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A story for Halloween....

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis

Clark Ashton Smith

As an interne in the terrestrial hospital at Ignarh, I had charge of the singular case of Rodney Severn, the one surviving member of the Octave Expedition to Yoh-Vombis, and took down the following story from his dictation. Severn had been brought to the hospital by the Martian guides of the Expedition. He was suffering from a horribly lacerated and inflamed condition of the scalp and brow, and was wildly delirious part of the time and had to be held down in his bed during reccurent seizures of a mania whose violence was doubly inexplicable in view of his extreme debility.

The lacerations, as will be learned from the story, were mainly self-inflicted. They were mingled with numerous small round wounds, easily distinguished from the knife-slashes, and arranged in regular circles, through which an unknown poison had been injected into Severn's scalp. The causation of these wounds was difficult to explain; unless one were to believe that Severn's story was true, and was no mere figment of his illness. Speaking for myself, in the light of what afterwards occurred, I feel that I have no other recourse than to believe it. There are strange things on the red planet; and I can only second the wish that was expressed by the doomed archaeologist in regard to future explorations....

Read the rest....

An excerpt:

Octave had turned toward us now, and he stood in an idle posture before the open door, like one who has finished some ordained task. I was the first of our party to throw off the paralyzing spell; and pulling out a clasp-knife—the only semblance of a weapon which I carried—I ran over to him. He moved back, but not quickly enough to evade me, when I stabbed with the four-inch blade at the black, turgescent mass that enveloped his whole upper head and hung down upon his eyes.

What the thing was, I should prefer not to imagine—if it were possible to imagine. It was formless as a great slug, with neither head nor tail nor apparent organs—an unclean, puffy, leathery thing, covered with that fine, mould-like fur of which I have spoken. The knife tore into it as if through rotten parchment, making a long gash, and the horror appeared to collapse like a broken bladder. Out of it there gushed a sickening torrent of human blood, mingled with dark, filiated masses that may have been half-dissolved hair, and floating gelatinous lumps like molten bone, and shreds of a curdy white substance. At the same time, Octave began to stagger, and went down at full length on the floor. Disturbed by his fall, the mummy-dust rose about him in a curling cloud, beneath which he lay mortally still.

Conquering my revulsion, and choking with the dust, I bent over him and tore the flaccid, oozing horror from his head. It came with unexpected ease, as if I had removed a limp rag: but I wish to God that I had let it remain. Beneath, there was no longer a human cranium, for all had been eaten away, even to the eyebrows, and the half-devoured brain was laid bare as I lifted the cowl-like object, I dropped the unnamable thing from fingers that had grown suddenly nerveless, and it turned over as it fell, revealing on the nether side many rows of pinkish suckers, arranged in circles about a paIlid disk that was covered with nerve-like filaments, suggesting a sort of plexus.

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FAQ

Why do you publish posts that are nothing but screen captures from Zardoz?

I'm fascinated by the visual. I choose a black background because images would look good against it, even though I knew it would make the text harder to read. But I've been putting off the replacement of the copy of Photoshop that died with my old computer ever since this blog began -- time and money, you know? -- and I don't have a scanner or drawing tools, and I don't want to copy images from elsewhere on the web. That leaves the screen images I capture with my gizmo for turning VHS tapes into DVDs.

Screen captures especially fascinate me. The first images -- Lost Highway, Apocalypse Now, the Sailor Moon series in its amusing DiC incarnation -- were just images left over from making old menus, but I liked posting them enough to start accumulating images with posting in mind. I've always meant to write about these movies and use the images as illustrations, especially Pierrot le Fou and Lost Highway, but the images are also interesting by themselves. Screen caps embody narrativity, haunt the imagination with their phantom contexts. I chose Pierrot le Fou and Zardoz for how many good images they seemed likely to reveal. Looking for these is the visual equivalent of close reading, and gave me many of the ideas I want to write about.

Many games can be played. For example, the first three Zardoz images were chosen to give the movie a science-fiction sleekness it doesn't really have (and to show the principles, Charlotte Rampling, Sara Kestelman, and Sean Connery), but then -- when I had the idea a few days ago of Halloween-themed posting -- I looked for images that made it look like a horror movie (displaying some of its better visual qualities in the process). I enjoy it, and thought you might too.

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Random Question

What did you dream when you ate a spider while sleeping?

Candy from a Spider

Eagerly, I emptied my trick or treat bag on the kitchen table. Some of the candy moved -- candy worms inching, candy bugs scurrying, candy bats circling my head. Others performed in place -- laughing candy gremlins, candy fireflies flashing colors to go with their flavors, candy pumpkins that expanded in the fresh air.

A candy spider lept from the bag to the tabletop to the wall. When it found a nice clean corner, the spider would spin candy webs until it was empty. Those were the best.

I caught a candy bat with my thumb and forefinger and placed it on my outstretched tongue. The bats would be beautiful in the holo, but up close they were just noisy blurs that threatened to get stuck in my hair.

I smiled at Mom's aircam, which had followed me all night.

The spider had finished a web. I leaned over and wound it up with a finger, careful to leave the spider. As I sucked on it, sweetness sparkled in my mouth like candles of flavor in a dark cave.

