He finished his tour by pointing out the house he’d lived in during the last period of his “obscurity,” as he called it.
“It was moved from its original location to Meeting Street,” he said, “but, as you see, I managed to arrange to have it carefully brought back here to 66 College Street, where it belongs. And I saw to it that my aunts had the use of it, not just part of it, but the run of the whole building, until their deaths.”
“That must have been very satisfying to you,” I said.
“It was, Edwardius,” he said with a smile that began a little grimly but then broadened. “However it was nothing next to the restoration, the re-creation, you might even fairly say the glorification, of my grandfather’s place at 454 Angell Street, which is where Mr. Smith has now almost driven us. There it is, just ahead.”
We paused briefly before a high, wrought-iron gate which opened smoothly when a button was pushed in the Rolls’s dashboard, then rolled up the curve of a driveway and came to a gliding stop before a large, most imposing house.
“I admit to improving on its architecture,” Lovecraft observed, exiting from the car with a light step and no use of his cane whatsoever. “Even to transforming it entirely. Whipple Van Buren Phillips’s house was a simple clapboard affair, though of substantial size, and not at all the splendid Georgian manor which you see before you. I suppose I could be accused of being a trifle Williamsburgian in all this, but it’s both aesthetically and emotionally authentic, and the material, garnered by my agents from all points in a quite Hearstian manner, is entirely period.”
“It sounds just like the creation of the mansion in your story, ‘The Rats in the Walls,’ ” I said, looking about at all this splendor more than a little wide-eyed.
“Of course it does,” said Lovecraft, with a smile. “Of course it does. Good heavens, wasn’t it painfully obvious my whole notion of that American millionaire creating an ideal ancestral home was the pathetic dream of an impoverished romantic? Ah, but I see from your expression that does not seem to have crossed your mind. Well then, perhaps that little tale of mine isn’t quite as embarrassing as I’d feared all these years, after all.”
By now Mr. Smith had opened and was standing by the many-paneled front door, tall and richly gleaming beneath its glorious fanlight. Lovecraft led the way inside, laid his cape and hat on a handsome Wedgwood table, and waited until I had done the same with mine.
“They look quite natural there, side by side, do they not?” he asked. “Perhaps, Edwardius, where I have failed to do so on my own, the two of us together may bring capes and broad-brimmed trilbies back in style!”
He walked to a handsome double door, paused with his hand on one of its brightly polished knobs, then turned back to me with a mildly vexed expression.
“Please do accept my apologies,” he said. “I have grown thoughtless in my solitary, self-indulgent ways. I was about to drag you on through an extended tour of the house, as I know there is much you will want to see, particularly in the library—oh, just wait ’til you see the library!—but it completely slipped my mind that you’ve only just climbed off that obviously uncomfortable bus and would doubtless very much enjoy some freshening up.”
He paused to snap open and consult a wonderfully quaint old watch which he’d extracted from a pocket in his vest.
“It’s a little over an hour to four,” he said. “If Mr. Smith will be kind enough to show you to your room, you’ll have plenty of time for a wash-up and perhaps even a short nap before tea, which is a custom we have taken to observing in recent years. Also, quite frankly, it will give your grandpa a chance for a little nod as well!”
Mr. Smith led me to my quarters and introduced me to its quirks, most helpfully the involved controls on an imported shower in the bathroom. After he left I spent a few minutes gaping in wonder at the room’s marvelous antique furnishings, including a dazed, indeterminate period of time standing before a huge, lovely, glowing landscape which I took to be a Turner until I bent to examine the small gold plate fixed to its bottom frame and read that it portrayed the fabled realm of Ooth-Nargai from Lovecraft’s novel Beyond the Wall of Sleep and that its artist was “unknown.”
