CHAPTER SEVEN

OTHER WEIRD
FICTION AND HORRORS

Roughly one-third of Clark Ashton Smith’s short stories can be classified as weird or horror fiction not belonging to any story-cycle.

The goal of these weird stories, like Smith’s works in other areas, was the liberation of imagination and the creation of a dark and exotic beauty. This he accomplished most readily in tales with a fantastic, extraterrestrial, or historically-distant setting; however, under Lovecraft’s influence Smith also composed modern horror stories, in which the generation and maintenance of atmosphere is paramount, but in which the imaginative aspects are confined to a single super­natural character or event. Although Smith admitted that he found modern settings for his stories “rather uncongenial”,107 such stories were more easily marketable than his poetic fantasies or name-only “science fictions”.

The tales of horror which utilize a contemporary setting are by their nature among Smith’s most conventional productions, and as a result, they show the greatest influence of other writers. He acknowledged that several tales were directly inspired by well-known works: Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” provided the germinal seed for “The Nameless Offspring”, Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” brought about “The Epiphany of Death” (which after Lovecraft’s death Smith dedicated to him), while “Pickman’s Model”, also by Lovecraft, begat “The Hunters from Beyond”.108

“Genius Loci” (1932, GL) stands out as Smith’s most chilling, understated, and effective venture in the genre or sub-genre of the horror story. The painter Francis Amberville is visiting the California ranch of a writer-friend, Murray. His artistic fancy is attracted by a lonely, stagnant pond, ringed by “sickly-looking alders which seem to fling themselves backwards, as if unwilling to approach it”. Although he feels it to be a place of vague evil (“It is silent and desolate...it is unholy in a way I simply can’t describe”), Amberville resolves to travel there daily to sketch or paint the scene. At times he sees the apparition of an old man who fits the description of Chapman, a man found dead beside the tarn years before.

As the days wear on, Amberville grows surly, secretive, compulsive. The writer’s suspicions become aroused by this uncharacteristic be­havior and he makes his own journey to the pool, where he finds Amberville almost hypnotized before his canvas. Murray himself is not immune to the atmosphere of the place: “That infamous, eerie scene depressed me beyond measure. It seemed that the boggy bottom was trying to drag me down in some intangible way. The boughs of the sick alders beckoned. The pool, over which the bony willow presided like an arboreal death, was wooing me foully with its stagnant waters”. Am­berville becomes more indrawn after this; one night, Murray realizes the full depth of his friend’s strange possession: “Beside me, in the lamplit room, behind the mask of his humanity, a thing that was not wholly human seemed to sit and wait”. In desperation, he arranges for Amberville’s fiancée, Avis Olcott, to visit the ranch, but she proves too weak-willed to turn him from the lure of the pool.

In the end, Murray finds both Amberville and the woman dead in the tarn. Floating above their bodies he fleetingly sees “a malign, luminous, pallid emanation...a phantom projection of the pale and deathlike willow, the dying alders, the reeds, the stagnant pool and its suicidal victims”:

The landscape was visible through it, as through a film; but it seemed to curdle and thicken gradually in places, with some unholy, terrifying activity. Out of these curdlings, as if dis­gorged by the ambient exhalation, I saw the emergence of three human faces that partook of the same nebulous matter, neither mist nor plasma. One of these faces seemed to detach itself from the bole of a ghostly willow; the second and third swirled upward from the seething of the phantom pool, with their bodies trailing formlessly among the tenuous boughs. The faces were those of old Chapman, Francis Amberville, and Avis Olcott.

After the fashion of his best science fiction stories, such as “The City of the Singing Flame” and “The Light from Beyond”, “Genius Loci” retains an air of un­dispelled mystery and the unknown. Murray confesses this at the end, saying that nothing he could add to the narrative “would lessen the abominable mystery of it all in any degree”. And again like “The City of the Singing Flame”, the narrator knows he shall be drawn back to the place of doom and shall suffer the fate of his companions.

