"The Voice of the Beach"

 by Ramsey Campbell 

originally published Fantasy Tales #10, Summer 1982

Our Unnamed Narrator (Arrrrgghhh!! Another one!!!) is an author who lives alone, without a phone, in a bungalow along some English beach.  In summer, he invites a friend, Neal, to come for an extended stay.  It seems Neal has recently gotten divorced and had some kind of unspecified breakdown.  UN seems to suffer from migraines or some such as well.

The beach isn't actually all that pleasant and no one seems to go there, but Neal and UN poke around.  They find some odd little shells that should be too small to produce "seashell resonance" (yes there's actually an official name for that phenomena.  Please note before you go thinking "Wow! This Aycorn guy is really smart!" that I had to look that one up) - but as it happens they do.  Or something like it.  By the time they get back UN is feeling like crapola, but Neal wants to explore the beach further.  He's also got wind from some place about an abandoned village nearby that he'd like to check out.  They decide to do so tomorrow.  UN notices, disconcertingly, that beach seems glow, flickeringly, at night.  And that this flickering glow produces the effect of odd figures moving or dancing jerkily in the light.

They find the ruins of the village - now nothing more than big chunks of slate that form a kind of maze-like structure rising out of the sand.  In what might have been a cellar or basement, Neal finds an aged, fungus-y notebook.  The incoherent writings within make reference to the beach, the flickering lights, dancing, moving sands, the beach making you go places or sucking you in, etc.  UN dismisses it as mad ravings but Neal is fascinated and keeps studying it.  He spends more and more time exploring the beach and environs while UN spends more and more time suffering from sunstroke or heat exhaustion or just in general being unfortunate enough to be the main protagonist in a Campbell story - which anyone who's read enough Campbell knows is not really a good thing to be.

Somewhere, Neal learns that the abandoned town was called Strand, and that they seemed to be fleeing the beach for reasons they wouldn't discuss.  He claims to hear chanting in the sounds from the shells.  Neal gets weirder and more hostile and spends less and less time at the bungalow.  He talks about "patterns" ("when the pattern's ready it can come back") and the beach being some kind or alternate reality that was temporarily displaced by our reality, but is now reasserting itself and taking over.

The weirdness continues and UN can barely function.  Neal is supposed to call a doctor but doesn't (or does one come?).  UN sees what looks like him dancing on the flickering beach at night, buried up to his knees in sand.

Neal completely loses it and deafening, alien sounds come out of his mouth that sound like the odd sounds from the shells, only at massive volumes, then runs off into the night.  UN finally manages to follow him out, and finds himself walking among debris and pieces of Neal's clothes.  He realizes that the beach seems to be moving under him, the sand forming shapes (the debris are apparently not real but just shapes formed from sand - maybe), the weird sounds start up again.  He flees back to the bungalow. 

Inexplicably, he cannot bring himself to leave.  He dreams (or are they dreams) of Neal's face coming out of the wall, making the weird sounds again.  He starts to take long walks on the beach.  One day he sees the sands form themselves into what looks like Neal's face.  He too begins to contemplate "the pattern".  He realizes that the beach, or the entity he thinks of as the beach, is expanding.  One day it will encompass the world.

This is a difficult story to assess in my usual sarcastic terms. Campbell's intention was to tell a Lovecraftian tale without the usual name-dropping.  And he certainly has achieved that here.  The notebook and the abandoned village and its sketchy and unnerving history all echo Lovecraft tropes, and certainly this is as "cosmic" as "cosmic horror" gets.  One could also note that the beach entity has a certain resemblance to critters like Abhoth and Ubbo-Sathla.  

Campbell also cites it as the most successful of his Lovecraftian stories (c. 1982 anyway).  And I guess that depends on what you consider success to be in this case.

The story is difficult because Campbell is difficult.  Originally a devotee of HPL, he soon fell under the spell of other writers, especially Robert Aickman, a fine and celebrated writer of "strange stories", many of which could be rightly considered horror (but none of them even remotely Lovecraft-influenced).  From Aickman Campbell learned implication and runaway surrealism.  In Aickman's stories, bizarre events occur without explanation, and often the point of the story must be read between the lines.  The best of them are remarkable; the worst merely weird and obtuse.

