"The Devouring of S'Lithik Hhai"

by John R. Fultz
originally published NetherReal, 1997

X'hyl is an alchemist of the serpent-men, millenia ago.  Recently, the serpent-men have been feasting on a race of stone-age primates known as the Voormis,  who worship the toad-like god Tsathoggua.  It should be noted that the serpent-men feast as snakes do - that is, they swallow their meals whole, and alive.

Noting that these Voormis are more intelligent and show more signs of civilization than expected, X'hyl has become concerned.  He is granted permission to wipe them out.

X'hyl and his soldiers witness a Voormis ritual which involves a baby sacrifice.  Horrified, they kill every Voormis in sight.  However, the statue of Tsathoggua comes to life, and eats X'hyl - whole and alive.

An amusing little nasty in the Clark Ashton Smith mode.

"Behind the Mask"

by Lin Carter

originally published Crypt of Cthulhu #47, Roodmas 1987

Bryant Hoskins, a junior librarian at Miskatonic U, becomes enamored of certain books in the restricted section - y'all know what I mean....

Particularly taken with the R'lyeh Text, he steals it from the library.  He effs off to a remote cabin, where he studies it while trying to fend off increasing disturbing dreams, usually involving the Plateau of Leng.

His superior reports the theft of the book.  The cops arrive at the cabin to find Hoskins a raving lunatic.

Again, a very minor story though darker and less corny than Carter's usual.

"The Fishers From Outside"

by Lin Carter

originally published Crypt of Cthulhu #54, Eastertide 1988

Winslow Sloan is hired as an assistant by a Prof. Mayhew and taken to Africa on an expedition to find Lost Zimbabwe.  They find it, and something called "The Black Stone", a ten-sided sculpted stone with disturbing figures on each face.  It's what Mayhew has been searching for.  

Back home in the States, Sloan gets more and more uncomfortable as Mayhew digs deeper and deeper into the usual literature.  One night, Mayhew sends him on a (truly) pointless mission so he can be free to try out a ritual related to the stone.  Sloan gets back in time to see Mayhew being eaten by shantaks.

Very minor stuff from Carter, but short enough to make it an enjoyable enough bit of pulp horror.

"The Double Tower"

by Lin Carter

originally published Weird Tales, Winter, 1973

Zloigm the Necromancer is a serpent-man, living millenia before the rise of humankind.  He's also an expert in his profession of collecting sorcerous information from numerous and arcane sources.

His studies direct him to a being called Cryxyxll, an alien life form on another world that takes the form of a sentient mold.  Determining that this thing has info he needs, Zloigm pursues various magical means to make contact.  Although he does so, the results are disappointing.

Zloigm goes for a walk in his garden, and finds things changed.  So, too, his remote tower home has also been transformed.  Soon he finds his mind has been transferred into the mold, while the mold-thing's mind now inhabits his own serpentine body.  No biggie, he thinks - he'll summon one of his magical servants to right things.  Only then he realizes that, as a mold, he has no mouth to speak the necessary magical words...

Had Lin been reading Harlan Ellison?

An amusing little Klarkash-Tonian pastiche.

"The Face From Below"

by Laurence J. Cornford

originally published The Book of Eibon, Chaosium, 2001

The magician Pnom agrees to visit the region of Asphogoth, which has been plagued by horrors.  It seems a giant invisible monster is tearing things up.  Pnom is able to see the monster, and kill it.

A man named Vash-Tsoth turns up.  It seems he's looking for his brother, who has vanished.  Pnom tries to conjure the spirit of the region to answer where the bro went.  He then learns that Vash-Tsoth's brother was the monster in question, and that Vash-Tsoth, too, is a monster.  Like a big pussy, he flees.

An amusing sketch in the Smith mode.

"Something in the Moonlight"

by Lin Carter

originally published Weird Tales #2, Zebra, 1981

Charles Winslow Curtis, M.D., goes to work at Dunhill Sanitarium in Santiago, CA in 1949.  There he is introduced to patient Uriah Horby, a seemingly normal and un-insane fellow - except that he fears the moonlight, and something that comes with it.  He's been studying the usual sources and trying various rituals to banish or at least keep at bay something that he believes comes with the moon.  Being a dip, Doc Curtis helps him gather materials from various libraries.

Unfortunately, the thing he needs most turns out to be illegible and cannot be copied.  Even more unfortunately, Horby isn't so nuts, and on a particularly moonlit night, something black and fishy rises from the nearby marsh and carries him off.

An entertaining bit of pulp spookery.  Nothing more.

