Deej Recommends: The Hunters from Beyond
by Clark Ashton Smith
I regard this story as a superior piece of fan fiction. H.P. Lovecraft is named in this story, and the descriptive passages clearly strive for Lovecraftian energy and dread. If Clark Ashton Smith does not achieve the master's existential horror at the indifference of the universe, he does still manage a chilling little story that is worth reading and remembering.
The influence of Lovecraft is no surprise. Smith had been a friend and correspondent of his for a decade at the point that this story was written, a relationship which lasted to Lovecraft's death in 1937. Smith was one of the regulars in Weird Tales, sometimes included as one of the "big three" of that magazine's stable of writers with Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. (This trio is probably more of an ex post facto identification, since the most popular author in WT at the time it was a going concern was Seabury Quinn, author of the then-popular, now-mostly-forgotten stories starring occult detective Jules de Grandin.) So it is interesting that this particular story appeared not in *Weird Tales*, but in Strange Tales, a short-lived competitor of the early 1930s.
Smith did not begin by writing weird fiction, but as a poet, with several volumes published before his byline graced the pages of *Weird Tales*. And after 1936 and 1937, when he lost not only his friends Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, but both of his parents as well, he gave up writing fiction and focused on sculpture, with occasional forays into poetry once again.
While the following story does not rate with Lovecraft's best, I daresay it holds up well against "The Tomb". While "The Tomb" wins on purity of premise and absolute focus --- both probably due to it being the work of such a young author --- "The Hunters From Beyond" manages at least to hint effectively at the far greater vistas of madness and indifference that occupied Lovecraft for most of his writing career, something which "The Tomb" really does not. The obsession in the Lovecraft story only dooms the obsessee. The obsession in this one splashes doom more indiscriminately.
The Hunters from Beyond
Clark Ashton Smith
I have seldom been able to resist the allurement of a bookstore, particularly one that is well supplied with rare and exotic items. Therefore I turned in at Toleman’s to browse around for a few minutes. I had come to San Francisco for one of my brief, biannual visits, and had started early that idle forenoon to an appointment with Cyprian Sincaul, the sculptor, a second or third cousin of mine, whom I had not seen for several years.
His studio was only a block from Toleman’s, and there seemed to be no especial object in reaching it ahead of time. Cyprian had offered to show me his collection of recent sculptures; but, remembering the smooth mediocrity of his former work, amid which were a few banal efforts to achieve horror and grotesquerie, I did not anticipate anything more than an hour or two of dismal boredom.
The little shop was empty of customers. Knowing my proclivities, the owner and his one assistant became tacitly non-attentive after a word of recognition, and left me to rummage at will among the curiously laden shelves. Wedged in between other but less alluring titles, I found a de-luxe edition of Goya’s “Proverbs.” I began to turn the heavy pages, and was soon engrossed in the diabolic art of these nightmare-nurtured drawings.
It has always been incomprehensible to me that I did not shriek aloud with mindless, overmastering terror, when I happened to look up from the volume, and saw the thing that was crouching in a corner of the book-shelves before me. I could not have been more hideously startled if some hellish conception of Goya had suddenly come to life and emerged from one of the pictures in the folio.
What I saw was a forward-slouching, vermin-gray figure, wholly devoid of hair or down or bristles, but marked with faint, etiolated rings like those of a serpent that has lived in darkness. It possessed the head and brow of an anthropoid ape, a semi-canine mouth and jaw, and arms ending in twisted hands whose black hyena talons nearly scraped the floor. The thing was infinitely bestial, and at the same time, macabre; for its parchment skin was shriveled, corpselike, mummified, in a manner impossible to convey; and from eye sockets well-nigh deep as those of a skull, there glimmered evil slits of yellowish phosphorescence, like burning sulphur. Fangs that were stained as if with poison or gangrene, issued from the slavering, half-open mouth; and the whole attitude of the creature was that of some maleficent monster in readiness to spring.
