First published 'Dagon - DFL Special' 1989
When Clive invited me to his house late one Summer to partake in a weekend of literary discussions, little did I realise...
To fill in a little background, my name is John Hope and I am well known in the field of literary Criticism, but when I say “well known”, I do not mean to imply that the man on the Clapham omnibus would con¬stantly have my name on his lips. However, speak of me at that time to any caught up in the arcane circles of London literary life and my name would be known — though I wonder if any remembered the actual articles that I had written! I am unmarried. Being somewhat shy of the opposite sex, I had been led to many a celibate nightmare, but now approaching the autumn of my days, I had grown used to the solitude of my room and books.
I rush to admit that I was often branded trampish and over-scholarly. I had even been declined entry to many a posh club in Inner London because of my dissheveled appearance. However, I was, on average, happy and, in the main, financially self-sufficient.
Clive Hunt, a life-long friend, was much richer than I. No doubt, he would have been even more trampish than myself, if he had been left to his own devices. He was naturally and all-embracingly intellectual, but a rich Aunt had cared for his physical and monetary needs. One may read what one likes into that, but I must stress that Clive was a gentleman’s gentlemen, full of the most fitting good humour, kindness and wit. Some may call it unfortunate that his intellectual pursuits could only be described as pertaining to the weird and marvellous. Under various pseu¬donyms, he had supplemented his Aunt’s income with money stemming from stories in the fantasy field.
He lived in one of those up market Inner London suburbs south of the Thames where relative peace can be found amidst the turmoil and cosmo¬politanism of life in the Eighties. Since his Aunt’s sudden death (a death which must have affected him badly, but how badly I was about to discover), I knew he would be financially secure in view of the large legacy that she must have left him. As I travelled on the tube towards his stop, I speculated on the weekend before me but, I must repeat, little did I realise ...
* * * * *
I knocked on the door of the detached house, set back from the quiet avenue and encroached upon by a dense garden of unkempt ferns and weeds. From within I heard the pad of Clive’s customary slippers plodding along the parquet hall. His gait was a shuffling, shambling hop, skip and jump and, before I could appreciate the well known sounds, he opened the door...
I had not prepared myself sufficiently for the damage that his Aunt’s death had wrought on his features. His normal pallor was redoubled — a chalky visage now creased with the added years of grief. This mask attempted to grin a welcome but could only manage a sick grimace as a stiff arm raised itself to my shoulder to give it a reassuring tug. As he led me down the hall, his typical shamble was that of some half-mutilated prehistoric creature — an image that was lent some credence by the ill-kept hair straggling in greasy knots down his back ... and the grey flannel trousers mottled by stains.
I made my usual greeting and then embarked upon a speech that I regret¬ted making as soon as I had in fact made it. I berated him for his pitiful state, accused him of disgusting decay and threatened leaving at once.
“Why, man, you can actually see the bones of your skull and cheeks! Have you not eaten?”
I followed as he padded into his book-lined office. This was so familiar to me from many a previous visit, that my affection returned and recalled the occasions on which we had sat together in that very room and partook of literary discussions and recitals. I remembered a much younger Clive Hunt, fresh from some domestic skirmish with his Aunt, standing before me and reading aloud, with avid and proud intensity, from a new attempt of fantasy story-telling. The guttering lamp would flicker along the spines of the bookcase and across the juvenile lines of his face. As he came to the customary horrific climax of his little piece, he would glance up at me childishly expecting to see awe and praise in my eyes and I would smile knowingly...
As these memories hit me at the threshold of the study, I suddenly real¬ised that I had not yet mentioned the death of his Aunt. Of course, I had written to him and commiserated in the most conventional of ways but, naturally, he would expect some odd sympathy or two now face to face.
“I heard the tragic news… with such sorrow, Clive. Please don’t think me hard-hearted if I...”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got over it now. It takes time but I have accepted the fact and can only try to forget”.
I knew that Clive had had many disputes with his late Aunt but, as in all love-hate relationships, his affection for her had been deep. I took his last statement to mean that he had accepted my condolences but, forthwith, the subject was closed… so I immediately took him on to literary matters and suchlike. I tried to ignore his shaggy demeanour and also the seeming intangibility of his mood… and turned the convers¬ation to the latest Science Fiction and Fantasy he has read (or written).
* * * * *
From that time, we spent countless hours with Clive reading aloud to me, only broken by my humorous asides, by the quickly gobbled meals and the snatched naps that replaced normal lengths of sleep.
One night, however, Clive, still unwashed and as untidy as I had first seen him, suddenly became serious. How he could have previously restrained such comments as he now made, God only knows! All I could see was that he must have been awaiting some fulcrum of events, some flashpoint of atmos¬phere, to settle on my ears the most interesting thesis. Evidently, the moment had to be right and therefore, triggered by timely coincidence, he put down the book from which he had been reading and said:
“Excuse me, John, I have been thinking. I have been thinking quite a lot since ... my Aunt’s death...”
