Clark Ashton Smith's "Vulthoom," "The Dweller in the Gulf" and "The Flower-Women"

In 1972 Ballantine published a paperback collection of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith entitled Xiccarph.  Editor Lin Carter explains in his introduction that Xiccarph collects stories that are set on alien planets and thus are, nominally at least, science fiction stories, though they have the sorts of plots and are written in the style we associate with weird fiction.  Carter suggests that writing weird stories set on alien planets is a real innovation of Smith's--"a miniscule sub-genre all his own"--and that only Smith himself and C. L. Moore ever worked in this sub-genre truly successfully.

In 2020 you can read Xiccarph for free at the internet archive, which is what I am doing.  I have already read three of the stories Carter included in Xiccarph, "The Monster of the Prophecy" which I thought fun, "The Planet of the Dead" which I declared acceptable and "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis," which I thought was terrific.  ("The Planet of the Dead" appears in Xiccarph under the title "The Doom of Antarion.")  Today we'll read three stories from the volume that are new to me.

"Vulthoom" (1935)

"Vulthoom" made its debut in an issue of Weird Tales that also presented a reprint of Edmond Hamilton's "The Monster God of Mamurth," which I wrote about in 2017.  "Vulthoom" was the second most popular story in the issue, after the Hamilton reprint, according to Sam Moskowitz's research.  "Vulthoom" was included in the 1948 Arkham House collection of Smith stories Genius Loci and Other Tales and a 1951 issue of Donald Wollheim's Avon Science Fiction Reader.

Haines and Chanler are Earthmen who, through bad luck, find themselves penniless on Mars, living idly in the red planet's main commercial city and sole space port, Ignarh.  These guys are fascinated by Martian culture, and while exploring the eerie native quarter, where few Earthmen dare to go, lose track of time and get caught on the wrong side of the canal after nightfall!  As they hurry back towards the bridge to the modern quarter they are met by the tallest Martian they have ever seen, a native ten feet tall!  He wears the insignia that indicate he is the servant of a noble, and tells them their master would like to discuss a business arrangement with them.  H and C follow this guy into a building and take a long elevator ride, down down down into a mysterious subterranean city inhabited by Martians all of whom are as tall as their guide.

Down here they are taken to a room in which a giant flower sits on a tripod.  They hear a voice--the voice of Vulthoom!  Vulthoom tells them that he is a being from another dimension, a refugee from a far superior civilization forced into exile in our universe by implacable enemies.  He landed on Mars in his now inoperative space ship when Earthmen were little more than monkeys.  He set up this underground metropolis and chose from among the native Martians those who would be his servants, granting them stupendous longevity, not unlike his own.  Vulthoom's alien biology is such that he stays fully alert for a thousand of our years and then sleeps for a thousand years--his uplifted servants have the same sleep cycle.  Over the millennia Vulthoom has interfered but little with the Martians on the surface, who have come to regard him as legend, as an evil god worshiped by pariahs--for his part, Vulthoom says he is no god and that to him the word "evil" has no meaning.

After this background stuff, Vulthoom gets to the point.  "...I grow weary of Mars, a senile world that draws near to death; and I wish to establish myself in a younger planet.  The Earth would serve my purpose well."  His servants are building another spaceship right now to bring him to your favorite planet and mine, and Vulthoom wants H and C to precede him to Earth and organize cults of worshipers who will welcome him when he arrives.  In return they will receive money, the elixir of longevity, and flowers whose scent is a powerful narcotic.  By increasing the temperature of the chamber Vulthoom activates the flower, sending the Earthers on what we might call a psychedelic trip that has Chanler experiencing "an indescribable ecstasy."

The men have 48 hours to decide if they will become Vulthoom's proselytizers, and it is implied that, should they refuse, things will not go well for them.  They are given freedom of the subterranean city while they consider Vulthoom's offer, and try to escape via an ancient dry underground river bed.  When their escape attempt fails the Earthmen make a terrible sacrifice in order to retard Vulthoom's emergence, triggering the city's thousand-year sleep--the two humans are caught up in the thousand year slumber, from which they, with their puny lifespans, will never awake alive.  Before they all slip into dreamland, Vulthoom tells H and C that their sacrifice has been pointless, that in ten centuries he and his followers will take up their plans, the passing of time having seemed like no more than a single night to them, while H and C will be no more than dust.

This is a quite good one.

The 1972 British edition of Genius Loci and Other Tales features
the hideous visage of Man's most diabolical enemy, the Bat! 

          
"The Dweller in the Gulf" (1933)

This one first appeared under the title of "Dweller in Martian Depths" in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories.  Gernsback earned a reputation for not paying for the stories he had purchased and even printed, and Clark Ashton Smith was among those he stiffed.  In an April 24, 1935 letter to William F. Anger, H. P. Lovecraft discusses Donald A. Wollheim's article in a fan club newsletter exposing Gernsback's unethical practices, and tells Anger that while Frank Belknap Long thought the unpaid sum owed him by Gernsback for 1930's "The Thought Materializer" was too small to bother dragging in the lawyers, "Others I know--including CAS--have recovered cash from the Rat only through legal action."  (Lovecraft and Smith's nickname for Gernsback was "Hugo the Rat.")  In a letter Lovecraft sent to F. Lee Baldwin on January 13, 1934 he covers some of the same ground, and in a footnote to that letter in 2015's Letters to Robert Bloch and Others, editors David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi inform us that Smith hired lawyer Ione Weber to collect $769 owed him by Wonder Stories.  Whoa, that's real money!

