Deepest, Darkest Eden: New Tales of Hyperborea Read online

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  www.miskatonicriverpress.com

  Deepest,

  Darkest Eden

  edited by

  Cody Goodfellow

  New York • Florida

  2013

  Dedication —

  For CLARK ASHTON SMITH,

  Sage of Auburn, Savior of Atlantis.

  DEEPEST, DARKEST EDEN edited by Cody Goodfellow

  Copyright © 2013 by Cody Goodfellow

  Authors retain copyright to their stories, and unless noted otherwise, stories are

  © 2013 per author.

  “Coils Of The Ouroboros” by Cody Goodfellow © 2010. First appeared in Strange Aeons #10.

  “The Door To Earth” by Jesse Bullington © 2012. First appeared in Future Lovecraft, Prime Books, 2012.

  Cover art is © 2012 Mark E. Rogers.

  Interior art is © 2010 Mike Dubisch.

  All Rights Reserved.

  For information, contact Miskatonic River Press

  Published in the United States by:

  Miskatonic River Press, LLC

  944 Reynolds Road, Suite 188

  Lakeland, Florida 33801

  www.miskatonicriverpress.com

  ISBN 978-1-937408-02-2

  Contents

  Wider Than The World: A Door To Hyperborea

  Hostage

  To Walk Night... Alone...

  In Old Commoriom

  Yhoundeh Fades

  Coils Of The Ouroboros The History Of Avasquiddoc The Apprentice

  Daughter of the Elk Goddess

  The Darkness Below

  The Conquest of Rhizopium

  Zolamin and the Mad God

  Having Set Out to Be Vanquished

  The Lost Archetype

  One Last Task for Athammaus

  The Beauties of Polarion

  The Frigid Ilk of Sarn Kathool

  The Debt Owed Abhoth

  Return of the Crystal

  Rodney LaSalle Has a Job Waiting in Commoriom

  The Winter of Atiradarinsept

  The Door from Earth

  Weird of the White Sybil

  Wider Than The World: A Door To Hyperborea

  Neither by ship nor on foot would you find the marvelous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.

  ––Pindar

  Just beyond the highest mountain, just before the dawn of history––everywhere out of reach and beyond knowledge, there you will find Hyperborea. There you will lose yourself in a dream of a simpler, more dangerous past in order to face what you could otherwise never accept as your own reflection.

  To the ancient Greeks, the place beyond the home of the North Wind was a paradise of eternal sunshine, “far from labor and battle.” Homer located it north of Thrace, the extent of the settled Greek world; Pindar supposed it lay somewhere near the Danube. Plutarch and the Romans pushed it ever further north until it vanished beyond the Arctic Circle.

  To a modern age that has mapped the world to death, the need for Hyperborea is still so great that we must bury it in the prehistoric past. In her ambitiously mad metaphysical exegesis, The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky posited, among a pageant of forgotten rulers of the Earth, a race of yellow-skinned creatures that reproduced by budding like polyps, known as Kimpurshas. Though they left no biological descendants, the residents of the lost continent they called Plaksha enjoyed a Golden Age of tropical plenty and esoteric enlightenment until they, like the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, fell from their height of achievement and spiritually devolved into brutish, bestial monsters––namely, us.

  Theosophy flourished among an explosion of pseudo-mystical philosophies in the early twentieth century, but those who most effectively spread its gospel never pledged their faith, but swiped the crazier ideas to spice up their pulp fantasies. Foremost among these plunderers of the dubious new gospel was Clark Ashton Smith.

  For those unfamiliar with Smith’s phenomenal weird fiction (put this book down immediately and rectify this lapse; if you must, go to http://www.eldritchdark.com/, where all his short fiction may be found), Hyperborea was but one exotic setting among many for the self-educated poet and romantic iconoclast’s fancifully grotesque fables, all of which shared his celebrated lapidary prose and a sardonic wit to rival Ambrose Bierce or John Collier. Using both the theosophist and the Classical Greek visions of Hyperborea as base pigments, Smith created a panorama of weird fantasy unlike any other in a mere handful of lush short stories. Indeed, if they had a clear, inarguable fault, it was that there were far too few of them.

