“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 the 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 that 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? Aliester 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. Aliester 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 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 the 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 means ‘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 manuscr
ipt is known 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 Tomas 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 Johann Tritheim, Abbot of Spanheim. The accompanying letter contained a detailed and blasphemous interpretation of certain passages of the Book of Genesis. All of Wormius’s 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’s 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.
“The Necronomicon appears to have had a vast influence on both men. The character of Kelly’s scrying changed, which struck horror into the Dee household.”
“Scrying?” David was puzzled.
“Forgive me,” Calvin said. “The systems of magick now known as Enochian magick derive from the work of Dee and his seer Edward Kelly. Dee had a passion for discovering lost knowledge and spiritual truths. The method employed for these works was fairly standard for the time. Dee would act as the orator, directing fervent prayers to God and the archangels for 15 minutes to an hour. Then a scrying stone would be placed on a prepared table, and the angels were called to manifest a visible appearance. Kelly would watch the stone and report everything he saw and heard; Dee would sit at another table nearby and record everything that occurred. Kelly’s scrying technique changed when the two gained possession of the Latin translation of the Necronomicon.”
“How so?” David asked.
Calvin shrugged. “Kelly’s technique became more...hideous...monstrous in its nature. Crowley interpreted this as an abortive first attempt of an extra-human entity communicating the Thelemic Book of the Law. Very shortly afterward Kelly left Dee, who translated the Necronomicon to English. Contrary to Lovecraft, this translation was never printed. The manuscript passed into the collection of the great collector Elias Ashmole, and later to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.”
David perked up. “Does it still exist?”
Calvin shook his head. “I’m afraid Dee’s translation disappeared following a break-in in the spring of 1934. The British Museum suffered several burglaries and the Wormius edition was deleted from the catalogue and removed to an undergound repository in a converted slate mine in Wales. Other libraries lost their copies, and today there is no library with a genuine catalogue entry for the Necronomicon. In the mid 1930’s the few known copies of the Necronomicon just simply disappeared. It is believed that someone in the German SS government took an interest in obscure occult literature and began to obtain copies by fair means and foul.” He smiled ghoulishly. “It is believed there is a large wartime cache of occult and magickal documents in the mountains of Osterhorn near Salzburg that contains a copy of the Necronomicon. This may be connected to the rumor of a copy bound in the skin of concentration camp victims.”
David let this sink in. “You mentioned that the Necronomicon is supposed to be a history. What history is it supposed to be of?”
“Alhazred appears to have had access to many sources now lost, and events which are only hinted at in Genesis, or the Book of Enoch. Many of the legends he had access to are disguised as mythology in other sources, but are explained in great detail in the Necronomicon. It is also believed that Alhazred used magical techniques to clarify the past. Essentially, he believed that many intelligent species besides the human race had inhabited the Earth, and that much knowledge was passed to mankind in encounters with beings from ‘beyond the spheres’. He shared with some Neoplatonists the belief that the stars are similar to our sun and have their own unseen planets with their own life forms, but elaborated this belief with a good deal of metaphysical speculation in which these beings were part of a cosmic hierarchy of spiritual evolution. He was also convinced that he’d contacted beings he called the ‘Old Ones’ using magical invocations, and warned of terrible powers waiting to return to re-claim the earth. He interpreted this belief in the light of the Apocalypse of St. John, but reversed the ending so that the Beast triumphs after a great war in which the earth is laid to waste.”
“The Old Ones sound very Lovecraftian,” David said, nodding. “You’re sure Lovecraft never read the book himself?”
“Quite sure. I’m even pretty sure he wasn’t familiar with James Smith Long’s work at all. And you’re right, the similarities are uncanny. They parallel each other tremendously. It is clear that Alhazred elaborated upon existing traditions of the Old Ones. According to Alhazred, the Old Ones were beings from ‘beyond the spheres’, presumably the spheres of the planets, and in the cosmography of that period this would imply the region of the fixed stars or beyond. They were superhuman and extrahuman. They mated with humans and beget monstrous offspring. They passed forbidden knowledge to humankind, and they were continuously striving to seek a channel into our plane of existence. And do you know something else?”
“What?”
“This is virtually identical to the Jewish tradition of the Nephilim, the giants mentioned in Genesis. The word Nephilim literally means ‘fallen ones’. The story in Genesis is really only a fragment of a larger tradition, another piece that can be found in the Book of Enoch, which was never canonized in the Bible. According to this source, a group of angels sent to watch over the Earth saw the daughters of men and lusted after them. Unwilling to act individually, they swore an oath and bound themselves together, and two hundred of these ‘Watchers’ descended to earth and took themselves wives. The wives bore giant offspring, who then turned against nature and began to, and I quote, ‘sin against the birds and beasts and reptiles and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh and drink the blood’. That’s an exact quote from Enoch, by the way. The fallen angels taught man how to make weapons of war and cosmetics and enchantments, and astrology and other secrets. These separate legends are elaborated in later Jewish sources such as the Talmud, which makes it clear that Enoch and Genesis refer to the same tradition. The great flood described in Genesis was a direct response to the evil caused by humankind’s commerce with fallen angels, who were cast out and bound.”
David said nothing. He was letting this sink in. It was so overwhelming. “In Lovecraft’s fiction, cults are formed in an attempt to summon the Old Ones. Is this... is this possible for what we’re talking about?”
Calvin nodded. “Of course. The Necronomicon strongly hints that there is a cult, or group of cults, that worships the Old Ones and seeks to aid them to gain control of this planet. One of the tactics attempted by this cult is to breed human and Old One offspring that will then multiply and ingress into terrestrial life until the Old Ones return to their pre-ordained position.”
David was silent, letting this sink in. Calvin continued: “It is now generally believed by occult scholars that the Enochian system of magic Dee and Kelly came up with was directly inspired by those sections of the Necronomicon that deal with Alhazred’s techniques for evoking the Old Ones. Remember, the Necronomicon was primarily intended as a history
, and while it does provide some practical details and formulae, it is hardly a step-by-step beginner’s guide to summoning demons from beyond the gulfs of space and time. Dee and Kelly had to fill in many details themselves. It is believed that the scrying technique Kelly used was under the influence of the Old Ones. The very name of their system—Enochian—is a clue; it was inspired by the age-old traditions recorded in the Book of Enoch, and it was obviously Dee and Kelly’s intention to contact the Nephilim, or the Watchers. The manuscript of The Book of Enoch was lost until the late 17th century, so Dee would have had access to only a few fragments quoted in other manuscripts. Alhazred most likely had access to the Book of Enoch, as it was current throughout the Middle East in the eight century.”
“This Enochian stuff,” David said, “is it very common now?”
Calvin nodded. “Crowley translated the Enochian system in the early part of this century. He includes it in his Book of the Law. Others have attempted their own translations as well. Anton La Vey, the late founder of the Church of Satan, included a translation in his book The Satanic Bible, which can be found in any Borders bookstore.” Calvin smiled. “Hardly typical of what is supposed to be a system of forbidden magic, eh?”
“What is the difference between this James Smith Long’s work and that of Lovecraft?” David asked.
“Long utilizes the Necronomicon in its original meaning,” Calvin said, choosing his words carefully. “It isn’t mentioned very often, but in the one definitive book on the Necronomicon, Long’s work is quoted quite significantly. Obviously the author of the piece had gotten a hold of a copy of From Beyond, because he was able to describe the stories from it quite vividly. From what I could tell, the work is vastly different. Lovecraft merely hypothesis the Necronomicon, and comes quite close to its contents. His Cthulhu Mythos is pure invention, whereas Long’s work is based on truth. As is The Watcher from the Grave.”
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