Midway in that peculiar transit, he heard a sharp, sudden clapping of wings. It ceased with remarkable abruptness, and was not repeated. Looking back, he found that the Ispazar had fallen from the bridge, and was vanishing brokenly amid irreconcilable angles, in the gulf from which there was no return.
APPENDIX ONE:
STORY NOTES
Abbreviations Used
:
AHT Arkham House Transcripts: a set of transcriptions and excerpts from the letters of H. P. Lovecraft prepared by Donald Wandrei and August Derleth after Lovecraft’s death in preparation for what would be five volumes of Selected Letters (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965-1976).
AWD August W. Derleth (1909-1971), Wisconsin novelist, Weird Tales author, and co-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 (1908-1987), poet, Weird Tales writer and co-founder of Arkham House.
DSThe Door to Saturn: The Collected Fantasiesof Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Two. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).
EODEmperor 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.
GLGenius 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.
LLLetters to H. P. Lovecraft. Ed. Steve Behrends (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1987).
LWLost Worlds (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1944).
MHS Donald Wandrei Papers, Minnesota Historical Society.
ODOther Dimensions (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970).
OSTOut of Space and Time (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1942).
PDPlanets and Dimensions: Collected Essays. Ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973).
PPPoems in Prose (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965).
RAA Rendezvous in Averoigne (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1988).
RHB Robert H. Barlow (1918-1951), correspondent and collector of manuscripts of CAS, HPL, and other WT writers.
RW Red World of Polaris. Ed. Ronald S. Hilger and Scott Connors (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2003).
SHSW August Derleth Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library.
SL Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003).
SSStrange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Steve Behrends with Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).
ST Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, a pulp edited by Harry Bates in competition with WT.
TSSTales of Science and Sorcery (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964).
VA A Vintage from Atlantis: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Volume Three. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2007).
WS Wonder Stories, a pulp published by Hugo Gernsback and edited first by David Lasser and then Charles D. Hornig.
WTWeird Tales, Smith’s primary market for fiction, edited by FW (1924-1940) and later Dorothy McIlwraith (1940-1954).
The Mandrakes
Smith completed “The Mandrakes” on May 15, 1932, describing it as “short, sweet & medieval. It’s about a sorcerer who murdered his wife and buried her in the field where he got the mandrakes for the love-philtres in which he specialized. Later, something happened to the mandrake-crop….”1 He would later describe it as “not a very important item.”2
Weird Tales paid Smith $25 when it published the story in its February 1933 issue.3 The check was returned to Smith as unpaid when the Fletcher-American Bank, where the bulk of the funds of WT’s parent Popular Fiction Publishing Company were deposited, had its assets frozen. Smith would not receive any monies for this tale until August, and even then WT only paid half. WT, which had paid reasonably promptly on publication up to this point, would take longer and longer to pay for stories.4
1. CAS, letter to AWD, May 15, 1932 (SL 177).
2. CAS, letter to AWD, December 13, 1932 (ms, SHSW).
3. Popular Fiction Publishing Company, letters to CAS, February 23, 1933; April 13, 1933; August 29, 1933 (ms, JHL).
4. See Scott Connors, “Weird Tales and the Great Depression,” in The Robert E. Howard Reader, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Wildside Press, forthcoming).
The Beast of Averoigne
The first intimation of what would eventually evolve into “The Beast of Averoigne” may perhaps be found in a plot outline that Clark Ashton Smith tentatively called “The Werewolf of Averoigne:” “A terrible, semi-human thing—the progeny of a sorceress and a demon—which terrorizes the wood of Averoigne.”1 Sometime after this, Smith jotted down an idea with the present title that fleshed out the core idea of an unknown predator terrorizing the forests, but which provided a wholly ultramundane origin:
The depredations of a fearsome beast, beginning near a Nestorian monastery in the hills of Averoigne during a year of comets, meteors, and {. . . }. First p. of narrative is a deposition by one of the N. monks. It ends abruptly, through the death of the monk at the hands of this beast. Other people are slain by the monster; and finally the aid of the sorcerer is invoked against it. Through the skill of this sorcerer, the beast is tracked to the Nestorian monastery, is cornered in the cell of the abbot, and when a certain magic water is sprinkled upon it, is revealed as the abbot himself. Amid the horror of the beholders, the abbot flees to the wilderness. He is seen again in the form of the beast but is prevented from re-entering the monastery. After the passing of the comet, the depredations cease, and he is found dead in his own form.