Ambling down the widening streambed, the forest soon gives birth to the morning light and a ray of sunshine blinds me. As my vision adjusts, I see the stream empties into a pool of water below. I know this place well. The women come here to bathe and collect water. A few of them grace the waters now.
Part of me despises the need to jump. But the others are closing in on me, will soon be able to attack. I am certain if given an instant longer, they will. They will not hesitate to draw more blood from my already anguished body. My only recourse is to leap for my freedom.
The water greets me and although I know little of its depths, I am fearless. A multitude of tiny bubbles escort me to the surface where I am met by shrieks of trepidation. Two women abandon their small vessels by the shoreline, no longer concerned with gathering water. A third woman dashes out of the water, leaving her skins behind. She would rather take to the brush nude than share these waters with the likes of me. I follow her to land.
Distracted by this last woman’s screaming, an attack comes from overhead. I lift my eyes to meet the skyward flight of the spear. Its shaft quivers when the spear finds land several lengths short of where I stand. I take this as a warning, recognizing the face of the clan leader, his stance valiant at the lip of the waterfall. The look in his eyes is menacing.
The rest of his men begin to clamor down the earthen walls, intent on continuing their pursuit. Anger radiates through me and I decide I will run no farther. If these men wish to bring the fight to me, I will face them.
I grab the clan leader's spear and snap it in two before throwing the useless tool aside. I do not require such unsophisticated weapons. Glaring up at their leader with defiance, I dare him to come fight me, but he refrains. He stands observing his men nearing their prey.
Having scaled the walls of the canyon, his men reach the sandy beach and do not hesitate. They taunt me with their spears, thrusting them at me in short, quick lunges. They move to encircle me, a tactic I have witnessed them use on many creatures prior to this day. I stand my ground.
Seizing the first of these men, I coil one of my tentacles around his neck. He drops his spear as I constrict his throat, trying to squeeze the life from him. When his face flushes red and then to a bluish hue, I discover an odd pleasure in his suffering. I draw him in close to me, watching as I press tighter. His life fades and I feel gratified when his clansmen go to his assistance instead of confronting me. That is their weakness.
One of these men I take into an appendage, encircling his chest and lifting him high into the air. He tries to strike me with his spear, but he misses and the weapon falls away useless. I clutch another's leg and lift him as well. But he keeps a tight hold on his spear, but to my surprise seems to forget how to use his weapon. The teeth-like mandibles at the end of my limb dig into the flesh of his shin, drawing blood, forcing him to drop his spear. He screams, further feeding my indulgence of his pain. I rip away the muscle of his leg, finding bone and cinching down upon it.
Seeing this, the other two men are frozen by their terror. They no longer have interest in helping their fellow men, or in me for that matter. Instead, they make an attempt to defend themselves as they run. Now I am the hunter, and send a bold tentacle lashing outward to trip them up. I pin one of these men to the ground, sliding the weight of my body over him. The other I hold at bay, as he tries to fend off one of my lower appendages.
While I admit to having little taste for man, I will not say it does not bring me satisfaction. Surely there are better creatures to devour, but if given no other choice mankind will suffice. I might even be quite capable of growing accustomed to the flavor. Should I escape and they continue to track me, I would consider this, but I do not wish for it to become the case.
Taking the man I hold by a mutilated shin, I throw him toward the canyon wall with all my might. He strikes the rock with great force, his skull caving in against the rigid stone. A thin trail of blood marks his descent, as he slides to a watery grave. This end suits my wife's brother well for having crossed me. Content, I glance up at their leader, and he at me. My resentment of him offers me increased strength.
His ribs giving, a snap indicates the man I hold about his chest has endured a fracture. Before I can look, I feel the hot sting of his blade and turn to discover him readying to thrust the makeshift knife into the muscle of my limb once more. Trying to tighten upon his chest, I fail as his first cut has already weakened the muscle. And I am forced to switch tentacles.
