"The Winfield Heritance"

by Lin Carter

Published in Weird Tales #3, 1981

In the 70's, you couldn't be a fantasy fan and not run into ol' Lin Carter.  He was everywhere.  Of course, a large part of the reason for that is there just wasn't that much fantasy fiction until the late 1980's and beyond.  So if you were into fantasy, you read the best of what was out there.  And once that was exhausted, you read Lin Carter.

Carter was, to put it bluntly a "pastchieur", as in, one who writes pastiche, as in - a guy who wrote stories in imitation of other authors' style.  So Carter cranked out stories by the truckload in the style of Lord Dunsany, Lester Dent, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard (especially), and, yeah, H.P. Lovecraft.

He wasn't an especially good one, either.  While his stories were generally competently written, and, yes, he mastered and crammed them with all the tropes of the authors he was imitating, plot and story-wise they were generally unmemorable.  Like a meal that leaves you hungry an hour later.  Carter just didn't have the imagination that fired his influences.  The best he could do was knock off imitations that would have rated as second- or third-rate tales even if they had issued from the more potent hands of those he admired.

(Lest anyone think I'm being too harsh here, let it be noted that, as an editor for Ballantine, Carter led the "Adult Fantasy" series that brought back into and kept in print many major talents in the genre.  And for that he deserves credit)

Anyway, "The Winfield Heritance" is ultra-typical of Carter in Lovecraft mode.  Winfield Phillips, a grad student and scholar at Miskatonic University (of course), travels to Durnham Beach, CA in 1936 to attend the funeral and close off the affairs of a mysterious, ill-reputed uncle Hiram Stokely (whom he, in fact, never actually met). Ol' uncle Hiram was known to take part in "forbidden practices" and read "books that should never have been read" (in this cynical age, such suggestions take on even more outre, though funnier, implications than Carter intended). 

Well, it's a chance at a vacation and to resume his friendship with a cousin, Brian Winfield, with whom Winfield (Phillips) became acquainted, but who broke off the friendship under parental orders (presumably something to do with "forbidden practices").

Well, W.P. arrives in California, and he and his "boyish" cousin head out to uncle Hiram's estate, passing along the way a place called "Hubble's Field", notorious as a burying ground going all the way back to Native American tribes - the local injuns called the field "The Place Of Worms".

Of course, the town is run down and un-friendly.  Of course the house is big and spooky.  And of course, while looking for some late-night reading material, W.P. finds among his uncle's collection of lit such titles as Night Gaunts and The Soul of Chaos by Edgar Henquist Gordon, Azathoth by Edward Pickman Derby, The People of the Monolith by Justin Geoffrey and Black God of Madness by Amadaeus Carson.  Oh, and I forgot to mention the painting by Richard Upton Pickman they find in one of the rooms!

Oh, and before anything else happens (well, nothing has happened actually), they find a secret room!  And there - a copy of the English Necronomicon and Livre d'Ivon in Gaspard DuNord's own hand!!

(Did I ever tell you I found a Beatles butcher cover in a crate of old records some lady dropped off at a store I worked at?  It was all 60's rock stuff in bad shape.  "I just want to get rid of them!" she said)

Later, while the two are sitting around contemplating the potential $$$ value of all this shit, Brian decides to get into the Necronomicon for some light reading.  He helpfully rattles off a passage which included (of course) a laundry list of Cthulu-ian beasties names, and something about The Red Offering.and how the Yuggs, the Worms of the Earth will give material rewards to those who will perform The Red Offering for them.

You mean - uncle Hiram was offing people as sacrifices and getting paid for it!?  Well, yeah, that's what our masterminds figure - explains the more recent bodies found in Hubble's Field, don't it?  

What to do, what to do, they wonder.  I know!  Explore the secret room some more!  And guess what? The secret room leads to another secret room!!  And that leads to a flight of stairs deep into the earth.  What to do?  Go down them of course!

There they find a king's ransom in jewels laying around.  Brian, determined fellow that he is, charges on down the stairs ahead of W.P., who's put off by a foul stench as they descend further.  Brian calls out that he's gotta come see this ... then screams.  W.P. sees something "huge and wet and white" `surge', and then there is no more.  As he descends further, he sees that the stairs lead down into a pool of black slime.  And he can see the "agitated ripples" that tell him something big just went under.

W.P., of course, runs away and calls the police.  Who "probably" think he's nuts, but apparently don't bother to pursue the thing further (odd since, with Brian gone W.P. now inherits the entire estate - money, forbidden library of rare books, subterranean tunnel full of jewels, pool of black slime - the whole shebang).  He goes back to Santiago, CA and holes up in Brian's apartment, where's he's tormented by dreams in which voices tell him that he has made The Red Offering and must make it again, and rattle off more laundry lists of Lovecraftian beasties in case any were missed the first time around.  W.P. is beginning to think maybe he should move into uncle Hiram's old place...

Well, there you have it - like I said, Carter-Cthulhu in a nutshell.  He trots out every cliched plot and trope and prop ever displayed in the Derleth-Lovecraft "posthumous collaborations" old Arkham family with a name connecting them into Lovecraft characters; disreputable and now deceased relative (little or un-known to the narrator or protagonist of the story), run-down town full of unfriendly locals, inheritance including lotsa money, creepy old house and a ton of those ultra-rare black magical books, Cthulhu-ian name dropping.  All in the service of some "shocking" revelation - that uncle Hiram was a creep who got paid by some of the beasties to off people for them.  

Not exactly earth-shattering or potent, as revelations go.  Usually the Great Old Ones or whathaveyou had bigger plans - but maybe by 1981 their ambitions had diminished (oh, the story is set in 1936...).

This is paint-by-numbers fiction,  And it goes nowhere.