August Derleth Revisited
Appendix N Revisited, Part 8
Hello, and welcome to the eighth installment of my "Appendix N Revisited" project! As I mentioned previously, in the course of this project, I want to revisit the classics of fantasy fiction, weird fiction, and science fiction that made up "Appendix N" to the original Dungeon Master's Guide by Gary Gygax, both to explore their influence on my Hobby (RPGs) and my own writing and conception of fantasy fiction. The eighth installment focuses on August Derleth and his "posthumous collaborations" with H.P. Lovecraft. If you have never read these stories and wish to avoid spoilers, you should stop reading at this point, as I shall be discussing them in some detail.
August Derleth, 1909-1971, was (I believe) the first to publish the works of Lovecraft in book form, the founder of Arkham House publishing, and a "posthumus collaborator" with H.P. Lovecraft. He is listed without annotation in Appendix N (Gygax does not tell us what, specifically, Derleth wrote that he found inspirational to D&D), and while he did write stories of his own, his most well-known work was connected to the Cthulhu Mythos (incidentally, I have read that Derleth was the one who invented the term "Cthulhu Mythos" - Lovecraft never really called his own invented mythology anything except the self-deprecating "Yog-Sothothery"). But it is worth cautioning the reader that Derleth put his own spin on that mythos, adding more comfortable elements from a Judaeo-Christian worldview that Lovecraft certainly did not share.
The Interpretatio Derlethensis in brief: While Lovecraft's conception of the Cthulhu Mythos (or Yog-Sothothery) was of a cosmic horror that humans would label "evil" because it disregarded human entirely (e.g. Cthulhu and most of the other entities in this mythos are not really evil, they just see humans about the way humans see dust mites - beneath notice or consideration), Derleth wanted there to be good guys and bad guys. Reflecting his own Christian views, he saw the mythos as reflecting a "War in Heaven" theme in which the Elder Gods who were essentially good cast out and sealed away the Old Ones who were essentially evil entities, sometimes interpreted to be elemental forces. Humans make use of the "Elder Sign" like a crucifix in an old horror movie to ward off evil. Lovecraft's amoral universe is replaced by a universe of good at war with evil, and to my mind that certainly demeans the nature of the cosmic horror that Lovecraft described. But in some ways, it makes for better inspiration for fantasy RPGs, in which the protagonists (the PCs) are often involved in a good-vs.-evil war of some sort, and usually have some chance of defeating even cosmic challenges.
Ease of Availability
For purposes of this review, I used my battered old paperback copy of The Watchers Out of Time, but I see that paperback and Kindle editions are easily accessible on Amazon. The book does not seem to be available as an audiobook from Audible at this time, but "The Survivor" (one of the stories in the collection) is, and Derleth is listed as an author in some sci-fi anthologies that are available.
Summary and Commentary - SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!!!!
"The Survivor"
©1954 - Alijah Atwood leases the Charriere House on Benefit Street in Providence, RI, in 1930. Dr. Charriere was a surgeon who died and was buried on the property, in the garden by the old well. Mr. Atwood discovers documents left behind by Dr. Charriere including "strange, almost cabalistic drawings resembling physiological charts of various kinds of saurians," mostly of "order Loricata and the genera Crocodylus." Mr. Atwood finds that Dr. Charriere's will left the property to a "sole male survivor" who never appeared to claim his inheritance. In a style that Lovecraft had mastered and Derleth uses in a ham-fisted way, the audience realizes long before the protagonist that Dr. Charriere had been investigating ways to extend the lifespan by surgery and sorcery, that it was the same Dr. Charriere who had built the house around 1700 (and not, as Mr. Atwood keeps insisting, an ancestor), and that Dr. Charriere somehow intended to claim to be the surviving relative and claim the house. Mr. Atwood acquires a pistol, as he fears someone is trying to break into the house. He examines books left behind by Dr. Charriere, including one Lovecraft had invented for Derleth - the Cultes des Goules by the Comte D'Erlette (D'Erlette = Derleth). There is a rather awkward shoe-horning of mention of many races of creatures and entities from the Cthulhu Mythos. And then the incident finally occurs in which Atwood shoots the intruder in his house, and follows the blood trail to the well in his garden, finds cunningly concealed steps down to a hidden tunnel, and finds the casket and corpse of Dr. Charriere, whose experiments evidently had transformed him into a sort of lizard man. Atwood is shocked, but the audience is not, really, by the time the truth is "revealed."
"Wentworth's Day"
©1957 - Our protagonist is making a delivery near Dunwich (a Lovecraft-invented town in western Massachusetts), and is caught in a bad storm on dangerous roads in thinly-settled country. He takes refuge from the storm at the house of one Amos Stark. Lovecraft often attempted to render rural dialects phonetically (a somewhat less-successful literary technique, in my humble opinion), and Derleth attempts to imitate that here - e.g. Stark asks "Who be ye?" and "Storm ketched ye, eh?" "Come right in the haouse an' dry off. Don't reckon the rain'll last long naow." Stark tells the protagonist that this is "Wentworth's Day" - and it slowly is revealed that Nahum Wentworth was well-known around these parts, and had been an associate of Stark's. He lad loaned some money and some things, including the Seventh Book of Moses ("a kind of Bible for the supposed hexes" offering "spells, incantations, and charms to those readers who were gullible enough to believe in them") - this is the day the loan comes due, at midnight. But Nahum Wentworth is dead, killed in a hunting accident 2 months after making the loan - and it is slowly revealed that Amos Stark is the one who was holding the shotgun. He keeps insisting, as if trying to convince himself, that it was an accident. Anyway, the protagonist is offered a place to take a nap until the rain passes. While trying to sleep, the protagonist reads the Seventh Book of Moses, even reading aloud a passage containing an "incantation for the assemblage of devils or spirits, or the raising of the dead." Once again, Derleth is rather ham-handed about making sure he telegraphs to the audience what is going to happen while keeping it obscure from the characters! Amos Starks' clock is fast - he thinks the deadline has come and gone, but the protagonist knows that it is exactly midnight when there is a knock on the door. He hears "No! No! Go back! I ain't got it!" and runs to look - "Amos Stark was spread on the floor on his back, and sitting astride him was a mouldering skeleton, its bony arms bowed above his throat, its fingers at his neck. And in the back of the skull, the shattered bones where a charge of shot had once gone through." Like many Lovecraft protagonists, he faints from the horror. When he awakens, he finds Stark dead on the floor with fingerbones sticking out of his neck - and as he watches, those fingerbones detach themselves and go bounding away from the corpse, down the hall and out the door, to rejoin the corpse of Nahum Wentworth. While you can't "accidentally" cast spells in most fantasy RPGs, certainly PCs can accidentally trigger magical devices and processes (in the DCC modules The One Who Watches from Below and The Hole in the Sky, for example, there are names they are warned not to speak, and consequences if they do!)
