The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2 Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI

  The Madness of Cthulhu

  Black Wings of Cthulhu

  Black Wings of Cthulhu 2

  Black Wings of Cthulhu 3

  EDITED BY STEPHEN JONES

  Shadows Over Innsmouth

  Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth

  Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

  EDITED BY ROBERT M. PRICE

  Acolytes of Cthulhu

  The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781165485

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165492

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2015

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  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.

  All stories Copyright © 2015 to the individual authors.

  Introduction Copyright © 2015 by Kim Newman.

  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.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by Kim Newman

  Introduction by S. T. Joshi

  20,000 Years Under the Sea by Kevin J. Anderson

  Tsathoggua’s Breath by Brian Stableford

  The Door Beneath by Alan Dean Foster

  Dead Man Walking by William F. Nolan

  A Crazy Mistake by Nancy Kilpatrick

  The Anatomy Lesson by Cody Goodfellow

  The Hollow Sky by Jason C. Eckhardt

  The Last Ones by Mark Howard Jones

  A Footnote in the Black Budget by Jonathan Maberry

  Deep Fracture by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The Dream Stones by Donald Tyson

  The Blood in My Mouth by Laird Barron

  On the Shores of Destruction by Karen Haber

  Object 00922UU by Erik Bear and Greg Bear

  Notes on Contributors

  Also Available from Titan Books

  FOREWORD

  KIM NEWMAN

  THE FIRST H. P. LOVECRAFT WORK THAT CAUGHT MY IMAGINATION was the nonfiction essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” I must have skimmed some of the substantial text, since I got through it in an hour or two. Some details of that reading I can recall perfectly after forty years, but others are vague. I must have been eleven or twelve, and already interested in horror—a late-night screening of the 1931 Dracula on television maybe a few months earlier had struck me like lightning and set me on the path to so many of my adolescent and adult interests—but my reading in the field hadn’t gone much beyond Stoker, Shelley, Poe, and Stevenson. My family was visiting with friends for an afternoon and at their house I came across a late 1960s paperback Lovecraft collection which included the essay. In my mind it was The Tomb, with psychedelic lettering over a skull-and-glass-eye photo … but I’ve just dug out my old Lovecraft Panther paperbacks, a few editions later than that one, and find the default UK arrangement of the complete works—five story collections and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward—puts the essay in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.

  I can picture the room in which I read, not well-lit (were there no windows or was the light overcast?), and I think I could say which of my parents’ friends owned the book. In those days, everyone’s house had an odd selection of paperbacks, which might or might not reflect the tastes of who lived there or might have been a casual railway bookstall purchase or a discard from some guest. I assume, or maybe I’m projecting, I sampled some of the stories first … “Dagon” is only seven pages long and at the front of the book, and I believe the first Lovecraft I fully read was the atypical “The Temple.” Now, the arrogant Hun submarine commander who narrates strikes me as a crude cliché—a rare case of Lovecraft trying to create a character outside his own experience—but on first reading, I was impressed by the use of an unsympathetic lead and the genre mix of World War I combat and horror. The stories weren’t yet to my taste—a few years later, I fell on them again, collecting the whole set of Panther books, and Lovecraft was pretty much my favourite writer at age fourteen—but that long essay, with its tantalising array of titles and writers I knew and those which were new to me, caught my attention. I’ll forever think of my parents’ friends’ home—and I can’t even remember which Somerset town or village it was in—as the House With the Book With the Essay.

  Forty years on from that reading and ninetyish years on from its composition, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is still a solid account of the history of the field. Like Carlos Clarens’s An Illustrated History of the Horror Film—which I must have read at about the same time—its strength is that it turns something that could be a list of titles and thumbnail opinions into a narrative, a story of the evolution of a form that was still changing as its history was being written. Clarens, however, did not make horror films, and so he has an outsider’s distance … the great absence in Lovecraft’s essay, which considers some of his contemporaries, is Lovecraft himself, and yet he is there throughout, highlighting the works which informed his own sensibilities and influenced his own fiction, even playing down some strands of the genre he wasn’t much interested in pursuing. Looking at my own copy of Dagon, a slightly later edition than the one I remember reading, I see I went through the essay and underlined the titles of the novels and stories I had read … a barbarous practice I had abandoned by the time I got to Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. I did the same thing with the filmographies in Clarens and the few other books about genre movies I owned in the 1970s.