  Smith’s flurry of weird prose output lasted less than a decade, and it came at the height of a period largely lost and forgotten in the long shadows of Conan and The Lord Of The Rings. An outgrowth of the fin-de-siecle Orientalist and Decadent movements, pioneer fantasists such as E.R. Eddison, James Branch Cabell and Lord Dunsany devised lavishly foreign settings and bizarre schools of sorcery to supply new thrills for pulp aesthetes burnt out on the Arabian Nights. Escapism so pure it often ran out of air and became suffocating contrivance, but pre-heroic fantasy was unburdened by the all-too-familiar sword & sorcery conventions that have come to define high fantasy, and also refreshingly free of the reactionary constraints that would later hamstring the genre–-witness the lush, carnal and presciently trippy illustrations Frank C. Papé, Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay did for them.

  If for no other reason, Smith’s fantasies continue to thrill long after most of his contemporaries have been forgotten because they were the antithesis of Howard’s alpha-machismo psychodramas or Tolkien’s grand tapestries of valor and faith. In escaping into Smith’s primeval Eden, we find the first humans to be all too much like us, the Golden Age to be a thin coat of gilded paint. Frolicking in the forest primeval, we find a cruel and exacting moral code at work eons before the first mention of sin and Hell. Greedy, deceitful, lustful, larcenous, cowardly and mad with preposterous ambition, Hyperborea’s gnomish proto-human buffoons snort at us from the fossil record, mocking the polished modernity of a technologically omnipotent empire brought to its knees by trivial scandals and imbecilic media circuses.

  The literary adepts who gathered to bring you this anthology were not instructed to create counterfeit CAS stories, but were instead presented with an even more daunting challenge––to expand the canon of Hyperborea’s extraordinary mythos with tales told in voices out of time, yet uniquely their own. More, they were hounded and harangued by your humble editor to insure that these tales would be pure escapism––wild, ripping yarns with no cynical axes to grind. Therefore, be forewarned: any resemblance between the beetle-browed subhuman misbehavior on offer herein and your own is entirely coincidental.

  Cody Goodfellow

  Burbank, California

  April, 2013

  Hostage

  By Nick Mamatas

  The north winds fell silent. The blind man at the bottom of the boat actually ha
d some idea of where he was. North of Thracia, he reasoned. That was why the wind had stopped. The craft had drifted, crewless, past the realm of Boreas, who was the North Wind. The blind man would have laughed, if he could. He had been taken hostage for a reason he didn’t even understand—the men with spear points at his back and throat spoke only in the bar-bar-bar of strangers, and dragged him onto a triaconter, then set off, the thirty banks of rowers grunting and singing as they worked. Then the ship had come upon a sudden storm. The blind man could smell it in the air, but when he tried to speak he got a fist in the mouth and lashed to the mast. That’s what saved him when the great wave hit. Anyone who hadn’t gone overboard was either dead at their station or unconscious, perhaps drowned in a puddle. The blind man had squirmed from his ropes when the mast had snapped, and hung on as best he could.

  All the water was salt, but the blind man had salvaged a skin of wine, some bread that had gone to paste. Even a fish, raw and bony, that had been swept into the boat. It hardly mattered—a hale man with two eyes couldn’t navigate a ship such as this himself, and all the oars were broken. He briefly considered throwing himself, belly first, onto one of the shattered oars and ending it all, but the blind man was a storyteller of sorts. He was curious—what would happen next?

  That night was colder than he had ever known, though the night came late. The blind man had never experienced such a strange night—he shivered under the scraps of sail he could find, and it was so cold he thought he felt salty water freeze on the hair of his arms. His limbs went numb, and his nose, always so sensitive, closed. Waves spilled over the prow of the triaconter, littering the bottom of the boat with fish. The blind man tore one to pieces, alive, with his hands and teeth, drank its blood and spit out the bones as best he could. To choke on a bone after everything—that was an irony not even the gods would dare.

