The Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos had nothing to do with this tender tale of a boy and his corpse-like friend. Still, Mr. Smyth’s letter raised some interesting observations, and David made a note in his day timer calendar to pay the gentleman a visit during his trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which he was scheduled to make in a week.
VI
From the Los Angeles Times—July 6, 2000
SIGNIFIGANT ARCHEOLOGICAL FIND IN SOUTH AMERICA STUNS SCIENTISTS
(AP) Anthropologists will no longer refer to the Americas as the “New World” if carbon dating performed on artifacts found among the ruins of a newly discovered temple are proven to be reliable. According to sources, the initial results from carbon dating on the objects show them to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000–75,000 years old. “This is nothing short of astonishing,” claims Dr. Edward Danzig, Professor of Anthropology and Ancient Civilizations at The University of California. “We have reliably placed Homo Sapiens on this earth 30,000 years ago. To see evidence such as this, that demonstrates modern man was creating things of this magnitude over 30,000 years before most scientists believe he was on this earth, much less in this part of the world, is incredible.”
Dr. Edward Danzig is referring to statues found in the pyramid-like structure uncovered deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle in Brazil. The statues, all carved from stone, and all measuring twenty feet high, five feet wide at a weight of two tons apiece, depict a strange, hideous beast that can only be described as— “ (Continued page 34)
VII
Calvin Smyth didn’t leave a phone number with his return address. David Corban squeezed his eyes shut to alleviate the pain of a raging headache that was rocking his brainpan. He’d gulped two Excedrin with his last swallow of United Airline’s complimentary soft drink, but the headache persisted. The commuter flight from Philadelphia’s International Airport to the tiny Lancaster airport was bumpy with rough tail winds. The pilot announced they were preparing for landing. David settled down in his seat to battle the headache away as the plane prepared to touch down on the runway.
The headache was gone by the time he made it through the terminal gates. After collecting his luggage, snaring a rental car, and driving to his hotel in town and checking in, he retrieved Calvin Smyth’s address again. He lived on 1982 N. West End Avenue. The meager street map in the Lancaster Directory was no help. David drifted downstairs to the hotel lobby and ended up parting with three dollars and fifty cents for a more detailed Lancaster Street map.
He went to his car, unfolded the map and found North West End Avenue easily; it was near Franklin and Marshall College, about a five-minute drive through town. David started the car and set off down the highway to pay a visit to Mr. Smyth.
Rousing Mr. Smyth proved to be not difficult at all. He answered David’s knock with a curious, warm look. His features grew friendly when David introduced himself. The old man’s eyes lit up as if he was seeing an old friend for the first time in half a century. At eighty-nine years old, Calvin Smyth was in remarkably good shape for a man his age. Stooped with age, his eyes were lively, his movements smooth. He had a nervous tic along his right side from Parkinson’s disease, but other than that he looked healthier than a lot of people David’s own age. He opened the door of his modest Victorian home and bade David to come in and make himself comfy. After serving his young guest a cup of coffee, the two men sat down in the living room, where David began trying to steer the conversation toward a comfortable position from which to hurl questions at the older gentleman.
Mr. Smyth grew immediately interested when David mentioned the biography he was researching on Justin Grave. He leaned forward in his chair, his bright blue eyes dancing with delight. “I suppose that’s why you paid me a visit then?”
“In a way, yes,” David said, stepping carefully to the main question. “You don’t mind if we talk a little about Justin, do you?”
“Oh no, not at all.”
David produced a mini-cassette recorder from his black leather satchel and began recording. Calvin related the usual litany; he had known Justin since the second grade, they’d become friends when they were fourteen and he confessed to the many boyhood activities they’d done together. David nodded at the appropriate times and coaxed the story along by asking key questions. Justin had been an only child, and both parents had passed on in the early forties. Calvin thought there might have been an uncle in Ohio somewhere that had a big family, which would be the deceased writer’s only living heirs, but he wasn’t sure (David made a mental note to look into this further since Justin’s royalties were currently held in trust). “Justin’s folks were pretty solitary people. If they had relatives, they surely never mentioned them.”
While Calvin never aspired to be a writer, he loved reading ghost and horror stories, something his childhood friend shared. Only Justin had the story-telling bug in him as well, which eventually led to their not spending as much time together once Justin’s writing began to take off. “A writer is a solitary person,” Calvin said. “And Justin was no exception. All he did was write. He had no time for family or friends, much less girls. The few girlfriends he had were, pardon the expression, ‘easy-pickings,’ if you know what I mean.”
But Calvin had noticed a change in his old friend right around the beginning of 1939. He’d moved into a home on the outskirts of the city, and quickly became a recluse. “Justin got that place easy and quickly. Maybe too easy. It was almost as if some unseen force had guided him there. I knew those kind of living conditions weren’t to his liking; he had always liked the bustle of a community, with restaurants and theatres within walking distance. Something simple, but modest. So when that place came up for rent, I was surprised he took it. It was a good six months after he moved in that I saw him.”
