The work presented and discussed includes stereotypes of Orientialism in accordance with the period, including depictions of a Jewish character in accordance with antisemitic stereotypes. Reader discretion advised.
In 1786, a new Gothic novel appeared on the market: An Arabian Tale, From an Unpublished Manuscript. The author, unnamed in the first edition, was William Beckford, who composed the tale in French as an original work in the style of Oriental folklore being translated into European languages at the time, and translated into English by the Rev. Samuel Henley. It was published in French as simply Vathek, and in myriad editions over the next couple of centuries would be published under some variation of that title. In 1909, two episodes and an unfinished fragment initially intended as part of the novel were discovered among Beckford’s papers by Lewis Melville, and translated by Sir Frank T. Marzials and published in 1912.
The influence of Vathek on English literature is vast. It is the archetype of the Oriental romance novel, and the discovery and subsequent publication of the lost episodes, occurring when it did, renewed interest in the story among the Weird Tales crowd. When H. P. Lovecraft named the original of the Necronomicon as the Al Azif, he was borrowing an Arabic term from one of Henley’s footnotes to Vathek: “being the name applied to those strange night noises (of insects) which the Arabs attribute to the howling of daemons” (H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [27 Nov 1927], Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill 150). The unfinished third episode in particular caught their imagination:
Regarding “Episodes of Vathek”—my copy is even now on its way to you as a long-term loan, & it is my hope that—as interest—you will ere long shew me a completion of the 3d episode which shall out-Beckford Beckford! Possibly you may not wish to write the text in French, as Beckford did, but I am sure you can capture the general atmosphere better than anyone else in the gang. Cook once had a wild idea of letting us all try our hands at this job of completion, & of publishing the collected results in book form. That plan has now evaporated, but I don’t think literature has lost very much thereby—since most of us would be very inept at this form of composition. You, however, are really well fitted for it—& Morton & I were impressed with the idea of what a splendid result you could obtain. I’ll wager Wright would publish the episode with your ending—& perhaps a brief explanatory introduction. —H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, [27 Aug 1932], DS 381
Smith did write his “Conclusion to Wm. Beckford’s story of Princess Zulkais & Prince Kalilah,” later as “The Third Episode of Vathek,” which was published by R. H. Barlow in Leaves #1 (1937).
Yet there was another episode.
“An unpublished Episode of Vathek” was “edited by Charles Pendragon,” and was first published in Knights Quarterly Magazine (1823), a highly literary magazine best remembered today for publishing a review which claimed Percy Bysshe Shelley was the true author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. By comparison, the spurious Vathek episode was a bit of fun, on the order of a literary hoax.
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An unpublished Episode of Vathek
edited by Charles Pendragon
The taste for tower building, of which Vathek had set the example, became infectious in the country about Samarah. This monarch was at first indignant that his subjects should presume to copy his extravagancies; but his vanity was stronger than his pride, and he left them in the quiet possession of their follies. His most ambitious rival was the merchant Bekfudi. The riches of this superb person were enormous. His caravans every year brought him silks and jewels that would have rivalled a princess’s dowry, and the slaves that cultivated his groves of cinnamon might have formed the rear-guard of a sultan’s army. He became dizzy with his wealth, and fancied that he was descended from the Assyrian kings;—though his grandfather had carried a basket in the streets of Bagdad.
Bekfudi had a handsome palace and extensive grounds; the hills and the valleys of a little province were his; a broad lake lingered in his groves of citrons and palms; and the apricots of his garden almost rivalled those which Vathek so prized from the isle of Kirmith. The ladies of his seraglio were as numerous and as beautiful as the harem of the grand vizier, and the other furniture of his palace was equally rare and costly. But Bekfudi began to be satiated with the pleasures and the magnificence of ordinary mortals; in an evil hour he pulled down his palace and sold his women. He built an impenetrable wall round his extensive gardens, and vowed to raise, upon the highest hill which this barrier enclosed, a palace upon a new fashion. Bekfudi had no violent reverence for the religion of his country; and he therefore considered it a sinless profanation to make his dwelling-place like a mosque, and his tower resembling a minaret, though he modestly proposed it to be only ten times higher than the minarets of Bagdad. It was the extravagance of his ambition which prompted him to shut out all the world till he should have finished his mosque; and when his tower rose above the highest pines of the neighbouring hills, he solaced himself with the hope, that the peasants who gazed at an awful distance would believe that within its walls dwelt one of the sons of men, as powerful as the Genii, and as mysterious as the Dives.
Bekfudi possessed abundance of taste. His command of wealth enabled him to engross the rare productions of art which were sometimes too costly even for emirs to acquire; and he lavished his gold upon those who could best apply their talents to the excitement of his self-admiration. All the ornaments of his palace had reference to his ancestors; but though the artists, who recorded in fit emblems the mighty deeds of his progenitors, had an especial regard to truth, they sedulously avoided all allusion to the basket-bearer. In a word, the mosque was a very magnificent place. It was the handsomest monument that taste ever reared to pride; and though Bekfudi in his arrogance had tried to make his tower rival the dome of the great mosque at Damascus, and had only been stopt in his presumptuous aspirings by the equally insolent hurricane, which twice blew it down,—and though in his profaneness he had built his dormitories like the cells of the most pious santons, and had constructed studies and refectories after the models of sanctuaries and shrines,—still the palace was gorgeous and elegant, and such as no subject ever before raised in the dominions of the Commander of the Faithful.
Bekfudi went on for many moons building and embellishing his mosque,—heaping stones upon his tower till the uncivil blasts gave him hints where to stop, and hanging up new draperies of Persian silks till the limited art of the dyer forbade any further change. The superb merchant lived away in a round of selfish enjoyment; his slaves racked their inventions to prepare him viands of the most costly materials; and as his health would not allow him always to drink the red wine of Shiraz, he took care, under the fatal necessity of resorting to so common a beverage as water, to render it palatable by sending caravans and escorts to bring it from a fountain at a hundred leagues’ distance.
The great Mahomet, who had commissioned the Genii to mature and then pull down the presumptuous darings of the caliph Vathek, also resolved to crush the ambition of the merchant Bekfudi. But as the pride and power of the mosque=builder were bounded by natural limits, it was unnecessary to work any miracles for his instruction. He lived on in his round of luxuries; and as his caravans came duly over the desert, and his ships were seldom lost upon the sea, he thought that the spices and the fruits of his fertile isles would last for ever. But there was a sudden change in the fashions of Samarah. The cooks began to make their comfits without cinnamon, and the green dates of their native plains came into request, to the exclusion of the dried fruits of our wealthy merchant. His spices and his figs lay rotting in his warehouses, and, for the first time in his life, he began to think that his mine of wealth was not inexhaustible.
Thirty moons had passed before Bekfudi ceased to pull down and build up the apartments of his mosque, or to send a hundred leagues for his water. The pastry-cooks were inexorable, and his own household even could not endure the flavour of cinnamon. He at length discharged his masons and his carpenters, and, as a great effort of economy, abridged his table of one of the fifty-two dishes with which it was daily covered. But all these privations were unavailing; Bekfudi was in debt, and his creditors would not wait for a change in the taste for spices. He resolved to invite all Samarah to see his mosque, and to purchase his curiosities. For three moons all Samarah went mad. Away ran the idle and the busy, to scramble up Bekfudi’s tower,—to wander about his long galleries upon carpets from Cairo,—to touch his gold censers, or to pore upon his curious pictures. As to his books, Bekfudi carefully locked them up. He was a great commentator, and his relish for theological speculations led him to fear that his performances might introduce him to too close an acquaintance with the mufti and the cadi.
Amongst the mob who had been to see Bekfudi’s tower, was a clever little Persian Jew, who had the reputation of being one of the most discreet dealers in Samarah. Did a courtier require a thousand piastres to bribe a judge, our little Jew would raise the sum in a moment, upon the pledge of the courtier’s carbuncle; or did a lady of the seraglio desire a pound of gold dust to fee an eunuch, our little Jew would furnish it upon the most moderate interest. His warehouses were full of the moveable treasures of all the great men of the palace, from the grand vizier to the principal mute; and everybody vowed that he was the honestest Jew in the world, and it was a great pity so useful and so clever a trader should be a dog of an infidel.
Bekfudi had a hatred of all Jews; but, nevertheless, our little factor contrived to approach him. “He had come to proffer his services to the great merchant; he humbly proposed to purchase his matchless curiosities, and his magnificent furniture.” “What! he, the giaour from Persia? he presume to offer a price for rarities that monarchs might covet?” “Yes; and moreover, he would purchase his books and his paintings, his vessels of gold and of silver, his wine, his——.” The merchant was in a rage, and drove the Jew from his presence; but he quickly recalled him. “Slave,” cried Bekfudi, “I will hold a moment’s parley with thee. How much wilt thou give for my topaz cup, and my goblet set with emeralds?” “I will not purchase these alone,” said the Jew, “but I will purchase thy lands, and thy mosque, and thy silken draperies, and thy woven carpets, and thy golden vessels, and thy jewels, and thy books, and thy pictures, and all that thy palace contains; and here, without, I have twenty dromedaries laden with four hundred thousand sequins, which shall be thine.” Bekfudi was in a rage, but the eloquence of the dromedaries prevailed; and that night the little Jew locked up the mosque with the airs of a master.
The mob from Samarah was soon dispersed; and Bekfudi prepared with many a sigh to leave a palace of which he had so long been the uncontrolled lord. The little Jew haunted him from gallery to gallery, and from the gloom of the sanctuary to the sunlight of the great lantern. With the most provoking malice he dwelt upon the beautiful proportions of this pavilion, and the magnificent furniture of that saloon; and swore that none of the monarchs of the world could rival the great merchant in taste and splendour. “And what will you do with this unequalled palace,” said Bekfudi? “I have bought it for a dealer in sulphur,” replied the Jew. The pride of Bekfudi was ground into the dust; but he was curious to see the rival of his wealth and the inheritor of his possessions. It was agreed that they should meet at dinner.
The hour came, and Bekfudi appeared in the grand saloon attired in a splendid vest;—the aigrette of his turban was composed of the largest diamonds, and the plume that it bore was from the wing of a bird of paradise. His delicate hands were washed with the choicest essences, and the perfumes of his garments plunged the senses into a languor which nothing but the excitements of the most exquisite viands could dissipate. He expected to have met in the dealer in sulphur, a personage whose riches would have procured for him some of the refinements which belonged to the dealer in spices;—but how was he humiliated when a miserable old man presented himself, as ugly as a faquir that had been doing penance for fifty years, wrapped round with a wretched robe of dirty cotton, and his head surmounted with a beastly turban, that all the waters of Rocnabad could never purify. The forehead of this captivating personage was covered with knots and wrinkles, his blear eyes twinkled in their little pursed-up sockets, his enormous mouth exhibited three teeth of the most delicious blackness, and his rheum was freely bestowed upon those whom the flavour of his breath did not keep at a respectful distance. Bekfudi shrieked and shouted for his dwarf; but the obsequious Jew called in a loud voice for dinner, and the unhappy merchant was constrained by his politeness to take his seat at the board. The new possessor of the mosque was equally attractive in his diet; a ragout of garlic was served up for his especial pleasure; and as he dipped his grimy hands into the golden dish, Bekfudi would, have fainted at the odour of the savoury steams, had not his faithful dwarf thrown the reviving attar over his forehead, and forced a cup of sherbet down his throat. The mouth of the dealer in sulphur distended into an audible grin, and he pledged the dainty merchant in execrable brandy. Their conversation at length became interesting. The man of sulphur had a most agreeable collection of oaths; and as he swore by Solomon and Eblis, by the sacred camel and the dog of the seven sleepers, the man of spice perceived that he had a high reverence for the mysteries of theology;—and a wonderful sympathy in this particular grew up between them. They embraced and parted; but Bekfudi never forgot the garlic.
The little Jew soon applied his master’s purchase to good account. Within a week the superb merchant began to indulge a wish for the possession of some of his former most splendid baubles; he bethought him that his free habit of expressing his thoughts in the broad margins of his beautiful manuscripts might one day cause some awkward inquiries; and he was desirous of securing some pictures, of which he thought none but himself knew the peculiar value. He of the dirty hands was as ready to comply with these reasonable wishes, and Bekfudi began to think that his turban and his garlic might in time be endurable. The articles were selected, but the little Jew had yet to name the price. Bekfudi raved and tore his hair when a fourth of his four hundred thousand sequins were demanded for what had cost even him not a tenth of the sum. He raved and tore his hair; but the Jew and the sulphur-merchant were calm. Bekfudi had not yet learned to subject his desires to his circumstances; and two dromedaries marched off with their costly load.
The Jew and his merchant passed the winter very industriously. From his warehouses in Samarah, this active dealer brought all the glittering pledges which the misfortunes of his clients had left unredeemed; and he decorated the mosque like a grand bazaar, with a great many new curiosities, and a great many rare commodities with fine names from the east and the west, which the artists of Samarah could manufacture as well as those of Persia or China. The little Jew knew where to find expert limners, who could imitate the paintings even of the celebrated Mani, so as to deceive the most critical eyes; clever copyists, that would transcribe the tales and poems of Arabia, with a correctness that would enchant the most exquisite connoisseurs; and acute chemists, that would give to the secretly pressed grape-juice of the gardens of Bekfudi himself, the inimitable flavour of the wines of Shiraz or Kismische. The little Jew had, however, not quite so complete a judgment as the builder of the mosque, and he therefore committed a few mistakes with a very enterprising spirit. Amidst the solemn and subdued splendour of the sanctuary, upon which Bekfudi most prided himself, he hung up an enormous mirror which brought all the varied colours of the neighbouring galleries, and all the garishness of day, into the heart of its former deep and impressive gloom; and in the hall which the spice merchant had dedicated to the worthies of his country, he stuck up the statue of one of the rebellious princes who had presumed to contend against the justice of the great Haroun al Raschid. But the little Jew was yet a most deserving factor. All Samarah again flocked to the mosque with the great minaret; and all Samarah came this time with money in their vests, to purchase some relic of the magnificent Bekfudi. Every one was pleased, except the unhappy builder of the palace, for every one was agreeably relieved of his sequins at his own free-will. He alone writhed under the mortifications of his pride, and the outrages upon his taste. He stalked one day into the palace of his splendour, now metamorphosed into one large bazaar, and with a yell of fury he overthrew the statue of the foe of the caliph, and shivered into a thousand pieces the mirror which deformed the sanctuary. He then coolly paid the price which the Jew demanded, and retired to a humble dwelling without a minaret, to pass the remainder of his days in composing treatises on temperance and humility.
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Lady Vandeleur, at the other end of the apartment, was speaking somewhat eagerly with her brother, Charlie Pendragon, an elderly young man, much broken with dissipation, and very lame of one foot. —Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny van de Grift Stevenson, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885)
There was no Charles Pendragon. Many of the purported authors and editors of the Knights Quarterly Magazine were pseudonyms. The true author of “An unpublished Episode of Vathek” was Charles Knight, the founder and editor of Knight’s Quarterly Magazine. In Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century: With a Prelude of Early Reminiscences (1864/1865), Knight recalls the inspiration for the episode, when Fonthill Abbey, the home of William Beckford (author of Vathek), was to be auctioned off:
In the second number of the Magazine I wrote a paper, upon which I may not improperly say a little, as it in some measure related real incidents of my Working Life. “An unpublished Episode of Vathek” is reprinted in my volumes of “Once upon a Time.” Mr. Rutter, an enterprising bookseller of Shaftesbury, had proposed to me to publish a splen didly illustrated work, which he was preparing, on Fonthill, soon after the period when the wondrous building, of which every one had some marvel to relate but which no one had ever seen, was thrown open to those who chose to travel over Salisbury Plain, and pay a guinea for the long-coveted sight.
Bekfudi, says my tale, the superb merchant, had gone on for many moons building and embellishing his mosque, and living in a round of selfish enjoy ment. But gradually Bekfudi found there was a limit to his extravagance. Bekfudi was in debt. He resolved to invite all Samarah to “see his mosque, and purchase his curiosities. For three moons all Samarah went mad. Away ran the idle and the busy to scramble up Bekfudi’s tower,—to wander about his long galleries upon carpets from Cairo,—to touch his gold censers, or to pore upon his curious pictures. As to his books, Bekfudi carefully locked them up. He was a great commentator, and his relish for theological speculations led him to fear that his performances might introduce him to too close an acquaintance with the mufti and the cadi.”
I was amongst the curious, and had an agreeable holiday. But some months later I went to Fonthill to assist the worthy quaker bookseller of Shaftesbury in getting up his quarto. Fonthill had then passed into the possession of Mr. Farquhar, in the negotiation for which purchase Mr. Phillips, the famous auctioneer of Bond Street, was the agent. He stipulated for the purchase of Fonthill and everything which it contained:
“‘I will purchase thy lands and thy mosques, and thy silken draperies, and thy woven carpets, and thy golden vessels, and thy jewels, and thy books, and thy pictures, and all that thy palace contains; and here, without, I have twenty drome daries laden with four hundred thousand sequins, which shall be thine.’ Bekfudi was in a rage, but the eloquence of the dromedaries prevailed; and that rdght the little Jew locked up the mosque with the airs of a master.”
At this juncture I went to Fonthill. Artists were there making drawings. Journalists were there writing elaborate paragraphs, with a slight tendency to puff. My friend Stedman Whitwell was with me, and we rambled freely over the American gardens, partook of the choice fruit of the hothouses, and laid a sumptuous table every day. To me the ostensible lord of the place, the clever auctioneer, was particularly civil. The first night I was led by him through a long corridor apart from the saloons and galleries of this architectural marvel, and was instiled in a chamber of state, where the hangings of the bed were of velvet, and the chairs were of ebony reputed to have belonged to Wolsey. I sat in a reverie, moralizing, upon the probable dispersion of these splendid things, when I heard a whirr—my wax candle was suddenly extinguished—the bat that had dwelt in the gorgeous draperies was hovering about me. I was glad to creep into the downy bed. But I could not sleep. “Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs?”
There were other’s to whom sleep was that night more difficult to be secured than to myself. Two or three adventurous artists—I think George Cattermole was of the number—elected to lodge in the dormitories of the great tower, some hundred and fifty feet above the floor from which it sprang. The wind rose; the storm grew louder and louder; the frail structure rocked, as Gulliver’s cage rocked in the eagle’s beak. The terrified guests rushed down the broad stairs, and sat drearily in the dark saloon till the daybreak gave them assurance of safety. But I am rambling from my Episode of Vathek.
“Within a week the superb merchant began to indulge a wish for the possession’of some of his former most splendid baubles; he bethought him that his free habit of expressing his thoughts in the broad margins of his beautiful manuscripts might one day cause some awkward inquiries.”
I was taken by my host to the Library. “You are free,” he said, “to make any transcript you please of marginal notes on these books. I have sent an invitation to Hazlitt to come also; but I hear that he has not got beyond Winterslow Hut.” Something was whispered about a new book, to be called “Fly Leaves from Fonthill.” My curiosity was roused, though I shrank from making profit by book or article out of my notes. In truth, as far as I could trace, there was little in these volumes to, alarm their annotator or interest the public. I need not have tested my conscience. When the Library had been glanced at by profane eyes the object was accomplished.