Standing back from the painting I felt a slight dizziness and finally realized that Lovecraft had been quite right. I was exhausted (my prim New England lady would be shocked to learn how loudly she snored). So I hung up my one spare suit, washed some of the grime of travel from my hands and face, and it seemed to me I had barely stretched out on the bed when I found myself suddenly being dragged out of a profound slumber by a gentle tapping and Mr. Smith’s voice informing me from the other side of the door that tea would shortly be served.
I reared up on my elbows and lay there for a second or two trying to pull back the vanishing recollections of what must have been a spectacularly interesting nightmare. It had been quite Lovecraftian, which was, of course, appropriate. I’d been in a harsh landscape, cold, windy, and mountainous, and seen bits and pieces of something huge and grey with an appalling wingspan come flapping down toward me through the snowy air, clacking its teeth horribly and ever more eagerly with each lurching drop in its descent. Its small red eyes burned piercingly down at me with an intent interest which somehow struck me as hideously personal, and I heard it caw tremendously: “Perfect, ah, but you’re perfect!” just before it reached out its claws and I felt the first taloned squeeze of its inescapable grip. “You’re next!” it cawed. “You’re next! You’re next!”
Some important aspect of the dream seemed determined to evade me, but I pursued it determinedly until I felt my stomach contract with the peculiarly horrible recollection that I’d been looking up at the monster from the very stalks and bracken of the creature’s nest.
I shook my head without clearing it all that much, did another quick wash, tightened my tie, and started down the softly carpeted steps, but my downward progress was slowed considerably by the wonderful discovery that the ancestor portraits which lined the wall of the landing and stairway and which I’d only dimly noticed on my way up were, in fact, quite marvelous oil paintings of some of the principal villains in Lovecraft’s novels and stories, each one of their names and birth and death dates neatly engraved on little golden plaques mounted at the bottoms of their frames.
Along the wall of the landing was hung a triptych of portraits, the center one being the slim, subtly gruesome figure of Joseph Curwen, the resurrected necromancer from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and it was flanked by the likenesses of the two ghastly, grinning ancients who were his mentors and assistant magicians in the novel, Simon Orne, originally of Salem, and Edward Hutchinson, later known as Baron Ferenczy of Transylvania. Among the other wonderfully sinister villains depicted in paintings descending the handsome staircase, I came across the hunched and leering Keziah Mason from “Dreams in the Witch House,” with her horrendous familiar, Brown Jenkin, curling nastily round her feet, and an enormous, towering oil of Wilbur Whateley, the hybrid sorcerer of “The Dunwich Horror,” seemingly all unaware that his vest had come slightly open and the viewer had an appalling peek at the writhing monstrosity which was his chest.
The front part of the ground floor was deserted, but I heard a cozy clatter coming from the rear of the house and soon found my way to an exceptionally comfortable, sunny, and obviously well-equipped kitchen where I came across Mr. Smith leaning over a counter and humming to himself, serenely engaged in cutting tiny triangular sandwiches for tea.
“Ah, Mr. Vernon,” he said, looking up at my entrance and smiling. “Did you have a pleasant rest?”
I smiled back at him and had actually opened my mouth to make some insignificant joke about my nightmare of being in the monster’s nest, when the sunlight shone on his cheek in a certain way and I recognized him at last.
He stopped his cutting and began to observe me with some concern because my expression most certainly had abruptly turned very odd indeed, and I’m sure I must have gone pale as a corpse.
&nbs
p; “Is there something wrong?” he asked. “Can I get you a glass of water, Mr. Vernon?”
“Edwardius,” I said, then realized I had barely croaked the name, so I cleared my throat and swallowed before continuing. “I should be very honored if you would call me Edwardius, just as Lovecraft does. After all, he has always acknowledged you as his peer.”
“His peer?” asked Mr. Smith.
“You,” I said, “because you are Clark Ashton Smith, poet, author, artist, and honored friend of Lovecraft, of H.P.L. Please don’t deny it because I’m sure of it.”
I paused, and then, aware of my heart beating in my chest, I said the other part.