"The Peabody Heritage"
©1957 - Begins, "I never knew my great-grandfather Asaph Peabody, though I was five years old when he died on his great old estate northeast of the town of Wilbraham, Massachusetts." His father refused to sell the property, saying "Grandfather predicted that one of his blood would recover the heritage." So when the protagonist inherits the property on the "sudden death by automobile accident of both my parents in the autumn of 1929," he finds the estate in a "sad state of disrepair" - built originally in 1787 by an ancestor who, we discover later in the story, fled charges of witchcraft at Salem. The protagonist retires from life as a lawyer in Boston and moves to the estate, which he begins slowly restoring and repairing. He visits the family mausoleum, finds his great-grandfather's coffin disturbed and knocks off the cover to find Asaph was "accidentally" buried face down, so he "fixes" it. He has his parents re-interred in the family vault. The architect he hired to restore the house finds a secret room on the plans - a priest's hole? A room for runaway slaves? There were no Papists among the Peabodys, so he cannot guess. But the architect helps him find the room - signs of occupancy in the past, with leatherbound books, papers, chairs, and a desk. There are "curious signs drawn upon the floor, some of them actually cut into the planking in a crudely barbarous fashion." He begins to have "recurrent dreams of a most disturbing nature" about his ancestors, especially great-grandfather Asaph, accompanied by a large black cat, making "extraordinary progression through the air, quite as if he were flying." The next day, the architect informs of delay, for the locally-hired workmen quit the job. The protagonist notes that the townspeople seem quite hostile. He stops by the office of the family lawyer, Ahab Hopkins, who tells of the disappearance of a local child, something that used to happen quite often, and his family used to be blamed for it! "You are surely aware that your great-grandfather was considered to be a warlock!" He returns home to find a crude note - "Git out - or els." He has more bad dreams about Asaph, and lingering always in the background, a shadowy but monstrous Black Man - "not a Negro, but a man of such vivid blackness as to be literally darker than night, but with flaming eyes which seemed to be of living fire." His dreams also featured the sound of a child crying in pain, and a chanted voice, "Asaph will be again. Asaph will grow again." He has Polish workmen from Boston resume work, but they also quit when behind the walls are discovered yellowed paper covered in cabalistic signs, short dagger-like knives rusted by blood, and the smalls skulls and bones of at least three children! The protagonist removes these bones, which are crumbling to dust, to his family vault. Then he finds the desk in the hidden room freshly stained with blood, as if it had been used as a sacrificial altar! He starts examining the books and papers, which all pertain to Satanism and witchcraft. Then he finds a newspaper clipping about his ancestors who fled witchcraft charges in Salem, and a reference to "old wive's tales - that a warlock must be buried face downward and never be disturbed, save by fire." He has dreams that night of attending a Black Mass in which the black cat, Balor, becomes his familiar, and he signs the Black Book in his own blood from a scratch Balor made on his wrist - he awakens to find muddy footprints as if he had indeed gone to a Black Mass in the swamp, and he finds a real scratch on his wrist! He finds in his great-grandfather's journal that he had found his ancestor Jedediah buried face-down and had turned him over, bringing him back to life. The protagonist goes to the family crypt and opens Asaph's coffin, and finds that he is gaining flesh, as well as the withered corpse of the missing child! He drags Asaph's coffin out and burns it, as he learned that Asaph did in the end to Jedediah. He returns to the house and finds the demonic black cat, Balor - he tries to shoot it, but in vain. "This, then, was the Peabody heritage. The house, the woods, the grounds - these were only the superficial, material aspects of the extra-dimensional angles in the hidden room, the path through the marsh to the coven, the signatures in the Black Book . . . Who, I wonder, after I am dead, if I am buried as the others were, will turn me over?" There are Lovecraftian elements here, to be sure, but the Satanism described had its source in Derleth's Christianity, I am sure. How do you permanently kill the undead in fantasy RPGs?
"The Gable Window"
© 1957 - Our protagonist, Fred Akeley, moves into his cousin Wilbur's house less than a month after his untimely death, though "its isolation in a pocket of the hills off the Aylesbury Pike was not to" his liking (these Akeleys are apparently distant relatives of the Henry Akeley of Vermont who is a central character in the Lovecraft story "The Whisperer in Darkness"). Wilbur had been a student of archaeology and anthropology, gone on expeditions to Mongolia, Tibet, Sinkiang Province, South & Central America, and the southwest United States. Wilbur had remodeled the house, erecting a gable room over the south wing of the ground floor and installing a great round window of curious clouded class he had acquired in Asia - he had referred to it as "the glass from Leng" and "possibly Hyadean in origin" (Leng is a fictional place in Lovecraft's works, and the Hyades are stars connected to certain tales in the Mythos - Fred doesn't recognize the references, but presumably a reader familiar with Lovecraft would!). There are some of the usual elements of such a story -strange behavior of animals and pets around the house, strange sounds and feelings - ominous stuff. And then Fred finds an incomplete letter from Wilbur instructing that certain papers be destroyed, certain books donated to Miskatonic University (the fictional university of Lovecraft's stories), and that the gable window be broken - not simply removed and disposed of elsewhere, but shattered. Fred can't see any reason to do that. He finds the standard pile of Cthulhu Mythos books (including, of course, the Cultes des Goules of the Comte D'Erlette who is a counterpart of Derleth himself; D'Erlette=Derleth). There is a summary of what I call Interpretatio Delethensis, the version of the Cthulhu Mythos in which the good Elder Gods cast out the evil Great Old Ones. Delving into Wilbur's notes, he finds cryptic accounts of scenes or visions witnessed from October 1921 to February 1923, containing repeated references to making and breaking a star - evidently some sort of mystical pentagram. Sure enough, moving a rug in the gable room, he finds the faint chalk marks of a pentacle on the floor. He remembers and for some reason speaks aloud words found in his research (of course he does! Why does Derleth always have his protagonists absently speaking magical incantations? Lovecraft only used that device once that I can remember, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and it was awkward then!): "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" Of course, the glass unclouds, and he can see some scene evidently from the American southwest - Arizona? New Mexico? - in which vaguely humanoid creatures called Sand Dwellers in Wilbur's notes emerge from a cave . . . and are pursued by another, more terrible, tentacled creature! Fred hurls his shoe at the window with all his might, simultaneously wiping out part of the design of the pentacle, and hears shattering glass as he passes out (another over-used device). He awakens to find a severed ten-foot-long tentacle in the room . . . An inspiration for just about every magical portal or gate in fanatsy RPGs!
"The Ancestor"
©1957 - Protagonist Henry Perry goes to visit his cousin Ambrose and his German Shepherd, Ginger, at his secluded home in a dense forest to which he retired from a lucrative medical practice in Boston. Ambrose has 2 servants, groundskeeper and cook, Edward and Meta Reed, both in their sixties. Ambrose reveals that he has been conducting research into hereditary memory - a combination of drugs and music combined with fasting allow memory back to the womb and beyond, he claims. Henry is concerned that the addictive drugs Ambrose uses may be affecting his mind and body, but he helps type up his cousin's notes. These notes indicate that Ambrose has been experiencing regression to the memories of primate ancestors, and Ambrose himself begins to show signs of physical deterioration, including the inability to write (dismissed as temporary "cramps" or "nerve blocks"). Ambrose becomes increasingly reclusive, preferring simpler and simpler food (paleo diet!), the music he uses to inspire his trances becomes more "primitive" (records of Polynesian and ancient Indian music), until finally he locks himself away in his lab and refuses to come out or answer. Ginger becomes frantic, perhaps in reaction to a "pervasive and highly repellent musk emanating from the laboratory." In the end, Ginger ends up killing a small primate clad in the rags of Ambrose's clothing, and the audience realizes that "Ambrose had been trapped in that period of evolution." If you're a child of the 70s and 80s like me, and this sounds familiar, it's because this is basically the premise of the 1980 movie Altered States, which is always claimed to be based on sensory deprivation research - neither Lovecraft nor Derleth have ever been credited, to my knowledge.
"The Shadow Out of Space"
©1957 - One of Derleth's most derivative works of Lovecraftiana, opening with an epigraph from The Call of Cthulhu that "The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents" and following very closely the plot of The Shadow Out Of Time. The protagonist, Nathaniel Corey, is a psychoanalyst, describing his work with a subject named Amos Piper, brought in for treatment by his sister after suffering some kind of nervous collapse and hallucinations. The description basically is a third-person version of the basic plot of The Shadow Out Of Time - Amos Piper's consciousness was "swapped" with a member of the Great Race of Yith (not called by that name in this story) from a time in the past before humankind existed. What seemed to happen to observers in the story was that three years earlier, Amos Piper suffered a mental break and total memory loss, although he was able to re-learn enough to be functional within a few months. He then took up travel to "strange, out-of-the-way places" associated in the Cthulhu Mythos with pre-human inhabitants of the Earth - "the Arabian desert, the fastnesses of Inner Mongolia, the Arctic Circle, the Polynesian Islands, the Marquesas, the ancient Inca country of Peru," etc. After three years, Piper suddenly regained his previous memories and personality, losing all memory of his activities in the intervening three years. Piper describes his dreams of existing in an alien body in the distant past before the evolution of human life. There is a recitation of the Interpretatio Derlethensis from the memories manifesting as Piper's dreams - cosmic good vs. evil, Elder Gods vs. Ancient Ones. There is a recounting of other ages of the Earth, most from Lovecraft, though there are contributions that clearly come from Derleth's own late 1950s Cold War anxieties of inhabitants of "post-atomic earth, horribly altered by mutations caused by the fall-out of radioactive materials from the hydrogen and cobalt bombs of the atomic wars" (fodder for the Mutant Crawl Classics RPG?) Anyway, in dreams, Piper retains the memory of the Great Race's desire to flee the great cataclysms when the Ancient Ones escape their ancient bondage to rejoin the cosmic war against the Elder Gods. Then Piper suffers a "relapse" - claiming all the strange dreams and visions have vanished. The audience knows that he has been possessed by one of the Great Race again! Dr. Corey's office is broken into, files rifled, documents about Amos Piper removed - as if someone were covering up all evidence of what happened! Dr. Corey investigates Piper, but discovers that he joined an expedition to the Arabian desert that vanished. Then Dr. Corey notes that he is being stalked by a patient who strangely resembles Amos Piper . . . The story ends there with a note that it is a document found in Dr. Corey's office. Dr. Corey himself had suffered a mental break (which is described in such a way that the audience knows that he was also "mind-swapped" by an alien entity), and was confined to an asylum . . . There is really almost nothing new in this story that wasn't in the Lovecraft story that inspired it, sadly.