Campbell can have the same joy and the same problem.  His characters, as Stephen King has noted, seem to walk around in a perpetual hallucinogenic trip, and everything is observed with weird and unpleasant metaphors - which may not be just metaphors.  Towards the end of "Beach" UN sees a discarded baby buggy ( or "pram", to our English cousins) with a pile of sand on its roof.  He sees the pile of sand open a sort of mouth shape at him.  He thinks this is an illusion.  But then again in the same scene he describes the debris turning out to be nothing but phony shapes made by the sand.  So what was hallucination and what was real?  

Moments like that make skimming a story like this impractical.  You need to read it.  And you need to read between the lines.  And sometimes the answers still won't be there.  At its best this can be entertaining - at is worst, infuriating.  The most chilling moment in a Campbell story is in a tale he now semi-repudiates called "Trick Or Treat".  A girl is haunted by a nightmare she had as a child of a grotesque, monkey-like face peering in her bedroom window at her.  Years later, she and another girl find themselves in a pit of horrors while searching for her friend's lost dog.  The monkey-like figure appears, and the girl's friend screams because she also recognizes it ("Oh no! The Monkey!").  Nothing more is said but the meaning is clear to us and the girl - the face at her window was not a dream.

Unfortunately, in Campbell's lesser stories and, too often, his novels, the neurotic protagonists continual bizarre interior monologues, the what-was-it, was-it-real and what-the-fuck-is-going-on tend to get tiresome.

There is one paragraph towards the end of the story, that for me articulates the nature of Lovecraft's greater stories very simply:

I was fleeing the knowledge, deep-rooted and undeniable, that what I perceived blotting out the sky was nothing but an acceptable metaphor.  Appalling though the presence was, it was only my mind's version of what was there - a way of letting me glimpse it without going mad at once.

Which is what HPL was saying as far back as "The Call of Cthulhu" after all. 

So in that sense, I suppose it is very successful as a Lovecraftian story.

On the other hand, I've read "Beach" twice sine the mid-80's and couldn't remember much about it.  Just a couple guys living on the beach and one goes nutso (which is essentially correct).  There are other Campbell stories that have stuck with me more and which I enjoy reading more, even if they are less "successful."  Something of a compromise score here, but:

"Herbert West: Reanimator"

 by H.P. Lovecraft   

originally published Home Brew, February-July, 1922  

Our Unnamed Narrator recounts his days at med school (Miskatonic U, of course), where he hooked up with his idol, one Herbert West, a froot loop extraordinaire who's big scientific goal was reanimate dead bodies.  Just cuz.  

The two have a lot of wholesome boys adventures, including stealing supplies from the U, grave robbing, stealing corpses from morgues, experimenting on said corpses (with varying levels of success), creating screaming zombies, burning down their secret lab, turning  the dean of the medical school (who has forbidden West access to cadavers since his experiments and theories are, after all, nuttier than a Planter's factory) - into a crazed, flesh-eating zombie serial killer (during a typhoid outbreak, no less!) (PS - despite the above West gets his medical license), helping cover up the accidental death of a boxer, reviving said boxer (who also becomes a flesh-eating zombie serial killer!), murdering a travelling salesman (yep, he gets experimented on, too), serving in WWI as a medic (not for patriotic or humanitarian reasons - just cuz it gives him more free bods to experiment on) re-animating body parts independent of their original owner (not least of which the head of an army major), and probably some other fun things I'm missing.

Eventually all of this catches up with West when a bunch of his old experiments show up one night, tear up his house and disembowel him.  Nontheless there's no evidence of same, and the police ain't buying UN's story...

Christ ... y'know a lot of people cite this p.o.s. as a fave but I can't see it.  True, it does have a hilarious "storyline" and the ludicrous gruesomeness of the whole thing is entertaining in its hysteria and cheerful buckets o' blood insanity.  Unfortunately, its barely even a story at all - more like a series of vignettes regarding the career of one very mad mad scientist.  I might add that the segment with the boxer ("Six Shots by Moonlight") contains some of the most disgusting racist crap HPL ever spun - far worse than the usually cited offender, "Horror At Red Hook" in this reader's unhumble opinion.  I can usually handle Lovecraft's gruesome racial views, however distasteful, but this one goes too far.  Stick with the Stuart Gordon movie.

"The Strange High House in the Mist"

 by H.P. Lovecraft  

originally published Weird Tales, October 1931

Thomas Olney is a "philosopher", which I guess is Lovecraft-ese for "consultant", or "unemployed unrecognized genius", who lives in creepy ol' Kingsport with his wife and kids.  

High on a cliff overlooking the town and the ocean is a strange house which the locals fear and whisper odd things about.  It's been there for generations.  Olney decides to investigate, and climbs the mountain to poke around.  

