"The Seven Geases"

 by Clark Ashton Smith 

originally published Weird Tales, October 1934

Lord Rabilar Vooz is a magistrate, cousin to the king hisself, in prehistoric Hyperborea.  One day he sets out with a band of retainers to the forbidding Eiglophian Mountains, a volcaninc range dominated by one Mount Voormithadreth, home of the hairy man-ape race called "voormis", which he intends to hunt.  The mountain is a spooky place, and it is said that many horrible things lurk in the caves under the mountains, including the bat-toad god Tsathoggua; but Rabilar, being a modern man, dismisses all that as mere superstition.

Rabilar, like the arrogant fuckwit he is, gets a bit lost in the mountains.  He also gets a bit of a surprise when he sees smoke rising from behind some tall rocks - as if someone were making a fire.  He follows the smoke and comes upon a nasty-looking old dude in a nasty-looking robe holding some kind of ceremony around a fire.

Mr. Nasty is a wizard named Ezdagor, and he's pretty put-out about Rabilar interrupting his ceremony.  So he puts Rab under a "geas", a spell which compels him to complete a task as ordered.  The task is to go into the bowels of the earth under the mountain, via the caves of the voormis, and offer himself as a sacrifice to Tsathoggua.  Rab tries to laugh this off but finds he can't laugh.  Or speak.  Or do anything other than make his way to his destination, guided by Raphthotis, Ezdagor's faithful archaeopteryx familiar.

Rab goes through the caves, harried by the voormis who manage to do only minor injury to him thanks to his armor, and makes his way down to Tsathoggua, who just ate and isn't interested.  So Tsath-o puts a new geas on him, sending him to Atlach-Nacha, who's too lazy to peel him out of hisd armor, and so geases him to go to visit the sorceror Haon-Dor, who also has no use for him and thus geases him to go see the Serpent People.  They too can't find a use for him, and geas him on to the Cavern of the Archetypes, where he is eaten several times by astral/mist-formed dinosaurs, before the archetypes, the original, evolved form of men (misty energy beings) insult him and geas him to go see Abhoth, who they consider all kinds of gross and therefore the only place for a turd like Rab.

Abhoth, a big slimy pool that breeds gross little monsters incessantly, also can't think of what to do with Rab.  So he puts on him the worst geas he can think of - sending him back to the surface world (well it's awful to Abhoth).

Rab starts his way back but falls through Atlach-Nacha's web and into a possibly bottomless gulf.  Poor Rab!

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek story, kind of a cross between a dark, surreal fairy-tale, and an EC comics story, had EC ever ventured into such territory.  You can almost hear The Old Witch or The Crypt-Keeper cackling away at the end.  Its kind of like a grim bedtime story you might read to your kid - if you had the Weirdest Kid in the World.  I know I would have dug it.  I leave it to you to speculate on what that says about me.

For all its tongue-in-cheek-ness, Smith's acidic prose and endless invention make this charming and a fun read.  And it its the one and only full appearance of Tsathoggua and Atlach-Nacha, both of whom I've always had a soft spot for.  I mean, come on - you can't beat a lazy toad-bat god!

"The Beast of Averoigne"

By Clark Ashton Smith

Originally published Weird Tales May 1933

Brother Gerome, "the humblest monk of the Benedictine Abbey of Pergion" happens upon an unusual sight late one evening - a red comet dropping off an unpleasant extraterrestrial passenger in the medieval French province of Averoigne.  It stands man-height, moves like a great snake, with glowing red eyes and bat-like teeth.  

Well this sets the abbey into a tizzy, but lots of praying and sprinkling of holy water avails them not, as first forest animals, then cattle, then people start turning up mutilated and drained of marrow.  Brother Theophile picks up the narrative, telling us of the extreme methods the monks go to (exorcism, mortification, taking their cell phones away) to stave off the monster - all to no avail either, as pretty soon its killing monks in their sleep right in the abbey!

Having no other viable options, the abbey turns to Luc le Chaudronnier, a sorcerer, who narrates the final third of the story.  Luc has a plan - to invoke the aid of demon that is imprisoned in a ring once the property of Eibon of Hyperborea -which among Smith-ian sorcerers would be the equivalent of bed sheets stolen from the Beatles hotel rooms.  He makes a deal with the demon that he'll free it, if it'll get out of Earth and take the Beast with it.  So the big night comes, the Beast creeps into the abbey, Luc smashes the ring, and out pops the demon which promptly hauls the snaky beast off to parts unknown - like real unknown.  Oh - but it leaves behind the body of Brother Theophile, who, it seems, it had possessed and was hiding in this whole time.  Poor Theo!