"The Lamp of Alhazred"
© 1957 - The title is an obvious reference to Lovecraft's early "Arabian Nights" pseudonym, Abdul Alhazred, later a character in his stories who authors the dreaded Necronomicon. The protagonist, Ward Phillips, receives his grandfather Whipple's lamp seven years after his disappearance. He had been living in his grandfather's house on Angell Street in Providence, RI, reading from the "Whipple library," but finally he gets the lamp. It came from a tomb in Arabia, from Irem, the City of Pillars (which features in Arabian mythology and Lovecraft's stories); Old Whipple had written of the lamp that "It may bring pleasure equally by being lit or by being left dark. It may bring pain on the same terms. It is the source of ecstasy or terror." The lamp is inscribed with an unknown and impossibly ancient language, including some hieroglyphics or pictographs. One night, Ward lights the lamp, and works by its light, revising a poem in archaic style, but then he begins to have visions of past ages and ancient epochs, perhaps other worlds, strange vistas connected with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, etc. He abandons his tedious poetic revisions in favor of short, weird tales inspired by visions from the lamp. He writes for days without rest, keeping up his correspondence, and years pass without lighting the lamp again. Sixteen years later, he finds the lamp again and lights it once more. Instead of eldritch vistas, this time he sees his own childhood. He walks into the vision and disappears. Ward was never found - he is assumed to have died. The story is an allegorical retelling of the life of H.P. Lovecraft, and reuses the device Lovecraft used of his own Randolph Carter stand-in, who used a silver key to rejoin his own past. The first time I read this story, I was somewhat frustrated with how simplistic and uninteresting it seemed; after a lifetime of reading about the life of H.P. Lovecraft, I realize how closely this allegorical tale follows Lovecraft's own vision of his own life. It tries to be the autobiographical story H.P.L. would have wanted to tell, someday, had he lived.
"The Shuttered Room"
© 1959 - A somewhat unsatisfying story set in Dunwich, Massachusetts, with connections to Innsmouth, Massachusetts (both fictional towns invented by Lovecraft). Abner Whateley returns to his ancestral home in Dunwich. He finds the will of his grandfather, Luther S. Whateley, imploring him to destroy the old mill section of the house and kill anything living in it. He examines the house, which is empty - the shuttered room above the mill where his aunt Sarah had been confined has had its windows broken out from the inside. He meets with other relatives, including grandfather Luther's brother, Zebulon, and gets hints that an audience familiar with Lovecraft will understand to mean that Sarah was connected to the hybrid people of Innsmouth, who acquire amphibian-like traits due to interbreeding with the Deep Ones, a race that lives in the ocean. He also finds hints of a frog-like creature haunting the old house, and comes to realize that it is the son of his aunt Sarah, a creature grown savage and fierce. It attacks him in the end, and he throws his kerosene lamp at it, destroying it with fire.
"The Fisherman of Falcon Point"
© 1962 - The story of Enoch Conger of Falcon Point, a few miles down the coast from Innsmouth. Enoch is a fisherman who sells his catch in Innsmouth or Kingsport. One night he caught something like a woman - "she was not a mermaid" - off Devil Reef. A few years later, Enoch is injured and rescued by two other fishermen and brought back to his home; Dr. Gilman is called in from Innsmouth, but when he arrives, Enoch has vanished! There were signs of wet footprints with webbed toes! Enoch Conger never came back . . . but "Venerable old Jedediah Harper, patriarch of the coastal fishermen,"swore that he saw people (Deep Ones!) swimming off Devil Reef, and Enoch Conger among them!
"Witches' Hollow"
©1962 - Perhaps one of the most egregious cases of the Interpretatio Derlethensis being applied to the Cthulhu Mythos - Protagonist, Mr. Williams, came in 1920 to teach at District School Number Seven west of Arkham. A student names Andrew Potter comes to his attention - he lives in Witches' Hollow off the main road through the hills. Mr. Williams resolves to talk to Potter's parents about his excellent grades and potential, but finds Potter's father to be reluctant, even hostile - Andrew is only in school at all because the law requires it. He finds out that the land at Witches' Hollow was owned by "Old Wizard Potter" who died and left it to these relatives from Upper Michigan. They used to be "nice friendly people," but now have turned reclusive. People whisper that Wizard Potter "called something down from the sky, and it lived with him or in him until he died." In his research, the editor of the Arkham Gazette sends him to the Miskatonic University library with a note to let him see a book - the Necronomicon. Professor Martin Keane notes Mr. Williams reading it and approaches him. They discuss the Potter family in Witches' Hollow. Professor Keane invites Mr. Williams to his house, and gives him a 5-pointed stone star inscribed with strange symbols - the "Seals of R'lyeh, which closed the prisons of the Ancient Ones. They are the seals of the Elder Gods." Keane tells Williams to keep one on himself at all times, and to get Andrew Potter to touch one - if something happens, he cannot be allowed to go back home, but must be brought to Keane. For some reason, Williams agrees. He presses one of the seals to Andrew Potter's forehead later, and he has some kind of seizure, lapsing into unconsciousness. He brings Andrew to Keane, and they repeat the process with Potter's sister and father as they show up to investigate. They wait in vain for the mother - "She isn't coming," Keane says, "She harbors the seat of the intelligence." So they go to Witches' Hollow. When they finally get Mrs. Potter with the seal, a strange smoke-like entity arises from her body, and flies off into space in the direction of the Hyades . . . whence it came.
"The Shadow in the Attic"
© 1964 - Our protagonist is Adam Duncan, who unlike virtually any true Lovecraftian protagonist, has a fiancee named Rhoda Prentiss. He had a great-uncle named Uriah Garrison, and anyone who crossed Uriah, even within the family, seemed to die mysteriously. He lived in Arkham, Massachusetts, and had a shunned attic into which no one was permitted by day, nor with lamp nor light of any kind. When Uriah Garrison dies, Adam inherits the house, with the provision that he live there in the summer (Adam is a teacher, but can go live there in the summer months). He is working on a doctoral dissertation in English on Thomas Hardy (which seems to be a bit of an obsession for Derleth - Hardy references show up in a couple of his stories). Anyway, Adam moves in, and Rhoda shows up unexpectedly the next day. They go out to dinner in town, then come back to the house to sleep - Adam in his great-uncle's room on the 2nd floor, Rhoda on the first floor (How QUAINT! They're not married yet, so they sleep apart! But later, Adam tells us that she has spent the night in his bed before! Shocking! Well, it was the 1960s!). That night, he reaches out and feels a woman's breast - not Rhoda's "firm, beautifully rounded" ones, but "flaccid, large-nippled, and old" - he turns on a lamp but there is no sign. The mere mention of a woman's breasts should tell us that this story is more Derleth than Lovecraft! Anyway, the next morning, Rhoda says she thought that there was a woman in the house last night. Uncle Garrison's cleaning woman? Rhoda suddenly bursts out with "Oh, Adam - can't you feel it? . . . Something in this house wants you, Adam - I sense it. It's you the house wants." She begs Adam to leave with her, but he refuses, and she promises to come again later in summer, and makes Adam promise to write faithfully. The next day, Adam thinks of the locked attic room which no one ever dared enter. He goes in and finds it empty except for a chair, on which sits a woman's clothing (including rubber gloves, elastic stockings, and house slippers) and a rubber mask. There is a strange shadow on the wall, a distorted shape seemingly burned into the wood as if by a blast of flame. He also finds a mouse-hole with strange symbols "painted in garish red chalk or oil" around it. Adam tries to find out if the neighbors know anything, but all he gets are mysterious hints - "You seen the blue light yet?" "You heard anything you couldn't explain?" "Old Garrison was up to something. I wouldn't be surprised if he's still at it." Refusal to believe Uriah Garrison is really dead. One neighbor, Mrs. Barton, had dared to upbraid Garrison for keeping a woman . . . and was found dead of a heart attack the next morning - "scared to death." Adam tries looking into Garrison's library, but finds only a lot of stuff about superstition and witchcraft. Rhoda calls from Boston, saying all the books old Garrison had checked out from the Widener were on sorcery. She again fails to convince Adam to leave. That night, he hears the "cleaning lady" - and sees the spectral likeness of this great-uncle, who vanishes. He goes down to the kitchen, where a lamp is burning, and a woman cleaning. He goes to confront him, but she looks him in the eyes - "like pools of glowing fire, eyes that were hardly eyes at all" stares into his. He turns and flees upstairs to his room. He hears her go up to the attic room. He dares to peek out, and sees a blue glow under the attic door, fading. He throws open the door - empty! But then, from the mouse hole, "a drift of blue light, like smoke" . . . He runs to the bedroom and flings himself on the bed and falls asleep. He awakens to Rhoda pounding on the door. "Go away. We don't need you." "So - I'm too late, then." "Go away. Just leave us alone." Rhoda leaves. That night, he eagerly awaits the woman he now calls Lilith - blue light seeps in and forms a naked woman. He also sees the form of Uriah Garrison forming. Then he smells smoke, hears crackling flame, and then the voice of Rhoda calling to him. She had set a ladder under his window-sill. The house burned to the ground. He inherits the property, sells it, marries Rhoda (who later claims to have set the fire herself). Huh. OK.