“Of course I know it’s impossible because you are dead.”
He stared at me for a moment, then he frowned slightly and went back thoughtfully to his cutting. He made about three more little sandwiches and stacked them carefully on a silver tray with the rest, then he lay the knife on the counter.
“I suppose it was bound to happen one day, sooner or later,” he murmured to the sandwiches, and then he gave a tiny shrug and looked up directly into my eyes.
“Very well, you’re right,” he said. “About both those things. I am Clark Ashton Smith, and I am dead. As you see, it turned out not to be impossible.”
I stared at him, then groped forward and took hold of the counter with both hands because, to my great embarrassment, I appeared to be on the verge of fainting.
“There’s a stool there, by your side, to your left,” said Smith gently. “From the look of you, it might be a good idea if you sat on it. Carefully and slowly. It was quite thoughtless of me to be so abrupt.”
I sat, carefully and slowly as he had said, and the pounding in my ears and the dancing spots of light before my eyes began to fade and dim.
“I thought you’d spotted me back at the bus terminal, you know,” he said, handing me a glass of water which he had somehow filled without my noticing. “Then I saw you hesitate and falter into indecision, and I figured we’d got away with it again.”
I took a long drink of the water, then another, and after a deep breath or two I decided I would probably be able to talk.
“I couldn’t place you until just now,” I said, speaking a little clearer with each word. “Then I saw the sun shining through your beard, and I knew.”
He glanced at the window behind him and nodded with the relieved air of one who has solved a minor puzzle.
“Ah, yes. That would weaken its effect,” he said. “It’s the square cut extending from the sides of the jaw that does the job, you see. I thought it up myself and must admit I’m quite proud of the way it effectively obscures the essential triangularity of my face. Unless, as I now learn, the sun shines through it from behind.”
“Of course it’s particularly difficult to recognize someone in disguise when you think they’re in their grave,” I said, taking another sip of water.
“Naturally. That was our basic working assumption,” he said. Then, with a small, resigned sigh, he added: “Not that I’m all that well known. It isn’t as though we’ve been trying to conceal someone really famous.”
The kettle on the burner started to whistle and he reached up, took two canisters from a shelf, then turned to me.
“What tea would you care for, Mr.—ah—Edwardius? We’ve finally managed to wean Howard away from sugar with a little coffee to a simple English breakfast blend. I, always the exotic, am attached to an odd Japanese concoction brewed from twigs, but it’s not, confessedly, for every taste.”
“I’ve never ventured out farther than Lipton’s in a bag,” I admitted.
“None of that here, I’m afraid,” Smith said. “Far too common for the likes of us. Let’s start you out with a Darjeeling; the highest quality, but quite undemanding.”
He lost himself for a moment or two in contentedly and efficiently assembling pots and cups and saucers, but then he stared at his hands, stopped still, and looked up at me from a neatly squared stack of napkins with an expression of concern on his face which was more than a little pathetic.
“I hope you’re not apprehensive about these hands of mine spreading some contagion,” he said, holding them up before himself like two foreign objects. “They look this way, I look this way, because of an essential crudeness in my construction. It’s not a disease, you know. It’s nothing you can catch.”
“I’m sorry I pulled my hand away from yours back at the bus station,” I said, after a pause.
“Oh, no, you had every right to. They’re horrible,” he said. “Horrible!”
He turned toward the window and rotated his hands on his wrists so that they caught the sunlight this way and that.
“I’m like this all over, you know,” he said. “Every inch of me. And it’s not just my skin, worse luck, it’s the same with my insides. My bowels, my heart, no doubt my brain itself, must be made of this repellent, defective stuff.”
He rubbed his hands as if he were trying to smooth them, to reduce their gaping pores, and then looked back at me over his shoulder.
