The Summoning

by J. F. Gonzalez

  David grinned as he leaned back in his chair. Justin Grave’s first posthumous piece was going to be his epitaph; his small, but fanatical audience was surely going to love it.

  III

  David made a trip to The Hollywood Book and Magazine Store that evening after closing down business for the day.

  David’s favorite clerk, Brian Eaton, was seated on a chair, leafing through a recent issue of Fangoria. Brian was medium built, in his late twenties. The sides of his head were shaved down to the skull, wild hair sprouting from the top to cascade down to his shoulders. His left ear was pierced with six earrings. He played bass guitar in a local alternative band called Evil Offspring, and was a walking encyclopedia when it came to pulp trivia. The Hollywood Book and Magazine store itself was the kind of place that pulp fans in the Los Angeles area flocked to. The entire second floor of the place was devoted entirely to pulps—everything from Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Amazing Stories, to rare pulps like Strange Tales. David heard that the owners of the store sold the extremely rare second issue of Weird Tales a few months back for a tad over ten grand to a collector who’d been searching for it for the past five years.

  Brian looked up from his early evening reading and grinned as David walked in. “Yo, Dave. New issue at the printer?”

  “You bet.” Dave sidled up to the counter as Brian put the magazine down and approached, grinning wide.

  “So what can I do for you this evening?”

  “You know anything about a pulp magazine called Shudder?”

  Brian nodded. “Sure do. It came out right around the time Unknown made its debut. It didn’t last long though. Why?”

  “Well, I’m looking for a novel that was serialized in Shudder. A Justin Grave piece. The Watcher from the Grave.” He waited to see if recognition set in. It did.

  Brian’s face lit up, excitement in his eyes. “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. That’s the story that caused some major editorial freak out. There were even Senate subcommittee hearings over the contents of pulp magazines being too damaging for kids.”

  Wow! Pre-McCarthyism thirteen years before the infamous Congressman set up the witch hunt that ultimately killed EC Comics and black-listed several Hollywood screenwriters and actors for their supposed communist ties. “Tell me about it,” David asked.

  Brian shrugged. “Not much to tell. Shudder only published seven issues, with The Watcher from the Grave appearing in serialized form in each issue. It caused an uproar by the third installment and by issue five the shit hit the fan. The hearings were already in place. Ironically, the novel concluded in issue seven, the same issue with which the publisher decided to abort his publishing career by killing off the magazine. He ultimately sued Grave for an unspecified amount of damages and eventually went bankrupt.”

  This was all news to David. “What was it that freaked everybody out so bad?”

  “The story itself,” Brian explained, not breaking stride as the history lesson continued. “It had something to do with cult killings, was Lovecraftian in nature but incredibly sexual as well, way ahead of its time. It combined the cosmos of Lovecraft with a hint of Clark Ashton Smith, along with the ghoulishness of Hugh B. Cave and Robert Bloch. It had ghouls, sex, death, and a race of creatures that wait in the outer spheres of space and time, ready to plunder the human race. Like I said, it was kinda Lovecraftian in theme and tone—it talked about another sphere where the gods came from, spoke of R’lyeh and Shub-Niggurath, but then at the same time it wasn’t.” He chuckled. “Justin Grave was something of a trendsetter anyway—I mean, some of the stuff he was doing in the early thirties makes stuff that’s out now tame by comparison. Know what I mean?”

  David nodded. Grave was downplayed as a hack writer for much of his career, and was ultimately forgotten in the field of horror for thirty years until an enterprising small press publisher issued Cloak of Darkness and Others in hardcover. The collection went on to win several awards, and a year later Grave’s first horror novel in over thirty-years, The Ritual, appeared in paperback from Lion Books. It still took ten years after that for his work to be taken seriously as an important contribution to fantasy literature.

  “The story never appeared anywhere else,” Brian continued. “During the commotion, an aspiring film maker optioned it from Grave, but nothing happened. Ten years later another producer bought the rights and made it into a low budget feature starring Bela Lugosi.”