"The Dark Brotherhood"
© 1966 - A strange piece that seems to partake more of 1950s and 1960s sci-fi sensibilities than the weird tales of Lovecraft. In short: The protagonist, Arthur Phillips of Angell Street, lives in Providence, RI, and frequents the Athenaeum (incidentally, one of my favorite places in Providence, and somewhere I spent ridiculous amounts of time when I lived there), courting a young woman named Rose Dexter (I used to "court" my now ex-wife there, as Poe courted Sarah Whitman there). AN YWAY, they meet a dark-clad man named Mr. Allan who, it happens, looks exactly like Edgar Allan Poe. They spend some time with him, individually and together. He promises the protagonist that he can prove the existence of extraterrestrial life with the help of his brothers. Arthur Phillips agrees, and seven identical versions of Mr. Allan show up and perform a sort of ritual (they refer to it as the "experiment") that causes him to have visions of a dying world, and creatures like rugose cones (a description Lovecraft used for the Great Race of Yith). Mr. Phillips does not handle this revelation well, and slips into denial, deciding it was "just a hallucination." The next afternoon, he goes to the house that the Allan brothers seem to occupy. He enters and finds strange technology he can not explain nor understand, and sees a replica of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as a perfect replica of one of the creatures from his vision. He flees. He cannot decide what to do. In the end, he thinks he should contact Rose Dexter - he gets in touch by phone, and she says Mr. Allan invited her over for the experiment. He tells her not to go, but can't say why, and she seems reluctant to obey him - he has no right to tell her what to do! He has been told that there are more than 100,000 inhabited worlds, most with life completely alien to that of Earth. The next night he tries to get in touch with Rose, but he is told by her sister-in-law that she left with someone he presumes is one of the dark-clad Allan brothers. He gets his father's pistol and goes to the house of the Allans, where he sees Rose in a trance in a machine, and in the case next to her a perfect duplicate, and another of those rugose cone aliens. He fires blindly at the machine, putting out the light and starting a fire, grabs Rose in the confusion and drags her out to safety. The house burns down and an unidentifiable object bursts from it and vanishes skywards. He presumes the Allans were aliens with the ability to put their minds into replicas of humans, who settled on the image of Edgar Allan Poe not realizing that his image was not typical. He speculates, "God only knows how many of them may be here, among us, even now!" (Pretty standard body-snatcher pod-person stuff, right?) But then it occurs to him - "How can I be sure that, in those frenzied minutes, I rescued the right Rose Dexter?" He needs to see her to be sure. The story ends with a clipping from The Providence Journal, dated July 17, with the headline LOCAL GIRL SLAYS ATTACKER - Rose Dexter "fought off and killed a young man she charged with attacking her," "identified as an acquaintance, Arthur Phillips . . ." Dun dun DUN!
"The Horror from the Middle Span"
© 1967 - The story claims to be the "Bishop Manuscript" found while investigating the disappearance of Ambrose Bishop, enclosed in a glass bottle thrown clear from a burning house, held in the office of the sheriff in Arkham, Massachusetts. The protagonist, Ambrose Bishop, came from London to lay claim to some property abandoned ever since his great-uncle Septimus Bishop disappeared about 20 years prior from his home above Dunwich. He goes to Dunwich, checks out the house, goes to the general store of Tobias Whateley (who wants nothing to do with him once he finds out he's kin to Septimus Bishop, who had a reputation as a healer or warlock, unknown to Ambrose). Tobias says that Septimus and his were killed, not disappeared.Ambrose goes back through record of the Arkham Advertiser, and finds two articles on Dunwich from that time, one on the disappearance of Septimus Bishop, the other about repairs to a pier that supported the middle span of a disused bridge over the Miskatonic River in the country above Dunwich. So Ambrose goes back to start working on Septimus' house, he finds the strange books and symbols we expect by now, and finds a secret passageway from the basement that ends up on a hillside overlooking that stone bridge over the river. He goes through the papers and finds several that connect Septimus to stories from the Lovecraft canon. For example, the first bears the heading "Starry Wisdom" and assures Septimus that the group still operates in Providence, with the Shining Trapezohedron that summons the Haunter of the Dark, signed Asenath - this is referring to both "The Haunter of the Dark" and possibly "The Thing On The Doorstep" by H.P.L. Another is from Wilbur Whateley, kin of Tobias (and a major figure in "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P.L.) - this letter mentions that "those from the air" can "take body" from "human blood," "as you, too, will be able to do if you are destroyed other than by the Sign." "I saw you there - and what walks with you in the guise of a woman." He feels disturbed and goes rambling in the woods, coming to that ruined bridge with the strange middle span. But a storm is threatening, so he returns home. The next morning, after the storm, he returns to look at the bridge, but the storm destroyed the middle span . . . and he finds a lot of bones! Some are human bones, some not. He returns to Dunwich to ask if there were an old cemetery nearby that might explain the bones. He does to talk to the local Baptist minister, Reverend Dunning, who derides the locals for their inbred superstitions. He returns home, and sees fresh blood on the altar in the basement, and runs out of the house. He sees an old man who says that he is clearly a Bishop, and asks which. When he explains that he is Ambrose, the figure says that he is Septimus Bishop. Ambrose faints (of course). When he wakes up, there is no one there (of course). There follows a rash of disappearances in Dunwich, and he is sure that Septimus has returned, and has dreamlike encounters in which Septimus warns that the villagers are coming for them . . . The Bishop Manuscript ends confusingly. It is followed by a clipping about the restoration of the old bridge that washed out, and the middle span crowned with the Elder Sign . . .
"Innsmouth Clay"
© 1971 - A short story in which an artist named Jeffrey Corey moves to the Innsmouth area to work. He sculpts a "Sea Goddess," but feels compelled to give it webbed digits and gills. He has strange dreams and compulsions that relate to the Deep Ones intermarried with certain Innsmouth clans like the Marshes and Waites, dreams of people living under the sea, the names Cthulhu and R'lyeh (garbled). The Corey vanishes. The narrator looks for him, sees a thing that looks like him in the water, but with gills . . .
"The Watchers Out of Time"
A manuscript left unfinished at the time of Derleth's death in 1971.
The influence of H.P. Lovecraft on Gygax and early D&D is extremely obvious; the influence of Derleth is more subtle. In a way, though, Derleth's vision of humans being able to align themselves with cosmic forces of good to oppose cosmic forces of evil is more in line with what D&D is about than Lovecraft's cosmic horror. Think about it - if you want to play an investigator into the Cthulhu Mythos who, true to Lovecraft, is doomed to madness and death, play the Call of Cthulhu RPG (now in it's 7th edition!). In fact, many editions of CoC have a disclaimer that they are based on Lovecraft's original vision, not later interpretations by others (meaning those like Derleth, though not mentioning any of them by name. Nevertheless, the CoC game does use the term "Cthulhu Mythos" which Derleth may have invented! But if, on the other hand, you want to play a mortal servant of an Elder God, a "cleric" if you will, and have that Elder God grant your character spells to defeat evil monsters, as in Derleth's interpretation of Lovecraft . . . well, play D&D.
