The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Read online

  Lovecraft also admitted to writing “many fanciful tales about the Antarctic Continent” in youth; but none of these survive. He somehow did not find the impetus to write his Antarctic tale until well along in his mature literary career.

  At the Mountains of Madness was written at a critical juncture in that career. In 1926, he had written “The Call of Cthulhu”—a tale that not only launched the Cthulhu Mythos but that initiated a remarkable final decade of writing highlighted by such masterworks as “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35). By this time, Lovecraft had come to realize that the advance of science had caused the standard motifs of supernatural fiction—the ghost, the vampire, the werewolf, the witch, and so on—to become utterly played out and implausible. An entirely new approach was needed. The tales of the Cthulhu Mythos constituted one such approach: as Fritz Leiber has keenly stated, these stories were revolutionary because they “shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space.” At the Mountains of Madness was a critical work in this process. In a letter written at the very time he was writing the novella, Lovecraft stated:

  The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural fantastic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?

  It is for this reason that the earlier parts of At the Mountains of Madness are so filled with details about the geology, biology, and botany of the Antarctic continent. Lovecraft’s lifelong studies in science were put to good use, but they also enhance the verisimilitude of the story so that the incursion of the bizarre—first the discovery of the cryogenically frozen Old Ones, then the encounter with an even more alien entity, the shoggoth—can seem plausible.

  It was in this novella, too, that Lovecraft definitively “demythologized” the “gods” of his Mythos. In earlier tales (especially “The Dunwich Horror” (1928)), such entities as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Shug-Niggurath could be seen as godlike (they certainly have their share of human worshipers), whose doings are recorded in such occult treatises as the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. But when, in At the Mountains of Madness, the protagonists study the bas-reliefs of the titanic city of the Old Ones, a staggering revelation dawns upon them: the Old Ones “were the makers and enslavers of [earth] life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young.” So now, the stories about the “gods” found in the Necronomicon are mere “myths”!

  Another remarkable feature of At the Mountains of Madness is the gradual, insidious way in which the entities that first cause such perturbation to the human protagonists, Dr. William Dyer and a graduate student, Danforth—the barrel-shaped Old Ones—are later rehabilitated, from a moral and cultural perspective. It is true that the Old Ones apparently caused the deaths of many men and dogs in the sub-expedition undertaken by Professor Lake; but this is later explained as a natural result of their unexpectedly coming back to life after millions of years and finding themselves besieged by fur-covered bipeds and quadrupeds whose nature and intentions they cannot fathom. As Dyer and Danforth continue to study those bas-reliefs, they come to a momentous conclusion:

  Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them … and this was their tragic homecoming…. Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

  For, of course, the real horrors of At the Mountains of Madness are the baleful shoggoths—those protoplasmic beasts of burden created by the Old Ones—who later revolted against their masters and apparently overthrew them. The emergence of one surviving shoggoth toward the end of the story constitutes one of the most spectacularly terrifying passages in the history of weird fiction.

  At the Mountains of Madness is the pinnacle of Lovecraft’s “cosmic” vision and of his union of traditional supernatural fiction with the burgeoning genre of science fiction. The epic scope of the novella, both in time and in space, is impressive; and there is a further twist in that Lovecraft provides a kind of humiliating “origin of species” courtesy of the Old Ones’ ability to create life. It is bad enough that the Old Ones appear to have created all earth-life as “jest or mistake”; but later we learn that the Old Ones also created a “shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.” This must be one of the most misanthropic utterances ever made—the degradation of humanity can go no further.

  And yet, the fate of the novella in print was not a happy one. Lovecraft apparently devised the tale so that it could be printed as a two-part serial, with a division in its exact middle, after Section VI. But, when he sent the story to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales in the spring of 1931, Wright sat on it for months before finally rejecting it. Lovecraft bitterly records the reasons Wright gave for the rejection:

  Yes—Wright “explained” his rejection of the “Mountains of Madness” in almost the same language as that with which he “explained” other recent rejections to [Frank Belknap] Long & [August] Derleth. It was “too long”, “not easily divisible into parts”, “not convincing”—& so on. Just what he has said of other things of mine (except for length)—some of which he has ultimately accepted after many hesitations.

  Lovecraft was devastated. Unusually sensitive to rejection, he refused to submit the tale to any other market. Finally, in late 1935, the young Julius Schwartz, wishing to establish himself as an agent in the science fiction and fantasy field, asked Lovecraft if he had any unpublished manuscript that he could market. Lovecraft gave him At the Mountains of Madness. Seeing that it was a tale that could easily pass for science fiction, Schwartz took it to the offices of Astounding Stories, telling editor F. Orlin Tremaine: “I have here a 40,000-word novella by H. P. Lovecraft.” Tremaine accepted it at once, without reading it. He paid $350 for it; after Schwartz’s 10 percent cut, that left $315 for Lovecraft.

