“I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye…”
(The Haunter of the Dark, pg.1017)
WE HAVE ARRIVED. HALLOWMASS. COME DRIFT INTO THE COSMOS WITH ME.
If you’re just joining us, you can start your Lovecraftian journey here!
“The Book”
This is another fragment involving the discovery of an ancient book which, upon opening, seems to take the narrator simultaneously out of time and space and bring all of it to him. There are some more shapeless flights out over strange alien cities and horrendous horrifying horrors etc.
It’s just a sliver of an idea. Move on.
A longer tale, though it remains interesting, involving Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee (wow, new names!) who is telling us his story in the hopes that (like so many others before him in this book) what we learn will mean no one ever goes looking for a terrible city in the middle of nowhere for fear of unleashing all the terrible things upon the planet.
Nathaniel was minding his own business when suddenly he went unconscious, woke up, and seemed to be a completely different person. For five years he was like this until one day he came back to his old self. So what happened?
True enough, this alien species will transfer minds across beings through time and space. It likes to collect information from the past and future, and does so by temporarily trading spaces with another body. So Nathaniel was acting weird because his body was inhabited by a creature who originall hailed from the planet of Yith. Meanwhile, Nathaniel was in that particular Yith’s body (by the way, I’m calling them the Yith instead of Great Race because that’s boring and it gets confusing with Old Ones, Deep Ones, Elder Things, etc.) and, after understanding what was going on, was allowed by the Yith people to wander fairly freely around their city, look at their stuff, ask questions, and encouraged to write down things from his time in his language. They have some lovely archives, by the way. The Yith were on Earth at the same time as the Old Ones from “The Mountains of Madness” and occasionally warred with them (don’t know why – both species are exceedingly intelligent so it makes no sense for them to do so. Maybe the Yith didn’t like that the Old Ones made shoggoths and used them as protoplasmic slave labor? Who knows.).
The Yith, for the most part, seem to be a fairly okay group of beings. They’re very polite to the “captive minds” as Nathaniel describes himself and others (some humans, others not) and show them all kinds of things. In fact, there’s a startling amount of information that Nathaniel gleans from “tales and impressions.” He’s got some serious details concerning the Yith given that they were hanging out on Earth long before man was even a concept in primordial ooze. I don’t see how a myth can generate since they would be gone long before any humans of intelligence were strolling around on two legs. But it made for very interesting reading so I’ll let it go. The Yith are only on this planet as these creatures because their previous planet was facing destruction so they pulled an extremely dick move and all of them traded minds with the creatures of Earth, leaving those creatures’ minds trapped in alien bodies on some other planet as it dies. RUDE. Also they’re going to do it again in the future, but by then humans will be gone and a form of beetle race will be the dominant species. Well, for a time at least until they’re thrown back millions (billions?) of years to deal with the awful horror that will destroy the Yith in that time.
Which, by the way, makes no sense to me. True, we need a reason for the Yith to be no more on Earth while the rest of us mosey around working from 9-5 and feeding ducks at the park on weekends. But it doesn’t make sense. The horrors that lurk under guarded trap doors during the Yith’s Earth time are an “elder race of half-polypous, utterly utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago.” So of all the alien things around, these are SUPER alien (suddenly reminded of a similar creature from a Rick & Morty episode that took the name “Fart”) and they’re the ones that the Yith drove underground and guard them steadily. Yet at the same time (and in the same paragraph), it’s stated that the Yith, “had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down” and then left them down there. And yet the Yith were creeped out by them and worried about them and so forth. But…you took care of them easily. So why is this a problem?
The “scary” part of the story is primarily the horror the narrator feels when trying to figure out if he’s dreaming, in reality, and what the hell his dreams actually consist of. He’s horrified by a lot of the Yith things he sees – even after all the discoveries he makes, which is kind of confusing. You think after discovering that the Yith, while rude, aren’t malicious and take care of both their host bodies and the minds stuck in their fellow Yith. But I’ll let that go too, seeing as being displaced for 5 years and then having your brain a little sloshy because of something else borrowing it for a while is enough to wreck anyone’s nerves. The other “scary” part is the nameless horror that are the Elder Things that float around in the dark that are never actually seen, just hinted at endlessly and are never actually scary because they never do anything. I suppose that’s the nature of certain horrors, but nameless aliens in the dark that never do anything are not frightening to me. Especially when it’s contradictory for the Yith to be scared of them when they were the ones who easily drove them underground in the first place.
