The Last Hieroglyph

by Clark Ashton Smith

  The story was set aside for three years. Smith described his current literary program in another letter to Derleth: “I am trying to finish a science fiction story, Secondary Cosmos, which I began two years ago; and may also add a third tale, The Rebirth of the Flame, to my Singing Flame stories. Other tales, begun and thoroughly plotted, are The Alkahest, and Sharia: a Tale of the Lost Planet. The last-named has great possibilities, I feel. Recent revisions include The Maze of the Enchanter, which I have pruned by more than a thousand words for re-submission to Esquire and W.T.”3

  Smith didn’t do much with the story after its completion. He admitted that “None of the present fantasy markets (Unknown is the best, I guess) appeal to me greatly….”4 He later told Derleth that he had given the story to agent Julius Schwartz Jr. to sell, but did not know the story’s status.5 “Double Cosmos” remained unpublished until it was published in Robert M. Price’s fanzine Crypt of Cthulhu in 1983. It was included in SS.

  1. CAS, letter to AWD, June 28, 1934 (ms, SHSW).

  2. BB items 37 and 38.

  3. CAS, letter to AWD, August 1, 1937 (ms, SHSW).

  4. CAS, letter to Margaret and Ray St. Clair, April 21, 1940 (SL 330).

  5. CAS, letter to AWD, November 6, 1948 (ms, SHSW).

  Nemesis of the Unfinished

  This is the only instance where Clark Ashton Smith actually collaborated on a story.1 Don Carter was the husband of Natalie Carter, whose portrait of Smith appears on the back panel of the dust jacket of Smith’s Selected Poems (1971). The Carters lived in Bowman, California, a small community located just outside of Auburn, and were part of a small network of friends that helped Smith with gifts of clothing and food and the occasional odd job when he needed to earn some cash. “Nemesis of the Unfinished” was apparently written while Smith was recuperating at home from a broken ankle. An outline of the story under the present title (uncredited, but the handwriting is similar to that in known specimens of Carter’s handwriting) was found among Smith’s papers, so it appears that the basic idea of the story occurred to Carter (undoubtedly inspired by the boxes of papers kept at Smith’s cabin).2 Two different versions of this story exist (an early draft of the first version is dated July 30, 1947). The first version is complete, but the second version, which incorporates significant deviation from Carter’s proposed plot, appears to be missing the last page. This version is included in Appendix 6.

  1. “Seedling of Mars” was written from a plot provided by the winner of one of Hugo Gernsback’s magazine contests, while in the case of “The House of the Monoceros” and “Dawn of Discord” Smith gave completed stories to E. Hoffmann Price with instructions to do with them what he wanted; neither case involved the active interaction of two creative minds.

  2. For Carter’s outline, see SS 40–43, 273–275.

  The Master of the Crabs

  Weird Tales celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with its March 1948 issue. In preparation for this, Associate Editor Lamont Buchanan invited Smith to contribute a new story in May 1947.1 The idea for “The Master of the Crabs” may be found in the Black Book:

  A wizard whose legs are trapped by falling rock in a sea-cavern. By hypnotic will-power, he gains control of an army of crabs, and forces them to overpower ship-wrecked seamen and feed him with shreds of flesh torn from their bodies. Tale to be told by one of the mariners, whose companions have disappeared mysteriously. Locale: desert isle. Wizard had perhaps gone there in quest of lost treasure. Possesses own eternal longevity. Crabs turn on and devour him when he loses his mesmeric power.2

  This entry predates the story entry for “The Colossus of Ylourgne,” which was completed on May 1, 1932, so this story had a long gestation period. Smith wrote out a full outline of this story, which he called at first “The Crabs of Iribos.”3 (Smith may have been reminded of this story when he broke his ankle and was hospitalized for a time during that summer.) WT Editor Dorothy McIlwraith accepted the story that October and paid Smith forty-seven dollars.4 It appeared in the anniversary issue accompanied by a gruesome drawing by Lee Brown Coye. Smith included the story in AY.

