The Maze of the Enchanter (59 page)

Vulthoom

A
n exceptionally complete synopsis of this, the third tale of Aihai (Mars), which was originally to have received the somewhat frivolous title “Beach-Combers of Mars,” exists among the Smith papers:

Two earthmen, stranded on Mars, and without funds, are approached by a great Martian, who offers them lucrative employment of an unspecified nature. Accepting the offer, they find themselves in the hands of the followers of Vulthoom, the evil deity of the Martians, who is worshipped in underground temples. Vulthoom is an actual being, almost immortal, who is said to have come to Mars thousands of years before from a world of the outer void. He is possessed of mysterious, though not necessarily supernatural, powers. His worship is forbidden by law, but he has many adherents, and desires to establish his power on earth as well as on Mars. He makes use of a terrible and degrading drug, administered as a perfume to enslave his devotees. The drug, which emanates from a fossilized flower, is worshipped on his altars, and gives off its carnalizing, brutalizing odor beneath the application of heat.

The two earthmen are compelled to take part in the ritual of the drug. One falls a temporary victim to its influence; the other, through some rare constitutional quirk, is comparatively immune. At the height of the drug-orgy, Vulthoom appears behind a geometric screen of {... } and approaches the terrestrials with a proposition. He will send them back to earth to proselytize his cause, if they will go voluntarily.

They refuse, and are turned loose in his caverns, ostensibly to wander as they will, but actually prisoners, besieged by terrible impressions and subtle influences—even pseudo-memories of a subjection to Vulthoom in some other frame of time and space—all of which is designed to break down their resistance. They see the frightful weaponries of Vulthoom; and a bodiless voice tells them the use of these weapons, to impress them further with the powers of the strange lord. They are separated, and each is made to believe that the other has yielded. Chanler, the more resistant, mad with rage at this belief, shatters a vial which is one of the weapons of Vulthoom—a vial that looses a black fire which eats its way upward through matter, and lets in the waters of the Yahan Canal on the cavern-world of the monster. Trying to escape before this catastrophe, Chanler finds his companion in the universal confusion; and both of them see Vulthoom for the first and last time, as the waters sweep him {...} cataract from his hidden sanctuary.

{detail:} 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

S
mith 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

D
espite 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

This story is unusual in that it did not evoke the same effusive enthusiasm from Lovecraft that Smith’s tales often called forth. He confided to Barlow “Yes—C A S’ s ‘Flower-Women’ is below par.”
⁶
Although he always encouraged Smith in his fiction writing, HPL was by no means blindly uncritical. As early as 1933 Lovecraft voiced agreement with Robert Bloch when the young writer complained that CAS “produces too much. That is the tragedy of economic necessity—he knows that much of his stuff is hack junk, yet has to keep grinding it out for the sake of the cash.” However, as we have seen from earlier notes, he was genuinely appreciative of Smith’s best efforts such as “The Dark Eidolon” or “The City of the Singing Flame.”
⁷

“The Flower-Women” appeared in the May 1935 issue of
WT
, and was collected in
LW
. As usual, a carbon of the typescript from CAS’s papers at the John Hay Library provided the text.

1.
SS
175.

2. William M. Clayton, letter to CAS, March 17, 1933 (ms, JHL).

3. H. C. Mayer, letter to CAS, May 1, 1933 (ms, JHL).

4. CAS, letter to DAW, August 6, 1933 (ms, MHS).

5. See CAS, letter to August Derleth, July 12, 1933 (
SL
211).

6. HPL, letter to RHB, May 29, 1935 (in
O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft’s Letters to R. H. Barlow
, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz [University of Tampa Press, 2007], p. 281).

7. HPL, letter to Robert Bloch, May 9, 1933 (in
H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to Robert Bloch
Supplement, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi [West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1993], p.6).

A
PPENDIX
T
WO:
A
LTERNATE
E
NDING TO
“
T
HE
W
HITE
S
YBIL”

S
lowly, Tortha won back to some measure of his former strength. But ever afterward there was a cloudy dimness in his mind, a blur of unresolving shadow, like the dazzlement in eyes that have looked on some insupportable light.

Among those who tended him was a pale maiden, not uncomely; and Tortha took her for the Sybil in the darkness that had come upon him. The maiden’s name was Illara, and Tortha loved her in his delusion; and, forgetful of his kin and his friends in Cerngoth, he dwelt with the mountain people thereafter, taking Illara to wife and making the songs of the little tribe. For the most part, he was happy in his belief that the Sybil had returned to him; and Illara, in her way, was content, being not the first of mortal women whose lover had remained faithful to a divine illusion.

A
PPENDIX
T
HREE:
T
HE
M
USE OF
H
YPERBOREA

T
oo far away is her wan and mortal face, and too remote are the snows of her lethal breast, for mine eyes to behold them ever. But at whiles her whisper comes to me, like a chill unearthly wind that is faint from traversing the gulfs between the worlds, and has flown over ultimate horizons of ice-bound deserts. And she speaks to me in a tongue I have never heard but have always known; and she tells of deathly things and of things beautiful beyond the ecstatic desires of love. Her speech is not of good or evil, nor of anything that is desired or conceived or believed by the termites of earth; and the air she breathes, and the lands wherein she roams, would blast like the utter cold of sidereal space; and her eyes would blind the vision of men like suns; and her kiss, if one should ever attain it, would wither and slay like the kiss of lightning.