  Obviously, those Panther Lovecraft collections did well, because they followed up by publishing other Arkham House titles and authors, often dividing the contents of thick hardbacks into several slim paperbacks, including Lovecraft’s “collaborations” and the Lovecraft-influenced or -influencing works of August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Arthur Machen, and Colin Wilson in editions with covers in the styles of the Ian Miller or Bruce Pennington illustrations used on the Lovecraft books. Panther didn’t get as far as Robert W. Chambers or E. H. Visiak, but they put out a lot of Clark Ashton Smith, which might now seem heady fare (or, in counterculture terms, fare for heads) but was popular reading at my school circa 1975, when contemporary horror didn’t run much past Dennis Wheatley and The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

  Among other things, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is a list of Lovecraft’s sources—he followed the advice of only writing what you know, and wrote from what he knew and loved best: books. Others have tried to systematise his cosmic vision into a myt
hos, but it was more inclusive and contradictory and strange than any belief system, it was more like a constantly expanding universe that could take in, absorb, replicate, and repurpose any text or story or character who came to mind. At the Mountains of Madness, the Lovecraft story that towers over this collection, is—as S. T. Joshi points out in his introduction—built upon sources momentous and trivial, drawing on much background reading, even as it engages with the still-thorny later stages of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. If Lovecraft had chosen to explore the Arctic rather than the Antarctic wastes, he could have entered into a dialogue with Frankenstein instead, but Poe is horror’s sphinx of the South.

  The upshot of this approach is that Lovecraft knew he was grist to the mill. He encouraged his friends to draw upon him as he drew upon them, and on earlier authors—though some did so more warily than others. For him, this was a game—amid the horrors, it’s easy to miss how playful Lovecraft was, in a way that only M. R. James really serves as a precedent for—but it was also serious. The game goes on, and all these years later, we’re still writing “Lovecraftian” or “Cthulhu Mythos” stories, even in sub-categories that relate to specific texts like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” or At the Mountains of Madness, in the spirit of homage, debate, critique, memorial, or philosophical enquiry. Lovecraft might well have baulked at particular stories—he was a critic of firm opinions, but tactful about the venues in which he expressed them—but would surely have approved of the ongoing enterprise.

  He wrote himself into the story of “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” leaving marks on the labyrinth walls as Verne’s Arne Saknussemm did on the way to the centre of the Earth. Now, we must follow his signs to our own revelations …

  Islington, December 2013

  INTRODUCTION

  S. T. JOSHI

  H. P. LOVECRAFT WAS ONE OF THE MOST WELL-READ WRITERS IN the history of weird fiction. His exhaustive treatise, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), covers the entire realm of supernatural fiction, from antiquity to his own day, in a compact 30,000 words; and his letters are full of discussions of other weird works that he devoured. He owned a complete file of Weird Tales, read substantial portions of other pulp magazines such as the Argosy, the All-Story, and Popular Magazine, and even sampled some of the early science fiction magazines, notably Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories.

  Much of this reading worked its way directly or indirectly into his fiction. This is not to say that Lovecraft was in any sense unoriginal; he always transformed what he borrowed, and he recognized that many artists drew upon the heritage of their field to infuse their work with vividness and piquancy. For Lovecraft, such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood were the pinnacles of weird fiction before and during his own day, and he found constant inspiration in their variegated writings.

  But it was from some lesser authors that he picked up some intriguing elements in some of his most celebrated tales. At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931, was no exception. We have traced its ultimate genesis all the way back to at least 1900, when Lovecraft first seemed to become interested in the Antarctic; but he had read fictional accounts of the frozen waste even earlier.

  Lovecraft admitted to being enthralled with W. Clark Russell’s The Frozen Pirate (1887): “I read it in extreme youth—when 8 or 9—& was utterly fascinated by it … writing several yarns of my own under its influence.” The Frozen Pirate is a wild, improbable story of a man, Paul Rodney, who comes upon a ship in the ice floes near Antarctica whose crew are all frozen; one becomes unfrozen by the heat of a campfire lit by Rodney and discovers that forty-eight years have passed. At some point, and for no apparent reason, he ages forty-eight years in a few days and dies. This may be the root of the conception of the unfreezing of the Old Ones after they are brought out of a cave in the Antarctic and experimented upon by the members of Professor Lake’s sub-expedition.

  It was around this time, or even earlier, that Lovecraft came upon a much more celebrated account of the Antarctic—Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837–38). Lovecraft’s ecstatic discovery of Poe in 1898, at the age of eight, turned his world upside down. Previously, he had come upon weird fiction in the form of Grimm’s fairy tales and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an edition of which (containing the spectacular illustrations of Gustave Doré) he had stumbled upon at the age of six. He had also discovered classical mythology in the form of Bulfinch’s Age of Fable (1855). But the discovery of Poe changed all that: “Then I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!! It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!”

