“I don’t know what they are—but I have surmised a good deal. They are hateful as the worms of the Pit, they are malevolent as harpies, they drool with a poisonous hunger not to be named or imagined… But I believed that they were powerless to do anything outside of their own sphere; and I’ve always laughed at them when they tried to entice me—even though that snakish mental pull of theirs was rather creepy at times. It was as if soft, invisible, gelatinous arms were trying to drag you down from the firm shore into a bottomless bog.
“They are hunters—I am sure of that—the hunters from Beyond. God knows what they will do to Marta now that they have her at their mercy. That vast, viscid, miasma-haunted place to which they took her is awful beyond the imagining of a Satan. Perhaps—even there—they couldn’t harm her body. But bodies aren’t what they want—it isn’t for human flesh that they grope with those ghoulish claws, and gape and slaver with those gangrenous mouths. The brain itself—and the soul, too—is their food: they are the creatures who prey on the minds of madmen and madwomen, who devour the disembodied spirits that have fallen from the cycles of incarnation, have gone down beyond the possibility of rebirth.
“To think of Marta in their power—it is worse than hell or madness… Marta loved me—and I loved her, too, though I didn’t have the sense to realize it, wrapped as I was in my dark, baleful ambition and impious egotism. She was afraid for me—and I believe she surrendered voluntarily to the Things. She must have thought that they would leave me alone—if they secured another victim in my place…”
He ceased, and began to pace idly and feverishly about. I saw that his hollow eyes were alight with torment, as if the mechanical telling of his horrible story had in some manner served to re-quicken his crushed mind. Utterly and starkly appalled by his hideous revelations, I could say nothing, but could only stand and watch his torture-twisted face.
Incredibly, his expression changed, with a wild, startled look that was instantly transfigured into joy. Turning to follow his gaze, I saw that Marta was standing in the center of the room. She was nude, except for a Spanish shawl that she must have worn while posing. Her face was bloodless as the marble of a tomb, and her eyes were wide and blank, as if she had been drained of all life, of all thought or emotion or memory—as if even the knowledge of horror had been taken away from her. It was the face of the living dead, the soulless mask of ultimate idiocy; and the joy faded from Cyprian’s eyes as he stepped toward her.
He took her in his arms, he spoke to her with a desperate, loving tenderness, with cajoling and caressing words. But she made no answer, no movement of recognition or awareness, but stared beyond him with her blank eyes, to which the daylight and the darkness, the void air and her lover’s face, would henceforward be the same. He and I both knew, in that instant, that she would never again respond to any human voice, or to human love or terror; that she was like an empty cerement, retaining the outward form of that which the worms have eaten in their mausolean darkness. Of the noisome pits wherein she had been, of that bournless realm and its pullulating phantoms, she could tell us nothing: her agony had ended with the terrible mercy of complete forgetfulness.
Like one who confronts the Gorgon, I was frozen by her wide and sightless gaze. Then, behind her, where stood an array of carven Satans and lamias, the room seemed to recede, the walls and floors dissolved in a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathsome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge. Outlined against that boiling measureless cauldron of malignant storm, Marta stood like an image of glacial death and silence in the arms of Cyprian. Then, once more, after a little, the abhorrent vision faded, leaving only the diabolic statuary.
I think that I alone had beheld it; that Cyprian had seen nothing but the dead, mindless face of Marta. He drew her close, he repeated his hopeless words of tenderness and cajolery. Then, suddenly, he released her with a vehement sob of despair. Turning away, while she stood and still looked on with unseeing eyes, he snatched a heavy sculptor’s mallet from the table on which it was lying, and proceeded to smash with furious blows the newly-modelled group of gargoyles, till nothing was left but the figure of the terror-maddened girl, crouching above a mass of cloddish fragments and formless, half-dried clay.
APPENDIX ONE:
STORY NOTES
Abbreviations Used
:
AWD
August W. Derleth (1909-1971), Wisconsin novelist,
Weird Tales
author, and founder of Arkham House.
AY The Abominations of Yondo
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1960).
BB The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979).
BL
Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
CAS
Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961).
DAW
Donald A. Wandrei (1908-1937), poet,
Weird Tales
writer and co-founder of Arkham House.
EOD Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bio-Bibliography
by Donald Sidney-Fryer et al. (West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1978).
ES The End of the Story: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume One.
Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006).
FFT The Freedom of Fantastic Things
. Ed. Scott Connors (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006).
FW
Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), editor of
Weird Tales
from 1924 to 1939.
GL Genius Loci and Other Tales
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1948).
HPL
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), informal leader of a circle of
writers for
Weird Tales
and related magazines, and probably the leading exponent of weird fiction in the twentieth century.
JHL
Clark Ashton Smith Papers and H. P. Lovecraft Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.
LL
Letters to H. P. Lovecraft
. Ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987).
LW Lost Worlds
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944).
MHS
Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota Historical Society.
OD Other Dimensions
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).
OST Out of Space and Time
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).
PD Planets and Dimensions: Collected Essays.
Ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973).
PP Poems in Prose
(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965).