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

This was the story my father told me. I asked him why he told it to me when he finished, and his answer was because his father had told him. And when I asked why Grandpa would tell him such a horrible thing, he said that a man, once upon a time, had told Grandpa and that it must have seemed fairly important for him to do so and Grandpa made it a point to remember and pass it along.

I didn’t sleep so well that night. We crawled into the tent to sleep, only I couldn’t. I just kept laying there in the dark, listening to the breathing of the others and waiting to feel that long-fingered hand wrap softly around my ankle.

And of course, it never did. I got over that story eventually, though I guess it took me some time to do so… and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t shine a flashlight in all directions any time I walked alone at night through a wooded area for years after. And then sometime later, after I’d moved away to live on my own and my father had moved on to be with God, the Wendigo slipped from my mind completely.

I think I was in my late-twenties or maybe even my thirties when I first came across the story The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood. I’d been in the library at the time doing a bit of research on something or other—I disremember what the subject happened to be—when I came across its name as part of a compendium of early horror stories. I became fascinated immediately with just the idea of reading it. As an adult, I’d become convinced that the Wendigo was just another of those family traditions that gets passed along generation to generation; a thing that didn’t really have any bearing in the real world. Seeing the creature mentioned from an outside source somehow legitimized the legend for me. Right away, when I saw the name scrawled along that old catalog card, I got the sense that Dad had known more than his share of tricks, simple factory worker or not, and I felt a bit of pride in his easy knowledge.

The damned book was already checked out when I went to look for it, of course, and the librarian informed me that it wasn’t due to be returned until the following week. I went back to the research I’d currently been working on, which went nowhere from that point because I couldn’t stop thinking about the tantalizing book. Eventually, I went home after accepting the fact that I wouldn’t be getting anything else done that day. I returned to my day to day life and tried to put the story from my mind. I went to work during the day, focused on my students, came home when I was supposed to, had dinner with my wife, and spent the evenings by her side. When it was time to turn in for the evening, we did so, and then I lay in bed for a long time thinking about that damned story.

When the following week came around, I was outside that library before it even opened on the day after the book was scheduled to be returned. I panicked for a moment when I was unable to find it on the shelf in its appropriate section, but it had only been absent because our librarian hadn’t yet replaced it. I went up to the front desk, dug through the returns and pulled it from the stack. I almost checked it out myself, but I saw that the story was not long, so I just took it over to a table and began to read.

The experience of reading that old tale was surreal. Blackwood’s Wendigo was not the same creature as my father’s. There was this character in the story, Défago, who is frightened by the Wendigo and runs off into the woods in terror to get away. One of his friends chases after him, following his footprints, until he soon finds that there are two tracks in the snow leading away from their campsite—one set very human and the other set larger… and decidedly not human. He follows these two sets for a time until eventually, it seems that Défago’s tracks change in aspect, assuming the inhuman shape of the Wendigo’s tread, though smaller. Further on along the trail, both tracks vanish.

Défago’s friend (I’ll be damned if I can remember his name anymore) gives up the chase soon after this point and returns to camp. There, he finds Défago himself, suffering from exposure to the elements and not right in the head; he’s jabbering and inconsolable. He dies not long after he’s discovered. I’m sure that I’m leaving some details out; it has been many, many years since I read it. I seem to recall the Wendigo having changed its shape to look like Défago, but I can’t recall when that would have happened or what he might have done.

I felt a touch of confusion, having read that old story. It was obvious to see where the similarities were between the legend my father had told me and what I’d read in that book, but the differences between the two were jarring to me. The story my father had told seemed fuller, somehow, like there was something important buried deep within it. The Blackwood work, by comparison, was little more than a simple horror story. Sure it was well-written but… that was all it was. There was nothing of true substance beneath the narrative; none that I could decode, anyway.

Compounding the issue was the fact that my father shared his version of the legend with me when I was a child so this would have been sometime around the mid-1950s or so. Blackwood wrote his story in 1910—never mind the fact that our family tradition held that Grandpa had first told it to Dad, which very well could have put the origination of our story before the time of Blackwood; I’d disregarded this truth as I cast about in my mind on the matter and had to be reminded of it later by my wife.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that story and how it related to my own. I spent a long time wondering which of them held the deeper truth; which was more relevant. So, I spent more time down at the library, looking up anything I could find on the subject and reading everything I found until my eyes burned in their sockets.

Eventually, my searches brought me to the subject of Algonquian folklore, wherein they maintained the myth of the cannibal monster… or of the evil nature spirit, depending on what material you happened to read: Wintekowa.

This creature was even further removed from what I’d learned as a boy; an insatiable, devouring evil consumed of greed and starvation. Some traditions suggested he was a forest spirit or god while others claimed that the Wendigo was born of man; that a man sufficiently unbalanced and broken of spirit could become the monster and thus fall into the tormenting of his fellows.

So now here was a third personality or “truth” that I had to contend with. For me, the creature had undergone an unlooked for and undesired evolution from a being of heartbreaking loneliness to a stalking killer to the embodiment of mans’ own self-destruction. The revelation was jarring, absolute, and exhausting.

I began to survey through the various mythologies for parallels and commonalities in some vain attempt to find the core of the creature, to understand the true intended nature and therefore the original intent of the myth—the myth from the first people to tell its story.

Ultimately, I discovered that such a thing was unknowable and, coming to accept this realization, understood that all versions that I’d heard or read over the then-short period of my life were, in essence, the truth. I realized that sometimes, the details of the story as they’re presented to you matter less than what you take away from it; matter less than the thoughts and the ideas ignited in your mind. The endings of such stories are sometimes happy or sad, uplifting or horrifying, but it’s what we take away from them that really matters. It’s the truths about us that such stories expose that become the transformative factor; such an experience has no business nor origin in the hands of the myth’s creator.

The significance of the story; its secret truth; its impact—these things are given birth in the heart of the listener.