The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Page 40

  At some later date, CAS considered writing a sequel to the story, to be titled “The Doom of Azédarac” (see Black Book, entry 49). Here, Azédarac, on his deathbed, transports himself to an alternate version of Averoigne, where he encounters an otherworld variant of himself, in which he engages in a necromantic battle and loses.

  1. Dagon was a Philistine god who, in the Old Testament, was frequently referred to as an opponent or rival of Jehovah (see 1 Samuel 5:2). Derceto (or Aphrodite Derceto) was the Greek name of the Syrian fertility goddess Atargatis.

  2. Fictitious.

  3. Azazel is a demon variously mentioned in the Old Testament (Leviticus 16:8, 10, 26). In the King James Version the name is mistranslated as “scapegoat.” Old Ones refers to the array of “gods” invented by HPL, as in this citation from the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred: “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.” “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), in The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2001), 219.

  4. Lilit is a purported Old French variant of Lilith, a female demon in Jewish myth; in some traditions she was regarded as Adam’s first wife (see below, where CAS refers to “the pre-Adamite lubriciousness of Lilit”). CAS has coined similar variants for HPL’s Yog-Sothoth (a cosmic entity who fathers a child from a human woman in “The Dunwich Horror”) and his own creation, Tsathoggua (see headnote to “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”).

  5. Fictitious.

  6. The last name translates to “bad evening.”

  7. This is CAS’s first citation of this imaginary book, analogous to HPL’s Necronomicon. However, the wizard Eibon was introduced in “The Door to Saturn” (completed on July 25,1930; Strange Tales, January 1932). CAS, HPL, and other authors cited both Eibon and his book in numerous tales, sometimes using the French title Livre d’Eibon. “The Coming of the White Worm” (completed on September 15, 1933; Stirring Science Stories, April 1941) purports to be Chapter 9 of the Book of Eibon.

  8. Erebean: adjectival form of Erebus, a portion of the Greek underworld.

  9. Asmodai is a variant of Asmodeus, a demon of lust and drunkenness in the apocryphal tradition of the Bible.

  10. In Hebrew tradition, Abaddon is a “place of destruction” associated with Sheol, the Hebrew hell. In Revelation 9:11, Abaddon is the name of “the angel of the bottomless pit.”

  11. Paynim is Christian term for a pagan or heathen.

  12. Phlegethon is, in Greek myth, a river of fire in the underworld.

  THE VAULTS OF YOH-VOMBIS

  The first draft of this story was completed on September 12, 1931. CAS had initially wished to title it “The Vaults of Abomi” (see the synopsis under the title in SS 162–63, where the entity in the story is named a vortlup). The story was rejected by Weird Tales, as editor Farnsworth Wright felt that the first half was too slow; he urged CAS to condense this section. HPL urged CAS not to make the cuts, but CAS felt he had no option: “I would have told Wright to go chase himself in regard to ‘The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis’, if I didn’t have the support of my parents, and debts to pay off. For this reason it’s important for me to place as many stories as possible and have them coming out at a tolerably early date. However, I did not reduce the tale by as much as Wright suggested, and I refused to sacrifice the essential details and incidents of the preliminary section. What I did do, mainly, was to condense the descriptive matter, some of which had a slight suspicion of prolixity anyhow. But I shall restore most of it, if the tale is ever brought out in book form” (letter to HPL, [early November 1931]; SL 165). Accordingly, the story appeared in Weird Tales (May 1932) and was reprinted in OST and CF 3. But CAS did not in fact restore the text of the story for any book appearance. The present text is a hybrid, based largely on the original typescript but incorporating some apparently deliberate revisions from the revised/abridged typescript.

  The story may betray the influence of HPL’s Antarctic novella At the Mountains of Madness. CAS had read the story in manuscript in August 1931 and responded enthusiastically: “I read the story twice—parts of it three or four times—and think it is one of your masterpieces. . . . I’ll never forget your descriptions of that tremendous non-human architecture, and the on-rushing shoggoth in an underworld cavern!” (letter to HPL, [early August 1931]; SL 158). In HPL’s story, as in CAS’s, a group of human explorers comes upon an immense city of strange architecture built by an alien race (in HPL’s tale, the so-called Old Ones, interplanetary creatures who had in fact created all Earth life); this race had been wiped out by an even stranger entity (in HPL, the shoggoth, an enormous protoplasmic entity that bears strong resemblances to the cowl-like creature in CAS’s tale), which then pursues the human explorers. See also notes 2 and 5 below.

  1. For Anakim, see note 1 to “The City of the Singing Flame.”

  2. CAS has misspelled Machu Picchu, an Inca city built around 1450 in a mountain range (eight thousand feet above sea level) above the Urumbamba Valley in southern Peru. See HPL’s description of the mountain ridge leading to the city of the Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness: “The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes” (The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, 281). A teocalli is a Mesoamerican terraced pyramid.

  3. lethiferous: bringing death or destruction.