The last words seemed to be blurted out despite the obvious grief he was undergoing. I did not interrupt but kept my unflinching eyes on his mouth.
“... You know, you have sat with me on many an occasion listening to horror stories, to my futile attempts at fantasizing ... This is all very well. It is all very wall ... but, be honest, John, it’s crude escapism! Books are just the televisions of the intellectual, little better, little worse. But — think about it, just imagine, what if our fantasizing were true? What if every little fantastic scene we were to conjure up would appear realistically before us — and we were subject to and endangered by the forces therein? Impossible, you say?”
“Nothing is impossible until proved to be”, I said in an attempt to humour him.
“And, if all this were true, how so much more worthwhile would our discussions and play-acting become. One only needs the strength of mind, the strength to dream and, perhaps, if the strength was actually greater than the strength that God or whatever force stabilizes the so-called reality around us ...” He waved a demonstrative hand around the book-lined study as if this were the “so-called reality” of one who may be God. “.... if we could but pitch our mental strength against the forces of nature, call it what you will, we could ... say, create a door from that bookcase!”
He pointed feverishly at a bookcase filled with his favourite fantasy books, viz, the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, the multi-faceted landscapes of Clark Ashton Smith, the garlanded vistas of Vance, the ghost-trodden corridors of Algernon Blackwood.
“How apt! If that bookcase, if that particular field of semantic force were to become an opening to some vast world of horror and undreamable spectacle — how apt!”
“How can this ‘strength’ of which you speak be conjured up?”
“Simplicity itself, my dear John”. He looked askance at me as he ran his fingers through knots of hair. “Just imagine — the culmination of two minds such as ours. Also, we cannot afford to fail. We shall swear to kill ourselves if we fail — and, consequently, we shall muster the strength to dream!”
* * * * *
Our first attempt ... was a ghastly experience. Not that we failed wholly
For several days after our first discussion about creating an opening or gateway from Clive’s bookcase, we sat and planned how such a phenom¬enon could be formulated. Primarily, we had to consider the conflux of time involved — at what point in the duration of our “seance” and for how long were we to concentrate our wills on the potential opening; how many strands of atmosphere and flashpoints of happenstance would be required to coincide before our gateway to horror and outworld spectacle would open before us; and how hard would we have to bind our trances and mutual fantasizing (too hard and we may be swallowed up forever in unchanging, unconscious nightscapes; not hard enough and we would only see thin miasmas of horror hooding the very room around us)?
Then ... Clive and I sat staring at the bookcase for several minutes, allowing ourselves to be engulfed by the mental vibrations that we were both trying to create. I cannot even hint at what was going on in our minds nor can I list the various rituals of gathering moods that we had previously engendered. Those elements were too vague, too transient and easily forgotten. All I can do is just state, as blandly as possible, the results of our first foray.
It is difficult to depict Clive’s expression for I was staring unwaver¬ingly ahead at the bookcase. However, if his nerves and tendons were taut as mine, if his eyes were round, rolling and fully exposed from the rippling cheekbones as mine, and, if his hands were fisted in pain above his vibrating knees as mine, then he must have been a tragic trance-jerked puppet.
Firstly, the bookcase swam before my eyes — the spines of the books rippled and bubbled to some obscure rhythm ... but, instead of the moving vista of watery reality becoming even more tenuous, even more diaphonous, and, finally, instead of turning into an opening or gateway... the book¬case rippled back into hard reality. I turned to Clive with disappointment greying my face and he turned to me likewise.
Then… I sniffed the air. What a shocking stench! I could only liken it to the putrid offal of some dark, forgotten canal in Venice where ghostly corpse-barges moon through the unending nights of Latin decay.
I turned again to the bookcase — and it seemed to shift in sharp jolts away from the wall. Straightaway, Clive and I rose and stepped towards the fidgetting bookcase. Together almost, we peered at the space between the now toppling case and the wall against which it had previously rested — and we saw a sight which sickened us beyond reason.
The emotional overtones are certainly indescribable. Between the book¬case and the wall was squashed the twitching carcass of some tentacular beast; its flesh was deeply pored, inflamed and haired, its lists were mottled with melded fat and stained with great warts and wriggling cancers. It was like the half-cooked remains of old poultry — still alive and panting in sick sighs. It was knobbed and crustaceous and in each pit of limb and body was a crutch of jellified, yellgreen pus. But, the worst was its face: decked with a cock’s comb, red as blood, was the human face of Clive Hunt’s deceased Aunt!
As our minds lost their occult grasp, its form slowly faded from the room.
