The End of the Story (52 page)

1. FW, letter to CAS, June 12, 1930 (ms, JHL).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, August 18, 1931 (
SL
160).

3. AWD, letter to CAS, November 10, 1948 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, November 16, 1948 (
SL
355 [misdated “November 6, 1948”]).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, December 18, 1948 (Arkham House archives).

6. AWD, letter to CAS, December 22, 1948 (ms, JHL).

The Necromantic Tale

“T
he Necromantic Tale” was completed on June 23, 1930, and was quickly accepted by Farnsworth Wright for
WT
(with Smith receiving forty-four dollars when it was published in the January 1931 issue).
¹
Shortly thereafter, Lovecraft read the story and made the following comments to Smith: “The atmosphere is very well sustained, & there is a genuine convincingness to the style. I wonder how it would have been to have the ancient wizard
disappear
at the stake, before the eyes of all spectators, just as the flames flare up?”
²
Smith, who as has been noted by Behrends was generally quite responsive to suggestions,
³
enthusiastically embraced this idea:

Thanks for your suggestion about “The Necromantic Tale”! I think so highly of it that I am re-typing a page of the story with an additional sentence or two about the mysterious footnote at the very end of the old record, saying that they saw Sir Roderick disappear when the flames leaped high; and that this, “if true, was the moste damnable proof of hys compact and hys commerce with the Evill One.” This emendation I shall submit to Wright, who has already accepted the tale. Wright ought to approve—the change almost “makes” the story.
⁴

Amusingly enough, the surviving carbons of the story have the relevant portion handwritten in the margins. “The Necromantic Tale” was collected posthumously in
OD
.

1. FW, letter to CAS, July 3, 1930 (ms, JHL).

2. HPL, letter to CAS, July 18, 1930, quoted in Roy A. Squires’
Catalog
no. 19 (1985), p. 25.

3. See Steve Behrends, “CAS and Divers Hands,”
Crypt of Cthulhu
no. 26 (Hallowmas1984): 30-31.

4. CAS, letter to HPL, July 30, 1930 (
SL
115).

The Immeasurable Horror

C
ompleted on July 13, 1930, Smith originally intended to market “The Immeasurable Horror” to the “scientifiction magazines,”
¹
but after rejections by
Amazing Stories
and presumably
Astounding Stories
as well as the Gernsback publications,
²
it was accepted by
WT
. Wright did point out

some flaws… that need fixing up. When your hero returns in the coaster to the Purple Mountains, your story speaks continually of “we”; but after he comes back he seems to be alone, and no further

mention is made of Markheim or Rocher. From the context the reader gathers that the other members of the party had to wait for the hero to regain consciousness before they found out what had happened? What of Rocher and Markheim? It may not need more than a line or two, but these two characters cannot be permitted to slide out of the story without any explanation at all.
³

Smith accordingly made the required alterations,
⁴
and the tale appeared in the September 1931 issue. It was collected in
OD
.

1. CAS, letter to HPL, July 30, 1930 (
SL
116).

2. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-September 1930 (
SL
120).

3. FW, letter to CAS, October 4, 1930 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. early October 1930 (
LL
13).

A Voyage to Sfanomoë

C
ompleted between July 13-17, 1930, “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” was snapped up by Wright, who offered CAS thirty dollars for the story.
¹
It was published in the August 1931
WT
. Smith originally included it among the prospective contents of his first Arkham House collection,
OST
, but it was not collected in hardcover until
LW
.
²

Apropos of the story, Smith made the following comments to Lovecraft in a discussion regarding their relative needs for emotional attachments to their surroundings:

I think we are probably more alike than some of my remarks on a desire to voyage in space and time may have led you to infer. This desire, in all likelihood, is mainly cerebral on my part, and I am not so sure that I would care to be “a permanent colonist” in some alien universe—no matter how bored or disgusted I may
seem
to be at times with my environment. And I have had reason to discover, at past times—particularly in times of nervous disturbance—how dependent I really am on familiar things—even on certain features of my surroundings which might not seem very attractive to others. If I am upset, or “under the weather”, an unfamiliar milieu tends to take on an aspect of the most distressing and confusing
unreality
—similar, no doubt, to what you experienced in Brooklyn. So, in all probability, I will do well to content myself with dream projections… But doubtless your geographical sense is far more clearly and consciously developed than mine.
³

1. FW, letter to CAS, July 22,1930.

2. CAS, letter to AWD, September 5, 1941 (
SL
333).

3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. November 16, 1930 (
LL
20). Lovecraft’s comments appear in his letter to CAS dated November 7, 1930 (
Selected Letters III
, pp. 214-215).

A
PPENDIX
T
WO:
“
T
HE
S
ATYR”:
A
LTERNATE
C
ONCLUSION

The following is the version of the story published in
La Paree Stories
for July 1931, and subsequently reprinted in
Genius Loci and Other Tales.
It replaces the last four paragraphs that follow the sentence “. He kissed her … and they both forgot the vision of the satyr… .”

T
hey were lying on a patch of golden moss, where the sunrays fell through a single cleft in the high foliage, when Raoul found them. They did not see or hear him, as he paused and stood with drawn rapier before the vision of their unlawful happiness.

He was about to fling himself upon them and impale the two with a single thrust where they lay, when an unlooked-for and scarce conceivable thing occurred. With swiftness veritably supernatural, a brown hairy creature, a being that was not wholly man, not wholly animal, but some hellish mixture of both, sprang from amid the alder branches and snatched Adèle from Olivier’s embrace. Olivier and Raoul saw it only in one fleeting glimpse, and neither could have described it clearly afterwards. But the face was that which had leered upon the lovers from the foliage; and the shaggy legs and body were those of a creature of antique legend. It disappeared as incredibly as it had come, bearing the woman in its arms; and her shrieks of terror were surmounted by the pealing of its mad, diabolical laughter.

The shrieks and laughter died away at some distant remove in the green silence of the forest, and were not followed by any other sound. Raoul and Olivier could only stare at each other in complete stupefaction.

A
PPENDIX
T
HREE:
F
ROM THE
C
RYPTS OF
M
EMORY

A
eons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvellous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close.

Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star—how stranger than any dream of dreamers in the spheres of today, or than any vision that hath soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sidereal past! There, through cycles of a history whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic heavens—a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its fires from the face of the irresolvable ether, threw a baffled and despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.

We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people—we who dwelt beneath that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and

darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.

Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams—the dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which the simulacra of century-forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immortelles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage: or wept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters.

And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.

A
PPENDIX
F
OUR:
B
IBLIOGRAPHY

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PP.

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.

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WT
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.

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OD
.

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,
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WT
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.

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WT
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WT

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.

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.

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The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
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AY
.