By Donald Wandrei
Originally published Arkham House, 1948
In the British village of Isling, near an ancient road called The Vadia, little Willy Grant finds something odd in an old graveyard. we're never told much about it but it might be a "green stone". His mom is not amused and informs him in no uncertain terms he's to return it to the graveyard the next day - or else! Remember this was the 40's and you could still beat kids with impunity in them good ol' days. But that night moms has a nightmare about a little gray Gollum-y thing skittering around a gravyard accidentally unleashing a bunch of giant titanic figures from the bowels of the earth. She and her husband wake up to the sound of Willy's screams. Running in, they find all that remains of him is a decayed mess. Moms loses her mind and wanders the roads, clutching something in a bundle she won't let anyone see, while Pops just stays silent and sulky (and they don't mention to the neighbors what exactly happened to Willy, claiming he died in the fire Moms accidentally started while wigging out upon seeing her kid go all M. Valdemar on her. Needless to say this stirs up a lot of gossip). During a big-ass storm, Moms babbles weird, unknown languages, and lightning strikes their house, causing another fire. When the neighbors come to investigate, the Grants are in pretty much the same state as Willy was ("greenish corrupton"). Oh and no sign of whatever it was she had in her bundle.
This weird tale reaches one Carter E. Graham, curator of the Ludbury Museum of Archaelogy and Anthropology and all-around slug (he's done a lot of exciting research and he'll write it all down and publish it, someday ... maybe) via the newpaper. The image Willy found interests him very much - "can it be"? he wonders aloud in a blurt of pulpish droologue. Off he runs to Isling to check out that old graveyard. Digging around he finds an image, vaguely described, of greenish-gray stone that seems to shift and change form while he looks at it. Holding it makes him feel displaced in time, frightened, and depressed, all at once. He keeps digging and finds a slab with characters on it, the like of which he's never seen before. Then the slab moves, or changes, revealing a tunnel into the earth that smells like a tomb. Then it goes back to its slab-state. Graham heads back for London, thinking lots of deep thoughts about the image, the slab and what it all might mean.
Cleaning the image, he finds some writings on its base, identical to the ones on the slab, and comes to believe they're some kind of astronomical chart. Later that night on the train home, he hears a weird chanting in the distance, the same burble Mrs Grant was burbling. The train crashes and Graham loses his bags, including the image, as he's knocked out.
When he wakes up, he's in a hospital, where a nurse he terrorizes with ludicrous psuedo-intellectual bullshit informs him he's undergone surgery for a skull fracture and a concussion, which she deems "minor". He spends his recovery time dwelling on the image and how he must somehow get it back. He also learns the reason for the train wreck is completely unknown, and that he's the only survivor. Efforts to find his bag with the image are fruitless, so he goes back to the graveyard, unearths the slab again, and takes pictures of it. He calls up an old colleague to check out the pics. His old colleague Alton is so entranced by the writings - a combination of Sanskrit and "the Ulonga chant", that he pretty much forgets Graham is even there, so Graham heads back to his hotel and reads the paper, wherein he learns that a ship has disappeared at sea, after being reported to have been enveloped in a "greenish mist".
Wandrei then decides to confuse us by hopping from Graham's story, and timeline, over to one concerning Dan Farrell, who was on the now-missing ship, but also on the ill-fated train (wasn't Graham supposed to have been the only survivor?). And so we begin Chapt. 4 with a disoriented Dan stumbling around in the wreckage of the train and a buncha messed-up corpses. Dan's none too happy about being in a train crash, especially since its going to make him late for the ship he needs to catch to the US. And boy does he need to catch it cause he just murdered his wife and needs to get the hell outta Merrie Olde like now. He doesn't give a damn that his luggage is buried under train wreck debris, but he wants to look normal while he's boarding that boat, so he grabs the first handy-looking bag that happens to be lying around among train parts and body parts. And wouldn't you know it - it's Graham's bag! He fucks around London (we're even treated to a detailed description of his breakfast menu - and boy does Danny have an apperite!), eventually boarding his ship. There he notices a smokin' hot chick with two-tone hair (in the 40's!?!) checking him out with a full-on come-rip-my-clothes-off-big-boy look. So natch he goes and chats her up, using the hair as an icebreaker. They proceed to have a coy conversation that's pretty much a textbook example of how not to make small-talk with a woman and perhaps answers the question as to why Wandrei was a lifelong bachelor, but in any case Dan learns her name is Joane Marsh and she might be married - she doesn't know! That latter turns out to be not as absurd as it sounds (even if her initial answer is) - it seems her husband Thomas disappeared without a trace about a year ago. Hmmm. How convenient. Dinner and drinks is on.
