Acolytes of Cthulhu Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI

  Black Wings of Cthulhu

  Black Wings of Cthulhu 2

  The Madness of Cthulhu (October 2014)

  EDITED BY STEPHEN JONES

  Shadows Over Innsmouth

  Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

  Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth (January 2015)

  Acolytes of Cthulhu

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781165263

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165270

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First Titan Books edition: June 2014

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved by the authors. The rights of each contributor to be identified as Author of their Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Introduction Copyright © 2014 by Robert M. Price

  Cover Art Copyright © 2014 by Bob Eggleton. All rights reserved

  Earl Peirce, Jr. “Doom of the House of Duryea” © 1936 Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales

  Joseph Payne Brennan, “The Seventh Incantation” © 1963 by Joseph Payne Brennan for Scream at Midnight

  Hugh B. Cave and Robert M. Price, “From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy” © 2014 by The Estate of Hugh B. Cave

  Duane Rimel, “The Jewels of Charlotte” © 1935 by Duane Rimel for Unusual Stories

  Manly Wade Wellman, “The Letters of Cold Fire” © 1944 by Popular Fiction Company for Weird Tales

  Henry Hasse, “Horror at Vecra” © 1943, appears here by permission of Forrest J. Ackerman

  Charles R. Tanner, “Out of the Jar” © 1940 by Albing Publications for Stirring Science Stories

  Edmond Hamilton, “The Earth Brain” © 1932 by Popular Fiction Company for Weird Tales

  James Causey, “Legacy in Crystal” © 1943 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales

  C. Hall Thompson, “The Will of Claude Ashur” © Popular Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales

  David H. Keller, “The Final War” first appeared from Perri Press in 1949

  Arthur Pendragon, “The Dunstable Horror” © 1964 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company for Fantastic Stories of the Imagination

  Arthur Pendragon, “The Crib of Hell” © 1965 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company for Fantastic Stories of the Imagination

  Steffan B. Aletti, “The Last Work of Pietro de Opono” © 1969 by Health Knowledge, Inc. for Magazine of Horror

  Steffan B. Aletti, “The Eye of Horus” © 1968 by Health Knowledge, Inc., for Magazine of Horror

  Steffan B. Aletti, “The Cellar Room” © 1969 by Health Knowledge, Inc. for Weird Terror Tales

  John S. Glasby, “Mythos” as by Max Chartair, © John Spencer & Co. for Supernatural Stories

  Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things” © 1975 by The Atlantic Monthly for The Atlantic Monthly

  Randall Garrett, “The Horror Out of Time” © 1978 by Mercury Press, Inc. for Fantasy & Science Fiction

  S.T. Joshi, “The Recurring Doom” © 1980 first appeared in Kenneth Neilly, ed., Lovecraftian Ramblings XV

  Dirk W. Mosig, “Necrotic Knowledge” © 1976 first appeared in Mosig, ed., The Necrotic Scroll

  Donald R. Burleson, “Night Bus” © 1985 by Yith Press for Eldritch Tales

  Peter H. Cannon, “The Pewter Ring” © 1989 by Cryptic Publications for Tales of Lovecraftian Horror

  David Kaufman, “John Lehman Alone” © 1987 for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

  Gustav Meyrink, “The Purple Death” translated by Kathleen Houlihan and Robert M. Price © 1997 by Robert M. Price

  Richard F. Searight and Franklyn Searight, “Mists of Death” © 1999 for the present collection.

  Neil Gaiman, “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” © 1998 by Neil Caiman. First published in The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Dedicated to Duane Rimel, Great Old One and Arch-Acolyte of Cthulhu

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by S. T. Joshi and Stephen Jones

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by Robert M. Price

  Doom of The House of Duryea by Earl Peirce, Jr.

  The Seventh Incantation by Joseph Payne Brennan

  From the Pits of Elder Blasphemy by Hugh B. Cave and Robert M. Price

  The Jewels of Charlotte by Duane Rimel

  The Letters of Cold Fire by Manly Wade Wellmann

  Horror At Vecra by Henry Hasse

  Out of The Jar by Charles R. Tanner

  The Earth-Brain by Edmond Hamilton

  Through the Alien Angle by Elwin G. Powers

  Legacy in Crystal by James Causey

  The Will of Claude Ashur by C. Hall Thompson

  The Final War by David H. Keller, M.D.

  The Dunstable Horror by Arthur Pendragon

  The Crib of Hell by Arthur Pendragon

  The Last Work of Pietro De Opono by Steffan B. Aletti

  The Eye of Horus by Steffan B. Aletti

  The Cellar Room by Steffan B. Aletti

  Mythos by John Glasby

  There Are More Things by Jorge Luis Borges

  The Horror Out of Time by Randall Garrett

  The Recurring Doom by S. T. Joshi

  Necrotic Knowledge by Dirk W. Mosig

  Night Bus by Donald R. Burleson

  The Pewter Ring by Peter Cannon

  John Lehmann Alone by David Kaufman

  The Purple Death by Gustav Meyrink

  Mists of Death by Richard F. Searight and Franklyn Searight

  Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar by Neil Gaiman

  About the Editor

  Also Available from Titan Books

  INTRODUCTION

  Lovecraft, since his death in 1937, has rapidly been becoming a cult. He already had his circle of disciples who collaborated with him and imitated him.

  Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous”

  November 24, 1945

  THE BIG CLUE IS THAT H. P. LOVE CRAFT USED TO SIGN HIMSELF sometimes as “Grandpa Cthulhu” or simply as “Cthulhu.” Thus the acolytes of Cthulhu are the acolytes of Lovecraft himself. The Cthulhu cult is the literary cult of Lovecraft. In this fact I believe we have a large part of the explanation for the power with which Lovecraft’s writings grasp many of his readers and captures their imaginations, never to let go. All fiction, as Michael Riffaterre notes (Fictional Truth) gains depth and resonance, manages in short to “ring true” to its readers only insofar as the author has built in the sounding board of a subtext, some apparently prior reality against which story images and developments will seem to ring solid. A fiction built on sand will sound tinny, hollow, when tapped by the reader. A classic example might be the Old Testament proof texts adduced by the Gospel of Matthew in order to demonstrate that various events in the life of Jesus fulfilled prophecy. The supposed events require some sort of a credibility boost, since they d
epict a man being conceived by the divine spirit in a virgin’s womb, miraculously healing the sick, etc., not exactly items that easily pass the test of most readers’ criteria of plausibility. But once Matthew narrates them, then provides an apparently matching proof text from ancient scripture, you think the miracles may be true after all. They all of a sudden appear to match ancient prophecy. They appear to be the other shoe falling, matching the one that Isaiah or Jeremiah or Zechariah let drop hundreds of years before.

  To take a very different example, the horror in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which the movie version cannot keep from looking cartoonish, strikes deep for the sensitive reader since a great length of the noose rope has been strung upon the gallows of an excruciatingly rendered family tragedy surrounding the gratuitous death of a beloved child. If not for the subtext of too-real tragedy, the text of dripping zombies could never convince.

  And I am suggesting that one big reason Lovecraft’s fiction is so hypnotically effective for many of us is that we see ourselves reflected in the mirror it holds before us. When we discover HPL we are likely to be adolescent bookish types, unathletic or at least uninterested in the hormone-driven lemming-existence of our peers. Thus we identify with the scholarly misanthropes populating Lovecraft’s stories. We love books, and by the time we have discovered our favorite recondite authors, most of their works are probably out of print, so we, like the doomed bibliophiles in Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars” and Howard’s “The Thing on the Roof,” learn what it is to covet unobtainable volumes and to go to what seem to us (and even more to others who do not share our love of books) to be fantastic, fanatical lengths to possess our treasures. Securing a copy of The Outsider and Others would scarcely be less of an event than stumbling upon a copy of John Dee’s Necronomicon.

  Some notice with an element of unease that fandoms tend to take on the overtones of a religious commitment. To those fans, the more mundane issue the challenge to “Get a life!” Ah, but you see, Montressor, we have a life! It’s more a question of where. As Debbie Harry sang in her song “The Real World,” “I’m livin’ in a magazine [Weird Tales, in our case]… I’m not livin’ in the real world… no more, no more, no more.” Or if you prefer REM, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” There is no objective “real world.” All lives are essentially scripted fictions running their course in the context of some fictive narrative universe or other. Everyone is a “creative anachronist,” but we Lovecraftians, like our cousins in other Buddha-fields of fandom, have elected to live a minority, sectarian existence in what sociologists Berger and Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality) call a “finite province of meaning.” We are willing to bear the reproach of the walking dead around us, the same who persecute poor Dilbert. We are proud of HPL for not being able to hold down a worldly job, even if we ourselves are able.

  Lovecraft has become our Christ, our God. In a dream an angel appeared to the erudite Saint Jerome to rebuke him for his love of the Classics: “Thou are not a follower of Christ, but of Cicero.” Guilty as charged!

  Some despise fandom-as-[a substitute for]-religion because they assume, as Paul Tillich did, that a religion must center about, and must symbolize, one’s ultimate concerns, and that these concerns must be appropriately ultimate in their scope, dealing with issues of timely relevance and eternal significance. But this is a sad and Puritanical definition of religiosity. It gets the focus wrong and neglects the role of imagination in religion, i.e. in myth. I think religious sensitivity is essentially an aesthetic stimulation of the imagination contributing to an aesthetic apprehension of life and the world through whatever filters we may choose to view it, whether that, e.g., of the great salvation-epic of the Bible, or that of the cosmic history of Lovecraft. It is such living fantasies as these which valorize an otherwise dull and utilitarian life. Moral convictions which, admittedly, everyone needs, are a different matter, and it is a dangerous confusion to make them dependent on, a function of, religious convictions. If you make that confusion, morality will always be subject to dogmatic decree, and holy wars, heresy hunts will sooner or later come to pass. So we Lovecraftians, we acolytes of Cthulhu, do not pretend to derive our varied moral stances from Lovecraft (except insofar as we read his essays and letters where he treats of such matters and happen to find him convincing). And we don’t think others should necessarily derive their moral compasses from their religions either. What a better world it would be if we could come together and derive our moral scruples from a common-sense, this-worldly set of considerations and agree to disagree on what choice will nourish our imaginations, generate the symbolic universes we will breathe the air of day by day.

