POSTSCRIPT: On the night of August 3rd, a Santiago police car saw a man in white pyjamas standing knee-deep in the surf near Wexton Pier, apparently reading a letter by the light of a match. Approaching him, Officers Harlow and Kellar shone their flashlights in his face. He seemed to be asleep, but the blinding light awakened him and he realized suddenly where he was and what he was doing. Paying no attention to the patrolmen, he suddenly, with white, shaking fingers, touched the burning match to the sheet of closely written paper he held, and hurled the blazing sheet into the dark, foaming waters. In that same instant, following the flight of the burning paper, Officer Kellar turned his light on the black waters, and reports that he glimpsed something enormous, round and slick, and white—but not remotely suggestive of a human body, he is certain.
At that moment, the wild-eyed man—later identified as Henry Stephenson Blaine, Ph.D., manuscript collection curator for the Sanbourne Institute in this city—apparently saw the thing in the surf—and much clearer than did either of the officers. For he staggered back with a horrible wailing screech that one of the officers, who has been both a prison guard at San Quentin and a security guard for an insane asylum, describes as the cry of a damned soul—"the most horrible sound I ever heard come from a human throat," he said, swearing and pale.
As the two patrolmen waded out to him, Dr. Blaine fell on his knees in the foaming surf and clapped both hands over his face, covering his eyes, screaming hoarsely: “God! God! Horrible—I have seen a Yugg! A Yugg!—Jesus—God—a Yugg!—God—lä! Zoth-Ommog!—cf'ayak ghaaa yrrl'th tho-Yuggya! Yaaaaaa-n'gh—”
The police closed with him and grappled with him; he reportedly made no resistance, but was so shaken with uncontrollable spasms of trembling that he could not stand and had to be carried to the patrol car. Along the way, he babbled with desperate urgency to his two captors—or rescuers: "I am mad or going mad—get to Hodgkins at the Institute—the stone thing from Ponape—God damn that mad fool, Copeland!—tell Hodgkins the jade idol must be destroyed—must be smashed, d'you hear me?—Kill it. kill it, kill it. killllllllllll—"
Dr. Blaine then collapsed in utter exhaustion and was admitted to Mercy Hospital Psychiatric Emergency Ward at 3 o’clock in the morning. He has been there now for two months; in all that time he has not spoken a single word, except for a gobbling sound he repeats over and over, which sounds like, “Yugg—Yugg-Yugg!"
He is now kept under forcible restraint for his own protection.
I have perused the manuscript found among the papers on his desk and forwarded to me by his assistant, Mr. Hodgkins. I have reached, and can reach, no final conclusion regarding it and its chaotic Contents.
With one remark found therein I heartily concur.
Some things we were not meant to know; and some things it is dangerous to learn. To which, recalling the horror and loathing suggested in the patient’s data on the monstrous worm-things he calls “Yuggs”, one of which he believes he saw clearly in the blaze of the policeman’s flashlight: Some things it is death and madness to see.
For since that night of cataclysmic horror Dr. Blaine has attempted to blind himself eleven times.
(signed) Robinson Dambler. M.D.
Physician-in-Charge
THIS tale, which had early borne as a working title ‘The Horror in the Gallery”, then “The Terror Out of Time”, wound up appearing first in Edward Paul Berglund’s 1976 anthology The Disciples of Cthulhu under the title “Zoth-Ommog." I am glad to have the chance to restore one of the earlier titles, which is superior despite, or rather perhaps because of, its obvious derivation from the title of Lovecraft’s “The Horror in the Museum” (though in fact it has almost nothing in common with that tale, being far more reminiscent of, “Out of the Aeons.” As a gaffe in the first edition of Carter’s Lovecraft: A Look behind the "Cthnlbu Mythos" [Ballantinc/Starmont/Borgo] reveals, Lin seems to have found it easy to confuse the two tales, since both have sections set in a museum.). The title “The Horror in the Gallery” signals the campy nostalgia of the whole enterprise, unlike “Zoth-Ommog”, which tells the reader exactly nothing. That Lin opted for this latter title perhaps reflects his not-so-hidden agenda in writing these stories: to fill in gaps he saw in the Mythos as currently outlined. The data, the system, was more important than the story, which existed simply as a vehicle for getting the new data into print. The story "Zoth-Ommog" is titled simply for the piece of Mythos data it embodies.
Yet this story rises above its underlying motivation. More than a little inspired, I suspect, by Fritz Leiber’s tribute to HPL, “To Arkham and the Stars” (see my anthology Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, Fedogan & Bremer, 1990), this story represents a radical departure in narrative technique from the approaches evident in the previous stories in this sequence. "The Thing in the Pit" and "The Red Offering" are both cast in Carter’s pseudo-Dunsanian archaic style, while “The Dweller in the Tomb” and “Out of the Ages” both employ the narrative shortcut of the journal or diary, throwing a bunch of narrative fragments at us rather in the manner of a set of story notes, which is finally all such a "story" is. “The Horror in the Gallery”, by contrast, tries (and succeeds, in my judgment) to enclose the story and the reader in a distinct and convincing narrative world of sufficient texture and color. It must be, and is, sustained by the weaving of a continuous narrative web of scene as well as summary, process as well as conclusion.
The end of the story, hackneyed though it seems, is on another level semiotically quite appropriate. When Hodgkins resolves the situation by simply throwing the star stone at the idol, we have the basic plot syntax stripped down to the bare bone: The whole story is a simple process (disguised as complex by the twists and turns of the narrative discourse) of two symbol systems pursuing a collision path. At that last moment, all the fiendish lore of the "Alhazredic Demonology" meets the wisdom of the Elder Gods (larger-than-life shadows cast by the Miskatonic savants whose advice Hodgkins seeks) head on, and all superfluities such as characters, narrative motivation, etc. drop away like booster rockets. The bare symbols themselves—the Elder Sign and the Old One idol—must finally clash, and one must annihilate the other.
Or perhaps both must annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter, and this is the moral of the story. The forces in opposition really do not have any ultimate moral reference in human terms. The Old Ones are not devils with the Elder Gods playing angels. Rather, they are an utterly alien factor aloof to and unmindful to us, but dangerous to us, like nuclear energy if we dare get in its way. The genuine Lovecraftian character of this bleak vision need hardly be pointed out, though most might not expect to see it in Lin Carter.
The Horror in the Gallery
by Lin Carter
THE following document is part of the Santiago County Police Homicide File G029-02. It was taken down in dictation by public stenographer R. A. Wallis from oral testimony voluntarily given under oath on the afternoon of March 29, 1929. Sheriff Homer Tate Watkins was the questioning officer; Patrolman Wilbur J. Barlow was the witness. The file was held in the "Open" section until six months after the above date, and since then has been filed under “Unsolved” in the County Criminal Courts Building, Santiago, California. We are grateful to the Public Prosecutor's Office of the state government for permission to include here this previously unpublished deposition.