Lovecraft Short Stories Read online

  This is a FLAME TREE Book

  Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells

  Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck

  Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker

  Thanks to Will Rough

  FLAME TREE PUBLISHING

  6 Melbray Mews, Fulham, London SW6 3NS, United Kingdom

  www.flametreepublishing.com

  First published 2017

  Copyright © 2017 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

  Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78664-465-7

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78755-253-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The cover image is created by Flame Tree Studio, based on artwork by Slava Gerj and Gabor Ruszkai.

  A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.

  Introducing our new fiction list:

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  Contents

  Foreword by S.T. Joshi

  Publisher’s Note

  The Tomb

  Dagon

  Polaris

  Beyond the Wall of Sleep

  The White Ship

  The Doom that Came to Sarnath

  The Statement of Randolph Carter

  The Cats of Ulthar

  The Temple

  From Beyond

  Nyarlathotep

  The Picture in the House

  The Nameless City

  The Outsider

  The Other Gods

  The Music of Erich Zann

  The Hound

  The Lurking Fear

  The Rats in the Walls

  The Unnamable

  The Festival

  The Shunned House

  Cool Air

  The Call of Cthulhu

  Pickman’s Model

  The Strange High House in the Mist

  The Colour Out of Space

  The Dunwich Horror

  The Whisperer in Darkness

  The Black Stone

  Robert E. Howard

  The Thing on the Roof

  Robert E. Howard

  At the Mountains of Madness (chapters I–II)

  The Hunters from Beyond

  Clark Ashton Smith

  The Shadow over Innsmouth

  The Dreams in the Witch House

  The Thing on the Doorstep

  The Shadow out of Time

  The Shambler from the Stars

  Robert Bloch

  The Haunter of the Dark

  Biographies & Sources

  Foreword: Lovecraft Short Stories

  H.P. Lovecraft has achieved a worldwide celebrity that he could not have begun to imagine. His work is disseminated both in English and in dozens of foreign languages; it has been widely imitated by hundreds of writers, and has served as the basis for films, role-playing games, and even Christmas merchandise. He has also been championed as a canonical American author and a pioneer in the genre of ‘weird fiction.’

  Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island. A precocious youth, he absorbed the Arabian Nights, Greek mythology, and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe before the age of ten. At the same time, he also became fascinated with the sciences, especially chemistry and astronomy. Because of ill-health, his formal schooling was spotty, and he failed to graduate from high school. But he developed a prodigious intellect through wide reading in his family library.

  Lovecraft wrote poems, stories and essays from as early as the age of six, but at 18 – when he suffered what he called a nervous breakdown – he destroyed much of this work. Unable to find a job, he lounged at home while his increasingly neurotic mother took care of him. Then, in 1914, he discovered the world of amateur journalism – a small community of writers, editors, and printers across the United States and England who issued small publications for their own amusement. Lovecraft quickly gained ascendancy in this community and was persuaded to resume the writing of weird fiction.

  In 1923 the founding of the pulp magazine Weird Tales afforded a professional venue for Lovecraft’s tales, even though it generally paid only one cent a word. The next year, he married Sonia H. Greene, a successful executive in the clothing business in New York. He moved into Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn, hoping to establish enough contacts in the publishing world to support himself. But he failed in that attempt, and the oppressive atmosphere of New York caused him to abandon his wife and flee back to Providence in 1926.

  This return to his native city engendered a literary outburst such as he had never experienced, and he wrote some of his most memorable fiction in the year that followed. Chief among them was ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ the story that initiated what came to be called the Cthulhu Mythos, a pseudomythology that depicted the coming to earth of immensely powerful alien entities who were worshipped as gods by the human cultists who encountered them.

  The final 10 years of Lovecraft’s life were relatively uneventful, but enlivened by wide travels up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada, from Quebec to Key West. He wrote less and less fiction with the passing of years: as his stories became longer and more complex, they were considered less suitable for publication in the formula-bound pulp magazines, and Weird Tales rejected some of his best tales. Some of his later work, verging on science fiction, appeared in such science fiction pulps as Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. But Lovecraft, who never had a book of his stories published in his lifetime, probably imagined that his work would fade into oblivion after his death. He died of intestinal cancer on March 15, 1937.

  The progression of Lovecraft’s work over a relatively brief career – from relatively conventional tales of haunted houses (‘The Rats in the Walls’) and psychic possession (‘The Tomb’) to richly textured narratives that span the cosmos – is remarkable. Aside from Poe, Lovecraft was markedly influenced by the Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany, with his fantasy tales of the ‘edge of the world.’ Later, he was influenced by the Welsh writer Arthur Machen, whose stories of obscure cults lurking on the underside of civilization helped to inspire his own tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.

  But Lovecraft’s best tales remain profoundly original: not only are they infused with his knowledge of the various sciences, but they express his abiding fascination with the landscape of New England – its topography, history, and culture. Moreover, his stories embody a deeply held philosophy of life, which he characterized as ‘cosmicism’ – the notion that human life is a trivial and insignificant accident in the infinite depths of space and time. He expressed this philosophy, as it applied to his stories, as follows: “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large ....To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.”

  Although Lovecraft was not natural
ly gregarious, he enjoyed communicating with like-minded individuals through correspondence. He became the focus of a cadre of weird fiction writers ranging from Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard to August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and many others. These writers elaborated upon the Cthulhu Mythos in their own stories, lending the concept greater verisimilitude. This practice has continued down to the present day.

  The present omnibus, presenting the full range of his fictional output from the beginning to the end of his career, demonstrates how H.P. Lovecraft has become a titan of weird fiction whose work continues to be read by millions.

  S.T. Joshi

  stjoshi.org

  Publisher’s Note

  We’re excited to announce the arrival of new companion titles to our existing Gothic Fantasy range: volumes featuring classic fiction from the masterful pens of some of our favourite authors. We’ve wanted to publish an anthology dedicated to Lovecraft for some time, and are thrilled to now present a rich volume of stories by such an iconic figure in the world of weird and horror fiction. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, populated by elder gods and arcane tomes, has entered the world of popular culture, as well as inspiring many authors. Lovecraft himself encouraged others to help in creating a shared universe, and in his spirit of inclusion we also offer a small number of works within the Mythos by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch. Delving beyond that universe we also bring you a chilling array of Lovecraft’s other tales of terror, including some stories from his Dream Cycle, amongst others.

  In order to enjoy a truer picture of the progression of Lovecraft’s writing, the stories are provided chronologically by when they were written (as on some occasions this was years before publication).

  The Tomb

  ‘Sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam.’

  Virgil

  In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

  My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.

  I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of waning moon – but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

  The vault to which I refer is an ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call ‘divine wrath’ in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.

  I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of the dead. It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briers, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal carvings above the arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalisingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginnings of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgement to my readers when they shall have learnt all.

  The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. Wi
th the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideas regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great sinister family of the burned-down mansion was in some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward. The odour of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.

  The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of Plutarch’s Lives in the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny whenever he should become old enough to lift its enourmous weight. This legend had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.

  Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those churchyards and places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his mound-covered coffin on the day of interment.