* * * * *
Little by little, Clive returned to normality… he listened to my insistent comments on how it had only been a “vision”, a sure example of the success of our strength to dream. The “vision” had merely been enwebbed in some strange “afterdeath” process that had become wedged in Clive’s brain. It had to be released — this “afterdeath” — it had to be purged — this Aunt fixation — before we could progress on to the true success of our experiments.
It may be said that I should not have encouraged him to further exper¬iments. But I considered it my duty to do so. Like a rider who falls at a difficult fence....
“Clive, it was only vision, only imagination. It was not your Aunt at all”. I swept my arm across his desk as if to clean away any dust.
“But, John...” His voice was weak and cracked. His appearance was even worse than when I had arrived. “We had to move that bookcase against the wall! Mark that! That bookcase was a full ten inches from its original position...”
“True — but there was not one stain on the carpet. Not one fleck of decayed flesh. Not even one hair. The “thing” had been realised as matter, yes. But it was vision. It did not exist. It was not your Aunt in some tortured limbo. It was not her terrified soul struggling to release itself from monstrous clutches. It was a psychosomantic, poltergeist-type image, a catharsis, a purging of your complexes and fears. We are now free to explore true vision”.
I had in fact been caught up by the idea of material vision. Clive’s enthusiastic idea had lost momentum in his mind and, instead, here I was selling the idea back to him!
About a week after the “afterdeath” monster vision, we both sat before the fateful bookcase, the same engendered stares pinned to those favour¬ite fantasy books, the same elements of time and space focussing their energies through our wills. The bubbling and rippling returned, the books doubled up, trebled up, twisted, merged and lumped into wadges of blurred image. The actual area of the bookcase, its face and front darkened like ink silting into blotting paper — and before us opened the gate…
II
He had sat there for an eternity and a half — or so it seemed to him. Perched on a boulder as large as himself, he looked above at the grey skies, heaven upon heaven of unending greyness — strangely morose and lowering. It was as if a great fall of snow was imminent — except that the atmosphere was sticky and thunderously humid. Snoi-Snep sat there as still as a contemplative statue, as he had for an eternity and a half.
Snoi-Snep was an ape-like figure — black and hairy — and his bald ebony dome rested in meditation on thick hands. He kept strong links with humanity: his eyes were mellow and deep, almost philosophical; his nose was well-shaped around dim nostrils; his limbs were those of an Ancient Greek athelete. But for the glance at the grey, lowering skies, his pose was indeed statuesque and peculiarly eternal.
The landscape was as desolate as the skies. With the exception of the boulder on which Snoi-Snep waited, the wastes around were unending shades of brown, strewn with small stones and unshaped rocks.
Waiting was religion. The depth of his eyes, the dark pools of intellect that welled there, spoke of a faith as deeply purple as the sky was deeply grey. For an eternity and a half, he had awaited the Coming of those who would lead him to a haven. He had yearned for respite from the boulder seat; some strange paradise would be the destination as those for whom he had waited took him by his black hand to lead him over the brown deserts to a lagoon of peace and rest. When his dark dome was not resting in contemplation upon his thick hands, he would be staring towards the endless horizons for those who must come.
Then, movement came! One day amongst a trillion others, one endless day amongst the endless days without night that the brown desert bore, he saw movement: two dawdling forms approached from the dim distance — and they were heading in his direction!
* * *, * *
“Are you ready, Mr. Hunt?”
“I am, Mr. Hope”.
We both hopped into the opening, not forgetting to draw the veil of “firehearthness” across the opening to stop anybody following us.
“Yes, it was certainly a good idea to disguise the opening as a fire-hearth, but would it not have been better to replace it with the original bookcase?” I asked.
“Perhaps, Mr. Hope, but now we are in the dark and heading for the end of this godforsaken tunnel, let us not worry about that. We have visions to seek.”
When we left the tunnel, I suppose it was inevitable. Whether it was conscious or unconscious, we were flexing our imaginative muscles and the vision before us stretched endlessly to each horizon in the style of every fantasist we had ever appreciated: the mediaeval water-wells and thatched cottages of Morris; the gambrel-roofs and twisted root-bogs of Lovecraft; the strange beyond-cities of Machen; the ghostly promenades of Aickman; the werewolferine reaches of afforested Averoigne; the space-scapes and tube-effigies of Vance; the castellated sorceries of Howard, Robert E....
That vision of multiform and conglomerate fertility soon faded (as our “muscles” weakened) into the brown dunes of some mouldering, sunless desert. The original hiccough of startled fantasy had given way to inevitable insipidity — negative, Pagan, silted, waterless wastes drifting ever to the margins of our minds.
“Well, Mr. Hope ...,” shrugged the man whose study we had left seemingly ages ago.
We trudged over that brown and infinite desert. We trudged over that brown brown, as if a goal was beyond the brown or amid the brown, a goal toward which our silent symphony wended.
I glanced towards Clive, one day, and I think he glanced at me simultaneously. One realisation apiece and we knew that a strange wonder was afoot. We had been trudging brown ‘pon brown for apparently months, or perhaps years, and no sustenance had passed our lips.
