by Gafford, Sam
With one sudden movement I managed to slash the figure across the face, but still this appeared to have no effect, and the consequence of doing it made me fall to the deck. I looked upwards and saw the huge sword a second away from coming down on me, but in that very instant I witnessed the shocking strike of an axe which took the figure’s head straight off from its shoulders. Its headless body remained standing over me, but from its open neck began to bubble and steam a black substance which I took to be the corrupted blood of the dead. Grady reached down and hurriedly pulled me to my feet; only the fact that he had kept hold of the emergency axe had enabled him to save my life.
In another second we were back in the fray and fighting desperately to try and help Payne. He was under attack from two of the Vikings at the same time, and had now been backed into a blazing corner. Without any warning whatsoever the crossbeam of the sail above gave way. With an instinctive dive to my side I managed to save myself, then I looked again for my mates and their assailants.
Now I saw only blistering flames in the place they had stood.
The fire was spreading rapidly by this point, and in my ears rang many awful cries of human pain. I managed to back into an empty deck space, but a hand grabbed me powerfully by the shoulder. It was Captain Gregson. He pulled me from the swirling smoke.
“It’s no good, Jenson!” he yelled. “The ship’s done for and so will we be if we don’t get out of here damn quick. What we must do now is get over to larboard pretty fast, lad.”
My eyes stung from the smoke and my body seemed to sweat and shiver at the same time, as Captain Gregson began to lead me through the fiery chaos. How the man could tell where he was going through all that billowing smoke was a mystery to me, but still I followed behind him, stumbling over burning bodies and deck equipment which I could barely see.
A blackened face suddenly appeared next to me, its fiery orbs peering as though with intense hatred. I slashed at the Thing with my cut-and-thrust, then made to continue rapidly on my way, grateful (at least in this one instance) for the shrouding smoke of the fire. At last we reached larboard, and through a clearing in the smoke I could see the lanterns of the lifeboat beneath the stern. Higgins and Bridges were shouting frantically up at us, but the noise of the roaring fire was such that I couldn’t hear their words.
Suddenly I felt a grip like iron around my neck and knew I had been seized by the hands of one of those dread creatures; I felt searing pain as my flesh immediately began to burn. But in another second Captain Gregson was aware of the situation. With one ruthless movement he plunged his sheath knife into the face of the evil form that held me, and straightway came a lessening of the cruel grip, so that I was free once more.
Despite the terrible pain I was in, I turned rapidly to confront the figure, but now there was nothing to be seen but smoke. I looked back to the captain and saw that his eyes were alert to every area about us.
“Jenson, lad, escape while you still can—I have a little business to finish before I can join you.”
Then I realised which direful creature had just held me in its unholy grip.
“No, sir, I can’t leave you to fight a Thing like that without any help!”
“Go now, lad! At least let me have the satisfaction of knowi—”
His sentence was never finished. From out of the dense smoke had thrust two deathly black arms which were fringed with flame. Cruel fingers squeezed deep into the captain’s neck, and I saw a torrent of blood flow from his mouth.
I’m not a coward and I never will be, but at that time I knew for sure that Captain Gregson was finished and that I could only hope to save myself. I leapt from the larboard rails in the very instant the fiery eyes of that dread creature fixed on me once more, and when I hit the tropical water I made sure I went under. You see, I had never seen hatred burn so fierce when they made recognition of me, and I knew there would be no escape if I should merely swim to the rowboat. I swam underwater for as far as I could manage with one breath of air, and when I did surface I took another breath and swam still further.
When I eventually felt safe enough, I took in the scene of the devastation from a distance. The rowboat beside the Spirit Moon was now on fire, and contrasting against the flames I saw the charred and bloody bodies of Higgins and Bridges. My eyes moved to the burning wreck of the Spirit Moon, and standing within the scorching fires on larboard was that hideous black figure with arms folded arrogantly.
