"The Horror from the Hills"

by Frank Belknap Long

originally published Weird Tales January-March, 1931 

Our tale begins with one Algernon Harris, curator of Archaeology at the Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts. Few people believe this, however, because he's 26, wears loud ties, and behaves "like a college junior at a fraternity house jamboree".  Apparently such behavior consists of being real friendly with attendants and even calling them by their first names, as opposed to the binge drinking, vomiting, and taking advantage of passed-out coeds that such a description conjures up.  

Anyway even if most of his academic peer group et al don't take him seriously, his field workers are sure as hell devoted - being sent to the harshest, most remote corners of the globe, and some of them coming back missing, um, eyes, noses, arms. And some don't come back at all. That's loyalty I tell ya!

So right now Algie-boy is all kinds of excited, cuz one of his hapless fools crack field agents is back in town, with a new find!  That would be Clark Ulman, just back from the Plateau of Tsang, whence he's come bearing a statue reported as having been hidden in a remote cave, guarded by "yellow abnormalities", and which a score of previous explorers had died trying to retrieve.  Well, Ulman's done it, and the statue is on its way to the museum.  But Algie is taken aback when a choked-sounding Ulman calls and tells him to destroy the statue: "it has worked its malice on me - ME!" he emphasizes, "you'll understand when you see what - what I have become!" he explains dramatically.  

Algie is busy mulling over the whole business of Ulman's call and what might have happened to him - in fact he's apparently talking to himself - out loud - at length - when a package is delivered.  Said "package" (shouldn't it be more like a crate?) is a huge statue, the ugliest friggin' thing Algie has ever seen, a big gruesome creature sort of looking like an elephant (on a side note - based on Long's claims over the years and the way its described in the story, Chaugnar Faugn only vaguely resembles an elephant.  Nonetheless, he is consistently depicted as a kind of evil mutant elephant, like Ganesh's evil twin or something).  

Ulman shows up forthwith, his face concealed by a scarf wrapped all the way up to his eyes.  When Algie gives a good ol' boy pat on the shoulder, Ulman collapses, unable to breath.  He can't stand to be touched.  Ever sympathetic, Algie responds that he knows he must have had a rough trip, and he's sure he can get Ulman extended PTO.

Ulman explains how he journeyed across the Plateau of Tsang - alone, on foot.  He was reduced to drinking his own blood and eating dogshit to survive (uh-huh).  Eventually he found his way to the cave where Chaugnar Faugn's idol was guarded by those "yellow abnormalities", who took him prisoner and started to torture him, until the high priest, Chung Ga, came to his rescue.  Chung explained Chaugnar's true nature, as both the creator and, ultimately, destroyer of everything in the universe.  They gave Ulman plenty of food and drink and a straw mat in the cave to sleep on.  During the night, something terrible entered the cave and attacked him, feasting on Ulman's own blood.  Ulman soon comes to realize that the creature attacking him is Chaugnar Faugn, and that the statue is not merely a statue but an avatar of CF itself.  Chaug rewards Ulman's brilliant deduction by mauling him.  According to Chung Ga, this is all part of the plan.  He tells Ulman about Chaugnar's history - how he and five "brothers" began their time in what would become central Europe, in the Pyrenees, attended to by a race of beings Chaugnar created from toads.  Their servants were finally wiped out by the Romans.  Chaungar opted to leave his bros and head for "the primal continent", there to hide in the remote mountains until a white man came for him, warning his bros that when he devoured the world, he would devour them, too. It seems that, according to Chung Ga, Ulman is the white man of the prophecy, and they want him to take the idol to New York.

Ulman concludes his story by ranting - for two pages! - about Cuvier's theories and how ancient Chaugnar may really be, then, to prove his point, he yanks off the scarf to reveal his face horribly and weirdly mutilated - including his nose now elongated and his ears now enlarged - that's right kiddies - he's becoming an elephant man! Isn't Algie convinced now that he should destroy the idol?  Heck no! He figures the whole experience was done via "he hypnotic endowments of the Oriental":  "It's ghastly and unbelievable how much a Hindoo or a Tibetan can accomplish by simple suggestion."  To Ulman pointing out that his face was normal when he boarded ship back to America, Algie simply offers that the cultists did some plastic surgery on him in his sleep.  Suddenly, Ulman can't breathe and he collapses writhing to the floor and dies.  A coroner later rules his death due to heart failure, though he can't explain why the body decomposed so damn fast...

Algie meets with his boss, Dr. George Francis Scollard, to discuss the whole matter, with Algie still arguing for the mundane explanation - since to do otherwise would cause him to be labeled a whacko.  Scollard and Algie spend the next two pages discussing acromegaly.  But as they approach the museum, they see a crowd outside.  Including reporters.  And cops.  "Did you put the - the statue on exhibition?" Scollard exclaims.  Well of course Algie put it on exhibition.  And let reporters cover it as well.

