The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (3 page)

The first of these “regional” works to appear in print was “The Horror from the Mound,” set in West Texas and featuring a young cowpuncher who laments his decision to give up his life as a cowboy to buy a farm. The story reflects two threads from Howard’s letters to Lovecraft: his considerable sympathy for farmers, who were struggling mightily as the Depression began to settle over the land; and his interest in the legends of lost Spanish treasures, which have been popular in Texas since before the Spanish left.

Most important, of course, Howard shows he is still interested in taking on tropes of the horror genre—here, the vampire again—and giving them an unusual treatment. Too unusual for one poor
Weird
Tales
reader, who complained that “The Horror from the Mound” [contained] no less than four flagrant breaches of accepted vampire tradition.” As we have seen, Howard was no respecter of literary traditions. In fact, it might be said that, with this story, Howard had finally succeeded in bringing together all three of his favorite genres—western, adventure, and the weird—to create the first “weird western.”

Following “The Horror from the Mound,” Howard turned increasingly to his native environs for other tales of horror and the supernatural. “The Valley of the Lost” makes use of the theme of little people, essentially transferring elements of “The Children of the Night” and “Worms of the Earth” to the Southwest and giving the story an ending we might more expect of Lovecraft than of Howard. “The Man on the Ground” is a very short tale but a gripping meditation on the power of hate, a crystallization of all Howard had learned in his study of Texas feuds. It is a fine example of that ability we noted earlier to lend almost tangible form to an abstract emotion. “Old Garfield’s Heart,” in which early Texas Indian fights and legends play a prominent part, is about as close to home as Howard gets in a story: Lost Knob is his fictional counterpart to his hometown of Cross Plains. The dark magic of “The Dead Remember” is all the darker when set against the authentic backdrop of a cattle drive. These stories, along with his increasingly confident handling of westerns, convinced Lovecraft that “in time he would have made his mark…with some folk-epic of his beloved southwest.”

The story generally considered Howard’s finest horror tale, though, was not set in the Southwest, but in the South. Texas straddles both geographic regions, and Howard explained to Lovecraft that a dividing line ran between Dallas, which was in East Texas and looked to the south, and Fort Worth, which was, as its slogan goes, “Where the West Begins.” Bagwell, where the Howards lived when Robert was about eight years old, is east of Dallas, on the fringes of the Piney Woods area that takes in parts of southwestern Arkansas, northwestern Louisiana, and East Texas. And it is in Bagwell that we find the genesis of “Pigeons from Hell.”

“I well remember the tales I listened to and shivered at, when a child in the ‘piney woods’ of East Texas, where Red River marks the Arkansaw and Texas boundaries,” Howard wrote to Lovecraft (using the phonetic spelling for his father’s native state). “There were quite a number of old slave darkies still living then. The one to whom I listened most was the cook, old Aunt Mary Bohannon…. Another tale she told that I have often met with in negro-lore. The setting, time and circumstances are changed by telling, but the tale remains basically the same. Two or three men—usually negroes—are travelling in a wagon through some isolated district—usually a broad, deserted river-bottom. They come on to the ruins of a once thriving plantation at dusk, and decide to spend the night in the deserted plantation house. This house is always huge, brooding and forbidding, and always, as the men approach the high columned verandah, through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away. The men sleep in the big front-room with its crumbling fire-place, and in the night they are awakened by a jangling of chains, weird noises and groans from upstairs. Sometimes footsteps descend the stairs with no visible cause. Then a terrible apparition appears to the men who flee in terror. This monster, in all the tales I have heard, is invariably a headless giant, naked or clad in shapeless sort of garment, and is sometimes armed with a broad-axe. This motif appears over and over in negro-lore.”

Just how familiar Howard might have been with “negro-lore” must remain a matter of some conjecture (he lived most of his life, other than that short period in Bagwell and a few weeks in New Orleans, in communities in which there were few, if any, African Americans), but certainly he used what he did know to good effect. Critical consensus seems to concur with Stephen King’s remark that “Pigeons from Hell”

is “one of the finest horror stories of [the twentieth] century.” It was later adapted for television’s
Thriller!
, an anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff, and is widely regarded as the best episode of that series, “one of the most truly frightening journeys into small-screen fantasy.”

