THE RETURN OF THE SORCERER
Clark Ashton Smith
Copyright © 2009 by Prime Books.
Introduction © 2009 by Gene Wolfe.
Cover art copyright © 2009 by Peter Bergting.
Editor: Robert Weinberg.
Cover design by Linduna
Ebook design by Neil Clarke
ISBN: 978-1-60701-260-3 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-60701-209-2 (trade paperback)
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CONTENTS
Introduction, Gene Wolfe
The Return of the Sorcerer
The City of Singing Flame
Beyond the Singing Flame
The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
The Double Shadow
The Monster of the Prophecy
The Hunters from Beyond
The Isle of the Torturers
A Night in Malnéant
The Chain of Aforgomon
The Dark Eidolon
The Seven Geases
The Holiness of Azédarac
The Beast of Averoigne
The Empire of the Necromancers
The Disinterment of Venus
The Devotee of Evil
The Enchantress of Sylaire
Publication History
About the Author
Introduction
Gene Wolfe
During his lifetime (1893 to 1961) Clark Ashton Smith was best known as a poet and a ladies’ man. My own experience teaches that the writing of poetry is an easy occupation and pleasant one—far easier and far more pleasant than building birdhouses, for example. The relentless pursuit of a variety of women is (I am told) laborious, costly, and frequently frustrating.
At one point the two find common ground: neither is remunerative. Today we have forgotten both the poet and the womanizer and know Smith only as a writer of fantastic and often frightful tales, one whose best work is literally inimitable. In its heyday, he was one of the three musketeers of Weird Tales, the other two being H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Let us pause briefly to notice that although Lovecraft has had many imitators (he is in fact quite easy to imitate) and Howard more than a few, no one imitates Smith. There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him. Klarkash-Ton, as Lovecraft called him, arrived in 1930 and departed in 1935, producing a staggering amount of fiction during those six brief years. May I give the barren years after 1935 a little personal perspective? I was four when Smith stopped writing his necromantic narratives, and thirty when he died.
No thoughtful reader should overlook the dates of his brief productive period. Smith began to write, and write frantically, at the time of the stock market crash. (Late October and early November of 1929.) He continued to write through the depths of the depression and stopped as soon as the economy had somewhat revived.
The pattern strongly suggests that Smith was dependent on dividends for income, probably dividends from inherited stock. Today, when we have forgotten how much a single dollar would buy in the nineteen thirties, we sneer at the one-cent, two-cent, and even half-cent word rates paid by the old pulps. We would do well to remember that Howard, a doctor’s son who wrote for those rates instead of going to medical school, had the highest income in Cross Plains, Texas. A recent issue of Weird Tales carried a cover price of five ninety-five. I have the May, 1940 issue, on which the cover price is fifteen cents. At two cents a word, this sentence would buy that Weird Tales and return change.
Does this mean that Smith’s output was mere hackwork? Far from it! Samuel Johnson, for decades the literary dictator of England, said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Charles Dickens, who worked in a factory as a boy, was given a little education and pulled himself out of poverty by writing. Smith’s contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, once wrote: “You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live . . . All write [sic] but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material . . . ” (Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald 1934)
Smith did not need Hemingway to tell him. He was a poet, with a poet’s high, almost satanic, pride. It was not in him to do less than his best, any more than it is in a thoroughbred stallion to race slowly.
At the time he wrote for the pulps, Smith lived in a cabin near an abandoned mine, far from any neighbor. The nearest town was Auburn, northeast of San Francisco; Auburn is not large even today. There can be little doubt that strange lights shone in the windows of that cabin by night, and that strange sounds emanated from it. No source I have found reports these; but when a man like Smith lives in a place like that, he has Visitors.
And that is where this introduction ought to end, but I cannot resist piling on a few more facts that seem to me to illuminate the extraordinary author you will soon begin reading.
The first is that although Smith was locally famous as a poet, he never attained a national reputation. This was undoubtedly because his sort of poetry was utterly out of fashion at the time he wrote it. He was (in Northern California in the nineteen thirties!) a poet of the French decadence. Baudelaire had published Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, thirty-six years before Smith was born.
The second is that many of Smith’s stories originally included strong sexual elements. These were removed, for the most part, by the editors who bought them. If you are inclined to excoriate the editors for it, as I am, we must remember that the postal inspectors of that day zealously impounded magazines containing material they felt prurient. The slightest nod in the direction of sexual intercourse was dangerous.
The third is that Smith was an amateur painter and sculptor. Those who have examined his work in both media feel that it was in sculpture that he excelled.
As is only to be expected, his sculptures are odd, to say the least. They are largely heads, of which only a few appear human; most might better be called the heads of aliens or demons. Although they are small enough that a man can readily hold them in one hand, they possess an air of massive antiquity. If you were shown a photograph of one without any other object present to provide scale, you might suppose that it would require a truck to move it, and that archaeologists would condemn you for moving it at all. Smith dreamed of antediluvian temples sunk beneath the sea or smothered among triumphant vines, this as he sat alone in the sunshine, carving the soft stone he found in the abandoned mine with a pocket knife.