"The Horror from Yith"

by Alan D. Gullette, Walter C. DeBill Jr., and Ted E. Pons
originally published in Nyctalops No's 8,9,10 - April 1973 - January/February 1975

Dr. Christopher Evans-Douglas, prodigy and mathematics genius, boogies off to a remote cabin in the mountains of Idaho, to study the occult.  it seems CED is plagued by strange dreams of an alien city and alien library, and bodiless, mental beings who inhabit synthetic bodies in the form of floating metallic spheres, which come with retractable limbs.

It turns out these are actually a branch of the Great Race of Yith, a branch which has reestablished itself on the home planet.  CED soon finds himself mind-exchanged, and takes up life as a sphere.

Two (colleagues? friends?) named Laszlo and Dunaway arrive in the mountains, guided by Guozar Aldecoa, in search of the cabin, and of CED for reasons that aren't clear.  Along the way they are attacked by a bigfoot, and by stone-age-y beast men.

 Eventually they find the cabin.  They find CED in a trance/coma.  An attempt to awaken him goes horribly wrong.  Meanwhile, back on Yith, the colony is attacked by Flying Polyps.

Laszlo and Aldecoa end up in the Australian desert, retracing the steps taken by Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee in "The Shadow Out Of Time".  They find that the Flying Polyp colony in the region is very much alive, and very, very active.

This story, like any round-robin, is messy.  Although it is coherent and the first two sections relate nicely to one another.  The third seems to come out of nowhere and have little connection to the first.  At least the writing styles mesh.

It also isn't especially good.  I've never been all that thrilled by the Great Race, and long sections detailing their life as metallic spheres is even less interesting than their life as super-limpets.  Only Aldecoa works as a character, and the bigfoot attack is absurd.  The final third is actually pretty atmospheric and gripping, but in the end its a somewhat pulpier take on the last portion of "The Shadow Out Of Time".    In all, competent but a bit pointless.

"The Scroll of Morloc"

by Lin Carter
originally published Fantastic, October 1975

Yhemog is a shaman of the Voormis.  Pissed-off after having been passed up again for high priest, Yhemog decides he is now an atheist, and wants to stick it to the worship of Tsathoggua.

The Scroll of Morloc is an artifact housed in the Temple of Tsathoggua, sacred to the rival deity Rhan-Tegoth and his followers, the Gnoph-Keh.  Yhemog decides to take the scroll and perform the ritual in the temple, thus to defile it.

He gets into the temple, frees the scroll, performs the ritual, and finds himself transformed into a Gnoph-Keh.  Temple guards, finding a Gnoph-Keh in the temple, kill it quick.

Another amusing C.A. Smith pastiche.

"The Changeling"

by Walter C. DeBill
originally published The Mlandoth Myth Cycle and Others, Lindisfarne Press, 2002

Matt Rourdan is sent by his employer, the mysterious Kazimerz Grodek, of The Observers, a group that studies paranormal events, to a rural farm where the Heinrich family is suffering a tragedy.  

Some time earlier, after some spooky events in the woods, their daughter Gretchen changed.  She became withdrawn, seemed unfamiliar with her own body, and began to live almost like an animal, even took to killing chickens and tearing up the house.

While Rourdan suspects psychological causes, he also remembers reading in Cthonic Revelations of a race of aliens, beings of pure mind, who could project themselves into, and take over the bodies, of other beings.  Some of the literature referred to these as "Dark Ghosts".    But that's not all.  Because there is a similar race of beings known as "Black Eddys".  It seems that the "Dark Ghosts" are (sort of) benign, whereas "Black Eddys" are cosmic scumbags.

Rourdan is sent back to interview the Heinrichs further.  He finds the situation has worsened considerably.  Gretchen is gone and the husband has been killed.  Also the Heinrich's mysterious cousins, Armand and Helen, and their aged aunt Jane, seem to have wandered off.  Cops are everywhere.

Rourdan decides to go nosing around Armand and Helen's house.  He is captured.  He finds himself tied up in a room, where Gretchen and another child are unconscious on the floor.  Like all good villains, Armand, Helen, and Jane explain their whole plan. It seems Jane is a Dark Ghost.  And the other kid is a clone of Gretchen they've been raising to house Dieghan, a fellow Dark Ghost buddy of hers.

But, things go horribly wrong. A Black Eddy gets into Gretchen2 (I think).  There's some shooting and death and cops and Gretchen1 is apparently okay, reunited with her mom, while Gretchen2, now housing a Black Eddy, runs wild into the woods.  Finally the Black Eddy moves on to a mountain lion.

This tale actually has some solidly gripping moments, especially towards the end.  Unfortunately, its marred by confusing narrative - I was left unclear about relationships, locations, and what, exactly, had happened.  DeBill's writing is good but unspectacular, style-wise, but he could use an editor.