Now it seems, another attendant, Mr. Cinney, has been murdered and mutilated right there in the museum.  (You might think the high fatality and injury rate of attendants reporting to Algie would get Scollard's attention, huh?).  In fact, Cinney's face is gone, and his body's drained of blood.  One possible witness, another attendant named Williams, has flipped out, screaming about "the worm from hell" and they can't get much more out of him.  The police are convinced the crime was committed by a "Hindoo" or a "Chinaman".  As evidence they've found a wooden bowl with the remnants of some rice, and blood, and chopsticks.  Plus there's blood all over the Chaugnar statue.  In the course of their talking to a police detective, a Chinese guy is turned up, hiding in the museum.  It seems a strange dream led him to go to the museum last night, and wait to be devoured by a god.  But instead the god devoured Cinney.  The cops are mystified by this conversation, but Scollard tells them he's certain the Asian guy is innocent, and warns them not to get rough with him.  Algie then points out something to Scollard - the trunk on the Chaugnar Statue seems to have moved...

Then he and Algie head off to see someone - a Dr. Henry Imbert F.R.S, F.A.G.S (if you can figure out what those are meant to stand for, there's a no-prize in it for you), specialist in ethnology (what we'd now call cultural anthropology, I suppose).  "When Imbert sees [a photo of the Chaugnr Faugn statue]", Algie mutters to himself (he apparently always thinks out loud), "he'll be the most disturbed ethnologist that this planet has harbored since the Pleistocene Age."  That's pretty impressive, given that the Pleistocene Age dates back 11,700 years and the earliest defined ethnologists showed up in the 18th century.  Of course he did say "this planet" so perhaps Algie's musings also encompassed ethnologists on other planets?)

Dr. Henry Imbert F.R.S,F.A.G.S. spends four pages getting to the point that he doesn't have anything intelligent to say about this icky statue, much less its moving.  So he suggests they see someone else - former brilliant criminal investigator now quack supernaturalist and recluse Roger Little. On the way over, they read in the papers of a similar massacre in the Pyrenees, leaving 14 people dead.  

Roger Little turns out to be a froot loop who talks exactly like H.P. Lovecraft in his letters.  He babbles on for five fucking pages about how boring murder is, his plans to write a horror novel, etc.  Algie is struck silent in awe by him, which gives us one more reason to think Algie might be a nitwit.  However, when someone mentions Chaugnar Faugn, Little finally stops his monologue in shock.

It seems last Halloween, Little had an incredibly detailed dream, in which he was L. Cualieus Rufus, a financial official in a Spanish province in the time of Republican Rome.  In this role, he was drawn into an investigation of a race of strange peoples, unlike any of the local races, who held inhumans rites in the hills involving drumming and chanting, and, conicidentally, said rites were linked to disappearances of nearby villagers, which always occurred on the night of the ceremonies.  Of even greater concern - the hillish folk seem to be in league with an creepier group called the "miri nigri", and a couple of these got into a scuffle in a nearby town not so long ago.  Now people haven't disappeared (as they usually do), and some fear a more dreadful retribution is at hand.

Rufus takes a band of stout men into the lands of the strange people, on the night on one of their rites. The sound of the drumming and chanting becomes overwhelming, and the Romans' horses freak out.  Their guide loses his shit and grabs a sword and impales himself.  The sky goes black as the stars are blotted out, and they are surrounded by cackling and leaping creatures in the shadows, things with "huge flaring ears and long waving trunks that howled and gibbered and pranced in the skyless night."  The Romans panic and flee in such terror that some are trampled to death, and the hills themselves seem to be moving, as Rufus screams and wakes up back as Roger Little.  

Told of the little Asian man's dream, Little is even more impressed ("Mongolians as a rule are extremely psychic" he muses), and more convinced that something big is going down re: Chaugnar Faugn (and his brothers).  He theorizes (for a couple pages) about what Chaugnar Faugn might be, in physics terms. Suddenly, there's a phone call, informing Algie that the Chaugnar statue is gone (though the pedestal remains).   Little tells the group he wants to show them something.

In his lab, Little has built a strange machine, described as made of spheres and crescents that move in directions difficult for the eye/mind to follow when the machine is running.  Little explains that the machine is an anti-entropy beam, which basically uncreates things by sending them back in time.  He then spends the next eight pages pontificating about physics, time, the nature of reality, etc., before getting back to his plan - track down Chaugnar Faugn and zap him with the anti-entropy ray.  All agree this is a fine idea, though not before Algie manages to vaporize one wall of Little's apartment - a fact which seems not to phase Little in the slightest.  Off they go in search of Chaugnar.