Other horror tales by Smith are less successful. His techniques and inclinations were ill-suited to anything that partook of the contem­porary, the realistic—conventional horrors succeed through an air of verisimilitude, an atmosphere of broken or interrupted realism, that Smith was either unable or unwilling to supply to his own modern stories.

One of the best -known horrors, “The Return of the Sorcerer” (1931, OST, dramatized by the Night Gallery television series in the early 1970’s), is an example of Smith’s melodramatic and ham-fisted ap­proach to the generation of spectral atmosphere. A young man accepts the post of secretary to a recluse. He feels sourceless premonitions of doom; he meets his employer in a room “whose musty shadows could never have been wholly dissipated by sun or lamplight”; he is told that the recluse’s brother “has gone away on a long trip”—but of course, the brother has actually been done away with.

The secretary is asked to read a passage from the Necronomicon, Lovecraft’s invented book of dread secrets, which states that even a dismembered wizard can rise up from death to seek vengeance. Smith gives it all away with this quotation, and there is no surprise when we later learn that the old man had chopped his brother into little bits, and is now being haunted in a piecemeal fashion. While this technique of slap-in-the-face foreshadowing succeeds in the fantasy world of Zothi­que—in “The Tomb-Spawn”, say, when the story-teller details the horrors that the main characters are doomed to encounter—it evis­cerates “The Return of the Sorcerer”. And Smith was imitating Lovecraft at his worst with such lines as, “horror-breeding hints and noisome intuitions invaded my brain”.

Similarly, “The Treader of the Dust” (1935, LW) suffers from heavy-handed treatment and cliché characters, but is redeemed by some exquisite ideas and images. The studious main character, Sebastian, a dabbler in the occult and the recipient of an “old mansion together with a generous income”, inadvertently summons up Quachil Uttaus, The Treader of the Dust. This ultra-terrestrial demon brings the decay of ages at his touch. As a result, Sebastian’s study is a mass of dust and rotting furniture, and his man servant has been reduced to a mound of powder. Old age descends in seconds upon the occultist, but before his death, he witnesses the return of Quachil Uttaus:

His eyes, lifting with enormous effort, saw for the first time that a rough, irregular gap had appeared in the room’s outer wall.... Through it a single star shone into the chamber, cold and remote as the eye of a demon glaring across intercosmic space.

Out of that star—or from the spaces beyond it—a beam of livid radiance, wan and deathly, was hurled like a spear upon Sebastian....

He was as one petrified by the gaze of the Gorgon. Then, through the aperture of ruin, there came something that glided stiffly and rapidly into the room toward him, along the beam. The wall seemed to crumble, the rift widened as it entered.

It was a figure no larger than a young child, but sere and shriveled as some millennial mummy. Its hairless head, its unfeatured face, borne on a neck of skeleton thinness, were lined with a thousand reticulated wrinkles. The body was like that of some monstrous, withered abortion that had never drawn breath.... Upright and rigid, the horror floated swiftly down the wan, deathly gray beam toward Sebastian.

“The Demon of the Flower” (1931, LW) is one of Smith’s few entirely extraterrestrial fantasies, and is the short story extension of his prose-poem “The Flower-Devil” (ca. 1920) with plot elements taken from his poem “The Hashish-Eater” (1920). The prose-poem describes the animate, serpentine vegetation of Saturn, ruled by a single monstrous blossom, while one of the episodes of “The Hashish ­Eater”—now famous because of this short story—reads,

...In Some Antarean world I see

The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,

And silver-lashed, vermillion-lidded eyes

Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests

At moonless eve in terror seek to slay

With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood

That hide a hueless poison....

Betraying its origins in an imagistic prose-poem, “The Demon of the Flower” leads off with eight full paragraphs of lush description, depicting life on the planet Lophai where people play a subordinate role to the vicious, semi-intelligent plants. The plants are themselves subordinate to the Voorqual, an ancient spirit living within a huge blossom-bearing tree. A priesthood worships the Voorqual, and once a year one of their number is sacrificed to the malign plant. When Nala, the betrothed of King Lunithi, is chosen for sacrifice,109 the king nurtures a secret plan to destroy the Demon of the Flower.