“The articles,” says the Episode, “were selected, but the little Jew had yet to name the price. Bekfudi raved and tore his hair when a fourth of his four hundred thousand sequins were demanded for what had cost even him not a tenth of the sum.” (309-312)
Without this background, “An unpublished Episode of Vathek” must seem a literary oddity with only superficial connection to Beckford’s novel. With Knight’s little memoir, it becomes a biting satire, where Bekfudi is Beckford, and the mosque with the tall minaret is Fonthill Abbey itself, which was constructed unsoundly, the dangerous tower eventually collapsing in 1825; and the 400,000 sequins equivalent to the £330,000 price Fonthill Abbey and all its contents sold for. How many contemporaries were sufficiently familiar with the situation to recognize the satire is difficult to say, but it is in the nature of things that the punchline to a joke may be lost to history—unless someone took the pains to explain it, some decades later.
I suspect it was the lack of any supernatural element in “An unpublished Episode of Vathek,” rather than its satirical nature, which has prevented its wider exploitation. At the time, Knight could hardly have known there were more episodes of Vathek forthcoming, and made no attempt to carry the hoax further. It speaks well of Clark Ashton Smith that, with Lovecraft’s encouragement, he entered into the enterprise of finishing Beckford’s fragment with an open heart and an eye toward producing a work as weird as Beckford himself managed, far away from the literary jests of bookmen.
Eldritch Fappenings This review concerns a work with adult Lovecraft themes and graphic art. Reader discretion advised.
Right and proper gentlemen, your attention, please. This is a public announcement: Room 308 Graphics & Publishing will no longer pursue games supplement production. Newly completed, the long-anticipated Call of Cthulhu adventure supplement The Mysteries of Mesoamerica, which was to be RM308’s premier publication, will instead be published by Pagan Publishing with an estimated release date as Summer 2008.
My apologies.
As the lone chief editor, operations manager, financial coordinator, sales representative, and sole artist, illustrator and designer for the entire company, I laboured for several years to get The Mysteries of Mesoamerica, a lavishly illustrated 150-page opus and RM308’s premier publication, into production, devoting many hundreds of hours, early mornings and late evenings, weekends and holidays — every spare scrap of free time — to its design and development, anticipating my return to the games publishing forum. But as 2007 came to a close and I began final preparations for MoM’s release — at the same time preparing the foundation for the next supplement, The Mysteries of the Old West, Volume I (like ‘Mesoamerica, another monster supplement in excess of 175 pages!) — I realized that it would be impossible for RM308 to continue as it had. It was simply too much for one artist: rendering cover art, interior illustrations, NPC portraits, maps, spot art and layout, and struggling to maintain the production schedule of a respectable, marketable games publisher. As the sole proprietor, I concluded that RM308 could never become what I’d originally intended it to be.
It must be said that I had meanwhile also grown increasingly disenchanted and frustrated (again) with the games industry’s orthodoxy, mediocrity, vapidity and apathy. Especially where Lovecraft and roleplaying are concerned, I feel strongly that too many bubbly, juvenile, tender-hearted milksops have infested the genre: Pollyannas promoting a kinder, gentler version of the Cthulhu Mythos by way of Cthulhu plush dolls, Elder Sign earrings, ‘Niggurath nursery rhymes, Miskatonic Christmas carols, and buttloads of other flippant silliness.
And it’s not just the gaming industry. The general population of devotees among “Lovecraftian circles” suffers from a fairy tale misconception of the Mythos, one that I believe would turn poor Howard in his grave if he could see the candy-ass travesty that his grand universe has become. The mainstream Mythos is a dumbed-down and diluted, popularized and trivialized, emasculated cartoon, wholly separate from the dark, unutterable, obscene and blood-soaked savagery that is the true essence of the Mythos, and my contempt for this fashionable, New Age, Hello Kitty Lovecraft is well known.
So no more games. RM308 hereby retires from its ambitions at roleplaying publication. Again, my apologies, especially to Brian Appleton and John Crowe, my trusted colleagues and brothers-in-arms. Room 308 Graphics & Publishing will now concentrate its efforts on the development of my former personal works, Black Sands: Betrothed (the original), Black Sands: Catalogue of the Ten Thousand Churches, and Black Sands: Temple of the Compass. This “creative course correction” will be more manageable and feasible than full-time game supplement production, and will more faithfully reflect my personal (hardcore) concepts of the greater Mythos. More importantly, the rendering of these books will better serve and honour my lord and master, the Great Phæraoh Ahau Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, Father of Knives, Cæsar of the Ten Thousand Tongues and Architect of the Monument of the Great Rain — blessings be upon His name! I’ve long considered my personal works to be secondary to CoC, but no longer.
Previews will soon be available for your inspection at my new website: www.RM308.com, and I hope to receive your continued support.
Blair Reynolds died in 2021. A few who knew him or admired his work marked his passing (“Blair Reynolds has left the building”). In the few short years after, much of his presence and memory have vanished from the internet. The above message was posted on the Yog-Sothoth.com forums, now defunct and unlikely to rise again. Blair Reynolds’ website, rm308.com, is long gone, although the Internet Archive contains bits and pieces of what it was. Most of his self-published work remains largely unavailable in hardcopy. Perhaps in five or ten years someone will contact the family, scrape through the archives, and put together an artist retrospective. Maybe then we’ll remember Blair Reynolds for who he was and what he did.
The Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game was first released in 1981. Heavily influenced by RuneQuest (1978) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977), CoC brought then-contemporary ideas of roleplaying gaming to then-contemporary ideas of what Lovecraftian horror and the Cthulhu Mythos were. By the end of the decade, however, things were shifting. Horror roleplaying was moving in different directions (Vampire: the Masquerade would be published in 1991), and Lovecraftian horror was becoming more open and accessible to new voices, further from the rigid categorization of the Mythos under August Derleth.
In 1990, John Tynes founded Pagan Publishing, a small group that put out a Call of Cthulhu gaming fanzine called The Unspeakable Oath. This would be the starting point of what would become Delta Green and a variety of contemporary Mythos fiction that spun out of that, reworking and reimagining Lovecraft’s Mythos in new ways (for more on the history of Pagan Publishing, see Shannon Appelcline’s Pagan Publishing: 1990–Present). What struck most readers first and foremost was the cover by Blair Reynolds:
Reynolds’ artwork was featured on all of the issues of The Unspeakable Oath through 8/9 in 1993. It is probably Reynolds’ best-known work, stylistically distinct, often featuring a combination of photorealism, gore, nudity, and ritual elements that many found suggestive, tantalizing, and disturbing. Some of the effect, with distinct foreground characters against a detailed but darker background, suggests a multimedia-like approach, layering elements on top of each other to form the final composition.
At the time, Call of Cthulhu artwork wasn’t transgressive. Decent artists worked for Chaosium, but no one pushed the envelope in terms of what was acceptable for a roleplaying product in the 1990s; there was little gore, little nudity, and the monsters and cultists could often look more goofy than menacing. In an era when horror roleplaying was moving toward a more mature audience with various White Wolf games like Vampire: The Masquerade, it took more than tentacles and fish-people to really sell Lovecraftian horror as being something more than quaint. It needed something fresh, artwork that took chances and hinted at forbidden rites and rituals, monstrosity and corruption. Blair Reynolds provided that edge of mystery and taboo-breaking.
In 1994, Reynolds left Pagan Publishing to form his own Room 308 Publishing, and although he provided some more artwork for other gaming projects, his focus turned to a creator-owned work: Black Sands #1 (1996), the first part of a self-published black-and-white graphic novel written and illustrated by Blair Reynolds with additional works of fiction provided by James Reynolds.
“Black Sands: Betrothed” runs 26 pages. The pages are not laid out as a comic strip, but are a collection of artistically arranged art, some of it sexually explicit, and text. The text consists of excerpts from the 1924 journal of Frank Orand Buhtbaumbe, recounting a dream given to him by the Vision Serpent about his wife Allison, during their honeymoon in Haiti. Buhtbaumble watches his wife have sex with the human form of the Vision Serpent, and in the morning finds her gone; he consults with a friend, Dr. Henry Tiller, in New Orleans, and discovers that it was Nyarlathotep that took his bride. Buhtbaumbe seeks her at an ancient temple and kills many cultists—only to discover that was his wife’s plan all along. Then he wakes from the dream.
Cover and sample pages:
In the introduction to this issue, Reynolds explains:
This is a “cyclic” story, which means simply that portions of the book – Parts I, II, and III – will trade places back and forth each issue. The main body of each issue will always be entitled “Black Sands”, and for the Premiere Issue the main body is devoted to Part II, which takes place in the early 20th century. In addition to the main body, two “preludes” set the stage for upcoming issues, giving you an idea of what is ahead. The preludes for this issue include Part I (prehistory) and Part II (near future). Issue Two will see Part II (20th century) sliding into a prelude spot while Part I moves into the Black Sands main body, and the “meeting” of Hiuto and Messala will be illustrated in full detail, as the event deserves. Part III will take another prelude position in Issue Two and then come full circle to the main body – and the forefront – in Issue Three. Issues afterward will continue in this cyclic fashion, and in this manner the Black Sands saga will unfold.
It was an ambitious plan, and sadly wouldn’t quite come to fruition. But we can see the outline of what Reynolds hoped to accomplish.
The first prelude is “Tunc” (then), which takes the form of a prose account by Commander Torrence MacLaren, 22 April 2103 that runs for two prose pages. There is a heavy Delta Green vibe, a sense that this is a future of secrets where the Mythos is spilling into the open, and that MacLaren is more than he appears.
The second prelude is “Nunc” (now), two pages of prose from the journal of Onufari Iramus El’de Shaideene Messala, in an indeterminate year, but implicitly pre-gunpowder. This is the first appearance of the characters Hiuto and Messala mentioned in the introduction, and based on the last line, their “meeting” would have been vivid, if it had been published:
She was left speckled with the fluids of her escort when I finally go to her, tied her and left her face-down on one of the mattresses.
I made certain to stand where she could see me while I undressed. I wanted her to see the scars, and the marks of faith. And when I opened the haversack I’d brought in with me, it was especially important for her to see the pale mask I withdrew . . . . . . . as well as the polished metal cylinders and needles.
The remaining six pages consist of four works in the form of “files” for some unnamed group or agency. Two of these are labeled in the introduction “Templar File SK60550/312G” and “Templar File HD86179/782V” by James Reynolds, with supporting artwork by Blair. Again, there’s a strong Delta Green vibe to all of these, the idea of hidden narratives of the Mythos in a contemporary setting, buried under layers of government secrecy. Very much in the vein of what would become the SCP wiki format, although less structured.
“SK60550/312G” involves an experiment where student subjects are dosed with the hallucinogenic excrement of a newly discovered insect species. The results are strongly implied to be nasty, although a lot of blanks are left in the record.
“HD86179/782V” is slightly more infamous; the “Dogon Project” has a child born and raised in complete darkness with minimal human contact, echoing various feral child legends and Harry Harlow’s infamous monkey studies. This is the part which gets, if not exactly graphic, more transgressive than typical:
In his twelfth year he discovered masturbation. I still wonder what his source of fantasy was. He even used to try to engage in sex with his feces and food.
Yet there was one particularly interesting twist beyond that:
When he turned nineteen he had formed his own type of language. His grunts and movements were a way of talking to himself. This seemed perfectly natural to me until one day he formed a word, a word that I knew all too well: CTHULHU!
Sample pages from the files:
Black Sands #1 (1996) is as vivid today as it was thirty years ago. There are still boundaries that fiction and art rarely approach, and while I wouldn’t qualify any of this as pornography or even erotica, there is no doubt that this is in the same vein as the Linda Lovecraft anthologies in terms of being very explicit, mature works, with none of the humor or silliness that often cuts the Lovecraftian horror like baking soda in cocaine. If there’s a criticism, it might be that the writing is a little too obsessed with the question of good and evil, too focused on contrasting what the characters are seeing with Christian definitions of good and evil.
Black Sands #2 and subsequent issues would never emerge; in the 90s he returned to illustration for roleplaying games, and then stuck mostly with prose fiction. However, there was a sort of sequel in the 2010s. In 2013, Room 308 published Black Sands: Catalog of the Ten Thousand Churches, Journal No. 1, which republishes the entirety of the “Betrothed” sequence, along with prose chapters. Here, Blair Reynolds abandoned his original plan and rewrote the material as Col. Franklin Mackenzie Keyes’ field notes on various Lovecraftian cults he had encountered in his adventures.
Journal No. 1 was followed by an edited, much less explicit second edition in 2019, which alters the original “Betrothed” art to remove an erect phallus and various vulvas. This was followed by Journal No.2 (2019) and Journal No. 3 (2021) shortly before Blair Reynolds’ death. All of these volumes are illustrated, though nowhere to the degree of Black Sands #1 (1996), and the later volumes make considerable use of public domain and stock art, altered for purpose. They make for fun reading, nowhere near as edgy as the original Black Sands, but with plenty of wit and quite a lot of thought behind the various cults and cultic shenanigans.
It is a sad legacy. Blair Reynolds’ work, prose and art, is largely forgotten today; his great project of Black Sands was never fully completed, at least not according to his original vision, and even the few books he did put out near the end of his life are rare. All are out of print, except for Kindle editions of Black Sands: Catalog of the Ten Thousand Churches, Journal No. 1 (without the “Betrothed” comic), Journal No. 2, and Journal No. 3, which are still available for now.
Maybe, one day, that will change. I hope so. More people deserve to see what Blair Reynolds achieved, or tried to.
One summer between semesters at university, I visited some family in Portland, Oregon for a couple of weeks. There was a small hole-in-the-wall bookstore, the name long forgotten, and no longer there; little more than two long walls full of books through which browsers circled in a shuffling line. My prize that day was a slim little volume of ghostly and occult stories titled Unholy Relics (1947) by M. P. Dare, whose name I did not recognize.
It turned out I had read Dare before, because a few stories had appeared in various anthologies, and I recognized “The Demoniac Goat” from The Shub-Niggurath Cycle. What I didn’t know was anything about M. P. Dare. That would come later, in bits and pieces over the years. An amateur archaeologist and historian, a journalist and bookman, thief and forger, and finally: suicide. I suspect the criminal convictions, the divorces, the accusations, and his final resort to poison have raised M. P. Dare’s profile higher than his fiction alone would have; even the most generous literary critic has noted that Unholy Relics is cruder than M. R. James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and other volumes, for all that Dare seems to be following in James’ footsteps.
Near the end of his life, Dare went on the BBC radio and gave an account of the ghosts he had encountered in his life. It is his most explicit statement of a belief in the supernatural that survives, and has long been obscure, first published in The Listener 21 Sep 1961, and reprinted only twice: in Ghosts & Scholars #18 (1994), and in Ash-Tree Press reissue of Unholy Relics (1997), where it augments Reg Meuross’ biographical introduction.
This is a story of M. P. Dare that most people have not heard: his own story, in his own words.
※
Ghosts I Have Met
by M. P. Dare
THROUGHOUT THE AGES, men have believed intensely in ghosts; they have feared them and have developed an elaborate magic to propitiate them or to counteract their influence. I have myself seen Africans block up the door of a mud hut, knock a hole in the far side, and rush their corpse backwards several times round the hut in order to confuse the ghost and prevent its returning to plague the living.
In any intelligent gathering, if the conversation turns on the subject of ghosts, one will find three classes of people: those who will not believe that ghosts exist, because they have not seen one; those who defend the ghost’s existence because they firmly believe they have seen one; and the agnostic who refuses to commit himself either way. As a person who, for over thirty-five years, has made an active study of occult matters, let me say at once that I belong to the second class: I firmly believe that ghosts do exist; and I would like to give evidence to support that belief—not at second-hand but from my personal experiences.
A question I am always being asked, as an occultist, is: ‘What is a ghost?’, which is extraordinarily difficult to answer. One reply is that a ghost is the disembodied spirit of a dead person, still walking the earth, and for some reason still ‘tied’ to it. Another is that it is only a ‘thought-form’, projected by our own subconscious minds and built up, as it were, into the visible image of a dead person, from vibrations left behind him at the point of death. It is particularly difficult to arrive at a definition, because some kinds of ghosts (or haunters) are never seen—such as the poltergeist, or throwing-ghost, which hurls things about. Again, we find well-verified cases of the apparition of a living person being seen. However, I will try to avoid all controversy.
I have inherited an abnormally developed psychic sense, and had my first encounter with a ghost as a young student at the age of eighteen. In the long vacation I was staying with an aunt in an old country cottage. Returning at dusk one evening, I said ‘Good-evening’ to the dear old village woman everybody called Betty, who lived next door. She was struggling to open the ancient latch, so I went to help her and said: ‘What’s the matter, Betty, can’t you get in?’ She said nothing, smiled very sweetly, and vanished. At first I did not realise what had happened: she had looked so solid, in her usual Victorian bonnet and short cape. When I got over the shock I realized that old Betty had been dead for the past eight months. When I told my aunt she said she ought to have warned me that she had often seen Betty fumbling with her latch. The old lady had been born next door, lived there eighty-two years, and died there.
That, I think you will agree, is a good case, with two independent witnesses; and my aunt had said nothing to me previously which could have put an ‘image’ of Betty into my mind, causing a vision of her to be produced sub-consciously.
It may be said that this class of experience proves survival after death, or it may merely mean that somehow a projected image of Betty was built up from vibrations surviving in the place where she had been so happy for so long—for it is not always those who have been unhappy in life who are earthbound, and who appear as ghosts.
Incidentally, why is it that some people can see ghosts often and with ease, but others never have that experience in a lifetime? I have known cases of two people being together, one seeing a ghost and the other not. Perhaps an analogy with radio will explain it—the suggestion that if you are not tuned in to the right wave-length of the vibrations which cause the visible image, then you will never see a ghost.
Another happy ghost I have known was in an ancient Midland manor house, where I was present on the day that a Tudor doorway, stairs, and a secret room were discovered. It is the home of an old family who were Catholic recusants under the harsh reign of Elizabeth. The maid, bringing in the first course at dinner that evening, dropped the lot in fright and gasped out that there was an old man with a white beard in the passage staring at her. We rushed out, and saw, framed in the Tudor doorway, the dignified figure of an Elizabethan priest, with a small white beard, dressed in a black cassock. The figure smiled, turned slightly towards my host, raised a hand in blessing, and said distinctly, in what you might call a loud whisper, ‘Pax tibi, filius!’ (Peace to you, my son). My host being speechless, I replied: ‘Et tibi pax, Pater’ (And peace to you, Father). Then I asked him, speaking very slowly and distinctly: ‘Why are you here? You have frightened the serving girl’. He replied: ‘I am able to come to you because you have found my room. I was happy here. I was the family priest’.
Up to now, he had seemed material; I could not see the doorway through him; but now he seemed to melt away like a mist. We explained to the servants that they need not fear this gentle ghost. That was twenty-five years ago, and I heard recently that he is still seen sometimes, but never speaks, and if questioned seems unable to reply.
This experience raises several problems. For instance, is this apparition a spirit, earthbound by ties of affection? Why did he not appear before his room was found, to lead us to it? That would have been in accord with the idea that all ghosts have a mission to execute (an idea, by the way, which 5 is not always correct). I do not think this ghost was a ‘mind-projection’ from ourselves, because the maid, who knew nothing about the secret room and recusant priests, saw it before we did.
