Who Goes There?

There’s something to be said about the longevity of Manly Wade Wellman’s career—not just the sheer length of it (half a century) but how long Wellman was able to retain respect and an inviting readership, from the ’30s until his death in 1986. Wellman was actually born outside the US, in Portuguese West Africa (what is now Angola), but his family moved to the US when he was very young and he would eventually adopt North Carolina as his home state—a fact that would influence much of his fiction. Like most interesting writers, Wellman is a man with some internal contradictions: he played football in college but wanted to write poetry; he was a neo-Confederate but some of his stories read as anti-racist, and he respected the cultural practices of the indigenous peoples in the land of his birth. He was also apparently biracial, being white but also with some Native American ancestry. At the time “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” came out, Wellman had been in the game for over forty years, yet he was about to win the inaugural World Fantasy Award for Best Collection with his horror collection Worse Things Waiting. Today’s story is pretty short, and minor Wellman (didn’t stop it from getting a World Fantasy Award nomination), but it also shows Wellman in his natural habitat, so to speak.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1975 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 22nd Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), 100 Fiendish Little Nightmares (ed. Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg), The World Fantasy Awards: Volume II (ed. Fritz Leiber and Stuart David Schiff), and the Wellman collections The Valley So Low: Southern Mountain Stories and The Devil Is Not Mocked and Other Warnings.

Enhancing Image

The opening paragraph of this story might be the very best part, truth be told, for its compression of backstory, elegance of style (Wellman is a much more delicate prose stylist than most of his generation), and who Wellman is asking us to sympathize with. Jack Bowdry has been tried but acquitted for murder, for the death of Kib Wordin, a local eccentric Jack accused of being a “witch-man” and whom Jack supposedly killed after Kib refused to leave town. Jack has killed a man before the story even gets started, in what may or may not have been self-defense, and so it may come as a surprise to the reader that he’s also gonna be Our Hero™. Well, more like anti-hero. Jack is mostly an easy-going rural type, set to get hitched to a much younger woman, Tolly, who’s 20 to Jack’s 34, although Tolly’s father is “more educated” and keeps quite a few books in him home, some of them being on rather arcane subject matter. Normally with this kind of folkloric horror story the protagonist would have to be eased into the idea of accepting witches, demons, and the like, but Jack starts out as superstitious, and luckily for him his superstitions have some weight in reality. He had killed Kib with a silver bullet, which may sound odd because we then expect Kib to have been a werewolf; thing is I’m not sure when the whole silver bullet thing became a mainstay in werewolf lore, because here Kib turns out to be a normal dude. Why silver, then? We’re also told at the beginning that Kib lived in a red cabin with a “creepy” tree nearby, a very old one, and that a witch-man had lived on that property before him.

And then another witch-man before that…

Because of this story’s brevity and the obviousness of its twist, it’s hard to talk about for too long, especially before getting into spoilers; but also we’re not here necessarily for the twist, or even the scares themselves, but the strong atmosphere Wellman evokes. Said atmosphere is sort of like the more dreamlike moments in William Faulkner’s writing, a vaguely hallucinatory Southern gothic vibe that retains a genuineness in no small part because Wellman had lived in North Carolina for two decades or so at this point. It’s very rustic, the kind of in-between place where white Christianity and indigenous beliefs would clash and mix together. Jack is a Christian who also believes that pagan beliefs are rooted in things which may actually have hold over this world. He is understandably concerned when he looks through his own modest library and finds a book he knows was not there before: Albertus Magnus, or White and Black Magic for Man and Beast. Somebody had also left a gold eagle here, like it’s an insignia. He consults his Bible, although rather than a specific passage he flips to three at random: Psalms, Acts, and Revelation. The line from Acts, “…cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians,” refers to Diana of the Roman pantheon. Of course in the Bible the old gods are denounced, but the line taken out of context sounds like genuine praise of Diana—of the old pagan ways. Diana is the goddess of hunting and nature, although as Jack notes, she’s not merciful like the Abrahamic God; rather she could be very petty, as the old gods tend to be. “Ain’t what sounds like a good goddess to worship,” Jack says. Little bit of humor there. He talks with Tolly about these strange things at his house and the signs his Bible gave him, and while it might’ve been tempting to make Tolly herself secretly a witch, she only knows some Expositionese because her father studies mythology and the occult. We never see the dad.

There Be Spoilers Here

Not content with having gotten away with murder, Jack takes an ax and journeys out to the cabin where Kib had lived, although not being seeing some strange shape (possibly human, possibly animal) scurry off his property. Jack and Tolly bury Albertus Magnus, as a good Christian is supposed to do with such a book, before Jack notices that the tree on the property does not look right. He tries chopping down the tree, but the tree does not agree with this procedure, in a scene that honestly reminds me of a certain infamous scene from The Evil Dead. Obviously the idea of a tree coming to life (well, more to life than it should) and exercising its tree-fingers was by no means a new idea, even in 1975. Thankfully Tolly comes in to help with a shotgun, which for some reason she added to with silver coins. What does the silver mean here? Is it supposed to have a special effect? Regardless the tree goes down, and takes the cabin with it. The first and more obvious twist is that the tree is the thing giving the property its bad aura, which makes sense since Diana is a nature goddess. The second twist, and this interests me the more I think about it, is that since Jack killed the witch-man who lived in the cabin he’s the next in line. The tree is fueled by worship, but it also demands an occasional sacrifice, and Jack has some darker qualities which could serve him well in a villainous role. Wellman here is admitting that his protagonist is by no means an angel, and that he could be tempted to server evil instead of good. Thankfully Jack resists, and ultimately is rewarded for it, as the ancient evil of the property retreats and some cloaked, unnamed figures (presumably worshipers of Diana) leave town.

A Step Farther Out

No big surprises with this one, but it was a very pleasant read. Wellman was in his seventies at this point, but still had a fine touch and a sense of environment—you could say a level of focus that most writers his age simply wouldn’t have anymore. Robert Heinlein was writing some of his very worst material and coasting on what was admittedly an impressive career when he was Wellman’s age. “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” is not really scary, but it’s good old-fashioned rural horror.

See you next time.