This incident introduces a plot-line to the story, but the role of ‘plot’ is underplayed from the start. We immediately suspect that the king’s plan will fail, for he is introduced as “the last if not the first of his race” to rebel against the Voorqual. And as in “The Empire of the Necroman­cers”, Smith conveniently provides a weapon to fight an unassailable tyranny, in this case a deus ex machina in the form of a second ancient demon: “Lunithi remembered an old myth about the existence of a neutral and independent being known as the Occlith: a demon coeval with the Voorqual”. Typical of Smith, however, the shortcomings of the Occlith as a plot-device are offset by the creativity of its conception. In contrast to the botanical Voorqual, the Occlith rules a fabulous realm of arid stone, gorgeous mineral outcroppings, and lethal chemical pools. In appearance, the Occlith has “the likeness of a high cruciform pillar of blue mineral, shining with its own esoteric luster”; the oracle it delivers is in a voice “like the tinkling of mineral fragments lightly clashed together”.

Lunithi is told to poison the grail of sacrificial blood offered up yearly to the Voorqual. This he does, using a layer of his own blood to hide the “hueless poison”, and the hoary plant crumbles before his eyes. But Nala, whom he has saved from sacrifice, becomes the next host for the Voorqual, and Lunithi watches as her fair form assumes the hor­rible lineaments of the devil-plant. The tale ends with words of unrelinquished doom, both personal and worldy: “He knew then that the Voorqual had returned to claim its sacrifice and to preside forever above the city Lospar and the world Lophai”.

In “A Tale of Sir John Maundeville” (1930; OD) and “The Ghoul” (1930; OD), Smith employs antique settings to provide breathing-room for his imagination and to distance his readers from the mundane. In the latter tale, set in Arabia at the time of Vathek, a sorrow-stricken young man agrees to an abominable pact: he will supply a ghoul with eight fresh corpses, killed by his own hand, to insure that his dead wife’s body will be left undefiled. After the death of the seventh victim, he is arrested and brought to trial but is released after the circumstances of the affair become known. The judge is certain that the young man “will render justice to himself and to all others con­cerned”; this he does, by killing himself and becoming the eighth and final meal for the ghoul.

“A Tale of Sir John Maundeville” carries on the adventures of the fourteenth-century journeyman as chronicled in The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Maundeville (or Mandeville). Sir John enters a barren desert given over wholly to Death, ruled by a monstrous charnel worm, king of the realm “by virtue of having conquered and devoured the mortal ruler thereof, as well as those who were his subjects”. For entering this land of the dead, Sir John is punished with imprisonment in a tomb, that he might learn “the things which none should behold with living eyes”. He lives for days in the putrid dark­ness, with rotting cadavers for his companions. When he is set free, Sir John makes haste to more hospitable lands.

“The Chain of Aforgomon” (1933-34, OST) returns to the favorite theme of loss, and represents one of Smith’s most substantial fantasies. John Milwarp, a writer of exotic Oriental novels, has died under mysterious circumstances; moreover, the memory of his very existence has begun to fade from the minds of his friends and readers, and even the ink in his diary is fast fading into illegibility. This document reveals that Milwarp had felt all his life a sense of distant longing, “a sentiment of formless, melancholy desire for some nameless beauty long perished out of time”. Seeking the source of this half-recalled loss, Milwarp experiments with a drug which has the power to transport the soul into its previous incarnations. He travels backward in time in this fashion and, upon awakening, discovers that he is Calaspa, a citizen of the planet Hestan, a world that predates the formation of the Earth. There he is a priest of the time-god Aforgomon; but he is also in mourning over the death of his lover, Belthoris. It was the echo of this loss that had plagued the contemporary Milwarp: “Sorrow and desola­tion choked my heart as ashes fill some urn consecrated to the dead; and all the hues and perfumes of the garden about me were redolent only of the bitterness of death”. In the blackness of his anger and despair, Calaspa repudiates Aforgomon and calls upon a rival god—handy things to have around, these rival gods—to restore one single hour of his life with Belthoris. The request is granted, but his brief happiness is tarnished by a lover’s spat that takes place just as the hour ends. He feels that “vain... like all other hours, was the resummoned hour; and doubly irredeemable was my loss”.