*
I will give few details of my struggle to stay alive during the remainder of the night, save to say that with the arrival of a solemn and misty sunrise there came to my eyes the sight of a passing steamer. I couldn’t tell the crew that picked me up the true story; they wouldn’t have believed me. There was no sign of the Drakkar or the coffin-shaped portal it had sailed from. I told them the whole thing was the result of an accidental fire aboard our ship. You see, all our ship and crew had been burnt to cinders.
*
Now I am much older and my employment is via the age of the steamship. At times my voyages still pass through that particular area of the tropics, so that I think back to that awful experience of my youth, and a great sadness comes over me every time when remember Captain Gregson and all the crew of the Spirit Moon. Then a chill will come to my spine as I gaze out to sea and hope to witness no sign of fire in all the silence and dark of the tropical night.
A Concluding Oink:
An Abnormal Flight of Fancy
By James Bojaciuk
There is nothing more precious than what has been lost.
We will always long for John Watson’s tin dispatch box; for we will never discover the particulars of the lighthouse, politician, and the trained cormorant, nor we will ever uncover the truth behind the Giant Rat of Sumatra (which, even now, the world is unprepared to learn). Carnacki, the infamous Ghost-Finder, leaves us in a similar bind. Dodgson, the biographer, and Hodgson, the literary agent, never saw fit to tell us the “horrible Black Veil business,” where young Aster died and Carnacki was only saved by the water circle. Nor could they bring themselves to certify the Yellow Finger Experiments. Carnacki’s history is at a loss.
There is one such case we can track and, in fact, track past Carnacki’s conclusion to its blasphemous source.
In “The Whistling Room,” Carnacki tells his dinner party that this case was “no mere Aeiirii development; but one of the worst forms, as the Saiitii; like that ‘Grunting Man’ case—you know.” We may imagine that Dodgson and all nodded in perfect understanding. We, however, are left befuddled. We are only honorary dinner guests, and such tales are not for us.
Yet Carnacki would tell his guests of another—or, perhaps, the same—grunting man.
In “The Hog” we receive a shower of details. A man, Bains, arrives on Carnacki’s doorstep. He believes himself mad. Every night he dreams he is separated from his body and hounded through an incomprehensible maze. Pig-men give chase; they squeal, loudly, speaking to each other in grunts and ineffable oinks. Suddenly, Bains finds himself oinking in their choir. Carnacki attempts a sleep experiment but, as so often happens in occult detection, everything goes terribly wrong.
“As the rolling chaos of swine melody beat itself away on every side, there came booming through it a single grunt, the single recurring grunt of the HOG; for I knew now that I was actually and without doubt hearing the beat of monstrosity, the HOG.” The Sigsand Manuscript, that anchor of strength and sanity which whispers the seductive whisper that yes, men can hold back the dark, recoils from the Hog. It is something that terrifies his scarred old soul. The Hog is an Outer Monstrosity, Sigsand knows, and “in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end. And in that ye Hogge had once a power upon ye earth, so doeth he crave sore to come again.”
We shall not go mightly in depth into Carnacki’s technology. That is a topic deserving an essay all its own. But some words must be spared to explain the following: Carnacki has devised an ingenious “
color defense.” A number of circular light bulbs are primed in different colors: combinations can bring about protection (green or blue, “God’s color in the heavens”) or summon all Hell’s children (“reds and purples . . . are fairly dangerous . . . [and] ’focus’ outside forces”). To the spirit world, these circles of light project a dome against—or encouraging—influence.
The Hog, which Sigsand knew to be terrified off, enters Carnacki’s light defense through Bains, calling out to him as a mother to her sow.