  David’s eyebrows shot up. He was supposed to be the film buff. “I never knew that!”

  “Don’t feel so bad,” Brian said. “It was one of the endless stream of low budget films Lugosi did toward the end of his career. The film itself was largely confined to art houses and special midnight screenings in a few major cities. It came and disappeared and now it’s one of Lugosi’s lost films.”

  David’s entrepreneurial mind was racing. If he could secure reprint rights for Watcher and resurrect the film on video (that is, if he could find it) he could make a small fortune. “Do you have any copies of Shudder in stock?”

  David grinned wide. “You’ve come to the right place. I’ve got all seven issues in very good condition. They’re pricey, though.”

  “How much?”

  Brian named the price and David winced. It was enough to meet his monthly living expenses. David pulled his day-timer out of his black leather satchel and opened it up to his vast array of plastic. He pulled out an American Express card. No revolving debt.

  “Couldn’t you just see if you can get a copy of the original manuscript from Justin himself?” Brian had just returned from the storeroom where he laid out all seven issues of Shudder in their protective plastic covers on the counter. David examined them carefully.

  “I would, but the man passed away this morning,” David said.

  Brian looked bummed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  David relayed his conversation with Mike Asbury earlier that afternoon. Brian listened intently. “Justin told me once that back in the sixties, a fire broke out in his house and he lost everything. Every pulp he had ever appeared in, along with the original manuscripts to all his published works. He’s been able to get copies of some of the pulps through the years, but he never did get all of them. I’m not sure he had any copies of Shudder.” David looked into Brian’s pensive features. “So, I don’t think that would work. Besides, I want these now. It’ll make a great tax-write off as well.”

  Brian rang the transaction up. “Not only that, but you will be the proud owner of a sought after collectors item. Now that he’s passed, these are going to be worth a lot more money. Count yourself lucky.”

  “I do.” David placed the fragile pulps in his satchel and bade Brian goodbye as he left the shop. His excitement and adrenaline spurned him on to what he knew he had to do in order to break his mini-publishing empire wide open.

  IV

  The hardcover first edition of The Watcher from the Grave sold out in two weeks.

  David was prepared for the reaction to the advertising he put out, and he quickly ordered a second printing before the ink dried on the first. Six months later, The Watcher from the Grave had gone through four printings and a bidding war had started between four major paperback houses for reprint rights. Justin Grave’s literary agent, and Nightshades Publishing, had set up an estate for the deceased writer that was going to reap huge financial rewards in the months to come.

  During the book’s production, David was able to scare up the original print of the cinematic version of The Watcher from the Grave. It was found moldering away in a warehouse near downtown Los Angeles. Hard detective work uncovered the print and once viewed, David realized he had to scare up some investors and do some legal checking to make sure the marketing rights to the film were clear. His main concern was that Lugosi’s estate would holler blue murder when word leaked out about the print. A referral through a mutual business associate put him in touch with a legal shark by the name of Daniel Walters, of Walters, Lowell and Zuckerma
n. Daniel navigated the choppy legal seas, and within two months the contracts were signed, sealed and delivered. Lugosi had signed a one-shot deal with the producer of Watcher for a flat fee of two thousand dollars. His biographers surely hadn’t been able to point out why Lugosi allowed himself to be ripped off. Different theories had been tossed out in explanation, but they were useless to David; the forty-eight year old document between the actors and the producer/holders of the film guaranteed no future royalties to Lugosi’s estate should the film ever be resurrected. Thus guaranteeing the future of Nightshades Publishing.

  There was no problem in rounding up investors for the fifty grand needed for the post-production, distribution, and marketing of Watcher onto video. Return on investment was expected within three months of release. The moola came in a month and a half early. So much for forecasting.

  What David didn’t expect from all the hoopla surrounding the resurrection of Justin Grave’s lost novel was the offer to pen the deceased writer’s biography for another enterprising small publishing house. The advance was small, but David jumped at the chance anyway. The travel required to research the book would provide a much needed working vacation.