Another question: Why cannot the priest, if really a spirit from some limbo beyond the grave, answer questions about his present state? This is one of the hardest problems we have in the study of ghosts, for it nearly happens; and when a ghost does answer questions its replies are vague and unsatisfactory. A churchman might explain it by saying that we are not permitted to know in advance the conditions of our future state.
Another ghost of my experience, in yet another English manor house, really did live up to tradition by having a mission; and this one belonged to the class of unhappy haunters. Also, it was an interesting case of a haunter that was never seen. Once its mission was accomplished it ceased to trouble the living. This was in a house near Rockingham, where the family suddenly became the victims of a most unpleasant and annoying form of haunting. It centred on a beautiful little Georgian writing-desk in the bedroom of the young daughter, who was thirteen years of age. It is a curious fact that many ghost-disturbances of this type seem concentrated on young girls on the threshold of womanhood: they seem to be a transmitting medium for the exercise of these violent forces. The trouble began when the girl, awakened by a noise of heavy tramping about the room, saw every drawer in the desk being wrenched open by some unseen force, and the contents pitched out on to the floor. The trouble stopped a few days later, but recurred regularly at monthly intervals. I was asked to investigate, occupied this room, and also saw the desk handled violently and heard the noises.
Concluding that a family ghost with a mission was responsible, and that its search was connected with the desk, I had it searched by an expert, who found no fewer than six secret drawers in it. In one of those was a packet of old faded letters, and these gave us the clue. They were written in 1756 to the son of the house by a village girl whom he had seduced, and who threatened suicide if he did not marry her. I feel absolutely certain that this was his room, and his desk, and that one of his last, intense thoughts when dying was of horror and fear lest someone should find these letters; and I am sure it was his uneasy spirit searching for them. The head of the house and I burnt those letters, and there was no further trouble.
Some of these hauntings by ghosts, both seen and unseen, are much more violent and malevolent than this one, and it is not wise lightly to laugh at them. I remember one awful house, an empty bungalow I went to inspect in India, with a view to renting it, where the atmosphere of evil and death that poured out as soon as one opened a certain door was absolutely incredible. My Great Dane dog, naturally a fearless animal, felt it, and cringed in terror. Enquiry revealed that in that room, five years before, a man had gone mad, killed his wife, and hacked the body to pieces. I did not actually see a ghost—I bolted hastily out of the house after opening that door. But I later learned that an Indian acquaintance who had tried to live in the place had to leave it because of its evil atmosphere. He told me that he had seen, three times, shadowy forms struggling in that same room.
This was certainly a very unhallowed spot; but even so holy a place as a church, surrounded by daily prayer and good influences, can be haunted by an unhappy personality, and in one of two such cases within my own experience I have not only seen the ghost, but recognized it. Here the building was a modern church attached to the Dominican priory in a Midland city. Not only myself, but the three priests officiating at High Mass, and several people known to me in the congregation, saw the apparition. What we saw, to our astonishment, was a fourth priest, in addition to the three who should alone have been there, and we recognized him as a Dominican of the house, who had died a month before in great spiritual distress (it was assumed), because after death his papers revealed a scandal in his private life. Hence he was haunting his priory, where several of the brethren saw him flitting about the corridors. After a special exorcism rite, and a Mass for the Dead had been said, he ceased to haunt.
‘The evil that men do lives after them’, said Shakespeare. How true this often is of the ghost-world, from the English Midlands to the jungles of India.
M. P. Dare was not the protagonist of some M. R. James story made flesh, though there are hints in his biography that maybe he wanted to be. This is nowhere more obvious than when comparing some of his anecdotes of ghostly encounters with his sole story collection, Unholy Relics and Other Uncanny Tales. In the introduction to that book, Dare wrote:
These tales are fiction—and yet not fiction. They are all founded upon actual experiences of the author in the realms of the uncanny. The antiquary, perhaps because he is in close touch with the human thought of all time, that is not dead, but sometime sleepeth, comes more into contact with that dim borderline region than most people.
Did Dare actually mean this, or was it just a “Based on a true story” line to help sell the book? Did he start out as critical and slowly become a believer, or did he always carry a belief in the supernatural that only publicly came out relatively late in life? If we accept “Ghosts I Have Met” as true, then Dare may have held a belief for much of his life, and that changes how we read some of his stories. Certainly, the incident of the letters in the secret drawer coincides closely with Dare’s story “The Haunted Drawers” (although thankfully he ages up the lady in that story).
There might be other elements of autobiography buried in Dare’s fiction, incidents from his life that informed or inspired his thin legacy. No one has yet collected all the bits and pieces of that life in one place. There are essays in The Leicester Mail during the 1920s that indicate an abiding interest in archaeology, history, and local superstitions (e.g., “Witchcraft and Superstition in Leicestershire – No. 1” by M. P. Dare), and here, too, we might wonder if a bit of Leicestershire folklore influenced his story “An Abbot’s Magic.”
Perhaps, someday, a scholar will have the patience and resources to correlate the contents of a broken life, like an archaeologist reassembling the shards of a cursed pot. What new light might be shed on these old tales, if only we knew what Dare was drawing on when he wrote them? It would be fitting if the key to Unholy Relics, the part that made the stories more than just Jamesian pastiche, was Dare himself.
The following review concerns a work of Lovecraftian pornography. It includes nude images and will discuss relevant matters of sexuality in detail. Reader discretion advised.
Ignacio Noé (1965– ) and Ricardo Barreiro (1949–1999) were two of the Argentinian comic creators who found a niche in European comics, their work often bouncing between Spain, France, and Italy, with translations in many different markets. Their collaboration El Converto Infernal first appeared in the Spanish-language adult comics magazine Kiss Comix in 1995, serialized from issue 49 to issue 56, running 62 pages, lavishly painted and drawn by Noé. The result was popular enough to be translated into several languages, and an English translation by Robert Legault was published in a lightly censored edition by NBM in 1997 as The Convent of Hell.
As the title suggests, The Convent of Hell is a work of nunsploitation. The roots of this genre go deep in European art and literature, including historical accounts that amount to “nuns behaving badly,” like the Nun of Watton, but most contemporary scholars point to La Religieuse (1792) by Denis Diderot, a sympathetic novel about a nun trapped in the legal and social constraints of her order and unable to leave, as a turning point. The work both emphasizes the lack of personal freedom that the nun Suzanne Simonin experiences and offers sharp criticism of the Catholic Church and its institutions. This set the stage for the main erotic line, where nunsploitation erotica is primarily a variation on the “women in prison,” but offering tangential and complementary taboos including lesbianism, sex work, BDSM, and blasphemy—themes which all crop up in greater or lesser degree in works like The Devils(1971), directed by Ken Russell.
First panel, showcasing the remote and isolated location of the fortress-like convent.
Openly erotic explorations of the theme varied widely. Robert E. Howard, for example, owned a copy of The Merry Order of St. Bridget, a flagellation novel involving nuns, and captured the central theme of imprisoned passion in a poem:
NUN
I have anchored my ship to a quiet port; A land that is holy and blest. But I gaze through my bars at the tempest’s sport And I long for the sea’s unrest. —Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, 23 Jun 1926, Collected Letters1.98
Exploitation filmmakers, comic book artists, and writers in the 1970s became especially lavish in using nuns, working out several variations on the basic theme, especially in countries with a strong Catholic influence such as Italy, Spain, France, and their diaspora. Nor was Lovecraftian media immune. The underground comic Tales from the Leather Nun (1973) includes one of the first original Lovecraftian comics, “Tale of the Leather Nun’s Grandmother” by writer/artist Jaxon, who owes her youth and beauty to the work of the wizard Alhazred—and who has accidentally turned her vulva into a portal into the cosmic domain of Cthulhu and other eldritch entities.
Barreiro and Noé were quite evidently drawing from an eclectic mix of resources in composing their work, and the graphic novel has a frankly erotic character playing out to many interests. There are elements of sadomasochism, bondage, lesbianism, Satanism, and corruption that come together with supernatural elements. After a brutal opening involving the sexual torture of a novitiate, the nuns uncover a hidden locked door in the basement (possibly a reference to Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy), which inspires in the Mother Superior a dream of a Lovecraftian-flavored Satanic ritual:
While the Church of Satan does include a few Lovecraftian elements, the actual being that emerges in this dream is a monstrously-endowed satyr. An older nun manages to find a reference to the door in a handy copy of the Necronomicon…
The mother superior of the convent doesn’t listen to her, however, and forces the door open, leading to an eruption of phallic-headed tentacles reminiscent of Japanese hentai in one of the most infamous scenes from the graphic novel.
Which gets explicit and quite graphic, leading to the afflicted nun’s death and the sealing of the door. Douglas E. Cowan, who summarizes the graphic novel in greater detail in his book The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination, waxes clinical:
When the locks are broken, though, the nuns shrink back in fear as this time a true Lovecraftian horror bursts into the room. A flurry of tentacles, each rubbery arm tipped with a sinister phallus, emerges from whatever unearthly space lies beyond the door. Seizing the first available Marionite sister, it quickly envelops and strips the screaming woman. Fondling her ever more intmately, the tentacled abomination progresses to vaginal, anal, and oral rape—physical manifestations of everything she has sworn to abjure as a consecrated virgin. Although the other nuns are frozen in terror, with every new invasion of the young nun’s body a cut-away panel shows the effect on the Mother Superior, who grows increasingly turned on with each grotesque violation. Finally, the abbess orgasms as the Great Old one lifts the other woman high into the air, sexually impaled, every tentacular phallus ejaculating at once. A rain of eldritch sperm covers her body, and unable to withstand the supernatural assault, she dies naked on the rude stone floor.
We are never told her name. (111-112)
That night, the corrupted Mother Superior goes to unseal the door, and is interrupted by a messenger from God, a child-like angel.
Image truncated because no one needs to see a naked putto.
This sequence—where the corrupted Mother Superior nails the tiny angel to the door and then literally sucks the life out of them through their penis—was omitted from NBM’s edition of The Convent of Hell, probably out of fear that what it was depicting was too close, at least visually, to child sexual abuse material. There are anecdotes that even this mild self-censorship wasn’t sufficient; Steve Fentone in AntiCristo: The Bible of Nasty Nun Snema & Culture reports that: “[…] initial shipments of THE CONVENT OF HELL were reputedly stopped at the Canadian/US border, presumably for the books elements of bestiality and degradation.” (234)
With this sacrifice, the Mother Superior manages to summon a monstrously endowed Beelzebub through the door, in the form of a gigantic satyr. The corruption of the convent is soon complete in an orgy of sex and blood. After a chance encounter with a pair of newlyweds, the Vatican learns of the degradation and sends a special assault force with holy-water-blessed members and flamethrowers to deal with the Satanic infestation, destroy the demon, and block up the doorway once again.
This is not the first erotic comic work to invoke Lovecraftian names and themes; aside from the aforementioned Tales from the Leather Nun, there were works like the Italian comic Ramba, written by Marco Delizia; and the Young Witches series, which was created by Ricardo Barreiro and Francisco Solano López. The conflation of Lovecraftian elements with Satanic elements wasn’t uncommon in this respect, but neither is it really an attraction for those looking for Lovecraftian erotica, instead of Satanic porn with a thin skin of Lovecraftian elements. These few panels reproduced for this review contain basically all the Lovecraftian names and references across 64 pages of art.
El Convento Infernal is definitely a work of art. It is sacrilegious to the point of comedy; occasionally brutal, often over-the-top, yet the artwork is vivid and, as Cowan points out, often draws on classical works of Satanic imagery for reference. There is a vividness to the full-color artwork which is starkly at odds with the sometimes muddy shading of the black-and-white artwork that dominated Kiss Comix at the time. It is an exercise in excess where every episode seeks to grab the reader with at least one can’t-unsee-that image. In that respect, it is a success.
But does it go too far?
This is not a work that delves deep into the psychology of cloistered nuns, although there are hints of sexual repression and political considerations throughout the story; it is primarily, and always, a pornographic work, and some of the acts are violent and nonconsensual. There isn’t any actual bestiality, as Fentone mentions; the great hoofed goat with the enormous phallus is a demon. There is not technically any CSAM; it’s an angel. Yet it is definitely a dark fantasy, and one that is narratively built like a sexploitation horror film if there were no budget on special effects and the actresses would do absolutely anything in front of the camera.
Clark Ashton Smith was living in Auburn, California, when the Catholic order the Sisters of Mercy opened a convent within sight of his cabin in 1939/1940. He sometimes jokingly called it “the Nunnery of Averoigne,” and the sight of the nuns inspired a few poems. Most were relatively sedate affairs, but one speaks of the temptation of the forbidden:
IMPROBABLE DREAM
In my dream a nun, Proudly bosomed, lunar-pale, Danced naked in the sun.
El Convento Infernal is, in a much more explicit fashion, just such an improbable dream. More lavish, more detailed, and probably tripping the censors as obscene in some jurisdictions, yet in every sense a pure sexual fantasy that bespeaks a fascination with seeing the untouchable touched, the inviolate violated, witnessing the act of transgression against deeply ingrained cultural taboos.
Outside the United States, there have been multiple editions of this work collected in Spanish, French, and possibly other languages. The English edition has never been reprinted and today is quite scarce. Noé would return to Lovecraftian themes in 2023 when he provided a variant cover for Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu (Zenescope), which is evocative of his earlier work while being in no way tied to it.
Eando (“E and O”) Binder was the joint pseudonym of the brothers Earl Binder (4 Oct 1904–13 Oct 1966) and Otto Binder (26 Aug 1911–14 Oct 1974). The Binder brothers were writers for the pulp magazines in the 1930s, including science fiction pulps like Amazing and horror fiction pulps like Weird Tales, where they came to the attention of peers like H. P. Lovecraft. By 1939, Otto was doing the writing while Earl was acting as a literary agent, and in the same year they expanded from the pulps into the burgeoning comic book industry, where Otto would make his mark on characters like Captain Marvel and Superman, among many others.
In the 1950s, before the Comics Code Authority was established that would kill off most of the horror comics, the typical horror comic magazine was essentially an anthology featuring 2-4 short comics, featuring different characters, with a couple of pages of prose fiction. A ghoulish host might introduce the issue and stories and act as a bare-minimum framing narrative. The reason for this specific format could be cultural—various publishers aping the successful EC comics formula—but there are indications of other forces at work.
Comic books fell into part of a broader discussion on changing postal rates during the 1940s and 50s—critics claimed that the government was essentially subsidizing advertisers by allowing them to mail off periodicals primarily intended for advertising at lower rates—and, in part, mail censorship, as postal inspectors were the first line of blocking obscene publication (for more on which, see Obscenity in the Mails: Controls on Second-Class Privileges 1942-1957). However, the Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America Edition of 1940 and the Post Office Manual (1952) make no specific reference to comic books or give any guideline for the minimum number of pages of prose fiction in a periodical.
We do know some publications were denied as second-class mail; crossword puzzle magazines notably faced difficulties qualifying as second-class mail (cf. P.O.D. Docket Nos. 1/141; 1/147; 1/155 and 1/156), in part because of the lack of varied content. Report on second-class mail to the postmaster general (1946) by Charles A. Heiss does specifically discuss comic books and the percentage of comics, fiction, and advertising in a sample issue (the fiction coming to ~2.5 pages), so content was clearly an issue the USPS considered, though no guidelines are mentioned or given as to specific numbers of pages per issue. However, there are indications that there were informal guidelines stipulating such requirements. In one trial, a series of questions concerned comic magazines with second-class mail privileges:
Q. Each of these magazines contains not over two pages of textual matter? A. I wouldn’t say that.
Q. As a minimum? A. I wouldn’t say that. They usually tell their story in pictures.
Q. Do they have textual matter? A. I am comming to that.
Q. Can’t you tell me whether or not they have textual matter? A. Indeed they do.
Compare this to a letter and its answer in Blue Beetle #5 (1965):
Carl Barks recalled in one instance:
As explained in the entry for “Land Beneath the Ground” (US 13-02), the Gyro Gearloose stories that began in “Uncle Scrooge” No. 13 came about as a result of Western’s applying for a second class mailing permit for the comic. To gain second class privileges a periodical must contain at least two stories, each one featuring different characters. Barks turned to Gyro Gearloose, the inventor, to provide the required second feature.
Two stories had been completed before it was realized that no characters from the lead story could be used. In his 1969 list for Michael Barrier, Barks commented: “The four-page Gyro stories for Uncle S. #13 and #14 were sent back to me for changes. In the #13 story I’d used the nephews. Because of postal mailing laws, no characters used in other parts of the book could be used in the Gyro story. Hence the change to Mickey’s nephews. The character ‘Speedy’ in #14 was originally Donald.” —Applying For A Second Class Mailing
I have not found any print postal regulations from the 1940s, 50s, or 60s that specify a number of pages of non-comic material, or that stories may not share the lead character. Nor have I found anyone who cites a specific regulation or judicial ruling. However, I have found a judicial ruling which implies guidance on the matter was provided:
The publication with which we are concerned is printed monthly and is principally in comic strip form. Each issue features a special topic such as dogs, horses, Indians, the FBI, etc. […] By agreement at the hearing, ten issues of the publication published at the time of the application were introduced into evidence. The petitioner offered three later issues and counsel for the Director objected to this receipt into evidence. After the hearing he withdrew his objection when the Hearing Examiner indefinitely recessed the hearing because the Director would not appear to testify after being requested to do so by the Hearing Examiner. Each of these three later issues contain four separate stories on four subjects not connected with the principal topic of the issue. These are printed stories and articles rather than the comic strips which are the balance of the magazine. The petitioner added this matter upon the advice of the Director who had informed him that in the former format each issue of the publication was a book about a specific subject and not a periodical. After being so advised the petitioner made an effort to comply with the regulations and changed the format. There is nothing in the applicable regulations as to the content of a publication except to require that it must be for the purpose of “disseminating information of a public character” or “devoted to literature, the sciences, art or some special industry.” Section 132.224, Postal Manual. […] The fact that the Director did not tell him an exact number of pages which had to be devoted to other matter should not be held against the petitioner, especially since no regulation has been promulgated on this point. —P.O.D. Docket No. 1/158 (36 Feb 1960)
The indication is that at some point, one or more postal inspectors provided guidelines for what qualified a comic magazine as a periodical (second-class matter) instead of a book (third-class matter), and this became de facto standard industry practice, even if it might not have been put explicitly into writing and published as a federal regulation.
Whatever the actual cause, comics in the ’50s often featured brief, forgettable, potboilerish fiction, the vast majority of it not particularly noteworthy and written either anonymously or under pseudonyms. But…there’s also the occasional story from a recognizable name, such as “Fiend of Fire” as by Eando Binder, which was published in Beware! Terror Tales #2 (July 1952, Fawcett). This was almost certainly a solo work by Otto, dashed off quickly to fill an issue, but while it has been reprinted in various comic book reprints since entering the public domain, it has never been included in collections of the Binders’ pulp fiction, as far as I’ve been able to determine.
※
Fiend of Fire
by Eando Binder
HARLOW MAXON felt pretty good as he stuffed his pipe and prepared to settle back for a smoke. He was safe now. His big problem had been settled—completely. He could relax now and enjoy life.