The house is small, almost medieval in construction, and does actually have an occupant.  It is also impossibly placed on the cliff edge.

The resident is a strange character, a young man with ancient eyes, who speaks of strange and ancient places and things - Atlantis, Poseidonis, gods older than "The Elder Ones".  Things get weird as Olney sees shadowed shapes around the windows.  There's a knock on the door.  Who shows up but the gods Neptune and Nodens, ancient sea deities.  Nodens takes Olney up on his shell-chariot and off they go.  They fly over Kingsport during a storm.

Olney comes back but seems more prosaic after his encounters.  He has lost interest in the mysteries of life and the universe, but seems content.

An odd little story, very Dunsany-influenced, but HPL's writing style is borderline obtuse here, and I'm not sure if he knew where he wanted to go with this one himself.  Atmospheric though.

"The Moon Bog"

 by H.P. Lovecraft  

originally published Weird Tales, June 1926

Denys Barry, a friend to our Unnamed Narrator, has made some scratch in Americay and returned to the Old Sod to rebuild his family's old castle, thus pleasing the locals by creating jobs and taking care of an eyesore.  But after awhile something scares `em off, and Denys has to bring in servants and workers from other parts.  He writes his old buddy UN and asks him to come visit, being as he's lonely out there in that not-so-crumbling-anymore Irish castle.

UN arrives to be told by the locals that the land has become accursed.  He finds on the property a bog, and an islet therein, where sits "a strange olden ruin" that "glistens spectrally".  

It seems Denys lost the workers when he decided to drain the bog, seeing it as nothing but wasted land.  But the locals believed a spirit lived in the ruin, and: "There were tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon, and of chill winds when the night was warm; of wraiths in white hovering over the waters, and of an imagined city of stone deep down below the swampy surface. But foremost among the weird fancies, and alone in its absolute unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him who should dare to touch or drain the vast reddish morass."

Denys laughed off their concerns, which isn't the sort of thing that will endear you to folks, let's face it. 

UN thinks it's all pretty silly, too.  Until he's awakened in the night by weird piping, and observes wispy, glowing figures dancing around the ruin in the moonlight, and a great glow coming from the ruin.  And the hired workers are joining in.

Not sure if it was a dream or what, UN is filled with dread the next day, increasing as he watches Denys prepare to drain the bog.  

That night he falls asleep and is awakened by a repeat of the previous night's supernatural partying, and something in their rites is bringing doom upon the nearby town.  UN does what anyone would do in such a situation - start praying to Graeco-Roman deities!! Next thing you know icy winds are howling in the windows, and he can hear Denys screaming.  He loses his shit and runs through the castle and outside and is eventually found wandering in the town.  

He recalls seeing, as he ran, that the formerly-devoid-of-life bog was now full of big frogs, "which piped shrilly and incessantly in tones strangely out of keeping with their size" (whatever that's supposed to mean).  A particularly big and ugly frog glances up, and UN follows its gaze to see what appears to be a shadowy figure, resembling Denys, writhing in terror or agony as it is drawn up towards the moon. "And now I shudder when I hear the frogs piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places."

This story is fun and long on atmosphere, but slight in content, and Lovecraft's worst stylistic excesses hurt it - I'm kind of a smart guy, but I had to re-read several lines to be clear what it was he was trying to say was going on.  Not to mention some pure silliness (yeah, I know when I'm scared shitless praying to Artemis is the first thing that comes to mind!).  Nonetheless, and story with big frogs as harbingers of doom, bogs, and moonlit faerie dances can't be all bad.

"Black Bargain"

 by Robert Bloch 

Originally published Weird Tales May 1942

Our Narrator works at a drug store as a pharmacist and soda jerk.  Mostly the latter.  And he hates his job.  One evening a sinister-looking dude shows up and has him put together some very suspicious stuff - aconite, belladonna, etc.  And asks his to to put it on his account.  Being in a sever state of not-giving-a-shit, o.n. complies.

Three days later Mr. Sinister, who's real name is Fritz Gulther, shows up dressed to the nines and pays his bill.  And invites o.n. for a drink.  There, o.n. tells him he knows what he's up to - black magic!!  No no no no no sez Fritz - its just medieval-type chemical recipes.  And he's used them to create a brilliant formula that netted him a great job at Newsohm, a chemical corp, and would o.n. like a gig as his secretary?  All of this is going promisingly till o.n. notices something odd - Fritz's shadow on the wall seems to be independent of him - it doesn't move with or quite match its originator.  When o.n. mentions this, Frtz threatens to bash his skull in.