Though I had been for years a professional writer of stories that often dealt with occult phenomena, with the weird and the spectral, I was not at this time possessed of any clear and settled belief regarding such phenomena. I had never before seen anything that I could identify as a phantom, nor even an hallucination; and I should hardly have said offhand that a bookstore on a busy street, in full summer daylight, was the likeliest of places in which to see one. But the thing before me was assuredly nothing that could ever exist among the permissible forms of a sane world. It was too horrific, too atrocious, to be anything but a creation of unreality.
Even as I stared across the Goya, sick with a half-incredulous fear, the apparition moved toward me. I say that it moved, but its change of position was so instantaneous, so utterly without effort or visible transition, that the verb is hopelessly inadequate. The foul specter had seemed five or six feet away. But now it was stooping directly above the volume I still held in my hands, with its loathesomely lambent eyes peering upward at my face, and a gray-green slime drooling from its mouth on the broad pages. At the same time I breathed and insupportable fetor, like a mingling of rancid serpent-stench with the moldiness of antique charnels and the fearsome reek of newly decaying carrion.
In a frozen timelessness that was perhaps no more than a second or two, my heart appeared to suspend its beating, while I beheld the ghastly face. Gasping, I let the Goya drop with a resonant bang on the floor, and even as it fell, I saw that the vision had vanished.
Toleman, a tonsured gnome with shell-rimmed goggles, rushed foward to retrieve the fallen volume, exclaiming: “What is wrong, Mr. Hastane? Are you ill?” From the meticulousness with which he examined the binding in search of possible damage, I knew that his chief solicitude was concerning the Goya. It was plain that neither he nor his clerk had seen the phantom; nor could I detect aught in their demeanor to indicate that they had noticed the mephitic odor that still lingered in the air like an exhalation from broken graves. And, as far as I could tell, they did not even perceive the grayish slime that still polluted the open folio.
I do not remember how I managed to make my exit from mthe shop. My mind had become a seething blur of muddled horror, of crawling, sick refulsion from the supernatural vileness I had beheld, together with the direst apprehension for my own sanity and safety. I recall only that I found myself on the street above Toleman’s, walking with feverish rapidity toward my cousin’s studio, with a neat parcel containing the Goya volume under my arm. Evidently, in an effort to atone for my clumsiness, I must have bought and paid for the book by a sort of automatic impulse, without any real awareness of what I was doing.
I came to the building in which was my destination, but went on around the block several times before entering. All the while I fought desperately to regain my self-control and equipoise. I remember how difficult it was even to moderate the pace at which I was walking, or refrain from breaking into a run; for it seemed to me that I was fleeing all the time from an invisible pursuer. I tried to argue with myself, to convince the rational part of my mind that the apparition had been the product of some evanescent trick of light and shade, or a temporary dimming of eyesight. But such sophistries were useless; for I had seen the gargoylish terror all too distinctly, in an unforgettable fullness of grisly detail.
What could the thing mean? I had never used narcotic drugs or abused alcohol. My nerves, as far as I knew, were in sound condition. But either I had suffered a visual hallucination that might mark the beginning of some obscure cerebral disorder, or had been visited by a spectral phenomenon, by something from the realms and dimensions that are past the normal scope of human perception. It was a problem either for the alienist or the occultist.
Though I was still damnably upset, I contrived to regain a nominal composure of my faculties. Also, it occurred to me that the unimaginative portrait busts and tamely symbolic figure-groups of Cyprian Sincaul might serve admirably to soothe my shaken nerves. Even his grotesques would seem sane and ordinary by comparison with the blasphemous gargoyle that had drooled before me in the book-shop.
I entered the studio building, and climbed a worn stairway to the second floor, where Cyprian had established himself in a somewhat capacious suite of rooms. As I went up the stairs, I had the peculiar feeling that somebody was climbing them just ahead of me; but I could neither see nor hear anyone, and the hall above was no less silent and empty than the stairs.
