"The Cult of the Dead" by Gabrielle and Ray Cummings
Remember August 2018, when I read eleven short stories and three novels by Ray Cummings? Wow, we've had some real adventures at this blog, haven't we? Here are links so you can effortlessly relive those happy days!
"Arton's Metal," "The Thought-Woman," and "Personality Plus"
"Magnus' Disintegrator," "Almost Human" and "Aerita of the Light Country"
That's enough advertising for today--let's get to the matter at hand, "The Cult of the Dead," which appears in Strange Stories under the pen name Gabriel Wilson, which I am told is a pseudonym applied to works on which Ray Cummings and his second wife, Gabrielle Wilson, collaborated.
This story takes place during the American occupation of Haiti. Our narrator lives at his villa in Haiti, and is friends with a local physician, Dr. Bané, a highly respected black man who is not personally involved in necromancy or voodoo or other occult phenomena, but is very familiar with such practices, which are prevalent across the troubled island nation. The narrator's nephew, Harry, a journalist, comes from New York for an extended visit, intent on learning all about the religion and sorcery of Haiti and getting a scoop that will make his career. His uncle and that kindly doctor warn him not to get mixed up in esoteric local customs, as it could be dangerous, but they also feed his fascination. The narrator has a huge library of occult books which Harry devours, and Dr. Bané tells the young newshound some thrilling accounts of magic in Haiti. For example, the story of a woman whose father was murdered, who wore as a talisman a severed human hand; when her father's killer came after her, the hand defended her, slaying the assassin and securing justice.
After absorbing all this second-hand knowledge, Harry sets out to get some firsthand experience, dyeing his skin black and donning native garb and sneaking into a necromantic ritual attended by a hundred Haitians and presided over by a guy in smoked goggles and a top hat. When the narrator learns of this he rushes over to the ceremony, recognizing the danger Harry is in, and the cultists, knowing the narrator is a friend of Dr. Bané, take the unprecedented step of allowing a white man to attend their ceremony.
While the narrator watches, his reckless nephew snaps a photo with a flash bulb, disrupting the ceremony, and one of the severed hands that is part and parcel of this necromantic ritual strangles Harry to death. (How many times do I have to tell people not to leave New York?) The narrator can't do much to help Harry because, in the middle of the excitement, his malaria acts up.
"The Cult of the Dead" has the kind of standard plot that will work in the hands of a skilled and conscientious writer, but I have to give it a thumbs down because the story is poorly written. Many sentences are clumsy, words are used in unconventional ways, and there are what I consider punctuation errors. In my career on the fringes of academia I have had to copyedit and proofread many rough drafts by more or less competent writers as well as many assignments by students for whom English is a second language, and reading "The Cult of the Dead" was like reading one of those things--I was rewriting every second or third sentence in my head, which is not something I enjoy doing for free. If the Cummings had revised this thing, or an editor at Strange Stories had rolled up his sleeves and done some real work on it, I would have probably judged it acceptable or marginally good, but as it stands I cannot give it a passing grade.
"The Cult of the Dead" does not seem to have ever been reprinted.
"He Waits Beneath the Sea" by Robert Bloch
This one appears under the pseudonym Tarleton Fiske, a pen name used by Bloch on quite a few occasions. it would be nearly sixty years before "He Waits Beneath the Sea" would be reprinted under its author's true name, in Arkham House's 1998 Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies.
Bloch starts his story with a little joke I guess directed at science fiction fans. A young scientist kisses his girlfriend, and we are told it is a scientific kiss, conducted with expertise and efficiency. I expected this jape to presage a series of such jokes, but there aren't any more, and in fact the story that follows is quite gruesome; I am entertaining a theory that this little bit of humor hints at a theme of the story that Bloch didn't really flesh out, an argument that a full person and a full life require passion and feeling as well as logic and intelligence.
Ames is the scientist, and I guess his young lady, Jean, is also a scientist, or at least a hanger on of scientists; the two lovers are aboard the submarine of a scientific expedition headed by Jean's scientist uncle, taking a break from scientific work to make out in the privacy of an otherwise untenanted chamber. The sub is resting on the ocean floor, but as our hero and heroine are sucking face it inexplicably descends radically and erratically, somehow drawn down into an unexpected fissure. When the boat finally comes to rest, Ames opens the chamber door to find the rest of the sub has been totally wrecked, all their comrades presumably killed; even more strangely, Ames can smell fresh air and see light coming through the holes in the hull!
"He Who Waits Beneath the Sea" is kind of like one of those Edmond Hamilton or Henry Kuttner adventures in which a guy is transported to some weird place where he ends up fighting with a sword. Ames and Jean find that the incapacitated research sub is shipwrecked in an underground world beneath the waves; littering the floors of all the caverns and tunnels they explore are the corpses of sailors, men from all periods of history and representing all races. From the body of a Roman soldier Ames picks up a sword, its edge still keen after over a thousand years, which is lucky for him and Jean, because some of the many corpses laying around spring to life and attack them! In this tale of horror Bloch offers readers many grotesque images, and we are treated here to descriptions of slimy headless bodies grappling with our heroes and being hacked to pieces by the horrified surface dwellers.