The influence of Derleth and Lovecraft can be felt in D&D from an early time. An early printing of Deities and Demigods had "The Cthulhu Mythos" as a pantheon of gods and beings with whom D&D characters could interact. This literary mythos, and that of Michael Moorcock, were removed early on (though Fritz Leiber's "Nehwon Mythos" remained in later 1st edition and into 2nd edition Legends and Lore printings). This early tendency to include Lovecraftiana, often with some Derleth coloring, has continued in fantasy RPGs to this day, including Cthulhu's inclusion as a Neutral deity in DCC RPG (yes, Neutral - he does not care for Law or Chaos or any other mortal concern!) and a monster (CR 30!) in the Pathfinder RPG (along with many other entities and monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos).
There have certainly been too many influences of Derleth's version of Lovecraft on fantasy RPGs for me to list here - themes are used and abused, often badly, by too many authors for me to list. If you want to see an example of it being done well, allow me to recommend nearly anything by Daniel J. Bishop, who has a truly amazing grasp of the Cthulhu Mythos and how to use it in fantasy gaming. For examples containing an actual Cthulhu cult, check out Purple Duck Publishing's The Portsmouth Mermaid and its supplement, Three Nights in Portsmouth:
©1954 - Alijah Atwood leases the Charriere House on Benefit Street in Providence, RI, in 1930. Dr. Charriere was a surgeon who died and was buried on the property, in the garden by the old well. Mr. Atwood discovers documents left behind by Dr. Charriere including "strange, almost cabalistic drawings resembling physiological charts of various kinds of saurians," mostly of "order Loricata and the genera Crocodylus." Mr. Atwood finds that Dr. Charriere's will left the property to a "sole male survivor" who never appeared to claim his inheritance. In a style that Lovecraft had mastered and Derleth uses in a ham-fisted way, the audience realizes long before the protagonist that Dr. Charriere had been investigating ways to extend the lifespan by surgery and sorcery, that it was the same Dr. Charriere who had built the house around 1700 (and not, as Mr. Atwood keeps insisting, an ancestor), and that Dr. Charriere somehow intended to claim to be the surviving relative and claim the house. Mr. Atwood acquires a pistol, as he fears someone is trying to break into the house. He examines books left behind by Dr. Charriere, including one Lovecraft had invented for Derleth - the Cultes des Goules by the Comte D'Erlette (D'Erlette = Derleth). There is a rather awkward shoe-horning of mention of many races of creatures and entities from the Cthulhu Mythos. And then the incident finally occurs in which Atwood shoots the intruder in his house, and follows the blood trail to the well in his garden, finds cunningly concealed steps down to a hidden tunnel, and finds the casket and corpse of Dr. Charriere, whose experiments evidently had transformed him into a sort of lizard man. Atwood is shocked, but the audience is not, really, by the time the truth is "revealed."
"Wentworth's Day"
©1957 - Our protagonist is making a delivery near Dunwich (a Lovecraft-invented town in western Massachusetts), and is caught in a bad storm on dangerous roads in thinly-settled country. He takes refuge from the storm at the house of one Amos Stark. Lovecraft often attempted to render rural dialects phonetically (a somewhat less-successful literary technique, in my humble opinion), and Derleth attempts to imitate that here - e.g. Stark asks "Who be ye?" and "Storm ketched ye, eh?" "Come right in the haouse an' dry off. Don't reckon the rain'll last long naow." Stark tells the protagonist that this is "Wentworth's Day" - and it slowly is revealed that Nahum Wentworth was well-known around these parts, and had been an associate of Stark's. He lad loaned some money and some things, including the Seventh Book of Moses ("a kind of Bible for the supposed hexes" offering "spells, incantations, and charms to those readers who were gullible enough to believe in them") - this is the day the loan comes due, at midnight. But Nahum Wentworth is dead, killed in a hunting accident 2 months after making the loan - and it is slowly revealed that Amos Stark is the one who was holding the shotgun. He keeps insisting, as if trying to convince himself, that it was an accident. Anyway, the protagonist is offered a place to take a nap until the rain passes. While trying to sleep, the protagonist reads the Seventh Book of Moses, even reading aloud a passage containing an "incantation for the assemblage of devils or spirits, or the raising of the dead." Once again, Derleth is rather ham-handed about making sure he telegraphs to the audience what is going to happen while keeping it obscure from the characters! Amos Starks' clock is fast - he thinks the deadline has come and gone, but the protagonist knows that it is exactly midnight when there is a knock on the door. He hears "No! No! Go back! I ain't got it!" and runs to look - "Amos Stark was spread on the floor on his back, and sitting astride him was a mouldering skeleton, its bony arms bowed above his throat, its fingers at his neck. And in the back of the skull, the shattered bones where a charge of shot had once gone through." Like many Lovecraft protagonists, he faints from the horror. When he awakens, he finds Stark dead on the floor with fingerbones sticking out of his neck - and as he watches, those fingerbones detach themselves and go bounding away from the corpse, down the hall and out the door, to rejoin the corpse of Nahum Wentworth. While you can't "accidentally" cast spells in most fantasy RPGs, certainly PCs can accidentally trigger magical devices and processes (in the DCC modules The One Who Watches from Below and The Hole in the Sky, for example, there are names they are warned not to speak, and consequences if they do!)
"The Peabody Heritage"
©1957 - Begins, "I never knew my great-grandfather Asaph Peabody, though I was five years old when he died on his great old estate northeast of the town of Wilbraham, Massachusetts." His father refused to sell the property, saying "Grandfather predicted that one of his blood would recover the heritage." So when the protagonist inherits the property on the "sudden death by automobile accident of both my parents in the autumn of 1929," he finds the estate in a "sad state of disrepair" - built originally in 1787 by an ancestor who, we discover later in the story, fled charges of witchcraft at Salem. The protagonist retires from life as a lawyer in Boston and moves to the estate, which he begins slowly restoring and repairing. He visits the family mausoleum, finds his great-grandfather's coffin disturbed and knocks off the cover to find Asaph was "accidentally" buried face down, so he "fixes" it. He has his parents re-interred in the family vault. The architect he hired to restore the house finds a secret room on the plans - a priest's hole? A room for runaway slaves? There were no Papists among the Peabodys, so he cannot guess. But the architect helps him find the room - signs of occupancy in the past, with leatherbound books, papers, chairs, and a desk. There are "curious signs drawn upon the floor, some of them actually cut into the planking in a crudely barbarous fashion." He begins to have "recurrent dreams of a most disturbing nature" about his ancestors, especially great-grandfather Asaph, accompanied by a large black cat, making "extraordinary progression through the air, quite as if he were flying." The next day, the architect informs of delay, for the locally-hired workmen quit the job. The protagonist notes that the townspeople seem quite hostile. He stops by the office of the family lawyer, Ahab Hopkins, who tells of the disappearance of a local child, something that used to happen quite often, and his family used to be blamed for it! "You are surely aware that your great-grandfather was considered to be a warlock!" He returns home to find a crude note - "Git out - or els." He has more bad dreams about Asaph, and lingering always in the background, a shadowy but monstrous Black Man - "not a Negro, but a man of such vivid blackness as to be literally darker than night, but with flaming eyes which seemed to be of living fire." His dreams also featured the sound of a child crying in pain, and a chanted voice, "Asaph will be again. Asaph will grow again." He has Polish workmen from Boston resume work, but they also quit when behind the walls are discovered yellowed paper covered in cabalistic signs, short dagger-like knives rusted by blood, and the smalls skulls and bones of at least three children! The protagonist removes these bones, which are crumbling to dust, to his family vault. Then he finds the desk in the hidden room freshly stained with blood, as if it had been used as a sacrificial altar! He starts examining the books and papers, which all pertain to Satanism and witchcraft. Then he finds a newspaper clipping about his ancestors who fled witchcraft charges in Salem, and a reference to "old wive's tales - that a warlock must be buried face downward and never be disturbed, save by fire." He has dreams that night of attending a Black Mass in which the black cat, Balor, becomes his familiar, and he signs the Black Book in his own blood from a scratch Balor made on his wrist - he awakens to find muddy footprints as if he had indeed gone to a Black Mass in the swamp, and he finds a real scratch on his wrist! He finds in his great-grandfather's journal that he had found his ancestor Jedediah buried face-down and had turned him over, bringing him back to life. The protagonist goes to the family crypt and opens Asaph's coffin, and finds that he is gaining flesh, as well as the withered corpse of the missing child! He drags Asaph's coffin out and burns it, as he learned that Asaph did in the end to Jedediah. He returns to the house and finds the demonic black cat, Balor - he tries to shoot it, but in vain. "This, then, was the Peabody heritage. The house, the woods, the grounds - these were only the superficial, material aspects of the extra-dimensional angles in the hidden room, the path through the marsh to the coven, the signatures in the Black Book . . . Who, I wonder, after I am dead, if I am buried as the others were, will turn me over?" There are Lovecraftian elements here, to be sure, but the Satanism described had its source in Derleth's Christianity, I am sure. How do you permanently kill the undead in fantasy RPGs?