Cyprian was in his atelier when I knocked. After an interval which seemed unduly long, I heard him call out, telling me to enter. I found him wiping his hands on an old cloth, and surmised that he had been modeling. A sheet of light burlap had been thrown over what was plainly an ambitious but unfinished group of figures, which occupied the center of the long room. All around were other sculptures, in clay, bronze, marble, and even the terra-cotta and steatite which he sometimes employed for his less conventional conceptions. At one end of the room there stood a heavy Chinese screen.
At a single glance I realized that a great change had occurred, both in Cyprian Sincaul and his work. I remembered him as an amiable, somewhat flabby-looking youth, always dapperly dressed, with no trace of the dreamer or visionary. It was hard to recognize him new, for he had become lean, harsh, vehement, with an air of pride and penetration that was almost Luciferian. His unkempt mane of hair was already shot with white, and his eyes were electrically brilliant with a strange knowledge, and yet somehow were vaguely furtive, as if there dwelt behind them a morbid and macabre fear.
The change in his sculpture was no less striking. The respectable tameness and polished mediocrity were gone, and in their place, incredibly, was something little short of genius. More unbelievable still, in view of the laboriously ordinary grotesques of his earlier phase, was the trend that his art had now taken. All around me were frenetic, murderous demons, satyrs mad with nympholepsy, ghouls that seemed to sniff the odors of the charnel, lamias voluptuously coiled about their victims, and less namable things that belonged to the outland realms of evil myth and malign superstition.
Sin, horror, blasphemy, diablerie—the lust and malice of pandemonium—all had been caught with impeccable art. The potent nightmarishness of these creations was not calculated to reassure my trembling nerves; and all at once I felt an imperative desire to escape from the studio, to flee from the baleful throng of frozen cacodemons and chiseled chimeras.
My expression must have betrayed my feelings to some extent.
“Pretty strong work, aren’t they?” said Cyprian, in a loud, vibrant voice, with a note of harsh pride and triumph. “I can see that you are surprised—you didn’t look for anything of the sort, I dare say.”
“No, candidly, I didn’t,” I admitted. “Good Lord, man, you will become the Michelangelo of diabolism if you go on at this rate. Where on earth do you get such stuff?”
“Yes, I’ve gone pretty far,” said Cyprian, seeming to disregard my question. “Further even than you think, probably. If you could know what I know, could see what I have seen, you might make something really worth-while out of your weird fiction, Philip. You are very clever and imaginative, of course. But you’ve never had any experience.”
I was startled and puzzled. “Experience? What do you mean?”
“Precisely that. You try to depict the occult and the supernatural without even the most rudimentary first-hand knowledge of them. I tried to do something of the same sort in sculpture, years ago, without knowledge; and doubtless you recall the mediocre mess that I made of it. But I’ve learned a thing or two since then.”
“Sounds as if you had made the traditional bond with the devil, or something of that sort,” I observed, with a feeble and perfunctory levity.
Cyprian’s eyes narrowed slightly, with a strange, secret look.
“I know what I know. Never mind how or why. The world in which we live isn’t the only world; and some of the others lie closer at hand than you think. The boundaries of the seen and the unseen are sometimes interchangeable.”
Recalling the malevolent phantom, I felt a peculiar disquietude as I listened to his words. An hour before, his statement would have impressed me as mere theorizing, but now it assumed an ominous and terrifying significance.
“What makes you think I have had no experience of the occult?” I asked.
“Your stories hardly show anything of the kind—anything factual or personal. They are all palpably made up. When you’ve argued with a ghost, or watched the ghouls at mealtime, or fought with an incubus, or suckled a vampire, you may achieve some genius characterization and color along such lines.”
For reasons that should be fairly obvious, I had not intended to tell anyone of the unbelievable thing at Toleman’s. Now, with a singular mixture of emotions, of compulsive, eery terrors and desire to refute the animal versions of Cyprian, I found myself describing the phantom.
He listened with an inexpressive look, as if his thoughts were occupied with other matters than my story. Then, when I had finished:
“You are becoming more psychic than I imagined. Was your apparition anything like one of these?”
