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Cthulhu Cymraeg
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CTHULHU CYMRAEG
Lovecraftian Tales From Wales
Edited by Mark Howard Jones
KINDLE EDITION
- 2013 -
Published by Screaming Dreams
113-116 Bute Street, Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, CF10 5EQ
www.screamingdreams.com
This compilation of short stories
Copyright © Mark Howard Jones 2013
Each story is Copyright © of the respective author
All contributors assert their moral rights to be
identified as the authors of this work
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover artwork Copyright © Kate Evans 2013
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the publisher.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
S. T. Joshi
INTRODUCTION
Mark Howard Jones & Steve Upham
WHAT OTHERS HEAR
John Llewellyn Probert
THE BICYCLE-CENTAUR
Rhys Hughes
THE CAWL OF CTHULHU
Bob Lock
PILGRIMAGE
Mark Howard Jones
SONG OF SUMMONING
Brian Willis
THE NECRONOMICON
Charles Black
UN-DHU-MILHUK WOULD (IF HE COULD)
Liam Davies
PERIPHERY
Paul Lewis
STRANGER CROSSINGS
Adrian Chamberlin
FOREWORD
S. T. Joshi
“Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen.” That is the beginning of H. P. Lovecraft’s celebrated discussion of Machen in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), a discussion that has probably prompted many readers to probe the work of this classic Anglo-Welsh writer.
Lovecraft, who first discovered Machen in 1920, went on to remark that the poignant novel The Hill of Dreams (1907) features a “youthful hero [who] responds to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author’s own, and lives a dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown village of Caerleon-on-Usk.” This comment points to one of the central reasons for Lovecraft’s fondness for Machen – their joint fascination with the ancient Roman presence in Britain. Lovecraft, who from the age of five onward had nurtured himself on classical myths, Greek and Latin literature, and ancient history, found an ineffable thrill in envisioning the march of the Roman legions throughout the civilised world of two millennia ago, and perhaps envied Machen’s physical proximity to the abundant Roman ruins in England, Scotland, and Wales.
Lovecraft went on to purchase many of Machen’s books, including his three poignant autobiographies, Far Off Things (1922), Things Near and Far (1923), and The London Adventure (1924). It was from these books, clearly, that Lovecraft gained a knowledge of Machen’s youth in Wales and his departure from the land of his birth to become a struggling writer and journalist on Fleet Street. But of course, Lovecraft was chiefly interested in the bountiful array of Machen’s weird fiction, ranging from the novella “The Great God Pan” (1894) to the episodic novel The Three Impostors (1895) to the landmark collection The House of Souls (1906). It is this last volume that contains “The White People,” which Lovecraft came to rank as second only to Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” as the greatest tale in all weird literature.
The influence of Machen on Lovecraft – and specifically on the Cthulhu Mythos – is immense, and far beyond the scope of this brief foreword. Suffice it to say that Machen’s conception of a secret race of stunted, primitive beings (the “little people”) dwelling on the underside of civilisation helped to trigger Lovecraft’s own ideas of baleful entities lurking in forgotten corners of the world. Lovecraft had come upon Machen’s fiction a few years before he read Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which appeared to give a scholarly imprimatur to the idea of the “little people”; indeed, he went on to admit that the story “The Festival” (1923) was jointly influenced by Machen and Murray.
Machen undoubtedly influenced the seminal story of the Cthulhu Mythos, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926). Here, a professor – and subsequently his great-nephew, after the professor dies under mysterious circumstances – ends up piecing together “dissociated knowledge” about the secret cult of Cthulhu, in very much the manner in which Professor Gregg, in “Novel of the Black Seal” (the chief episode in The Three Impostors), gathers together evidence of the continuing existence of the “little people.” Gregg too dies mysteriously, and Lovecraft quotes with relish the professor’s final warning: “If I unhappily do not return from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the awfulness of my fate.”
Machen’s most obvious influence on Lovecraft occurs in “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), where the basic framework of the story – the impregnation of a woman by a “god” – is copied directly from “The Great God Pan.” It is by no means clear that Lovecraft has surpassed his mentor in this tale.
What is still more interesting is that the figure – or perhaps the myth – of Machen himself enters tangentially into Lovecraft’s fiction. The character Thomas Malone, in “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925), seems to bear a strong likeness to Machen. Let us recall Lovecraft’s initial description of the Brooklyn police detective:
To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley’s best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré.
The mention of “ecstasy” is clearly a nod to Machen’s idiosyncratic treastise Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), while the mention of Beardsley points to Lovecraft’s awareness that Machen, Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and others were the dominant figures in the “Yellow Nineties,” that fin de siècle period in England that had, to his delight, overturned the stodginess of Victorian conventionality and introduced a modicum of radicalism, daring, and even decadence into British culture and society.