Following a trail of reported murders, they trace him to the Jersery shore and turn the ray on him, ultimately having to run after him, training the ray on him, since his ancientness means it takes a long time to "uncreate" him in time.  A turtle caught in the beam is not so lucky.  Buh-bye turtle!  Eventually Chaugner gets his fat ass caught in a mire and the team is able to finish the job, dissolving him into primordial slime while he bellows away, finally leaving only a terrifying, gigantic image of himself filling the sky, which grabs at them before fading away.  The five other Chaugnar kin also dissolve at the same time, giving Little the opportunity to drone on some more about their oneness, while speculating that Chaugnar might one day reappear, thousands of years in the future.  Thus the story ends.

(It would be nice to report that Scollard then turns the anti-entropy ray on Little, and Algie too for good measure, but no such luck).

Fuck I don't know what to say after that particular nutty ride and I'm not even sure how to rate, since I actually enjoy this little romp, even though  it embarrasses me.  It is, except for the long passages of pontification, fairly exciting, has genuinely interesting ideas, merging "modern" (1931) science with metaphysics, which won't become fashionable for another 60 years, and there are a couple good, powerfully scary passages involving Chaugnar Faugn, such as his first appearance as a blood-sucker in the cave:

Even before I opened my eyes I knew that something unspeakably malign was crouching squatting on the ground beside me.  I could hear it breathing in the darkness, and the stench of it strangled the breath in my throat ... I became aware of two blinking, fish-white eyes glaring truculently at me through the darkness."

And later in his death throes:

"For an instant it loomed thus terribly menacing, the sould of all malignancy and horror, a cncerous cyclops, oozing fetor."

The climax of the Roman dream is really potent - except Long didn't write it - or didn't write most of it.  The whole Roman dream was taken nearly verbatim from a letter by H.P. Lovecraft.  Long largely cut-and-pasted it into his story - though I have not compared the original letter to the story (that's okay - I'm sure S.T. Joshi has).

Despite these small strong points, the story can't overcome its major weakness: it's some of the worst writing Long ever turned out.  Now I've read a fair bit of Long, and though I wouldn't call him a literary giant, most of his writing is solid and serious and perfectly decent by any normal standards.  But occasionally he would lapse into purple pulpdom, with some of the most histrionic dialogue this side of a romance comic book.  And man oh man did he do it here.  In fact, Long's writing is so bad here it reads almost like a cornball parody of pulp horror writing.  The dialogue is patently absurd, with characters stammering and shouting as they articulate realizations about the cosmic horrors unfolding around them.  The characterization is nonexistent.  And pages and pages are given over to philosophical/quantum physical/ethnological dissertations which I guess Long found interesting, but if i wanted that I wouldn't be reading a pulp horror story.  To top it all off its racially insensitive as hell, if not outright racist.

I should note that "Hills" is one of those tales that became a Mythos story after the fact, whem HPL incorporated Chaugnar, tongue-in-cheekily, into one of his lists of mythos beasties.  There's nary a mention of the Necronomicon or aught else to be found within, though Chaugnar Faugn is a good fit for a Great Old One, to be sure.

Okay - the verdict: its kind of a fun read if you can overlook the bad writing.  But it is no classic.  Its tough to scare up these days and, interestingly, has yet to be reprinted in any Chaosium collections (odd!).  I definitely don't recommend throwing down $100+ for the Arkham original - look for one of the paperback reprints on Ebay - which will still set you back $20+.  But only if you're looking for some cosmic horror laffs.

"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.

"The Space Eaters"

 by Frank Belknap Long  

originally published Weird Tales, July 1928

Howard (a thinly-disguised - well, actually I hope in a lot of ways he's a thickly-disguised) HPL is buds with Frank, Our Narrator who, for a change, has a friggin' name!  Howard apparently writes supernatural stories - real good ones, per Frank.  But he's having a bad night.  He's frustrated because he can't articulate or describe what he wants to articulate and describe (he then goes on to articulate and describe them - which is basically icky monsters from outer space who have colors and shapes and appearances that don't correspond to anything on our world.  Obviously you can't say something looks kinda like a cross between a lobster and a wallaby if, in fact, it not only doesn't look anything like a lobster or a wallaby - in fact it looks like some other planets equivalent to lobsters and wallabies - except said other planet doesn't have anything equivalent to lobsters and wallabies or anything equivalent to anything we've ever seen before so ... fuck this is even making my head hurt so I kinda don't blame Howard for being a little pissy.  A little pissy mind you - he's being such an ass about Frank's "prosaic" brain that I'm left wondering a little bit why Frank even pals around with the guy.  At least now we know the original inspirations for Titus Crow/Henri De Marigny.