With the last words, he lifted the sheet of burlap from the muffled group of figures beside which he had been standing.
I cried out involuntarily with the shock of that appalling revelation, and almost tottered as I stepped back.
Before me, in a monstrous semicircle were seven creatures who might all have been modeled from the gargoyle that had been confronted me across the folio of Goya drawings. Even in several that were still amorphous or incomplete, Cyprian had conveyed with a damnable art the peculiar mingling of primal bestiality and mortuary putrescence that had signalized the phantom. The seven monsters had closed in on a cowering, naked girl, and were all clutching foully toward her with their hyena claws. The stark, frantic, insane terror on the face of the girl, and the slavering hunger of her assailants, were alike unbarable. The group was a masterpiece, in its consummate power of technique—but a masterpiece that inspired loathing rather than admiration. And following my recent experience, the sight of it affected me with indescribable alarm. It seemed to me that I had gone astray from the normal, familiar world into a land of detestable mystery, of prodigious and unnatural menace.
Held by abhorrent fascination, it was hard for me to wrench my eyes away from the figure-piece. At last I turned from it to Cyprian himself. He was regarding me with a cryptic air, beneath which I suspected a covert gloating.
“How do you like my little pets?” he inquired. “I am going to call the composition ‘The Hunters from Beyond.’”
Before I could answer, a woman suddenly appeared from behind the Chinese screen. I saw that she was the model for the girl in the unfinished group. Evidently she had been dressing, and she was now ready to leave, for she wore a tailored suit, and a smart toque. She was beautiful, in a dark, semi-Latin fashion; but her mouth was sullen and reluctant, and her wide liquid eyes were wells of strange terror as she gazed at Cyprian, myself and the uncovered statue-piece.
Cyprian did not introduce me. He and the girl talked together in low tones for a minute or two, and I was unable to overhear more than half of what they said. I gathered, however, that an appointment was being made for the next sitting. There was a pleading, frightened note in the girl’s voice, together with an almost maternal concern; and Cyprian seemed to be arguing with her or trying to reassure her about something. At last she went out, with a queer, supplicative glance at me—a glance whose meaning I could only surmise and could not wholly fathom.
“That was Marta,” said Cyprian. “She is half Irish, half Italian. A good model; but my new sculptures seem to be making her a little nervous.” He laughed abruptly, with a mirthless, jarring note that was like the cachinnation of a sorceror.
“In God’s name, what are you trying to do here?” I burst out. “What does it all mean? Do such abominations really exist, on earth or in any hell?”
He laughed again, with an evil subtlety, and became evasive all at once. “Anything may exist, in a boundless universe with multiple dimensions. Anything may be real—or unreal. Who knows? It is not for me to say. Figure it out for yourself, if you can—there’s a vast field for speculation—and perhaps for more than speculation.”
With this, he began immediately to talk of other topics. Baffled, mystified, with a sorely troubled mind and nerves that were more unstrung than ever by the black enigma of it all. I ceased to question him. Simultaneously, my desire to leave the studio became almost overwhelming—a mindless, whirlwind panic that prompted me to run pell-mell from the room and down the stairs into the wholesome normality of the common, Twentieth Century streets. It seemed to me that the rays which fell through the skylight were not those of the sun, but of some darker orb; that the room was touched with unclean webs of shadows where shadow should not have been; that the stone Satans, the bronze lamias, the terracotta satyrs and the clay gargoyles had somehow increased in number and might spring to malignant life at any instant.
Hardly knowing what I said, I continued to converse for a while with Cyprian. Then, excusing myself on the score of a nonexistent luncheon appointment, and promising vaguely to return for another visit before my departure from the city, I took my leave.
I was surprised to find my cousin’s model in the lower hall, at the foot of the stairway. From her manner, and her first words, it was plain that she had been waiting.
“You are Mr. Philip Hastane, aren’t you?” she said in an eager, agitated voice. “I am Marta Fitzgerald. Cyprian has often mentioned you and I believe that he admires you a lot.