All of this aside, I did enjoy this story. Nathaniel’s waffling about “Is this a dream? Or is this reality?” got a little repetitive over time (especially since any reader worth their salt will know, yes, it’s all real, and yes, we know what’s in that book you got in the tomb and then, to no one’s surprise, lost), but the telling of the tale, both what he did while out of his body (as told to him by others) and what he understands happened to his mind during that time as well as the Yith’s history were all very interesting. Even his jaunt underneath the Australian sands inside the Yith’s old city was interesting rather than repetitive. This tale echoes hints of “The Mountains of Madness” what with nameless horrors lucking belowground, as well as the story immediately before this one with the blending of minds and bodies and the sensation of being different places at once. Who knows, maybe this is what grew out of the “The Book.”
Fun fact: William Dyer of “The Mountains of Madness” was a part of the expedition Nathaniel went on to Australia. This is after his Antarctica explorations, so you’d think that after hearing Nathaniel’s descriptions and whatnot his response at some point would be something like, “Oh hell no, count my ass out. I’ve already found an insanely old city and that shit got weird.”
Given how this story ends, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It has all the trappings of a creeping horror coming to get a young man who’s made a terrible mistake sort of story, yet the ending isn’t very clear to me.
Robert Blake is interested in the occult (why wouldn’t he be? Everyone else is) although much to my astonishment he isn’t from Arkham or even a part of the Miskatonic University. So naturally he’s read things like the Necronomicon and whatnot. But it’s actually a decrepit church that catches his eye from across town. He visits it one night and finds a bizarre shaped jewel in a carved box, along with ancient texts. Looking at what he discovers is called the Shining Trapezohedron proves to be his undoing because something across the cosmos notices and decides not only to look back, but to come and find him. To what end, I don’t think we’ll ever know.
We eventually find out that it’s the Yuggoth (Pluto) aliens that made this item although for what reason I’m not sure since, given their scientific advancements, doesn’t seem to be necessary. Unless, of course, hanging out with whatever entity uses this thing is what provided them with the knowledge in the first place. It’s been lost and re-found throughout the millennia until poor Robert Blake discovered it. At the end of the tale, Blake is dead. It’s announced it was through some sort of electrocution, but despite the thunderstorm outside when he died, his abode is untouched by lightning. I honestly have no idea. Did the thing get his soul and pull him off into dark places unknown? Did it touch him and proved to be too powerful? Or did Blake somehow manage to end things himself?
No idea. I’m left more confused than concerned. Oddly enough, this entity also felt like a more traditional evil paranormal thing than Lovecraft’s usual fare. It couldn’t handle light of any kind and needed complete darkness to even move about. In which case, Blake, dude – invest in some lanterns.
-THE END-
I would like to thank you for coming on this journey with me. Now I can firmly say that I have read a great deal of Lovecraft and am more familiar with his worlds and creations than before. Some tales entertained, some did provide the creeps, and others were simply fantastical. I will say that his dream stories are by far my favorite and I may dip back into “The Dreams of Unknown Kadath” some time in the future.
I do wonder what it was that made Cthulhu such a focal point of Lovecraft when other gods, such as Yog-Sothoth, Nylarthotep, and Azathoth (both of which are evoked even in the final story) are mentioned so much more and act in a greater manner concerning our planet and the humans on it. Or why all his dreamscapes fall by the wayside when his name is brought up.
Nevertheless, we have done it. Conquered over 1,000 pages of text in the mystical month of October and talked about them all. Now let us eat our Halloween candy and pray that Cthulhu never wakes, the ice of Antarctica never melts, the sands of Australia never shift, and that every copy of the Necronomicon is destroyed, never to trouble the minds of men again (because clearly we women are smart enough never to read that accursed thing).
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