Behinder

Behinder

Origin: Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"

Description

"And there's the Behinder." "And what," said Mr. Yandro, "might the Behinder look like?" "Can't rightly say, Mr. Yandro. For it's always behind the man or woman it wants to grab.... Only a gone gump would go up there."

And I saw what nobody's ever supposed to see. The Behinder flung itself on his shoulders. Then I knew why nobody's supposed to see one. I wish I hadn't. To this day I can see it, as plain as a fence at noon, and forever I will be able to see it. But talking about it's another matter. Thank you, I won't try.

— Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"

The "Behinder" is a secretive predator that hunts its prey through the mountain country, lurking unseen among the trees, until it chooses to leap from hiding from behind and grab the man or woman it wants to grab. Behinders are horrible in appearance: few people have ever seen a Behinder, but those who have seen one wish for the rest of their lives that they had never laid eyes upon the thing.

Keeper Notes

• I halfway imagine the Behinder as a humanoid creature, lean and gaunt and corpse-like, with bulging, staring eyes, descended from nominally human beings who wandered deep into the hills, got lost in every way a human being can get lost, mixed with entirely the wrong sort of not-quite-human folk of the mountains, and came out twisted and wrong; I think the Behinders live, after a fashion, almost like solitary people: in crude huts and caves in the hills, painted in awful cave-paintings of the Behinder's device, and filled with the stone-aged accouterments of things that at one time were mostly human, but have slid far from that form of body and mind in a direction that no humanoid thing ought to slide; perhaps some unfortunate victims of the Behinder have been dragged to these dark and horrible caves, and have seen the nightmare stories in the Behinder's unspeakable cave-art, and have known the things that only Behinders could or would reveal, as the last things those poor souls ever see before the Behinder returns for them to finish whatever it was it grabbed its victim from behind for.... (fan theory)

Associated Mythos Elements

• setting: Folk Mythos
• story: Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"

References

• Fiction: Manly Wade Wellman's "The Desrick on Yandro (fiction)"