Maxon lit the match and held it to his pipe, ready for a good smoke. But suddenly, the match flame hissed and sprang toward his eyes, like a live thing! With a yelp of pain and fright, Maxon flung it down and stamped on it, breathing hard.
Why had the match acted like that? Maxon calmed down. “Oh, just a defective one,” he told himself. “I’ll try another.”
Lighting another match, he held it gingerly at arm’s length, in case it would act up too, but it’s flame was normal and steady. Sighing in relief, he brought it to his pipe, puffing. But again, amazingly, the flame suddenly expanded lividly and hissed toward his face as if to burn his eyes out!
Cursing, bewildered, Maxon flung it down. But the flame was not out and the rug caught fire, fiercely. It did not seem like a normal flame at all as a patch of rug swiftly burned and widened. Maxon had all he could do to stamp it out with both feet, crushing it underfoot!
Maxon stood there panting, but more puzzled than frightened. Matches just shouldn’t act that way. And he was annoyed too. How could he light his pipe and enjoy a smoke? Well, skip it, he told himself reluctantly.
He settled back and picked up the paper, forgetting the incident. What did it matter, for there, in the news columns, were the words that made him safe—MAN DIES IN FLAMING AUTO! The text went on to state that driving down the street, John Begget’s car suddenly caught fire and the trapped driver was burned to death within, an unfortunate accident.
“Accident,” gloated Harlow Maxon to himself. “Sure it was an accident—planned by yours truly! I killed him, but nobody suspects!”
It was a common enough story. Maxon had borrowed heavily from John Begget, his friend, to indulge his taste for gambling. Losing steadily, he had kept putting off Begget, until in anger, Begget threatened to have him arrested and jailed. Maxon had been unable to raise the money. So what else was there to do but silence Begget? Get him out of the way? That solved everything—at least in the unscrupulous mind of Maxon. And so he had secretly planted the thermite-bomb in Begget’s car, leading to its explosion and complete burning.
That had been this morning. And now, tonight, Maxon was a free man, safe from the law. He dropped the paper with a satisfied smirk, settled back, and started to light his pipe.
But he had forgotten. Again there was a deadly hiss as the small flame grew and shot at his face like a fireball! Maxon stamped it out in a hurry, choking, with a slow dread clutching at his heart. Looking in a mirror, Maxon saw that his eyebrows had been singed that time.
Cursing, eager for his smoke, Maxon went into the kitchen and turned on one burner of the gas-range. It was automatic. He needed no matches. But at the moment the burner went on, its blue flame gave a hiss and shot toward him in a long searing tongue like a striking snake!
Maxon staggered back. The flame seemed to search for him, curling and twisting through the air. Horrified, Maxon dropped to his knees and was thus able to reach up and turn off the gas. The flame died just before it reached the hair on his head.
Trembling and shaken, Maxon went back to the living room and pulled an easy chair up to the fireplace. He had lit the fire before and needed to bask in its warm glow, and recover from his jitters over the weird events that had just happened.
“Ah, this is better,” he mumbled, stretching his hands toward the dancing flames.
But abruptly, they were dancing flames no longer. With a roaring hiss much louder than before, a sheet of flame burst from the fireplace toward Maxon. Screeching, Maxon leaped from the chair and stumbled back, barely in time, out of range.
The long ribbon of flame from the fireplace seemed to reach for him like clutching hands, even though he ran the length of the room. After him the fiery hands came, as if there was no escape!
And then Maxon was in the corner of the room; trapped. He turned at bay, moaning. He waited for the searing hot touch on his body, shuddering, whining in fear . . .
But then, most eerie of all, the flame took form slowly—human form. And its hiss became a mocking voice that said—”No, I won’t kill you this soon. Not before you suffer torment and know what I am. Look at me, Harlow Maxon! Don’t you see who I am?”
Maxon’s eyes bulged, taking in the human shape that the flame had formed. “No, it can’t be!” Maxon moaned. “It can’t be you—John Begget!”
“Yes, John Begget, your victim, hissed back the fire-spirit. “In flames I died—and in all flames I live again! Don’t try to understand, Maxon. It is something beyond the mundane. I was able to make those match flames dart in your eyes before. I made the gas flame leap at you. And now I’ve come for you out of the fire-place. Call me a fire ghost or whatever you will, but now you will die as I died—in fiery torment!”
And with a ghastly, hollow laugh, the fire spirit clutched for Maxon with its flaming hands . . .
But Maxon remembered the fire-extinguisher nearby, enclosed in a wall niche. Somehow he grabbed it out and swung the nozzle at the flame form. The fine spray beat it back. The fire ghost retreated before him and Maxon reached the fireplace, putting out the whole fire there. Only then did he stop, feeling that he had won out in this mad duel to the death with the fire fiend.
But one last ember glowed, and a somber hiss echoed in the air, forming words. “You have won for now, Maxon. But you can’t escape me. Remember, I can strike at you from any flame—anywhere—anytime! You can’t escape me!”
“Yes, I will!” shouted back Maxon. “It’s simple—I’ll just avoid all flame. It’s as simple as that!”
In the following days, Maxon carried out his grim campaign. He stopped smoking. He would never light a match again. And he could do without fires in the fireplace easily enough. As long as he kept away from flame, he was safe. In his daily life among others at the track or gambling casino, it was not hard to keep away from those lighting matches nearby. With care, he could keep out of range of an open fire, in any form.
He had one bad moment when some friends dropped in one evening, surprising him on his birthday. One of the girls came out of the kitchen with a birthday cake and lighted candles, as they all sang the familiar birthday song to him. Maxon stared horrified and then dumped a bottle of soda, snuffing out the candles. He had acted like a maniac and ruined the evening, but once more he had foiled the fire ghost.
Maxon was triumphant, getting a sort of twisted joy out of his strange duel with the supernatural. By sheer persistence, he’d won out.
Even on a hunting party in the winter season, Maxon took care not to sit near the blazing fire they built when having lunch. He almost froze, sitting away from the heat, but he was safe!
Safe that is, until a whipping wind kicked up sparks and before they knew it, a brush fire had blazed up! The others fought the flame but Maxon ran—only to be blinded by smoke. Staggering, coughing, he was suddenly faced by a wall of fire, out of which a fiery shape loomed hugely, with a hissing roar of laughter. The fire ghost again!
Long arms of flame shot toward him, but Maxon saw his salvation not far off—a running brook. Without hesitation, he plunged into the icy waters, safe from the fire spirit, until his friends succeeded in beating out the last of the fire.
Even in the hospital, where his friends hastened him after the icy plunge. Maxon was happy. He was safe from fire—safe from the fire ghost. Safe from being consumed by fiery vengeance from beyond . . .
†
MAXON suddenly started, his spine crawling. What was that the doctor was saying?
“Fever! A very high fever—one hundred and five! We can’t bring it down! Poor chap!”
Maxon’s eyes alone saw the wraith-like shape that sat on his chest, in flowing outline, grinning. He heard the soft hiss of the fire ghost’s words—”Fever is a form of ‘fire’ too, Maxon! Fever consumes the sick body just like a fire! Didn’t I tell you there was no escape? . . .”
THE END
※
“Fiend of Fire” is brief, original, and fairly straightforward with a slight EC-style twist at the end—Binder would go on to write for EC for about a year before the Comics Code Authority killed their horror and crime comics. The bad guy gets his thematically appropriate comeuppance; the supernatural occurrences are an atypical haunting, but otherwise unexplained. A fairly minor work in a long and storied career, but for fans who thought they’d read all of Eando Binder, there’s far more beyond the pulps.
This story contains historical stereotypes of Native American cultures and characters. Reader discretion advised.
The very first issue of Weird Tales included “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes” by Otis Adelbert Kline—the first part of the first serial to run in the Unique Magazine. Kline was, alongside Farnsworth Wright, one of the readers for the magazine under its first editor Edwin Baird, and one source claims that Kline ghost-edited the massive May-Jun-July 1924 triple-issue that marked the end of the old management. Wright would end up in the editorial seat at Weird Tales, and we can only speculate how things might have been different if Kline had gotten the job instead.
Kline continued as a writer and increasingly as a literary agent, marketing the pulp stories of Robert E. Howard, E. Hoffmann Price, C. L. Moore, and others during the 1930s and 40s, until his death in 1946. Most of Kline’s weird fiction from the pulps has been reprinted in various places, but there are more obscure non-weird works that have never been reprinted, including a handful of short pieces for newspapers. The most substantial of these is “The Unmarked Murder Trail,” which appeared in the Toronto Star Weekly 1 Nov 1941.
CHARLEY WHITESHIRT, the outcast Seminole Indian, was bent on murder. But he had bided his time and matured his plans so that no suspicion of the crime should fall upon himself. For days, while he pretended to be fishing, he had watched the Florida Everglades bungalow of Rance Gordon, the young Chicago artist who, in Charley’s estimation, was to blame for the death of his daughter as well as his own disgrace.
Two weeks before, Rance had persuaded the shy Seminole maiden to pose for him. She was reluctant at first, but could not resist the money he offered her. Ten dollars seemed such a tremendous sum. It would buy her many trinkets and much fine cloth with which to decorate herself, that she might captivate a certain young man of the tribe.
She well knew the horrible risk she ran but did not fear detection. In this, she overlooked the clever and cunning of her love rival, who spied upon her and immediately told the chief.
A solemn pow wow was held that evening and as a result the girl was expelled from the tribe in the dead of night. At the same time, her father, because of his negligence, was condemned to the disgrace of wearing white man’s clothes and taking a white man’s name. From then on his Indian name was never mentioned. His tribesmen scornfully called him Charley Whiteshirt.
Charley trailed his daughter’s wandering footsteps into the swamp the next day. He found her doubled up in a puddle beneath a cypress tree, her dead face blue and contorted with agony. A water moccasin had bitten her. | It did not occur to Charley that the artist had been perfectly innocent in the matter. Rance Gordon, in his estimation, was the cause of his daughter’s death and his own disgrace. So Gordon must die.
It was for this reason that he had been watching the artist’s bungalow. And now his opportunity was at hand.
Charley put down his fishing rod and took up his ancient thirty-two calibre single shot rifle. A look of intense hatred crossed his copper colored features and flashed in his black eyes. Steadying himself in the boat, he parted the concealing saw palmettos with the rifle barrel.
Bareheaded, and clad in white polo shirt and shorts, young Gordon was walking straight toward his hidden enemy, presenting an easy target. The rifle cracked and the artist slumped to the ground, show between the eyes.
The Indian could have paddled away, leaving no trace of himself on or about the body of his victim. But he had been seen fishing in the vicinity of the bungalow for a number of days. So he knew that he would be the first suspect to be taken into custody. Therefore he had resolved that Gordon’s body must not be found at all.
Depositing his rifle in the bottom of the boat, he swiftly rolled up his trousers, then stepped barefooted into the shallow water and waded ashore. Carefully spacing his steps, he tiptoed to the body. Then he bent over, unlaced the white-and-tan golf shoes, and sitting on the back of his prone victim, put them on. After flinging the body over his shoulder, he turned, and stopping, spread a few handfuls of leaf mould over the marks in the moist earth where it had fallen. Then he sprinkled fresh earth over the blood which had drained from the wound.
Careful Cover-Up
SATISFIED that there was no trace of the murder which even an Indian would notice, he continued toward the water, carefully stepping upon and obliterating the tracks which his bare feet had made, so it would appear that Gordon had stopped at this point for a moment—then resumed his walk straight down to the water and into it.
Heaving the body into the boat, the Indian followed. Then he paddled out to where the water was up to his shoulders, dropped the anchor, and removed his clothing. He had come prepared with wires and heavy stones, and some twenty minutes later when he rowed away, the corpse was buried under two feet of muck and four feet of water.
The Indian was too canny to go far. He anchored his boat in part of the lake where he could not possibly have seen Gordon enter the inlet. Then, after cleaning his rifle, he resumed his fishing.
Some time later an outboard motor with three men in it drew up to the Gordon dock.
“Here we are, young feller,” said Sheriff Abner Peters to the youth beside him, as his deputy, a gangling, loose-limbed cracker with wrinkled leathery features, sprang out and fastened the bow line. “Reckon Rance’ll be mighty glad to see ye.”
“I know I’ll be glad to see him,” replied Jack Williams, Gordon’s brother artist and close friend. “and I sure appreciate your running me up here. Thanks a lot.”
The young red-headed six-footer heaved his bag on to the dock and sprang up after it.
“Don’t mention it, son,” replied the sheriff, stroking the grizzled stubble on his weather-beaten face. Then he shouted in stentorian tones: “Hey, Rance! Here’s company come to see ye.”
He waited in vain for an answer, then shouted again.
Still no reply.
“Funny he don’t answer,” said the sheriff, clambering up on the dock. “Reckon he must have gone for a walk. I’ll traipse along to see if I can help you find him.”
The gangling deputy lumbered after him.
The bungalow door was unlocked, but they found the place untenanted.
“I can’t understand it,” said Williams. “Rance said he would be here today.”
The sheriff went out and scanned the water. Some distance away he saw Charley Whiteshirt, fishing.
“Hey, Charley,” she shouted. “Come here.”
The Indian paddled over to the dock.
“Seen anything of Rance Gordon today?” asked the sheriff.
“Me no seeum at all,” replied Charley. “Me fish.”
“Uh, huh. Fishin’ must be pretty good around here lately, the way you hang around. Never used to be.”
“Not bad,” Charley replied.
“Pretty good at follerin’ a trail, ain’t ye?”
“Plenty good.”
“All right. Let’s scout around and see where Gordon went this morning.”
“May I come along?” asked Williams.
“Sure. Why not?” He turned to his deputy. “Better stay here, Lem, and keep an eye on the boats and things.”
“Okay, sheriff,” replied Blackwell.
“Let’s go, Charley, said the sheriff impatiently.
“Me find,” grunted the Seminole, springing out and tying his boat to the dock.
The sheriff’s eyes rested for a moment on the old thirty-two rifle which lay across the seat, but he said nothing.
The Indian circled the bungalow, followed by the two men. Presently he came to the trail which Gordon had made only a few hours before.
“Fresh track,” he said. “Now we find.”
They followed the trail over a small hummock, and down through the saw palmettos toward the water.
The sheriff paused for a moment at the point where Rance Gordon had fallen, and Charley, fearful that he had not obliterated all signs of the murder, stealthily looked the ground himself. But he could see nothing wrong, and the sheriff made no comment as they proceeded down to the water’s edge.
“He wade into water. See tracks,” said Charley, pointing.
“Danged if he didn’t. But where did he go from there? And why did he wade into the water with his shoes on?” Sheriff Peters bit off a chew, ruminated for a moment, and spat an amber stream into the lake. “Do you reckon he committed suicide?”
“Rance wouldn’t kill himself,” said Williams. “Why he had no reason to take his own life. He was forging ahead in his profession, winning a name for himself. Had plenty of money and leisure.”
“Mebby there was a gal,” ruminated the sheriff.
“Gal plenty bad medicine,” said the Indian.
“That’s right, Charley. There might have been a gal, at that. Let’s go back to the bungalow. Might not be a bad idea to take a look around for the body.”
“If he drown this morning, ‘gator got body by now,” said the Indian.
“Mebby, and mebby not. We’ll have a look, anyway.”
“Mind if I use your boat, Charley?” asked the sheriff. “The other’s kinda of heavy to paddle around, and I want to make a search.”
“Use all you want,” the Indian replied.
“Okay. You go up to the bungalow and keep company with Mr. Williams and my deputy until I get back. I’m going to cut me a 10-foot pole and poke around in the muck.”
“How come, sheriff?” asked Blackwell. “Do you reckon he done buried himself, after committing suicide?”
Peters winked slyly at his deputy so the others could not see, and said:
“You never can tell, Lem.”
“Stick ‘Em Up”
CHARLEY went up to the bungalow with the others. He was somewhat perturbed. The sheriff might find the body, but the chances were small. But he had not expected that Peters would get suspicious and decide to look for the body buried in the muck. Outwardly, the Indian maintained the stoical demeanor characteristic of his race. The deputy rummaged around in the cupboard, pushed a few pine knots into the stove, and made coffee.
The Seminole sipped his in silence while the other two speculated as to what had become of Rance Gordon.
Presently the sheriff came into the bungalow carrying the Indian’s rifle in one hand and his forty-five in the other.
“Stick ’em up, Charley,” he said. “Yore under arrest for the murder of Rance Gordon. Put on the bracelets, Lem.”
The deputy drew a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and clamped them on the Indian’s wrists.
“Good God! Did this Indian murder Rance?” exclaimed Williams incredulously.
“Ain’t no question of it,” replied the sheriff. “Rance painted a pitcher of Charley’s daughter a couple of weeks ago. She was seen here and told on by another girl, so the chief expelled her from the tribe and condemned Charley to the disgrace of wearing white man’s clothes and taking a white man’s name. Charley found her dead in the swamp from snake bit, next day. So he was out to get Rance.
“Might have got away with it, but he was a leetle too clever. Shot Rance from the boat, walked up to him barefoot, put on his shoes, and carried him back into the water, tramping out his own tracks. But them tracks didn’t fool me none.”
“Did you find the body?” Williams asked.
“Got it in the boat. Rance was shot through the head with Charley’s thirty-two rifle.”
“But what was wrong with tracks—what made you leery?” asked the deputy.
“White man toed out—Indian toed in,” was the reply.
※
“The Unmarked Murder Trail” is not a whodunit. Or a howdoneit, or even a whydoneit; the murderer is identified right away, their motivation established, the method described clearly. So this is an inverted detective story or howcatchem. Having established the crime scene, the interest becomes how the wily lawman outthinks the criminal despite all of his precautions. Television’s Columbo is probably the best-known example of this style in popular culture.
Kline’s little howcatchem isn’t a great example of the genre. The sheriff comes into the story apparently having full knowledge of Charley’s motivation and quickly determines the method. The final clue hinges on something not seen or hinted at—Charley could wear the dead man’s shoes, but his gait was different, so the tracks the two left were distinct.
What is notable about this story is the characterization of the Native Americans. While Kline gets the geography and tribal affiliation correct—the Seminole people have long been associated with Florida and the Everglades (Lovecraft even met a couple during a trip to Florida in the 1930s)—pretty much everything else is stereotype. Charley Whiteshirt speaks in Native American Pidgin English. The Seminoles in Florida do hold a powwow celebration today, but it was started in 1971, borrowed from similar celebrations by other indigenous peoples; the usage here as a general meeting is in keeping with the broad flattening of diverse Native American cultures into a dime novel or Hollywood mold. Even the art for the story by Walter J. Heffron is characteristic garb of Plains peoples, not Florida Seminoles. The total effect is neither particularly accurate nor sympathetic.
This is a potboiler mystery, one that relies on stereotypes for interest, with the barest hint of impropriety—there is the implicit suggestion that Charley’s daughter posed nude; why else would merely modeling warrant expulsion?—and maybe if it were longer Kline would have fleshed it out with a romance and more characterization. As it is, the cast is almost too crowded and much depends on coincidence; Jack Williams only exists to bring the sheriff there in time to see the tracks. One good Florida afternoon rain might have erased the tracks, and Charley would have gotten away with it.