"The Gable Window"
© 1957 - Our protagonist, Fred Akeley, moves into his cousin Wilbur's house less than a month after his untimely death, though "its isolation in a pocket of the hills off the Aylesbury Pike was not to" his liking (these Akeleys are apparently distant relatives of the Henry Akeley of Vermont who is a central character in the Lovecraft story "The Whisperer in Darkness"). Wilbur had been a student of archaeology and anthropology, gone on expeditions to Mongolia, Tibet, Sinkiang Province, South & Central America, and the southwest United States. Wilbur had remodeled the house, erecting a gable room over the south wing of the ground floor and installing a great round window of curious clouded class he had acquired in Asia - he had referred to it as "the glass from Leng" and "possibly Hyadean in origin" (Leng is a fictional place in Lovecraft's works, and the Hyades are stars connected to certain tales in the Mythos - Fred doesn't recognize the references, but presumably a reader familiar with Lovecraft would!). There are some of the usual elements of such a story -strange behavior of animals and pets around the house, strange sounds and feelings - ominous stuff. And then Fred finds an incomplete letter from Wilbur instructing that certain papers be destroyed, certain books donated to Miskatonic University (the fictional university of Lovecraft's stories), and that the gable window be broken - not simply removed and disposed of elsewhere, but shattered. Fred can't see any reason to do that. He finds the standard pile of Cthulhu Mythos books (including, of course, the Cultes des Goules of the Comte D'Erlette who is a counterpart of Derleth himself; D'Erlette=Derleth). There is a summary of what I call Interpretatio Delethensis, the version of the Cthulhu Mythos in which the good Elder Gods cast out the evil Great Old Ones. Delving into Wilbur's notes, he finds cryptic accounts of scenes or visions witnessed from October 1921 to February 1923, containing repeated references to making and breaking a star - evidently some sort of mystical pentagram. Sure enough, moving a rug in the gable room, he finds the faint chalk marks of a pentacle on the floor. He remembers and for some reason speaks aloud words found in his research (of course he does! Why does Derleth always have his protagonists absently speaking magical incantations? Lovecraft only used that device once that I can remember, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and it was awkward then!): "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" Of course, the glass unclouds, and he can see some scene evidently from the American southwest - Arizona? New Mexico? - in which vaguely humanoid creatures called Sand Dwellers in Wilbur's notes emerge from a cave . . . and are pursued by another, more terrible, tentacled creature! Fred hurls his shoe at the window with all his might, simultaneously wiping out part of the design of the pentacle, and hears shattering glass as he passes out (another over-used device). He awakens to find a severed ten-foot-long tentacle in the room . . . An inspiration for just about every magical portal or gate in fanatsy RPGs!
"The Ancestor"
©1957 - Protagonist Henry Perry goes to visit his cousin Ambrose and his German Shepherd, Ginger, at his secluded home in a dense forest to which he retired from a lucrative medical practice in Boston. Ambrose has 2 servants, groundskeeper and cook, Edward and Meta Reed, both in their sixties. Ambrose reveals that he has been conducting research into hereditary memory - a combination of drugs and music combined with fasting allow memory back to the womb and beyond, he claims. Henry is concerned that the addictive drugs Ambrose uses may be affecting his mind and body, but he helps type up his cousin's notes. These notes indicate that Ambrose has been experiencing regression to the memories of primate ancestors, and Ambrose himself begins to show signs of physical deterioration, including the inability to write (dismissed as temporary "cramps" or "nerve blocks"). Ambrose becomes increasingly reclusive, preferring simpler and simpler food (paleo diet!), the music he uses to inspire his trances becomes more "primitive" (records of Polynesian and ancient Indian music), until finally he locks himself away in his lab and refuses to come out or answer. Ginger becomes frantic, perhaps in reaction to a "pervasive and highly repellent musk emanating from the laboratory." In the end, Ginger ends up killing a small primate clad in the rags of Ambrose's clothing, and the audience realizes that "Ambrose had been trapped in that period of evolution." If you're a child of the 70s and 80s like me, and this sounds familiar, it's because this is basically the premise of the 1980 movie Altered States, which is always claimed to be based on sensory deprivation research - neither Lovecraft nor Derleth have ever been credited, to my knowledge.
"The Shadow Out of Space"
©1957 - One of Derleth's most derivative works of Lovecraftiana, opening with an epigraph from The Call of Cthulhu that "The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents" and following very closely the plot of The Shadow Out Of Time. The protagonist, Nathaniel Corey, is a psychoanalyst, describing his work with a subject named Amos Piper, brought in for treatment by his sister after suffering some kind of nervous collapse and hallucinations. The description basically is a third-person version of the basic plot of The Shadow Out Of Time - Amos Piper's consciousness was "swapped" with a member of the Great Race of Yith (not called by that name in this story) from a time in the past before humankind existed. What seemed to happen to observers in the story was that three years earlier, Amos Piper suffered a mental break and total memory loss, although he was able to re-learn enough to be functional within a few months. He then took up travel to "strange, out-of-the-way places" associated in the Cthulhu Mythos with pre-human inhabitants of the Earth - "the Arabian desert, the fastnesses of Inner Mongolia, the Arctic Circle, the Polynesian Islands, the Marquesas, the ancient Inca country of Peru," etc. After three years, Piper suddenly regained his previous memories and personality, losing all memory of his activities in the intervening three years. Piper describes his dreams of existing in an alien body in the distant past before the evolution of human life. There is a recitation of the Interpretatio Derlethensis from the memories manifesting as Piper's dreams - cosmic good vs. evil, Elder Gods vs. Ancient Ones. There is a recounting of other ages of the Earth, most from Lovecraft, though there are contributions that clearly come from Derleth's own late 1950s Cold War anxieties of inhabitants of "post-atomic earth, horribly altered by mutations caused by the fall-out of radioactive materials from the hydrogen and cobalt bombs of the atomic wars" (fodder for the Mutant Crawl Classics RPG?) Anyway, in dreams, Piper retains the memory of the Great Race's desire to flee the great cataclysms when the Ancient Ones escape their ancient bondage to rejoin the cosmic war against the Elder Gods. Then Piper suffers a "relapse" - claiming all the strange dreams and visions have vanished. The audience knows that he has been possessed by one of the Great Race again! Dr. Corey's office is broken into, files rifled, documents about Amos Piper removed - as if someone were covering up all evidence of what happened! Dr. Corey investigates Piper, but discovers that he joined an expedition to the Arabian desert that vanished. Then Dr. Corey notes that he is being stalked by a patient who strangely resembles Amos Piper . . . The story ends there with a note that it is a document found in Dr. Corey's office. Dr. Corey himself had suffered a mental break (which is described in such a way that the audience knows that he was also "mind-swapped" by an alien entity), and was confined to an asylum . . . There is really almost nothing new in this story that wasn't in the Lovecraft story that inspired it, sadly.
"The Lamp of Alhazred"
© 1957 - The title is an obvious reference to Lovecraft's early "Arabian Nights" pseudonym, Abdul Alhazred, later a character in his stories who authors the dreaded Necronomicon. The protagonist, Ward Phillips, receives his grandfather Whipple's lamp seven years after his disappearance. He had been living in his grandfather's house on Angell Street in Providence, RI, reading from the "Whipple library," but finally he gets the lamp. It came from a tomb in Arabia, from Irem, the City of Pillars (which features in Arabian mythology and Lovecraft's stories); Old Whipple had written of the lamp that "It may bring pleasure equally by being lit or by being left dark. It may bring pain on the same terms. It is the source of ecstasy or terror." The lamp is inscribed with an unknown and impossibly ancient language, including some hieroglyphics or pictographs. One night, Ward lights the lamp, and works by its light, revising a poem in archaic style, but then he begins to have visions of past ages and ancient epochs, perhaps other worlds, strange vistas connected with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, etc. He abandons his tedious poetic revisions in favor of short, weird tales inspired by visions from the lamp. He writes for days without rest, keeping up his correspondence, and years pass without lighting the lamp again. Sixteen years later, he finds the lamp again and lights it once more. Instead of eldritch vistas, this time he sees his own childhood. He walks into the vision and disappears. Ward was never found - he is assumed to have died. The story is an allegorical retelling of the life of H.P. Lovecraft, and reuses the device Lovecraft used of his own Randolph Carter stand-in, who used a silver key to rejoin his own past. The first time I read this story, I was somewhat frustrated with how simplistic and uninteresting it seemed; after a lifetime of reading about the life of H.P. Lovecraft, I realize how closely this allegorical tale follows Lovecraft's own vision of his own life. It tries to be the autobiographical story H.P.L. would have wanted to tell, someday, had he lived.