A few of his carvings he mailed to friends, packing the little heads that loom so large in rags, and stuffing them into empty tins, packing those tins in more rags in cardboard boxes. Most he literally threw away. Since his death, his admirers have combed the area around his cabin, finding a good many.
Earlier I wrote that Smith had come—and gone. That he had been ours only briefly, and now was ours no longer. That is so for me and for many others. If you have yet to read him, it is not so for you. For you solely he is about to live again, whispering of the road between the atoms and the path into far stars.
“New-born, the mage re-summons stronger spells, and spirits
With dazzling darkness clad about,
and fierier flame
Renewed by æon-curtained slumber.
All the powers
Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;
And there, to blaze with blinding glory
the bored hours,
He calls upon Sham-hamphorash,
the nameless Name.”
The Return of the Sorcerer
I had
been out of work for several months, and my savings were perilously near the vanishing point. Therefore I was naturally elated when I received from John Carnby a favorable answer inviting me to present my qualifications in person. Carnby had advertised for a secretary, stipulating that all applicants must offer a preliminary statement of their capacities by letter; and I had written in response to the advertisement.
Carnby, no doubt, was a scholarly recluse who felt averse to contact with a long waiting-list of strangers; and he had chosen this manner of weeding out beforehand many, if not all, of those who were ineligible. He had specified his requirements fully and succinctly, and these were of such nature as to bar even the average well-educated person. A knowledge of Arabic was necessary; among other things: and luckily I had acquired a certain degree of scholarship in this unusual tongue.
I found the address, of whose location I had formed only a vague idea, at the end of a hilltop avenue in the suburbs of Oakland. It was a large, two-story house, overshaded by ancient oaks and dark with a mantling of unchecked ivy, among hedges of unpruned privet and shrubbery that had gone wild for many years. It was separated from its neighbors by a vacant, weed-grown lot on one side and a tangle of vines and trees on the other, surrounding the black ruins of a burnt mansion.
Even apart from its air of long neglect, there was something drear and dismal about the place—something that inhered in the ivy-blurred outlines of the house, in the furtive, shadowy windows, and the very forms of the misshapen oaks and oddly sprawling shrubbery. Somehow, my elation became a trifle less exuberant, as I entered the grounds and followed an unswept path to the front door.
When I found myself in the presence of John Carnby, my jubilation was still somewhat further diminished; though I could not have given a tangible reason for the premonitory chill, the dull, somber feeling of alarm that I experienced, and the leaden sinking of my spirits. Perhaps it was the dark library in which he received me as much as the man himself—a room whose musty shadows could never have been wholly dissipated by sun or lamplight. Indeed, it must have been this; for John Carnby himself, in a manner, was very much the sort of person I had pictured him to be.
He had all the earmarks of the lonely scholar who has devoted patient years to some line of erudite research. He was thin and bent, with a massive forehead and a mane of grizzled hair; and the pallor of the library was on his hollow, clean-shaven cheeks. But coupled with this, there was a nerve-shattered air, a fearful shrinking that was more than the normal shyness of a recluse, and an unceasing apprehensiveness that betrayed itself in every glance of his dark-ringed, feverish eyes and every movement of his bony hands. In all likelihood his health had been seriously impaired by over-application; and I could not help but wonder at the nature of the studies that had made him a tremulous wreck. But there was something about him—perhaps the width of his bowed shoulders and the bold aquilinity of his facial outlines—which gave the impression of great former strength and a vigor not yet wholly exhausted.
His voice was unexpectedly deep and sonorous.
“I think you will do, Mr. Ogden,” he said, after a few formal questions, most of which related to my linguistic knowledge, and in particular my mastery of Arabic. “Your labors will not be very heavy; but I want someone who can be on hand at any time required. Therefore you must live with me. I can give you a comfortable room, and I guarantee that my cooking will not poison you. I often work at night; and I hope you will not find the irregular hours too disagreeable.”
No doubt I should have been overjoyed at this assurance that the secretarial position was to be mine. Instead, I was aware of a dim, unreasoning reluctance and an obscure forewarning of evil as I thanked John Carnby and told him that I was ready to move in whenever he desired.
He appeared to be greatly pleased; and the queer apprehensiveness went out of his manner for a moment.
“Come immediately—this very afternoon, if you can,” he said. “I shall be very glad to have you, and the sooner the better. I have been living entirely alone for some time; and I must confess that the solitude is beginning to pall upon me. Also, I have been retarded in my labors for lack of the proper help. My brother used to live with me and assist me, but he has gone away on a long trip.”