I must take issue with a fellow scholar. Neal Alan Spurlock, whose article “Ab-Reality: The Metaphysical Vision of William Hope Hodgson” (Sargasso #1) states that the Hog
is not really a single entity, per se; instead, it seems to embody all the pig/swine-related beings, a sort of totem for their species, and the species itself seems merely to be a product of a momentary mixture of human and ab-human, only possible in the borderland space of the House and its surrounding area. The swine-things only exist in a particular moment in time. (133–34)
This is very good scholarship when it comes to digging deep into Hodgson’s themes and, I may admit, made my third rereading of The House on the Borderland all the more enjoyable. Yet if we were to look at The House on the Borderland and “The Hog” as two pieces of a Hodgsonian universe, this piece of Mr. Spurlock’s theory falls down. The Hog becomes elevated from a momentary manifestation snorting through our history into something abnormal and indefatigable: something that the Recluse could only watch in horror, barely protected by a psychic bubble; something that terrified Sigsand; something Carnacki, for all his technology and knowledge, was unable to counter.
In this view, the ab-natural is not merely momentary: it is eternal.
But let us touch on Spurlock again: though one of his theories has been pushed away, he makes a thrust that pins the Hog’s nature:
The threat is entropy itself, the rule of time, the tendency of all things, matter and energy, to decay into less and less structured forms. The threat comes into our universe not spatially, but temporally, from the future. For it is the breakdown of matter and energy that allows for this alien force to invade at all. The future—the far future—is not where the enemy wins the war and occupies our territory, but where the enemy begins their existence and thrives, just as our form of life thrived at our end of time. They are at their most powerful in the highly entropic universe near the end and we, as highly complex . . . entities, are proportionately weakened. This process . . . forces . . . our Human-Current to fall, and the Hog-Current to arise. (132–33)
From only the data available in The House on the Borderland, this is an admirable survey of the state of Hodgson’s universe. Man can only live in a small, shrinking hospitable zone (or, for clarity, a space of time) with entropic forces closing in.
What this analysis misses is a key quotation from the Sigsand Manuscript: “in ye earlier life upon the world did the Hogge have power, and shall again in ye end.”
From dust to dust, from entropy to entropy; what thou wert, thou shall be. The universe began in a state that promoted hog-kind. The universe ends in a state hospitable to Hog-kind. We exist in a small temperate zone where the “Hog-Current” cannot exist and we thrive. The Hog can only appear briefly under ideal conditions. It seems the Hog can recruit members of humanity into its entropic race. It had nearly absorbed Bains. We are left to wonder if the rest of the Hog’s swine-things—which pursued Bains nightly—are other men it has stolen. We do not know the scope of its activities.
Entropy acts as an infection: it latches onto men. The stable routine of existence (our superficial complexities) are attacked first: Bains can no longer sleep. This allows the Hog—and its ilk—to step in and begin to claim his mind. In this way, the Hog collects followers in every age and place: agents of entropy ready to be deployed (much like the attacking army of swine-things in The House on the Borderland). Dreams are the only things sufficiently entropic to allow the Hog entry: thus it was with Bains (and, perhaps, thus it was for Lady Mirdath and the narrator of The Night Land). If, as Spurlock suggests, time is no barrier for the Hog, then perhaps Bains was intended to be one of the attacking force.
When Carnacki encounters the Hog it is, in fact, stopped—but not by Carnacki. He and all his colors are useless. An outside agent appears and blasts the Hog back to its home. Perhaps this agent is God, perhaps a god, perhaps an angel, perhaps something else: Carnacki gives us the clearest view of his universe’s spectral epistemology, but he never gives us a clear look at the “positive” (i.e., non-entropic) forces.
Carnacki ends his adventure as confounded as we are. He has no answer. He is merely relieved the ordeal is over.
Yet we can track the Hog’s trail further.
In 1908, Hodgson edited a small volume that two campers discovered in the Irish woods. They are Tonnison and Berreggnog, two stout men who run back to civilization after finding a river—and by that river the wreck of the house—and inside that wreck of a house, a tattered, water-washed book. The writer of the book is unknown: he came to that wreck of a house when it still stood whole. He brought provisions, he brought money, he brought his sister, he brought his dog, he brought all his advancing years and aging bones.