Dan drops by Joane's luxurious cabin and we're treated to what passes for a "sexy" scene as written by a Lovecraft-obsessed Weird Tales pulp writer and some-time surreal/gothic/cosmic horror poet - i.e. it's pretty damn hilarious. Then dinner with a lot more coy dialog. They make plans to meet again for dancing in a bit. Dan goes back to his cabin and finally opens Graham's bag, being a little surprised at what he finds. He removes the bundled-up image and tosses the bag out the porthole. He unwraps the image and it freaks him out, but somehow he finds himself unable to toss it out the porthole, so he makes his way out to the decks intending to toss it over the side as soon as he can get some momentary privacy. Unable to find one, he conceals the bundled image under a firehose.
We're then treated to another lengthy scene of Dan getting ready for his hot date, finally interrupted when Joane shows up, calling him "Tom" in her sexiest voice. Now things get really weird as Joane reveals to no particular surprise to us readers that she offed her hubby. Dan goes to retrieve it but finds Joane already has it and is in bed with it(!) and chanting those same weird chants we've encountered before. Things get pretty damn weird between these two mariticidal (that's a real word!) lovers before the ship finally vanishes, in the aforementioned cloud of greenish mist.
Graham, bright fellow that he is, deduces the idol must have been on the ship. So he muses about where it might be now. He decides to go back to Isling, taking with him Bjort Liska, a young archeologist from the museum staff, and Tom, the janitor's son, cuz he's strong and reliable even if he is a dumbass. After lunch and pointless debate about eating in graveyards, Graham starts digging away. Soon he's uncovered the great slab door and gotten it "open". With Tom handling the ropes at the other end, Bjort and Graham lower themselves down into the mysterious shaft. After a long trip they come to the bottom, which is filled with skeletons. Bjort determines these are fine specimens of cro-magnons, and under them neanderthals, piltdowns, flintones, rubbles ... the whole history of human evolution. After three hours they decid to go back. Just in time for the rope to suddenly snap and fall. Reacting with superhuman calm, Bjort and Graham decide to see if there might be another way out. After some digging, they find a tunnel and Graham explores it. Eventually he eperiences another hallucinogenic episode, shapes changing and realities shifting. Next thing he knows, he's waking up at Stonehenge. He manages to make his way back to Isling and graveyard, where Thomas had simply nodded off. He lowers himself down, but nothing is left of Bjort except his tools and some clothing items. Graham begins to believe that this was a kind of trap set to lure the curious and investigative, and that Bjort fell vitim to it, the first human to do so in thousands of years. Lucky Bjort!
Back home he finds a letter from Alton's secretary, informing him that Alton has snuffed it but not before writing out some papers and having them sent to Graham. It seems he finally figured out the Isling characters, connected to two other unknown languages he discovered in Hyderabad and Africa. After voicing the Isling sounds aloud, things got weird - the spatial distortions Graham experienced, weird chanting sounds, and then he bashed his head so hard he was bleeding to death. Despite bleeding to death from a head injury, he was able to scribble this tiresomely long-winded last letter to Graham, an even sign it. Also included is his partial transaltion, - an invocation to the "far titans" from the "great far beyond".
Menwhile the news is grim - a black magic-related uprising in Africa, religious mania leading to riots in India, in New York an artist named Glen Kalen has committed suicide, after reporting a period of disturbing dreams and producing some striking but unpleasant paintings, including one a great greenish fog from which menacing figures seem to be emerging, a serial killer loose in San Francisco, another suicide, a young poet, who left behind a few lines involving the coming of the "titans", a catastrophic fire at a mental institution in Bavaria which led to the escape of a bunch of crazies, who left behind drawing of monsters crushing or eating people, and a pilot reporting seeing a greenish haze on Easter Island. Graham sets off on another trip - presumably to Easter Island?
We're then treated to a lengthy autobiographical entry from Graham's diary, most of which has little-to-no relevance to the story (including his disastrous love life). In the process we discover that some of the language of the translation ("Keeper of the Seal") Graham had in fact encountered before, in Tibet, years ago, along with some maps that seemed to depict the earth as it was millions of years ago, and including an unexplained line from where Easter Island would be to where Stonehenge would be. At this point Graham reveals that he's long suspected human life may have developed due to the intervention of some alien intelligence, and that this is an idea he's been purusuing for a long time. And he thinks he's got his evidence now. Interesting that he'd completely forgotten that previous discovery until now.
Easter Island is deserted - Graham has no clue where the natives went. He explores the island, getting more freaked out by his isolation, the famous statues, and weird lights and sounds. He's troubled by weird dreams of flying through space and being aware of incomprehensible alien intelligences. He experiences apocalyptic visions of the "titans", or at least as he imagines them.
Graham dreams of a barren, blasted land under a green sun, where eventually he comes across a forest. The forest is wild and full of strange and menacing trees and growth and half-glimpsed threatening life-forms. He wanders on through forest, hills, an empty alien city, mountains till he comes to an area lit by a strange light. There he's assailed by lights, sounds, winds, flames. He wakes up - in a blackened wasteland under a green sun. He wanders on, his perceptions of time, space and identity in flux. He ends up floating in a sea. A spaceship appears, lands in front of him, and a man steps out and speaks to him in an unknown language, then in several known ones. He is led aboard the ship by this fellow, whose name is Moia Tohn, and shown a star chart (turns out he's still on earth) and a device that turns thoughts into visual images. He learns he's moved forward in time almost 1.5 million years.