“Pigeons from Hell” and other of the piney woods stories (such as “The Shadow of the Beast” and

“Black Canaan”) contain some language and attitudes that many readers will find uncomfortable or offensive. Not to put too fine a point on it, Howard was a product of his time and place, the early-twentieth-century South and Southwest, and casually racist attitudes went along with it. In addition, he was writing for the pulp magazines, and stereotyping of ethnic groups served as a kind of shorthand for the writers and readers of this form of popular fiction: Asians, Native Americans, Latins, Irish, Swedes, Eastern Europeans, and others are frequently not treated any better in pulp stories than blacks, whether African or African American, are. But in “Pigeons from Hell,” “Black Canaan,” “The Dead Remember,” and other tales, Howard also displays his considerable gifts for narrative and invention, and his extraordinary talent for creating that atmosphere of “fear and dread suspense” that Lovecraft noted; and I believe that a closer look at the stories reveals considerable sympathy with the downtrodden.

In “The Dead Remember,” for instance, it is clear that Howard’s sympathies lie with Joel and Jezebel, rather than with the cowboy who murders them in a drunken rage, and in “Pigeons from Hell,” it seems equally clear that his sympathies lie with the “mulatto” maid Joan and not with her white tormentor, Celia Blassenville. Howard’s own extreme sensitivity to authority (“Life’s not worth living if somebody thinks he’s in authority over you,” he told one correspondent) may have been at the root of his discomfort with mistreatment of slaves (“Thank God the slaves on my ancestors’ plantations were never so misused”), and this, along with pride in his Southern heritage, may be why he chose to make the Blassenvilles Creoles from the West Indies rather than Southerners. In “Black Canaan,” it is true that the villains are Saul Stark, the conjure man, and his “quadroon” accomplice, the Bride of Damballah, but here I believe Howard’s sympathies lie as much with the swamp blacks, over whom Stark holds sway not so much by holding out the promise of liberation as through fear of being “put in the swamp,” as with the white inhabitants of the town. In fact, when he names the white town Grimesville, the black settlement Goshen, and the region in which both are found Canaan, I think he may be subtly—perhaps unconsciously—displaying his sympathies with the oppressed.

We have appended to this volume four fragmentary tales that, so far as can be learned, Howard never completed. Two of these will fall into the Cthulhu Mythos: “The House” concerns Justin Geoffrey, and provides a tantalizing hint of where his madness began; the “Untitled Fragment” that begins “Beneath the glare of the sun…” explicitly links the Conan series to the Mythos, through discussion of Conan’s Hyborian Age in
Nameless Cults
. (The title
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
, used here by Howard for the only time, was actually coined by August Derleth, at the request of Lovecraft, who had wanted a title that would serve as the original German. Lovecraft ardently promoted the use of Derleth’s version because of its “sinister, mouth-filling rhythm.”) The other two fragments employ, in my view, some very interesting concepts. “Golnor the Ape,” with its protagonist who had “lived in two worlds” and who is yet able to see and converse with beings of that mysterious “other” world, and “Spectres in the Dark,” in which men seem to be driven mad by things that move in the shadows but cannot be seen, offer intriguing glimpses into the fertile imagination of Robert E. Howard.

Settle back in your chair and let that imagination sweep you into worlds of mystery, adventure, and terror. You might first want to be sure there are no deep shadows in the room.

Rusty Burke

February 2008

In the Forest of Villefère

The sun had set. The great shadows came striding over the forest. In the weird twilight of a late summer day, I saw the path ahead glide on among the mighty trees and disappear. And I shuddered and glanced fearfully over my shoulder. Miles behind lay the nearest village–miles ahead the next.

I looked to left and to right as I strode on, and anon I looked behind me. And anon I stopped short, grasping my rapier, as a breaking twig betokened the going of some small beast. Or was it a beast?

But the path led on and I followed, because, forsooth, I had naught else to do.

