"Some Notes Concerning a Green Box" by Alan Dean Foster

Sirs: I did not know what to do with these notes until a friend of mine suggested that I send them along to you, assuming, I suppose, that you might find them of some interest. They form an exceedingly odd story, one with which I am now not so sure I wish to be connected. I report them here as they occurred....

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"Some Notes Concerning a Green Box" was published in The Arkham Collector, Summer 1971. In his notes on the story in With Friends Like These (1977), Alan Dean Foster says the story began as a joke, product of his first looking into Lovecraft.

It's testament to Foster that, initially exposed to Lovecraft, he would write a glib and jokey send-up of what had become clichés by 1970. 

The story is presented as a letter. The narrator details his investigation of the disappearance of two anthropologists. They were last known to be sailing south of Easter Island. Fragments from a log book indicate they were searching for something, following Captain Cook's old charts, "almost directly down the center of the subsurface mountain mass known as the Easter Island Cordillera."

Our narrator also discovers that one of their collaborators, a Chilean academic, was conducting some esoteric rituals on the mainland at the same time. Survivors of that event:

....were found in the mountains the night after the quake, shivering and frightened. They were given food and clothing by the government rescue team and permitted to return to their families, except for one oldster who adamantly maintained in spite of the most determined expostulations that the professor was responsible for the quake. According to this patriarch, the professor had been performing some incomprehensible ritual with burning herbs and an odd little idol when the tremors had begun. At this point the old man's testimony lapses into insane drivel, as when he claims that the mountain across the valley from them got upon gigantic stone feet and stepped on the professor, killing most of the party with him.

"A mountain walked" indeed!

From there, "Some Notes Concerning a Green Box" splutters along on in-jokes until it ends. 

Foster reports he sent the narrative as a letter to Derleth, who offered to publish it as a work of fiction. Clearly, Derleth had his net out for young writers, and caught not just Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley.

Jay

12 June 2022