“Could we be dreaming up ourselves as well as this environment?” I swept my hand across the vista as I said this.
“Do you mean to say, Mr. Hope, that not only are we fantasizing in concrete form this vile vision of endless wastes, but also ourselves in some godly form — whereby we need neither food nor drink?”
“I mean that very thing, my dear sir.”
Stylization of our speech, in this way, seemed to be the very scaffold of the vision.
It will be remembered that Clive had been dirty and unkempt during those far-off days in his South London home. Now, his visage, although pale like some effete angel, was golden-trimmed and shining. His clothes were robes of some garlanded religion — an offshoot of a peculiar Dunsany cult. His eyebrows arched like some intellectual Conan of the Spheres as he responded to my hypothesis of self-creation:
“I am looking at you, Mr. Hope. I am taking you in. You are like the hero of a romantic book. Your locks are dark. Your brows are deep and reasoning. Your lips are full and delicious. Your beard is grey-streaked with wisdom. And I have never known you different. You are you. And you were you before we started this trail of mind and inner-mind...”
“I am looking at you, too, Mr. Hunt. Your face is almost transparent, showing from within the fine vessels of silver fluid. Your garb is flowing and Christ-like. Your speech is glowing and Cicerone ... You are you. And you were you...”
There are many tales of another passenger along the way — at first unseen but, then gradually realised. Do you recall how months, or years, passed as we trudged the brown dunes of duration? We wondered whether at first our fellow passenger was nothing but a sunless shadow of one of us. Then, we knew, gradually, we were being accompanied by a negro of leonine cast. He had strange timeless tales to tell — he told of three who followed us. Of three who wished vengeance. And of those three, he was one,
His name was Snoi-Snep. We learnt, little by little, of his utter fear of himself and of his own relentless pursuit of himself in company with two creatures such as ourselves. We also learnt that those two companions were in relentless pursuit of our good selves. So, we patted Snoi-Snep on the back and pledged our support to him against himself and against those Englanders who we knew little of except their eternal quest across our own created plains and visions — for our good selves!
I tell of our flight through the visions of our favourite fantasies, pursued by an impossible possee, a deadly crew of thoughtless beings. We set up obstacles of horror behind our trail, we created every crevice and cranny of formulated fantasy to bar their way. We threw behind us pits and nets of thought, we dropped in our wake countless mazes and labyrinths of horror and supernatural, endless avenues of ghosts and monsters, unalter¬able chasms and ravines of imagination ... taking special care not to stumble back ourselves into these carefully constructed nightmares.
* * * * * *
When .Clive Hunt and myself actually saw the three figures pursuing us across the plains of brown waste, we literally shook with fear and anger combined. How dare they chase after artists across the very canvas upon which those artists intend to paint!
We had to think quick. We had to shrug off our self-imposed tautologies and refinements to throw back defensive fantasies. Crude as they might be, unplanned and rough-edged as they definitely were, we had to think dreams — and damn quick!
It must have seemed to Snoi-Snep that we were setting up a stage, a proscenium arch, with a red, red curtain. We visualized crudely pottered puppets and amateurish scenarios. We thrust our hands into glove dolls and pulled at our tangled threads of tear-stained, jerking Pinnochios.
We pulled the red, red curtain together and, pushing those dirty devices through the various slits in its surface, we gargled frightening gutterals to fit the antics of our puppets ... and just hoped for the best. One of Hunt’s puppets was particularly effective and was the main cause of the utter rout and flight of our three pursuers...
…*******The red glare had started. At first, shafts of red light bore down from the previously dreary sky. Hunt and Hope could not tell whether they were sharp, angular shafts at regular intervals of space or if they were blurred splotches of irregular bursts of red fire. In any event, the shafts quickly spread in magnitude and blinded them with a continuous sheet of uniform fire. Brighter and brighter burned its hue. Then, out of the hinterland and mid-mysteries of its shapeless infinitude, Hunt and Hope glimpssd sharp visages of scorn. Tongues lolled carelessly from tusked openings and eyes, redder still, winked malignantly above green-snotted nostrils. Then... AUNTIE CHICKEN stepped out of the red murk and waddled as if with a broken back. She had brooded in the shittah-tree for centuries and now she yearned vengeance on those who had ill-created her. She squawked beneath her bleeding red cock’s comb and gobbled up their sucking-pig souls...******
We had no doubt called up our own selves, our own Destiny and Cthulhu from where it should not have left.
“I glance at Mr. Hunt”.
“And I glance at Mr. Hope”.
And we perch in the land where the corpses grow and Snoi-Snep tells us far-fetched stories for an eternity and a half.
Many aeons and worlds away, others warm their hands by the fire-hearth that burns on fuel of page on page.
Fin.