My new teeth, of which I am unfamiliar with, claw at the man's face. He tries to scream, but his weeping is muffled. Fraught for breath, I finally find enough strength to collapse a couple ribs, though it no longer matters. When I release the man, he falls to the ground faceless and near death.
Beneath me, the man offers little struggle, succumbing to my mass, perhaps hoping I have forgotten him. I have not. The other man, having toiled with my tentacle, finds an opportunity to escape and seizes the moment. I thrust both limbs at him, finding his legs, and tripping him up once more. He falls forward, impaling himself on his own spear.
My attention returns to their leader, as I relieve this last man of my burden. I take this fallen man up into my clutches, his hands in one tentacle and his feet in another. He does not struggle even as I lift him to the sky. Their leader surveys me and at first I tease, before severing the man in two. His blood and entrails shower me, I am overwhelmed with confidence.
There are many things I want to say, messages I want to convey, but I know this man will never understand my words. He turns and runs and I consider giving chase, as I know someday he might seek to return. Perhaps he will even bring others. I do not know why I let him live, but then I realize with certain clarity I might want him to come back.
Until that day, I will construct an underwater lair in the sea, where I will wait for them. I will long for them to interrupt my slumber, to provide me with another taste of humanity. Here I will be both the hunter and the fisher of men, ever patient in awaiting their hopeless return.
Kenneth W. Cain writes dark fiction from his home in eastern Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and two children. He is the author of several novels and short fiction, including his acclaimed collection These Old Tales. His work has appeared alongside such notable authors as Hill, Barker, Ketchum, Braunbeck, Maberry and others. http://kennethwcain.com
Story illustration by Steve Santiago.
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Cosmic Terror from Poe to Lovecraft
The fear of unknown from the abyss of the soul to cosmic chaos
by Sandro D. Fossemò
(Translation by Rossella Cirigliano)
“Life and dreams are leaves of the same book:
reading them in order is living,
skimming through them is dreaming.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
When the master of the ghost story M.R. James reads Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, he does not make out the deep meaning of the term “cosmic” and naively ends up by ridiculing it to a friend of his. James makes a sensational mistake, for he does not realize that adjective is the access key to the core of the fantastic literature where man is often to face, with his own might only, an awfully chaotic world and, for this, unlikely to be understood by human rationality. As Roger Caillois justly writes in his essay “De la féerie à la science-fiction”, the fantastic «reveals a scandal, a laceration, an unusual, almost unbearable, invasion in the real world. […] With the fantastic a new bewilderment, an unknown panic appears.» In such a dramatic and psychologically decentralized condition, reality is unknown and untamable, for supernatural forces rule it to the prejudice of the cosmic or earthly system we believe structured and rational. Therefore, because of a foreign and adverse environment, a psychic “laceration” arises which, according to Edgar Allan Poe, comes out of an ill soul and, according to Lovecraft, of a crazy universe but, for both, such an inner gash is a passage to the horror, bound to com
e to death or psychological delirium. In such a context, it is easy to guess the deep nature of terror within the fantastic as a direct manifestation of a blind and cruel Nature that is called “cosmic terror”. It describes the terrible fear the unknown causes, where human condition is literally subject to indecipherable events. The link between fear and incomprehensible occurs when the characters are not the human beings but those supernatural events which devour the anthropocentric element in favor of colossal and anonymous occult agitations, coming from beyond. Lovecraft himself thinks it is important to give room to what we have left behind, if we want to express the nature of the fantastic. «The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. Pleasure to me is wonder – the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.» Thus it is a question of freeing and interpreting an inner and fantastic-inherent expression, which is firstly amplified to the detriment of the anthropocentric element and then changed into a horror sense under the influence of the unknown, which may have a metaphysical or materialistic direction, depending on the author’s cosmic philosophy.