Donald Raymond Smith (The Sage of Nuneaton) was a notable but reclusive British fan, noted for being one of the first fans to write fanfiction in the contemporary sense—i.e., original amateur fiction featuring fictional characters created by and for fans. Before the 1940s, “fan fiction” was simply fiction written by fans, as opposed to professional writers, and didn’t necessarily reuse the characters or settings of other writers. While there are some examples of this sort of thing in the 1930s in ‘zines like The Fantasy Fan, Smith had a knack for it.
One of his most notable efforts is “Why Abdul Al Hazred Went Mad,” first published in The Nekronomikon #3 (Autumn 1950), now a very scarce fanzines; and very rarely republished, last appearing in The Second Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (2016).
※
Why Abdul Al Hazred Went Mad
by D. R. Smith
The fabulous Necronomicon was never finished. This is well-known to all advanced students of the occult, whether or not they have had the courage and good fortune to peruse a copy. A well-known—in spite of the fact that few who have delved into the soul-blasting secrets of that loathsome mixture of revolting instruction and blasphemous history have managed to preserve their sanity to read that final chapter, which begins with the mutterings of one in a frenzy and dies away in the hideous ravings of mania. Abdul Alhazred—may his name be accursed forever—remained devilishly sane during the acquisition and recording of that abominable knowledge which few throughout the centuries have dared to acquire, even in part. It was the story he attempted to tell in that last frenzied chapter that shattered his black mind and sent his spirit gibbering with horror out of his diseased body into the gleeful embraces of the torturers of the damned.
And no one has ever dared to make that story known. Indeed, the most diligent search has failed to trace any mention of the terrible message by any student of the occult. Yet it was known to be sublime genius, and the crux of it published to the world in words still spoke on the public stage:
“(Anthony) . . . . . . on the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh
Which some did die to look on;”
But should that story be widely known, it may be that what drove the blaspheming Arab mad may well drive honest men sane. And so I transcribe below, shorn of as much of its incoherent madness as possible, and cleansed of the filth that besmirched every thought that bubbled from the cess-pit of Alhzared’s obscene mind, a correct version of the last chapter of the Necronomicon.
. . . . . .
There was One Other. The Great One. Great Father and Great Mother in One. Greater than Great Cthulhu, than Hastur his brother, than Shub-Niggurath the Goat with a Thousand Young, than Tsathoggua, than great Yog-Sothoth himself—for They are but One’s spawn. One was once of the Great Old Ones, near the mightiest, for One challenged the supremacy of Azathoth Himself, the blind idiot, Lord of All. May, his children have told me—but this I may not believe—that One (who is too great to be Named) was indeed Lord of All! So great was One that They-who-Are-Not-To-Be-Thought-Of, fearing lest Evil become supreme, hurled him from his awful throne and chained him within chains of flesh that he might not break to this, the Planet of the Damedn. And as he fell he spawned Yog-Sothoth, who only is less than Azathoth. Sos says great Cthulhu, first of the Great Abominations which One formed from his own flesh to be his servants and the masters of the planet.
Mighty was the Great One. Loathsome the body They had bound him in—yet he gloried in its horror, and moulded it with his own will into a Thing to describe which would strike death into the craven soul of mortal men. The Faceess Nyarlathotep, messenger of the Great Old Ones, could not endure the foulness that was One, where he lay in a pool of his own slimy exhalations in the cavern in the mountains, lay and ruled the world with the terror of himself and the gods he had spawned. Had but I, Abdul Alhazred, been alive then to worship him! Great his Children, diligently have I served them and well have they paid me, with ecstasies the name of which should draw shrieks of horror from those white-livered children-in-men’s-shapes who talk so loud of their puerile torturings with knives and fire and water. But the Great One—to serve him would have been—would have been . . . . . . . .
Curse the Roman! May the Hounds of Tindalos hunt his shrieking soul through the ends of space for a million million times a million eons! How could he do that which he did! Great Cthulhu I asked and he shrank and would not reply. Tsathoggua I asked, and Tsathoggua would not tell me. Yog-Sothoth I asked, greatest of the Spawn, and Yog-Sothoth would not tell me. Yea, by my Art did I call on Nyarlathotep, the faceless howler in the darkness, commanding thee messenger of the Great Old Ones as never man had dared before, and Nyarlathotep ceased his eternal howling and would not reply, though he feared me as he fears only Cthugha, the Eternal Fiery One, who when the Time comes shall consume utterly.
Was it machination of Azathoth? One’s children say Azathoth, even mighty as he was, would never have dared to plot against the Great One. Yet surely it was only by some hostile guidance that this man, this incredible man, was driven with his rabble of soldiers into the mountains where lay the cavern of the Great One. Perhaps the Elder Gods—but they had only wanted to exile the Great One, not destroy him.
However it was, the Roman came. Marcus Antonius, a big brawling lecherous brute who boasted he feared nor god nor devil. A foolish boast, which many have made to me—and fled shrieking if they but smelt the week-old effluvium left from one of Cthulhu’s visits. But Marcus Antonius—how could there be such a man? Man he was, who fought and loved like a man, and died foolishly as a man will through stupid devotion to a trollop. Could such a one be greater than the Great Ones to whom I have given so much worship? That I have damned myself to all eternity for—for . . . . . . . . . NO!
I must tell it. It must be recorded. This Antonius and his soldiers were lost. Starving. They drank the urine of the horses. They killed the horses and ate them—and went on through the bare mountains. Antonius was their leader. He boasted of his strength and endurance and would eat of the horse-flesh, leaving it for others. On they went, and they came to a valley—a gloomy cleft in the hills. But water ran crystal clear down a rocky bed and scrubby pines grew around. They drank the water and made a huge fire of the trees—but the hunger was still there. And Marcus Antonius was hungriest of all.
At the head of the cleft was a cave. Caves are often inhabited by animals. Animals can be eaten. Marcus Antonius led the way to the mouth of the cave, but there all stopped. For from the cave came such a stench as would petrify a man’s soul within his living body, and more evil than that. None could advance further but Antonius, who called them cowards and went on, went down into the dreadful gloom of that cavern. Went alone . . . . . .
Silence. A long silence. Then suddenly, horribly the reverberating uproar of a furious combat in some vast hollow below. Part of the noise the bellows of fighting-mad Marcus Antonius—part of such a nature that many who heard fled screaming from the accursed spot. They were the lucky ones. Those who remained, white-faced, frozen with terror, heard the noises continue, and draw nearer. Abruptly the cavern belched forth a writhing mass, the maniacally fighting Antonius smeared from head to foot with a mixture of his own blood and revolting slime from That which he fought. That which he had dragged out into the light of day, where never had it been seen before. That which is javelin could not slay, his sword not wound. That abomination at the sight of which the watchers dropped dead, the very souls lasted out of their bodies.
It called for help, and twilight shrouded the sun, and the strong shapes of the Wind Walkers, Ithaqua and Lloigor and Zhar and Great Hastur himself came howling down. And Antonius saw and laughed unafraid, and called upon Jupiter, whom the Greeks called Zeus, the Lord of Heaven and master of storms, called asking for aid as from an equal. And lo, on the Walkers and on Hastur, on Cthulhu hurtling from the sea and on Yog-Sothoth gathering formlessly from everywhere and nowhere, on all the hastening Spawn of One, Jupiter hurled his thunderbolts, and his laughter crashed and bellowed and split the skies as he lashed back the children of One with the multi-thonged lashes of the lightning.
And under that madness of light and noise Marcus Antonius, with strength beyond the compute of mortal man, raised the Great One and hurled him onto the mighty fire his men had kindled. Horribly One screamed and writhed amongst the glowing embers, and Antonius laughed and threw on more wood, and in the heart of the flames One screamed abominably until little but blacked charcoal was left of his fightful body. And then Marcus Antonius, a man amongst men, who feared nor God nor devil, but who was very hungry, smashed the charred shell and inside found nothing but a single steaming piece of rank flesh, loathsome of shape and color and odor. But it was flesh, and he ate.
Yes, he ate it! The brutish Roman dolt, he ate it, the yet-living heart of the Great One! And so he destroyed for ever the Great One! And if One could himself be thus destroyed by brute courage and appetite, what of his children? Have I given my life and more than my life to the service of those who have no more power over a brave man than the beasts of the field?
. . . . . . . .
The rest is madness.
THE END
※
Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets, The barks of trees thou browsèd. On the Alps It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh Which some did die to look on. And all this— It wounds thine honor that I speak it now— Was borne so like a soldier that thy cheek So much as lanked not. —William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene 4
This is a notable mid-century Mythos pastiche; it is very firmly drawing on the later Derlethian conception of the Mythos, not so much in the elemental schema as the very casual name-dropping of Cthugha and the like, the emphasis on a hierarchy among the eldritch entities, etc. The crowning joke of the piece is that Shakespeare reference, which is one of those obscure points like Tolkien’s Cats of Queen Berúthiel, which is not explained, but hints at something unspoken.
In that final jest, there is a rebuke of the Lovecraftian premise. Reminiscent of whenever Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian encountered an eldritch entity. It represents, in a literary way, the kneejerk response to the fannish devotion that the very look at such-and-such an entity will drive you mad, or that such a creature as Cthulhu is incomprehensible, by responding “Squid guy.”
Basically, Smith was playing the game but subverting the expectation. Yet he plays it straight at the end; how would a dedicated cultist, who has given their life and committed innumerable acts in worship of these alien entities, react when it turns out that these entities aren’t all-knowing or all-powerful, and might, in fact, taste good with a bit of garum?
Robert W. Chambers is best remembered today for his collection The King in Yellow (1895), the first half of which features the weird stories that originated Yellow Mythos, with vague and disconcerting references to Carcosa, the Lake of Hali, the Yellow Sign, and the eponymous play The King in Yellow. These stories have proved to have an enduring popularity, and have been rewritten and analyzed many times. Chambers would go on to considerable success as a writer, primarily of popular romances.
However, Chambers didn’t stop writing weird fiction. His next collection The Maker of Moons (1896) is another collection of odd novelettes and short stories; the showcase—and most frequently reprinted—story from that volume is the eponymous “The Maker of Moons,” a Yellow Peril fantasy that Lovecraft would make discreet reference to in “The Whisperer in Darkness.” What many readers miss, however, is that Chambers wrote The Maker of Moons so that the stories lead into each other; it begins with “The Maker of Moons” and then proceeds to “The Silent Land,” whose final paragraphs call back to the first story and then lead into the next story, “The Black Water.” What we get, then, is a more complex metafictional narrative, somewhat similar to what Arthur Machen did with The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations (1895).
“The Silent Land” contains two references to Carcosa—and as such, can be read as a kind of addendum or extension of The King in Yellow, although the connection is tenuous and the atmosphere is different. Still, for students of the Yellow Mythos, it rewards reading.
In the same year that it was originally collected in The Maker of Moons (1896), “The Silent Land” was serialized in several newspapers, notably The Pittsburgh Press (12 & 19 Jul 1896), The Inter Ocean (19 & 26 Jul 1896), and The Buffalo Courier Express (19 & 26 Jul 1896); it was later serialized again in The Salt Lake Herald (10 Nov 1907) and the Illustrated Sunday Magazine (3 & 10 Aug 1913).
While a complete Chambers bibliography is difficult to compile, “The Silent Land” seems to have been rarely reprinted except in reprints of the entire The Maker of Moons collection, as newspaper serials, or, now that it is in the public domain, as part of a general mass reprint of Chambers’ weird work. Anthologists have largely missed it, likely because it is such a slight story, though attentive critics and scholars like Kenneth Hite have long noted it and the connection to The King in Yellow, including reference to it among their annotations.
The text of “The Silent Land” reproduced below is taken from The Maker of Moons (1896) (which can be read in toto at the Internet Archive), with two changes. First, several of the newspaper serializations included illustrations, which have never been reprinted; these are included below. Second, Chambers’ original story included several songs in untranslated French. For the benefit of readers, a literal translation of these lines in English is provided alongside the original text.
FERRIS and I had had a dispute, a bitter one, and, as usual, Ferris had pushed his cap over his eyes until the hair on the back of his head stuck out.
“You can’t do it,” he said, shoving both hands up to the wrists in his canvas fishing-coat.
“I’ll prove it,” said I. “What a stubborn mule you are, Ferris!”
“Stubborn nothing,” he retorted, “you and your theories must have your little airing, I suppose, but I don’t intend to assist.”
“I’m right sometimes,” I said.
“Sometimes you’re wrong, too,” said Ferris.
Then he walked off toward the cliffs, whistling, uncompromising, untidy.
“There’s a hole in your leggings!” I called after him, but he did not deign to answer me.
“Obstinate ass,” I thought, for we were very fond of each other, “if he wastes his time with the Silver Doctor he’ll rue it.”
Then I looked at Solomon and lighted a cigarette.
Solomon was a bird, an enervating bird of the Ibis species, wrinkled and wizened, like the mummies of his native land, which was Egypt. The bird was mine, a sarcastic tribute from Ferris, and the bird and the sarcasm both bore directly on the only disputes which ever arose between Ferris and myself. The cause of these disputes was a trout-fly, an innocent toy of scarlet and tinsel, known to anglers as the “Red Ibis.” I swore by it, Ferris swore at it. In the long winter nights when the streams gurgled under the frozen forests and the lake was a sheet of soggy snow, Ferris and I loafed before the fire pulling tangled masses of leaders and flies about and dragging the silken lines over the rugs to hear the reels click. Every fly known to the brethren of the angle was discussed-every fly except the Red Ibis. We both honestly tried to avoid this bone of contention. We talked of Duns and Hackles, and Spinners and Gnats, but in spite of every precaution the Red Ibis would occasionally rise like a fiery spectre between us, and then we disputed vehemently.
“No angler with a rag of self-respect would use the Ibis,” said Ferris, with that obstinate shrug which added gall to the insult, and I—well, the crowning insult came when Ferris sent to Cairo and imported a live Egyptian Ibis for me.
“Pull out his tail feathers when you ‘re short of Red Ibis,” gasped Ferris, weak with laughter, as I stood silently inspecting the bird in my studio.
“I’ll send him to Central Park,” said I, swallowing my wrath; but I thought better of it, and Solomon, the wizened, became an important member of my household.
The bird was a mystery. I never cared to encounter his filmy eyes. Centuries seemed to roll away when he unclosed them, visions of tombs and obelisks filled my mind-glimpses of desert sunsets and the warm waters of lazy rivers. His black shrivelled head, bare as a skull, lay like a withered gourd among the garish flame-coloured feathers on his breast.
“Solly,” said I, when Ferris disappeared below the cliff, “do you want a frog?”
The bird unclosed one eye. I went to a pail of water in which I kept minnows, and Solomon followed me, solemnly hopping.
“Help yourself, Solly,” said I, uncovering the pail.
I called him Solly because I wished to put myself at ease with this relic of Egyptian Royalty. The splendour of Pharo’s court had not dimmed this hoary prophet’s eye, which was piercing when the sleepy film left it—piercing enough to make me feel thousands of years young, and very bourgeois. In vain I addressed him as Solly, in vain I gave him chocolate creams,—he was the aristocrat, the venerable high-priest of an Empire dead—and I was his man-servant, his ass, and his ox.
Solomon dabbed once or twice at a sportive minnow, pecked pensively at the handle of the pail, swallowed a pebble or two, and then, ruffling his scarlet feathers, sidled aimlessly back into the sedge by the frog-pond. I watched him for awhile, brooding dreamily among the rushes, but he paid no further attention either to me or to the small green frogs that squatted on the lily-pads or floated half submerged, watching him with enormous eyes.
A noisy blue-jay flitted through the orchard and alighted on a crab-apple tree solely to insult Solomon. He of course was unsuccessful, and his language became so utterly unfit for publication that I moved away, shocked and annoyed.
The sun was very hot. It glittered with a blinding light across the rippling pond, where dragon-flies darted and sailed and chased each other over the water, or flitted among the clouds of dancing midges, searching for prey.
A sweet smell came to me from orchard and sedge; there was an odour of scented rushes in the air, and the lingering summer wind bore puffs of perfume from clover-fields and meadows fragrant with flowering mint. I looked again toward the cliffs. Ferris was not in sight.
“Obstinate mule,” I thought, and, picking up my rod and fly-book, I sauntered toward the forest.
“Ferris,” said I to myself, “is after that big trout by the Red Rock Rapids, but he’ll never raise him with a Silver Doctor, and he’ll come home in a devil of a temper.”
I sat down in a clump of sweet fern and joined my rod. When I had run the silk through the guides and had fastened the nine-foot leader, I opened my fly-book and sought for a Red Ibis fly. There was not one in the book.
“I must send to New York to-morrow,” I thought, turning the aluminum leaves impatiently; ‘ fancy my being out of Red Ibis!” I selected a Yellow Oak fly for the dropper and a nameless Gnat for the hand-fly, and, drawing the leader down to the reel, started on again, carrying my rod with the tip behind me.
The forest was dim and moist and silent. Where the sunshine fell among the ferns a few flies buzzed in the gilded warmth; but except for this and a strange grey bird which flitted before me silently as I walked, there was no sign of life, nothing stirring, not a rustle among the leaves, not a movement, not a bird-note.
Over moss and dead leaves aglisten in the pale forest light I passed,—over crumbling logs, damp and lichen-covered, half submerged in little pools; and the musty fragrance of the forest mould set me dreaming of dryads, and fauns, and lost altars, whose marbles, stained with tender green, glimmer in ancient forests.
This belt of woods was always silent; I often wondered why. There were no birds—none except this strange grey creature which kept flitting ahead of me, uttering no note. It was the first bird I had ever seen in the western forest belt the first bird except Solomon, who occasionally accompanied me on my trips to the long pool in the river which borders the wooded belt on the west.
It was an unknown bird to me,—I could catch fleeting glimpses of it,—and its long slender wings and dark eyes brought no recollections to my mind.
To the north, south, and east the woods were full of thrushes and wood-peckers; full of game, too—grouse, deer, foxes, and an occasional mink and otter, but the shy wood creatures left the western forest belt alone, and even the trout seemed to shun the dark pools where the river swept the edges of the wood until it curved out again by Lynx Peak. I say the trout shunned it, but there was one, a monstrous fish, wily and subtile, that lived in the long amber pool below. Early in the season Ferris had raised him with a Silver Doctor, and Ferris’s madness on the Silver Doctor dated from that moment. His mania for this fly lead him to use it in season and out, and no amount of persuasion or of ridicule moved him.
“Because,” said I, “you had a Silver Doctor snapped off by a big fish, do you imagine it’s the only fly in the world?”
“It’s good enough for me,” he said.
There were two things which Ferris used to say that maddened me. One was, “The Silver Doctor’s good enough for me;” the other was, “New York’s good enough for me.”
We never discussed the latter question after Ferris had alluded to me as a “Latin Quarter Nondescript,” but the battle still raged over the merits of the Silver Doctor and the Red Ibis.
When I came to the wooded slope which overhung the river I buttoned my shooting coat and began a cautious descent, trailing my rod carefully. I headed for the foot of the pool, for one of my theories, which ruffled Ferris, was that certain pools should be fished up stream. This was one of those pools, according to my theory; and when I had reached the rocks and had waded into the rushing water, I faced up stream and cast straight out into the rapids which curled among the boulders at the foot of the pool.