  Unfortunately, things turned out differently.

  V

  David Corban was a week into researching Justin Grave’s life for the biography when Nightshades Publishing received a letter in shaky handwriting. It was postmarked Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

  July 6, 2000

  Dear Mr. Corban,

  I note with great interest that you have published Justin Grave’s long lost novel The Watcher from the Grave in an attractive deluxe edition, and have undertaken to resurrect and distribute the film based on the book, later this year on video. While I applaud your keen business mind in tackling such an endeavor, I wanted to share with you some insights I have on the background of the story, and the later film adaptation.

  I became acquainted with Justin in 1919, when we were both in grammar school. We became friends in 1925 when we were both high school freshmen. We remained friendly correspondents over the decades. Justin and I shared similar interests, mainly a love for the macabre, and the strange and bizarre. It had always been Justin’s goal to create a piece of fiction that would out-do anything being published at the time. We were both avid followers of the great pulps, and while I was never a correspondent or member of the now infamous “Lovecraft Circle,” we both shared a deep admiration for the gentleman from Providence. Justin published only a few Cthulhu Mythos stories, his most famous being the one that also ultimately destroyed his career in the early forties—The Watcher from the Grave.

  Of course, Watcher touches on much more than simple deities from outlying cosmos struggling to gain their hold on our world, a world they once ruled. In addition, the work of Dr. John Dee was also a big influence on Watcher, as well as research into the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, the fabled lost city of Atlantis, and the ancient civilizations of South America. He had a theory, you see, about these “lost” civilizations that he wanted to answer in his novel. Ultimately he failed with mass America, but others before had tried to confront similar themes masked in mystery and fantasy. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith have flirted with such themes for years, but never in such grotesque detail as Grave managed to accomplish in a single story. Grave’s contemporaries, too, seemed unwilling or unable to grapple with the anthropological aspect of the ideas expounded in such themes. The two who came closest, Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, died rather tragically at the height of their careers. The third, Clark Ashton Smith, virtually abandoned writing in 1937 and produced no more of his strange, dark fantasies. Who knows what light these gentlemen would have shed on such things if they hadn’t suddenly died or abandoned their careers?

  I’ve been keeping up with the world of fantasy ever since, and while I admire those who have come after Lovecraft and copped his style—namely Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell—none have come close to dealing with what these gentlemen were trying to accomplish. Even Lovecraft himself opted for devising his fictional towns of Innsmouth and Arkham, and casting devilish, tentacled creatures from the deep seas as integral parts of his tales, using them to obscure the true facts.

  Have you ever read anything by James Smith Long? Don’t worry if the name doesn’t seem recognizable. Long’s work is largely forgotten now, but he published a steady stream of work from the 1840’s through the 1870’s in England, appearing in many of the Penny Dreadfuls and the Dime Novels of that time. Long died tragically in 1878 in a flat in London (and by strange coincidence, the very same room where Mary Ann Kelly was later found eviscerated beyond recognition by Jack the Ripper in 1888). Sadly, Long’s work has been out of print for over a hundred years, but his work is astonishing to compare to that of his literary descendants—there’s no doubt that Grave must have read Long’s work at one point, for Long talks of the same dreaded book that is so evident in Watcher. Yes, hard to believe, but Long makes reference to Lovecraft’s famed Necronomicon throughout the stories in his lone collection, a volume entitled From Beyond (I do not have a copy, but I remember Justin had an old, weather beaten copy. From what I recall of the flyleaf, it was issued in the year of Long’s death by a small publisher in London in an edition of 250 copies, most of which were ordered destroyed by Parliament for “blasphemy.” The book is virtually impossible to find today. I imagine copies that survived destruction by the pillars of British Society were destroyed during the blitzkrieg of London during World War II). Despite what Lovecraft’s biographers say, (and Lovecraft himself, rather contradictorily in his letters), I tend to believe Lovecraft must have come in contact with Long’s work at some point. How else could he have heard about the Necronomicon?

