The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (44 page)

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 Pacific, 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”).