Poe and Lovecraft, in their common passion for the noble science of astronomy, have both developed a cosmogony influenced by opposed philosophical currents: in fact Poe’s cosmic terror is metaphysical, while Lovecraft’s is merely materialistic. Yet, it is necessary to consider that Lovecraft’s scientific materialism recalls the figure of a “horror poet”, as it is so secret and impenetrable in its unreal dimension that barely touches and goes beyond metaphysics in an almost mimetic and assimilated way, through a mechanistic analysis.
Before shortly analyzing the differences, we must make the point that great writers such as Poe and Lovecraft never show, in their fiction, a well defined and easily identifiable trend within a given “philosophical system”, just because no reductive schematism falls within the natural and variegated existential expression of literature.
Idealism
The two well-known American writers are great masters of “nightmare” with completely different, if not even opposed, cultural backgrounds; but sometimes, in spite of their obvious differences, they both have in common the same horror expression. They both share the idea of “life as a dream”, but they do not provide the same oneiric interpretation of the world, since Poe’s thought, unlike Lovecraft’s, partly inherits the philosophical development of the German romantic idealism, dating back to early 19th century, which tends to believe in the existence of a harmonious relationship between finite and infinite, that is an indissoluble link between Man and God. The idealist Schleiermacher (1768-1822)’s statement the world is not without God, God is not without the world is totally in tune with the theocentric cosmogony in “Eureka”, where Poe asserts that everything has been created by “God’s Will”. Obviously, asserting that everything is created by God does not absolutely mean that “everything is God”, but on the contrary it might mean that “everything is controlled by God”. Short stories such as “The colloquium of Monos and Una” and “Mesmeric Revelation” clearly show Poe’s spiritual aspect.
In romantic idealism the concept of the universe is totally transcendent, as nothing escapes God’s omniscience and nothing goes beyond God’s almightiness. In the world the most microscopic organism is structurally chained to the macroscopic material dimensions, with an infinite net of links which do not escape, even in the least part, God’s Will.
The new metaphysical myth of German romantic aesthetics is a unitary art that overtakes the dualism between finite and infinite. Poe’s fantastic assumes a basic metaphysical structure, as it is also connected to such principles. Metaphysics is that unknown sphere where horror often spreads out. Fear gains ground in a hallucinative dimension, in which the material and physic universe magically melts into the immaterial and metaphysical universe of the dream. «If matter is the last step of a spirit descending from high above in order to ascend again to its original place, then in a perspective like ours we can certainly talk about “metaphysical horror”, due to the exact influence of the spiritual world into matter, a sort of transfiguration of reality, that is the indissoluble pivot of any metaphysical concept.» Thanks to the concept of spiritual metaphysics as all the same with natural physics, the writer is able to create a harmony of fantastic effects, deeply connected to metaphysical horror.
To better understand the mystery relating Poe’s art to horror, in my opinion it is necessary to take partly into consideration Schelling (1775-1854), who considers God as an “irrational will” dictated by a negative, blind and obscure principle, in everlasting contrast with a positive and rational one.
Materialism
Lovecraft’s cosmogony is a completely different thing: drawing inspiration partly from Schopenhauer (1788-1860), he considers the world as a dream devoid of a divine guidance, but rather at the mercy of blind and irrational forces, ready to unchain a crazy and imperturbable universe, which is not by nature against, but unaware, of man. Lovecraft goes deeper into cosmic philosophy, starting from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1844-1900) and then outstripping them because of a concrete scientific materialism, concerning an inscrutable cosmos that appears mysterious, inflexible, oneiric, multiform, multicolored and, at the same time, indifferent and chaotic. This recalls, more or less, the Epicurean mechanistic materialism, where the universe is interpreted on the basis of an automatic and mixed combination of atoms according to a mechanistic system, which is not fortuitous but deterministic and causal and totally excludes any divine interference. «There is nothing to take real exception to in the statement that a given group of human tendencies springs from the natural collocation of material particles operating automatically without the intervention of an external consciousness. Such a statement does not imply in any way the action of chance (for a cosmos of mutually interacting parts is all law & no chance...) […] The whole cosmos is, always has been, and always will be a limitless field of force composed of alternately combining and dispersing electrons. They work in fixed ways, none of which need explanation by any hypothetical “spiritual” world apart from that whose laws they obey. […] Everything that exists or happens, exists or happens because the balance of forces in the cosmic pattern makes it inevitable.»