Some of Bloch's descriptions could get him into deep doo doo today. Ames and Jean's most fearsome assailant is the animated corpse of a large naked black man whose legs were lost at some point in his tragic history. This menacing figure, whose "snarling African face" is also described as a "bestial countenance," propels himself on his "ape-like arms" and snatches Jean, and then, when Ames strikes him with the Roman sword, drops the woman to start strangling Ames. The resourceful Jean picks up the sword and decapitates the cadaver of color. (There is the idea abroad that women in old pulp magazines who aren't femmes fatale are all damsels in distress that need to be saved by men, but Jean saves Ames more than once in this story--she is right there in the thick of things, wielding a sword and operating machinery as need be.) Ames comes back from the brink of unconsciousness as the hands around his throat relax, but the African's head speaks to them, foreshadowing later developments in the story.
Eventually, Ames and Jean meet the last survivor of an advanced civilization that throve far below the Earth's surface for millions of years; a few thousand years ago this race evolved into bodiless beings of pure intelligence! These beings of pure energy, having lost all connection to the material world, became decadent and forgot all the science knowledge and engineering techniques they had amassed, with the exception of the wisest among their number, this particular individual whom Ames and Jean have met. After all his fellows had expired, during the heyday of Atlantis, this sole survivor began the long term project of figuring out how to animate the dead bodies of sailors and then forming from them an army and navy with which to conquer the surface world. His zombie slaves have built a fleet of submarines and for the last few hundred years the bodiless being has been waiting for the fortuitous arrival of an undamaged human body into which to pour his own consciousness. Such a body has finally arrived--that of the young and healthy Jean!
Overcoming various obstacles, including a fight with the animated corpse of Jean's uncle, Ames and Jean destroy the energy being and escape in one of its submarines, saving themselves and the surface world that you and I call home.
I like the plot of "He Waits Beneath the Sea" and the gore is effective, but this story has problems similar to those in the Cummings' "The Cult of the Dead," poor sentences and errors which some revising or editing could have fixed. One example is that the ancient intelligence laughs at Ames when the scientist threatens him, and then remarks that he has never laughed before, because a being of pure intelligence has no emotions. The problem with this is that the decapitated head of the legless black giant laughed at them a few pages ago, right before the ancient intelligence explained that it animated the dead bodies by injecting a small part of its intelligence into them. A similar niggling issue is that the energy entity explains that it uses a powerful magnet to draw ships down into the fissure, but most of the dead sailors we see are from wooden ships.
Bloch's story has fewer such problems than the Cummings', however, and the plot and action are more entertaining, so I'm grading this one OK.
(A side note. A scan of Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies is available at the internet archive, world's greatest website, and I looked at the text there of "He Waits Beneath the Sea" to see if there had been any obvious revisions; specifically, I checked to see if "ape-like arms" and "bestial countenance" were still there. They were there alright, but there was a change that caught my eye. Where the scan of Strange Stories has "the iciness of death," the scan of the 1998 collection has "the leiness of death," presumably some kind of OCR error. For shame, Arkham House!)
"A Message for His Majesty" by August Derleth
Acceptable filler, competent but forgettable.
"A Message for His Majesty" would be reprinted seventy years after its appearance in Strange Stories with the publication of the Derleth collection The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things, a copy of which sold last year for $500.00, a fact I discovered while looking for a sharper image of its cover. I guess the weird is a good long term investment.
"Half Bull" by Manly Wade Wellman
Twenty-two-year-old Philip Matlock is a hunter armed with a Hawken rifle (though the text here calls it a "Hawkens rifle") travelling through Cheyenne territory. Game has been scarce, and he is hungry, so when he sees some teepees he does what most white men would not do--he approaches the Cheyenne, as he is fond of Indians and can speak the tongues of the Cheyenne and Pawnee. Soon he is sharing a meal with the Cheyenne, and Wellman says a lot of complimentary but perhaps stereotyped things about the Indians, that they are brave and stoic and so forth. We also learn that among the tribe is also a beautiful young woman.
The Cheyenne are hungry and expect to starve soon; they explain that a monster has driven away the local game and they can't get anyplace where there might be food because the monster scared off their horses. This monster is like the front half of a buffalo, a sort of two-legged demon. The dauntless Cheyenne are less distressed over the likelihood of dying of hunger than they are of the fact that if they die near the Half Bull the monster will devour their souls before their souls can get to "the Shining Lodge."
Matlock declares he will destroy this monster, and the second half of the story details his efforts, eventually successful, to do so, and how this fight between good and evil spawned that cairn and the custom of passersby tossing a rock on it.