“Maybe you’ll think me crazy,” she went on, “but I had to speak to you. I can’t stand the way that things are going here, and I’d refuse to come to the place any more, if it wasn’t that I—like Cyprian so well.
“I don’t know what he has done—or what has been done to him—but he is altogether different from what he used to be. His new work is so horrible—you can’t imagine how it frightens me. The sculptures he does are more hideous, more hellish all the time. Ugh! those drooling, dead-gray monsters in that new group of his—I can hardly bear to be in the studio with them. It isn’t right for anyone to depict such things. Don’t you think they are awful, Mr. Hastane? They look as if they had broken loose from hell—and make you think that hell can’t be very far away. It is wrong and wicked for anyone to—even imagine them; and I wish that Cyprian would stop. I am afraid that something will happen to him—to his mind—if he goes on. And I’ll go mad, too, if I have to see those monsters many more times. My God! No one could keep sane in that studio.”
She paused, and appeared to hesitate. Then:
“Can’t you do something, Mr. Hastane? Can’t you talk to him, and tell him how wrong it is, and how dangerous to his mental health? You must have a lot of influence with Cyprian—you are his cousin, aren’t you? And he thinks you are very clever, too. I wouldn’t ask you, if I hadn’t been forced to notice so many things that aren’t as they should be.
“I wouldn’t bother you, either, if I knew anyone else to ask. He has shut himself up in that awful studio for the past year, and he hardly ever sees anybody. You are the first person that he has invited to see his new sculptures. He wants them to be a complete surprise for the critics and the public, when he holds his next exhibition.
“But you’ll speak to Cyprian, won’t you, Mr. Hastane? I can’t do anything to stop him—he seems to exult in the mad horrors he creates. And he merely laughs at me when I try to tell him the danger. However, I think that those things are are making him a little nervous sometimes—that he is growing afraid of his own morbid imagination. Perhaps he will listen to you.”
If I had needed anything more to unnerve me, the desperate pleading of the girl and her dark, obscurely baleful hintings would have been enough. I could see that she loved Cyprian, that she was frantically anxious concerning him, and hysterically afraid; otherwise she would not have approached an utter stranger in this fashion.
“But I haven’t any influence with Cyprian,” I protested, feeling a queer embarrassment. “And what am I to say to him, anyway? Whatever he is doing is his own affair, not mine. His new sculptures are magnificent—I have never seen anything more powerful of the kind. And how could I advise him to stop doing them? There would be no legitimate reason; he would simply laugh me out of the studio. An artist has the right to choose his own subject-matter, even if he takes it from the nether pits of Limbo and Erebus.”
The girl must have pleaded and argued with me for many minutes in that deserted hall. Listening to her, and trying to convince her of my inability to fulfil her request, was like a dialog in some futile and tedious nightmare. During the course of it, she told me a few details that I am unwilling to record in this narrative; details that were too morbid and too shocking for belief, regarding the mental alteration of Cyprian, and his new subject-matter and method of work. There were direct and oblique hints of a growing perversion; but somehow it seemed that much more was being held back; that even in her most horrifying disclosures she was not wholly frank with me. At last, with some sort of hazy promise that I would speak to Cyprian, would remonstrate with him, I succeeded in getting away from her, and returned to my hotel.
The afternoon and evening that followed were tinged as by the tyrranous adumbration of an ill dream. I felt that I had stepped from the solid earth into a gulf of seething, menacing, madness-haunted shadow, and was lost henceforward to all rightful sense of location or direction. It was all too hideous—and too doubtful and unreal. The change in Cyprian himself was no less bewildering, and hardly less horrifying, than the vile phantom of the bookshop, and the demon sculptures that displayed a magisterial art. It was as if the man had become possessed by some satanic energy or entity.