Another possible portrayal of Machen appears in the fragment “The Descendant” (1927?), where a “man who screams when the church bells ring” is said to live in Gray’s Inn, where Machen himself lived for a time. Lovecraft goes on to say of this individual, Lord Northam, that “During the ’nineties he dabbled in Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemed to promise escape from the close vistas of science and the dully unvarying laws of Nature.” This is unquestionably a reference to Machen’s own hostility to the relentless march of scientific knowledge and his fear – a plausible one, as it happens – that the pillars of religion might be shaken by the advance of science. Lord Northam’s mind has been shattered by a reading of the Necronomicon, and it would have been fascinating if Lovecraft had completed this tale and explained why Northam had ended up as one who “lives all alone with his streaked cat… and people call him harmlessly mad.�
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It is a shame that Lovecraft did not pursue his readings in other Welsh writers. He would no doubt have been surprised and intrigued to learn that his great contemporary Dylan Thomas had dabbled in weird fiction from time to time, and he would surely have found much interest in the mainstream work of Caradoc Evans (1878–1945), who – like Richard Llewellyn in How Green Was My Valley (1939) – evoked the richness of the Welsh landscape as vividly as Lovecraft had enlivened his New England environment in such tales as “The Whisperer in Darkness” or “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
And Lovecraft would no doubt have been delighted that the Welsh authors of today have used his Cthulhu Mythos as a springboard for imaginative extrapolations of their own, as he himself had done with the weird fiction of Arthur Machen. He would have been gratified that writers of such an ancient land, where the tread of Roman legions can still be sensed, had found inspiration in his tales of cosmic horror – a meeting of minds across the water that would have heartened this scion of Devon ancestry who drew continual imaginative nourishment from the literature of Great Britain.
— S. T. JOSHI
INTRODUCTION
Mark Howard Jones & Steve Upham
The fact that the word ‘Lovecraftian’ can now be used to denote an entire sub-genre of literature is significant in that it indicates a rare degree of acceptance and influence. When a writer becomes a mini industry, you know he’s arrived.
This is particularly remarkable if you consider that Lovecraft, at the time of his death in 1937 at the age of just 46, was virtually unknown outside of a relatively small group of friends and readers. Indeed, he hadn’t had a single book published during his lifetime.
It was the devotion of his friends (in particular August Derleth) that kept alive his reputation and carefully nurtured it.
And whether you interpret Lovecraft’s creations literally as many-tentacled terrors rising threateningly from the depths, or as metaphors for the existential dread that seems to dog mankind’s every forward step, it is clear that he created a potent series of symbols. They have a strong grip on the imagination, spawning innumerable reprints of his own tales, numerous imitators, learned treatises on his work and even an appearance (albeit thinly disguised) in a popular cartoon about a talking dog and his mystery-obsessed young friends.
In short, he and his creations can now be found everywhere. As the French author Michel Houellebecq noted in 1998 in his book ‘Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life’, “… his originality appears to me to be greater today than ever.” It is an originality that has some of its roots in Welsh soil.
Caerleon-born author Arthur Machen influenced Lovecraft strongly with his tales of ancient evil. Anyone who has stayed in Wales for any length of time can feel that it is an old country; very old. Machen’s genius was to suggest that maybe some previous tenants of this land might not be ready to relinquish their claim on it completely. His tales impart a dreadful sense of being watched. And by something that we don’t fully understand.
What Lovecraft took from Machen were these ‘demoniacal hints of the truth’ (as Lovecraft put it in his 1920 story ‘Arthur Jermyn’), of the ancient reaching forward threateningly into the present. He then imbued them with a cosmic scale.
It could even be suggested that Lovecraft’s inter-dimensional beings are versions of the Welsh myth of the Tylwyth Teg (or ‘Fair Family’), reflected in a monstrous magnifying mirror. Machen used these supernatural beings, who were said to dwell underground or below water, in his own work (most notably in ‘The White People’, ‘The Novel Of The Black Seal’ and ‘The Children Of The Pool’), making them even more terrifying than their already unsettling reputation. Perhaps Lovecraft was impressed by these creatures’ reputed ability to use water as an occult gateway between their own realm and ours, echoing this in his own creations’ thankfully unsuccessful attempts to create their own gateways between the arcane and the mundane.
Machen’s reputation has undergone a renaissance in the last 30 years (partly – but not wholly – down to a ‘reflected glory’ from Lovecraft’s popularity). He is now rightly regarded as one of the most important progenitors of the modern ‘weird tale’. Without him, Lovecraft’s work would have been very different. If he hadn’t discovered Machen’s tales, the Anglophile New Englander would probably have been far more influenced by Lord Dunsany or Algernon Blackwood and perhaps his writing would have had far less impact than it has had.