Anyway, there's a knock on the door and its Frank's neighbor/friend Henry Wells, who drives a delivery carriage and ain't too bright, I guess.  But he's had a weird night.  He was out on the road in this terrible fog (did I mention its a really foggy, damp night? Well it is so keep track!) riding through some woods he's always thought were kinda creepy, when something fell in his lap and then jumped in his face - something wet and spongy and gross.  And then he saw something slither rapidly down a tree ... long and white and kind of like a snake - or an arm!  With a hand!  Or maybe not.  He's not sure.  Then he felt a terrible cold or pain (or both) in his head which lasted about 10 minutes.  When he got home, he looked at his temple and he had this nice clean hole there, the size of a bullet hole, going all the way into his brain!

Howard, as if he weren't enough of an asshole, starts shouting at Henry (whom he considers a "yokel") that he's obviously been shot, he's drunk, stupid, voted for Bush twice, etc.  Henry doesn't take too well to this and besides, he's got another headache, so he runs out of the house.  Next thing you know Frank and Howard can hear him screaming in terror or agony.  Frank and Howard proceed to do the natural thing: have a big argument and debate while they change into rain gear - and then go see if they can help him!  OH I forgot to mention there's now a loud droning sound in the woods...

They find him and get him back to the house, where he goes nuts and attacks Howard (which may not be a symptom of insanity, when you get down to it).  A Dr. Smith (oh the pain!) is called.  He operates on Henry while babbling a lot of flowery weirdness (actually Jonathan Harris would have fit the part well) before saying there's nothing more he can do and running away.  He seems to know something ("they have laid there mark on him"), too.  

Frank and Howard flee on Frank's launch, noting a huge shape forming in the sky over the woods, which are now aflame, which they dare not get a good look at.  They make the sign of the cross at it a bunch of times with some burning cotton waste, and it loses definition and vanishes.  Yay!

Back in Brooklyn, Howard gets to writing about the experience, and now he's got what he was looking for - a way to describe "cosmic" horrors beyond the ken of "prosaic" brains (mind you - his big "cosmic" horror is basically semi-visible brain-eating gloop monsters from outer space, as seen in many a 50's sci-fi movie [inevitably starring John Agar], but let's not pop Howie's balloon just yet - he had a rough week).

Frank reads his MS and thinks its brilliant but too horrible for words, and tells him to knock off his seeking after untold horrors.  They have a big philosophical argument until and Frank stomps off, finally tired of Howard's assholery.

That night Howard calls him - the droning's started again!  Frank rushes over (idiot).  He finds Howard writhing on floor yelling about "crawling chaos" while a dark shape beams brilliant lights into Howard's head and pages of his story fly around the room.

Frank manages to make the sign of the cross again, while covering his eyes in horror, and the dark thing bails.  Too late to save ol' Howie though.

Now let me tell you, I've been really looking forward to re-reading "The Space Eaters" for a long time, because I remembered it as being one of the best of the best.  I also remembered F.B. Long as being a genuine literary talent, having been entranced by his collection The Early Long, wherein I first read this at 14 or so, being at that time strung out on all things Lovecraft and desperately trying to find more works by his "circle".  

Well more recent encounters have learnt me that Long was no literary genius (his ideas were imaginative and his prose could be striking, but other times...).  Still I expected great things from "The Space Eaters".

Well...

Okay, let's establish this - "Space Eaters" isn't bad ... just taken down to bare plot, its not so removed from a lot of much-maligned Derleth things.  I won't go into the whole business of the cross (vs. the Elder Sign) because it seems reasonable that a powerful mystic symbol might work against some cosmic beasties even if it isn't the mystic symbol.  Its more imaginative than Derleth would have been (grosser, too).  And at times its just plain hysterical.  Howard is such a complete asshole that either Long was going over the top or he'd had a hatful of HPL at the time he wrote it ... or HPL was really that insufferable (I hope not!).  I'll say again: his concept of an indescribable cosmic horror is the plot of a movie that would now be pure MST3K fodder.  I had to snicker.  Brain-eating monsters from space??? The dialogue gets so portentous and corny that even Stan Lee wouldn't have put his name on it, especially the doctor's monologue while operating.  And the "Omigod!  Henry's screaming! He must be in trouble!  Let's go help him after we finish arguing and change clothes!" belongs in a Monty Python sketch.

But ... but ... I like Long.  I like him because at his best, his writing is really potent and evocative even if it is pulpy.  This tale begins:

"The horror came to Partridgeville in the fog."

Simple, unadorned, unquestionably pulpy and yet it works, it resonates.  To a pulp horror fan, it sets you up that something special is going to come.  Later, Henry's monologue about what he sees in the woods,  a white, snaky ... arm?  With a hand?  Or not?  may be way too poetic for a yoke, but it also recalls the unrealistic but poetic dialogue characters in Ray Bradbury stories often utter.  Long is no Bradury, but it does appear they sipped from the same cup a time or two.

All in all, not near the classic I remembered it as being, but still a fun spooky read.