The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  INTRODUCTION

  The idea and literary use of “cosmic horror” did not begin with the work of H. P. Lovecraft, nor can he really be said to have “popularized” it, at least in his lifetime, although there have been few other writers who have enjoyed such a rich and influential literary afterlife. When Lovecraft invited his friends to use his own literary materials—which he used himself rather sparsely, for various idiosyncratic reasons—he could not possibly have imagined that the process would continue for more than seventy years after his death, produce hundreds of volumes, and expand to include people such as me, who were not even born until long after he had passed on.

  Even now, though, it is not entirely clear that the Cthulhu Mythos, as Lovecraft’s key endeavor came to be known, has actually been “popularized,” in spite of its overflow to such media as films, comic books and computer games. One of its chief attractions, in fact, has always been its defiant esotericism, coupled with the fact that the mere mention of it (by those whose tongues are up to the difficult task of mentioning it) can make respectable literary folk curl their lip in contempt and disdain. Like all the good stuff, the Cthulhu Mythos belongs to “unpopular culture” rather than “popular culture,” and its adherents probably would not want it any other way.

  The notion of cosmic horror is itself essentially esoteric. As an esthetic sensibility, or the source of a subtle frisson of dread, it is far more dependent on the imaginative capacity of the reader than tales of pursuit by serial killers, the sudden appearance of ghosts or doors bulging in response to unspecifiable forces on the other side, all of which are obvious sources of anxiety whose threat is close at hand. In its essence, cosmic horror is far more abstract, asking us to take aboard and appreciate some of the corollaries of the intellectual awareness that the horizons of our vision and our lives are extremely minuscule by comparison with the size and age of the universe.

  It was not until the nineteenth century that scientific discoveries allowed awareness to grow that the true size of the universe could not be measured in mere thousands of miles, nor its real antiquity in mere thousands of years. This was significant because, by and large, the everyday imagination can cope with thousands, and perhaps, at a stretch, millions, but there is no way that it can properly encompass billons or trillions, which are simply too vast to envisage. The effect that the incapacity in question has on the psyche is indescribable, as is evidence by the fact that the most commonly-used verb invented to represent it, “boggle,” is an obvious joke—one of many attempts to cope with the problem by simply refusing to recognize it. It is that denial rather than the fact itself that provides Lovecraftian fiction with its heart and soul; the fiction of cosmic horror rarely bothers to point out the mere truism of our utter insignificance in a vast and uncaring universe; what it does is to play, sometime delicately and cleverly, but always with a reserve of sheer brutality, with our inability to deal with the fact mentally, and our perverse insistence that, even if it is so, it is irrelevant.

  The Mythos was important, initially within the context of Lovecraft’s circle of friends and their attempts to lay siege to Weird Tales and a handful of other market outlets, because it provided a vocabulary of ideas that permitted certain basic aspects of an awareness of cosmic vastness to be represented. The most basic of them is perhaps Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos that lurks in the cosmic background, behind the veils of matter, space and time, but there is a good reason why the honor of being its central figure was attributed to Cthulhu, who is possessed of all kinds of useful ambiguity in the shrewdly scattered details suggesting his origin, history and contemporary existence: dead but capable of eternally lying (in more ways than one); extraterrestrial but also extradimensional; associated not only with enigmatic “star-spawn” but also with the slimy mysteries of the alien world under the sea; shadowed but in no way properly documented by the cryptic pages of the Necronomicon....

  It is because the central ideas of the Cthulhu Mythos provided the first such vocabulary that it has not only retained a unique place in literary history but continues to supply useful fuel to writers interested in working in the same territory of psychic unease. Other symbolic vocabularies have been invented since, and it can certainly be argued that some do the job more elegantly, but they can never have the primacy, and hence the “authenticity” of Lovecraft’s. It can certainly be argued, too, that it is a nobler quest for writers to invent their own vocabularies and redo the work from scratch themselves, but there is a sense in which starting over robs writers of a precious asset of recognizability: the ability to help readers orientate themselves rapidly, and to draw upon what readers already know as a resource.

  Writers of naturalistic fiction are, of course, always fully tooled-up with that resource, and even writers of heterocosmic fiction retain substantial provisions of it in the mimetic and naturalistic aspects of their heterocosms, but it is often useful to have extra supplies of recognition and familiarity built in even to those aspects of a world within the text that seek to differentiate it from the familiar world. There are good reasons (as well as a few bad ones) why fantastic universes invented by writers often outlive their creators and continue to expand and reproduce long after their genesis—and the Lovecraftian universe has some of the best reasons of all. If modern adventures in its expansion and reproduction—including this one—seem to some observers to be mere exercises in pastiche, so be it, but I certainly do not feel that what I am doing is copying, or even supplementation, but rather attempting to assist with a useful process of evolution.