“You must forgive him,” he said. “He was lonely, you see. I know it’s difficult for one as young as yourself to begin to imagine how impossibly isolating it is to have the world one was born in die off with the passage of the years. Along with all of its inhabitants, mind. People and things keep vanishing only to be replaced by other people and things which vanish in their turn until even the memories of everything and everybody you grew up with and held dear are reduced to tiresome, passé jokes.”
He had turned back to the tea tray, busying and calming himself with a final supply and inventory of its contents as he talked.
“You said it yourself, Edwardius,” he said, filling the creamer with a hand that betrayed only the tiniest tremble. “I was one of the very few people he considered his peer. I was also, very importantly, an inhabitant of his original world; a contemporary. Unfortunately for him, I was also dead. But H.P.L. had, some time ago, hit on a way past that. He’d purloined the basic notion from a book by none other than good old Cotton Mather—the idea of raising the dead from their ‘essential salts’—attributed it to the French scholar Borellus, and used it as the basic modus operandi for his scurvy Frankensteins in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. My present resurrection represents his second practical application of the technique.”
“That’s horrible!” I cried.
“Yes,” he said. “I confess that now and then I find myself wishing he hadn’t done it, as death was really quite a relief. But, as I say, he was lonely. And eventually I will die again. I need only be patient.”
A faint sigh sounded from the back of the kitchen.
“Well, well, Klarkash-Ton,” said Lovecraft softly, employing the eerie nickname he’d concocted for his friend during their famous correspondence in the thirties. He stood framed by the doorway, leaning forward slightly with both hands interlaced atop the handle of his cane. “Things seem to have moved along smartly during Grandpa’s nap.”
I jumped to my feet as clumsily as a startled calf, but Smith merely turned his head and nodded as Lovecraft advanced into the room, looking carefully first at one and then the other of us.
“The boy has so far exceeded our most hopeful expectations. He recognized me, Howard,” Smith said. “He recognized me—thereby setting himself apart from all previous visitors—and being a meticulous scholar of our little literary circle, he knew of my generally unheralded demise.”
“So you went ahead and told him the truth without overmuch preamble, as we planned,” he said, then walked slowly over to my side. “And you, Edwardius? Have you believed him? From the look of you it would appear you have.”
“My presence is difficult to refute,” observed Smith. “As are my grisly looks. More importantly than all that, our friend appears to have taken the complete and sudden overturning of reality as he knew it with commendable equanimity. It seems our speculations based on the promise of his tales were quite correct, and that—unlike the common he
rd—Edwardius is blessed with an open mind.”
Lovecraft rubbed his huge jaw thoughtfully, studied me silently for a long moment.
“Excellent,” he said at length, and, after a moment more, he added: “The two of us have for some time felt the growing need for a knowledgeable assistant, Edwardius. Also, certain signs which have cropped up repeatedly in my studies and experiments indicate strongly that our establishment is on the brink of some important transformation and that new blood will very shortly be required. We have been studying your writings and been impressed by them, not only because of their obvious literary merit, but because they seem to tell us that there is something remarkably right about you for the sort of activities in which we are engaged. We have both, in short, come to the conclusion that you would fit nicely into our little association.”
I was amazed, even dazzled, by this totally unexpected turn. For a space I could only gape at the two of them—with my mouth wide open I am sure—but eventually I managed to gather myself together enough to speak.
“I’m honored,” I said, “more honored than I can say, that you would even consider such a thing!”
“Very well, then, let us see how things work out,” said Lovecraft with a small nod as he studied me intently, eye to eye. “Your ability to accept Klarkash-Ton’s resurrection was the passing of an important test. Perhaps after we’ve all enjoyed a little tea, Edwardius, you’ll be up to accepting a few other things. But be warned, please do be warned, they’ll be a lot harder to swallow than our ghostly Mr. Smith!”
The sandwiches tasted even better than they had looked, an almond cake which Smith had purchased from a Portuguese bakery was superb, and the Darjeeling demonstrated clearly that my accustomed bag of Lipton’s, though perfectly serviceable, by no means exhausted the subject of tea.
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