This is an entertaining story, Wellman doing a good job with the action scenes as well as offering a vivid portrait of the Indians, the white man who admires them, the monster from native folklore and the environment in which these three entities meet. Wellman's Old West and its inhabitants feel real, and this story is the best we are reading today.
While Wellman portrays the Cheyenne as admirable, his story conforms to the sort of pro-imperialist model we see in, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs' work, in which Tarzan and John Carter are white men who are not only better savages than the noble savages they encounter and naturally become the savages' leaders, but teach said savages a better way to live. Matlock embodies what critics might call a "white savior" trope; as heroic as the natives are, it is the Christian white man who solves their problem for them, and the power of Jesus Christ, whom Matlock teaches the Indians about, plays a role in the defeat of the monster.
You can find "Half Bull" in 2003's Sin's Doorway and Other Ominous Entrances.
"Spawn of Blackness" by Carl Jacobi
Stephen Fay is a scientist and inventor, working on a theory that the seven notes of music correspond to seven colors and a projector that can shine appropriate colors in conjunction with a piece of music. He lives in a big old house in the city with his beautiful niece Jane Barron and his lab assistant, Italian immigrant Corelli. Our narrator, Fay's friend and physician Dr. James Haxton, receives a desperate phone call from Fay one evening--Fay needs medical attention!
At the Fay household, Haxton finds that his friend has some terrible flesh wounds--Fay says a giant rat inflicted the bloody injuries! The rat looked a lot like a creepy wooden artifact Fay has in his office, a crudely carved rat the size of a paperweight, the product of some Polynesians who live on a remote island and worship the rat! Fay purchased this thing on a trip to the Middle East in an Arab shop because it "caught his eye." Niece Jane found the thing so hideous that she insisted it not be within her view, but covered with a black cloth.
Haxton hangs around the old house, and has a chance to talk to Corelli, the Italian. I have remarked a number of times at this blog that Italians in these early 20th-century weird stories often play the role of the exotic other (see my blog post which covers Frank Belknap Long's "Grab Bags Are Dangerous"), people who are superstitious and/or have esoteric knowledge WASPs don't have, and Corelli fits this mold. Corelli has a theory that the colors black and white closely correspond with evil and good.
Jacobi's somewhat convoluted story follows Haxton as he figures out what is up and instructs Fay in how to use his color projector to resolve the plot. Jacobi and Haxton wait to the end of the story to explain everything. Basically, Corelli asked Fay if he could marry Jane, and Fay dismissed the very idea as ridiculous. This "injured his Latin pride," as Haxton puts it, and so Corelli plotted a means of achieving his revenge and at the same time proving his theory. Black, of course, is the absence of color, the absence of light--an item appears black because it absorbs light; light of course is a form of energy. Corelli recognized that the rat carving was a fetish item from a temple of devil worshippers, and so must be charged with evil Satanic energy. The black cloth put over it would absorb some of that evil energy. Corelli took the cloth, put it in a wooden frame and attached this, as a sort of lens, to Fay's light projector. When the projector was activated it (somehow) made material the Satanic energy in the cloth, bringing into being the murderous giant rat! Corelli painted the door to Jane's bedroom with reflective paint that would protect her from the monster, but Fay and Corelli himself were left unprotected, and in the end of the story Corelli is himself slain by the supersized rat. Fay and Haxton use the projector, set to emit bright pure white light, to defeat the rat monster.
I kind of like this one, with all its wacky theories and devices and a spurned lover as the instigation of the plot.
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As a group, these stories are pretty entertaining, with crazy monsters and plenty of gore. And if we want to play college professor, we can see that they serve to illustrate the ways weird and horror authors writing in English for an Anglophone audience make use of the exotic other. We've got the noble and sympathetic Native Americans of Manly Wade Wellman's tale, a people who have a rich culture of their own but who need the white man's help and would certainly benefit from exposure to the Gospel. Carl Jacobi illustrates the hot-bloodedness of Italians--they are quick to fall in love and quick to turn to sneaky violence to achieve vengeance if their desires are obstructed; these Mediterraneans also seem to have knowledge of the supernatural which the more rational Northern European lacks. There's the Cummings' treatment of the blacks of Haiti, who have an inexplicable and dangerous sorcery which white people probably should steer clear of. We see Robert Bloch just brazenly use the strategy of likening him to an animal to make a physically powerful black man even more scary. And, least starkly, we have August Derleth's tale of torture in medieval France, perhaps a reflection of how American and British people typically see the arrogant and self-important frog- and snail-eating fancy boys of Gaul as heirs to a long history of cruel tyranny and violent radicalism symbolized best by their most famous invention, the guillotine.
The 1930s weird may be under our skin, but we'll be taking a break from the topic to read a 1970s science fiction novel that, I suspect, will be about computers in the next exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.
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