In the second part of Morgan’s feature on The Wendigo, it gets personal….
By Morgan Knudsen, Entityseeker (Research & Teachings)
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s investigators, my partner and I had no awareness of the goings on in Egg Lake or St Albert. It may as well have been another world in another time and place. In 2004, Stephanie and I held a lecture in Edmonton, Alberta. We were lecturing on an English folklore story known as the Black Shuck, a gigantic black dog with fiery paws said to terrorize the English countryside. It was just by chance; someone was in our audience that night who we would be tied to for the rest of our lives. His name was Matt Spearin, and as he heard our lecture, the description of the black aggressive dog stuck out to him in a way it touched no one else. After the lecture, he told us about his encounter as a child with a giant black beast and an illness that nearly resulted in his death. An illness with facial swelling, a fire like rash on his hands and feet, and a monster coming through his window in the night. Matt described the encounters in detail in his upcoming book, “Wind/Feather/Astronaut”: “Don’t touch that, it might be Cujo”!!!! My hand pauses for a moment over the half-buried GI Joe Skimobile, lost to a late fall sand box mission and then under the previous winter’s ice. “What’s Cujo?” I ask. The name sends a chill down my spine. “Cujo is this big, scary dog that goes bad and kills all these kids,” says my neighbour, Alex, with the authority and demure of a 7-year-old over his now mystified, 4-year-old audience. My blood runs beyond cold over his words, and over the name… it actually has a name and this guy knows it. I am speechless, transfixed. “I only told my parents and my Nana about the dumb dog… how do you know about it? How do you know what it’s called?” “If you’re not careful, he’s gonna come for ya tonight and take you right outta your bed”, he says gleefully. “He comes every night,” I tell him as his smile melts from his chin into a look of puzzlement.
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“Right through my window,” I continue. “He shakes my bed off the floor, growling and snarling. He comes from that lonely J-Train yard on Sesame, as tall as my house and thin, with really long, spindly arms and weird, black spider-fingers. His head looks like a wicked Terrier, a Scotty, you know, the dogs with the beards? But with wild, terrifying eyes and sharp pointy ears… He’s WAY scarier and he is WAY bigger. Nastier. A giant. A monster.” “No, Cujo is just a dumb movie I saw,” he tells me, attempting to enliven the sudden, abnormal hue his face has taken on. “You don’t see him? He comes when you get really hot and when you cannot move in your bed. I cannot even yell for my mom, ~it is THAT scary. Wait until you hear it growl,” I inform him. “It sounds like there are a thousand of him in that growl. I bet he comes for you tonight, right through your window, you’ll see.” My tone is serene, convicted, the voice of a true believer. “That’s my window, right there,” pointing up to the brown frame, 8 feet from the ground, embedded in the white stucco, “Cujo passes through this yard every night. And now he knows who you are. He knows where you play, and he knows that you live RIGHT across the street.” “You’re just sayin’ that, m-makin’ it up,” he says, with the pallid, almost teary look of a kid who just had someone piss all over his grave. “So, Cujo is what it’s called,” I reflect, thinking a name like that made more sense than what I had for breakfast that morning. It was hitting a nail like a bullseye and driving it right through the board. J-Train could j-j-jump right into that name and fit like some unholy marriage. “C-U-J-O”. “Wanna stay over?” I ask.
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