The Door to Saturn (2 page)

However, as Emerson reminds us, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Smith may have deliberately varied his spelling and usages depending upon the particular mood or atmosphere that he was trying to achieve in a particular story. As he explained in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft sometime in November 1930,

The problem of “style” in writing is certainly fascinating and profound. I find it highly important, when I begin a tale, to establish at once what might be called the appropriate “tone.” If this is clearly determined at the start I seldom have much difficulty in maintaining it; but if it isn’t, there is likely to be trouble. Obviously, the style of “Mohammed’s Tomb”
¹
wouldn’t do for “The Ghoul;” and one of my chief preoccupations in writing this last story was to exclude images, ideas and locutions which I would have used freely in a modern story. The same, of course, applies to “Sir John Maundeville,” which is a deliberate study in the archaic. (
SL
137)

Therefore we have allowed certain variations in spelling and usage that seem to us to be consistent with Smith’s stated principles as indicated above.

Four of the stories included in this volume were published after Smith’s death in 1961. “Told in the Desert” was first published by August Derleth in an original anthology from Arkham House, and no manuscript or typescript survives in either the Clark Ashton Smith Papers at Brown University or the August Derleth Papers at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library in Madison, Wisconsin. A search of the remaining papers at Arkham House itself failed to locate any manuscript. “A Good Embalmer” was first published in
Strange Shadows,
a collection of unpublished stories, variants, fragments, synopses, notes, and other prose edited by Steve Behrends in 1989. A holograph manuscript exists at Brown’s John Hay Library. Two stories, “The Red World of Polaris” and “The Face by the River,” were long believed to be lost. A copy of the latter was located among the papers of the late Genevieve K. Sully. The original typescript of “The Red World of Polaris” was sold by Smith to a Brooklyn, New York fan named Michael DeAngelis, who planned to publish it in a fanzine. DeAngelis himself disappeared, and it was feared that the story disappeared with him. However, Ron Hilger located DeAngelis’ co-editor Alan Pesetsky, who found a typescript that he had made in preparation for that aborted fanzine appearance, which we published in 2003 as part of the collected adventures of Captain Volmar.

Smith published six stories himself in a 1933 pamphlet,
The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies,
but later revised some of these for sale to
Esquire
(unsuccessfully) and
Weird Tales
(successfully) in the late 1930s. In these instances we use the version published by Smith himself.

Typescripts exist at the JHL of two stories included here, “An Offering to the Moon” and “The Kingdom of the Worm” (also known as “A Tale of Sir John Maundeville”), but in both cases it appears that these are of an earlier draft. In the case of the former it seems to us that the published version is the superior, possibly the result of the Smith of 1950 revising his earlier work, and in the latter evidence exists that a revised version was submitted to
Fantasy Fan
editor Charles D. Hornig that leads us to favor that text.

Although tearsheets from
Weird Tales
were used in the preparation of
Out of Space and Time,
the latter’s text differs from both the magazine appearance and the original typescript in a manner not reflected elsewhere in the Arkham House editions. The first involves the elimination of some text and the merging of two paragraphs into one. We suspect that this represents a transcription error on the part of Alice Conger, August Derleth’s secretary. The second occurs at the very end: both the typescript and
Weird Tales
have as the last line “But Fleurette was still bemused with wonder, and could only answer him with a kiss.”
Out of Space and Time
changes this to “respond to his words...” This last change could have easily been changed in any of the several copies of
OST
corrected by CAS that we have been fortunate to consult, and he did not. The first change, however, while also not reflected in any of the corrected copies, might have been allowed to stand since its correction would have involved quite a bit of effort and would have altered the meaning but slightly. However, since that meaning is altered, we have decided to restore the missing text.

“The City of the Singing Flame” presents an unusual case. The text published in
Out of Space and Time
represents a fusion of this story with its sequel, “Beyond the Singing Flame” (
Wonder Stories
November 1931), that was carried out by Walter H. Gillings, editor of the British pulp magazine
Tales of Wonder,
when the stories were reprinted together in the Spring 1940 issue. Smith could provide Arkham House publisher August Derleth with neither the typescript nor tear sheets from the
Wonder Stories
appearance, so he resorted to the one version that he had at hand. Smith’s financial situation was such at the time that it was imperative he hand in the book as soon as possible. When Jim Turner was preparing the text for Arkham House’s collection
A Rendezvous in Averoigne,
he reversed many but not all of the changes. His text differs from both the final typescript prepared by Smith as well as the story’s original appearance in the July 1931 issue of
Wonder Stories.

We regret that we cannot present a totally authoritative text for Smith’s stories. Such typescripts do not exist. All that we can do is to apply our knowledge of Smith to the existing manuscripts and attempt to combine them to present what Smith would have preferred to publish were he not beset by editorial malfeasance in varying degrees. In doing so we hope to present Smith’s words in their purest form to date so that the reader might experience what Ray Bradbury described in his foreword to
A Rendezvous in Averoigne
: “Take one step across the threshold of his stories, and you plunge into color, sound, taste, smell, and texture—into language.”