More candy struggled out of the pile to show off. Dancing candy mushrooms, jumping candy toads, a candy preying mantis that caught other candy so that they hopped around inside its transparent body.

A second web was done. Absently, I pulled it loose and savored it.

Still more candy appeared. Candy ghosts, drifting wisps of vapor with cartoon eyes. Hooting candy owls, slinking candy black cats. It was tempting, but I knew better than to eat too much. Besides, it seemed a waste to eat it now instead of later when it had all run down.

When I sucked on the third web, something crunched in my mouth. The spider. I hadn't been paying attention. The spider was edible, but I felt a pang of loss at the thought of all the webs that I would now never eat.

A bad taste spread from the crunchy bits of spider. Chemicals for making the webs? I was puzzled, then alarmed. It almost tasted like a real --

Horror

Fear and fire are alike. Notice how easily they combine in the common image of people sitting around a campfire listening to a scary story.

Now picture the terror of a primordial band as an advancing forest fire consumes their territory. Another living simile, another shared aspect displayed.

Why do people like horror stories?

For some people, that's a real question. Horror stories show awful things happening. They intentionally make us feel unpleasant emotions: dread, revulsion, shock, supernatural terror. Where's the pleasure? Surely horror must desensitize us or, worse, teach us to enjoy its atrocities.

Think of wildfires, of refugees under dark smoky skies leaving their homes behind. Think of walking down a street late at night. Even now, in the 21st century, fear and fire can blaze out of control, become wild forces breaking through civilization. They can drag us back to the primordial night.

Have you ever built and lit a campfire? It's fun. In high school a friend of mine borrowed a plastic lighter and sheepishly returned it the next day empty. He'd been tripping the night before and had watched the flame, transfixed, until the fuel was gone. The domestication of fire was, and is, a big thing.

If the idea of horror bothers you, think of it this way. Just as the campfire is tame fire, the scary story, the horror paperback or horror DVD, is tame fear. You can turn it on and off. It's fear you control. That's how pleasure becomes possible. A primal force, bent to human wishes though a prism of artifice -- or art.

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I've decided this is my Halloween movie.

Quotes

"Why did you try to stop me from going back upstairs that day?"

She managed to smile, although her eyes were already spilling over with tears. "I didn't know it really mattered to you. I didn't want us to miss the train."

It had been a small thing, an unimportant thing. For some reason not clear even to him he had insisted on going back upstairs to his study when they were about to leave the house for a short vacation. It was raining, and she had pointed out that there was barely enough time to get to the station. He had surprised himself and her, too, by insisting on his own way in circumstances in which he had never been known to be stubborn.

He had actually pushed her to one side and forced his way up the stairs. Even then nothing might have come of it if had he not -- quite unexpectedly -- raised the shade of the window that faced toward the rear of the house.

It was a very small matter. It had been raining, hard, out in front. From this window the weather was clear and sunny, with no sign of rain.

He had stood there quite a long while, gazing out at the impossible sunshine and rearranging his cosmos in his mind. He re-examined long-suppressed doubts in the light of this one small but totally unexplainable discrepency. Then he had turned and had found that she was standing behind him.

He had been trying ever since to forget the expression that he had surprised on her face.

"What about the rain?"

"The rain?" she repeated in a small, puzzled voice. "Why, it was raining, of course. What about it?"

"But it was not raining out my study window."

"What? But of course it was. I did notice the sun break through the clouds a little, but that was all."

"Nonsense!"

"But, darling, what has the weather to do with you and me? What difference does it make whether it rains or not -- to us?" She approached him timidly and slid a small hand between his arm and side. "Am I responsible for the weather?"

"I think you are. Now please go."

-- Robert A. Heinlein, "They" (1941)


I didn't notice it at first. David [Bowie] had to point it out to me. On a nice balmy Hollywood late afternoon, a storm was going on outside his window: rain, thunder, lightning, the works. Outside all the other windows in the house there was calm and sunshine.

I stood there looking at this thing, sort of numb, but then snapped out of it, resumed my Angie Fix-it role, and proposed reassuring points about the eccentric California climate and the deceptive topography of the Hollywood Hills.

I did a pretty good job, but all the same it took a long time to pacify David after this latest manifestation. He didn't get to sleep until quite late that evening. And before I myself went to sleep, I had to struggle for some time with the thought that my explanations weren't quite as convincing as I'd have liked them to be.

-- Angela Bowie with Patrick Carr, Backstage Passes (1993)

September Girl

September. The sky cools. The impurities settle out. Here, up in the Hudson Valley, the sunlight is so clear that even beaming sideways through the late afternoon there is just the palest tinge of champagne in its color to betray that the star at its center is yellow and not white.

September 22. My birthday is the autumnal equinox. The sun crosses the celestial equator. A time of equipoise, just as a birthday is balanced between past and future. Summer becomes Fall. Virgo becomes Libra.

Always a sad time. Maybe because I've always lacked for social skills, and this is about the time of the new school year when it would become clear that I had failed once again to find a place. Maybe it's autumn itself, the disappearing animals, the waning sun, the leaves fired up with mad plant colors -- apricot, pomegranate, banana, orange, eggplant -- as the green, the good, chlorophyll decomposes. Maybe it's the clarity.

Clarity is always sad.

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