Did Calvin ever visit him there? “Justin always gave an excuse for me not to come over,” Calvin recalled. He sipped his coffee languidly. “Either the place was always a mess, or he wasn’t going to be in, or he was asleep or something. The one time I did go there, he’d already finished Watcher and he looked bad.” Calvin’s face grew somber at the memory. “He looked over his shoulder as if someone was watching him. And he spoke very carefully, as if he was being careful of what he said.” Calvin frowned. “It also looked like he’d broken his nose at one point and never got it fixed. He had a noticeable bump right here.” He rubbed the bridge of his own honker. “I asked him what happened, and he said he’d gotten drunk and fallen down the stairs. I asked if he’d seen a doctor about fixing it and he said he couldn’t afford it. And then he changed the subject and wouldn’t talk about it again.”
Calvin related Justin’s state of mind during the hearings and the lawsuit filed against him by Shudder’s publisher. “He hit the bottle real hard, becoming a real alcoholic. Most magazines wouldn’t take his work anymore, and he started writing under pen names again. He looked bad, the worst he’d ever looked in his life, and I told him that maybe he should see a psychiatrist. He refused, and six months later he joined the army and was shipped overseas to fight Hitler and his SS.”
The talk continued for nearly three hours. Calvin related what eventually happened to Shudder’s publisher: he was found dead of multiple stab wounds in a New York City brownstone. The film producer who turned Watcher into celluloid was killed in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, and the film’s director eventually landed a spot in the Atascadero loony bin. He committed suicide two years later by gouging out his own eyeballs. David found all this extremely fascinating. What became of the actors who starred in the film? Lugosi’s story was a matter of public record, and the other actors had been little known. Calvin had done his homework years ago. “All of them were dead by the mid-fifties,” he stated matter-of-factly. “The actress that played opposite Shane Towers, the lead actor, was murdered by a jealous boyfriend. Shane himself died of a drug overdose shortly after the film was shot, and two others died of heart attacks a few years later.”
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“Kind of reminds me of what happened to Poltergeist’s alumni,” David murmured. Calvin got the hint and nodded. Four of the actors from that film had passed away mysteriously, or been murdered. Strange, but surely coincidental.
After the war, Justin moved to Los Angeles and tried to remain anonymous. He found work as a foreman in a factory, and tried moving back to his hometown in 1950. It didn’t last long. He took off for Florida six months later and lived on the streets of Miami for two years. After several stints in jail and alcohol rehabilitation centers, he saw the light and found Jesus. His sudden conversion to Christianity came as a surprise to Calvin, who revealed to David that Justin had always been an atheist. But his friend was glad Justin wasn’t “finding salvation in a bottle” anymore. Justin picked himself up with the meager cash from the sale of Watcher to film, and never made a cent beyond the initial advance. He married a girl from his church two years later, and the couple moved to Tampa Bay where they opened a hotel.
“He eased up on the religion stuff as the years went on,” Calvin said. He had brewed more coffee and they sat in the living room with fresh, steaming mugs. “And he started writing again in the sixties under the old name again, mainly for the mystery magazines. Nobody seemed to notice he was publishing fiction again. He’d been forgotten entirely, but it didn’t bother him.”
Eventually an enterprising young fan would discover that the Justin Grave writing cozy mysteries for Alfred Hitchcock’s, Ellery Queen’s and Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazines was the same writer who wrote all those grisly horror stories for the pulps. The fan contacted Justin via one of the magazines, and a correspondence ensued. The fan persuaded Grave to return to the horror field. Grave’s first published horror story in almost thirty-five years, “Sleep No More,” appeared in Whispers three years later. More stories followed in a briefly revived Weird Tales, and in another little magazine called Weirdbook. Cloak of Darkness & Others appeared two years later, and once again Grave was back writing what he loved the most.
David knew the rest of the narrative by heart, having read Grave’s recent work and meeting the writer himself at various conventions; a string of successful paperback novels, a slew of short stories in the leading horror and fantasy magazines of the day—Twilight Zone, Night Cry, The Horror Show, and his old alma mater Weird Tales (resurrected yet again and so far still going strong) were only some of the publications his work appeared in. What he’d been unaware of was Grave’s past and the circumstances surrounding The Watcher from the Grave.
Now David popped the question that had been on his mind since he’d gotten Calvin’s letter. “You mentioned in your letter to me that part of the inspiration for Watcher was a Dr. John Dee, as well as the myth of several lost civilizations. Can you tell me a little more about that?”
Calvin heaved a big sigh. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “Are you familiar with ritual magic at all? Aleister Crowley, the Order of the Golden Dawn and the like?”
David shook his head. “Not really.”
“What about ancient Jewish myth or biblical mythology?”
“Only what was pounded into me in Catholic school.” David grinned.
Calvin sighed again and leaned forward. He managed a smile. “I take it you are pretty familiar with Lovecraft?”
“I am,” David said, his next question popping out of his mouth automatically. “And that’s the other thing I wanted to ask you about. You mention in your letter that the Necronomicon is actually referred to in a piece of fiction over fifty years before Lovecraft began using it in his work. What do you know about this?”
“It all ties in together, trust me,” Calvin said, taking a sip of coffee. “To give you the short version, the Necronomicon, according to Lovecraft, does not exist. However, the Necronomicon according to Dr. John Dee does exist.”