Everywhere I went, I was powerless to shake off the feeling of the intangible pursuit, of a frightful, unseen vigilance. It seemed to me that the worm-gray face and sulphurous eyes would reappear at any moment; that the semi-canine mouth with its gangrene-dripping fangs might come to slaver above the restaurant table at which I ate, or upon the pillow of my bed. I did not dare to reopen the purchased Goya volume, for fear of finding that certain pages were still defiled with a spectral slime.
I went out and spent this evening in cafés, in theaters, wherever people thronged and lights were bright. It was after midnight when I finally ventured to brave the solitude of my hotel bedroom. Then there were endless hours of nerve-wrung insomnia, of shivering, sweating apprehension beneath the electric bulb that I had left burning. Finally, a little before dawn, by no conscious transition and with no premonitory drowsiness, I fell asleep.
I remember no dreams—only the vest, incubus-like oppression that persisted even in the depth of slumber, as if to drag me down with its formless, ever-clinging weight into gulfs beyond the reach of created light or the fathoming of organized entity.
It was almost noon when I awoke, and found myself staring into the verminous, apish, mummy-dead face and hell-illuminated eyes of the gargoyle that had crouched before me in the corner at Toleman’s. The thing was standing at the foot of my bed, and behind it as I stared, the wall of the room, which was covered with a floral paper, dissolved in an infinite vista of grayness, teeming with ghoulish forms that emerged like monstrous, misshapen bubbles from plains of undulant ooze and skies of serpentine vapor. It was another world, and my very sense of equilibrium was disturbed by an evil vertigo as I gazed. It seemed to me that my bed was heaving dizzily, was turning slowly, deliriously toward the gulf; that the feculent vista and the vile apparition were swimming beneath me; that I would fall toward them in another moment and be precipitated forever into that world of abysmal monstrosity and obscenity.
In a start of profound alarm, I fought my vertigo, fought the sense that another will than mine was drawing me, that the unclean gargoyle was luring me by some unspeakable mesmeric spell, as a serpent is said to lure its prey. I seemed to read a nameless purpose in its yellow-slitted eyes, in the soundless moving of its oozy lips; and my very soul recoiled with nausea and revulsion as I breathed its pestilential fetor.
Apparently, the mere effort of mental resistance was enough. The vista and the face receded; they went out in a swirl of daylight. I saw the design of tea roses on the wallpaper beyond; and the bed beneath me was sanely horizontal once more. I lay sweating with my terror, all adrift on a sea of nightmare surmise, of unearthly threat and whirlpool madness, till the ringing of the telephone bell recalled me automatically to the known world.
I sprang to answer the call. It was Cyprian, though I should hardly have recognized the dead, hopeless tones of his voice, from which the mad pride and self-assurance of the previous day had wholly vanished.
“I must see you at once,” he said. “Can you come to the studio?”
I was about to refuse, to tell him that I had been called home suddenly, that there was no time, that I must catch the noon train—anything to avert the ordeal of another visit to that place of mephitic evil—when I heard his voice again.
“You simply must come, Philip. I can’t tell you about it over the phone, but a dreadful thing has happened: Marta has disappeared.”
I consented, telling him that I would start for the studio as soon as I had dressed. The whole nightmare had closed in, had deepened immeasurably with his last words; but, remembering the haunted face of the girl, her hysteric fears, her frantic plea and my vague promise, I could not very well decline to go.
I dressed and went out with my mind in a turmoil of abominable conjecture, of ghastly doubt, and apprehension all the more hideous because I was unsure of its object. I tried to imagine what had happened, tried to piece together the frightful, evasive, half-admitted hints of unknown terror into a tangible coherent fabric, but found myself involved in a chaos of shadowy menace.
I could not have eaten any brekfast, even if I had taken the necessary time. I went at once to the studio, and found Cyprian standing aimlessly amid his baleful statuary. His look was that of a man who has been stunned by the blow of some crushing weapon, or has gazed on the very face of Medusa. He greeted me in a vacant manner, with dull toneless words. Then, like a charged machine, as if his body rather than his mind were speaking, he began at once to pour forth his atrocious narrative.
