The Door to Saturn (55 page)

Smith incorporated elements from his previous work into “The Letter from Mohaun Los.” The battle between the warring pygmies occurs in his poem “The Hashish-Eater:”

Then
I watch a war of pygmies, met by night,
With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,
On plains with no horizon, where a god
Might lose his way for centuries; [...]
⁶

Steve Behrends suggests that the rescue of the persecuted alien sage Tuoquan may derive from Smith’s synopsis for a proposed sequel to “The Monster of the Prophecy.”
⁷
In “Vizaphmal in Orphiuchus,” Smith describes how

Tsandai, a savant of Zothique, a world of one of the suns of Ophiuchus, has fallen foul of the local scientific fraternity in general; and they are about to turn him, by the use of a transforming-ray, into a low, brainless type of monster. Vizaphmal, the Antarean wizard-scientist, using his space-annihilator at random, for the sake of adventure, appears in the chamber where the transformation is about to take place. Comprehending the situation telepathically, he rescues Tsandai and carries him away to the uninhabited equatorial zones of the planet.
⁸

1.
SS
160.

2. CAS, letter to HPL, November 10, 1930 (
SL
132).

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

4. CAS, letter to AWD, May 26, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

5. CAS, letter to AWD, April 31[
sic
], 1943 (
SL
339-340).

6. CAS, “The Hashish-Eater; or, The Apocalypse of Evil.” In
The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith
(New York: Hippocampus Press, 2002).

7. “Notes to the Text.”
SS
260n47.

8.
ES
266,
SS
143.

The Hunters from Beyond

S
mith was working on “The Holiness of Azédarac” when he
“
suspended work on it to write a 6000 word modern thriller, ‘The Hunters from Beyond,’ which I have just completed. I hope it will have enough ‘plot,’ etc. for the new Clayton magazine.”
¹
(Smith was referring to Harry Bates’
Strange Tales
, which paid two cents a word upon acceptance, as opposed to
WT
which usually paid a cent a word upon publication.) Smith was somewhat ambivalent regarding the story, telling Derleth that it was “probably junk.”
²
Derleth liked the story and made some suggestions:

I daresay if you wanted to you could make it into either a long space story (pursuit of these hunters from beyond, etc etc) or a first rate horror story with a perfectly ghoulish climax (the girl and Cyprian both keeping silent anent their work, the horror gradually encroaching, closing in upon them, Hastane perceiving only hints here and there, until in the end the whole hellish thing bursts on him. But it is good as it stands, and I like it. The end I find just a little weak. It is as if you had got up some morning and said Now I must write and story and evolved this and got tired of it near the end.
³

As if to confirm Derleth’s assessment, Smith politely thanked him for his suggested revisions, adding “good; but I’m none too fond of the story, and shan’t feel like reworking any of it if I can sell it anywhere as it stands. I have other ideas that interest me more.”
⁴

By this time Smith was submitting those stories that he thought had a chance to
Ghost Stories
because of their higher rate of payment, and by mid-June he was still waiting to hear back from its editor Daniel Wheeler. Its rejection may be inferred from the fact that he next submitted it to Wright, who also rejected the story on grounds that “it lacks the convincingness of most of your stories. It is not nearly as convincing or thrilling, for instance, as Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model’—to mention a story of similar theme.”
⁵
(This may have stung a little, since Smith acknowledged that story as the inspiration for his own.)
⁶
Smith also mentions that Harry Bates returned the manuscript “ostensibly for lack of print space.”
⁷

Some weeks after Wright’s rejection Smith made some changes to the story, “leaving it more in doubt as to what is actually going on in the studio up to the last moment, and adding at the end, for contrast to the mindless girl who is beyond ‘even the memory of horror,’a last vision of the ghoul-infested gulf, ‘the ravening faces, the hunger contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge’.”
⁸

At first Smith was still not satisfied with “The Hunters from Beyond:” “The tale doesn’t please me very well—the integral mood seems a little second-rate, probably because the treatment of modern atmosphere is rather uncongenial for me.”
⁹
Not long after writing this, less than ten days, Smith began to change his opinion: “‘The Hunters’ looked pretty good when I read it over the other day, and I think I prefer it to the Helman Carnby thing now, though I didn’t at first.”
¹⁰
He elaborated upon this later , explaining that “my preference for ‘The Hunters from Beyond’ is based on its style, too. I agree that Carnby has a more original plot; but it seems to need some additional atmospheric development.”
¹¹
However, the reevaluation or reassessment seems to have been rather short-lived, since when Bates bought the revised version Smith called it “the least original of my recent yarns.”
¹²
When it appeared in the October 1932 issue of
ST
, where it received the cover illustration that Smith rather liked, he told Derleth “‘The Hunters’ is no great favorite of mine either; but it seems to shine by comparison with the other tales.”
¹³
He later selected it for inclusion in
LW
. Our text is based upon the typescript dated August 11, 1931 at JHL.