  4. The description may be meant to echo the climax of M. R. James’s ghost story “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” (in Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, 1904), in which an invisible monster manifests itself in a bedsheet and presents “a horrible, an intensely horrible face of crumpled linen” (Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi [New York: Penguin, 2005], 99). CAS had read James for the first time in February 1931, remarking: “The tales are about perfect in their way, and some of them—particularly . . . the one about the specter ‘with the crumpled linen face’ (can’t remember its title at the monent) are hideously powerful” (letter to HPL, [c. 15–23 February 1931]; SL 148).

  5. This may be an echo of the bas-reliefs that the explorers in HPL’s At the Mountains of Madness find carved on the walls of buildings in the Old Ones’ city, allowing the explorers to piece together the history of the Old Ones’ colonization of the planet.

  6. lancinating: characterized by a sensation of cutting or piercing.

  UBBO-SATHLA

  This story was completed on February 15, 1932. Two days later, CAS wrote to Donald Wandrei: “I am also sending a new fantasy of my own, ‘Ubbo-Sathla,’ whose ideation may remind you a little of your own tale, ‘Alfred Kramer.’ The main object of ‘Ubbo-Sathla’ was to achieve a profound and manifold dissolution of what is known as reality—which, come to think of it, is the animus of nearly all my tales, more or less” (SL 170). Wandrei’s “The Lives of Alfred Kramer” (Weird Tales, December 1932) does indeed present striking parallels to CAS’s story, telling of a man beset with racial memory, so that he becomes increasingly primitive and finally ends as a mass of protoplasmic slime. CAS had jotted down a plot synopsis of the story (see SS 174), but it is unclear whether he had done so prior to reading Wandrei’s tale.

  “Ubbo-Sathla” was rejected by Weird Tales upon initial submission but later accepted, appearing in the July 1933 issue. It was later reprinted in OST and CF 3. It is one of CAS’s most frequently anthologized stories, chiefly by virtue of its having appeared in August Derleth’s Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969). It can rank as one of CAS’s most successful ventures in the Lovecraft vein.

  See Steve Behrends, “The Birth of Ubbo-Sathla: Smith, Wandrei, Alfred Kramer, and the Begotten Source,” Crypt of Cthulhu 45 (Candlemas 1987): 10–13.

  1. Variant spellings of Tsathoggua (see headnote to “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”), Yog-Sothoth (see note 5 to “The Holiness of Azédarac”), and Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial entity trapped in the city of R’lyeh, in the depths of the South Pa
cific, as created by HPL in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and cited in many other stories.

  2. For the Book of Eibon, see note 7 to “The Holiness of Azédarac.”

  3. In the Greco-Roman era, Thule was regarded as an island in the far North, north of Britain; this has led some scholars to identify it with the Orkney or Shetland Islands. The phrase ultima Thule (first found in Virgil’s Georgics 1.30) was meant more generally as some incredibly remote realm. In 1910, the explorer Knud Rasmussen established a trading post on the northwest corner of Greenland, calling it Thule.

  4. The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred was invented by HPL in “The Hound” (1922); Alhazred had been cited in “The Nameless City” (1921) as the author of an “unexplainable couplet.” HPL cited the book in many subsequent stories, as did several of his colleagues.

  5. This description recalls HPL’s portrayal of the god Azathoth. In the poem cycle Fungi from Yuggoth (1929–30), HPL memorably refers to Azathoth in the final couplet of the sonnet “Nyarlathotep”: “Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play, / The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away” (The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works, ed. S. T. Joshi [New York: Hippocampus Pres, 2013], 89).

  THE DOUBLE SHADOW

  This story was completed on March 14, 1932. It appears to have been based on the following plot germ: “A man sees a monstrous shadow following his own and merging with it gradually, day by day, while coincidentally with this merging, he loses his own entity and becomes possessed by an evil thing from unknown worlds. In his personality, the hideous invading spirit takes form and becomes manifest till his shadow is that which had followed him” (SS 174). CAS thought it “the most demoniac of my recent tales” (letter to Donald Wandrei, April 6, 1932; manuscript, Minnesota Historical Society), but it was rejected by Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales. To CAS’s surprise, in June 1932 Harry Bates of Strange Tales provisionally accepted both this story and “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” but a few months later his publisher William Clayton shut down Strange Tales, orphaning both stories. Wright again rejected the story late in the year, and CAS had to be content with having it appear as the title story in his self-published pamphlet, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933). Years later Wright belatedly accepted “The Double Shadow,” and it appeared in a slightly abridged form in Weird Tales (February 1939); this version was reprinted in OST. The text in CF 3 derives from the Double Shadow appearance.

  See Jim Rockhill, “The Poetics of Morbidity: The Original Text to Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Maze of Maal Dweb’ and Other Works First Published in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,” Lost Worlds 1 (2004): 20–25; Peter H. Goodrich, “Sorcerous Style: Clark Ashton Smith’s The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,” (FFT 305–17).