“They took her,” he said, simply. “Maybe you didn’t know it, or weren’t sure of it; but I’ve been doing all my new sculptures from life—even that last group. Marta was posing for me this forenoon—only an hour ago—or less. I had hoped to finish her part of the modeling to-day; and she wouldn’t have had to come again for this particular piece. I hadn’t called the Things this time, since I knew she was beginning to fear them more and more. I think she feared them on my account more than her own—and they were making me a little uneasy too, by the boldness with which they sometimes lingered when I had ordered them to leave, and the way they would sometimes appear when I didn’t want them.
“I was busy with some of the final touches on the girl-figure, and wasn’t even looking at Marta, when suddenly I knew that the Things were there. The smell told me, if nothing else—I guess you know what the smell is like. I looked up, and found that the studio was full of them—they had never before appeared in such numbers. They were surrounding Marta, were crowding and jostling each other, were all reaching toward her with their filthy talons; but even then, I didn’t think that they could harm her. They aren’t material beings, in the sense that we are, and they really have no physical power outside their own plane. All that they do have is a sort of snaky mesmerism, and they’ll always try to drag you down to their own dimension by means of it. God help anyone who yields to them; but you don’t have to go, unless you are weak, or willing. I’ve never had any doubt of my power to resist them, and I didn’t really dream they could do anything to Marta.
“It startled me, though, when I saw the whole crowding hell-pack, and I ordered them to go pretty sharply. I was angry—and somewhat alarmed, too. But they merely grimaced and slavered, with that slow, twisting movement of their lips that is like a voiceless gibbering, and then they closed in on Marta, just as I represented them doing in that accursed group of sculpture. Only there were scores of them now, instead of merely seven.
“I can’t describe how it happened, but all at once their foul talons had reached the girl; they were pawing her, were pulling at her hands, her arms, her body. She screamed—and I hope I’ll never hear another scream so full of black agony and soul-unhinging fright. Then I knew that she had yielded to them—either from choice, or from excess of terror—and knew that they were taking her away.
“For a moment, the studio wasn’t there at all—only a long, gray, oozing plain, beneath skies where the fumes of hell were writhing like a million ghostly and distorted dragons. Marta was sinking into that ooze, and the Things were all about her, gathering in fresh hundreds from every side, fighting each other for place, sinking with her like bloated, misshaped fen-creatures into their native slime. Then everything vanished—and I was standing here in the studio, all alone with these damned sculptures.”
He paused for a little, and stared with dreary, desolate eyes at the floor. Then:
“It was awful, Philip, and I’ll never forgive myself for having anything to do with those monsters. I must have been a little mad, but I’ve always had a strong ambition to create some real stuff in the field of the grotesque and visionary and macabre. I don’t suppose you ever suspected, back in my studgy phase, that I had a veritable appetence for such things. I wanted to do in sculpture what Poe and Lovecraft and Baudelaire have done in literature, what Rops and Goya did in pictorial art.
“That was what led me into the occult, when I realized my limitations. I knew that I had to see the dwellers of the invisible worlds before I could depict them. I wanted to do it. I longed for this power of vision and representation more than anything else. And then, all at once, I found that I had the power of summoning the unseen….
“There was no magic involved, in the usual sense of the world—no spells and circles, no pentacles and burning gums from old sorcery books. At bottom, it was just will-power, I guess—a will to divine the Satanic, to summon the innumerable malignities and grotesqueries that people other planes than ours, or mingle unperceived with humanity.
“You’ve no idea what I have beheld, Philip. These statues of mine—these devils, vampires, lamias, satyrs—were all done from life, or, at least from recent memory. The originals are what the occultists would call elementals, I suppose. There are endless worlds, contiguous to our own, or coexisting with it, that such beings inhabit. All the creations of myth and fantasy, all the familiar spirits that sorcerers have evoked, are resident in these worlds.
“I made myself their master, I levied upon them at will. Then, from a dimension that must be a little lower than all others, a little nearer the ultimate nadir of hell, I called the innominate beings who posed for this new figure-piece.