The story may have been inspired by an actual experience that occurred while the young Smith was suffering from an attack of tuberculosis. Writing in the November 1934 issue of Charles D. Hornig’s fanzine
The Fantasy Fan
, CAS described in “The Demonian Face” how

About 1918 I was in ill health and, during a short visit to San Francisco, was sitting one day in the Bohemian Club, to which I had been given a guest’s card of admission. Happening to look up, I saw a frightful demonian face with twisted rootlike eyebrows and oblique fiery-slitted eyes, which seemed to emerge momentarily from the air about nine feet above me and lean toward my seat. The thing disappeared as it approached me, but left an ineffaceable impression of malignity, horror, and loathsomeness. If an hallucination, it was certainly seen amid appropriate surroundings; if an actual entity, it was no doubt the kind that would be likely to haunt a club in one of our modern Gomorrahs.
¹⁴

1. CAS, letter to AWD, May 1, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

2. CAS, letter to AWD, May 8, 1931 (
SL
153).

3. AWD, letter to CAS, May 12, 1931 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to AWD, May 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

5. FW, letter to CAS, June 30, 1931 (ms, JHL).

6. CAS, letter to AWD, May 8, 1931 (
SL
153).

7. CAS, letter to AWD, July 11, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

8. CAS, letter to AWD, August 18, 1931 (
SL
160-161).

9. CAS, letter to AWD, August 28, 1931 (
SL
161).

10. CAS, letter to AWD, September 6, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

11. CAS, letter to AWD, September 15, 1931 (ms, SHSW).

12. CAS, letter to DAW, November 21, 1931 (ms, MHS).

13. CAS, letter to AWD, July 19, 1932 (ms, SHSW).

14.
PD
40.

A
PPENDIX
T
WO:
A
LTERNATE
E
NDING TO
“
T
HE
R
ETURN OF THE
S
ORCERER”

Begins immediately after the paragraph “It was not my own violition…”

I
seemed to know with a loathly prescience the sight that awaited me beyond the sill. But the reality would have put to shame the foulest enormities of the nether pits. Carnby—or what remained of him—was lying on the floor; and above him stooped an unbelievable thing—the nude, headless body of a man, already blue with incipient putrefaction, and marked with earth-stains. At wrist and elbow and shoulder, at knee and ankle and hip, there were red sutures where the sundered limbs had been knit together in some hellish fashion, by the power of a will that was more than mortal. The Thing was holding a bloody surgeon’s saw in its right hand; and I saw that its work had been completed….

Surely, it would seem, I was viewing the climax of all conceivable horror. But even as the Thing knelt with its ghastly tool suspended above the remains of its victim, there came a violent crash from the cupboard, as if something had been hurled against the door. The lock must have been defective; for the door burst open, and a human head emerged and bounded to the floor. It rolled over, and lay facing the medley of human fragments, that had been John Carnby. It was in the same condition of decay as the body; but I swear that the eyes were alive with malignant hate. Even with the marks of corruption upon them, the features bore a manifest likeness of those of John Carnby; and plainly they could belong only to a twin brother.

I was beyond horror, beyond terror; and I do not believe I could have stirred again if it had not been for the thing that happened now. As if the animating and uniting power had been removed with the completion of its task, the headless cadaver toppled to the floor, scattered in all its original portions. The life had gone out of the eyes in that terrible head; and there was nothing but a heap of mouldy members, beside the fresh fragments of that other.

The spell was broken. I felt that something had withdrawn from the room—the overpowering volition that had held me captive was gone. It had released me, even as it had released the corpse of Helman Carnby. I was free to go; and I fled from that ghastly room and ran headlong through an unlit house, and into the outer darkness.

A
PPENDIX
T
HREE:
B
IBLIOGRAPHY

“The Door to Saturn.”
ST
1, no.3 (January 1932): 390-403. In
LW
.

“The Red World of Polaris.”
Red World of Polaris
by Clark Ashton Smith. Edited by Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).

“Told in the Desert.”
Over the Edge
. Edited by August Derleth (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964; London: Victor Gollancz, 1967; London: Arrow, 1976). In
OD
.

“The Willow Landscape.”
Philippine Magazine
(May 1931).
WT
34, no.1 (June-July 1939): 87-90. In
DS
,
GL
.

“A Rendezvous in Averoigne.”
WT
17, no. 3 (April-May 1931): 364-374.
WT
33, no. 1 (January 1939): 112-22. In
OST
,
RA
.

“The Gorgon.”
WT
19, no.3 (April 1932): 551-58. In
LW
.

“An Offering to the Moon.”
WT
45, no. 4 (September 1953): 54-65. In
OD
.

“The Kiss of Zoraida.”
Magic Carpet
3, no. 3 (July 1933): 373-76. In
OD
.

“The Face by the River.”
Lost Worlds
no. 1 (2004): 3-7.
WT
61, no. 1 (July 2005): 52-55. Reprinted in
Seekers of Dreams
. Edited by Douglas A. Anderson (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005).

“The Ghoul.”
Fantasy Fan
1, no. 5 (January 1934): 69-72. In
OD
.

“The Kingdom of the Worm.”
Fantasy Fan
1, no. 2 (October 1933): 17-22. In
OD
.

“An Adventure in Futurity.”
WS
2, no. 11 (April 1931): 1230-51, 1328. In
OD.

“The Justice of the Elephant.”
Oriental Stories
1, no. 6 (Autumn 1931): 856, 858, 863-64. In
OD
.

“The Return of the Sorcerer.”
ST
1, no.1 (September 1931): 99-109. In
OST.
Reprinted in
Sleep No More.
Edited by August Derleth (NY: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944; NY: Editions for the Armed Services, 1944).

“The City of the Singing Flame.”
WS
3, no. 2 (July 1931): 202-13 (as “City of Singing Flame”).
Tales of Wonder 
no. 10 (Spring 1940): 6-31 (combined with “Beyond the Singing Flame”).
Startling Stories
5, no. 1 (January 1941): 98-106. In
OST
(combined with “Beyond the Singing Flame”),
RA
. Reprinted (combined with “Beyond the Singing Flame”) in
The Other Side of the Moon.
Edited by August Derleth (NY: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949). Reprinted (combined with “Beyond the Singing Flame”) in
From Off This World
. Edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend (NY: Merlin Press, 1949).

“A Good Embalmer.”
Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith
. Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

“The Testament of Athammaus.”
WT
20, no.4 (October 1932): 509-21. In
OST.