  It was through “The Master of the Crabs” that Smith made a minor but real impact on modern pagan religions. Smith refers to an arthame in the story, which is a type of dagger used by ceremonial magicians. He picked this word up from his copy of Grillot de Givry’s 1931 treatise Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy. Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the Englishman who helped bring the Wiccan religion into the public realm, apparently read the issue of Weird Tales containing this story while he was visiting America and picked up the word, which he inexplicably spelled as athame. According to Ronald Hutton, “There is no evidence to explain Gardner’s omission of the ‘r’ in the word; perhaps he first heard it orally and guessed at the spelling, perhaps he decided to simplify it, or perhaps the error was in a source he was copying.”5 The surviving manuscript of “The Master of the Crabs” was severely scorched in the fire that destroyed Smith’s cabin in September 1957. The text from WT was collated with the surviving fragments.

  1. Lamont Buchanan, letter to CAS, May 7, 1947 (ms, JHL).

  2. BB item 42.

  3. This outline is too long to be included here, but it may be found in SS 148–150.

  4. See Dorothy McIlwraith, letters to CAS, October 3, 1947 and October 31, 1947 (ms, JHL).

  5. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999): p. 230.

  Morthylla

  Smith had one of his increasingly infrequent bursts of productivity in the autumn of 1953, completing two stories in the later part of September and beginning a third. One of these was “Morthylla”, “a tale of Zothique, concerning a pseudo-lamia who was really a normal woman trying to please the tastes of her eccentric poet-lover.”1 Smith had worked out its plot in the Black Book:

  Valzain, the young voluptuary, weary of feasting and debauchery leaves the house of a friend when the revels are at their height, and wanders forth from Umbri, city of the Delta, to an old necropolis on a mound-like hill half-way between Umbri and Psiom, the twin city. Here, in the moonlight, he meets a beautiful being who calls herself Morthizza, lamia and spirit of the tombs. Half-believing, half-disbelieving, in his weariness of mortality and of fleshly things, he falls in love with her. They meet night after night. His desires begin to revive, but she tantalizes him, refusing corporeal contact. One night, as playful proof that she is a vampire, Morthylla wounds him in the throat with her teeth, saying that this is the only kiss permitted between them. But, as proof of her love, she will not suck his blood. Valzain pleads for a further consummation. Wistfully, she tells him that he must know and love her as she really is before such a consummation would be possible. A day or two later Valzain, visiting the twin city Psiom, sees a woman in the street who has the very features of Morthylla. A friend tells him that she is Beldith, a woman of pleasure, who lately has been absenting herself from the orgies of Psiom, and has been seen going forth at night toward the old necropolis that was once common to both of the cities of the Delta. Valzain, disillusioned, realizes that she is identical with Morthylla, and that she has been playing a game with him. He seeks her out and taxes her with the deception, which she readily admits, at the same time asking if he cannot love her as a mortal woman, since she, all the time, had loved him as a man. Valzain, fearful of the revulsion of the flesh which, for him, has ensued from every carnal contact, tells her sorrowfully of his disenchantment, and without reproaches, bids her farewell. Later, unable to bear the tedium of existence, he commits suicide, stabbing himself in the throat with a sharp poignard at the same spot were Morthylla’s teeth had wounded him. After death, he finds himself at that point in time where he had first met Morthylla among the tombs, and the illusion begins to repeat itself for him, presumably with no danger of an awakening. The woman Beldith grows old and grey among the revelries of Psiom; but her intimates note that she seems often absent-minded between the wine-cups; and her young l
overs sometimes complain that she is distrait and unresponsive in their arms.2

  A poetic couplet that was entered a few entries before the above-quoted entry would appear in hindsight to have provided the germ of this idea:

  For in your voice are voices from beyond the tomb.

  And in your face a shadow risen from vast vaults.3

  The Relationship of Valzain and Famurza resembles that of CAS and his mentor, George Sterling.

  Weird Tales snatched this story up and published it in the May 1953 issue. The magazine would soon be reduced to digest size and would cease publication in little over a year. Smith included the story in TSS. Only a couple of pages of the typescript for “Morthylla” survive among Smith’s papers at JHL; most of the typescript perished in the September 1957 fire that destroyed Smith’s cabin.

  1. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 371 [misdated 1953 in this appearance]).