I returned to my downtown lodgings, paid my rent with the last few dollars that remained to me, packed my belongings, and in less than an hour was back at my new employer’s home. He assigned me a room on the second floor, which, though unaired and dusty, was more than luxurious in comparison with the hall-bedroom that failing funds had compelled me to inhabit for some time past. Then he took me to his own study, which was on the same floor, at the further end of the hall. Here, he explained to me, most of my future work would be done.
I could hardly restrain an exclamation of surprise as I viewed the interior of this chamber. It was very much as I should have imagined the den of some old sorcerer to be. There were tables strewn with archaic instruments of doubtful use, with astrological charts, with skulls and alembics and crystals, with censers such as are used in the Catholic Church, and volumes bound in worm-eaten leather with verdigris-mottled clasps. In one corner stood the skeleton of a large ape; in another, a human skeleton; and overhead a stuffed crocodile was suspended.
There were cases overpiled with books, and even a cursory glance at the titles showed me that they formed a singularly comprehensive collection of ancient and modern works on demonology and the black arts. There were some weird paintings and etchings on the walls, dealing with kindred themes; and the whole atmosphere of the room exhaled a medley of half-forgotten superstitions. Ordinarily I would have smiled if confronted with such things; but somehow, in this lonely, dismal house, beside the neurotic, hag-ridden Carnby, it was difficult for me to repress an actual shudder.
On one of the tables, contrasting incongruously with this melange of medievalism and Satanism, there stood a typewriter, surrounded with piles of disorderly manuscript. At one end of the room there was a small, curtained alcove with a bed in which Carnby slept. At the end opposite the alcove, between the human and simian skeletons, I perceived a locked cupboard that was set in the wall.
Carnby had noted my surprise, and was watching me with a keen, analytic expression which I found impossible to fathom. He began to speak, in explanatory tones.
“I have made a life-study of demonism and sorcery,” he declared. “It is a fascinating field, and one that is singularly neglected. I am now preparing a monograph, in which I am trying to correlate the magical practices and demon-worship of every known age and people. Your labors, at least for a while, will consist in typing and arranging the voluminous preliminary notes which I have made, and in helping me to track down other references and correspondences. Your knowledge of Arabic will be invaluable to me, for I am none too well-grounded in this language myself, and I am depending for certain essential data on a copy of the Necronomicon in the original Arabic text. I have reason to think that there are certain omissions and erroneous renderings in the Latin version of Olaus Wormius.”
I had heard of this rare, well-nigh fabulous volume, but had never seen it. The book was supposed to contain the ultimate secrets of evil and forbidden knowledge; and, moreover, the original text, written by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, was said to be unprocurable. I wondered how it had come into Carnby’s possession.
“I’ll show you the volume after dinner,” Carnby went on. “You will doubtless be able to elucidate one or two passages that have long puzzled me.”
The evening meal, cooked and served by my employer himself, was a welcome change from cheap restaurant fare. Carnby seemed to have lost a good deal of his nervousness. He was very talkative, and even began to exhibit a certain scholarly gaiety after we had shared a bottle of mellow Sauterne. Still, with no manifest reason, I was troubled by intimations and forebodings which I could neither analyze nor trace to their rightful source.
We returned to the study, and Carnby brought out from a locked drawer the volume of whic
h he had spoken. It was enormously old, and was bound in ebony covers arabesqued with silver and set with darkly glowing garnets. When I opened the yellowing pages, I drew back with involuntary revulsion at the odor which arose from them—an odor that was more than suggestive of physical decay, as if the book had lain among corpses in some forgotten graveyard and had taken on the taint of dissolution.
Carnby’s eyes were burning with a fevered light as he took the old manuscript from my hands and turned to a page near the middle. He indicated a certain passage with his lean forefinger.
“Tell me what you make of this,” he said, in a tense, excited whisper.
I deciphered the paragraph, slowly and with some difficulty, and wrote down a rough English version with the pad and pencil which Carnby offered me. Then, at his request, I read it aloud:
“It is verily known by few, but is nevertheless an attestable fact, that the will of a dead sorcerer hath power upon his own body and can raise it up from the tomb and perform therewith whatever action was unfulfilled in life. And such resurrections are invariably for the doing of malevolent deeds and for the detriment of others. Most readily can the corpse be animated if all its members have remained intact; and yet there are cases in which the excelling will of the wizard hath reared up from death the sundered pieces of a body hewn in many fragments, and hath caused them to serve his end, either separately or in a temporary reunion. But in every instance, after the action hath been completed, the body lapseth into its former state.”
Of course, all this was errant gibberish. Probably it was the strange, unhealthy look of utter absorption with which my employer listened, more than that damnable passage from the Necronomicon, which caused my nervousness and made me start violently when, toward the end of my reading, I heard an indescribable slithering noise in the hall outside. But when I finished the paragraph and looked up at Carnby, I was more than startled by the expression of stark, staring fear which his features had assumed—an expression as of one who is haunted by some hellish phantom. Somehow, I got the feeling that he was listening to that odd noise in the hallway rather than to my translation of Abdul Alhazred.
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