It seems that DeBill's goal has been to create a kind of alternate Cthulhu Mythos, with similar entities, trappings, and concepts, yet with different faces.  The "Dark Ghosts" and "Black Eddys" are obviously very close to the concept of the Great Race, and yet are not the Great Race as we know them.  And yet, he makes reference to their origin as being the planet Yith.  This makes things less clear.  Not a bad story at all, but flawed.

"The Shadow From The Steeple"

by Robert Bloch

originally published Weird Tales, September 1950

Edmund Fiske, lifelong friend of the late Robert Blake (hapless protagonist of "The Shambler from the Stars" and "The Haunter of the Dark"), is not satisfied with the official explanation of Blake's sudden demise (the truth of which is recounted in "The Haunter of the Dark").  He begins an investigation.

Said investigation takes many years, as Fiske corresponds with many of those who had contact with Blake.  This includes no less than H.P.L. himself, who was also investigating, and published what he had learned and/or surmised as the aforementioned story "The Haunter of the Dark".

 His investigations continue to point to the riddle of Dr. Amrose Dexter, who tossed the Shining Trapezohedron, said to release the Haunter, into the Narragansset Bay.  Why there?  And why has a medical doctor, since the war, spent years apparently involved in atomic energy?  And why won't he answer any of Fiske's letters requesting a meeting?

After many failed attempts, Fiske arrives at Dexter's Providence home, and finds Dexter in residence.  He confronts Dexter about the Trapezohedron, Blake's death, and his apparent involvement in the development of nuclear weapons.  He quotes from Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth, sonnet XXI: Nyarlathotep

And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

...accusing Dexter of being no less than Nyarlathotep himself.  He pulls a gun, but at that moment Dexter switches out the light, revealing himself as a glowing, inhuman thing.  Fiske dies of a heart attack.

As Dexter's butler calls for the police, Dexter steps into his garden.  Two panthers, recently escaped from a zoo, enter the garden.  They fawn at his feet, licking his hands...

This tale, one of the last Lovecraftian stories that Bloch would ever publish, is one of his best.  By this time, Bloch had outgrown his HPLisms and had developed his own voice - straightforward, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but with an acidic tone that kicks in at the end and twists the knife.  The outcome may be a bit inevitable, but its richly satisfying all the same.

"The Sealed Casket"

by Richard F. Searight

originally published Weird Tales, March 1935

Wesson Clark, sneaky archaeologist, has inherited a small, sealed ancient casket from his now-deceased colleague, Martucci.

Martucci, it seems, had never had the courage to open it.  But Clark does.  Only to discover it contains a sinister occupant....

Pulpy fun with a certain M.R. James flavor which I kind of liked.

"The Grinning Ghoul"

by Robert Bloch
originally published Weird Tales, June 1936

Our (again!) unnamed narrator was once a prominent psychologist, but now finds himself an inmate of the same sanitarium he once committed patients to.

It seems not long ago he was visited by one Alexander Chaupin, a tall, thin man with some kind of skin condition and unhealthy pallor.  Chaupin claimed to be a professor at Newberry College.  He was troubled by disturbing dreams in which he was led into a vault at a local cemetery,  and from there into underground caverns and tunnels beneath the cemetery, where he witnessed ghouls engaging in sinister worship and other ghoul-ish activities.

What's more troubling for Chaupin is that he believed these dreams to be, not dreams, but actual events.  His readings in the usual forbidden tomes led him to believe that ghouls were real.  And a visit to the cemetery led to his quickly finding the vault and the tunnels, as seen in his dreams.

The u.n. of course believed Chaupin to be crazier than a shithouse rat, his calm, articulate and gentlemanly demeanor notwithstanding.  Figuring the only course of action was to prove that there was no reality to the tunnels or the ghouls, he accepted Chaupin's invite to meet at the cemetery on an upcoming evening.  

Upon arriving, Chaupin led him to the vault, into the tunnels, with which Chaupin seemed all-to-familiar, and finally to a meeting with the ghouls themselves, of which Chaupin was revealed to be one!!!!

This is very early Bloch - he'd have been about 19 when it was published - and, like his other early Mythos goodies, it shows.  The story is written in a heavily Lovecraft-Poe style - though I must add that Bloch pulls off Lovecraftian Purple with a certain campy charm.  

The real weakness is the plot, which really makes no sense.  Why would the ghouls reveal themselves to the doc in this manner?  What was the point?  Practical joking?  Do ghouls just like pranking squares?  I guess its possible.  I mean, they live underground and eat corpses so, having any number of other unnapealing practices seems unsurprising.  Clearly, a little more thought and plotting on Bloch's part could have alleviated the gaping lapse in logic that the whole story is predicated on.  Still, I won't deny it's a fun read.