Sargasso #2

by Gafford, Sam

  I swung, left to right, cobra-quick. The blade parted his neck with a whisper, and my follow-through cast a thin line of blood outward over the walls, a line of it just above Danaë—a red rain to rival the gold.

  I remembered then, from some strange depth within me, a section of The Golden Bough that I had read as a youth. Frazer spoke of the divination rites of savages: barbarous rituals wherein man or animal was sacrificed with organs spread across rough-hewn stone altars, so that the future might reveal itself in the arrangements of blood and tissue. I looked at the quivering pyramid of intestines at my feet and saw, in that structure, a ruin of my own making—initiation through barbarism.

  From where I stood, and the corpses of the Martins lay, I could see no one. The act had been quick, silent. I tossed the blade to the side and looked at Danaë for what must have been the final time. She was as I found her, nearly thirty ago, in Vienna: immaculate and radiant. There was nothing left for me but to enter the belly of the beasts, to venture into their store and bring an end to it, to everything. I grabbed a gallon of lamp oil from a cabinet beside my desk and dropped my security gate. I snapped the key off in the lock and strode, without hesitation, into BacoNation. I dropped their gate too, and similarly buggered the lock with a key retrieved from a lanyard found on Eliot. I splashed the oil over the shelves, clothes, and carpet and upended the still active griddle onto the largest puddle.

  I’m told the store caught quickly; I was as well. They pulled me from an airport queue without much commotion; I had been about to board a flight bound for Austria. My lawyer has mentioned my mental state and my confessions. I disregard him. It is my hope, you see, that they will hide me away. I wish to be locked away in perfect solitude, preferably somewhere high. It is there that she will find me; she will come as the rain, my goddess, Danaë.

  The Burning Ship

  By Phillip A. Ellis

  The prison hulk is burning off the shore;

  a word of burning flame, a speech of smoke

  hangs upon the sea’s horizon, mute

  about the lives that form its fettered tallow.

  The hollow words of priests and preachers echo

  in the quiet silence of the shore. The moorings

  of the damned hulk are little more than chains

  and manacles that keep the sheep unblemished.

  The gaolers had escaped, and watch from safety,

  huddled in rum and blankets, thanking god

  that none unworthy of that death had perished:

  the prison hulk is burning off the shore.

  Dust and Atoms: The Influence of

  William Hope Hodgson on

  Clark Ashton Smith

  Clark Ashton Smith (courtesy Scott Connors)

  By Scott Connors

  When Clark Ashton Smith read William Hope Hodgson’s novel The Night Land, the resemblance of Hodgson’s epic tale of a humanity besieged by outside forces on a sunless earth to his own stories of Zothique, undoubtedly occurred to him, although so far no letters confirming this have come to light. This has not prevented others from stating outright that The Night Land was the inspiration for Zothique. For instance, in a discussion of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun novels, Peter Wright stated in passing that “Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique cycle, a series of stories [that were] influenced, at least in part, by William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land” (97). Darrell Schweitzer was less hesitant when he asserted that “We can see the origins of Zothique in The Night Land” (9). Unfortunately, as with those who believe that Robert W. Chambers’s sinister play The King in Yellow was the inspiration for the Necronomicon, questions regarding what Smith read, and when did he read it, make or break such a hypothesis.

  It has long been known that Smith read Hodgson’s novels on loan from H. C. Koenig, when his precious Hodgson first editions circulated among the members of the Lovecraft Circle. That Smith was appreciative of Hodgson’s work is also beyond question: In his review-essay “In Appreciation of William Hope Hodgson,” CAS singled out The Night Land for special praise:

  In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land. Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy. (Smith, “In Appreciation,” 46–47)

  Until recently, this is all that we knew about Smith and Hodgson.

  During the editing of Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, a number of Smith’s letters were not included because of limitations on space, and Hodgson is discussed in a few of these. Hodgson is first mentioned in a postcard to H. P. Lovecraft postmarked 23 July 1934: “Will send on shortly some books by W. Hope Hodgson, which H. Koenig loaned me and said to forward to you.” A little over two months later, the following appears in a letter from CAS to August Derleth dated 29 September 1934: “I sent you a couple of books the other day, pursuant of instructions from the owner, H. Koenig. The Night Land, I believe, is to be forwarded at your leisure to Lovecraft. It is a strange and remarkable book; and the author, W. H. Hodgson, is certainly a man of high and authentic genius.” From this we can ascertain that Smith read Hodgson’s novels for the first time during the late summer of 1934.

  Since the first tale of Zothique, “The Empire of the Necromancers,” was completed on January 7, 1932, over two years before Smith read The Night Land, it is clear that Hodgson’s novel, while it certainly impressed CAS, could not have provided any inspiration for his stories of that doomed land. By the time Smith had read Hodgson, his production of short stories for the pulps was showing marked signs of slowing down due to a combination of family matters and a growing disillusionment with the capriciousness of magazine editors and the poor taste of a particularly rabid type of fan. Smith would complete no further stories for the remainder of 1934, and would complete only three tales in 1935. Is it possible that he found inspiration in Hodgson for another story?