“I don’t know what they are, but I have surmised a good deal. They are hateful as the worms of the Pit, they are malevolent as harpies, they drool with a poisonous hunger not to be named or imagined. But I believed that they were powerless to do anything outside their own sphere, and I’ve always laughed at them when they tried to entice me—even though that snakish mental pull of theirs was rather creepy at times. It was as if soft, invisible, gelatinous arms were trying to drag you down from the firm shore into a bottomless bog.
“They are hunters—I am sure of that—the hunters from Beyond. God knows what they will do to Marta now that they have her at their mercy. That vast, viscid, miasma-haunted place to which they took her is awful beyond the imagining of a Satan. Perhaps—even there—they couldn’t harm her body. But bodies aren’t what they want—it isn’t for human flesh that they grope with those ghoulish claws, and gape and slaver with those gangrenous mouths. The brain itself—and the soul, too—is their food: they are the creatures who prey on the minds of madmen and madwomen who devour the disembodied spirits that have fallen from the cycles of incarnation, have gone down beyond the possibility of rebirth.
“To think of Marta in their power—it is worse than hell or madness. Marta loved me, and I loved her, too, though I didn’t have the sense to realize it, wrapped as I was in my dark, baleful ambition and impious egotism. She was afraid for me, and I believe she surrendered voluntarily to the Things. She must have thought that they would leave me alone if they secured another victim in my place.”
He ceased and began to pace idly and feverishly about. I saw that his hollow eyes were alight with torment, as if the mechanical telling of his horrible story had in some manner served to requicken his crushed mind. Utterly and starkly appalled by his hideous revelations, I could say nothing, but could only stand and watch his torture-twisted face.
Incredibly, his expression changed with a wild, startled look that was instantly transfigured into joy. Turning to follow his gaze, I saw that Marta was standing in the center of the room. She was nude, except for a Spanish shawl that she must have worn while posing. Her face was bloodless as the marble of a tomb, and her eyes were wide and blank, as if she had been drained of all life, of all thought or emotion or memory, as if even the knowledge of horror had been taken away from her. It was the face of the living dead, the soulless mask of ultimate idiocy; and the joy faded from Cyprian’s eyes as he stepped toward her.
He took her in his arms, he spoke to her with a desperate, loving tenderness, with cajoling and caressing words. She made no answer, however, no movement of recognition or awareness, but stared beyond him with her blank eyes, to which the daylight and the darkness, the void air and her lover’s face, would henceforeward be the same. He and I both knew, in that instant, that she would never again respond to any human voice, or to human love or terror; that she was like an empty cerement, retaining the outward form of that which the worms have eaten in their mausolean darkness. Of the noisome pits wherein she had been, of that bournless realm and its pullulating phantoms, she could tell us nothing: her agony had ended with the terrible mercy of complete forgetfulness.
Like one who confronts the Gorgon, I was frozen by her wide and sightless gaze. Then, behind her, where stood an array of carven Satans and lamias, the room seemed to recede, the walls and floor dissolved in a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathesome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultradimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge. Outlined against that boiling, measureless cauldron of malignant storm, Marta stood like an image of glacial death and silence in the arms of Cyprian. Then, once more, after a little, the abhorrent vision faded, leaving only the diabolic statuary.
I think that I alone had beheld it; that Cyprian had seen nothing but the dead face of Marta. He drew her close, he repeated his hopeless words of tenderness and cajolery. Then, suddenly, he released her with a vehement sob of despair. Turning away, while she stood and still looked on with unseeing eyes, he snatched a heavy sculptor’s mallet from the table on which it was lying, and proceeded to smash with furious blows the newly-modeled group of gargoyles, till nothing was left but the figure of the terror-maddened girl, crouching above a mass of cloddish fragments and formless, half-dried clay.
By Smith's standards, this is pretty restrained. Get him writing about Zothique or another one of those fantasy places he invented, and he gets drunk on poetry and entomology.