{detaiclass="underline" } Vulthoom and his people have awakened after a hibernation of a thousand akkals, or ten thousand years.
1
Smith began “Vulthoom” in October 1932, but did not finish the story until February 14, 1933. In the aftermath of the “Dweller in the Gulf” fiasco, CAS was no longer submitting stories to Wonder Stories; Strange Tales was dead and Astounding Stories comatose, so he took a chance and submitted it to Wright at Weird Tales. Smith didn’t think much of its chances, so he was pleasantly surprised when Wright accepted the tale, which was published in the September 1935 issue. “It fails to please me,”2 he wrote to Derleth, adding the next month that “It seems to have pleased [Wright], for some ungodly reason; but after all it’s a cut or two above Edmond Hamilton.”3 Smith received one hundred dollars for the story, which he later included in GL. In his letter of acceptance Wright mentioned that they were reserving the radio broadcast rights, but promised “if we receive any money from such broadcasting we will turn it over to you.”4 “Vulthoom” tied in the Eyrie’s reader’s poll for most popular story in the issue in which it appeared, sharing the honors with a reprint of Edmond Hamilton’s fine story “The Monster-God of Mamurth” and “The Man Who Chained the Lightning” by Paul Ernst.5 The present text is based upon Smith’s carbon, which is now deposited at the John Hay Library.
1. SS 175-176.
2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 19, 1933 (ms, SHSW)
3. CAS, letter to AWD, March 14, 1934 (ms, SHSW)
4. FW, letter to CAS, March 10, 1933 (ms, JHL).
5. See Sam Moskowitz, “The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales 1924 to 1940,” in World Fantasy Convention 1983 (Chicago: Weird Tales Ltd., 1983), p. 37.
The Weaver in the Vaults
Smith finished this, the sixth tale of Zothique, on March 15, 1933. Like its immediate predecessor in the sequence, “The Voyage of King Euvoran,” it may not have been originally conceived as part of this series. In a letter to Lovecraft dated January 27, 1930, CAS mentions the titles of several stories he was planning to write, among them one called “The Ghoul from Mercury.” A synopsis exists under that title, which describes “An entity like a gigantic fire-ball, from some alien planet, which devours the corpses in graveyards and morgues, and even breaks into the mummy-cases in museums.”1
The Black Book contains a more detailed plot synopsis under the present title:
Two henchmen of a king of Zothique, who are sent down into the royal catacombs of a deserted city to retrieve the bones of an ancient ancestor of the king. They find that many of the vaults are empty, and reaching the last vault, in which is interred the monarch that they seek, they find a nameless horror gorging itself upon the mummy and spinning an arabesque web of filthy iris and unclean splendor in the dark. They flee, and are separated; the narrator of the tale becomes lost in the catacombs, and returning, finds the Weaver spinning its charnel web, more foul and refulgent than before, from the body of his late companion.
2
Wright not only accepted the story, but asked Smith to draw an illustration for it as well. “Someone has evidently been extolling my drawings around the W.T. office,”3 Smith wryly observed to Lovecraft, who had mentioned CAS’ artwork in several of his stories, most recently “The Horror in the Museum,” a story that he “revised” (i.e., ghost-wrote) for Hazel Heald, which had appeared in the July 1933 issue along with “Ubbo-Sathla.” Weird Tales paid Smith a total of fifty-two dollars for this story, seven dollars of which were for the illustration.4 Smith would illustrate a total of seven stories for WT, including “The Dark Eidolon” and “The Charnel God.”
After the story’s publication (in the January 1934 issue), August Derleth expressed his appreciation, which elicited this response from CAS: “I am glad The Weaver pleased you. I like the tale myself, particularly some of the atmospheric touches. In the drawing, I tried to achieve composition as well as illustrative value. The lines of the figure are part of a set arrangement, designed to create the feelings of incarceration, despair and burdenous rigour. But maybe I overdid it a little.”5 Lovecraft was typically appreciative of the story, singling out “the atmosphere of that unhallowedly ancient crypt” as “tremendously vivid!”6 “The Weaver in the Vault” was collected in GL. This text is based upon CAS’ carbon, now at Brown University.
1. SS 156.
2. BB item 11.
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. mid-October 1933 (SL 230).
4. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letter to CAS, May 29, 1934 (ms, JHL).
5. CAS, letter to AWD, January 10, 1934 (ms, SHSW).
6. HPL, postcard to CAS, postmarked January 24, 1934 (ms, JHL).
The Flower-Women
Despite not being able to sell “The Maze of the Enchanter,” Smith began to write a further tale of the archmage Maal Dweb in October 1932, but did not complete it until March of the next year. The plot that he outlined that October is essentially the same as what he ultimately wrote, differing only in the methods in which he disposed of the rival sorcerers:
Maal Dweb, bored with his omnipotence, goes forth in disguise to visit one of the worlds over which he rules. There he allows himself to be captured by certain fantastic creatures, the flower-women, who are half-woman, half-plant. These creatures, who have somewhat the character of vampires, and are about to make him their victim, but he diverts them by various feats of thaumaturgy, so that they defer his doom. Learning that they are preyed upon by certain half-ophidian sorcerers of the region, who use their corporeal substance in the compounding of magic drugs, Maal Dweb undertakes to deal with these sorcerers. He reduces himself in size, and hidden in the floriation of one of the living blossoms, gains entrance to the lair of the sorcerers in a honey-combed mountain. There, while they sleep, he changes the ingredients of the brew, which they intend as an elixir for their own use; and drinking the brew they dissolve instantly in liquid corruption.
1
Farnsworth Wright rejected “The Flower-Women” upon first submission, calling it “well done, but [it] seemed a fairy story rather than a weird tale proper.”2 Smith then sent it to William Clayton, who had invited him to submit manuscripts “of occult and weird stories”3 for a possible revival of Astounding Stories, but this did not materialize because Clayton resigned “due to ill health.”4 When Smith purchased a new typewriter to replace his old worn-out Remington, he resubmitted “The Flower-Women” and “The Death of Malygris” to Wright, who “evidently ... liked them better when I retyped them on my new Underwood,”4 since he accepted the former that July.5