  This writer believes that he did. The Night Land was not the only novel of Hodgson’s that CAS found to be of exceptional merit. It was The House on the Borderland that he thought to be “probably the most sustained and least faulty” of Hodgson’s novels. He praised it for its “profound and pervasive familiarity with the occult:

  Hideous phantoms and unknown monsters from the nightward gulf are adumbrated in all their terror, with no dispelling of their native mystery; and surely such things could be described only by a seer who has dwelt overlong on the perilous verges and has peered too deeply into the regions veiled by invisibility from normal sight. (Smith, “In Appreciation,” 46)

  A recent re-reading of The House on the Borderland revealed a number of similarities between Hodgson’s novel and a Clark Ashton Smith story that was completed within six months of his first reading. I refer to “The Treader of the Dust,” which he finished on February 15, 1935 but probably had been conceived or begun sometime earlier. During a recent re-reading of The House on the Borderland, it was noticed that there are several points shared in common between Chapter XV (“The Noise in the Night”) and XVI (“The Awakening”) of Hodgson’s novel and Smith’s short story.

  There are significant differences between the two works. These chapters in Hodgson’s novel depict a cosmic vision of the end of the universe, while “The Treader of the Dust” tells how a reclusive scholar into occult matters accidentally summons a “hideous phantom from the nightward gulf” that accelerates the aging of his home, his manservant, and finally himself, until all that remains is dust.

  Dust, of course, occurs throughout these chapters of The House on the Borderland. Consider the following:

  I glanced away, round the room, and now, for the first time, noticed how dusty and old the place looked. Dust and dirt
everywhere; piled in little heaps in the corners, and spread about upon the furniture. The very carpet, itself, was invisible beneath a coating of the same, all pervading, material. As I walked, little clouds of the stuff rose up from under my footsteps, and assailed my nostrils, with a dry, bitter odour that made me wheeze, huskily. (Hodgson 100)

  Or this:

  As I glanced about, it seemed to me that I could see the very furniture of the room rotting and decaying before my eyes. Nor was this fancy, on my part; for, all at once, the bookshelf, along the side wall, collapsed, with a cracking and rending of rotten wood, precipitating its contents upon the floor, and filling the room with a smother of dusty atoms. (Hodgson 101)

  Compare this with the following from Smith’s tale: “The aspect of sheer, brittle, worm-hollowed antiquity which had manifested itself in certain articles of furniture, certain portions of the mansion, was no more than the sudden revealing of a covert disintegration that had gone on unnoticed by him in his sedulous application to dark but absorbing researches) (“Treader” 137). Furthermore, both Hodgson and Smith employ similar imagery to describe the disintegration of matter. Referring to the atomic theory of Democritus, and not the modern theory of atomic structure, Hodgson writes that “fresh atoms, impalpable, had settled above that mixture of grave-powder, which the aeons had ground” (106). Smith, on the other hand, uses simile to describe “a fine gray dust like a powder of dead atoms” (“Treader” 139).

  The decrepitude of the furnishings is reflected in the faces of both Hodgson’s narrator and Sebastian when they look in a mirror. First, Hodgson:

  Instead of the great, hale man, who scarcely looked fifty, I was looking at a bent, decrepit man, whose shoulders stooped, and whose face was wrinkled with the years of a century. The hair — which a few short hours ago had been nearly coal black — was now silvery white. Only the eyes were bright. Gradually, I traced, in that ancient man, a faint resemblance to myself of other days. (100)

  Then, Smith:

  And it was this same application, with its unbroken years of toil and confinement, which had brought about his premature aging; so that, looking back into the mirror on the morn of his flight, .he had been startled and shocked as if by the apparition of a withered mummy. (“Treader” 137–38)

  Despite the poor condition to which time has reduced the furniture, both Hodgson’s and Smith’s characters find a chair that can bear their weight: “I . . . saw my old chair. The thought of sitting in it brought a faint sense of comfort to my bewildered wretchedness. [. . .] I turned, with a great effort of will, and made towards my chair. I reached it, with a groan of thankfulness. I sat down” (102). Compare with Smith: “Afterward—how long afterward he could not tell—he found himself sitting in the high chair before the lecture on which The Testaments of Carnamagos lay open. Dimly he was surprised that the seat had not crumbled beneath him” (“Treader” 140).

  Movement is difficult for both protagonists: in Hodgson, the narrator found that “Each step that I took, seemed a greater effort than the one before” (102). This is attributed to the thickness of the dust. John Sebastian, in contrast, is paralyzed by fear of what he has unknowingly summoned: “Again he felt the impulse of flight: but his body was a dry dead incubus that refused to obey his-volition” (Smith 141).

  The most striking parallel between The House on the Borderland and “The Treader of the Dust,” in this writer’s opinion, is the fate of their respective companions: Pepper, the dog of House’s narrator, and Timmers, John Sebastian’s manservant, in “Treader.” In both cases all that remains is a mound of dust. (Hodgson 99, “Treader” 140 ).

