I have already called attention to the fact that Kuttner made little use of Lovecraft’s own monster deities. Two exceptions are Azathoth, who figures largely in “Hydra”, and Dagon with his deep ones, who are recognizable in “Spawn of Dagon.” In “The Secret of Kralitz” there is a single reference to “leprous, subterranean Yog-Sothoth.” Kuttner drops this hint, never to pick it up again, but we must wonder if here we do not perhaps discover the origin of August Derleth’s later categorization of Yog-Sothoth as an earth elemental. Certainly nothing in Lovecraft suggests it.
Naturally, Kuttner paid the most attention to his own inventions. Of these the first was Vorvadoss, a being whose cult is restricted to the king (Sindara) of Bel Yarnak. He appears as a dust-devil in the sand in “The Eater of Souls”, where he gives the king advice on how to vanquish the Eater, a local troll who dwells in the Grey Gulf ofYarnak. In “The Invaders” he is hailed by mortals as “Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak! The Troubler of the Sands! Thou Who waiteth in the Outer Dark, Kindler of the Flame.” He even seems to have borrowed an appellation from the Eater of Souls, as he is now called “Vorvadoss of the Grey Gulf of Yamak.” Where did Kuttner get the name “Vorvadoss”? Who knows? But I wonder if he just twisted “Barbados” a bit.
Nyogtha (the Thing that should not be, the Black God of Madness), from “The Salem Horror”, is the best known of the Kuttnerian Old Ones. He is made “brother of the old ones” in Kuttner’s Necronomicon passage, just as Cthulhu himself is made merely “their cousin” in Lovecraft’s Necronomicon text in “The Dunwich Horror.” Nyogtha is said to burrow up from the depths of the earth in answer to an occult summons. Kuttner’s Nyogtha may have served as the inspiration for Brian Lumley’s Shudde-M’elle, the Burrower Beneath. But it is no less likely that Nyogtha was itself an assemblage of themes borrowed from Nyarlathotep in “The Haunter of the Dark.” Both are inky clouds of blasphemy which the protagonist, a visiting writer, accidentally summons in an old building full of occult associations.
Iod appears personified as a deity in two stories, “The Invaders” and “The Hunt”, and he is dubbed “The Shining Pursuer”, “the Hunter of Souls.” It is a true Lovecraftian deity: “It was a blazing, cosmic horror spawned by an outlaw universe, an abysmal, prehuman entity drawn out of fathomless antiquity by elder magic. A great faceted eye” protrudes from “membranous”, “squamous, semitransparent flesh” from which extended “hideous, plant-like appendages” which “writhed blindly in the air, making hungry little sucking noises.”
Finally, in “Bells of Horror”, Kuttner introduces his demon of darkness, Zuchequon, the Dark Silent One. He is the herald and harbinger of eternal darkness and is scheduled to appear at the end of the age, though foolish mortals may awaken him early if they can conjure up exactly the deep tones that can rouse him. Again we seem to have a twin of Nyarlathotep as the avatar of darkness in Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” Interestingly, whereas Kuttner explicitly associates Iod and Vorvadoss with Cthulhu and Yig as gods worshiped on primal Mu, here he just as explicitly excludes Zuchequon from the ranks of the Old Ones. He is not a star-spawned creature, but rather more of a cosmic principle. In this Zuchequon reminds us of Clark Ashton Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla, also disassociated from the Old Ones as having been here, native to the steaming earth, before the arrival of Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth from the stars. Of course, neither statement stood in the way of Lin Carter numbering Zuchequon and Ubbo-Sathla among the Old Ones. In fact, he made the former the son of the latter! (See his story, “Dead of Night”, in this collection, as well as his “Zoth-Ommog” in Edward Paul Berglund, ed., Disciples of Cthulhu, 1976. The latter will be reprinted under the earlier title “The Horror in the Gallery” in my upcoming Chaosium Carter collection The Xothic Legend Cycle.)
Lin Carter’s great joy was to do for the Mythos exactly what he himself described Helena Petrovna Blavatsky doing: codifying fugitive and unattached morsels of legend, theory, and nonsense into a grand system. (For a complete treatment of Carter’s Mythos architectonics, see the chapter “The Statement of Lin Carter” in my book Lin Carter: A Look behind His Imaginary Worlds, Borgo Press). What is surprising is that he seems never to have noticed the existence of several of the Kuttner Mythos items mentioned here, taking note in his various Mythos glossaries and theogonies of only Nyogtha, “Zulchequon”, and the Book of Iod.
The present volume is in a sense part of Lin Carter’s championing of the Kuttner Mythos legacy. The Book of lod (it was Lin’s idea to call a Kuttner collection that) would have been the second in his series of Lin Carter Fantasy Selections from Zebra Books, the first being the original edition of Robert Bloch’s Mysteries of the Worm (also resurrected, as the second volume in the present Chaosium fiction series). Indeed, Lin wanted to assemble collections of the Mythos work of each major Lovecraft Circle member. Not a bad idea.
The Secret of Kralitz
by Henry Kuttner
This eerie tale of an afterlife is surprisingly close in general conception to Lovecraft’s own sequence of Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets XVI, XVII, and XVIII, “The 'Window", “A Memory", and “The Gardens of Yin”, in which a narrator also penetrates the secret of his ancestral manor and enters into an unexpected afterlife populated by lost forebears. Yet surely the similarity is fortuitous. Lovecraft was still at work on the sonnet cycle when Kuttner alerted him to expect the manuscript of “The Secret of Kralitz.” (Could HPL have been influenced by young Kuttner in this instance?) Lovecraft judged Kuttner’s tale a success:
“In spite of the suggestion of youthful overcolouring in spots I like it immensely. It had the Gothic atmosphere touch that I supremely relish—the one intangible element that makes a weird story really potent & fascinating in my eyes. It is a pity that most ‘weird' tales lose this fundamental quality in an effort to be modern and sprightly.” (October 15, 1936)
One wonders what Lovecraft would have thought of the increasingly modem tone of the stories Kuttner published in Strange Stories and Weird Tales after HPL’s death. He may have had some tall explaining to do on that day in 1958 when he passed into the gloomy Valhalla of horror authors to meet HPL.
First publication: Weird Tales, October 1936.
I awoke from profound sleep to find two black-swathed forms standing silently beside me, their faces pale blurs in the gloom. As I blinked to clear my sleep-dimmed eyes, one of them beckoned impatiently, and suddenly I realized the purpose of this midnight summons. For years I had been expecting it, ever since my father, the Baron Kralitz, had revealed to me the secret and the curse that hung over our ancient house. And so, without a word, I rose and followed my guides as they led me along the gloomy corridors of the castle that had been my home since birth.
As I proceeded there rose up in my mind the stern face of my father, and in my ears rang his solemn words as he told me of the legendary curse of the House of Kralitz, the unknown secret that was imparted to the eldest son of each generation — at a certain time.