  But the Lovecraft cult, I fear, is on a more infantile level than the Baker Street Irregulars and the cult of Sherlock Holmes.

  Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous”

  …the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.

  H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” 1926

  Adolescence is a time when intelligent people have begun to attain enough independence from family-circle influences to place all inherited beliefs under severe scrutiny. If you are going to become a rationalist, a skeptic, an agnostic, adolescence is the prime time to do it. It is a rebellion mechanism. It is a way of standing up on your own, for yourself. That doesn’t mean you are not correct in throwing out childhood catechism. You have also come into possession of critical reasoning skills for the first time. If there is something rotten in Dogma Denmark, you have the keen nose to smell it. And all this, too, primes one for HPL. One catches sight of Lovecraft’s scientific, rationalist, cosmicist worldview, where the myth of human self-importance is overthrown by realization of the yawning eternity of (as William Jennings Bryan summed it up) universal dust.

  Thus cut off from the common run of conservative sitcom watching parents and prom-attending contemporaries, the young Lovecraft reader clutches his secret lore gleefully to himself, contemptuous of the surrounding herd, even as Lovecraft himself was, and for the same reasons. Such a reader will see himself reflected just as truly in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s novel The New Adam.

  The trouble with Edmund Wilson, which led him to those blasphemous words about our God of fiction that we can never forgive, any more than Vietnam veterans can ever forgive Jane Fonda, is that he was getting frostbite and enjoying it. Unlike the Transactional Analysis theorists who urge us to keep the child inside us alive and well, Wilson belonged to a cigar-chomping, scotch-sipping generation addicted to the stale smoke and the bitter reek of “realism,” of boring adulthood, and who thought literature should reflect that outlook, the pages of “good books” merely wallpaper sheets for the prison cell of adulthood. We come on the scene with a childlike second sight which enables us to see the roaring glories of the Zen initiate. Growing up applies cloudy cataracts to the soul, and we can see the magic no longer, though fans have found a way. We use Lovecraft’s fiction (and other fan-idols) like the jaded Randolph Carter used the Silver Key, to return to that brilliant world of dream, which is meaning. And Lovecraft, like Proust, freely admitted it was a regression to childhood. But why put it so nastily? Why not choose another metaphor, say, turning about and becoming as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, since only their like will gain it.

  The time is right for a greater appreciation of this deeper, more serious aspect of Lovecraft’s fiction… The ground is particularly ready in Europe, where his works are held in highest esteem.

  Dirk W. Mosig, “The Prophet from Providence,” 1973

  Antediluvian-cyclopean ruins on lonely Pacific island. Centre of earthwide subterranean witch cult.

  H. P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book #110, 1923

  The exotic pungency of the secret cult of Cth
ulhu in Lovecraft’s fiction arises from the curious paradox of it being both widespread, worldwide, on the one hand, and yet secret on the other. It is conterminous with history, the bequest of the sleeping Old Ones to their dupes the human race (not that this is any different from the traditional Near Eastern religions, since in both the Babylonian Enuma Elish and in Genesis, humanity is created to serve as a slave race of grounds keepers). It covers the earth as the waters cover the sea; if one learns too much about it, “nautical-looking Negroes” will appear out of thin air to bump you off, and yet Western scholars seem never to have heard of it. The cultists of Cthulhu ply their rituals in lonely places, far from the ken of civilization.

  And so with Lovecraft’s acolytes: we identify with the vague net of Lovecraftians spread abroad somewhere else, and though we would relish fellowship with kindred spirits, we dread it, too, lest we be forced to profane our dearest treasures by bringing them forth into the open air. The friendly interest of another Lovecraft fan well met is at once a relief (we’re not crazy—at least someone else suffers from the same obsession!) and a threat, since for us Lovecraft’s fiction is a Holy of Holies into which only the solitary soul may step. The gathering of the coven should be a sacred convocation, and yet it is somehow a trespass.

  And perhaps this fact explains a shocking and horrifying feature of many fan conventions (even in those microcosms of the same known as comic book stores). When those who by themselves are esotericists as they tread the solitary path nonetheless come together periodically, they magically transform into a bunch of obnoxious, profane, mundane Racoon Lodge conventioneers. Their odd costumes, which seemed the mark of solitary devotion to Darker Mysteries, now by virtue of simple public accumulation, have become a new and public mundanity, like geeks in the audience of Let’s Make a Deal. Attending such a function one suddenly feels the force of the old joke that you wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have someone like you as a member. The Mysteries become pathetically profane by mutual revelation. Thus the esotericist requires secrecy even should one some day become the majority (and for the moment, in a convention, one is). As Macrobius said with reference to the ancient Greek Mysteries: “only an elite may know about the real secret… while the rest may be content to venerate the mystery, defended by… figurative expressions from banality.” In my estimate, the wonderful Necronomicons have perfectly walked the tightrope I am describing. No costumes are allowed, no weapons, except acid critical tongues.