Joshua Gayou - Commune - The Complete Series - A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Box Set (Books 1-4)

“No, I reckon it’s fine,” Lum said. “These’re important things to unnerstand, no matter yer age.”

“Well…” George mused, “I just question the utility of such a thing anymore—fear for fear’s sake. I’d much rather that if a story’s to be told, that it’s something that teaches the listener.”

The others were quiet as they considered this. The tip of George’s stick lit as it tapped along the coals; he lifted it to his lips and blew it out. A trailing finger of smoke disappeared into the indigo night sky like a ghost pointing up into the heavens.

“Well…” Lum prodded, “how ’bout one-uh them, then?”

“One of what, now?”

“A yarn that teaches?”

“Oh, well…” George filled his cheeks with air as he thought, the whiskers around his mouth poking out and shining in the firelight. “Well, I suppose there is one I can think of. Something my father told me when I was a young man, oh, about two hundred years ago.”

I’ll tell you a story that I’ve learned several times over in my life; a thing that’s been told to me and that I have told to myself as the long march of time has passed me by, as the world around me got a whole hell of a lot faster and all my friends that I thought would always be there when I needed them started to die off—a rare event, at first, but then something that happened more and more as the years moved on into memory. You never think of such things when you’re young and strong, when you’re invincible, but you sure will think about it the first time someone your age passes on, and all the surviving folk who are supposed to know about such things stand around in a circle, nod sagely to each other, and use the phrase “Natural Causes”. A thing like that tends to put you off. You sort of stop and look around awhile, and then you ask, “When was it that I became old?”

And if you’re lucky, someone will be there to answer you; someone who’s busy getting old right along with you. But such luck is granted only by whatever force it is that drives the universe and is not a thing upon which you may rely.

My people came to the United States by way of Canada long, long before any of the people now here before this fire were even a thought in their antecedents’ minds. The region at the time was thick with the American aborigine, and I honestly don’t know if the legend of the Wendigo was something that my family picked up as they passed through into the states (as they claimed) or if the acquisition of the creature’s story became a part of our own familial legend, growing more true as the retelling got further and further away from the people who were originally supposed to have learned the story. At a certain point, you learn to just accept that a thing happened; whether or not it actually did is beside the point.

My grandfather told the story to his father, who told it to me when I was a boy. This was the manner of story reserved for camping trips, which was a thing we did quite frequently back in those old days, when the cost of a family vacation was limited to a factory worker’s wage and time spent out in mother nature was coveted every bit as much as a trip to some fancy European country. They’d bundle us up into the station wagon along with the canvas tent and camping gear they’d ordered from the Sears catalog and run us out to the wilderness—not a KOA campground; KOA wasn’t even a thing that existed back then. You just knew where to go out into the world, and nobody had to be told to pick up their garbage or guard their fire or any such nonsense. Just about everything was of a simpler nature in the world I once knew.

My father told me this story, like I said, in the dark of the night when the sounds of the wilderness felt closer and the light of the fire seemed somehow diminished under the chill of the air. He told me about the Wendigo.

It was a creature, he said, that lived alone out in the woods, imbued of incredible physical powers. It flew through the trees through a manner of propulsion wholly unknown at unimaginable speeds.

“How fast?” I asked my father, and he said, “Fast enough that the force of his passage has pushed his eyes flat, and he is forever crying blood runners of tears from the corners of his blind eyes.”

I looked up at the trees around us when he said this and asked, “But the trees are so close. Wouldn’t his wings have hit the trunks?”

He has no wings, said, my father. When I asked how it was that the creature could fly without any wings, he only shook his head.

The Wendigo is man-shaped and tall, taller than the tallest man you’ve ever seen, and so very thin. If you could make him stand still—and you cannot—you could count every bone in his body through his skin, which is grey like the crumbling ash of immolated wood. He is toothless and cannot speak; he can only moan, and the sound of his moaning is the sound of the wind through the tree boughs.

These things as my father said them sounded horrible to me and, seeing the obvious fear in my eyes, he reached out to me and said that the Wendigo does no harm to man. He’s a shy and timid creature. He eats the flesh of no animal, living instead on the moss that grows along the cool side of the tree trunks. Even so, though he will not hurt you, he must be feared.

“Why?” I asked.

The Wendigo is lonely, terribly lonely, my father says, wandering through the forest for all time; a never-ending series of featureless days and nights, for he can neither sleep nor die. He cannot hear, and so he cannot hear the wail of his own voice on the wind nor can he hear the laughter of the water on the rocks. He cannot see, as I’ve said, and so he cannot see the light of the sun as it falls across his body, nor can he feel its warmth, for his flesh is broken. Smell is the only sense that is left to him, and this he uses to find the trees and the moss he eats and the people whom he hunts.

He hunts for loneliness, you see. The Wendigo will not harm you; not in any way that it could understand. He will ensnare you in his too-long fingers and draw you away into the night. He will not hear your screams because he is deaf, and so will not understand that you fear him. He will feel you pull away and will suppose that you are blind, like him, and will, therefore, seek to guide you safely as you struggle to batter yourself senseless against the hard wooden skins of the surrounding trees. He will take you away to be with him, out there in the woods, and because he does not sleep and will never die, he will never let you go.

In time, you will learn not to fear him because it is impossible to stay afraid forever. You will learn eventually that he won’t hurt you, not on purpose, though your eyes will eventually flatten out to blindness just as his have done, as he carries you flying through the trees, bleeding forever down your cheeks long past the time they’ve stopped aching from their monstrous compression, and when you’re no longer able to see you’ll learn to accept the clumps of moss he presses to your lips with spindly fingers innocent of wrinkle or nail, so starved for any nourishment will you be when you feel the gentle prodding, that furry dampness he insists upon you like a mother pressing forth her breast.

You’ll forget who you are when enough time goes by; forget who you were. Forget that there was a time before you were with the Wendigo and you’ll wander together through the forest for all time, unless you lose one another in all that darkness and silence, and you begin to search for your lost companion, ever lonely, year in and year out, until you eventually find him again, and you grab and pull and insist, though he fights you mightily in the darkness and silence and struggles to pull away from you.