At the second cast I hooked a snag and waded out to disengage it. Fumbling about under the foaming water I found my fly imbedded in something which refused to give way. I tugged cautiously and gently; it was useless. Then I rolled up my sleeve and plunged my arm into the water up to the shoulder. This time it did give way; I drew out my arm and held up something glistening and dripping, in which my hook was firmly imbedded. It was a shoe, small, pointed, high-heeled, and buckled with a silver buckle.
“This,” said I, “is most extraordinary,” and I sat down on a flat rock, holding the shoe close to my eyes.
“Besnard—Paris,” I read stamped on the lining over the heel. And the buckle was of sterling silver. I sat for a moment, thinking.
Our cottage, Ferris’s and mine, was the only house in the whole region that I knew of, except the old house in the glade by the White Moss Spring. That was unoccupied and had been for years—a crumbling, abandoned farm, tottering among the young growth of an advancing forest.
But as I sat thinking I remembered early in the season having seen smoke above the trees once when we were in the neighbourhood of the White Moss Spring, and I recollected that Ferris had spoken of poachers. We had been too lazy to ininvestigate, too lazy even to remember it until, as I sat there holding the small shoe, the incident came back to me, and I wondered whether anybody had taken up an abode in the abandoned farm.
I didn’t like it. The forests and streams belonged to Ferris and me, and although up to the present moment it had not been necessary to employ many keepers, I began to fear that our woods were being invaded and that we should soon be obliged to find protection.
I looked at the shoe, turning it over carefully in my hands. It was new-had scarcely been worn at all.
“Pooh,” I thought, ” the owner of this could scarcely do much damage among the game, but of course there may be bigger shoes in company with this, and those bigger shoes had better look out!”
My first impulse was to throw the shoe into the underbrush. I started to do this, and then carefully laid it down on a sun-warmed rock.
“Let it dry,” I muttered; “it’s evidence for Ferris.” But as it happened, Ferris was not destined to see the shoe.
II.
I FISHED the pool twice, once up and once down, and heaven knows I fished it conscientiously; but no trout rose to the flies, although I changed the cast half a dozen times and even violated my feelings by tying a Silver Doctor. It was true I glanced up and down the river to see whether Ferris was in sight before I did so.
“The wily old devil won’t come up,” said I to myself, meaning the trout; “I’ll give him a rest for a while.” And I sat down on the rock where the pointed shoe was drying in the sun, laying my rod beside me.
“What’s the use of speculating about this shoe,” I thought, and straightway began to speculate.
The strange grey bird with the slender wings and dark eyes slipped through the undergrowth along the opposite side of the pool, but it uttered no call, and I caught only fleeting glimpses of it at intervals. Once, for a moment, it flitted quite near, and a sudden sense of having seen it before came over me, but lfter a little thinking I found myself associating it with a rare bird I had once noticed in Northern France, and of course it was impossible that this could be a French bird.
“It was an association of ideas,” said I to myself, looking at the mark in the slim shoe. “Besnard—Paris.” And I began speculating upon the owner of the shoe.
“Young? Probably. Slender? Probably. Pretty? The deuce take the shoe,” I muttered, picking up my rod. Presently I laid it down again, softly.
“Now, perhaps,” said I to myself, “this little shoe has tapped the gravel of the Luxembourg, patted the asphalt of the Boulevard des Italiens, brushed the lawns of the Bois—ah me! ah me!—the devil take the shoe!”
The sun beat down upon the rock; the little shoe in my hand was nearly dry.
“No,” said I to myself, “I’ll not show it to Ferris. And I’ll not shove it into my pocket—no—for if Ferris finds it he’ll rag me to death. I’ll throw it away.” I stood up.
“I’ll just throw it away,” I repeated aloud to encourage myself, for I didn’t want to throw it away.
“One, two, three,” said I, with an attempt at carelessness which changed to astonishment as I raised my eyes to the bank above whither I had intended to hurl the shoe.
For an instant I stood rigid, my right hand clutching the shoe, arrested in mid air. Then I placed the shoe very carefully upon the rock beside me and took off my shooting-cap.
“I beg your pardon,” said I, ” I did not see you.”
I stood silent, politely holding my shooting-cap against my stomach. But I was confused, for she had answered me in French, pure Parisian French, and my ideas were considerably unbalanced.
I am afraid I stared a little. I tried not to. She was slender and very young. Her dark eyes, half shadowed under black lashes, made me think of the strange, dark-eyed bird that had followed me. She sat on the crooked trunk of a tree overhanging the bank, her feet negligently crossed, her hands in the pockets of a leather shooting-jacket. I’m afraid to say how short her skirts were,—but of course this is the age of bicycles and shooting-kilts.
I clambered up, hanging to limbs and branches. It was a miracle I did not break my neck.
“Why do you not take the path?” she asked. “Do you not know you might fall—and all for a shoe?”
“But such a shoe—”
“True, the buckle is silver—”
“Which I claim the privilege of buckling,” said I, dragging myself up beside her.
She deliberately held out her slim stockinged foot, and I slipped the shoe on it.
The silver buckle was not easily buckled. There were difficulties—for the tongue had become bent and needed straightening.
“You might take the shoe off again to arrange the buckle,” she said.
“I can straighten it without that,” said I.
When at last the buckle was clasped we had been talking so long that I had told her my name, my residence, my profession, and more or less about Ferris. I don’t know why I told her all this. She seemed to be interested. Then I asked her if she lived at the “Brambles.”
“The Brambles? ” she repeated, looking at her shoes.
“The deserted Farm by the White Moss Spring—”
“Yes—not alone; I have a housekeeper.”
“Aged?”
“Very—and fierce. But I shall do as I please.”
“Did you buy the house? “
“No. It was empty, and I walked in. Next day they sent my twelve trunks from Lynne Centre. The furniture was good.”
“And you have been there for two months?”
“Yes. I have a horse and dog cart too. Rose drives to Lynne Centre twice a week for the marketing. I think I shall keep a cow—I generally do what I please. I choose to amuse myself with you just now.”
“This,” said I, ” is a very strange history; did you know that Mr. Ferris and myself—existed?”
“It is not a strange history,—no, I once saw your house as I passed through the forest belt, but there was nobody there on the lawn except an ordinary person with little side whiskers.”
“Howlett!” I exclaimed.
“Comment?” she asked.
“A servant, an Englishman.”
“Probably,” said she, looking dreamily at me.
Then I told her all about Ferris and myself; how we came every spring to the Clover Cottage with Howlett, a cook, and three dogs as retinue, how we fished in summer and shot in the autumn, how twice a year men came all the way from Lynne Center to house our hay and repair damages, how the game-keepers lurked at the mouth of the valley, miles to the south, to prevent poachers from entering, but we concluded it was not necessary for keepers to patrol the woods inside the valley.
“Now,” I said, “the poachers are in our very midst—here established—and such dangerous poachers, too! What shall we do with them, Mademoiselle?”
“You mean me,” she said, with wide open eyes.
“No,” said I, “I do not mean. you—you are very welcome in our valley.”
“But I am sure you do mean me,” she said, smiling.
Then we talked of other things, of Paris and France; of trout, and flies, and Ferris, of Normandy, and the beauty of the world; but it was nearly five o’clock before we spoke of love.
“I have never loved,” she said, looking at me calmly.
“Oh, how unnecessary!” I thought, for I had believed her clever.
“But,” she continued, gravely, “I think it is time that I did.”
“I think so too,” said I.
“I should like to fall in love,” said she; “I have nothing else to do.”
“I also am very idle,” I said.
“Then,” said she, “the opportunity only is lacking.”
I think I muttered something about poachers—I was not perfectly cool.
“Now,” said she, “I know you mean me!”
“Ah,” said I, “I mean a keener poacher than you or I, a free rover more to be dreaded than an army of riflemen.”
“Then you don’t mean me,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Do you know,” said she, ” I should very much like to be the heroine of a romance.”
“I will aid you to be one!” I said, hastily.
We had known each other nearly three hours.
“Let us,” said she, “pretend that this is the forest of Versailles in the time of Louis Quinze.”
“Let us indeed!” I cried, enthusiastically.”
“And you are a Count—”
“And you a Marquise—”
“Named Diane; it is my real name.”
“Diane.”
“And you—”
“My real name is Louis—”
“It will do; you may kiss my hand.”
I wondered just where she was going to draw the line. Then, the devil prompting, I entered recklessly into this most extraordinary adventure.
And what an adventure! Words, thoughts even failed me as I looked at her. This woodland maid with the wonderful eyes! There was no mistaking the challenge in her eyes, the half-innocent smile, the utter disregard for every human conventionality.
“How,” thought I— “how can such a woman wear a childlike face!”
I had known coquettes,—many,—but the depth of this strange girl’s recklessness I feared to sound—I dreaded almost to understand.
“She is too deep,” said I to myself— “too deep for me,” and I looked her questioningly in the eyes.
I don’t know why or how,—I never shall know probably, but a sudden conviction seized me that she was as innocent as she looked. Imagine a man coming to such a conclusion! I felt inclined to laugh, and yet I was as firmly convinced as though I had known her all my life.
“You may kiss my hand,” she said, and held it out to me.
I did. I wished I hadn’t a moment later, for I tumbled head over heels in love with her and fairly gasped at the idea.
“Lovers in the Court of Louis Quinze resembled us, I think,” she said, after a long silence.
“We will try to make the resemblance perfect,” said I, taking both her hands in mine.
She bent her head a little,—there was just a shadow of resistance,—then I kissed her on the lips.
There are moments in a man’s life when he does not know whether he is a-foot or a-horseback. I remember that I sat down on the bank and carefully uprooted several fems. When I had regained control of myvoice,—the little maid was very silent,—I asked her to tell me of herself, if it might please her to do so.
“I was born,” said the little maid, resting her small head on one hand, “in Rouen. Do you know Rouen?”
“Yes.”
“Papa was an officer, and he killed his general when I was seven years old. It was something about Mama; I never saw her again. Then we went to Canada very quickly; Papa died there. I had been in a convent school; I ran away, and went to New York. I am nineteen, and very reckless.”
“Yes, Diane…”
“I have a great deal of money in banknotes. It was Papa’s. I have never counted it—it is in a big trunk. I understand English, but do not care to speak it. I do not care what becomes of me; I wish it were over—this life. You are the first man who ever kissed me. Do you believe me?”
“Yes, Diane.”
“I wonder you do. Let us go down to the river where the sunlight falls. The descent is easy—”
“Diane—you must not go—”
“With you—will you give me your hand?”
“Come.”
“Did you see that shy grey bird?” said the little maid, hesitating on the slope, her hand in in mine.
I could not see it, for we had already begun the descent.
“WHERE the mischief have you been all day?” demanded Ferris that evening as we sat on the veranda after dinner.
“Well,” said I lighting a pipe, “when you bad your fit of sulks I went off for a brace of trout.”
“Did you see anything worth seeing?”
“I saw no trout,” said I.
“Unfortunate, eh?”
“Oh not very,” I said, looking at Solomon.
“Not very?”
“Look at that ridiculous bird, Ferris.”
“Swallowed a frog the wrong way…” said Ferris, watching the solemn contortions of Solomon; “he looks like a little Jew in a crimson overcoat with a stomach ache. What fly did you use, Louis?”
“Everything; couldn’t raise a fin.”
“Oh, you’ve been trying that old devil down by the west woods ! I should think you’d let him alone; it’s useless,” yawned Ferris.
“I’m going to try for him every day till I get him,” said I, trying not to lie more than necessary.
“Of course you’ll not infringe?”
“Infringe I Not much! You can have the whole west woods to your own sweet self; but you’re an idiot!”
“Not at all,” said I, thankfully; and in a burst of confidence I confessed that I had used a Silver Doctor.
There was a momentary gleam of triumph in Ferris’s eyes, but he was very decent about it and asked me most politely for the loan of a Red Ibis. Oh men of the busy world, learn courtesy from the angler! There are other things you need not learn from anglers.
“My dear fellow,” said I, more touched than I had been for a long time, “I haven’t a Red Ibis left. I shall write Conroy to-night before I retire. If you really do want an Ibis I will catch Solomon and pluck a plume from his tail feathers.”
“I don’t want it enough to inconvenience you or hurt Solomon’s feelings,” said Ferris, laughing.
After a long interval of silent smoking Ferris rose and yawned at the moon.
“Do you know what a Spirit-bird is, Ferris?”
I asked, rapping my pipe on the arm of my chair.
“Spirit-bird—the French one—the Oiseau Saint-Esprit? Yes, I’ve seen one—in the Vosges.”
“Grey-with slim wings and big dark eyes?”
“That’s the bird,” said Ferris; “why?”
“Well, I thought I saw one to-day. Of course that ‘s impossible.”
“Of course,” said Ferris, yawning again! “I’m going to turn in; good-night, old chap.”
“Good-night,” said I, tapping nervously on the veranda with my pipe.
Howlett came out a few moments later with my wading-shoes which he had been oiling.
“Well,” said I, “are the hob-nails all right?”
“Seving ‘ob nails is h’out, sir,” replied Howlett, holding up the shoes for my inspection.
“Put them in as soon as they’re dry. Did you oil the bamboo? Good. Is my lamp lighted? Put it out—and you need not sit up, Howlett; I ‘m going for a stroll.”
“Thank you sir,” said Howlett,— “and Solomon, sir?”
Now it was one of my delights to see Howlett house Solomon. The wily Ibis loved to snoop about in the moonlight, and he was always ready for Howlett when that dignified servant came to round him up.
I looked at Solomon, who stood gloomily brooding among the water-lilies.
“He ought to be in bed,” said I.
Howlett descended the veranda steps with arms extended, but Solomon sidled out into the pond. Howlett pleaded earnestly. He flattered and cajoled, but Solomon was obdurate.
“Nothink I say do move ‘im, sir!” said Howlett, stiffly; “he is vicious to-night, sir.”
“Then take the boat,” I said.
Howlett in a boat chasing a sulky Ibis was one of those rare spectacles that few are permitted to witness. Once a week Solomon turned “vicious” and then, at Ferris’s and my suggestion, Howlett took to the boat. A terrestrial Howlett was solemnly ludicrous, but an aquatic Howlett was impossible. Of course Ferris and I never laughed—that is, aloud, but we usually felt rather weak after it was over.
In the course of half an hour Solomon, mad, wet, and rumpled was cornered by Howlett and clasped to his stiff shirt front, muddy, bedraggled, and kicking.
“Good-night, Howlett; breakfast at seven tomorrow,” said I, and sauntered out into the moonlit valley.
I had been walking almost half an hour when it occurred to me that I should be in bed.
“What the deuce am I sprinting about the valley at this hour for?” I thought, looking around.
Over the shadowy meadows the night mist hung, silvered by the moonlight, and I heard the meadow-brook rippling through the sedge. Slender birches glimmered among the alders, and all the little poplar leaves were quivering, but I felt no breath of air.
Where the dark forest fringed the meadow I saw the moonbeams sparkling on lonely pools, but the depths of the woodland were black and impenetrable, and the forest itself was vague as the mist that shrouded it.
For a long time I stood, looking at the stars and the mist, and little by little I came to understand why I was there alone.
I knew I should go on, I wished to, but I lingered in the moonlight staring at earth and sky until something moved in the thicket beside me, and I followed it, knowing it was the Spirit-bird.
When I entered the forest I could scarcely see my hand, but I felt a trodden path beneath my feet, and I heard before me the whisper of soft wings, and presently I heard the river, rushing through rocks of the western forest, and when I came to the wooded bank the moonlight fell all around me.
There was a narrow strip in the forest, overgrown with silver birch and poplar and lighted by the moon, but I searched it in vain, up and down, up and down, always with the whisper of soft wings in my ears.
At last I called, “Diane,” and before I called again, her hands lay close in mine.
* * * * * *
“I came,” said the little maid, “because you were coming.”
“Who told you I was coming?”
“Told me? No one told me. Rose is asleep. Why did you come?”
“Why did you, Diane?”
“I? Because you came. How did you find my bower?”
“Your bower, Diane?”
“It is yours I know; I call it mine; I call it the Silent Land.”
“It is very silent,” I said.
“It is always silent—no birds, not even the noise of the water. Do you think it is sad? There are times when sounds,—the song of living creatures and the countless movements of things that live, trouble me. Then I come here. There are flowers.”
“The air is very sweet, too sweet. What is the perfume? The trees are heavy with fragrance. Ah!—are you tired, Diane?”
“No—it is the odour of blossoms; I sleep here sometimes.”
“Your hair is loose—how long it is I Is it the perfume from your hair—is it your breath—”
“The blossoms are very sweet; the moon has gone.”
“There is a star,—bow soft your breath is.”
“I do not see the star; where, Louis?”
“It is there;—clouds are veiling it;—there is a mist over all—”
“It is my hair—over your eyes.”
IV.
“HOWLETT,” said I, one warm afternoon, “Solomon is unendurable: he follows me everywhere, and I wish you to see that he minds his own business.”
“A hobstinate bird, sir,” said Howett, ” and vicious when crossed,—which I scorn ‘is h’anger,—beg pardon sir,—for ‘e’s took to biting wen ‘is vittles disagrees.”
“Has he bitten you?”
“Twice, sir,—which ‘appily my h’eyes is huninjured, though h’aimed at by ‘is beak.”
“This is intolerable,” said I; “you must punish him, Howlett.”
“‘Ow, sir?”
“Tie him up when he bites. Have those flies come from Conroy’s?”
“Nothink ‘as came, sir.”
“Where is Mr. Ferris?”
“Mr. Ferris is a whipping of the h’Amber Pool sir, with three sea-trout to the good and a brace of square tails. Solomon followed ‘im, sir, and is h’observing the sport.”
“Then I can get away without that red feathered Paul Pry tiptoeing after me,” I thought, and sent Howlett for my rod-case.
“Tell Mr. Ferris, when he returns, that I may not be back until dinner,” I said, when Howlett brought the case.
I selected a four-ounce split bamboo, pocketed my fly-book and a tin box of floating flies for dry fishing, picked up a landing-net, and walked away toward the western woodland, whistling. I had not fished for three weeks, although every day I went away into the western woods with rod and creel. Ferris laughed at my infatuation for the long pool where the great fish lay and jeered at me when I returned evening after evening with no trout, although the river, except the western stretch, was full of trout. He had never come to the pool,—I should have seen him from the Silent Land if he had,—but Solomon sneaked after me on several occasions. Once I caught him craning his neck and peering into the bower,—our bower—and as I did not care to have him pilot Ferris thither, I hustled him off.
The woods were fragrant and warm, stained by the afternoon sun ; the quiet murmur of the brook came to me from leafy thickets as I walked, and I heard the river rushing in the distance and the summer wind among the pines. White clouds shimmered in the blue above, sailing, sailing God knows where, but they passed across the azure, one by one, drifting to the south, and I watched them with the vague longing that comes to men who watch white sails at sea.
I had turned my steps toward the long pool, for I had decided to fish that afternoon, wishing to redeem my words to Ferris—at least in part; but as I stepped across the trail I heard the sound of wings, and a shadow glided in front of me toward the forest. It was always so from the first, and now, as always, I turned away, following unquestioningly the Spirit-bird. The noise of the river ceased as I entered the Silent Land. For an instant the grey bird hovered high in the sunshine, then left me alone.
I threw myself full length upon the blossoming bank and waited, chin on hand. And as I waited, she came noiselessly across the moss, so quietly, so silently that I saw her only when her fingers touched mine.