  2. BB item 99.

  3. BB item 94.

  Schizoid Creator

  Psychoanalysis and psychiatrists were not subjects near to Clark Ashton Smith’s heart. In his 1934 essay “On Fantasy” he listed “Freudianism” as one of the chief forces working against the imagination in modern life, and in a 1949 symposium on science fiction he offered the quip “Sometimes I suspect that Freud should be included among the modern masters of science fiction!”2 One of his epigrams states that “One can postulate anything, and people will accept it as religion, philosophy—or psychoanalysis.”3

  Smith gave full vent to his contempt for Freud’s minions in one of two stories he wrote early in the autumn of 1952, “Schizoid Creator.” As he described the tale to L. Sprague de Camp, it was “a fantastic satire that mixes black magic with psychiatric shock-treatment (the patient being a demon!).”4 The “black magic” to which Smith refers is the use of the names of God to compel entities both demonic and divine to do the sayer’s will. Two consecutive items in Smith’s Black Book illuminate this further:

  According to Jewish tradition, when Lilith refused to yield obedience to Adam, she uttered the Shemhamphorash, the ineffable name of Jehovah, and, by virtue of this, instantly flew away. This utterance gave her such power that even Jehovah could not coerce her.

  According to widespread belief, the gods have kept their true names secret but other gods, or even men, should be able to conjure with them. To the Mohammedan, Allah is but an epithet in place of the Most Great Name; and the secret of the latter is committed to prophets and apostles alone. Those who know the Most Great Name can, by pronouncing it, transport themselves from place to place at will, can kill the living, raise the dead to life, and work other miracles.5

  Smith refers to “Shem-hamphorash, the nameless name,” in his last poem, “Cycles.”6

  The image of Satan caressing a flayed girl is a homage to his mentor, George Sterling. In his poem “A Wine of Wizardry” Sterling included the following lines:

  But Fancy still is fugitive, and turns

  To caverns where a demon altar burns,

  And Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,

  Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed,

  Ere Lilith come his indolence to greet,

  Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed

  In chains so heated at their master’s fire

  That one new-damned had thought their bright attire

  Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance

  So terribly that brilliance shall enhance.7

  Smith submitted the story to Fantasy Fiction, a digest-sized competitor of Weird Tales that emulated the model of Unknown Worlds, where it appeared in the November 1953 issue. Only burned fragments survive of the typescript for this story, and what parts can still be read would seem to indicate that it was an earlier draft—there are differences with the published text, but the differences are cruder and less polished than what finally appeared. The current text is based upon the Fantasy Fiction text.

  1. PD 38: “In short, all pipe-dreams, all fantasies not authorized by Freudianism, by sociology, and by the five senses, are due for the critical horse-laugh.…”

  2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 11, 1949 (SL 358).

  3. CAS, The Devil’s Notebook. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Don Herron (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990): p. 71.

  4. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 370). This letter is misdated 1953.

  5. BB items 21 and 22.

  6. CAS, “Cycles.” In The Wine of Summer: The Complete Poetry and Translations Volume 2. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008): p. 642.

  7. George Sterling, “A Wine of Wizardry.” The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003): 150–151.

  Monsters in the Night

  Anthony Boucher (pseudonym of William A. P. White [1911–1968]) had given Clark Ashton Smith’s first two Arkham House collections favorable reviews, so when he became one of the founding editors of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he would appear to have been a reliable new market for Smith’s stories. Boucher even lived in nearby Berkeley, California, where Smith visited frequently to visit his friend George Haas, with whom Boucher was also acquainted.

  Smith submitted “Thirteen Phantasms” to Boucher late in 1951. Boucher rejected the story on the grounds that it was too realistic, but took the time to offer Smith these observations, which unfortunately survive only in a burned fragment:

  Personally I’ve been enjoying & admiring your fiction for twenty years & more—particularly that individually mordant humor that you display in such items as “The Monster of the Prophecy” and “The Weird of Avoosl Wutthuquan.” (I just checked & see that I misspelled that… but you’ll admit that’s doing well from memory!) But your type of highly elaborated & remote fantasy doesn’t [burned] to be what our readers want. They prefer a more simple treatment, a closer impingement of the fantastic [burned] people. [remainder burned]2

  He concluded the letter with an invitation to drop in for a drink if Smith were ever in Berkeley.

