"The Horror from the Depths"

by August Derleth and Mark Schorer 
originally published Strange Stories, October 1940 (as "The Evil Ones")

While dredging a lake for the Chicago World's Fair in 1931, workman turn up a couple of strange specimens -  what appear to be the arm or tentacle, and perhaps the head, of some large, unknown species.  Chief Engineer John Tennant, our narrator known only as "Sharp", and Prof. Jordan Holmes of the field museum study these odd things, and insist on calling them "fossils", even though there's clearly nothing fossilized about them.  They are however, boneless. Holmes also calls them "bloodless" even though they ooze greenish-black goop which, y'know, sounds like blood to me (sort of).  

One other interesting factor - the specimens change - throwing out new tendrils or tentacles, but only when no one's watching.

Sharp gets an urgent call one morning from Holmes, saying he's on his way to pick Sharp up and head for the museum - "something highly out of the ordinary had occurred.  En route, Holmes tells him that just before dawn, he received a phone call from the museum.  He was unable to remember what the caller said, but he remembers "someone screaming ... horrible babbling sounds ... a sucking noise ... someone whistling..."  Instead of doing anything about it there or then, he just went back to bed!

( Now, I have to stop here and note that I'm torn between pointing out that this is one of those hilarious lapses of logic and common sense that periodically occur when Derleth heads up to Lovecraft country - I mean, seriously - you get a call from the office at dawn with someone screaming, babbling sounds, sucking sounds, etc ... and you go back to bed???? But then again ... you get a call from the office at dawn with someone screaming, babbling sounds, sucking sounds, etc ... so fuck it, you go back to bed.  Maybe Holmes isn't so dumb after all.  Perhaps this is the Lovecraftian equivalent of Peter in Office Space leaving his answering machine on to take message after message from his insufferable boss)

Well, at the museum the guard is unsurprisingly dead and mangled.  And the glass case that had contained the specimens is shattered, and the specimens gone ... though they've left some bits of themselves behind for a touch of grossness.  Holmes and Sharp sit around thinking about what these gloop-monsters might actually be.  Then they meet rather pointlessly with some other eggheads in which everyone decides that they don't know what the hell is going on.  Meanwhile, another mangled body turns up in Grant Park.  Oops! 

They wander off to Grant Park and check out the crime scene with impunity, noting especially the weird giant tracks that come up out of, then return to, the lake. As a group, they decide the best thing to do is to just hope the beastie won't come out again, and they go back to work intending to forget the whole thing (what is it with these dudes?).  Sharp notes that "it was a relief to get back to work, to order men about" which tells you something about his idea of a good time.

Meanwhile, Holmes has been to the library (uh oh), the folklore and mythology section (yipes!) and guess what he found?  You got it - The Necronomicon - cue two-page explanation of the Mythos According to Derleth, complete with name-dropping! Holmes is now righteously freaked out, but Sharp tries to dismiss the whole thing.

Not fer long.  The night watchman Jackson calls Sharp that evening to tell him that "big shadowy things" are coming out of the lake - "should I call the police?" he asks.  People are dumber than usual in this story.  Sharp rushes over to take a look.

On the scene, he witnesses 8-10 big shadowy things over the lake.  And finds Jackson's mutilated body.  The cops show up and question him - he gives dishonest answers that sound even more far-fetched than the truth would.

Holmes shows up with a Latin volume, the "confessions" of a Roman named Clithanus which make reference to creepies sorta like what they seem to be dealing with, and how they were driven beneath the waters and sealed away using "blessed stars". Holmes has his eureka.  If they can just find those "blessed stars" - whatever they are!

Their nebulous plan is interrupted by the sounds of riot at Municipal Pier.  As they drive out, they hear a cacophony of screaming, laughing - but also snarling, whistling, and sucking sounds.  They are turned away by a phalanx of cops.

The next day there are reports of 22 dead on the pier, the sighting of the beasties, and an incident of mass hysteria and violence.  For no explicable reason, the local papers treat it all as something of a joke (??!!??).  Tennant decides the best course of action is to get some buddies with machine guns and go down and dust these monsters when they come up out of the lake.  Holmes and Sharp ineffectually try to stop him and end up watching even more ineffectually from a distance as this plan goes horribly wrong, and most of Tennant's men are killed (Tennant survives but suffers a complete psychological breakdown).  In Tennant's pocket, Holmes finds a star-shaped stone (DAH DUM!!)

The next day Tennant is sane enough again, and informs that he found the star-stone by the side of the lake.  The dredge had brought up about fifty of them, and Tennant, for no apparent reason, decided to grab one.  Sharp and Holmes hightail it over to the lake, where they find the star-stone pile untouched. They load them into a crate and sail out onto the lake at dusk, where they board a barge, draw a pentacle - decorating it with star-stones, and read a banishing ritual from Clithanus.

There is a great whispering and whistling sound.  The star-stones begin to glow, and the whole sky lights up.  Sharp passes out like a good Lovecraftian hero.

He wakes up, still on the barge.  All is quiet.  Holmes is there too, unconscious.  The star-stones have checked out.  The barge is surrounded by stinky green slime.  Sharp and Holmes head home.  Holmes explains that what he missed was The Elder Gods, in the form of great pillars of fire, descending from the skies and whacking the gloop-monsters once and for all with beams of light.  

Well ... that was a ride!

I first came across "The Horror from the Depths" in a little book called Colonel Marksean and Less Pleasant People, an Arkham House pub that I found in my local library when I was 14.  At that particular moment, putting my hands on an actual Arkham House book was the most exciting thing I could imagine short of putting my hands on an actual girl!  So I took it home and devoured it, mostly while cutting school.  

Colonel Markesan is the "cream" of a group of stories co-written by August Derleth and Mark Schorer, a fellow aspiring author from Sauk City, WI.  The way the intro tells it, the two of them shacked up in a cabin on a lake in the summer of 1931, and ground out a plethora of quickie horror stories for the Weird Tales market.  As I remember the book the stories were nothing special but were fun reads, and it amusingly checked off a whole list of standard horror themes:  werewolf - check, vampire - check, ghost - check.  No surprise Derleth crammed in a couple of Cthulhus while hitting the check boxes.  I also thought this sounded like a lot of fun and wished I had a fellow horror-loving aspiring author I could shack up with in college and just crank out horror stories (it never happened).

Decades later Peter Ruber's Arkham's Masters of Terror came long to blow my bubble.  It turns out Schorer and Derleth were hardly buddies - Schorer was a rich kid who looked down on Aug's working-class mein but buddied up to him when he learned he was actually publishing fiction.  Aug took pity on the little turd and helped him by dropping by the cavern in the wee hours and leaving him some outlined plots, which Schorer would then write up.  Over the years, Schorer became a noted Wisconsin regionalist, like Derleth himself.  But he also blatantly and extensively plagiarized Derleth on numerous occasions, an act Derleth took him to task for, and which Schorer ultimately owned up to (after Derleth had passed).  

While I'll revisit the Colonel one day, for now I'll stay with this'n.  "Horror from the Depths" is decidedly tepid stuff, with an uninteresting menace, conclusion, and laughable lapses of logic, especially when it comes to the characters' behavior.  While the plot does indeed seem like boiler-plate Derleth-Lovecraft riff, Schorer's prose style is decidedly less compelling than Aug's, which was usually effective and atmospheric, even at his worst.  This is very minor-league stuff.