  This is not to say that there is no cosmicism in Smith’s story. The climax of the tale involves the narrator experiencing a literal and personal apocalypse, both in the meanings of a revelation and of a judgment, as the crumbling structure gives way to vistas of time and space as sweeping as in any of CAS’s other stories or poems:

  Then he realized that the room was not wholly dark, for he could discern the dim outlines of the lecturn before him. Surely no ray was admitted by the drawn window-blinds: yet somehow there was light. His eyes, lifting with enormous effort, saw for the first time that a rough, irregular gap had appeared in the room's outer wall, high up in the north comer. Through it a single star shone into the chamber, cold and remote as the eye of a demon glaring across intercosmic gulfs. Out of that star - or from the spaces beyond it - a beam of livid radiance, wan and deathly, was hurled like a spear upon Sebastian. [. . .] Then, through the aperture of ruin, there came something that glided stiffly and rapidly into the room toward him, along the beam. The wall seemed to crumble, the rift widened as it entered. [. . .] It was a figure no larger than a young child, but sere and shriveled as some millennial mummy. Its hairless head, its unfeatured face, borne on a neck of skeleton thinness, were lined with a thousand reticulated wrinkles. [. . .] The legs, with feet like those of a pigmy Death, were drawn tightly together as though confined by the swathings of the tomb; nor was there any movement or striding or pacing. Upright. and rigid, the horror floated swiftly down the wan, deathly gray beam toward Sebastian. [, , ,] He felt that his veins were choked with dust, that his brain was crumbling cell by cell. Then he was no longer John Sebastian, but a universe of dead stars and worlds that fell eddying into darkness before the tremendous blowing of 'some ultrastellar wind. (“Treader” 142)

  Smith’s vision differs from Hodgson in two ways. First, it is more personal: John Sebastian, the protagonist of “The Treader of the Dust,” is not a detached observer but a horrified, if still passive, participant in the events that he witnesses. Second, Death is an integral component of Smith’s vision; as Fritz Leiber observed of him, “Death in all its phases [. . .] seems to be his chief inspiration and theme” (72).

  It was not unusual for Clark Ashton Smith to find inspiration in favorite works of fiction. For instance, we know that “The Nameless Offspring” was suggested by a reading of Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (Selected Letters 145), while “Genius Loci” was written not long after a reading of Algernon Blackwood. These readings stimulated his imagination so that he wrote not pastiches but original work that reflected well both on Smith and on the works that so fired his imagination. William Hope Hodgson can be numbered among those writers whose imaginations helped to fuel that of Clark Ashton Smith.

  Works Cited

  Hodgson, William Hope. The House on the Borderland. 1908. In William Hope Hodgson. Ed. S. T. Joshi. The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2014. 13–152.

  Leiber, Fritz. “Clark Ashton Smith: An Appreciation.” In In Memoriam: Clark Ashton Smith, ed. Jack L. Chalker. Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1963. 71–73.

  Schweitzer, Darrell. “Introduction.” In The House on the Borderland. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2005. 7–9.

  Smith, Clark Ashton. “In Appreciation of William Hope Hodgson.” Reader and Collector 3, no. 3 (June 1944): 7. Rpt. Planet and Dimensions: Collected Essays of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Charles K. Wolfe. Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1973. 46–47.

  ———. Letters to August Derleth. August Derleth Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society Library, Madison, WI.

  ———. Postcards to H. P. Lovecraft. Private collection.

  ———. Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors. Arkham House, 2003.

  ———. “The Treader of the Dust.” Weird Tales 26, no. 2 (August 1935): 241–46. Rpt. The Last Hieroglyph. Ed. Scott Connors and Ron Hilger. The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2010. 137–143.

  Wright, Peter. Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.

  And the Worried Waters Laughed

  By Charles Lovecraft

  (Remembering William Hope’s ocean tales)

  Of staring memories’ fixated glare,

  Converging sextants point out all the lost

  Pale
souls once shipped there, in their short-lived cost,

  Across the seven seas’ strange moon-like stare,

  The glimmering silver fare yet fierce to take

  Them down to Davey’s locker’s charmless board,

  To live, down there, amongst the seaweed horde

  And countless, unknown sub-aquatic quake.

  There gong forevermore those nauseous bells

  Which ring out seaweed monster treasure troves,

  The rustling under sea’s black nightmare groves

  Where dwell the undefined aquatic hells

  That vomit straight up from their black terrains

  What some do pray are belching, whale-like stains.

  ON THE SHELF

  William Hope Hodgson

  The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction

  Centipede Press, April 2014

  Hardcover, 734 pages, $60

  Edited and with an introduction by S. T. Joshi

  http://www.centipedepress.com/

  Reviewed by Sam Gafford

  The recognition of William Hope Hodgson as a major writer of weird fiction continues with the publication of this volume. A recent series, The Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction, debuted with no less than four hardcover collections by masters of the weird tale. In addition to Hodgson, the series launched with companion volumes by no less than Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft. That Hodgson was included with these august names is indicative of growing interest in the writing of this interesting and unique individual by readers and scholars alike.