As their guest, Graham catches up on the history of the last few millenia. He learns the ways of this new world, so far removed from earth as we know it that it might as well be an alien planet. He considers a form of voluntary suicide the people now have, but decides to stay and explore this new world.
What the fuck was this?
Wandrei was the great missing link of the "Lovecraft Circle". Co-founder of Arkham House, close friend of HPL, frequently mentioned in Lovecraft bios, and still alive into the 1980's. But his stories were near-impossible to find and (mostly) never made the lists of recognized Cthulhu Mythosa. Unlike Derleth, Smith, Howard or even Frank B. Long there were no paperback collections out there to be had. Wandrei was a great unknown.
But, in the early 00's I did finally get some answers. Thanks to a library copy of Don't Dream, a collection of Wandrei's supernatural and fantasy tales. All of `em. Now the truth could be known. Wandrei didn't make the official Cthulhu lists because he never wrote anything specifically using the Lovecraft arcana. Though many of his stories thematically align with Lovecraft (fantastic cosmic alien terrors), he went his own way. More power to him on that.
As to the lack of availability of his stories, that one turned out to be even clearer. He wasn't very good.
It's not that he never wrote anything good stories. There are a handful of pretty good ones in Don't Dream. But for 400 pages and the company he kept, could I be blamed for having expected more? Nothing as memorable as Smith or Howard, about on a par with Long (maybe a notch or two below). Yes, superior to Derleth's bad pastiches and hacked-out spook stories, but nothing as good as Derleth's actual best ("The Lonesome Place"). Anyway Don't Dream settled my Wandrei curiosity pretty much for good. But I did seek this one out as well, via an interlibrary loan. I read it, was disappointed, and then promptly forget everything about it except that I hadn't been that impressed.
Anyway you can now read it on The Internet Archive if you don't want to shell out $70-$150 for a copy. Which, in case you haven't guessed, I don't recommend.
This isn't a terrible book. But if I had to pick one word, it's amateurish. Wandrei had talent as a wordsmith. His best fantasy writings are some very short (two pages or so) "prose poems" which have no real plot but are just exercises in descriptive spookiness and atmosphere. And Web has several bits of that. The opening chapter is really effective mini-horror story and sets the scene for some good stuff. The last part of the shipboard romance interlude, with Joane moaning in the bed with the image is quite bizarre and weird. The descriptions of the spatial distortions people experience when handling the idol, and Graham's experience in the underground chamber are completely effective and the kind of thing Lovecraft was often trying for and missing. And Graham's journey through the dark forest is terrific, spooky and otherworldy.
But then, side-by-side with it is truly bad pulp writing. The whole shipboard flirtation is embarassing. Not to mention the absurd coincidence of two people who've murdered their spouses meeting on a ship and falling for each other. Needless descriptions - a whole phone conversation written out, a detailed account of what Dan had for breakfast, are silly distractions. Bjort and Graham's blase reaction to being trapped in the chambers (they don't even seem concerned about what might have happened to Tom), and of course Alton taking time to write out all his notes and sign them(!) while bleeding to death (why didn't he just go to the fucking ER???) is hilarious.
The other problem is Wandrei was all over the map with his story. Having the Grant's tale as a lead-in/prologue works fine, but the switch from Graham to Dan is abrupt and confusing. Even moreso is the sudden insertion of Graham's autobiography which adds nothing except to tell us at length that he's a sad sack and always has been. And the fact that his having encountered the alien script before just apparently slipped his mind is pretty absurd too.
Then finally, in the last couple chapters, the story just veers off into another direction. Nothing is actually resolved and all the unsettling buildup is just dropped. What were the titans and what was the culmination of these apocalyptic visions? Ah, never mind. Let's just go tripping off with my new future pals.
The story is that Wandrei originally started this book in the 30's, couldn't find a publisher (not surprising as it isn't very good), then shelved it, did some revisions and got it published through Arkham House, which he was a co-founder of, after all. I don't know how much of the book is from the 1930's draft (which has since been published but I'm not interested enough to investigate), but it definitely seems as if Wandrei forgot where he was going so he wrote a resolution based on wherever his mind was at in the late 40's, without regard for any continuity with the rest of the book.
It's interesting to note how many other works this story recalls, both precursors and antecedents. There are echoes of "The Call of Cthulhu" (research into antiquities revealing ancient horrors), "The Shadow Out Of Time" (a detailed, and frankly dull description of an alien culture of the future), and shadows of Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and "The Sentinel". But Lovecraft, Wilson, and Clarke all did far more with these ideas.
All in all it's an interesting oddity with a few good moments. But nothing more.
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