  The gods, the blind man thought. He was far north now, where most of the gods he knew were strangers. Even the waves upon which the blind man sat were not Poseidon’s. There were only strange gods venerated on the edge of the world. He raised his arms and begged the sun for mercy, but sleep took him first.

  He dreamt of warmth, and of the smell of musk, and when he awoke he was warm and under the skin of a great beast. The blind man opened his mouth, but his throat was too dry to speak. So he croaked. And in return, the people gathered about him—and there were several—also croaked, then murmured in the language of barbarians in a way that the blind man knew to be tinted with curiosity, and perhaps even a little joy.

  The blind man was given water, and he finally could speak. He remembered hearing that the barbarian tribes of the far north knew a certain form of magic that depended on, and was empowered by, knowledge of names. So he croaked out what he was, what he had been—a blind man, a hostage. In the language of his people, those words were near-homophones. Hau-mohr-uhs.

  The blind man was bathed, and fed—though the food was slimy, and gamey—and even masturbated by a slim hand, and slowly he regained his strength. He did not know whether he was being kept in a tiny hut made of skins, or a long and twisting cave, or in the belly of a leviathan. In his dreams, it was always dark, and the world was a great pulsing thing, squirming and twisting around him, a dragon from the muck. But one morning he realized he hasn’t been dreaming.

  The boy spoke to him in his own language, though one heavily accented—aristocratic and foreign both at once.

  “What is your magic?” the boy said. An older man bar-barred something, prodding or correcting the boy somehow. “What do you have that brought you here?”

  “I don’t even know where I am,” the blind man said. “Or how I came to be delivered here.” The boy repeated the words, his voice lilting and excited, in his own language. After a generalized murmur the boy tried again:

  “What gods brought you here? Do you know the truth of Zhothaqquah?”

  Zhothaqquah. The blind man guessed it was a name—the name of a god. He had heard it before, during his recuperation, in his waking hours and in his dreams, where it was sang by the slow beating of his heart.

  “Cruel gods,” the blind man said. “Capricious gods.” The boy grunted in confusion. “Gods who are like children, smiling one moment, weeping the next, then dancing and singing,” the blind man explained. The boy seemed to like that better. He petted the blind man’s hairy arm.

  “Zhothaqquah has no such flaw,” the boy said.

  “Then why are you blind like me?” the blind man said. The boy gasped. There was some bar-baring from the men, the boy answered them, then asked the blind man, “How did you know?”

  “The way you reached for my arm, as if you did not quite know where it was, or, when you touched it, where it ended.” The blind man said, “Just because you are blind does not mean that you cannot be an observer of the world around you.”

  “I mean…” the boy said, his voice tentative. “How did you know that it was Zhothaqquah who blinded me? With his tongue, that snapped out from the darkness to mark me as his.”

  The blind man realized that he should stop speaking before he said something foolish. Hospitality was always tentative in barbarian lands, where the virtue of philoxenia was all but unknown. And, if the boy wasn’t just a lunatic and surrounded by the same, the gods here seemed rather closer than the far off game-players of his experiences. For a moment, he thought to pray, but the blind man had little to sacrifice. He hummed a hymm he knew, for the only god who could be found this far north. Perhaps the boy would think him a lunatic, and leave him now to rest.

  Instead, the boy sang. Like a native of the blind man’s country, in words unaccented by the barbarian tongue, free of grunting and growling. It was the blind man’s turn to gasp. Then, an epiphany—for the first time in his life, he was glad he could not see, because whatever these barbarians were hiding, he did not want to know. The other barbarians shushed the boy and entered into a lengthy, acrimonious, ten-way conversation with the boy. It sounded to the old man like a pack of angry dogs coming across a newly dead goat.