  Smith must have experienced a sensation of déjà vu at reading this: it was as if Farnsworth Wright were speaking from the next world. When he next submitted a story to F&SF, it was with a newly written story that lacked many of his characteristic rhetorical flourishes.

  “Monsters in the Night,” one of Smith’s most frequently anthologized stories, was the next story that Smith submitted to Boucher. He rejected it with these observations: “Sorry, but—nice idea, this werewolf-vs-robot, but I’m afraid it tips itself to the reader too early, & is too bluntly resolved.”3 Boucher responded in a more positive manner after Smith rewrote the story and fixed those defects: “With a very slight change at the end, we want to accept ‘Monsters in the Night.’ Please advise if you approve of the following, which would replace your last two paragraphs on page 4: [. . . ] We think this is quite an effective windup to a highly unique story.”4 Smith agreed to the change, leading to a story contract, a check for forty-five dollars, and the story’s appearance in the October 1954 issue of F&SF (under the title of “A Prophecy of Monsters,” which was obviously a nod by Boucher to one of his favorite Smith stories).5It was collected posthumously in OD.

  Since Smith readily agreed to Boucher’s suggested changes, and since he had a history of being open to such suggestions, we have retained the published ending. For the curious, here is what Smith originally wrote:

  “Who—what—are you?” quavered the werewolf.

  “I am a robot,” said the stranger.

  Several different drafts exist of this story. Our text is based upon the typescript dated April 11, 1953 on which CAS had crossed out “Monsters in the Night” and had written in its place “A Prophecy of Monsters,” along with “To Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “1100 words.”

  1. See FFT pp. 61

  2. Anthony Boucher, letter to CAS, December 6, 1951 (ms, JHL).

  3.
Anthony Boucher, note to CAS, April 18, 1953 (ms, private collection).

  4. Anthony Boucher, letter to CAS, May 17, 1953 (ms, JHL).

  5. Robert Mills, letter to CAS and attached legal contract, June 2, 1953 (ms, JHL).

  Phoenix

  August Derleth invited Clark Ashton Smith to contribute a story to an original science fiction anthology, Time To Come, that he was editing for Farrar, Straus and Young. Smith wrote a new story based upon a plot idea he had jotted down in the Black Book. Entitled “Phoenix,” it described “An expedition sent from the earth to the extinct sun, for the purpose of rekindling it by means of atomic fission. The expedition is trapped by the tremendous gravity of the dead, solid orb but accomplishes its purpose, after sending back to earth a rocket containing reports, messages, etc.”1 He completed the story sometime in September 1953 according to the typescript presented by Smith to George Haas, which was consulted for this text. It was collected posthumously in OD.

  1. BB item 81. The title itself may be found at item 78.

  The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles

  Smith had entertained the idea of writing additional adventures of Satampra Zeiros when he plotted out a story in his Black Book that he called both “The Ancient Shadow” and “The Shadow from the Sarcophagus,” but the story never progressed beyond that stage.1 “The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles” was begun in October 1952, when he mentioned in a letter that he was working on the story,2 but it was apparently not completed until just before April 25, 1957, when he announced its completion and submission to F&SF.3 Anthony Boucher delivered the news of its rejection in person, probably when they gathered together at George Haas’ home in Berkeley, but he typed out a letter putting forth his criticism: “It’s good to see the return of Satampra Zeiros after 26 years; but I’m afraid I can’t feel that THE THEFT OF THE THIRTY-NINE GIRDLES is really fantasy. The only fantasy element lies in its Hyperborean setting, & the events themselves, in your words (p 6), ‘though extraordinary, are not beyond nature.’ Result: an entertaining crime story in an extravagantly exotic setting rather than, strictly, a fantasy.”4 Smith submitted the story next to Fantastic Universe, but apparently editor Hans Stefan Santesson failed to appreciate its subtle humor. Donald A. Wollheim accepted the story for Saturn Science Fiction, a short-lived digest magazine, which published it under the less imaginative but also less suggestive title “The Powder of Hyperborea” in its March 1958 issue. It was collected posthumously in TSS.