  I am incredibly anxious to view The Watcher from the Grave on video when it is released. I remember seeing it in the fall of 1953 at a theatre in downtown Philadelphia. The film version moved me in a way the novel hadn’t; reading the novel for the first time gave me those unexpected tingles of gooseflesh one is accustomed to getting when reading great horror fiction (not to mention the three weeks of nightmares afterward; no novel has affected me similarly since then. Not even the work of Stephen King, who I simply adore). The film raised those levels two-fold. Having read the novel in Shudder, those in my party wanted to bolt from their seats during those integral parts of the story. You know what parts I’m talking about; the parts when that ghoulish wraith walks out of the cellar and—

  (Here the handwriting is illegible, and then it resumes after two lines of white space.)

  —we refrained though, and upon visiting the theatre the next week, in the accompaniment of more friends and colleagues, I was amazed to see the film was gone from the marquee. I’ve never seen it advertised on a theatre marquee since.

  In closing, I would like to commend you on a job well done in both resurrecting such a classic novel, as well as preserving the integrity of a man we all knew well and loved.

  Yours Respectfully,

  Mr. Calvin A. Smyth

  David read the letter twice with bemused interest. What did Dr. John Dee have to do with the seeds of Watcher? He couldn’t understand where Mr. Smyth was coming from in relation to that. While Grave’s story was unrelenting and literally scared the living shit out of you, it was pretty much a straight-forward horror story with Lovecraftian overtones that basked in the gruesome: a writer of the macabre vacationing in a fictional town within the Pennsylvania Dutch Country discovers a sacrificial altar in the basement of his home. It turns out the former owner was the follower of a secret cult, one that worshipped “The Watchers,” a group of demonic angels sent to watch over the Earth, who later descended and took themselves wives to beget monstrous offspring. They passed forbidden knowledge to mankind and were banished to the outer spheres for their crimes. Like most mythos stories, they are still seeking a channel into our plane of existence.

  Further exploration of the house finds that the former occupant had abducted people for sacrifice in
strange rites, offering the bodies to a creature described in great detail as “a leering, grinning emaciated scarecrow of a beast with a jaw full of broken, rotted teeth and rank breath that stank of the pit.” This creature is revealed to be one of the offspring of the Watchers, who had managed to remain in hiding when the other Watchers were banished to the outer spheres. In order to live, the offspring requires fresh blood from sacrificial victims. The more sacrifices made to the Watcher, the stronger he becomes. In return, he seduces his followers by showering them with succubi and incubi. Various idols and fetishes are utilized in rituals, some seeming to borrow heavily from Lovecraft’s Mythos: several of the mini-deities and fetishes grouped under the umbrella of the Watcher cult are amphibious in nature, some half reptilian and half mammal. The cult’s total purpose on earth was now established: to await the proper sacrifice, a human being whom the offspring could inhabit, allowing him to open the flood gates into the dimensions from which the Watchers had sprung, giving reign of the earth to those who had been banished to the outer stars.

  Upon discovery of the evidence at his home, the protagonist is caught in a whirlwind of sexual perversion and bloody rituals as he struggles to retain his sanity and his life. The mystery darkens when two young girls are found murdered, their bodies curiously drained of blood, and evidence of the murders leads law enforcement to him. A musty old tome is found in the house—the Necronomicon—and the authorities shudder at the sight of it. It contains a virtual pre-history of a world now gone, and a world that will soon become reality again “when the stars are right.” Unfortunately they are too late. The protagonist has already used the book at the Black God’s bidding and realized, too late, what the intentions of the cult really were: that he was to be the vessel that will bring the Watchers back, allowing the Outer Gods to take hold on this world again. He doesn’t realize this until the end, when a young woman who has become his love interest early on in the novel, lures him into the basement of his home and seduces him. Before he is aware of it, the basement is filled with people, some he recognizes, others he doesn’t. The offspring is among them, a wraithlike figure emaciated and shambling as it is led to him to take communion of his blood, thus giving the dark god new life which will help to throw open the gates.