  But when Lovecraft saw its appearance as a three-part serial in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding, he was outraged. Many, many editorial alterations had been made, chiefly in matters of punctuation and in chopping down Lovecraft’s long and leisurely paragraphs into shorter ones; toward the end, about a thousand words were simply omitted, to speed up the climax. So incensed was Lovecraft at this butchery that he regarded the story as essentially unpublished.

  But the opportunity for the republication of the story in its unadulterated form did not occur until long after his death. August Derleth, when preparing the story for inclusion in the first Arkham House volume, The Outsider and Others (1939), used Lovecraft’s own annotated copy of Astounding, where he had laboriously written in some—but by no means all—the corrections to the text; but this text still contained more than fifteen hundred errors, including such things as the capitalization of “shoggoth,” which Lovecraft was careful to lower-case in his manuscript and typescript, since he regarded it as a species name and not a proper name. Finally, I restored the text, based on Lovecraft’s typescript, in my corrected edition of At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Arkham House, 1985). This text has now been reprinted in At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Text (Modern Library, 2005), although I in f
act make no claims that my text is “definitive.”

  That Lovecraft’s Antarctic novella, with its cosmic backdrop and its distinctive multi-species cast of humans, Old Ones, and shoggoths (with bit parts played by Cthulhu and other monsters), has been an inspiration to generations of weird and science fiction writers is evident by the tales in this volume. One of the first who was so inspired was John W. Campbell, Jr., celebrated editor of Unknown and of Astounding. His novella “Who Goes There?” appeared in the August 1938 issue of Astounding, under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart. Campbell did not generally approve of Lovecraft’s lush prose style, and this novella is clearly an attempt to utilize the basic plot of the story in a manner that Campbell felt more suitable to the subject-matter. It was adapted as the classic B movie The Thing from Another World (1951). John Carpenter’s remake, The Thing (1982), brings us full circle in that it re-infuses elements from At the Mountains of Madness into the scenario.

  In 1940, the young Arthur C. Clarke produced the affectionate parody “At the Mountains of Murkiness.” Science fiction writers have long held ambivalent views of Lovecraft. On the one hand, they have admired his later work, including “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Shadow out of Time,” for its transformation of supernatural horror into cosmic wonder and awe; but they have found his dense, antiquated prose contrary to their spare realism, and his bleak view of a human race as the weak victims of incalculably superior cosmic entities conflicts with their view of the cosmos as a field open to infinite human exploration. Clarke plays upon some of these elements in his parody; but in his autobiography, Astounding Days (1989), he makes no secret of how much he enjoyed both At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time” when they appeared in 1936 issues of Astounding.

  This volume is not restricted to imaginative riffs on Lovecraft’s Antarctic novella; other Lovecraftian themes and tales are used as the springboards for ventures into the weird. But the element unifying all these stories is that they are far more than mere pastiches. Ranging widely in tone and subject-matter from humor and self-parody to plangent domestic conflict to chilling terror, they all reveal how Lovecraftian motifs can be used to generate tales that reflect each individual author’s vision of the world and of our fragile place within it.

  AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MURKINESS OR, FROM LOVECRAFT TO LEACOCK

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  WITH THE RECENT DEATH OF PROFESSOR NUTTY IN THE SCRAGGEM Mental Hospital I am left the only survivor of the ill-fated expedition he led to the Antarctic barely five years ago. The true history of that expedition has never until now been related, and only the report that another attempt is being made to investigate the unholy mysteries of Mount Morgue has prompted me to write this warning, even at the risk of shattering such sanity as I still possess.

  It was in the early summer of 1940 that our expedition, which had been sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Potato Peelers, of Murphy Mansions, in the City of London, arrived at the desolate shores of Limburger Land. We were equipped with planes, radio, motor sleighs, and everything necessary for our work and comfort, and every one of us felt eager to begin our work at once—even Dr. Slump, the Professor of Contagious Neuroses.

  I vividly recollect the day we set out toward the mountains. The polar sun was shining low over the ice fields when our line of tractor-sleighs started off inland. Soon we had lost sight of the sea, though we were still in radio communication with our base, and before long were passing over regions which no man had ever visited, nor, I trust, will ever visit again. The coast had seemed desolate and dreary enough, but the wilderness of snow and ice through which we were passing was a nightmare of jagged, frozen spires and bottomless crevasses. As we pressed onward a vague malaise crept over every one of us. A feeling of uneasiness, of strange disquiet, began to make itself felt, apparently radiating from the very rocks and crags that lay buried beneath their immemorial covering of ice. It was such a sensation as one might have felt on entering a deserted building where some all-but-forgotten horror had long ago occurred.

