"The Barrens" is a Cthulhu Mythos short story by F. Paul Wilson, first published in the collection Lovecraft's Legacy (Tor, 1990). It was later reprinted in Cthulhu 2000: A Lovecraftian Anthology (Arkham House, 1995).
Synopsis[]
Kathleen McKelston, a New Jersey accountant, is contacted by an ex-lover from college, Jonathan Creighton, who seeks her help investigating the folklore of Jersey's Pine Barrens. As she takes him farther into the Barrens, he takes her deeper into the Barrens' mysteries--putting her sanity and reality itself at risk.
Characters[]
Kathleen McKelston[]
The story's narrator is the proprietor of a small accounting firm, Kathleen McKelston and Associates, in New Jersey. Born in the Pine Barrens, her family moved when she was 14 to nearby Pemberton, so she could attend Pemberton High. In the Pines, she's remembered as "the one who got the college scholarship." She attended Rutgers University in the '60s, where she was "career-oriented" and was nicknamed Mac. She describes herself as "what you might call a feminist." At the time the story is set (ca. 1990), she is recently divorced.
Her hair has "a little gray tucked in with the red," but has "young face," with "high coloring and freckles."
Jonathan Creighton[]
He grew up in North Jersey, near a rural town called Gilead. He attended Rutgers in the '60s, where he was known as "Crazy Creighton." He dated and for a time lived with Kathleen, though she objected to his Pickman prints. He graduated with a degree in anthropology, then got a Master's and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He started a practice that failed--because he was using "a form of reality therapy, and "I don’t know—really know—what reality is." He went back to school, in the anthropology department of Miskatonic University, which he left because the “old farts in the antiquities department didn’t like where my research was leading me.” He now claims to have grants from Rutgers, Princeton, the American Folklore Society, and the New Jersey Historical Society to study “the origins of folktales." At the story starts, he's living in New York City (as he has a number with a 212 area code), but later is staying in Jersey at the Laurelton Circle Motor Inn.
He is described as a "plump, bearded, almost cherubic figure.... His hair was still thick and dark brown, but despite his round, rosy cheeks, his eyes were sunken and too bright."
Jasper Mulliner[]
He's "some sort of an uncle" of Kathleen—"on my mother’s side, I think." He's thought to be "a descendant of the notorious bandit of the pines, Joseph Mulliner."[1] Kathleen tells him that her father always said "there weren’t many folks in the Pines you didn’t know, and not much that went on that you didn’t know about.”
"His white hair was neatly combed and he was freshly shaved," Kathleen observes. "His skin was a weathered brown and looked tougher than saddle leather."
Gus Sooy[]
A reclusive moonshiner, he's called "an old Hessian who lives way out in the wildest part of the pines...somewhere far down in Burlington County, near Atlantic County."
"His white hair looked like a deranged bird had tried to nest in it," while his "lower face was obscured by a huge white beard, stained around the mouth," like an "Appalachian Santa Claus, going to seed in the off-season."
Peggy Clevenger[]
Known as the Witch of the Pines. "In the old days," it's said, "people used to put salt over their doors to keep her away.” She was a Hessian who lived in Pasadena, New Jersey, and had "all sorts of strange powers, like she could change her shape and become a rabbit or a snake." The story goes that "she had caught one of the pine lights, put a spell on it, and brought it down.”
Setting[]
The story takes its name from "the great Pine Barrens that ran south from Route 70 all the way down to the lower end of the state." Kathleen describes it:
The Barrens runs through seven counties, takes up one-fourth of the state.... How does two thousand square miles sound? Or a million acres? Almost the size of Yosemite National Park.... I’ve heard of an area of over a hundred thousand acres—that’s in the neighborhood of 160 square miles—in the south-central Barrens with twenty-one known inhabitants.... I'll bet there are people who’ve lived to ripe old ages in the Barrens who have never seen a paved road.... [T]here are vast areas that no human eyes have ever seen.
The Barrens were populated by
Hessians who deserted the British Army and fled into the woods...smugglers who used to unload freight in the marshes and move it overland through the Pines to avoid port taxes in New York and Philly... [and] Tories and Loyalists who were chased from their land after the Revolution.... The Lenape Indians settled in here, too, so did Quakers who were kicked out of their churches.
The village of Chatsworth, formerly known as Shamong Station, is called "the capital of the pines."[2] With a population of 300, it's a “veritable Piney megalopolis."
References[]
- ↑ The Omega, "Joe Mulliner: The Infamous Jersey Outlaw of the Late 1700s," by Joseph Sannito, October 17, 2021.
- ↑ Wikipedia, "Chatsworth, New Jersey."