The Caller of the Black by Brian Lumley (Arkham House, 1971)

The early horrible

The Caller of the Black by Brian Lumley (Arkham House, 1971) contains stories that commit all kinds of sins to sound and sense. It's a tyro work, and clearly a gamble for any publisher. Still, Derleth's support for Lumley looks prescient today: the author has produced many stories and some novels of real merit, and many more that gave their readers hours of pleasure and escape.

A Thing About Cars! 

"A Thing About Cars!" [Emphasis in original] begins with a gut-buster of a first sentence, which is also the first paragraph:

     Despite all government planning—the rapid constriction of multiple road systems spanning the length and breadth of the country, population transplants of the human spill-over from the cities to the previously thinly-peopled regions, and the conversion of many areas of wasteland into vast farming concerns—the traveller in England will somewhere, sooner or later, still stumble across the quiet backwater surviving modernity, defying time and sometimes, when the setting is just right, radiating an aura out of tune with the day and age which, as if in resentment of the slow but ever approaching encroachment of Man's machineries, might in certain perspective appear ominous and even frightening.

It's a story about a brother searching for a brother. The narrator, just discharged from the military, returns to the UK, hunting his "unfortunate brother Arnold." Arnold has lost his wife and son in separate car accidents, and has isolated himself in the rural wilds after a breakdown.

     There are places like this in the Severn Valley—Goatswood and Temphill spring unpleasantly to mind—and others in the North and North-East, like Harden on the coast and Tharpe-Nettleford on the North Yorkshire border; but between a certain triangle of ancient but updated towns in the Midlands, there exists an area of some hundred square miles simply abounding with tiny villages of hoary antiquity exuding an ancient nastiness, and I cannot think back on my experience in that region without shuddering abominably and knowing again the terror I knew then.

Lumley does a good job on the menacing atmosphere of rural isolation. And when brother meets brother, Lumley does the one thing few novice horror writers know how to do: he stops the story at the perfect moment.

* * *

The Cyprus Shell (1968)

A dinner guest writes a letter of apology to his host after fleeing the table during the seafood course.

     Two years ago in Cyprus something happened that put an end to my appetite for that sort of thing. But before I go on let me ask you to do something. Get out your Bible and look up Leviticus 11; 10/11. No, I have not become a religious maniac. It's just that since that occurrence of two years ago I have taken a deep interest, a morbid interest I hasten to add, in this subject and all connected with it.

      If, after reading my story, you should find your curiosity tickled, there are numerous books on the subject that you might like to look up—though I doubt whether you'll find many of them at your local library. Anyway, here is a list of four such books: Gantley's Hydrophinnae, Gaston Le Fe's Dwellers in the Depths, the German Unter-Zee Kulten, and the monstrous Cthaat Aquadingen by an unknown author. All contain tidbits of an almost equally nauseating nature to the tale that I must relate in order to excuse myself.

This is a transmigration of souls tale, but instead of an earthly protagonist exchanging places with a fantastic warrior hero, a snorkeling corporal trades places with a Murex.

    10 And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:

     11 They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.

                --Leviticus 11:10-11

* * *

Billy's Oak

Red-bathrobed Titus Crow takes time out from fiddling with De Maringy's clock to aid our narrator, who wants to look at a copy of "Cthaat Aquadingen, an almost legendary collection of spells and incantations purported to relate, among other things, to the raising of certain water-elementals...."

     "The, er, binding…" he muttered. "It's forever sweating—which is rather surprising, you'll agree, considering its donor has been dead for at least four hundred years!"

     "Its donor!" I exclaimed, glancing in morbid fascination at the book. "You don't mean to say that it's bound in…?"

     "I'm afraid so! At least, that copy is."

     "My God!…Are there many copies then?" I asked.

     "Only three that I know of—and one of the other two is here in London. I take it they wouldn't let you see it?"

     "You're very shrewd, Mr. Crow, and perfectly correct. No, I wasn't allowed to see the copy at the British Museum."

All of which is simply misdirection and prelude to a supernatural anecdote about Billy's Oak itself. Lumley builds-up saturating layers of genre cliché with control and sense of proportion before the nicely modest denouement.