As I went I bethought me, “My own thoughts will rout me, if I be not aware. What is there in this forest, except perhaps the creatures that roam it, deer and the like? Tush, the foolish legends of those villagers!”

And so I went and the twilight faded into dusk. Stars began to blink and the leaves of the trees murmured in the faint breeze. And then I stopped short, my sword leaping to my hand, for just ahead, around a curve of the path, someone was singing. The words I could not distinguish, but the accent was strange, almost barbaric.

I stepped behind a great tree, and the cold sweat beaded my forehead. Then the singer came in sight, a tall, thin man, vague in the twilight. I shrugged my shoulders. A
man
I did not fear. I sprang out, my point raised.

“Stand!”

He showed no surprize. “I prithee, handle thy blade with care, friend,” he said.

Somewhat ashamed, I lowered my sword.

“I am new to this forest,” I quoth, apologetically. “I heard talk of bandits. I crave pardon. Where lies the road to Villefère?”

“
Corbleu
, you’ve missed it,” he answered. “You should have branched off to the right some distance back. I am going there myself. If you may abide my company, I will direct you.”

I hesitated. Yet why should I hesitate?

“Why, certainly. My name is de Montour, of Normandy.”

“And I am Carolus le Loup.”

“No!” I started back.

He looked at me in astonishment.

“Pardon,” said I; “the name is strange. Does not
loup
mean wolf?”

“My family were always great hunters,” he answered. He did not offer his hand.

“You will pardon my staring,” said I as we walked down the path, “but I can hardly see your face in the dusk.”

I sensed that he was laughing, though he made no sound.

“It is little to look upon,” he answered.

I stepped closer and then leaped away, my hair bristling.

“A mask!” I exclaimed. “Why do you wear a mask,
m’sieu
?”

“It is a vow,” he explained. “In fleeing a pack of hounds I vowed that if I escaped I would wear a mask for a certain time.”

“Hounds,
m’sieu
?”

“Wolves,” he answered quickly; “I said wolves.”

We walked in silence for a while and then my companion said, “I am surprized that you walk these woods by night. Few people come these ways even in the day.”

“I am in haste to reach the border,” I answered. “A treaty has been signed with the English, and the Duke of Burgundy should know of it. The people at the village sought to dissuade me. They spoke of a–wolf that was purported to roam these woods.”

“Here the path branches to Villefère,” said he, and I saw a narrow, crooked path that I had not seen when I passed it before. It led in amid the darkness of the trees. I shuddered.

“You wish to return to the village?”

“No!” I exclaimed. “No, no! Lead on.”

So narrow was the path that we walked single file, he leading. I looked well at him. He was taller, much taller than I, and thin, wiry. He was dressed in a costume that smacked of Spain. A long rapier swung at his hip. He walked with long easy strides, noiselessly.

Then he began to talk of travel and adventure. He spoke of many lands and seas he had seen and many strange things. So we talked and went farther and farther into the forest.

I presumed that he was French, and yet he had a very strange accent, that was neither French nor Spanish nor English, not like any language I had ever heard. Some words he slurred strangely and some he could not pronounce at all.

“This path is not often used, is it?” I asked.

“Not by many,” he answered and laughed silently. I shuddered. It was very dark and the leaves whispered together among the branches.

“A fiend haunts this forest,” I said.

“So the peasants say,” he answered, “but I have roamed it oft and have never seen his face.”

Then he began to speak of strange creatures of darkness, and the moon rose and shadows glided among the trees. He looked up at the moon.

“Haste!” said he. “We must reach our destination before the moon reaches her zenith.”

We hurried along the trail.

“They say,” said I, “that a werewolf haunts these woodlands.”

“It might be,” said he, and we argued much upon the subject.

“The old women say,” said he, “that if a werewolf is slain while a wolf, then he is slain, but if he is slain as a man, then his half-soul will haunt his slayer forever. But haste thee, the moon nears her zenith.”

We came into a small moonlit glade and the stranger stopped.

“Let us pause a while,” said he.

“Nay, let us be gone,” I urged; “I like not this place.”