"The Shuttered Room"
© 1959 - A somewhat unsatisfying story set in Dunwich, Massachusetts, with connections to Innsmouth, Massachusetts (both fictional towns invented by Lovecraft). Abner Whateley returns to his ancestral home in Dunwich. He finds the will of his grandfather, Luther S. Whateley, imploring him to destroy the old mill section of the house and kill anything living in it. He examines the house, which is empty - the shuttered room above the mill where his aunt Sarah had been confined has had its windows broken out from the inside. He meets with other relatives, including grandfather Luther's brother, Zebulon, and gets hints that an audience familiar with Lovecraft will understand to mean that Sarah was connected to the hybrid people of Innsmouth, who acquire amphibian-like traits due to interbreeding with the Deep Ones, a race that lives in the ocean. He also finds hints of a frog-like creature haunting the old house, and comes to realize that it is the son of his aunt Sarah, a creature grown savage and fierce. It attacks him in the end, and he throws his kerosene lamp at it, destroying it with fire.
"The Fisherman of Falcon Point"
© 1962 - The story of Enoch Conger of Falcon Point, a few miles down the coast from Innsmouth. Enoch is a fisherman who sells his catch in Innsmouth or Kingsport. One night he caught something like a woman - "she was not a mermaid" - off Devil Reef. A few years later, Enoch is injured and rescued by two other fishermen and brought back to his home; Dr. Gilman is called in from Innsmouth, but when he arrives, Enoch has vanished! There were signs of wet footprints with webbed toes! Enoch Conger never came back . . . but "Venerable old Jedediah Harper, patriarch of the coastal fishermen,"swore that he saw people (Deep Ones!) swimming off Devil Reef, and Enoch Conger among them!
"Witches' Hollow"
©1962 - Perhaps one of the most egregious cases of the Interpretatio Derlethensis being applied to the Cthulhu Mythos - Protagonist, Mr. Williams, came in 1920 to teach at District School Number Seven west of Arkham. A student names Andrew Potter comes to his attention - he lives in Witches' Hollow off the main road through the hills. Mr. Williams resolves to talk to Potter's parents about his excellent grades and potential, but finds Potter's father to be reluctant, even hostile - Andrew is only in school at all because the law requires it. He finds out that the land at Witches' Hollow was owned by "Old Wizard Potter" who died and left it to these relatives from Upper Michigan. They used to be "nice friendly people," but now have turned reclusive. People whisper that Wizard Potter "called something down from the sky, and it lived with him or in him until he died." In his research, the editor of the Arkham Gazette sends him to the Miskatonic University library with a note to let him see a book - the Necronomicon. Professor Martin Keane notes Mr. Williams reading it and approaches him. They discuss the Potter family in Witches' Hollow. Professor Keane invites Mr. Williams to his house, and gives him a 5-pointed stone star inscribed with strange symbols - the "Seals of R'lyeh, which closed the prisons of the Ancient Ones. They are the seals of the Elder Gods." Keane tells Williams to keep one on himself at all times, and to get Andrew Potter to touch one - if something happens, he cannot be allowed to go back home, but must be brought to Keane. For some reason, Williams agrees. He presses one of the seals to Andrew Potter's forehead later, and he has some kind of seizure, lapsing into unconsciousness. He brings Andrew to Keane, and they repeat the process with Potter's sister and father as they show up to investigate. They wait in vain for the mother - "She isn't coming," Keane says, "She harbors the seat of the intelligence." So they go to Witches' Hollow. When they finally get Mrs. Potter with the seal, a strange smoke-like entity arises from her body, and flies off into space in the direction of the Hyades . . . whence it came.
"The Shadow in the Attic"
© 1964 - Our protagonist is Adam Duncan, who unlike virtually any true Lovecraftian protagonist, has a fiancee named Rhoda Prentiss. He had a great-uncle named Uriah Garrison, and anyone who crossed Uriah, even within the family, seemed to die mysteriously. He lived in Arkham, Massachusetts, and had a shunned attic into which no one was permitted by day, nor with lamp nor light of any kind. When Uriah Garrison dies, Adam inherits the house, with the provision that he live there in the summer (Adam is a teacher, but can go live there in the summer months). He is working on a doctoral dissertation in English on Thomas Hardy (which seems to be a bit of an obsession for Derleth - Hardy references show up in a couple of his stories). Anyway, Adam moves in, and Rhoda shows up unexpectedly the next day. They go out to dinner in town, then come back to the house to sleep - Adam in his great-uncle's room on the 2nd floor, Rhoda on the first floor (How QUAINT! They're not married yet, so they sleep apart! But later, Adam tells us that she has spent the night in his bed before! Shocking! Well, it was the 1960s!). That night, he reaches out and feels a woman's breast - not Rhoda's "firm, beautifully rounded" ones, but "flaccid, large-nippled, and old" - he turns on a lamp but there is no sign. The mere mention of a woman's breasts should tell us that this story is more Derleth than Lovecraft! Anyway, the next morning, Rhoda says she thought that there was a woman in the house last night. Uncle Garrison's cleaning woman? Rhoda suddenly bursts out with "Oh, Adam - can't you feel it? . . . Something in this house wants you, Adam - I sense it. It's you the house wants." She begs Adam to leave with her, but he refuses, and she promises to come again later in summer, and makes Adam promise to write faithfully. The next day, Adam thinks of the locked attic room which no one ever dared enter. He goes in and finds it empty except for a chair, on which sits a woman's clothing (including rubber gloves, elastic stockings, and house slippers) and a rubber mask. There is a strange shadow on the wall, a distorted shape seemingly burned into the wood as if by a blast of flame. He also finds a mouse-hole with strange symbols "painted in garish red chalk or oil" around it. Adam tries to find out if the neighbors know anything, but all he gets are mysterious hints - "You seen the blue light yet?" "You heard anything you couldn't explain?" "Old Garrison was up to something. I wouldn't be surprised if he's still at it." Refusal to believe Uriah Garrison is really dead. One neighbor, Mrs. Barton, had dared to upbraid Garrison for keeping a woman . . . and was found dead of a heart attack the next morning - "scared to death." Adam tries looking into Garrison's library, but finds only a lot of stuff about superstition and witchcraft. Rhoda calls from Boston, saying all the books old Garrison had checked out from the Widener were on sorcery. She again fails to convince Adam to leave. That night, he hears the "cleaning lady" - and sees the spectral likeness of this great-uncle, who vanishes. He goes down to the kitchen, where a lamp is burning, and a woman cleaning. He goes to confront him, but she looks him in the eyes - "like pools of glowing fire, eyes that were hardly eyes at all" stares into his. He turns and flees upstairs to his room. He hears her go up to the attic room. He dares to peek out, and sees a blue glow under the attic door, fading. He throws open the door - empty! But then, from the mouse hole, "a drift of blue light, like smoke" . . . He runs to the bedroom and flings himself on the bed and falls asleep. He awakens to Rhoda pounding on the door. "Go away. We don't need you." "So - I'm too late, then." "Go away. Just leave us alone." Rhoda leaves. That night, he eagerly awaits the woman he now calls Lilith - blue light seeps in and forms a naked woman. He also sees the form of Uriah Garrison forming. Then he smells smoke, hears crackling flame, and then the voice of Rhoda calling to him. She had set a ladder under his window-sill. The house burned to the ground. He inherits the property, sells it, marries Rhoda (who later claims to have set the fire herself). Huh. OK.