Three Earthmen are prospecting for gold on the same Mars upon which "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" and "Vulthoom" are set.  A sandstorm leads them to take shelter in a cavern, and within they discover a staircase carved into a cliff face that leads down into a stygian abyss.  In the interest of science, they leave behind their scaly Martian pack animals and descend the staircase.

Smith does a masterful job describing the horrendous adventures the three men suffer down in that black hell beneath the surface of the red planet: the hideous sights, the creepy sounds, the mounting suspense that culminates in the final horror!  Captured by a lost race of pale Martians only five feet tall whose eyes are missing and who move as if in a stupor, like "automata," the three prospectors are taken down into the lightless bottom of the abyss, where a pyramidal temple sits beside a dark pool.  The exhausted adventurers meet a fellow Earthman who was captured years ago--his clothes are mere ragged scraps and his "white beard and hair" are "matted with slime...full of unmentionable remnants."  Yuck!  This guy, whose eyes are also missing, introduces them to their new lives--they are in luck, today there is a ceremony!  Everybody, Martian and Earthman, zombie-like troops up the temple steps to the altar, where sits a small idol wrought from a unique material into the shape of their god, the Dweller.  All must caress the idol--this has a narcotic effect, and everybody lies down to dream.  The Earthers dream they are sharing the consciousness of both their fellow worshipers and of the Dweller himself--in a disturbing moment they experience the feelings of both the Dweller and one of his faithful as the god eats his follower alive!  When the prospectors awaken they see the half-eaten corpse of their predecessor and fellow human as well as a trail of bizarre footprints between the carcass and the pool!

Shocked out of their lethargy, the three adventurers flee up the steps, but do they have any chance of escaping the Dweller, a monster as big as an elephant that can climb up the cliff wall with its array of uncanny appendages?

This is a great story--the tone is quite fine, all of Smith's descriptions, such as how the idol feels and the sounds of the Dweller's footsteps, are great, and the Dweller itself is a brilliant monster design.  Nine out of ten empty eye sockets!

"The Dweller in the Gulf" was first reprinted in Arkham House's 1960 Smith collection The Abominations of Yondo (from which I have already read many stories), and in 1987 Necronomicon Press put out a chapbook of an unexpurgated version of the story, a text I should track down one of these days.

"The Flower-Women" (1935)

Maal Dweb is the cruel and amoral dictator of a solar system of three suns and six planets; his seat lies on the planet Xiccarph, a fortress decorated with fifty-one beautiful women he has turned to stone (to preserve their beauty) and defended by robots ("iron automatons.")  A genius wizard, he has developed esoteric means of observing his domain and of travelling within it--these magical contrivances of Smith's are clever and charming.

Maal Dweb grows bored--his life has no more suspense, offers no more challenge.  So he decides to put aside most of his magical devices and travel to one of his planets, Votalp, to intervene in an interesting conflict.  The flower-women, vampires who are half-human and half-plant and suck the blood of those whom they seduce with their mesmeric singing, are being carried off, one by one, day after day, by seven flying reptilemen who are themselves accomplished wizards.

After making friends with the vampire women, who initially seek to drink his blood, Maal Dweb shrinks himself to pygmy-size and hides among the petals of the flower-woman he divines will be tomorrow's victim.  When the pterodactyl men rip her up by the roots and carry her off to their citadel, Maal Dweb goes along for the ride, successfully sneaking into the scaly sorcerers' laboratory.  He finds they are cutting up the flower-women and mixing the parts with other rare ingredients in a cauldron, brewing up a magical potion.  Maal Dweb sabotages the potion behind the winged wizards' backs, and when they return he defeats them in a head to head contest of sorcerous power, sending them backwards on the evolutionary scale (a gag we've seen Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett employ.)  Six of his enemies reduced to mere snakes, Maal Dweb arrests the devolution of the seventh at the point at which it is a sort of dragon that he can ride back across the countryside of Votalp to the spot where he can initiate the magical transfer back to his castle on Xiccarph.

"The Flower-Women" has plenty of fun images, but the plot is a little slight and Smith here doesn't achieve the heights of fear and drama we see in "Vulthoom" and "The Dweller in the Gulf."  Good, but not great.

"The Flower-Women" had its debut in an issue of Weird Tales with one of the most bland and boring covers to ever grace the magazine--there's no girl and there's no monster and only one author and story are touted and that story is a murder mystery.  A murder mystery?  Were people picking up Weird Tales in hopes of reading about some gumshoe dusting for fingerprints?

Donald Wollheim put "The Flower-Women" front and center on the cover of a 1949 issue of The Avon Fantasy Reader, complete with a cover showing one of the reptilian wizards dragging off one of the vampiric flower women.  The repetitive images of the two women with their flat expressions and the flat-looking depiction of the reptile lend the colorful cover illo a sort of collage aspect that is strange and unnerving and modern.  (We'll ignore the incorrect spelling of Smith's name.)  "The Flower-Women" was also included in the 1944 Arkham House collection Lost Worlds. 

 
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These stories are easy to recommend to fans of the weird; "The Dweller in the Gulf" is particularly gruesome and is to be commended for introducing a novel and terrific monster.  Bravo to C A S!