Clark Ashton Smith: "The White Sibyl," "The Ghoul" and "The Plutonian Drug"

Let's read more stories by Clark Ashton Smith.  Today's three tales of madness and death all appeared in 1934; one of them debuted in one of the most famous of science fiction magazines, while the other two were first seen in small press publications and they would not be widely available until decades later.

"The White Sibyl" (1934)

"The White Sibyl" first appeared in a slim little stapled booklet along with a story by David H. Keller, and was later reprinted in many Smith collections, the first of which was 1960's The Abominations of Yondo.  A 2005 collection actually has "The White Sibyl" as its title story.  I'm reading "The White Sibyl" at the eldritchdark.com website, however.

The White Sibyl is a ghost or a spirit of a beautiful pale woman in white raiment who periodically appears in disparate locales in Smith's fantasy world of Hyperborea and then soon vanishes; sometimes she issues a cryptic prophecy before disappearing.  The poet and adventurer Tortha, who has travelled all over Hyperborea in search of beauty, is back in his home town when the White Sibyl makes one of her mysterious appearances, and he becomes incurably fascinated by her.  

Eventually Tortha ventures into the frozen mountains from whence the White Sibyl is said to come; there he meets her and the experience is mind-rending and flesh-scarring.  The poet he lives out the rest of his days in a primitive mountain village, delusional, thinking that the half-savage mountain girl who marries him is in fact the White Sibyl.  Smith ends the story on a melancholic, perhaps cynical, note, suggesting that many married men are truly in love with some other, likely illusory, woman, and that their wives learn to live with it.

Pretty good.

"The Ghoul" (1934)

Here's another story that debuted in a small press publication, and another story I am reading at eldritchdark.com.  "The Ghoul" first saw print in The Fantasy Fan, and since then has been included in an Italian anthology aimed at Yog-Sothery aficionados and a bunch of Smith collections, the earliest of which was 1970's Other Dimensions.

Wikipedia is telling me that the word and concept of the ghoul originated among the Arabs, and Smith sets his story in Iraq, during the reign of "the Caliph Vathek," a nod to the famous 18th-century novel by William Beckford.  A rich young man with a large estate, many slaves, and a reputation for honesty, has been credibly accused of murdering seven people and has been hauled before a judge ("cadi.")  The perp explains why he has embarked on a campaign of assassinating innocent people.

The wealthy young man's wife died just days before she was due to give birth to their first child.  Soon after she was buried, the grieving man went to mourn at his beloved wife's grave.  He was accosted by a demon who asked him to move aside so it could dig up and eat the man's wife.  The bereft husband begged for mercy, and the demon granted it, sort of: if the man brought to it eight fresh bodies he had slain with his own hand, one a night for eight successive nights, the demon would refrain from defiling his wife's grave and corpse.

So, every night for a week, this formerly upstanding citizen ambushed people and killed them with a sword and dragged their bodies to the cemetery to feed to the demon.  Now that he has been caught he expects he won't be able to deliver the final corpse tonight and so the demon will devour his dead wife.

The wise cadi knows just what to do--to the amazement of many onlookers, he lets the man go.  But the honest man behaves just as the judge expected--he returns to the graveyard and kills himself, keeping his bargain with the monster, sacrificing his own life and body to preserve the grave and body of his wife.

Not bad.

"The Plutonian Drug" (1934)

This story appears to be very highly regarded.  "The Plutonian Drug" made its debut in Amazing and that magazine saw fit to reprint it in a 1966 issue, and in 1987 Martin H. Greenberg included it in an anthology meant to represent Amazing's first decade, 1926-1935.  "The Plutonian Drug" was also featured in August Derleth's 1951 anthology The Outer Reaches: Favorite Science-Fiction Tales Chosen by Their Authors, and Michel Parry's 1973 anthology of stories about drugs, Strange Ecstasies.  And of course it has appeared in many Smith anthologies.

It is the space faring future!  Mankind has explored the solar system, made contact with the natives of places like Ganymede, and brought back to Earth many new natural resources.  Our story consists primarily of a conversation between a sculptor and a doctor; the doctor describes all sorts of new drugs found on other planets, their beneficial and baleful effects on human beings.  Eventually he coaxes the artist into trying out a drug discovered on Pluto.  

This drug allows the user to see into the past and into the future a few hours; the sculptor sees the past as a sort of series of pictures of himself, a sort of frieze (appropriately enough, he being a sculptor) of illustrating accurately his actions of the last few hours; the earlier images fade away gradually into incomprehensibility.  When he looks into the future he sees a similar frieze, but it is far shorter than the frieze portraying the past; it shows him taking a short cut through an alley and abruptly ends, no fading, just 45 minutes or so from the present, as he is in the middle of the alley.  We readers of course realize that he will be mugged and killed in the alley, and the end of the story confirms our suspicion.

This story is OK, no big deal.  Why Smith might have preferred this story over "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," "Vulthoom," or "The Immeasurable Horror,"  I don't know--maybe he didn't think of them as real science fiction stories but rather as horror stories set on Mars and Venus and this not suitable for Derleth's anthology, while "The Plutonian Drug," with its catalog of fictional drugs, is closer to what we expect of a traditional science fiction story. 

 

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The story that debuted in the major magazine is more conventional and less interesting than those that appeared in humble publications, but that is just how it goes sometimes.  And looking into the future and seeing your own death probably felt fresher back in 1934; the passing of 90 years and the publication of thousands of SF stories have exposed us to so many ideas, so many themes and tones and images, it has left us jaded.