David blinked. “Say again?”
Calvin leaned forward. “The Necronomicon is not a myth. It is very much real. But the Necronomicon that you know of, that Lovecraft wrote about, is far from the real thing. I have my suspicions that Lovecraft heard about some of the particulars from his wife, Sonia Greene, back in 1921 or so, but then—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” David said, his heart beating hard. “Are you telling me all this Cthulhu Mythos stuff is real?”
Calvin smiled. “Not at all. Why don’t I start at the beginning?”
Which he did.
It was a fascinating tale, one that David found hard to believe. But the more Calvin spun the story out, the more it all began to make sense. After all, don’t all myths and legends have some kind of basis in facts?
“Let me begin with Lovecraft,” Calvin said, reclining in his chair and addressing David like a professor addressing a student. “But first, some brief back story. Aleister Crowley was a student, and some say, a master of the occult. One of the things that no doubt happened is that Crowley read Dee’s translation of the Necronomicon. I say this because it was Crowley who later translated and adopted Dee’s Enochian Keys into his own Law of Thelema. He probably read the Necronomicon while researching Dee’s manuscripts because there are too many passages in his Book of the Law that read like a transcription of passages in that translation. Anyway, Crowley himself never mentioned the Necronomicon in his works. I suspect it was an embarrassment to him when he realized the extent to which he had unconsciously incorporated passages from the Necronomicon into his own Book of the Law.
“But in any event, Crowley was in New York in 1918, where he was trying to establish a literary career. He was contributing to Vanity Fair and other magazines, and it was at a lecture when he first encountered Sonia Greene, who had literary ambitions of her own. Crowley described her as one of the most beautiful women he’d ever met. As we know from Crowley’s reputation with women, he wasted no time with her. They saw each other on an irregular basis for some months.
“In 1921 Sonia Greene met Lovecraft and it was in that same year that Lovecraft wrote ‘The Nameless City,’ where he first mentions Abdul Alhazred. The following year he mentions the Necronomicon in ‘The Hound.’ In 1924 he and Sonia married.”
David interrupted the narrative with a question. “So he found out about the Necronomicon from Sonia?”
“That’s what is believed,” Calvin answered. “We don’t know exactly what Crowley told Sonia Greene when they were seeing each other, and we don’t know what she told Lovecraft. But knowing that Sonia and Howard connected in so many ways philosophically, and in ways relating to literature and such, it’s only too easy to picture them talking one night and Sonia mentions some of the ideas she learned from Crowley. She wouldn’t even have to mention Crowley by name; she might have simply mentioned that she’d heard of this book called the Necronomicon, made mention of some of what it contained, and Lovecraft’s imagination could have come up with the rest.”
David nodded. From what he knew about Lovecraft it was very possible. Lovecraft would write that he’d invented the name Abdul Alhazred when he was five years old, but he could have simply confused the name with the intense dreams of the Arabian Nights he’d had at that early age.
“So the long and short end of it is that Lovecraft’s fictitious Necronomicon is based on a real book called the Necronomicon.” David mused.
“That is correct,” Calvin said, his blue eyes dancing with amusement. “Not much is known of its author, Abdul Alhazred, who Lovecraft later dubbed ‘the Mad Arab’ for his tales. Abdul wasn’t mad, at least as far as we know, but he was probably rather eccentric. Also, unlike what Lovecraft wrote in his mythos stories, the Necronomicon was not a book of spells or a grimoire of ancient black arts. It was conceived as a history, and hence, a book of things now dead and gone. An alternative meaning of its name is ‘the book of the customs of the dead’.”
“Wow,” David said, leaning forward in his chair. This was really interesting.
Calvin continued. “The book was written in Damascus in 730 A.D., by Abdul Alhazred. No Arabic manuscript is know
n to exist. A Latin translation was made in 1487 by a Dominican priest named Olaus Wormius, who was a secretary to the Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. It’s likely the original Arabic manuscript of the Necronomicon came into his possession during the persecution of the Spanish Moors.
“Anyway, it must have been incredibly risky for Wormius to translate and print the Necronomicon during that time. It must have held an obsessive fascination for him, because he was finally charged with heresy and burned after sending a copy of the book to Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim. The accompanying letter contained a detailed and blasphemous interpretation of certain passages of the Book of Genesis. All of Wormius’ translations were seized and burned with him, although I suspect that at least one copy must have found its way into the Vatican Library.”
David stroked his chin, nodding. “I’ve heard they keep tons of old manuscripts and stuff there. That they keep secrets in there they don’t want the world to know.”
“Exactly!” Calvin said. “If they revealed them it would crumble the hold they have on the world.”
Calvin paused for a moment to take a sip of coffee, then continued. “About one hundred years later, in 1586 I believe, a copy of Wormius’ Latin translation surfaced in Prague. Dr. John Dee was a famous English magician at the time, and he and his assistant Edward Kelly were at the court of the Emperor Rudolph II to discuss plans for making alchemical gold. Kelly brought the copy from the so-called Black Rabbi, the Kabbalist and alchemist Jacob Eliezer, who had fled to Prague from Italy after accusations of necromancy.
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