* * *

The Writer in the Garret

Our narrator is hungry, practically homeless: a career writing fiction has been a failure. Walking the city streets at night, he sees another man throwing pages in a trash bin. He discovers the man is throwing away a manuscript.

     He did not seem adverse to my questions and I learned that he, just as I had done, was trying to write a long novel. Between chapters he "dabbled" with short pieces, the like of which I had found in the bin, but was not satisfied with them and never completed them to that basic degree of neatness or polish which is the natural right of any respectable publisher. No, he told me, he had never even tried to get his work published—what was the point when it was so hopelessly puerile? He would wait until he had written something really good and worthwhile and only then would he try! By this time he was obviously eager to get back to work so I detained him no longer. As he opened the door for me he thrust a half-dozen more such manuscripts into my hand, begging me to dispose of them also in the bin on my way out.

So begins a regular schedule of late night visits by the narrator to that bin. He types the discarded manuscripts and easily sells the result. Eventually a novel joins the short stories.

A year later, a nighttime visit finds no manuscripts in the bin. The narrator climbs to the writers room, but is intercepted by the landlord:

     "Visitin', sir?" he seemed surprised. "Well, strikes me as yer've come ter the wrong place if yer was wantin' ter visit 'im! Yer'd best be lookin' in Taylor's Field, up the road a way. Yer'11 know 'is grave easy enough. Fresh buried, 'e is!

     "No more'n a day or so ago, it 'appened. About ten in the mornin'—after the post 'ad delivered 'im a book! Let out such a scream, 'e did, an' fell down the stairs like a bag o' sticks. Broke 'is neck like it was a rotten twig—but 'e was 'alf dead anyway! Thin as a rake an' coughin' blood. 'Ere, not int'rested in the room, then?"

     Half crazy with self-loathing, shock and horror—submerged in a sudden ocean of that alien awareness—I was already half-way down the stairs, fleeing to the cleanliness of the night.

     Yet even as I hurried out through the door, ghoul that I was, out of long accustomed habit I turned towards the bin. The weird sensation of an unknown observer was almost a tangible thing as I promised myself that this (of necessity, now), would be the last time.

     Furtively glancing up and down the narrow street, I lifted the heavy, iron lid and plunged my hand into the bin's mephitic throat. Instantly my fingers grasped crackling paper and I started to withdraw my prize. But the manuscript was caught on something and would not budge. I tugged harder and then, not wanting to tear the paper, thrust both hands into the black interior of that evil container and hauled at what seemed to be a heavy bundle of wet rags beneath the manuscript. Suddenly the entire contents of the bin shifted and with a grunt of triumph I hoisted strongly upwards until…

     It was in those brief, shrieking seconds, as I struggled at the bin, that the horrible, impossible truth dawned on me. The muddy, dragging footprints on the recently rain-clean cobbles… The smell rising from the bin—which was not the normal odour of refuse—smote at my tortured nostrils… The small clots of earth scattered around that hellish container suddenly stood out as clear as boulders to my seared vision… My God! Sufficient to disturb the very dead…

This climax of "The Writer in the Garret" echoes a similar moment in another story of curse and theft, "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" by M. R. James:

     "Well, I felt to the right, and my fingers touched something curved, that felt—yes—more or less like leather. Dampish it was, and evidently part of a heavy, full thing. There was nothing, I must say, to alarm one. I grew bolder, and putting both hands in as well as I could, I pulled it to me, and it came. It was heavy, but moved more easily than I expected. As I pulled it toward the entrance, my left elbow knocked over and extinguished the candle. I got the thing fairly in front of the mouth and began drawing it out.

     "Just then Brown gave a sharp ejaculation and ran quickly up the steps with the lantern. He will tell you why in a moment.

     "Startled as I was, I looked around after him, and saw him stand for a minute at the top and then walk away a few yards. Then I heard him call softly, 'All right, sir,' and went on pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms around my neck." 

Lumley's narrator will apparently not have Mr. Somerton's opportunity to put back what has been stolen.  

