Robert Price: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

To my right, just this side of the West Street Bridge where the Miskatonic begins its northward swing, there crouched in the rapid current the ill-regarded little island of gray standing stones, where as I had read in The Arkham Advertiser I have sent me, a group of bearded bongo-drumming delinquents had recently been arrested while celebrating a black mass in honor of Castro — or so one of them had wildly and outrageously asserted. (For a brief moment my thoughts turned queerly to Old Castro of the Cthulhu Cult.) Beyond the island and across the turn of the river loomed Hangman’s Hill, now quite built-up, from behind which the sun was sending a spectral yellow afterglow. By this pale gloom-shot golden light I saw that Arkham is still a city of trees, with many a fine oak and maple, although the elms are all gone, victims of the Dutch disease, and that there are still many gambrel roofs to be seen among the newer tops. To my left I studied the new freeway where it cuts across the foot of

French Hill above Powder Mill Street, providing rapid access to the missile-component, machine-tool, and chemical plants southeast of the city. My gaze dropping down and swinging south searched for a moment for the old Witch-House before I remembered it had been razed as long ago as 1931 and the then moldering tenements of the Polish Quarter have largely been replaced by a modest housing development in Colonial urban style, while the newest “foreigners” to crowd the city are the Puerto Ricans and the Negroes.

Taking up my valise, I descended the bridge and continued across River Street, past the rosily mellowed red-brick slant-roofed stout old warehouses which have happily escaped demolition. At the Arkham I confirmed my reservation and checked my valise with the pleasant elderly desk clerk, but, since I had dined early in Boston, I pressed on at once south on Garrison across Church to the University, continuing to carry my cardboard box.

The first academic edifices to interrupt my gaze were the new Administration Building and beyond it the Pickman Nuclear Laboratory, where Miskatonic has expanded east across Garrison, though of course without disturbing the Burying Ground at Lich and Parsonage. Both additions to the University struck me as magnificent structures, wholly compatible with the old quadrangle, and I gave silent thanks to the architect who had been so mindful of tradition.

It was full twilight now and several windows glowed in the nearer edifice, where faculty members must be carrying on the increasing paper work of the University. But before proceeding toward the room, behind one of the windows, which was my immediate destination, I took thoughtful note of the orderly student antisegregation demonstration that was being carried on at the edge of campus in sympathy with similar demonstrations in southern cities.

I observed that one of the placards read “Mazurewicz and Desrochers for Selectmen,” showing me that the students must be taking a close interest in the government of the University city and making me wonder if those candidates were sons of the barely literate individuals innocently mixed up in the Witch-House case. Tempora mutantur!

Inside the pleasant corridors of the Administration Building I quickly found the sanctum of the Chairman of the Department of Literature. The slender silver-haired Professor Albert Wilmarth, hardly looking his more than seventy years, greeted me warmly though with that mocking sardonic note which has caused some to call him “unpleasantly” rather than simply “very” erudite. Before winding up his work, he courteously explained its nature.

“I have been getting off a refutation of some whippersnapper’s claim that the late Young Gentleman of Providence who recorded so well so many of the weirder doings around Arkham was a ‘horrifying figure’ whose ‘closest relation is with Peter Kurten, the Diisseldorf murderer, who admitted that his days in solitary confinement were spent conjuring up sexual-sadistic fantasies.’ Great God, doesn’t the sapless youngster know that all normal men have sexual-sadistic fantasies? Even supposing that the literary fantasies of the late Young Gentleman had a deliberate sexual element and were indeed fantasies!” Turning from me with a somewhat sinister chuckle, he said to his attractive secretary, “Now remember, Miss Tilton, that goes to Colin Wilson, not Edmund — I took care of Edmund very thoroughly in an earlier letter! Carbon copies to Avram Davidson and Damon Knight. And while you’re at it, see that they go out from the Hangman’s Hill sub-station — I’d like them to carry that postmark!”

Getting his hat and a light topcoat and hesitating a moment at a mirror to assure himself that his high collar was spotless, the venerable yet sprightly Wilmarth led me out of the Administration Building back across Garrison to the old quadrangle, ignoring the traffic which dodged around us. On the way he replied in answer to a remark of mine, “Yes, the architecture is damned good. Both it and the Pickman Lab — and the new Polish Quarter apartment development, too — were designed by Daniel Upton, who as you probably know has had a distinguished career ever since he was given a clean bill of mental health and discharged with a verdict of ‘justified homicide’ after he shot Asenath or rather old Ephraim Waite in the body of his friend Edward Derby. For a time that verdict got us almost as much criticism as the Lizzie Borden acquittal got Fall River, but it was well worth it!

“Young Danforth’s another who’s returned to us from the asylum — and permanently too, now that Morgan’s research in mescaline and LSD has turned up those clever anti-hallucinogens,” my conductor continued as we passed between the museum and the library where a successor of the great watchdog that had destroyed Wilbur Whateley clinked his chain as he paced in the shadows. “Young Danforth — Gad, he’s nearly as old as I! — you know, the brilliant graduate assistant who survived with old Dyer the worst with which the Antarctic could face them back in ’30 and ’31. Dan- forth’s gone into psychology, like Peaslee’s Wingate and old Peaslee himself — it’s a therapeutic vocation. Just now he’s deep in a paper on Asenath Waite, showing she’s quite as much an Anima-figure — that is, devouring witch-mother and glamorous fatal witch-girl — as Carl Jung maintained Haggard’s Ayesha and William Sloane’s Selena were.”

“But surely there’s a difference there,” I objected somewhat hesitatingly. “Sloane’s and Haggard’s women were fictional. You can’t be implying, can you, that Asenath was a figment of the imagination of the Young Gentleman who wrote The Thing on the Doorstep? — or rather fictionalized Upton’s rough account. Besides, it wasn’t really Asenath but Ephraim, as you pointed out yourself a moment ago.”

“Of course, of course,” Wilmarth quickly replied with another of those sinister and — yes, I must confess it — unpleasant chuckles. He added blandly, “But old Ephraim lends just the proper fierce male component to the Anima-figure — and after you’ve spent an adult lifetime at Miskatonic, you discover you’ve developed a rather different understanding from the herd’s of the distinction between the imaginary and the real. Come along now.”

We had entered the faculty lounge in the interim and he led me across its oak-paneled precincts to a large bay window where eight leather-upholstered easy chairs were set in a circle along with smoking stands and a table with cups, glasses, brandy decanter, and a blue- warmed urn of coffee. I looked around with a deep shiver of awe and feeling of personal unworthiness at the five elderly scholars and scientists, professors emeritus all, already seated at this figurative modern Round Table of high-minded battlers against worse than ogres and dragons — cosmic evil in all its monstrous manifestations. There was Upham of Mathematics, in whose class poor Walter Gilman had expounded his astounding theories of hyperspace; Francis Morgan of Medicine and Comparative Anatomy, now the sole living survivor of the brave trio who had slain the Dunwich Horror on that dank September morning back in ’28; Nathaniel Peaslee of Economics and Psychology, who had endured the dreadful underground journey Down Under in ’35; his son Wingate of Psychology, who had been with him on that Australian expedition; and William Dyer of Geology who had been there too and four years before that undergone the horrendous adventure at the Mountains of Madness.