  On the fourth day we sighted the mountains, still many miles away. When we pitched our camp at the end of the day there were only twenty miles between us and the nearer summits, and more than once in the night we were awakened by sudden tremors in the ground and the distant thunder of mighty explosions from still-active volcanoes.

  It took us two days to cover the remaining twenty miles, for the terrain was contorted into a frightful series of chasms and beetling crags, resembling the more contorted regions of the Moon rather than any portion of this Earth. Presently, however, the ground became less convulsed, and we pushed on with renewed vigor. Before long we found ourselves in a narrow valley running straight toward the mountains, now only four or five miles away. I was hurrying along at the head of the party when suddenly there was a sharp crackling noise together with a violent tremor of the Earth, and the ground just ahead of me dropped out of sight. To my horror, I found myself standing on the edge of a frightful precipice looking down into a chasm thousands of feet deep, filled with the steam and smoke of a hundred geysers and bubbling lava pools. Surely, I thought, the mad Arab, Abdul Hashish, must have had such a spot in mind when he wrote of the hellish valley of Oopadoop in that frightful book the forbidden Pentechnicon.

  We did not remain long at the edge of the valley, for at any instant the treacherous ground might subside once more. The next day one of the planes arrived and landed on the snows nearby. A small party was chosen to make the first flight, and we took off toward the mountains. My companions were Dr. Slump, Professor Palsy, and Major McTwirp, who was piloting the machine.

  We soon reached the chasm, and flew along its length for many miles. Here and there in the depths were suggestive formations, partly veiled by steam, that puzzled us greatly, but the treacherous winds made it impossible to descend into the valley. I am certain, however, that once I saw something moving down in those hellish depths—something large and black, that disappeared before I could focus my glasses on it.

  Shortly afterward we landed on a vast field of snow at the foot of Mount Morgue itself. As we shut off the engines an uncanny silence descended upon us. The only sound was the crashing of avalanches, the hissing of gigantic geysers in the valley, and the distant concussions of erupting volcanoes.

  We descended from the plane and surveyed the desolate scene. The mountains towered before us, and a mile further up the slopes the ground was strangely bare of snow. It seemed, moreover, that the tumbled shapes had more than a suggestion of order about them, and suddenly we realized that we were looking at the ruins our expedition had come so many thousands of miles to investigate. In half an hour we had reached the nearest of them, and saw what some of us had already surmised, that this architecture was not the work of any race of men …

  We paused for a moment at the all but ruined entrance and the sight of those hideous carvings on the fallen lintel all but drove us back. Low bas-reliefs, they reminded us of some nightmare surrealist creation of Dali or Dobbi—save that they gave the impression that they were not the representations of dreams but of horrible reality.

  After a few steps, the feeble Antarctic light had dimmed to absolute darkness, and we switched on our torches hastily. We had gone at least a mile from the entrance when we decided that we had better return. We had taken the precaution of blazing our trail by means of chalk marks on the walls, so that we had no doubt that (if nothing stopped us) we could find our way back to the surface. However, Dr. Slump was adamant.

  “I insist,” he cackled, “that we progress at least another mile. After all, we have a plentiful supply of torches, and we have not yet discovered anything of exceptional archaeological importance—though I, personally, am finding your reactions of the greatest interest. Poor McTwirp here has become positively green about the gills in the last ten minutes. Do you mind if I measure your pulse? Oh, well, you needn’t be rude about it. I am also amused by the way Palsy and Firkin keep looking over their shoulders and sh
ining their torches into corners. Really, for a group of distinguished scientists you are behaving in a most primitive manner! Your reactions under these unusual but by no means unprecedented conditions will certainly be included in the appendix to my forthcoming ‘Hysteria and its Pathological Manifestations.’ I wonder what you would do if I were to—”

  At this point, Dr. Slump let rip with the most piercing scream it has been my misfortune to hear since the last revival of King Kong. It echoed from wall to wall, left the chamber through the holes in the floor, and wandered for minutes through subterranean passages far below. When it finally returned, with a monstrous progeny of echoes, Professor Palsy was lying in a coma on the floor and Major McTwirp had disguised himself as a bas-relief and was propped up in one corner.

  “You blithering idiot!” I cried, when the infernal row had screeched out of the chamber for the second time. But Dr. Slump was too busy taking notes to answer me.

  At last silence, and a few bits of ceiling, fell. Slowly the other two revived and with difficulty I restrained them from slaughtering the doctor. Finally, Professor Palsy started the return to the surface, with the rest of us following close behind. We had gone a few hundred yards when from far away came a sound, faint but clear. It was a slimy, slithering noise that froze us to the marrow—and it came from ahead. With a low moan, Dr. Slump sagged to the ground like a desiccated jellyfish.