The theme of ghoulish literary theft is protean indeed, particularly in relation to Lumley. Is he consciously or unconsciously commenting upon his own aesthetic procedures as a Derleth epigone? Or is he instead oblivious to the statement he is sending out? Does this account for the scarcity of republication of "The Writer in the Garret"?

* * *

The Caller of the Black

"The Caller of the Black" opens with this paragraph of prose, because apparently Lumley wants his narrator Titus Crow to be taken for a pretentious ass:

     One night, not so long ago, I was disturbed, during the study of some of the ancient books it is my pleasure to own, by a knock at the solid doors of my abode, Blowne House. Perhaps it would convey a more correct impression to say that the assault upon my door was more a frenzied hammering than a knock. I knew instinctively from that moment that something out of the ordinary was to come—nor did this premonition let me down....

The strength, authority, and excellence of "Casting the Runes" is reinforced by every subsequent story I read about confrontations with black magicians seeking vengeance on their critics. 

Lumley's "caller" is the nefarious James Gedney. ("The Black" itself is a smothering fall of black snowflakes.) Titus Crow, seeking vengeance for two murdered men who tried to quit Gedney's cult, remorselessly turns the tables on this antagonist. 

....He could not take in what had happened, for it had all been too fast for him. His victim was snatched from the snare and he could not believe his eyes. But believe he had to as the first black flakes began to fall upon him! The shadows darkened under his suddenly comprehending eyes and his aspect turned an awful grey as I spoke these words from the safety of the shower:

     

"Let him who calls The Black,

Be aware of the danger

His victim may be protectedby the spell of running water

And turn the called-up darkness

Against the very caller…"   

  

    Nor did this alone satisfy me. I wanted Gedney to remember me in whichever hell he was bound for; and so, after repeating that warning of the elder Ptetholites, I said:

    "Good evening, Mr. Gedney—and goodbye…"

    Cruel? Ah! You may call me cruel—but had not Gedney planned the same fate for me? And how many others, along with Symonds and Chambers, had died from the incredible sorceries of this fiend?

    He had started to scream. Taken by surprise, he was almost completely covered by the stuff before he could move but now, as the horrible truth sank in, he tried to make it across the room to the shower. It was his only possible means of salvation and he stumbled clumsily round the table towards me. But if Gedney was a fiend so, in my own right, was I—and I had taken precautions. In the shower recess I had previously placed a windowpole, and snatching it up I now put it to use fending off the shrilly shrieking object before me.

    As more of "The Black," the evil blood of Yibb-Tstll, settled on him, Gedney began the frantic brushing motions which I remembered so well, all the while babbling and striving to fight his way past my window.... By now the stuff was thick on him, inches deep, a dull, black mantle which covered him from head to toe. Only one eye and his screaming mouth remained visible and his outline was rapidly becoming the bloated duplicate of that hideous shadow I had seen on the night of Chambers' death.

    It was now literally snowing black death in my room and the end had to follow quickly. Gedney's bulging eye and screaming, frothing mouth seemed to sink into the ever thickening blackness and the noises he was making were instantly shut off. For a few seconds he did a monstrous, shuffling dance of agony, and unable to bear the sight any longer I used the pole to push him off his feet....

Stirring stuff. But give me the tense ten minutes in the first-class carriage where Karswell's fate is sealed. Perhaps Lumley made a deal with a devil: popularity, but debased aesthetics.

* * *

The Mirror of Nitocris

Narrator Henri-Laurent de Marigny tells us all about a singular confluence among his occult bric-a-brac. At an auction of explorer Bannister Brown-Farley's estate, he buys the man's diary and a mirror Brown-Farley brought home from Egypt.

From the diary, de Marigny learns the dangerous properties of the mirror. Happily, among his collection he has Baron Kant's silver pistol, against which the mirror is not impervious.

This kind of connect-the-dots fiction probably looks appealing and "doable" to those satisfied to try Derleth-style hodgepodging. But like new adventures for Mina Harker or Poirot , it is no pleasure to read.

* * *

The Night Sea-Maid Went Down

I previously wrote about "Sea-Maid" here.

