When the Darkness Falls

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  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 which 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 that 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 from the fly leaf, it was issued in the year of Long’s death by a small publisher in London in an edition of 250 copies, of which most 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 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 never saw 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 Respectively,

  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 relenting 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 along 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 and 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 ritu
als, 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 for 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 from, 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 to the murders lead 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 to the Black God’s bidding and realized, too late, what the intentions of the cult really are: that he is 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.

  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 partake in a week.

  VI

  From the Los Angeles Times—July 6, 2000

  SIGNIFIGANT ARCHEOLOGICAL FIND IN SOUTH AMERICA STUNS SCIENTISTS

  (AP) No longer will geologists refer to the Americas as the “New World” if the carbon dating performed on the artifacts found among the ruins of a newly discovered lost temple are any indication to be proven reliable. According to sources, the initial results from carbon dating on the objects prove to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000–75,000 years old. “This is nothing short but astonishing,” claims Dr. Edward Danzig, Professor of Anthropology and Ancient Civilizations at The University of California said yesterday. “We have reliably placed Homo Sapiens on this earth 30,000 years ago. To see the evidence such as this, that demonstrate 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 the 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 by 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 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 for 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 in 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 me 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 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.”