  The old man realized that all the voices were those of men, and some youths, like the boy. Unusual that there were no women, as there was the smell of cooking food about, and the blind man’s bed was made thoroughly well. Perhaps this was a group of pederasts? Well, there’s nothing wrong with that… But no. Too many men to too few boys. Was this a military outpost, or an all-male mystery cult? The argument with the boy continued, and the blind man drifted off to sleep. He hoped to dream of the boy and his paean to the sun, but instead dreamed again of a sticky, pulsing dark.

  When the blind man awoke, his limbs were bound together, and he was being carried on a litter. He called out for the boy, fearing that he would only hear the bar-bar-bar of the older men in return. There was the laughter of self-satisfied men, but the boy did speak.

  “We’re taking you to meet a god,” the boy said. His tone was casual, as if discussing an unremarkable tide. The boy, blind, was holding one of the poles by the hostage’s feet, as if he were the guide. The blind man was full of questions, but there were rocks in his stomach. What if he said the wrong thing, and was dumped onto the rocks, then crawl about this frigid, foreign land till he starved?

  “Oh, how lovely,” the man said. If the boy agreed that it was lovely, he did not say. The blind man strained his ears to listen to footfalls, to the exhalations and murmurs of his bodyguard. There were no birds in the sky, no insects buzzing about, even when the rocky hill over which he was carried, the litter swaying like a small boat drifting from shore, turned to swampland. Finally, some time after noon, the litter was lowered into the muck.

  “Am I to be sacrificed now?” the blind man said.

  “No,” the boy said. The blind man could hear the other litter-bearers, and the rest of the men, shuffling away. They hadn’t stopped to eat or rest. Perhaps he wasn’t as far from the place with the fire and the bed of animals skins, as he had thought. A ritual march through a labyrinth of some sort? A path designed to conf
use him? “I’ll even stay here with you.”

  “Because you are blind.”

  “That’s right.”

  The blind man relaxed. The god was probably nothing other than one, or more, of the men, who’ll circle around the swamp once time and come back, wearing masks and lighting flaming powers and affecting strange voices. As gods do. He vowed to thrash about and grovel and beg convincingly, like an actor, to please the locals. He had some questions for the boy, but the boy only spoke a prayer in the grunting of his tribe. Then the blind man saw something. The trees of the swamp parted somehow, and light poured into the clearing. The black behind the blind man’s eyelids blazed red, then white, as when he was a boy and turned his face up toward the sun, in the hope of seeing some of the chariot behind the great and fiery wheel.

  Someone said his name. No, sang his name. The song penetrated the blind man’s bones. In the distance, he heard the boy shrieking Zhothaqquah Zhothaqquah Zhothaqquah!

  The blind man said Apollon! and Apollon, the only god of his people known to dwell north of Thrace, answered.

  Apollon knew of the blind man. He had seen him from his perch in the sky.

  Apollon appreciated the blind man. He knew of the man’s wiles, his stories.

  Apollon assured the blind man. He would leave this place one day, and perhaps even sing of what he learned.

  Zhothaqquah Zhothaqquah Zhothaqquah! the boy shouted. Then more barbarian jibberish. The blind man felt that the boy was far away. The blind man was floating on a cloud, in the immanent presence of a god in which he hadn’t truly believed since he was a boy whose eyes burned.

  The boy thrashed about in the mud, in an ecstasy of his own. The blind man nearly called out to him, but what would that mean to Apollon, to turn his attention toward a worm of a boy, and a barbarian besides?

  But…the boy knew Greek. He must have learned it from the god. The blind man swallowed hard and dared ask a question. It was well-phrased, practically a hymn, with meter and rhyme. It encompassed many subjects—who were the men who impressed the blind man and took him hostage? How did he come to be the sole survivor? Why did the boy know Greek? How could Apollon live half a year among such savages, with a dark and filthy thing Zhothaqquah as his only divine company?