  1. This is the subject of the story “The Death of Malygris” (see headnote to “The Last Incantation”).

  2. For Thule, see note 3 to “Ubbo-Sathla”; for Mu, see note 2 to “The Uncharted Isle.”

  3. For Lemuria, see note 1 to “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.”

  4. HPL had queried CAS as to the apparent redundancy of the phrase volumes and books, to which CAS replied: “This was a deliberate Latinism, since I used volumes in the very special sense of rolls or scrolls” (letter to HPL, [c. early April 1932]; SL 175).

  THE MAZE OF THE ENCHANTER

  This story was written in September 1932; it was originally titled “The Maze of Mool Dweb.” CAS thought highly of the story but was not sanguine about its chances of acceptance by Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales: “[the story] is ultra-fantastic, full-hued and ingenious, with an extra twist or two in the tail for luck. Probably, however, he [Wright] will think the style too involved for the semi-illiterates to whom he is catering” (letter to August Derleth, September 11, 1932; SL 188). CAS was right; Wright rejected the story because it was “too poetic and finely phrased” (letter to August Derleth, September 20, 1932; SL 190). CAS then sent it to the Argosy, but it was rejected. He contemplated retitling it “The Enchanter’s Maze” and renaming the protagonist as Maal Dweb. Ultimately he titled it “The Maze of the Enchanter” and published it in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933). This version was anthologized in Today’s Literature, ed. Dudley Chadwick Gordon, Vernon Rupert King, and William Whittingham Lyman (New York: American Book Co., 1935). But CAS still hoped for professional publication of the story. In 1937 he radically rewrote it, cutting out about one thousand words and toning down much of the exotic language; he then submitted it to Esquire, which published the occasional weird tale (his friend Donald Wandrei had landed some stories there), but editor Arnold Gingrich rejected it. Finally, Weird Tales accepted this abridged version and published it as “The Maze of Maal Dweb”; this version was reprinted in OST. The present text (reprinted from CF 4) follows that of The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies.

  1. odalisque: a female slave or concubine in an Ottoman harem. The term is French and derived from the Turkish odalik.

  2. In Greek myth, Laocoön was a Trojan priest who warned his people about accepting the Trojan horse presented as a gift by the Greeks. In Virgil’s Aeneid, he utters the memorable line: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (2.49; “I fear the Greeks, even when bearing gifts”). In vengeance, one of the Greek gods (either Athena or Apollo or Poseidon) sent two serpents from the sea to kill Laocoön and his two sons. CAS’s wording evokes the celebrated Roman sculpture, “Laocoon and His Sons” (circa 25 BCE; now in the Vatican), depicting Laocoön and his sons wrestling painfully with the serpents.

  3. gamboge-yellow: gamboge is a resin found in trees of the genus Garcinia. It is used to produce a saffron-colored dye, chiefly used for the robes of Buddhist monks.

  4. By capitalizing the word, CAS appears to refer to the Roman god Terminus, who protected boundary markers. These boundary markers (termini) were frequently topped with a bust of the god.

  GENIUS LOCI

  This story was completed on September 26, 1932. CAS was dubious as to its sales potential: after outlining the plot in detail, he wrote to August Derleth (September 28, 1932): “It was all damnably hard to do, and I am not certain of my success. I am even less certain of being able to sell it to any editor—it will be too subtle for the pulps, and the highbrows won’t like the supernatural element. Oh, hell . . .” (SL 192). But in fact, Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales accepted it readily, and it appeared in the June 1933 issue. It was subsequently reprinted in GL and CF 4.

  CAS apparently drew on actual folklore in conceiving the quasi-vampiric qualities of the genius loci (Latin for the “spirit of the place”). In one of his favorite books, Montague Summers’s The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), we find the following: “In [China] wills-o’-the-wisp are thought to be an unmistakeable sign of a place where much blood has been shed . . . and all mists and gaseous marsh-lights are connected with the belief in vampires and spectres which convey disease. Since the effluvia, the vapour and haze from a swamp or quaggy ground are notoriously unhealthy and malarial fevers result in delirium and anaemia it may be that in some legends the disease has been personified as a ghastly creature who rides on the infected air and sucks the life from his victim” (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960, 198).

  1. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923), Spanish painter of landscapes, portraits, and historical scenes.

  2. On CAS’s attitude toward “material science,” see note 2 to “The City of the Singing Flame.” The letter quoted there continues as follows: “If ever I have the leisure and opportunity, I intend some first-hand investigation of obscure phenomena. Enough inexplicable things have happened in my own experience to make me wonder. I am pretty sure that I saw apparitions in my childhood; one instance remaining especially vivid in memory. The phantasm was that of a bowed and muffled woman, weeping or at least sorrow-stricken, which appeared one night in a corner of my bedroom in an old house which my parents had rented for several months. It certainly left an eerie impression. Another queer happening, of a totally different kind, oc
curred four or five years ago. A woman-friend and I were out walking one night in a lane near Auburn, when a dark, lightless and silent object passed over us against the stars with projectile-like speed. The thing was too large and swift for any bird, and gave precisely the effect of a black meteor. I have often wondered what it was” (SL 236–37).

  THE DARK EIDOLON