But, Fritz is back the next day, apologizing and offering the job again.  He insists, insists he's not practicing black magic.  O.n. agrees to the job offer.  But again he notices Fritz's shadow ain't right.

Next day, o.n. goes to Gulther's office and finds a copy of De Vermis Mysteriis.  Gulther fesses up: yes he used black magic to get ahead, and yes he knows about the independent shadow.  And its growing more powerful.

As they talk, the shadow takes the place of Gulther.  O.n. shoots Gulther, but all that is left is an empty suit of clothes.

This little Bloch tale is more characteristic of Unknown, or for that matter, The Twilight Zone, then WT.  But nevertheless Bloch was a name by 1942, so his byline was good for sales.  This is Bloch in his mature mode; a lot of humor, a lot of misanthropy (I'm not sure Bloch wrote much after 1940 that didn't disparage current trends in fashion, slang, music and deportment - the old sourpuss!  And he was only 25 when he wrote this!), some dark and criminal doings, and (sometimes) elements of the supernatural.  There's nothing remotely Lovecrafty here, but the tale's done with gusto and it shows Bloch hadn't forgotten ol' Ludvig Prinn.  

"Death Is An Elephant"

 

by Robert Bloch 

Originally published Weird Tales February 1939

Our narrator works for the Stellar Bros. Circus.  Times being hard, the owner and o.n. go on a cruise trip to Asia in search of rare talent to bring in as star attractions for the show.  They come back with the Rajah of Jadhore, a little postage stamp in the Malaysia area (remember, 1930's maps) and his Sacred White Elephant.  And the High Priestess of the Temple of Ganesha who looks after the Sacred White Elephant.

Now the Rajah is a modern guy who wears suits with his turban, but the High Priestess is traditional to the core, and really weird, and smokin' hot.  And the Sacred White Elephant is actually silvery gray, seems to have an intelligence that's better than animal cunning, and hard-on against the world.  

And the Rajah has a warning.  The elephant, an incarnation of the god Ganesha, has a much darker side.  The roots of Ganesha lie in a much darker entity - Chaugnar Faun in Tibet, Tsathoggua in prehistoric times.  He's bad news, and the circus folks better watch it.

Well, bad luck starts hitting the circus and people start dying left and right.  And the Rajah confesses its the doing of the SWE and the High Priestess.  Finally having enough, he sacrifices himself to take them both out - spectacularly.  In the ring, of course!

A minor but fun bit of tongue-in-cheek horror from Mr. Bloch.  Interestingly, this one was missed by Lin Carter in the days when he put together the almost-definitive Mysteries of the Worm collection of Bloch's Cthulhu stories - perhaps because it was published under the psuedonym Nathan Hindin.  It's actually a sequel to an earlier (and better) Stellar Bros. Circus story, "Fangs of Vengeance", also published as by Hindin.  

In any case, this is no major loss to MoW, as its nothing too special as a story and any Mythosery is pretty minor.  It is certainly the only place I've ever seen Tsathoggua and Chaugnar Faun described as the same being, but Bloch always did play fast and loose with the arcana (and good for him, say I!).

"Sticks"

 by Karl Edward Wagner 

Originally published Whispers #3, March 1974

Colin Leverett is an artist, apparently associated with the pulps ala Weird Tales.  In 1942, he's on a fishing trip in the Adirondacks, preparing to ship off to the Big War.  

He comes across a collection of bizarre formations built from sticks, surrounding a collapsing, dilapidated old house in the middle of nowhere.  Inside the walls are covered with drawings similar to the stick formations.  In the darkened basement, he finds a mummified corpse.  A very lively one, which proceeds to grab him.  Leverett lashes out with his only weapon, an iron frying pan, bashes the thing's head in and runs for it.

Leverett goes off to war, never telling a soul about the encounter or the house.  He comes back, establishes himself as an artist.  Still haunted by his experience, his work becomes more morbid and disturbing, and his career falters.  He remains alone.