"The Dark Brotherhood"
© 1966 - A strange piece that seems to partake more of 1950s and 1960s sci-fi sensibilities than the weird tales of Lovecraft. In short: The protagonist, Arthur Phillips of Angell Street, lives in Providence, RI, and frequents the Athenaeum (incidentally, one of my favorite places in Providence, and somewhere I spent ridiculous amounts of time when I lived there), courting a young woman named Rose Dexter (I used to "court" my now ex-wife there, as Poe courted Sarah Whitman there). AN YWAY, they meet a dark-clad man named Mr. Allan who, it happens, looks exactly like Edgar Allan Poe. They spend some time with him, individually and together. He promises the protagonist that he can prove the existence of extraterrestrial life with the help of his brothers. Arthur Phillips agrees, and seven identical versions of Mr. Allan show up and perform a sort of ritual (they refer to it as the "experiment") that causes him to have visions of a dying world, and creatures like rugose cones (a description Lovecraft used for the Great Race of Yith). Mr. Phillips does not handle this revelation well, and slips into denial, deciding it was "just a hallucination." The next afternoon, he goes to the house that the Allan brothers seem to occupy. He enters and finds strange technology he can not explain nor understand, and sees a replica of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as a perfect replica of one of the creatures from his vision. He flees. He cannot decide what to do. In the end, he thinks he should contact Rose Dexter - he gets in touch by phone, and she says Mr. Allan invited her over for the experiment. He tells her not to go, but can't say why, and she seems reluctant to obey him - he has no right to tell her what to do! He has been told that there are more than 100,000 inhabited worlds, most with life completely alien to that of Earth. The next night he tries to get in touch with Rose, but he is told by her sister-in-law that she left with someone he presumes is one of the dark-clad Allan brothers. He gets his father's pistol and goes to the house of the Allans, where he sees Rose in a trance in a machine, and in the case next to her a perfect duplicate, and another of those rugose cone aliens. He fires blindly at the machine, putting out the light and starting a fire, grabs Rose in the confusion and drags her out to safety. The house burns down and an unidentifiable object bursts from it and vanishes skywards. He presumes the Allans were aliens with the ability to put their minds into replicas of humans, who settled on the image of Edgar Allan Poe not realizing that his image was not typical. He speculates, "God only knows how many of them may be here, among us, even now!" (Pretty standard body-snatcher pod-person stuff, right?) But then it occurs to him - "How can I be sure that, in those frenzied minutes, I rescued the right Rose Dexter?" He needs to see her to be sure. The story ends with a clipping from The Providence Journal, dated July 17, with the headline LOCAL GIRL SLAYS ATTACKER - Rose Dexter "fought off and killed a young man she charged with attacking her," "identified as an acquaintance, Arthur Phillips . . ." Dun dun DUN!
"The Horror from the Middle Span"
© 1967 - The story claims to be the "Bishop Manuscript" found while investigating the disappearance of Ambrose Bishop, enclosed in a glass bottle thrown clear from a burning house, held in the office of the sheriff in Arkham, Massachusetts. The protagonist, Ambrose Bishop, came from London to lay claim to some property abandoned ever since his great-uncle Septimus Bishop disappeared about 20 years prior from his home above Dunwich. He goes to Dunwich, checks out the house, goes to the general store of Tobias Whateley (who wants nothing to do with him once he finds out he's kin to Septimus Bishop, who had a reputation as a healer or warlock, unknown to Ambrose). Tobias says that Septimus and his were killed, not disappeared.Ambrose goes back through record of the Arkham Advertiser, and finds two articles on Dunwich from that time, one on the disappearance of Septimus Bishop, the other about repairs to a pier that supported the middle span of a disused bridge over the Miskatonic River in the country above Dunwich. So Ambrose goes back to start working on Septimus' house, he finds the strange books and symbols we expect by now, and finds a secret passageway from the basement that ends up on a hillside overlooking that stone bridge over the river. He goes through the papers and finds several that connect Septimus to stories from the Lovecraft canon. For example, the first bears the heading "Starry Wisdom" and assures Septimus that the group still operates in Providence, with the Shining Trapezohedron that summons the Haunter of the Dark, signed Asenath - this is referring to both "The Haunter of the Dark" and possibly "The Thing On The Doorstep" by H.P.L. Another is from Wilbur Whateley, kin of Tobias (and a major figure in "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P.L.) - this letter mentions that "those from the air" can "take body" from "human blood," "as you, too, will be able to do if you are destroyed other than by the Sign." "I saw you there - and what walks with you in the guise of a woman." He feels disturbed and goes rambling in the woods, coming to that ruined bridge with the strange middle span. But a storm is threatening, so he returns home. The next morning, after the storm, he returns to look at the bridge, but the storm destroyed the middle span . . . and he finds a lot of bones! Some are human bones, some not. He returns to Dunwich to ask if there were an old cemetery nearby that might explain the bones. He does to talk to the local Baptist minister, Reverend Dunning, who derides the locals for their inbred superstitions. He returns home, and sees fresh blood on the altar in the basement, and runs out of the house. He sees an old man who says that he is clearly a Bishop, and asks which. When he explains that he is Ambrose, the figure says that he is Septimus Bishop. Ambrose faints (of course). When he wakes up, there is no one there (of course). There follows a rash of disappearances in Dunwich, and he is sure that Septimus has returned, and has dreamlike encounters in which Septimus warns that the villagers are coming for them . . . The Bishop Manuscript ends confusingly. It is followed by a clipping about the restoration of the old bridge that washed out, and the middle span crowned with the Elder Sign . . .
"Innsmouth Clay"
© 1971 - A short story in which an artist named Jeffrey Corey moves to the Innsmouth area to work. He sculpts a "Sea Goddess," but feels compelled to give it webbed digits and gills. He has strange dreams and compulsions that relate to the Deep Ones intermarried with certain Innsmouth clans like the Marshes and Waites, dreams of people living under the sea, the names Cthulhu and R'lyeh (garbled). The Corey vanishes. The narrator looks for him, sees a thing that looks like him in the water, but with gills . . .
"The Watchers Out of Time"
A manuscript left unfinished at the time of Derleth's death in 1971.
The influence of H.P. Lovecraft on Gygax and early D&D is extremely obvious; the influence of Derleth is more subtle. In a way, though, Derleth's vision of humans being able to align themselves with cosmic forces of good to oppose cosmic forces of evil is more in line with what D&D is about than Lovecraft's cosmic horror. Think about it - if you want to play an investigator into the Cthulhu Mythos who, true to Lovecraft, is doomed to madness and death, play the Call of Cthulhu RPG (now in it's 7th edition!). In fact, many editions of CoC have a disclaimer that they are based on Lovecraft's original vision, not later interpretations by others (meaning those like Derleth, though not mentioning any of them by name. Nevertheless, the CoC game does use the term "Cthulhu Mythos" which Derleth may have invented! But if, on the other hand, you want to play a mortal servant of an Elder God, a "cleric" if you will, and have that Elder God grant your character spells to defeat evil monsters, as in Derleth's interpretation of Lovecraft . . . well, play D&D.
The influence of Derleth and Lovecraft can be felt in D&D from an early time. An early printing of Deities and Demigods had "The Cthulhu Mythos" as a pantheon of gods and beings with whom D&D characters could interact. This literary mythos, and that of Michael Moorcock, were removed early on (though Fritz Leiber's "Nehwon Mythos" remained in later 1st edition and into 2nd edition Legends and Lore printings). This early tendency to include Lovecraftiana, often with some Derleth coloring, has continued in fantasy RPGs to this day, including Cthulhu's inclusion as a Neutral deity in DCC RPG (yes, Neutral - he does not care for Law or Chaos or any other mortal concern!) and a monster (CR 30!) in the Pathfinder RPG (along with many other entities and monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos).
There have certainly been too many influences of Derleth's version of Lovecraft on fantasy RPGs for me to list here - themes are used and abused, often badly, by too many authors for me to list. If you want to see an example of it being done well, allow me to recommend nearly anything by Daniel J. Bishop, who has a truly amazing grasp of the Cthulhu Mythos and how to use it in fantasy gaming. For examples containing an actual Cthulhu cult, check out Purple Duck Publishing's The Portsmouth Mermaid and its supplement, Three Nights in Portsmouth:
I hope you enjoyed my thoughts about August Derleth. Please join me again for future installments of Appendix N Revisited, on or around the Ides of each month!
Until next time . . . Happy Reading! Skál!
~ Colin Anders Brodd
Ides of October
Villa Picena, Phoenix, Arizona
Ides of October
Villa Picena, Phoenix, Arizona
Next up for Appendix N Revisited: The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany!
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