  “The Legacy of Erich Zann” first appeared in a hardcover volume published by Perilous Press, as a makeweight for a short novel entitled The Womb of Time (2011). I liked it so much that I wrote a series of sequels, similarly featuring Auguste Dupin as a protagonist, confronting not only elements of the Cthulhu Mythos, but other aspects of an even vaster metaphysical system of which even the apparatus of the Mythos is envisaged an exceedingly tiny fraction. The other volumes, all published by Borgo Press, are the novella double Valdemar’s Daughter/The Mad Trist and the novels The Quintessence of August, The Cthulhu Encryption, and Journey to the Core of Creation.

  “The Truth about Pickman” and “The Holocaust of Ecstasy” were both written for anthologies of Mythos stories, the former for S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings (P.S. Publishing, 2010) and the latter for Darrell Schweitzer’s Cthulhu’s Reign (DAW 2010). “The Seeds from the Mountains of Madness” was planned as a contribution to another such anthology, but grew far too large for such inclusion and is published here for the first time.

  THE LEGACY OF ERICH ZANN

  “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.”

  —Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry

  into the Origin of Our Ideas of the

  Sublime and the Beautiful (1756)

  “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations
bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics, exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural.”

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders

  in the Rue Morgue” (1841)

  “Evidently, Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.”

  —H. P. Lovecraft, “The Music of Erich Zann” (1922)

  1.

  There were countless aspects of the enigmatic personality of Monsieur le Chevalier Auguste Dupin that puzzled me during the period when we shared the town house that I rented in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Many such questions were eventually illuminated in the course of our long nocturnal discussions, but a few lingered long after Dupin—having eventually decided that even the close company of such a sympathetic soul as myself was too much for his reclusive temperament to bear—had elected to return to his original lodgings in the Rue Dunôt and to ration our meetings to two or three per week. Two questions, in particular, continued to intrigue me deeply.

  The first of these unsolved mysteries was the question of why a man as intellectually able as Dupin—a man whose analytical powers were beyond compare—could not or would not find any sort of gainful employment suited to his eremitic tendencies. As something of an amateur in journalism myself—although I filtered my occasional works in that vein through a correspondent in my homeland, who revised them for publication there and attached his own signature to them—I suggested more than once that he might easily compensate for the exhaustion of his patrimony by means of his pen, but he only replied that his intense commitment to the truth made any such vocation unthinkable. When I suggested that there was more money to be made from fact than fiction—Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue had only just begun their epoch-making demonstration to the contrary at that time—he merely replied that most so-called “factual” journalism was more prone than the most fantastic fiction to the corruptions and distortions of rhetoric, and that the remainder was so trivial as to be an insult to penetrative intelligence.

  The second such mystery might well have fit into the category of such trivia, but it intrigued me nevertheless, How was it, I could not help wondering, that a man of such reclusive habits and antisocial tendencies, whose very existence was unknown to all but a select few inhabitants of Paris, was able to call unannounced on a person as important as the Prefect of the Parisian Police and be sure of being received? What was even more surprising was that the Prefect in question, Lucien Groix, occasionally took the trouble to call on Dupin in person, when he was in need of particular assistance—as in the matter of which my American correspondent eventually published a brief account under the title of “The Purloined Letter”. It seemed to me that the two of them must share a secret of some kind, but when I asked Dupin about it explicitly he would only confirm that it was, indeed, a confidential matter about which he was not permitted to speak.

  Both of these mysteries were, however, clarified one wintry night, not long after the events recorded in “The Purloined Letter”, when the Prefect came in search of Dupin yet again, this time to the old town house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain that I had then been renting for more than a year. Groix knew that Dupin and I had maintained our acquaintance to the extent that suited my elusive friend, so when he found the great logician absent from the Rue Dunôt not long before midnight, he hurried around to my residence, hoping that he would find us both there.

  Dupin was, indeed, indolently accommodated in my candlelit smoking-room that night; the weather being cold enough to deter us from taking one of our nocturnal strolls, we had just spent a pleasant hour or two moving an amicable discussion through a sequence of sympathetic subjects.

  I had begun the discussion by giving Dupin an enthusiastic account of a musical melodrama that I had seen two nights previously at the Délassements-Comique. Dupin never went to the theater and rarely read any dramatic criticism; since he no longer lived in my house, with all my reading-material conveniently to hand, his acquaintance with the daily newspapers was more-or-less restricted to the Gazette des Tribuneaux—but I thought he would be interested in the piece in question because of his long-standing interest in the phenomena of dreaming and somnambulism. The drama in question, scripted by Frédéric Soulié, with music by Maurice Bazailles, La Cantate du Diable—The Devil’s Cantata, in English—was loosely based on the most famous recorded instance of an inspirational dream: the one that had allegedly inspired the Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini to produce his best-known work, Il Trillo del Diavolo.