For defying “the sacred logic of time”, his fellow priests condemn him to death, after decreeing that, in some incarnation ages hence, he shall remember his crime against Aforgomon and die again. This is the doom that befell Milwarp. Even his place in Time has been taken away, and all memory of him is swiftly being erased; soon it will be as if he had never lived.

The story begins with a contemporary setting but moves on to a realm distant in both time and space, and this second setting is by far the more successful. Smith spends little time with the life of the terrestrial Milwarp, and the mental journey backward to Hestan is rushed, perfunctory, and unconvincing (“The walls of Nineveh, the columns and towers of unnamed cities rose before me and were swept away. I saw the luxuriant plains that are now the Gobi desert. The sea-lost capitals of Atlantis were drawn to light in unquenched glory”). One senses that Smith wished to put the modern portion of the tale behind him as quickly as possible, at the expense of believability. Once on Hestan, the story adopts fully the poetic and emotional tone of Smith’s best fantasies.

“The Devotee of Evil” (1930, AY) is a variation on the classic theme of the Medusa, a myth of long-standing interest to Smith. Set in Auburn, the tale involves the invocation of pure evil. Philip Hastane, fiction writer and narrator of the story, is approached by Jean Averaud, a mysterious newcomer. This meeting provides an example of one-line characterization, in addition to more heavy-handed foreshadowing: Hastane “was struck... by the fiery fixity of Averaud’s gaze—the gaze of a man who is dominated by one idea to the exclusion of all else. Some medieval alchemist, who believed himself to be on the point of attaining his objective after years of unrelenting research, might have looked as he did”. Averaud has the theory that evil is a physical phenomena, “a sort of dark vibration, the radiation of a black sun”,110 inadvertently focused by certain material objects, thus giving rise to haunted houses, cursed jewels, and the like. He has invented a device, a contraption of mirrors and bells, that will perfectly focus this radiation. Averaud succeeds in the end but is petrified into a sable statue by the evil light. As with nearly all of Smith’s stories, the prose of “The Devotee of Evil” is technically polished, but the ornate phraseology and overuse of metaphor jars with the commonplace modern surroundings.

“The Nameless Offspring” (1931, AY) reaches the pinnacle of gruesome horror in Smith’s fiction, and despite its conventional char­acters, setting, and devices, the story remains gripping and effective. The tale leads off with a remarkable “quotation” from the Necronomicon (written by Smith); and like Lovecraft’s tales, the first paragraph of the text tells of the devastating effect the strange ex­periences have had on the narrator: “the broken reflex of its horrors has crowded out in perspective the main events of normal life; has made them seem no more than frail gossamers, woven on the dark, windy verge of some unsealed abyss”. A traveller, Chaldane, is overtaken by a storm and seeks shelter in a mansion, which by coincidence is the home of a school-chum of his father. Conveniently for the story, he has heard of the shadowy history of the Tremoth household: thirty years ago, the Lady Tremoth had been certified dead and placed within the family vaults, but awoke from her cataleptic state the next day and told of “a pale, hideous, unhuman face” that was leaning above her when she came to. Nine months later, she gave birth and died; the child was shut away.

Sir John Tremoth, aging and infirm, greets Chaldane in a manner “impeccably courteous and even gracious. But the voice was that of one to whom the ordinary relations and actions of life had long since become meaningless and perfunctory”. On their way to the guest bedroom, they pass the bolted door of the room containing Tremoth’s still-living ‘son’, a room which adjoins the master suite. That night Sir John dies; on the following night, his body awaits burial, and Chaldane and the manservant are keeping vigil. A hideous scratching and mewl­ing begins in the next room, and in time the inhabitant therein breaks through the wall. Both men are knocked unconscious and upon recovering find that Sir John’s corpse has been half-devoured. Horrib­ly-shapen tracks lead back to the nighted vaults.