* * *

The Thing from the Blasted Heath (1971)

....I doubt if anyone could have named that shrub for it was the child of strange radiation, not of this world, and therefore unknown to man. Its leaves were awful, hybrid things—thick, flacid and white like a sick child's hands—and its slender trunk and branches were terribly twisted and strangely veined. It was in such a poor state when I planted it in my garden that I did not think it would live. Unfortunately I was wrong; it soon began its luxuriant growth and Old Cartwright often used to warily prod it with his cane when he came visiting.

....I thought that in ridding myself of the remainder of my collection I might also kill the memory of that which once stood in my garden. I was wrong.

    It makes no difference that I have given away my conches from the islands of Polynesia and have shattered into fragments the skull I dug from beneath the ground where once stood a Roman ruin. Letting my Dionaea Muscipulas die from lack of their singular nourishment has not helped me at all! My devil-drums and death-masks from Africa now rest beneath glass in Wharby Museum along with the sacrificial gown from Mua-Aphos. My collection of ten nightmare paintings by Pickman, Chandler Davies and Clark Ashton Smith now belong to an avid American collector, to whom I have also sold my complete set of Poe's works. I have melted down my Iceland meteorite and parted forever with the horribly inscribed silver figurine from India. The silvery fragments of unknown crystal from dead G'harne rest untended in their box and I have sold in auction all my books of Earth's elder madness.

    Yes, that which I once boasted of as being the finest collection of morbid and macabre curiosities outside of the British Museum is no more; yet still I am unable to sleep. There is something—some fear that keeps me awake—which has caused me of late to chain myself to the bed when I lie down.

    You see, I know that my doctor's assurance that it is "all in my mind" is at fault, and I know that if ever I wake up in the garden again it will mean permanent insanity—or worse!

* * *

An Item of Supporting Evidence (1970)

This is a nicely articulated conversation piece. The writer of short stories Titus Crow gets to intellectually slap-down his critic, the illustrator Chandler Davies. Crow is casually arrogant and imperviousness to criticism

Crow begins his first-person tale of besting Davies with relish:

    It was the contents of a letter from Chandler Davies, the weird-artist, commenting upon the negative effect which my short story Yegg-ha's Realm had had on him, which determined me to invite him round to Blowne House. Not that I grieved to any great extent over Mr. Davies' adverse comments—you can never please everyone—but I definitely disagreed with his expounded argument. He had had it that Mythological-Fantasy was 'out'; that the Cthulhu Mythos' fabled lands and creatures and Cimmeria's scintillating citadels and dark demons should have been allowed to die a sad but certain death along with their respective originators, and that constant culling from those tales—the brain children of my own, not to mention many another author's, literary progenitors—was weakening the impact of the original works. Nor, apparently, had my story—admittedly a Lovecraftian piece; set during the time of Rome's rule over England and involving the worship of an "outside God"—irritated him in this respect alone. What seemed to have annoyed Mr. Davies especially was the fact that I had portrayed "so thoroughly unbelievable a God" as existing in such a well-known period of England's history that even an average student of our country's antiquities could hardly miss the obvious impossibility of my tale....

* * *

Dylath—Leen (1971)

A man has recurring dreams of love and adventure in a fantastical land. The heartbreaking brevity of the protagonist's physical and emotional visits to that world achieve real resonance.

....It became as one of those nightmares (which indeed it was) where you run and run through vast vats of subconscious molasses, totally unable to increase the distance between yourself and your ethereal pursuer; the only difference being, dream or none, that I knew for a certainty I was running for my life!

* * *

De Marigny's Clock (1971)

Thieves outsmart themselves, despite the earnest warnings of householder Titus Crow. It's a very entertaining story that rises above most in this collection. (I was reminded of housebreakers who sometimes visited Lord Peter Wimsey in the small hours.)

* * *

In the Vaults Beneath

A lengthy mythos pastiche novella written in non-hysterical voice. It concludes with a wonderfully macabre punchline.

* * *

The Pearl (1971)

A gruesome "you can't go home again" pendant.

Jay

9 January 2022