Cthulhu still lives…again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more…but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places…Who knows the end? What has risen may sink and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
Although my own stories followed a somewhat different pattern in their approach to the macabre and were less cosmic even when exploring the mysteriously multidimensional aspects of Time and Space or the legend-haunted avenues of forgotten civilizations, it is not too surprising that one of these early tales, The Hounds of Tindalos, became incorporated into the Mythos. I have always felt it was an undeserved honor, but our long friendship made it more or less inevitable, particularly since the elaboration of his Mythos by others appealed irresistibly to the whimsical, boyish side of HPL’s nature.
Robert Bloch, who was also an early correspondent, contributed several chilling entities, and so did Clark Ashton Smith and two other Weird Tales writers. In The Shambler from the Stars, written perhaps a year before its publication in Weird Tales in 1935, Bloch not only makes HPL the central character (very much as I did in The Space Eaters) but links the Old Ones to several wholly fiendish entities of his own creation to which HPL himself subsequently responded with a sequel!
Smith’s Tsathoggua came closest to Cthulhu in frightfulness, but was otherwise quite different—a monstrous demon god not unlike those Indonesian effigies that adorn village huts, magnified a thousand times, and possessing far more inscrutable, universe-altering endowments. But he could ride comfortably, if hideously, on the cosmic winds generated by Cthulhu, and in all probability bowed to him as the Master.
My contributions to the Mythos were of assorted shapes and sizes, ranging from the tiny, flesh-devouring Doels, who inhabited an alien dimension shrouded in night and chaos, to the monstrous Chaugnar Faugn, whom only the suicidally inclined would have mistaken for a pachyderm. I also contributed one scenic vista, the mysterious, perpetually mist-shrouded Plateau of Leng, and one forbidden book, John Dee’s English translation of The Necronomicon, which I placed at the head of The Space Eaters when that story first appeared in Weird Tales, but later omitted when the story was reprinted in The Magazine of Horror, fearing that my invention might take on an appalling life of its own and appear on the shelves of some unsuspecting and defenseless book dealer! (It has been rumored that the original Arabic text once thus materialized and only a mound of ashes was found between the book racks the following morning…)
HPL also incorporated into the Mythos more than one allusion to entities that Robert W. Chambers had depicted (with far less consideration for book dealers) in The King in Yellow, a theoretically non-existent volume having much in common with The Necronomicon. Virtually all myth cycles, fictional or otherwise, include these “fringe-level” borrowings, which but to a minor extent enter into the main body of the cycle. The contributions of other writers did not diminish the genius-inspired originality of the Cthulhu Mythos; in its major aspects it remains entirely Lovecraftian. But Lovecraft could take mythical names or references, sometimes tossed off without too much thought, and cloak them with an aura of awesome mystery. Conscious artifice of this nature had, I have always felt, no important bearing on the visions which Lovecraft could conjure up when he became wholly absorbed in his writing. Then his tremendous creativity took over, and mere artifice was swept aside by a total surrender to “dreams no mortal had ever dared to dream before.” At such moments cities hoary with age, crumbling into ruin on the planet of some distant star, echoed to his footsteps, and it was easy to picture him bending to examine some instrument of nonhuman science, dating back ten billion years.
CHAPTER THREE
There can be no doubt whatsoever that HPL was quite different in many important ways from his grammar school classmates of seventy years ago. While every man of great imaginative brilliance has displayed enough unusual qualities in childhood to have drawn attention to himself at one time or another, Howard was a bit more than just a highly imaginative and sensitive child; he was a youthful prodigy who could compose rhymed verse at the age of six.
If he astonished his teachers by being able to converse with them quietly like a small adult, he must have astonished his classmates even more. As a rule, only a miracle can spare this type of child from the bullying tendencies which are the worst aspect of what happens when children of a dozen different family backgrounds and genetic endowments are thrown together in one school. But in HPL’s case the miracle took place.
He often discussed his school days with me, and if any deep mental wounds with their residual scars had been inflicted upon him, the concealment of such wounds solely to spare himself painful memories would have been totally inconsistent with the candor which was as natural to him as breathing when he dwelt upon the past. The psychological trauma which Freud ascribes to buried childhood memories would have met a stumbling block straight off, if HPL had for a moment allowed himself to take psychoanalysis seriously. I doubt whether he had any buried memories at all that did not go back to his actual infancy, for from that period onward, every tormenting confrontation with reality he may have experienced would have remained for him indelibly inscribed as on the pages of an open book, readily accessible to total memory recall. And no psycho-therapeutic prodding would have been required to induce such a recollection.
There were two aspects of his character which were, I am convinced, as pronounced in him when he was very young as when I first met him. He possessed the sort of innate personal dignity and belief in himself that would have made a great many schoolboy bullies draw back, not always for ignoble reasons. Even the worst of bullies have a tendency, despite themselves, to respect this kind of high integrity. Howard also possessed indomitable personal courage. Any classroom bully who encroached to a serious extent on his right to prideful independence (and I can picture him as being compassionately tolerant of very minor infringements) would almost certainly have found himself confronting a detached, cool-tempered fighting machine that would have stretched him out on the floor in short order. Even if that particular bully had been ten pounds heavier with a longer reach, I am certain Howard would have prevailed with comparative ease.
Despite the “invalidism” which his mother’s over-solicitude to some extent succeeded in inflicting upon him, HPL possessed a certain measure of physical strength. It was so much in evidence in his later years that it could hardly have been absent in a child who never set about building his muscles in a systematic way to compensate for a “frailness” which I doubt he ever took as seriously as some of his early correspondents probably believed.
Actually, there was nothing frail about him, even though he did not enjoy robust health at any time in his life. He was, of course, totally unlike the roaring, Falstaffian sort of literary hero with a bone-crushing handclasp which Hemingway preferred to regard as super-masculine. But very few sensitive, creative artists of any real achievement appear to have been that type, and the list includes Poe and Joyce and Yeats and even what little we know concerning the personal attributes of Shakespeare himself. (All of the portraits of the Bard of Avon, whether authentic or not, suggest that the poet was no more Hemingwayesque in aspect than Shelley or Keats or Santayana.)
During his formative years, HPL engaged in many of the hobbies and enthusiasms commonly associated with boyhood. At one time he was a member of an alert group of youngsters who had built up an impressive sleuthing apparatus modeled upon the Burns Detective Agency, which at the turn of the century was the only investigative bureau that had acquired so nationwide a reputation that every twelve year old in America was familiar with its slogan: “We always get our man.” Or so Howard assured me, at least, since the agency was formed soon after the Civil War and thus preceded my birth by a few years! In any case, I was far too young to have been aware of what was taking place in that realm even as late as 1910, when Howard had long since abandoned his interest