“It was from the tethered horses—they had screamed, not neighed, but screamed…
and there was no light down there, nor the sound of any human thing, to shew why they had done so.”
(The Very Old Folk, pg.627)
Welcome back to Our Daily Lovecraft. Take a breath before the final deep dive.
If you’re just joining us, you can start your Lovecraftian journey here!
Just a few pages long, the introduction calls this a “fragment” which it indeed seems to be. There isn’t really a story happening here and was seems like something that was simply found amongst Lovecraft’s writings. It has no real direction – almost like it started as something and Lovecraft never finished it. Which makes sense to me – I have notebooks that I call “Piece Notebooks” since they’re just places for me to scribble down ideas that may never be used in any way. They’re a way to get thoughts out of my brain. I wish Harry Potter pensieves were real because they would be infinitely faster (I write longhand), but oh well.
Another exceedingly short piece, I originally was looking forward to it as I’d hoped it would have far more information about the dreaded Necronomicon that we’ve already seen so much of. Characters in past stories have sought it out for it’s power and ability to help them reach into the dark abyss of other worlds and pull things through or chat with them or perform horrible feats typically unheard of or normally unavailable to common man.
But instead we’re treated to a very brief sliver of the places Abdul Alhazred, the Necronomicon’s author, visited or lived before dying. There are references to Yog-Sothoth (the prime entity called upon in “The Case of Dexter Ward”) as well as Cthulhu, as Abdul apparently worshipped both of them. Otherwise the remainder of the tale (if one might call it that), is a telling of how and where various copies of the Necronomicon were copied and where some of those copies might currently exist. Due to past references in other stories, those places and people are brought in here (i.e. Pickman and others) but it’s all very factual in tone and far less interesting than I’d hoped it would be.
A third short piece, which for this day I do celebrate the shortness again after slogging through the mire that was Charles Dexter Ward, which isn’t so much a story as it is a dream of Lovecraft’s, according to the introduction. A dream he had on Halloween night, no less.
In this dream he is a Roman named L. Caelius Rufus, and during his time in the village of Pompelo, there is much discussion about a group of strange people who live high in the mountains and do freaky stuff on the night of the Sabbath, so after some arguments and discussions, it is a agreed that the legion go up and take care of business. It doesn’t go well.
And then Lovecraft woke up. The end.
It doesn’t really evoke anything other than, “Man, listen to this weird dream I had,” to which one would eventually reply, “Whoa, that sucks,” and everyone would move on with their lives.
Featured image © Nicole Taft
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