Since the Witcher film and video games came out, and since Andrzej Sapkowski’s series of monster-hunting dark fantasy novels were translated, English-speaking North Americans have been introduced to whole slews of new fantastical creatures from Polish folklore. These creatures include many that might have been unfamiliar to readers of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Even Jorge Luis Borges seems to have missed accounting for many of them in his Book of Imaginary Beings.
In Sapkowski’s The Last Wish, for instance, readers were introduced to strange creatures such as the kikimora, amphisboena, and mecopteran, alongside more familiar entities from European folklore, such as nymphs, rusalkas, strigas, chimeras, and dryads. (Some Eastern European monsters also appear in The Bone Mother by David Demchuk.) However, “The White Wyrak” by Stefan Grabiński adds one more for the books. Described as “the Polish Poe,” Grabiński introduced me to the wyrak, a creature described as being a cross between a monkey and a frog.
I’m always pleased to have the opportunity to expand my Pokédex of imaginary creatures. It is difficult to find more information on the wyrak online, but a quick search does reveal two things: 1) wyrak in Polish means “mistake” (Google translate); and 2) it is also a Polish name for the tarsier, a very real creature who astonishingly matches its half-mammal, half-amphibian description.
Much weird fiction demands the reader’s effort in reconciling contradictory descriptions (such as the half-vegetable, half-animal shoggoths In the Mountains of Madness), in order to suggest the impossibility of imagining a particular creature. Sometimes creatures are described as liminal, straddling two categories, in order to suggest the arbitrariness (perhaps even the “wryak-ness,” or mistakenness, if wyrak means “mistake”) of our own scientific categories. When Polish naturalists encountered the Southeast Asian tarsier, they must have instantly recognized it as a creature from their own folklore.
However, the wyrak in “The White Wyrak” doesn’t climb trees; he climbs chimneys. The story is narrated by a young journeyman chimneysweeper who works for his master, Kalina, a jack-of-all-trades and devotee of Saint Florian who likes to tell tale tales. One of those tall tales seems to come to life one day, when they encounter the wyrak after two of the younger journeymen, Antarek and Biedron, go mysteriously missing on a routine chimney-sweeping job at an abandoned brewery.
The brewery was abandoned when the last brewer went bankrupt and hanged himself. As Kalina explains, “The boilers and machines are supposed to be evil. They’re of an old system. No one wants to take the financial risk of replacing it with a new one” (150). The risk involved in investing the capital necessary to replace the machinery means the place has remained abandoned long enough for the man-eating wyrak to take up residence in the chimney. Realistic details like these make the presence of a monster believable. Even if we don’t believe in the monster, we can at least believe in the severity of debt, which also eats men alive.
Kalina is wise in the ways of the world and the chimney sweeper’s craft. But it is hinted that his knowledge extends beyond the ordinary. He warns the narrator, saying, “Soot is treacherous, my boy, soot lays dormant inside dark smoke chambers and stuffy furnaces, and it lies in weight–for an opportunity. Something vindictive resides in soot, something evil lurks there. You never know what will emerge from it, or when” (150). Even if you don’t believe in monsters, Kalina offers sage advice. His profession is founded on the necessity of chimney sweeping due to the danger that accumulated soot can spontaneously ignite if it isn’t cleaned regularly. In a way, the wryak is the perfect metaphor for the very real, mundane danger of fire risks.
To tackle the chimney, Kalina drops a ball on a rope from the roof, while the narrator climbs up from the bottom. In the middle of the chimney, they see the “huge, owlish yellow eyes” of the wyrak as it holds “in his front claws what seemed like a human arm, which hung limply from a corpse” (151). The remains of the young apprentices are discovered, and the narrator hits the wyrak with a hatchet, slaying it. As it dies, they attempt to retrieve the creature’s body, but it dissolves into a “small milk-white substance,” becoming nothing more than a pile of soot as it exits the chimney (152). The monster leaves Kalina and the narrator with a bizarre case of white pimples due to their contact with the monster, but these soon disappear.
“The White Wyrak” contains a tidy resolution: the monster is slain. The supernatural strangeness disappears nearly as soon as the corpse exits the chimney. In this respect, and in terms of the sober realism with which he writes, Grabiński is most unlike Poe and Lovecraft, to whom he is also compared. The characters act rationally (at least in this story) and deal matter-of-factly with the presence of a wyrak. The story’s realism includes specific details of the chimney sweepers’ profession, such as their tools and even gems like his description of the “layers of easily flammable ‘enamel’ [that] glowed with a cold metallic luster” in the chimney (151). Though the chimneysweepers may be shaking in their boots, from the cool sobriety with which they approach the problem, one might think they were merely cleaning out a routine accumulation of soot.
As a weird tale, “The White Wyrak” has a tidy resolution, unlike more disturbing weird tales where uneasiness lingers long after the tragic story is “resolved.” However, perhaps we should not be lulled by the chimney sweepers’ rationalism. After all, Kalina’s apprentice is now aware that his master’s tall tales have a firm basis in reality. He, like the reader, has learned that the world is inhabited by monsters in its interstitial spaces, leaving unanswered the question of how many more monsters are out there, hiding in our ordinary world.
Next week, I’ll be writing about “The Night Wire” (1926) by the American pulp fiction writer H. F. Arnold.
“The Vegetable Man” by Luigi Ugolini is a simple enough story of a man whose skin has turned completely green.