Now in the 1970's, he's contacted by an old pulpster colleague, Prescott Brandon, now head of an Arkham House-ish publisher called Gothic House, who's in the process of putting together a three-volume collection of the works of pulp horror author H. Kenneth Allard, an old fave of Lev's, who seems to be (unsurprisingly) Lovecraft-ish.  Brandon wants Lev to take off the gloves and really give him something potent, and different.  Leverett starts including the stick formations, based on sketches he made back in the old house in 1942.  Brandon is thrilled by the drawings and writes him asking where the stick formations came from.  Leverett finally tells the tale of finding the stick formations and the old house, though he omits the encounter in the basement, which he now has convinced himself was a hopeless derelict whom he killed out of shock and fear after being grabbed.

Brandon is intrigued by the stick formations and the story and relays the whole thing to a friend of his, an archaelogist named Alexander Stefroi who's studying ancient, bronze-age megalith structures found in the US, which he believes are connected to an ancient cult that worshiped "The Old Ones".  A cult that is not defunct, either, since these sites have been linked to a cult active in the 1700's, whose members had their bodies preserved on stone tables in anticipation of being revivified by the "Old Ones" upon their return.  Lev is now starting to freak out.

Lev makes his way back to the Adirondacks, but the house and the stick structures are all now gone, seemingly washed away in floods long ago.  He writes to Stefroi about his non-findings.  Stefroi writes back that he is disappointed but not surprised.  The Mann Brook area is "weird and wild country," he writes, "and doubtless there is much we shall never know."  Then he drops the bomb.  Three nuts broke into Brandon's office, and murdered him viciously. Police figure they were drug addicts, but Lev has his own suspicions.  Not long before, Brandon had written that he was getting some odd and uncomfortable inquiries about Lev's art, and particularly the stick formations depicted therein.

Soon after Lev receives an unexpected visit.  Dana Allard, a previously unknown nephew of H. Kenneth.  With a briefcase full of previously unknown Allard stories, which he intends to publish himself, due to Brandon's unfortunate demise.  And he wants Lev to illustrate this collection, too.  No holds barred. Lev naturally can't turn the job down.  He goes to work.

Still, the work, the stories, the revelations and the murder haunt him.  He begins to have strange dreams involving the old house, the sticks, and the mummified thing, which still has its head caved in from being whacked with that iron pan. He gets a frantic letter from Stefroi- it seems he has found not only a profound megalithic site, surrounded by stick structures, and a still-active cult connected to it.  He intends to make contact with them and interview them about their beliefs and practices.  

And then Stefroi turns up dead, crushed beneath a huge rock at the megalith site.

Lev is now starting to seriously freak out. Especially after he wakes from a nightmare about joining a human sacrifice and finds himself covered in blood and with a heart still in his hand.  Ack!!

Lev makes his way to Dana's place to tell him they don't dare publish the book.  The cult is obviously trying to suppress info and will doubtless come after both of them.  Dana tells him he's overwrought, plus its too late.  He's got pallets full of copies in the basement, ready to ship off tomorrow.  In fact, he'll autograph a copy.  Lev's head is still spinning when Dana hands him his signed copy, and he notices its been autographed "H. Kenneth Allard".  And H. Kenneth explains that, far from suppressing the book, Lev's illustrations will help to spread the power of the Old Ones by embedding it in the imaginations and consciousness of readers everywhere.  And he brings in a friend of his, Althol, whom Lev has met before, back before the war.

Ohmanohmanohman. My first encounter with Karl Edward Wagner was in a very essential anthology from 1980, Dark Forces, which introduced me to authors such as Dennis Etchison, T.E.D. Klein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Russell Kirk, Charles L. Grant, Manly Wade Wellman and, yepper, Karl Edward Wagner.  Not just their stories therein, but the lengthy story introductions that provided me with a reading list that carried me through the 80's.  It was the intro to Karl's story that made me aware of the Kane books (woohoo!) and "Sticks", which I then came across about a year later in the First World Fantasy Awards anthology which I found at my local library (woohoo!!).  "Sticks" is Wagner's most famous story and deservedly so, cause he hits every checkbox.  It's funny (lots of sly in-joke humor for the Weird Tales devotee), and legitimately spooky/scary in the best way.  Not in the grim, gruesome, I-think-I'll-go-kill-myself manner of too much modern horror fic (although at 40+ years old, I suppose "Sticks" isn't "modern" anymore), but in the way that, well ... here I was re-reading this the other day at lunchtime in my bright, sunlit house on a warm (80+) late spring day, with birds singing and kids playing loudly in the schoolyard behind my house, and I still felt the chill as the noose began to close in on poor Colin Leverett.  

What can I say - I wish there were more like this out there.  Wagner, at his best, was one of the best.  RIP.