| Windrow Familiar |
|
The Windrow Familiar is a short, hunched figure associated with the black magic of its presumed creator, or at least master, Zebulon Windrow. Little description is attained due to a robe covering its face. From one of the long, draping sleeves you could see something that dangled like an octopus's tentacle [The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost].
Familiars are attendant spirits, often taking animal form and serving its masters with unquestionable loyalty. Windrow’s familiar is first seen by Johnny Dixon in a nightmare, where both Windrow and the creature appear in a stained glass window and announce their intention of possessing Johnny for his interruption of the Windrow curse upon the Childermass family.
Later, when Professor Childermass and Fergie Ferguson investigate the Windrow Estate outside Van Twiller, New York, they come across an ornamental folly, or small decorative building, called The Temple of the Inner Light on the grounds:
Suddenly the professor stopped talking. He was staring at a statue that stood in a niche on the front of the temple. It was a statue of a short, hunched figure in a monk's robe. The hood of the robe was large, and hung down over the creature's face, but you could see something dangling from one long, drooping sleeve. It looked like an octopus's tentacle [67].
From behind this building they hear a dog barking; soon its long, anguished whines and howls are dramatically cut off. Behind the temple they come across a gruesome scene:
Lying on the grass was the body of a small collie dog. It was dead. There was not much doubt about that. All the flesh had been sucked away from the dog's head, leaving only a bleached white skull [69].
After snooping through the mansion, the professor and Fergie separate momentarily, enough time for Fergie to be lured back to the temple by what he thinks are the desperate cries of help from the professor. It is in fact the evil intelligence of the Windrows at work and Fergie is lured to his doom by the monster: "tentacles reached out from the long sleeves, and they whipped around Fergie's arms, gripping them tightly... [106]." The professor returns in the nick of time with a bottle of Holy Water in hand and puts an end to the creature: it shrivels up and disappears when sprinkled with the water.
Bellairs was extremely well read in the works of M.R. James and pays tribute to that author by including small literary devices in his novels, such as this hooded creature. In one of James' most popular short stories, Count Mangus, it is the titular Count who maintains such a companion, discovered after embarking on the Black Pilgrimage - and, no, this was hardly a humanitarian endeavor. This very mysterious yet very handy (tentacley) companion soon sets out to do the Count's dirty work:
The figure was unduly short, and was for the most part muffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of the form which projected from the shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr. Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish.
Even after the Count has died, men trespassing on his land to hunt end up dead or having gone quite mad thanks to good Brother Tentacles. Here is the fate of one of these men:
And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.
|
| |
"Count Magnus" - Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (text at Project Gutenberg)
Text at Horrormaster.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Gabriel_De_la_Gardie
Who was Count Magnus? |
|
 |
| The Familiar of Zebulon Windrow. |
|