Woo this was a ride!  Very much a bit of Weird Tales fodder, it's Smith's purple prose that takes this pretty straightforward monster romp to a higher level, loading it with real atmosphere and dread, and Smith's trademark weird imagination.

 

"Dark Awakening"

 by Frank Belknap Long

originally published New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham House, 1980

Our unnamed narrator (one a' those again) has taken himself of to some New England beach resort for the summer.  One night in the hotel dining room he spots a hot number with two small kids and hope
s she doesn't have a husband back home.  The next day he scores by meeting her at the beach.  Her name is Helen Rathbourne, and she's a widow (score one for the narrator!).  And as it turns out, both her and the narrator have something in common - they both like to talk in bizarre pseudo-poetic dialog that sounds like nothing that would ever come out of a sane human mouth!  Example (Helen referring to her daughter): 

"Susan's quite different.  Most of her adventuring is done on `wings of bright imagining', as some poet must have phrased it some time in the past.  Perhaps far back in the Victorian Age.  I'm not good at making such lines up."

"I'm sure you're mistaken.  I read a great deal of poetry, both traditional and avant-garde, and I can't recall ever having encountered that particular line."

Uh-huh.

Well anyway while they're talking Johnny (Helen's son, who's about 8), gets bored and goes running off full-tilt boogie towards the washed-up, rotted wreckage of an old breakwater, neighbored by "swirling dark water" widening into a pool with a "deep, black, extremely ominous look".  He climbs up onto the dangerous pile while the unnamed narrator shouts ineffectively at him to come back down this instant.  The kid ignores the stuffy froot and instead seems to be mesmerized, staring off into the sea, until the boards give way and he falls into the pool.  U.N. heads in after him and fortunately finds him pretty quick.

Out on the sand Johnny recovers quite quickly and seems unharmed.  Except he's acting a little strange, explaining that he went out on the breakwater because something drew him out there - something he had to find, even though he didn't want to find it.  And whatever it is, he's got it clenched in his hand, so tightly that he actually can't even open his fist.

In any case, U.N. manages to get his hand open and retrieve the object, which turns out to be a pendant of some kind, an octopus with a grotesque human face.  U.N. is revolted but finds now he can't open his hand to throw it away.  His sense of reality starts to distort and he finds himself walking out into the sea, intoning "The Deep Ones await their followers ... the call has come (etc), and pronouncing some names familiar to all loyal Cthulhu Mythos fans.  

The next thing U.N. knows, he's waking up in a hospital bed.  Helen is there, talking to the attending physician, who not only share their bent for flowery speech, but is also very hip to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.  It seems a few weeks ago a bunch of freakjobs with waist-long beards were wandering around the beach area.  They've since disappeared.  And a man was found horribly mutilated, perhaps after an encounter with a shark (the pool is believed big enough to hold one).  The pendant, which Johnny pried from U.N.'s hand just before he went under, must have belonged to those neckbeards.  "Just suppose," Helen wonders, "Lovecraft didn't put everything he knew or suspected into his stories."  

As U.N. drifts off into a seconal-induced sleep, he hears Helen comment on how her daughter Susan seems to love him already ... and she can understand how Susan feels.  But he feels as if he is sinking into deep water, an octopoid face approaching, remembering his own strange, trane-induced words...

This was one of Long's last Cthulhu-influenced stories, and one of his last, period.  He had changed a lot in the years since the Weird Tales days.  Like some other stories of his published around the same time, "Dark Awakening" is a hundred times less pulpy, but a bit pretentious, yet is also evocative and has a strange, dreamy, wistful quality about it.  It isn't a great story.  Despite the Lovecraft-y prose, it works fine for the narrative, and the Unnamed Narrator is actually very believable.  Until he opens his mouth.  His (and Helen's, and Susan's, and the doctor's) dialog is ludicrous and weird.  It's hard to say what to make of this slight story but it stayed with me all these years since I first read it back in the early 80's.  So I think Long did something right.