He bought the house to die in it; he succeeded, but first he had to watch the house die.
We shall call him, as Hodgson did, the Recluse.
The swine-things reemerge: they swarm his house, seeking entry. We shall deal with his description of them further in this essay. Unfortunately, Carnacki left us no description of the swine-things’ appearance. We can only compare the pig-men Bains encountered and the swine-things the Recluse encountered in one area: sound.
The Recluse describes the swine-things’ sound as: “Out in the gardens rose a continuous sound. It might have been mistaken . . . for the grunting and squealing of a herd of pigs. But, as I stood there, it came to me that there was sense and meaning to all these swinish noises. Gradually, I seemed to be able to trace a semblance in it to human speech . . . it was no mere medley of sounds; but a rapid interchange of ideas.”
Bains describes the grunts as “It’s just like pigs grunting . . . only much more awful. All the grunts, squeals and howls blend into one brutal chaos of sound—only it isn’t a chaos. It all blends in a queer horrible way. I’ve heard it. A sort of swinish clamouring melody that grunts and roars and shrieks in chunks of grunting sounds, all tied together with squealing’s and shot through with pig howls. I’ve sometimes thought there was a definite beat in it . . .”
These descriptions are virtually identical: a continual sound; grunts as if from a herd of pigs; the sense that the grunts are not random, but part of a pattern. This weighs strongly in favor of the proposition that the unseen pig-men encountered by Carnacki and the swine-things encountered by the Recluse are in fact the same species.
Let us consider their god.
The Recluse is subject to a series of visions: vast, apocalyptic visions that leave him witness to the death of the universe, or to a not-quite-existent-plane. In one of these visions he finds himself in another world. The House sits on that plane. Up around it rises great bestial “statues.” These “statues” are not things of stone and steel, but living beings locked into an immortal “life-in-death.” Some readers may be reminded of the Necronomicon’s infamous couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die.”
The Recluse recognizes two of these gods: “I knew that I was looking at a monstrous representation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. . . . My glance fell back upon the huge beast-headed Thing. Simultaneously, I recognized it for the ancient Egyptian god Set, or Seth, the Destroyer of Souls. . . . ‘The old gods of mythology!’”
What is the researcher to do with this?
Perhaps . . .
First, many if not all of the world’s myths are accounts of the Outer Monstrosities at work in the world of man: scribes rationalized them, sanitized them. They rewrote their gods
and made them safe. Homer took them, took them softly, and bound the gods up from what may have been the Outer Monstrosities infesting men and creating a war full of blood sacrifices into a tale of honor, heroism, and the waste of war. Akhenaten discovered that his people’s mythology was built on worshipping the monsters that sought to kill them and absorb their world into chaos. He came in contact with the all-powerful, holy god who protected Carnacki in “The Hog” and sought to change his nation’s worship to righteousness.
Perhaps . . .
The statues are merely what the Recluse’s mind perceived them as: the closest equivalent to what he could understand were the old gods. Therefore his mind substituted the myth for blasphemes.
Perhaps . . .
The statues’ purpose is so far beyond us that we, wretched mortals that we are, could ever comprehend them.
We must pause in our theorization as he did. The Recluse is not alone on that plane. Among these “statues” lurks the Hog. Let us compare the Recluse’s description with Carnacki’s.
The Recluse describes the Hog as “a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appearance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine.”
Carnacki describes it as “I seemed to be staring down into miles of black Aether at something that hung there—a pallid face floating far down and remote—a great swine face. And as I gazed I saw it grow bigger. A seemingly motionless, pallid swine-face rising upward out of the depth. And suddenly I realized I was actually looking at the Hog. . . . It stuck me that it glowed very slightly—just a vague luminosity.”
As with the swine-things, the two descriptions of the Hog itself are virtually identical: gigantic, swine-faced, luminous. The safe, sane conclusion is that the Hog that Carnacki met and the Hog that the Recluse met are, in fact, the same creature.