  “In Soulié’s play,” I told Dupin, “the violinist who makes the diabolical pact does not hand his instrument over to the Devil, as Tartini did in his dream, but plays for him instead, in order that the Devil might sing one of the hymns that he once sang in Heaven, in chorus with other angels, before his fall. At this point, by means of one of the ingenious trap-doors whose use was pioneered at the Porte-Saint-Martin in the twenties, the middle-aged actor in conventional Mephistophelean make-up who has played the role of the Devil up to that point is abruptly replaced by a blond-haired boy soprano, whose looks and voice are, indeed, perfectly angelic. For the duration of the song, the Devil reverts, as it were, to his original form—but as he sings, the notes are gradually perverted as the violin seems to go out of tune, although it retains a curious alternative melodiousness, which is matched by the boy’s increasingly sinister but strangely bewitching voice.”

  “Scordatura,” Dupin put in.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The use of an unorthodox tuning of a violin, to which you have just referred, is known, technically, as scordatura,” he explained. “It is rather unusual, however, for a violinist to retune his instrument while actually playing it, in mid-piece. Is that, perhaps, one of Signor Paganini’s new tricks?”

  I had been to one of Paganini’s concerts at the Opéra the previous week, but I had not reported it to Dupin because I had not enjoyed it as much as I had hoped. That the violinist’s technique was brilliant I could not doubt, but his famous capricci seemed to me to be far more intricate than melodious. I preferred Bach’s violin sonatas. I was surprised that Dupin was even aware of the great virtuoso’s existence, let alone the substance of his work, or the fact that his current European tour had recently brought him to Paris.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed, in reply to his question. “Have you an interest in violin music, then, Dupin?”

  “None whatsoever,” was his paradoxical reply. “I have not touched such an instrument in twenty years, although my father saw to it that I was taught to play when I was a child and my circumstances were very different. I was once briefly acquainted with a violinist of genius, though, and met another through him who fancied himself a genius, and a memory of that circumstance caused me to listen with an attentive ear to some idle chatter related to Paganini, which I overheard during one of my nocturnal strolls. The Opéra is within easy walking distance of my lodgings, and although I have never been inside the institution itself, I sometimes pause for a petit mominette at one of the cabarets in which the audience tends to reassemble after performances. Their critical discussion usually washes over me unheeded, but on this occasion I listened to the comments because what was said about Paganini reminded me of my old acquaintance. Mention was made of the use of scordatura techniques, so I wondered whether Paganini had taken up the trick of retuning his instrument in mid-piece.”

  I did not care to investigate Dupin’s distant memories further, because I was eager to press on with my account of the play.

  “What makes the play unusual among Faustian fantasies,” I told him, “in spite of the fact that the violinist is coupled with a very obvious clone of Marguerite, in the form of a pretty female soprano played by Mademoiselle Deurne, is that Soulié—who published a novel called Le Magnetiseur not long ago—has ingeniously recycled the research he did for that work. He makes extensive reference to the Marquis de Puységur’s recent e
xperiments in animal magnetism, in order to sustain the notion that the protagonist’s Devil-induced hallucination is far more than an ordinary dream. In fact, the Devil’s magnetic power combines with the protagonist’s musical ambition to convert his playing into a means of access to the higher reality accessible to Mesmerized somnambulists.

  “Somniloquists,” Dupin said, reflexively. There was a frown on his face, as if something I had said had troubled him, and the correction he had offered seemed almost to be a means of deflecting his attention from that disquiet into a safer conversational channel.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, again.

  “Somnambulists, properly speaking, are individuals who walk in their sleep,” Dupin informed me. “The subjects entranced by expert Mesmerists, in order that they may relate visions of dream-dimensions or operate as channels for voices from those dimensions, are more properly called somniloquists: sleep-talkers.”

  “Not according to the play’s program-notes,” I said, reaching for the inside pocket of my jacket—but he stopped me with a casual gesture. He did not care what the program notes might say; he was a confirmed pendant, and he was perfectly certain that he was in the right—but he still had something else on his mind. I fell silent, knowing that he would take up the thread of the discussion, in the expectation that he would explain what it was that had disturbed him.

  Instead, he retreated into intellectualism, taking refuge in the produce of his esoteric scholarship. “I don’t know Monsieur Soulié’s work at all,” he said, “but it seems to me that his choice of exemplars is somewhat misguided. The late Marquis de Puységur did, indeed, conduct some interesting experiments in animal magnetism, although he was also responsible for the lamentable popularization of the term somnambulism in that context, but his work in that vein has since been supplemented—some would say superseded—by that of Alexandre Bertrand. Puységur and most of his followers are, in technical terminology, physiologists, primarily interested in bodily phenomena; connections between magnetism and music are far more readily drawn by the rival school of spiritualists, who consider what they stubbornly insist on calling the somnambulist state as fundamentally—again in a technical sense—ecstatic. The scene that you have just described would surely be more aptly underpinned by Bertran’s theories than Puységur’s. In this particular instance, of course, one ought not even to talk of somniloquism, but of somnimusicality—but that is a term which no one, as yet, has taken the trouble to coin, and perhaps, all things considered, we ought to be grateful for that.”