In sharp contrast to a tale like “The Nameless Offspring”, Smith’s later (post 1930s) weird stories and horrors frequently incorporate elements of humor and satire. In “Schizoid Creator” (1952, TSS)—an otherwise undistinguished and choppily-written piece—Smith postu­lates a schizophrenic God, a dual entity manifesting alternately the aspects of the Creator and the Devil. In essence Smith is saying, cynically, that with the world as it is, God must be crazy. A psychiatrist summons up a minor demon from Hell, whom he mistakes for the Devil, and subjects it to electro-shock therapy in hopes of affecting a cure. The demon is unhurt, but also unamused, by this treatment. It smashes the laboratory and departs; the psychiatrist is left a babbling madman and is committed to an asylum by his colleagues. The demon returns to Hell and informs the Adversary of its experiences, and is instructed to keep the psychiatrist well-bewildered for the remainder of his days. Afterwards, leaving Hell by a little-known door, the Devil, transformed into the Creator, makes his way into Heaven.

The posthumously published “Strange Shadows” (1940-41, SS)111 engages in some satire of particular relevance to Smith. The main character, Gaylord Jones, is deliberate self-parody—“Gaylord” was the maiden name of Smith’s mother, thus “Gaylord Jones” is a play on “Ashton Smith”. The story details some unusual effects of the excessive con­sumption of alcohol, a subject of some concern for Smith in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The style of this story was probably tailored for Unknown Worlds magazine; certainly the short, clipped sentences, the paucity of metaphor and uncommon words, along with a heavy use of slang, separate “Strange Shadows” from Smith’s other writings. The tale’s beginning illustrates some of these differences:

Downing his thirteenth dry martini, Gaylord Jones drew a complacent sigh and regarded the barroom floor with grave attention. He was drunk. He knew that he was drunk. With superb lucidity, he calculated the exact degree of his inebria­tion.

A great white light was pivoted in his brain. He could turn this light, instantly, on the most obscure corners of the noth­ingness called life. At last he was able to appreciate the absurd logic of the cosmos. It was all very simple. Nothing mattered in the least.

It was all very simple, and nothing mattered as long as one could keep himself sufficiently pickled. Ah, that was the prob­lem. Reflecting long and deeply, Jones decided that just one more martini would help to maintain his intoxication at the right stage.

On the way to the fourteenth martini, Jones stumbles over his own shadow, which has the appearance of a goatish satyr. The shadows of other people are equally “cock-eyed” and mock their owners: “A rich and popular society matron was paired with the four-legged shadow of a humpbacked cow. Shadows like those of hogs and hyenas trotted behind respectable bankers and aldermen”. Jones’ overindulgence in alcohol had somehow given him a distorted view of the astral plane, in which the true natures of individuals are reflected in the shadows they cast.

In the course of the story, Jones loses his fiancée, his business partner, his secretary, and nearly his sanity; however, these semi­-humorous adventures, though foretold by various shadow-happen­ings, are in fact prosaic enough for a Reader’s Digest serial. We recognize Smith’s hand at the end, though, when Gaylord Jones resolves—as Ashton Smith must have resolved on more than one bleak occasion—to “gather enough drinks to dissolve the very substance of reality into a shadow”.

107. Letter to Derleth, 28 August 1930.

108. For a further discussion of the literary interplay between Lovecraft and Smith, see “CAS & Divers Hands: Ideas of Lovecraft and Others in Smith’s Fiction”, in Part II of this book.

109. The scene in which Nala is selected by the Voorqual is echoed in “The Immortals of Mercury”, composed three months after “The Demon of the Flower”.

110. This notion anticipates Smith’s unfinished novella “The Infernal Star” (1933, SS), in which a character travels to Yamil Zacra and Yuzh, a pair of suns, one white and one black, that disseminate pure evil through their light.

111. Three versions of “Strange Shadows” have come down to us, the last of which is fragmentary. I refer to the middle version, also published in Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 1985, ed. Arthur Saha (New York: DAW, 1985).