1
Despite Smith’s doubts as to the salability of the tale, he “was agreeably surprised to have [Wright] accept it almost by return mail.”2 Wright had bought so many of CAS’s stories by this time that “Genius Loci” had to wait until the June 1933 issue to see print. Smith had mistakenly calculated the length of the tale as 6300 words, whereas it actually ran 6500. As a result, he cheated himself out of five dollars and received only sixty instead.3
Shortly before its publication, Clark wrote to Derleth that he “hope[s] you will like Genius Loci, which differs from most of my tales in having a local setting. Most of the action is mental, so it’s a wonder that Wright took the tale.” 4 He was no doubt gratified by the reaction of H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote to congratulate him “on the dark fascination of ‘Genius Loci’… you have succeeded in capturing that vague, geographical horror after which I have so often striven….” HPL added that “it interested me greatly to hear of the actual folklore background of this lethal phantasy—Montague Summers (of whose work I have read only the Vampire volume) must be full of data rich in fictional suggestions.”5 While the Smith letter to HPL does not appear to have survived, we know from elsewhere that Smith considered his copy of Summer’s The Vampire: His Kith and Kin to be one of his most prized possessions.6 Therein we find the following discussion:
In [China] wills-o’-the-wisp are thought to be an unmistakenable sign of a place where much blood has been shed… and all mists and gaseous marsh-lights are connected with the belief in vampires and specters which convey disease. Since the effluvia, the vapour and haze from a swamp or quaggy ground are notoriously unhealthy and malarial fevers result in delirium and anaemia it may be that in some legends the disease has been personified as a ghastly creature who rides on the infected air and sucks the life from his victims.
7
Earlier Summers also speculates that if a sensitive person who is “fatigued and languid so as to offer little or no resistance, a vampirish entity may temporarily utilize his vitality to attempt a partial materialization.”8 Another possible source may be traced to Smith’s readings of Algernon Blackwood the previous month.9 “Genius Loci” is reminiscent of Blackwood’s story “The Transfer” (first published in Pan’s Garden, 1912), which also deals with a plot of ground that exercises a sort of psychic vampirism on the vitality of those who come across it.
“Genius Loci” was selected by Smith as the title story for his third collection of fiction from Arkham House, which was published in 1948. It was also included in RA. The present text is based upon a carbon of the typescript among the Smith Papers at the John Hay Library.
1. CAS, letter to AWD, September 28, 1932 (SL 192).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, October 8, 1932 (SL 193).
3. CAS, letter to AWD, May 23, 1933 (SL 206).
4. CAS, letter to AWD, May 2, 1933 (ms, SHSW).
5. HPL, letter to CAS, June 14, 1933 (ms, JHL).
6. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, May 23, 1933 (SL 207).
7. Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928; rpt. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960), p. 198.
8. Summers, p. 197.
9. See CAS, letter to Genevieve K. Sully, August 5, 1932 (SL 184-185).
The Secret of the Cairn
Plotted in the autumn of 1931 at around the same time as “The Eternal World,” but not written until a year after, was “The Secret of the Cairn,” a title that was changed by Wonder Stories to “The Light from Beyond” without consultation with Smith (although he mentioned in a letter that he had no objection to the new title). Under its original title, “The Cairn,” Smith developed this plot synopsis:
Certain strange phenomena noted by a lonely artist, who sees one night a brilliant display of light, followed by a weird sub-auditory music and a spicy perfume. The next day, on the end of the hill above his cabin, he finds a new-built cairn of boulders, crowned by a queer three-pointed lucent star of unknown material. Starting forward to examine the cairn, he discovers that he cannot approach it—the ground seems to move forward beneath his feet like a treadmill at every step; he tries it from other sides, with the same result; and growing giddy and sick from his sensations, at length he desists, realizing that the space about the cairn is possessed of some unfamiliar property. He is immensely thrilled and excited, insomuch as he has long desired to find something supernatural or supernormal—something that would transcend the established laws of nature. He returns again and again to the location of the cairn, and notices about it a lingering trace of the same spicy perfume he had hitherto perceived, together with certain odd changes of the vegetation inside the circle of uncrossable space. The ground becomes covered with asphodel-like blossoms such as he has never beheld before; and a juniper tree near the cairn puts out great fiery crimson globes in lieu of its small bluish berries.
A fortnight later, there is a repetition of the strange lights and music that had first aroused his attention; and emerging from his cabin, he sees that the light is located in the vicinity of the cairn. Hastening thither, he sees through veils of blinding radiance a bizarre barge-like vessel and living figures that exhume a shrouded object from beneath the cairn and carry it aboard the vessel, which then disappears, soaring upward in a great flash and seeming to vanish into some alien dimension of space.
At dawn he visits the place, and finds that he can now approach the scattered remnants of the cairn, from among which the lucent triangular stone is gone. In a deep pit he finds a piece of glowing fabric, which may have formed an outer cerement; and touching it, he experiences some peculiar sensations. Beneath the cloth there is a seal-like object, formed of odd jewels that seem to have been wrought into cryptic characters. He is about to pick it up, when, in a blaze of intolerable light, the vessel returns. He loses consciousness, after seeming to fall through interminable gulfs and labyrinths of arcanic spaces and splendors. Amid this, he has the queer sense of being touched on the forehead by some{one}.
When he recovers, the vessel is gone, and the strange seal has likewise vanished, together with the glowing fabric. His fingers have turned blue where he touched the object, and are subject henceforward to certain queer disorders of sensation, one of which is an extension of tactility. There is a queer mark on his forehead, like a burn, but displaying intricately patterned crispations like some ultra-human fingerprint. He is seldom entirely sane afterwards, and is troubled by repetitions of the falling sensation, and by disorders of vision, such as chronic repetition of the bright light, and a recurrent vision of gulfs at his feet, together with the haunting perfume.