
DAVID G. HARTWELL
is a three-time Hugo Award nominee for Best
Editor. He was editor-in-chief of Berkley
Science Fiction and Director of Science Fiction for Timescape/Pocket Books: currently
he is a consulting editor at Tor Books and
Arbor House.
Hartwell is the author of Age of Wonders,
a book-length study of the science fiction
field. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University.
David Hartwell lives in Pleasantville,
New York.
The Color of Evil is the first volume of The
Dark Descent. Look for the succeeding volumes, The Medusa in the Shield and A Fabulous Formless Darkness, in November 1991 and
January 1992.
‘An important work
B
I m i
which belongs in every library.”
^
— The West Coast Review o f Books
‘
I j|A * •
This is the horror fan's wish-book.
All that need be said is— buy it.”
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 53