Given that such a large part of Lovecraft’s literary DNA came from this part of the world, it is surprising that so few Welsh authors have responded directly to his work, rather than merely being influenced by it at first or second hand. Hopefully this anthology will go some way to redressing that.
Each of the writers whose work you will find here have risen to the challenge by giving the ideas and aesthetics behind Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos their own distinctive twist. Whether you’re looking for adventurous absurdism, punishing post-Modern puns, hallucinogenic horror or good old fashioned gooseflesh – or anything in between – you’ll find it all in these pages.
Our contributors have all been born in Wales or have lived here for some time, so we hope a uniquely Welsh point of view comes through in the writing. We would like to thank all the writers for their hard work and hope this volume will provide an interesting and worthwhile addition to the canon of Lovecraftian literature.
As for that tongue-twisting title – for those unfamiliar with the Welsh language, Cymraeg is the Welsh word for ‘Welsh’. A rough guide to pronunciation is Come – Rye – then a hard G (as in ‘gag’), with the emphasis on the second syllable. (As far as pronouncing ‘Cthulhu’ is concerned, we suggest you consult the Notes On Pronunciation in the appendix of Abdul Alhazred’s The Necronomicon.)
Finally, we would like to thank S. T. Joshi, the renowned Lovecraft scholar and the great man’s biographer, for agreeing to write the illuminating and fascinating preface to this volume.
— Mark Howard Jones & Steve Upham, Cardiff, September 2013
WHAT OTHERS HEAR
John Llewellyn Probert
The world is thinner in some places.
Occasionally we may encounter signs that warn us of these locations, where reality is brittle and all that we understand has the consistency of little more than tissue paper. Often, however, there is nothing obvious, and we have to rely on the instinct we have developed through millions of years of evolution, the instinct that tells us to beware, to stay away, to leave well alone, even though the so-called higher parts of our brains can conceive of no logical reason why we might feel this way. Sometimes we are so distracted by the woes and hardships of everyday life that our instincts become dulled, our minds so occupied with the mundane that we fail to realise the dangers we are exposing ourselves to. But we ignore such warnings at our peril.
Where a land steeped in myth meets an ocean witness to more tragedy than the human mind can bear, our world is especially thin. The barriers have been worn away by the incessant play of illogical horrors, of fates unexplained, of desperate longing at the unfairness of life. It should come as no surprise that in such places the waves have a song to sing, a song that is heard by the surrounding hills as they wait for that which slumbers beneath them to awaken, a song that will not be finished until time itself ends. If the light is at just the right angle, and one looks carefully, one might see patterns in the troubled waters, and in the sand, too – unnatural configurations that change every day, symbols and messages left for races long gone, and with only the merest trace memory of how to interpret them inherited by those who believe they are now the dominant species on this planet.
In these special places those whom society might kindly describe as being of a sensitive disposition need to take special care, lest the assault on their already finely-tuned senses should be too much for them, driving them into an abyss of madness from which there is little chance of return.
In some places, the sensitive must take special care.
William Martin came to the seaside town of Llanroath to convalesce.
He chose it for a number of reasons. One was that he had spent many summers on the coast of South Wales as a boy, the trips to the Gower peninsula and to Carmarthenshire with his parents still amongst his fondest memories, and he hoped he might find some comfort from a part of the world that was, for the most part, familiar to him. Second, Llanroath was small, tiny in fact, and as he attributed his recent breakdown in part to the pressures of big city life he felt a break from it would also do him some good. Third, and perhaps the most decisive, Llanroath had a church in need of an organist. While he was aware that it had been in part his employment in a similar role at Bristol Cathedral that had driven him to his current state of malady, he could not be without music and besides, it was more the administrative and political aspects of the post, not to mention some of the dreadful children he had been required to teach and their even more dreadful parents, that he cited as the true cause of his breakdown. The works of Bach, Mendelssohn and Vierne hardly deserved to have the accusatory finger pointed at them as being the cause of his temporary insanity.
“You should probably take a break from the music completely for a while anyway,” his psychiatrist Dr Montague had instructed.
His ENT consultant had told him the very opposite.
“There’s no real way of curing tinnitus,” Mr Ramply-Watson had explained, his blue eyes bright beneath the circular examination mirror strapped to his forehead. Martin had always wondered which doctors actually wore that alien-looking thing and now he knew. “What you have to do is find ways of either blocking it out or blending it in with everyday sounds. It may sound strange, but even though your exposure to loud music was most likely the cause of the problem in the first place it’s probably going to be the best palliative for your condition as well.”