  Arthur Gordon Pym is, of course, not entirely set in the Antarctic, but its concluding portions depict his protagonists drifting down in a ship to the vicinity of the Antarctic continent; and it is there that they encounter the celebrated cry, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!,” which becomes, in At the Mountains of Madness, the high-pitched ululation of both the Old Ones and their erstwhile servants, the shoggoths. In Poe’s novel, the cry is first uttered by a group of “savages … with the strangest expressions of mingled horror, rage, and intense curiosity depicted on their countenances,” and later by “many gigantic and pallidly white birds.” Poe scholars have been puzzled as to the origin and significance of this utterance; it was presumably fabricated by Poe to enhance the general weirdness of the situation, and Lovecraft seems to have adopted it for a similar purpose.

  And yet, the influence of Arthur Gordon Pym on At the Mountains of Madness has frequently been exaggerated. It has even been claimed that Lovecraft’s tale is a “sequel” to Poe’s; but of course there are only the slightest connections between the two works. Jules Verne did indeed write a direct sequel to Pym, a novella called “The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields” (1897). Lovecraft’s tale, for all that it mentions Poe and Pym on several occasions, is a much more remote follow-up. Jules Zanger has rightly stated that At the Mountains of Madness “is, of course, no completion [of Pym] at all: it might be better described as a parallel text, the two tales coexisting in a shared context of allusion.”

  Lovecraft owned some other fictional treatments of Antarctica, among them Frank Cowan’s Revi-Lona (1879), James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), and Frank Mackenzie Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall: The Secret of the Antarctic (1899). He probably read these at a fairly early age also. De Mille’s novel tells the story of one Adam More, who in the year 1843 was shipwrecked in the South Pacific and managed to reach a land mass that he believes is Antarctica, although it is a land of lush and almost tropical vegetation. At one point it is stated: “The observations of Ross and of More show us that there is a chain of mountains of immense height, which seem to encircle the pole.” This sentence would surely have piqued Lovecraft’s curiosity, although possibly he already knew of that immense chain of mountains from the reports of James Clark Ross himself.

  But it may have been a much more contemporary work that actually triggered the writing of At the Mountains of Madness. The lead story in the November 1930 issue of Weird Tales was a poorly written and unimaginative tale by Katharine Metcalf Roof, “A Million Years After,” that dealt with the hatching of ancient dinosaur eggs. Lovecraft fumed when he saw this tale, not only because it won the cover design but because he had been badgering Frank Belknap Long to write a story on this idea for years; Long had held off because he felt that H. G. Wells’s “Æpyornis Island” had anticipated the idea. In mid-October 1930, Lovecraft wrote of the Roof tale:

  Rotten—cheap—puerile—yet winning prime distinction because of the subject matter. Now didn’t Grandpa tell a bright young man just eight years ago this month to write a story like that? … Fie, Sir! Somebody else wasn’t so afraid of the subject—and now a wretched mess of hash, just on the strength of its theme, gets the place of honour that Young Genoa might have had! … Why, damn it, boy,
I’ve half a mind to write an egg story myself right now—though I fancy my primal ovoid would hatch out something infinitely more palaeogean and unrecognisable than the relatively commonplace dinosaur.

  Sure enough, Lovecraft seems to have done just that. But he may have felt that the actual use of a dinosaur egg was itself ruled out, so that the only other solution would be the freezing of alien bodies in the Arctic or Antarctic regions.

  A final influence on At the Mountains of Madness is not literary but artistic. In the spring of 1930, while visiting Frank Long in New York, Lovecraft went to the newly opened Nicholas Roerich Museum, then located at 103rd Street and Riverside Drive (now at 317 West 107th Street). Roerich (1874–1947) was a Russian painter who had spent several years in Tibet and become a Buddhist. His paintings of the Himalayas are spectacularly cosmic both in their suggestions of the vast bulk of the mountains and in the vivid and distinctive colors used. His work seems largely unrelated to any of the Western art movements of the period, and its closest analogue is perhaps to Russian folk art. Lovecraft, who went with Long to the museum, was transported: “Neither Belknap nor I had ever been in it before; & when we did see the outré & esoteric nature of its contents, we went virtually wild over the imaginative vistas presented. Surely Roerich is one of those rare fantastic souls who have glimpsed the grotesque, terrible secrets outside space & beyond time, & who have retained some ability to hint at the marvels they have seen.” Roerich was perhaps not a consciously fantastic artist, but in Lovecraft’s mind he took his place with Goya, Gustave Doré, Aubrey Beardsley, S. H. Sime, John Martin (the Romantic painter and illustrator), and Clark Ashton Smith in the gallery of weird art. Roerich is mentioned a total of six times throughout the course of At the Mountains of Madness, as if Lovecraft is going out of his way to signal the influence.