“It has been a long time,” we said; and; “Did you sleep?” and; “When did you awake?”
Then we asked each other a thousand little questions which are asked when lovers meet, and we answered as lovers answer. We spoke of the Spirit-bird as we always did, wondering, and she told me how that morning it had tapped upon her window as the day broke.
“Rose did not hear it,” she said, “but I was already awake and thinking.”
“I awoke at sunrise too,” I said; “for a moment I thought it was a swallow in the chimney that fluttered so—”
“The Spirit-bird flies swiftly when Love is dreaming,”—that is a very old proverb of Normandy. What shall we do, Louis—there is so much to do and so little time in life!—I brought my lute—ah! you are laughing!”
“The lute is such an old-fashioned toy; I didn’t know you played. Will you sing too, Diane? Something very old, older than the lute.”
“I learned a song this morning because I thought you would care for it. That is why I dared to bring my lute into the Silent Land. The song is called, “Tristesse.”
Then the little maid sat up among the blossoms and touched the soft strings, singing:
“J’ai perdu ma force et ma vie, Et mes amis et ma gaité; J’ai perdu jusqu’ á la fierté; Qui faisait croire á mon génie.
Quand j’ai connu la Vérité J’ai cru que c’était une amie; Quand je l’ai comprise et sentie, J’en etais déjà dégoûté.
Et pourtant elle est éternelle Et ceux qui se sont passés d’elle lci-bas ont tout ignoré.
Dieu parle, il faut qu’on lui réponde; Le seul bien qui me reste au monde Est d’avoir quelquefois pleuré.
“I have lost my strength and my life, And my friends and my joy; I have even lost the pride That made people believe in my genius.
When I first encountered the Truth, I thought it was a friend; When I understood and felt it, I was already weary of it.
And yet it is eternal, And those who have done without it Here below knew nothing.
God speaks; He must be answered; The only good thing I have left in this world Is that I have sometimes wept.
“Sing, Diane,” I said, but I scarcely heard my own voice.
She laughed and bent above me with a graceful gesture. “Not that,” she said, “for you at least are not sad. There is a chansonnette,—shalt I sing again?—then be very still, here at my feet. Do you not think my lute is sweet?”
“Je voudrais pour moi qu’il fut toujoura fête Et tourner la tête Aux plus orgueilleux; Être en même temps de glace et de flamme, La haine dana l’âme, L’amour dans lea yeuz.”
“I wish for myself it were always a celebration And to turn the heads Of the proudest; To be at once ice and flame, Hate in my soul, Love in my eyes.”
“You, Diane?” I whispered; but she smiled, and the mystery of love veiled her dark eyes; and she sang:
“Je ne voudrais pas á la contredanse, Sans quelque prudence Livrer mon bras nu Puis, au cotillion, laisser ma main blanche Trainer sur la manche Du premier venu.”
“Si mon fin corset, sl souple et si juste, D’un bras trop robuste Se sentait serré, J’aurais, je l’avoue, une peur mortelle Qu’un bout de dentelle N’en fut déchiré.”
“I wouldn’t want, at the contradance, Without some caution, To offer my bare arm; Then, in the cotillion, to let my white hand Linger along the sleeve Of the first man who comes along.”
“If my fine corset, so supple and so snug, Were to feel constricted By an arm too strong, I would, I confess, be mortally afraid That a piece of lace Might be torn.”
She looked at me with soft, unfathomable eyes and touched the lute. When I moved she started from her reverie with a gay little nod to me:
“Quand on est coquette, il faut être sage, L’oiseau de passage Qui vole à plein cœur Ne dort pas en l’air comme une hirondelle, Et peut, d’un coup d’aile Briser une fleur!”
“When one is a coquette, one must be wise, The passing bird That flies with all its heart Doesn’t sleep in the air like a swallow, And can, with a beat of its wing, Break a flower!”
“Sing,” I said in a changed voice.
“I have sung,” she said, and laid her lute in my hands. But I knew nothing of minstrelsy and lay silent, idly touching the strings.
She had fashioned for her fair head a wreath of sweet-fern twined with clustered buds, white as snow and faintly perfumed.
“So I am crowned,” she said, “a princess in the Silent Land. Where I step, all things green shall flourish; where I tum my eyes, blossoms shall open in the summer wind;—am I not queen?”
“Will you not sing again, Diane? “
“No, it pleases me to hear a legend now. You may begin, Louis.”
“Which—the Were-wolf or the Man in Purple Tatters or the—”
“No, no—something new.”
“The Seventh Seal?”
“Begin it.”
“And when be opened the Seventh Seal there was silence in Heaven—”
“Dear Saints, have we not silence enough in the Silent Land? Tell me about battles.”
“‘And the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.’ I could tell you about battles, Diane.”
“Tell me,—don’t move your arm,—tell me of battles, Louis.”
“There was once a King in Carcosa,” I began.
But the little maid was already asleep.
I thought I heard a step in the undergrowth and listened.
The forest was silent.
V.
WHEN we awoke it was night. Down from the dark heavens a great star fell, burning like a lamp. Above the low-hanging branches, sombre, drooping, heavy with fragrance, a misty darkness lay like a vast veil spread.
In the stillness I heard her quiet breathing, but we did not speak.
Silence is a Prophet, unveiling mysteries.
Then, through the forest, we heard the sound of wings, and as we moved, stepping together into the shadows, the moon rose above Lynx Peak, gigantic, golden, splendid.
So we passed out of the forest into the star-lit night.
VI.
THE skies were leaden, the watery clouds hung low over the valley, and a wet wind blew from the west, ruffling the long pool where Diane stood. Kilted and capped in tweeds, creel swinging with every movement of the rod which swayed and bent with her bending wrist, she moved from ripple to shallow, wading noiselessly while the silken line whistled and the gay flies chased each other across the wind-lashed pool.
We spoke in a low voice, glancing at each other when the light cast struck the water.
“Under the alders Diane—” I said; “have you changed the Grey Dun for the Royal?”
“No, what is your new cast?”
“Emerald and Orange Miller—I shall tie an Alder-fly in place of the Miller. Do you think the water warrants a cast of three?”
“It is rough; I don’t know,—Louis, was that an offer?”
“I think it was the spray from the rapids. Shall we move up a little? Do you feel the chill of the water?”
“I am cold to my knees,” said the little maid, “the river is rising I think—ah, what was that?”
“Nothing,—you touched a floating leaf in the swirl.”
“Splash!” A great fish flopped over in the pool, a trout, lazy, unwieldy, monstrous.
“Oh! he missed it!” cried Diane, turning a little white.
“Cast again,” I whispered, tossing my rod onto the sandy beach and unslinging my landing-net.
Trembling a little with excitement she cast across the swirl, once, twice, twenty times, but the monster was invisible. Somewhere in the dusky depths of that amber well the fierce fish lay watching the lightly dropping flies, unmoved. Then we changed the cast; I emptied my fly book, but nothing stirred except the hurrying water, curling, gurgling, tumbling through the rocks. Finally I broke the silence.
“Diane, it was the spinner that he rose to. He’s after something redder. Have you a Scarlet Ibis?”
“No—have you?”
I almost groaned, for Conroy’s flies had not arrived, and I hadn’t an Ibis in the world.
After a while she reeled in her silken line, and we waded to the sandy beach and sat down.
“Oh, the pity of it,” sighed Diane; “never have I seen such a trout before. I suppose it is useless, Louis.”
I sat moodily poking holes in the sand with the butt of my landing-net.
We spoke of other things for a time, sinking our voices below the roar of the river. Presently a sunbeam stole through the vapour above, lighting the depths of the dark pool. And all at once we saw the trout, hanging just above the pebbly bottom; we saw the scarlet fins move, the great square tail waving gently in the current, the mottled spotted back, the round staring eyes. The swelling of the gills was scarcely perceptible, the broad mouth hardly moved.
For a long time we sat silent, fascinated; then something stirred behind us on the beach and we slowly turned. It was Solomon.
“My bird—an Egyptian Ibis,” I whispered, laughing silently; “he has followed me, after all.”
Solomon ruffled his scarlet plumes, blinked at me, scratched his head with his broad foot, pecked at a bit of mica, and took two solemn steps nearer.
“Diane,” said I, suddenly, “I’ll get a red fly for you; don’t move—the bird will come close to us.”
But Solomon was in no hurry. Inch by inch he sidled nearer, dallying with bits of moss and shining pebbles, often pausing to reflect, but gradually approaching, for his curiosity concerning Diane was great.
“He looks as if he had stepped off an obelisk,” murmured Diane; “I have seen hieroglyphics that resembled him. Oh, what a prehistoric head—so old, so old!”
“His name is Solomon,” I whispered. “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. I’m going to have a small bit of Solomon’s glory—sh—h! ah! I’ve got him!”
It was over in a second, and I do not believe it was painful. There was a flurry of sand, a furious flapping of flame-coloured wings, a squawk! a smothered laugh—nothing more.
Mortified, furious, Solomon marched off, shaking the river sand from wing and foot, and Diane and I, with tears of laughter in our eyes, wound the scarlet feather about a spare hook, tied it close with a thread from my coat, and whipped it firmly to the shank. I looped the improvised fly to Diane’s leader, and she shook the line free.
The reel sang a sweet tune as she drew the silk through the guides, and presently she motioned me to follow her out into the rippling shallows, and I went, swinging my landing-net to my shoulder. She cast once. The fly struck the swirl and sank a little, but she drew it to the surface and the current swept it under the alders.
For a moment it sank again; then the ripples parted, and a broad crimson-flecked side rolled just below the surface of the water. At the same moment the light rod curved, deeply quivering, the reel screamed like the wind in the chimney, and the straining line cut through the water, moving up the pool with lightning speed.
“Strike!” I cried, and she struck heavily, but the reel sang out like a whistling buoy, and the fish tumbled into the churning water under the falls at the bead of the pool.
“Now,” said Diane, with a strange quiet in her voice, “I suppose he is gone, Louis.”
But the vicious tug and long, fierce strain contradicted her, and I stepped back a pace or two to let her fight the battle to the bitter end.
The struggle was splendid. Once I believe she became a little frightened,—the rod was staggering under the furious fish,—and she spoke in a queer, small voice:
“Are you there, Louis?”
“I am here, Diane.”
“Close behind?”
“Close behind.”
She said nothing more until the great fish lay floating within reach of my net.
“Now!” she gasped.
It was done in a second; and, as I bore the deep-laden net to the beach, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure among the trees on the bank above. Diane was kneeling breathlessly on a rock beside me; she did not see the figure. I did, for an instant. It was Ferris.
VII.
DINNER was over. Ferris and I lingered silently over the Burgundy; and Howlett hovered in the corner with a decanter of port until Ferris shook his head.
It had been a silent dinner. Ferris tried to be cordial, and failed. Then he tried to be indifferent, with better success. We exchanged a word or two concerning a new keeper who was to be stationed at the notch in the north, and I spoke to Howlett about cleaning the lamps.
Neither of us mentioned rods or trout, although Howlett had served us a delicious sea-trout that evening which had fallen to Ferris’s rod, over which we ordinarily should have exulted.
Ferris of course knew that I had seen him among the trees on the bank above the long pool. It was my place to speak; we both understood that, but I did not. What was there to say? Suppose I should go back to the beginning and tell him—not all, but all that I was bound in honour to tell him.
What would he think if I spoke of the Spirit-bird, of the Silent Land, of my long deception ? An explanation was due him—I felt that with a vague sense of anger and humiliation. For weeks I had abandoned him; I never thought about his being lonely, but I knew now that he had felt it deeply. Oh, it was the underhand part of the business that sickened me, the daily deceit, the double dealing. Ferris was no infant. A word would have been enough. I had never by sign or speech spoken that word which would at least have set me right with him, and which I could have spoken honourably. And moreover, if I had spoken that word,—no, not a word even, a look would have been enough,—Ferris would never have entered the western forest belt.
We sat dawdling over our wine in the glow of the long candles while the fire crackled in the chimney place; for the evening was chilly, and Solomon brooded sullenly before the blaze. Howlett, noiseless and pompous, glided from side-board to table, decorously avoiding the evil jabs from Solomon’s curved bill, until Ferris woke up and told him he might retire, which he did with a modest “good-night, sir,” and a haughty glance at Solomon. A half hour of strained silence followed.
I leaned on the table, my head on my hands, watching the candle light reflected on the fragile wine glasses. Myriads of little flames glistened on the crystal bowls, deep stained with the red wine’s glow. The fire snapped and sparkled on the hearth, and Solomon slept, his wizened head buried in the depths of his flaming plumage.
And as we sat there, there came a faint tapping at the curtained window. Ferris did not hear it I did, for it was the Spirit-bird.
“I must go,” said I, rising suddenly.
“Where?” said Ferris.
I looked at him stupidly for a moment, then sank back into my chair.
Solomon stirred in his slumber and I heard the wind rising in the chimney.
Ferris leaned across the table and touched my sleeve.
I looked at him silently.
“I must speak,” he said; “are you ready?”
I did not reply.
“Sadness and silence have no place here, between you and me. Shall I tell you a story I once read?”
“I am half asleep,” I muttered.
“This is the story,” he said, unheeding my words. “There was once a King in Carcosa—”
My hand fell heavily upon the table.
“—And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies—”
“For God’s sake, Ferris—”
“Yes,” he said,” for God’s sake.”
We sat staring at each other across the table, and if my face was as white as his I do not know, but my hand trembled among the glasses till they tinkled.
“I was born in France,” he said at last. “You did not know it, for I never told you. What do you know about me after all? Nothing. What have years of friendship taught you about my past? Nothing. Now learn. My father was shot dead by an inferior officer in Rouen. The assassin escaped to Canada where—I found him. He died by his own hand—from choice. I did not know he had a child.”
The dull fear at my heart must have looked from my eyes. Ferris nodded.
“Yes, you know the rest,” he said; “the shame and disgrace of the suicide drove the child away—anywhere to escape it—anywhere—here, into the wilderness the woman fled where she hath a place prepared of God.”
The Spirit-bird was tapping on the window, I heard the noise of wings beating against the pane.
“I must go,” I said, and my voice sounded within me as from a great distance.
“Vengeance is God’s,” said Ferris, quietly: “I am guilty.”
“I must go,” I repeated, steadying myself with my hand on the table.
The noise of wings filled my ears. I knew the summons.
“Do you not hear?” I cried.
“The wind,” said Ferris.
Then the door slowly opened from without, the long candles flared in the wind, and the ashes stirred and drifted among the embers on the hearth. And out of the night came a slender figure, with dark eyes wide, and timid hands outstretched—outstretched until they fell into my own and lay there.
“I came from the Silent Land,” she said; “the bird lead me; see, it has entered with me, Louis.”
“It is my wife who has entered,” I said quietly to Ferris, and the little maid clung close to me, holding out one slim hand to Ferris.
There was an interval of silence.
“Father Gregory will breakfast with us tomorrow,” said Ferris to me.
“A Priest?”
“Open the window,” smiled Ferris; “there is a small grey bird here.”
So I opened the window and it flew away.
“Good-night,” whispered the little maid, and kissed her hand to the open window.
“Diane!”
She came to me quietly. Ferris had vanished; Solomon peered dreamily at us with filmy eyes.
“The Spirit-bird has gone,” she said.
Then, with her arms about my neck, I raised her head, touching her white brow with my lips.
* * * * * *
When my wife read as far as you have read, she picked up the embroidery which she had dropped beside her on the table.
“Do you like my story?” I asked.
But she only smiled at me from under her straight eyebrows.
The next morning I received her ultimatum; I am to cease writing about beautiful women of doubtful antecedents who inhabit forest glades, I am to stop making fun of Howlett, I am to curb my passion for rod and gun, and, if I insist on writing about my wife, I am to tell the truth concerning her. This I have promised Ysonde to do, and I shall try to, in “The Black Water.”
※
There is not much of a plot to “The Silent Land”; the tone is often flippant, the characters ciphers, and strictly speaking, there is nothing overtly supernatural that might mark this as a weird tale. Yet there is a great deal of atmosphere and suggestion to the writing, and that tantalizing ambiguity is, I suspect, the point. There’s a quality to the story reminiscent of Robert Aickman or Shirley Jackson, which toys with supernatural horror but refuses to resolve any of it.
Probably the most notable tease in the story is the repeated refrain “There was a King in Carcosa”—which readers of Chambers’ previous weird collection, The King in Yellow (1895), will connect with “dim Carcosa” in the shadowy mythology of those stories. We never get more than that beginning; never know whether the characters have read or are paraphrasing The King in Yellow play or some other, related legend. Yet the thought they might lends the utterances more dread than they would normally have.
Weird Tales was unusual among pulp magazines in publishing a relatively large number of “unique” authors—that is, authors who only appear with a single credit in the magazine. Often, it is their only story credit in any pulp magazine. While WT editors Edwin Baird, Farnsworth Wright, and Dorothy McIlwraith worked to attract recognizable writers, they were not above giving any author their chance. Such was the case with Royal W. Jimerson, a staid newspaper editor (Lesser Known Writers). “Medusa” is his only known published fiction story.
First published in Weird Tales (Apr 1928); it was reprinted in the Not At Night anthologyBy Daylight Only (1929), and Weird Tales (May 1938). The internet presence and continued interest in scans of old issues of Weird Tales have given “Medusa” renewed prominence, with reviews, audio adaptations, and speculation.
※
Medusa
by Royal W. Jimeson
IN DEFIANCE of fashion and her husband, Marian Bardwell nursed the yard-long, tropical luxuriance of her blue-black hair, stedfastly refusing to have it bobbed. No coiffeuse ever profaned its twining, serpentine profusion; no hands but her own were equal to the ritual of the 4 o’clock brushing that Marian performed with the dreamy-eyed reverence of a devotee who with mystic, ceremonious pass and gesture invokes the deity of some dusky shrine.
Before the dressing-table of her boudoir she sat, confronted by boxes of powders, pots of rouge, lotions and rarely blended essences; but these she ignored, having selected from a bewildering assortment of brushes her favorite, amber-handled, amber-backed, and cunningly carved in the nude, gracious curves of a Medusa whose serpentine tresses crept about and enclosed the oval that the Gorgon’s upraised, slender arms supported.
Bardwell entered through the door connecting his room with Marian’s.
“At it again! That damned hair!”
Bardwell shrugged his shoulders, grimaced at the thought of his wife’s oblivion to his presence, then with an effort erased the somber frown that lined his lean, handsome features. He turned as if to leave, but paused, fascinated by that ceremonial brushing. The lustrous amber disk and its golden bristles gleamed and stirred like a gigantic beetle as she moved it slowly through the abysmal darkness of her hair. Her movements were rhythmic, supple, richly rounded; in some unbelievable way her arm glided in a series of convolutions whose sinister grace made Bardwell shudder.
“That damned hair!” he repeated as he wrenched himself from the fascination of the ritual. And then: “Why don’t you cut out all this nonsense and be human? Have your hair bobbed, buy up a bunch of new clothes, and we’ll take a second honeymoon in Florida next month. We can afford it now, you know. And . . . we both need a change of scene,” concluded Bardwell irrelevantly, knowing well that no change of scene could ever veil the aura of age-old evil that clung to the serpentine blackness of Marian’s hair.