Although Lovecraft believes in materialism, his idea about the universe is not only limited to the ephemeral material contact of human senses with external objects, but in the cosmos is something much deeper and more obscure that common human knowledge cannot make out. For example, in the short story “The Silver Key” the possibility is described of the predisposed scatter-brained dreamer, Randolph Carter, to enter, in a less limited way, the sphere of dreams, thanks to a particular key; here it is possible to overpass “Maya’s veil” and access, without any metaphysical abstractions, physically to the true reality of a blind and unknown universe made up of huge space-time labyrinths, immersed in an infinitely repeatable interlacement. It is important to consider that Carter’s is not a personal supernatural experience but, on the contrary, the space-time world is depicted as a scientific fact of the universe: it is a materialist-mechanistic answer to the metaphysics of chaos. For Lovecraft the world of dreams is not the “magical” or “mystic” universe of some romantic fanatic, but it is exactly a possible cosmos’ revelation that allows man to live ultra mundane experiences.
«From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and incorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking.»
Based on the dream revelation of a peculiarly unusual universe, these examples show that man is subject to an imperceptible dimension, able to overwhelm him whenever it wants to.
Fantastic realism
In the difficult exegesis of Lovecraft’s imagination there is no need to scientifically explain all tha
t happens, because it would undermine the natural imaginative inclination of fantastic literature. Yet, we can try to play on human impossibility, although scientific knowledge and means are available, to dominate such a mechanistic and chaotic Nature, which becomes so dangerously unforeseeable to produce cosmic horror. «In reply, I would suggest that none of my narratives aims at scientific accuracy and inclusiveness, each being rather a mere transcript of an isolated mood or idea with its imaginative ramifications.» Lovecraft always tries to make fantastic credible; that is to pervade the scientific aspect with the ultra mundane one in order to make the narration more involving and impressive. In fact, human fear is fuelled by the fact that the monstrous event might happen if certain scientifically possible combinations are satisfied, whose results are unknown to us.
If for Schopenhauer man is at least a “metaphysical animal” continuously wondering about the meaning of existence, for Lovecraft instead man is a poor “entrapped animal”, lonely in the lost jungle of the universe, with no Providence to help him, since life is inexorably attacked by unknown cosmic overwhelming events, haunted by horrible dark creatures, without the victim hoping to be saved in an ultra mundane life. The only chance to be saved depends on the ability and resources of the victim.
Eternal return
In such a blind and chaotic universe where existence is engulfed in a cruelly uncontrolled and repetitive game, which does not distinguish life from death or justice from injustice, Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal return” slightly complies with Lovecraft’s indifferentism. «Nothing but a cycle is in any case conceivable—a cycle or an infinite rearrangement, if that be a tenable thought. Nietzsche saw this when he spoke of the ewigen wiederkunft. In absolute eternity there is neither starting-point nor destination.» When the German philosopher writes in the Gay Science: «what if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"» he seems to clearly recall a paragraph of a short story of Lovecraft’s about the existential tragedy of man, overwhelmed by the infinite coil of chaotic and repetitive cosmic terror, prey in the eternal return of horrible and devilish beasts totally far from the least concept of mercy and repentance. Like the grotesque “The Rats in the Wall”, where the character is constantly and psychologically tortured by the eternal recurrence of an obsessive and «insidious scurrying» of rats hiding in the walls and scampering along black pits full «of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls!» An obvious example of eternal return is told in the horrifying short story “The Winged Death”, where the horrible blue-winged fly returns continuously to the doctor’s room to take revenge for a diabolic murder.
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