The chilly, repellent opulence of that somberly gleaming, iridescent coiffure haunted Bardwell, distracting his hours of waking and making his sleep a confusion of reptilian nightmares. The living, creeping coldness of those profuse tresses had in four years frozen an indefinable terror into his soul. An age-old horror nightly twined itself on Marian’s pillow, separating them as might a limitless expanse of steaming, evil-haunted jungle.
“I’ll never cut my hair,” declared Marian with the passionless certitude of one pronouncing a law of nature. “Never again mention such a thing!”
Then she set aside her mirror and, after a final lingering reverent caress with the Medusa-handled brush, turned in her low chair to face Bardwell.
“Win, can’t you take me as I am and be content to leave me as I am? You knew when you married me that there was something strange about me. I loved you, Win. Still do. Always shall. But I can’t—”
“But you must!” flared Bardwell.
“No, I can not. Please don’t be unkind to me,” she pleaded. “All my life I’ve been different from other women. I worried my mother into her grave—”
“And now I’m in line,” despaired Bardwell. “Marian—”
But even as she spoke, the animation faded from the exquisite oval of her face; she picked up the amber brush and again languidly stroked the coiling darkness that hung heavily on her white shoulders, spelling the wordless syllable of an everlasting prayer to the deity Bardwell hated and—feared.
“We’ll take a second honeymoon in Florida,” he had said. But he knew that it was no honeymoon but rather the fantastic hope that the warmth and unfailing sunlight of Florida might sear to extinction the living, chilly blackness before whose shrine Marian worshiped with measured, languid passes of an amber brush.
Drawn by a compelling sorcery, attracted in spite of himself, Bardwell drew closer, catching the sound of the brush that caressed Marian’s waist-long hair, strands that blended and writhed, curled and intertwined independently of the golden bristles. He gently laid his fingers on a strand, hoping against hope . . . shivered . . . muttered . . . then turned and strode from the room.
Marian’s movements became slower, more and more torpid, more languid, until finally, succumbing to the tropical, overheated atmosphere of her Riverside Drive boudoir, she carefully placed the amber brush on the table and, mustering her ebbing vitality, picked her way to bed.
The black, tentacular strands disposed themselves about the pillow, dark serpents basking on silver-white sand. . . .
2
SARASOTA, rather than glittering Miami or Palm Beach, appealed to Bardwell as being the most suitable field on which to make his final play against that which hung over him like the mantle of an oppressive doom.
And there he sought to inveigle Marian into play and festivity, to entice her from the somnolent ritual of everlasting hair-combing, to revive the gayety of their earlier days. He succeeded, for a few days; but on the first morning of the second week he found Marian before her mirror, amber Medusa in hand, and lost in the impenetrable sorcery that had made his life a vortex of madness.
That same afternoon found her asleep at the edge of a steaming lagoon, her hair spread fanwise about her, basking in that fierce damp heat.
“Now, by the Lord, this is too much!” he snarled, as he seized her by the hand, thrust her into their car, and carried her, still dazed and half asleep, back to their hotel. Once in the privacy of their suite, he continued, “This damned nonsense must stop! And I’ll stop it, here and now!”
Bardwell seized a pair of scissors and, stifling his repugnance, grasped a handful of that serpentine, black hair. And then he dropped the gleaming steel, recoiling before the chilly flame that came to life in Marian’s smoldering eyes.
“Win Bardwell,” she began in a calm voice whose deadliness matched the light in her eyes, “this is going too far. Whatever else you may wish to do, at least stop short of mutilating me and killing yourself.”
“What?” demanded Bardwell. “Mutilate you? Kill myself—good Lord, Marian, this is getting worse every day! What’s going to become of us?”
The venom faded from her voice, and the fire from her eyes, as she replied: “Win, I’ve told you a thousand times I can’t help being what I am. Can’t you remember the old days when my strange ways didn’t annoy you?”
And Bardwell recalled the first weeks of their marriage—mad, ecstatic nights and dream-filled days. The chill contact of Marian’s hair, even then, had carried the faint suggestion of some ancient evil that always blended in their love-making, adding piquancy to Bardwell’s pleasure, suggesting to him that he had found Eve and Lilith in one person. He had loved the dank chill of her hair, cold strands that burned like creeping, living fire; and a curious, pagan fascination lay in that queer gesture, so like an archaic, dimly remembered ritual, with which Marian would toss the great braids about her back and shoulders, where they clung and twined. . . .
“Win,” continued Marian, “have you changed, or have I? Leave me if you wish. You needn’t stay. I’ll play fair with you if you wish to leave me. Only . . . promise me you’ll never again attempt to cut my hair. Promise me, and I’ll forgive you. And if you can . . . try to remember.”
Bardwell remembered, and promised. And that night, and many nights thereafter, Bardwell held stony-eyed communion with bottles branded with three stars and marked with the name of Martel.
Yet hope was not entirely gone: for Bardwell would occasionally vary his routine, emerge from the haze, and in the calmness of evening seek anew the means of overcoming that which oppressed him. And thus it was that wandering at random he met old Dr. Berg, who during the many years previous to his retirement from active practise had attended Marian and Marian’s parents.
“Dr. Berg! Strike me blind, but it is good to see you!”
In the pleasure of this unexpected encounter, Win Bardwell for the moment forgot that which the undying sun of Florida had not eradicated.
“And just as good to see you, Win. What in the world brings you to Sarasota?”
The doctor paused, hesitating to inquire as to Bardwell’s wife, yet knowing that such inquiry must be forthcoming from him. Bardwell’s next remark bridged the gap.
“I know you’ve retired, Doctor,” he began, “but I want to have a word with you. In private. And at once, if you’re not engaged.”
Dr. Berg nodded acquiescence. A cab carried them to the doctor’s apartment.
“No, lad,” interrupted the white-haired medico, “you’re not loco. It killed her mother; and It has made me wonder, and pass quite beyond the borders of reason and science. In a word, Win, it’s that deadly poison coldness of Marian’s hair. . . .”
The doctor shivered.
“Yes,” agreed Bardwell. “It’s driving me nutty. She won’t have it cut. She spends hours brushing it. Like some fakir sitting before a heathen god and thinking himself into the silence. Lord in heaven, but I often wonder if she’s human! The touch of a single strand of it drives me wild. And at the same time, I think the world of her. That’s the worst of it!”
THE old doctor poured a slug of Bacardi. Bardwell swallowed the amber flame and continued, “Either I’m absolutely bughouse, or something is totally wrong with Marian. One of us should be sewed up in a sack and dropped into the Gulf. If she’s okay, then I’m due for a padded cell; or if I’m right, then that girl is a monstrosity . . . oh, hell! What do you make of it, Doc?”
“I make exactly nothing of it,” replied Dr. Berg. “Nothing that any sane man of science could accept. Her parents told me a similar story, when she was about six years old—told me of the ghastly, snaky coldness and clamminess of Marian’s heavy hair. I laughed and called it nerves. But when I touched the kid’s unusually long hair, I nearly passed out, used as I was to grotesque and repellent deformities. It was as though I had thrust my hand into a nest of serpents all clinging together for warmth.”
Bardwell lifted his face from his hands.
“This madness has to stop. I’ll clip that poisonous jungle she nurses day and night. Promised her I wouldn’t, but promises be damned!”
“No, Win, don’t do that. Her mother tried it, once. Leave her if you can’t stand it any longer. But don’t kill her. Or yourself—”
“What? You, too? What in thunder do you mean—kill her, or my self?” demanded Bardwell, recovering himself, and drawing animation from the incredible words the doctor had just spoken in paraphrase of Marian’s outlandish speech. “Are you as nutty as she is, and I shall be? For God’s sake—”
“Steady, lad. She isn’t, and I’m not, and you’re not, yet. Listen. . . .”
The doctor drew from his desk a leather-bound, loose-leaf notebook, turned a few pages, remarking as he did so, “Heredity is a curious thing. Marian’s outlandish hair inspired me to study the matter in general and in particular. I’ve never dared publish my thoughts and findings. Like Rabelais, I prefer to die before I am cremated. But I’ll tell you as much as I can. It may help you. For we lose fear of that which we understand, even if but partly.”
The doctor paused; pinched the end from a long black cigar; sought, found, but forgot to strike his match. And then he read, intoning solemnly, like a judge pronouncing sentence.
“Atavism is an outcropping of tendencies and characteristics that have skipped two generations or more. Such outcroppings are rare enough, though usually not startling. But what of tendencies that have lain dormant, skipping thousands of generations, reappearing only after hundreds of centuries of extinction?
“Your wife, Win. . . . For twenty years I’ve studied this matter, ever since at her mother’s insistence I touched that living, snaky hair.”
“For God’s sake, Doctor, what do you mean?”
“Just what I said. One thing at a time. You’ll finally grasp what you’re up against.”
The doctor struck his match, touched light to the lean, dark cigar, then continued: “You’ve played polo, and witnessed many polo matches. Remember Captain Erich von Ostenburg?”
“Yes. Fierce, heathen sort of fellow. Wonderful player. But what the devil—?”
“One thing at a time, Win. Have patience and let me put it across bit by bit, groping with you even as I myself have groped in the dark. He resembles not one of his relatives, distant or near; nor does he resemble any one of his ancestors for ten generations back, if the private rogues’ gallery, as he calls the family portraits, means anything at all. That fellow is a Tartar, pure and simple; a throw-back to some obscure ancestor who rode in the trace of Genghis Khan. Look at him; look at those eyes, those cheekbones, the contour of his skull, and see the stamp of the Mongol. Look at the way he sits his horse, crouched like some squat demon riding into battle. He might be the Grand Khan himself. That is atavism, but on a small scale. Merely a dozen odd generations.”
Bardwell was too much puzzled to interrupt.
“Some Tartar of the hordes of Genghis Khan grafted himself onto the family tree of the house of Ostenburg. And now, centuries later, we have Captain Erich. But this,” repeated the doctor, “is atavism on a small scale. Listen again:”
And from his notes the doctor read, “It was Herbert Spencer, greatest of all rationalists, who pointed out that there is a foundation of fact for everylegend and superstition of mankind. Was there then a race, back in the mists that shroud the emergence of humanity from prehistoric reptilian slime, whose physical attributes supplied the fact basis for the Medusa myth, the legend of the Gorgons?”
Bardwell stared, blinked, wondered whether or not he had heard aright the madness which dripped from the white-mustached lips of the old doctor. Then Bardwell remembered all too well the serpentine, clinging coldness of Marian’s hair and knew that he had indeed married a Medusa whose type for a thousand centuries had been, and would today, but for some ghastly jest of nature, be extinct.
3
DAY after day the amber brush with its carved Medusa flickered like some monstrous golden beetle as Marian, secure in the shelter of Bardwell’s promise, devoted more and more of her time to the now endless caressing of the coiling, midnight madness that crowned her pallid features, enshrouded her shoulders, and reached almost to her knees.
Small, swift boats brought Bardwell solace from Bimini: Martel, and Bacardi, and the deadly, pale green Pernod—wormwood distilled with madness. Substitution: serpents for serpents. And through the haze gleamed a pair of long-bladed coupon shears. Martel and Pernod and promises mingle curiously.
Dr. Berg watched from a distance, resigned himself to the futility of further effort, and confined his pity to a slow, sorrowful shake of his white head. His words were unvarying: “Don’t attempt to cut her hair. Her mother tried it, once. . . . Grin and bear it, or else leave her. But forget those scissors, and remember your promise. . . .”
Martel and Pernod and promises mingle curiously. Yet through it all persisted the memory of ancient days, of mad, ecstatic nights and dreamfilled days, and of a lovely, pallid girl whose great dark braids of hair clung and twined about his shoulders, adding piquancy to his pleasure; so that one night Bardwell, deciding that while he could not grin, he might at least bear it, thrust aside the pale green madness that turned milky white as the melting ice diluted it, and sought Marian’s boudoir.
A shaft of moonlight filtered in through the thinly draped French window and enriched the pale features and argentine shoulders of his sleeping wife. Her long hair somberly enshrouded the loveliness of her face and spread fanwise across both pillows. A faint, acrid odor mingled itself with the perfume of the sleeping Madonna; and apart from, but somehow a part of her even breathing, came the vague sound of things that crept not quite noiselessly, and their sibilant hissing.
As Bardwell stared fixedly, the sable strands moved, stirred, animated by an independent life: black serpents awakening from their slumber on silver-white sands. For the first time he saw that which he had suspected, and feared.
From the pocket of his brocaded lounge robe he drew the final solution, the companion of endless nights of grief: a pair of long-bladed coupon shears.
4
“JUST across the hall from 614? Yes, sir, I’ll look into it right away,” replied the night clerk. And then, slamming the receiver, he addressed the house detective: “Dawson, for the love of Mike see who’s got the heebie-jeebies in 640.”
Whereat the night clerk yawned and prepared to resume his nap while awaiting Dawson’s report as to the cause of that prolonged scream of anguish, the voice of a man and woman mingled in an awful cry of horror and despair, the ghastly disturbance whereof the guest in 614 had complained.
But that nap was interrupted ere it was resumed.
“I’ll be eternally damned!” gasped the night clerk, paused a moment, then started in pursuit of the house detective who had in three bounds cleared the lobby and gained the street.
A patrolman on a beat several blocks from the hotel collared the frenzied man and clubbed him into a state of comparative calmness. Investigation verified the house detective’s outrageous story, thus keeping him clear of a padded cell; but investigation came to a dead standstill when confronted by the scarlet, excoriated mask of what had once been Win Bardwell’s lean, handsome features, and the thousand tiny, livid punctures which had pierced the skin. Nor was it any easier to account for the monstrous black coil, wrist-thick, which encircled Bardwell’s body, and stranglingly, closed about his throat: frosty cold, midnight black, iridescent hair the like of which came from no man or beast . . . but which must have come from the head of the woman who lay dead on the bed beside Bardwell.
Dr. Berg saw, but wisely refrained from venturing an opinion. On returning to his apartment, he drew from his desk a loose-leaf, indexed notebook, turned to the page ending, “Was there a race in the mists that shroud the emergence of humanity from prehistoric, reptilian clime, whose physical attributes supplied the fact basis for the Medusa myth?”, and completed in a few words his commentary on atavism.
※
Royal W Jimerson only wrote one fictional story, and this is it. It bears a lot of resemblance to Medusa’s Coil, a collaboration between H P Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop. A story which was published AFTER Medusa. —Morgan Scorpion, “Medusa” by Royal W. Jimeson audio narration (Youtube)
“Medusa’s Coil” by H. P. Lovecraft was the third and final weird fiction story that he revised/ghostwrote for Zealia Brown Bishop; although written in 1930, it was not actually published until Weird Tales (Jan 1939). As part of its re-discovery in the internet era, some reviewers have noted a similarity between “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) and “Medusa” (1928).
Lovecraft never mentioned “Medusa” or Jimerson in any of his letters, even when discussing the April 1928 issue of Weird Tales. While Lovecraft probably read it, as he seems to have read most issues of WT, it either didn’t stand out or he failed to mention it to any correspondent in any surviving letter. The stories do share some commonalities: a woman with unusual hair, a reference to the medusa myth, and a jealous husband. In everything else, from plot to setting, the stories are different.
While we cannot rule out that “Medusa” may have influenced Lovecraft in some way, if it was an inspiration, it was one ingredient in a mix that combined Zealia Bishop’s original idea, Lovecraft’s Mythos, and a complicated narrative framework.
Few alert readers of the National River Salvage Report for May 1925 failed to note the singular events occurring at the Kinsey Museum here in East Lust, Mass. I was curator of that museum during the entire period of weird happenings (1746-1923), and am writing now of them in order that some glimpse of the awesome terror that paralyzed this town may reach the outside world. I am writing this message in the back of the 1926 calendar of the New Coolidge Granite Tombstone and Lifelike Birdbath Company, and placing it in a bottle.
Executor’s note: Professor Horvath was murdered at the Shanghai Pleasure Palace six minutes after writing this terrible account. The only clue to his killer and/or killers was this note pinned to his left earlobe. It read: “Thus does Muhgo, the Serpent God, revenge himself of all those who defile the sacred temple of the Eight-toed God of the Flowering Amazon. Are you saved?”
Dr. Murchlow, the museum taxidermist, was found a few days later stuffed with oyster dressing. And Prof. Shrewcraft was run over by a truck belonging to the Serpent God Moving Van & Storage Co.)
Anyone who has read the forbidden Cultes Des Goules, of which there only six known copies, (not including the Pocket Books edition) has some idea of the strange elder beings who once inhabited the far reaches of the Pacific. We are all familiar with the eldritch statues on Easter Island, and the weird carvings on the dissecting boards of Biology labs. This whole affair began in the South Pacific when a huge cone-shaped rock was thrust up from the immortal sea.
Captain Thor Kontihiki, of the whaler, SS Conshohoken, spotted the island, and having nothing better to do, decided to investigate. On the island he found what appeared to be a rocketship. Indeed, this was the case. For the strange writing on the ship’s side, when held up to a mirror, said: “I am Johnny Rocketship. Who the hell are you?’’
Hearing of this, I immediately wired (enclosing postage) for the ship to be sent (in a plain brown wrapper) to the museum. For that very morning Dr. Tree had said to me, ‘‘A rocketship would sure as blazes pep up this damned rathole.’’ Dr. Tree was known as the town Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also lived there, was known as the town Dr. Tree.
No one paid much attention to the ship, since our museum was a quiet and orderly one, and did not admit people. But one morning Dr, Murchlow peered into the mysterious craft. He fainted on the spot.
On further investigation we found that a rooster and a bull were frozen in a solid cake of ice. The newspapers, picking it up, wittily called it a “Rooster an’ Bull Story’’.
Curious townsfolk and assorted hens flocked from near and far. And with them came strange orientals. Soon twenty sinister orientals came daily to the museum, calling themselves Spade Managora and his Argentine Hawaiians. They played dixieland in the Guy Lombardo manner, and every evening made a sacrifice of a new-born elephant to the ship.
More and more orientals came, and lines two blocks long formed outside the museum. The police cracked down. But because of the size of East Lust, the last 46 people in line were outside city limits, and couldn’t be arrested.
It was on the morning of June 5, 1933 that the weird events finally came to an end in an earth shaking manner. When Dr. Murchlow and I went to view the rocket ship, we could find no trace of it. In its place were about twenty orientals, frozen solid in the various attitudes of playing “Muskrat Ramble.”
But there is no use to go further. We are doomed. For there are more things in Horatio than this world dreams of. Dr. Murchlow has left, I think that I will follow. He said that he was going to the Sinister Oriental Saloon to get frozen. Perhaps he’s right.
※
“S. G.” is presumably Steve Goldberg, the humor editor for The Georgian, a small college magazine which included quick little spoofs among its contents. This particular setup draws more heavily from Lovecraft than Saki (readers can easily see plot points lifted from “Out of the Æons” (1935) by Hazel Heald & H. P. Lovecraft), but they’ve mixed in a number of other references as well, such as Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki expedition.
Satire and parody are an important part of any literary tradition. Like pastiche, they tend to focus on the most obvious elements of a story, ignoring the subtleties; but where a pasticheur is attempting a serious derivative work, the satirist delights in absurdity. Spoofs in particular tend to bring in incongruous elements, double entendres, and mockingly undercut the mood or seriousness of the original with slightly risqué humor.