The editors wish to thank Douglas A. Anderson, Steve Behrends, Geoffrey Best, Joshua Bilmes, April Derleth, William A. Dorman, Don Herron, Margery Hill, Rah Hoffman, S. T. Joshi, Terence McVicker, Neil Mechem, Marc Michaud, Will Murray, Boyd Pearson, John Pelan, Alan H. Pesetsky, Rob Preston, Robert M. Price, Dennis Rickard, David E. Schultz, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and Jason Williams for their help, support, and encouragement of this project, as well as Holly Snyder and the staff of the John Hay Library of Brown University, and D. S. Black of the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, for their assistance in the preparation of this collection. Needless to say, any errors are the sole responsibility of the editors.

1. “Like Mohammed’s Tomb,” a science fiction story written in October 1930. As with “The Red World of Polaris,” Smith sold the only known manuscript to Michael DeAngelis.

T
HE
D
OOR TO
S
ATURN

I

W
hen Morghi, the high-priest of the goddess Yhoundeh, together with twelve of his most ferocious and efficient underlings, came at morning twilight to seek the infamous heretic Eibon in his house of black gneiss on a headland above the northern main, they were surprised as well as disappointed to find him absent. Their surprise was due to the fact that they had fully thought to take him unaware; for all their tribunals against Eibon had been carried on with meticulous privacy in underground vaults with sound-proof bolted doors; and they themselves had made the long journey to his house in a single night, immediately following the hour of his condemnation. They were disappointed because the formidable writ of arrest, with symbolic flame-etched runes on a scroll of human skin, was now useless; and because there seemed to be no early prospect of trying out the ingenious agonies, the intricately harrowing ordeals which they had devised for Eibon with such providential forethought.

Morghi was especially disappointed; and the malisons which he muttered when the emptiness of the topmost room had revealed itself, were of truly cabbalistic length and fearfulness. Eibon was his chief rival in wizardry, and was acquiring altogether too much fame and prestige among the peoples of Mhu Thulan, that ultimate peninsula of the Hyperborean continent. So Morghi had been glad to believe certain malignant rumors concerning Eibon and to utilize them in the charges he had preferred. These rumors were, that Eibon was a devotee of the long-discredited heathen god Zhothaqquah, whose worship was incalculably older than man; and that Eibon’s magic was drawn from his unlawful affiliation with this dark deity, who had come down by way of other worlds from a foreign universe, in primeval times when the earth was still no more than a steaming morass. The power of Zhothaqquah was still feared; and it was said that those who were willing to forgo their humanity by serving him would become the heritors of antemundane secrets, and the masters of a knowledge so awful that it could only have been brought from outlying planets coeval with night and chaos.

The house of Eibon was built in the form of a pentagonal tower, and possessed five stories, including the two that were underground. All, of course, had been searched with painstaking thoroughness; and the three servants of Eibon had been tortured with a slow drip of boiling-hot asphaltum to make them reveal their master’s whereabouts. Their continued denial of all knowledge, after a half hour of this, was taken as proof that they were genuinely ignorant. No sign of a subterranean passage was unearthed by delving in the walls and floor of the lower rooms; though Morghi had even gone so far as to remove the flagstones beneath an obscene image of Zhothaqquah which occupied the nethermost. This he had done with extreme reluctance, for the squat, fur-covered god, with his bat-like features and sloth-like body, was fearsomely abhorrent to the high-priest of the elk-goddess Yhoundeh.

Returning in renewed search to the highest room of Eibon’s tower, the inquisitors were compelled to own themselves baffled. There was nothing to be found but a few articles of furniture, a few antique volumes on conjuration such as might be owned by any sorcerer, some disagreeable and gruesome paintings on rolls of pterodactyl parchment, and certain primitive urns and sculptures and totem-poles of the sort that Eibon had been so fond of collecting. Zhothaqquah, in one form or another, was represented in most of these: his face even leered with a bestial somnolence from the urn-handles; and he was to be found in half the totems (which were those of sub-human tribes) along with the seal, the mammoth, the giant tiger, and the aurochs. Morghi felt that the charges against Eibon were now substantiated beyond all remaining doubt; for surely no one who was not a worshipper of Zhothaqquah would care to own even a single representation of this loathsome entity.

However, such additional evidence of guilt, no matter how significant or damnatory, was of small help in finding Eibon. Staring from the windows of the topmost chamber, where the walls fell sheer to the cliff and the cliff dropped clear on two sides to a raging sea four hundred feet below, Morghi was driven to credit his rival with superior resources of magic. Otherwise, the man’s disappearance was altogether too much of a mystery. And Morghi had no love for mysteries, unless they were part of his own stock-in-trade.

He turned from the window and re-examined the room with minutely careful attention. Eibon had manifestly used it as a sort of study: there was a writing-table of ivory, with reed-pens, and various-colored inks in little earthen pots; and there were sheets of paper made from a kind of calamite, all scribbled over with odd astronomical and astrological calculations that caused Morghi to frown because he could not understand them. On each of the five walls there hung one of the parchment paintings, all of which seemed to be the work of some aboriginal race. Their themes were blasphemous and repellent; and Zhothaqquah figured in all of them, amid forms and landscapes whose abnormality and sheer uncouthness may have been due to the half-developed technique of the primitive artists. Morghi now tore them from the walls one by one, as if he suspected that Eibon might in some manner be concealed behind them.

The walls were now entirely bare; and Morghi considered them for a long time, amid the respectful silence of his underlings. A queer panel, high up in the south-eastern side above the writing-table, had been revealed by the removal of one of the paintings. Morghi’s heavy brows met in a long black bar as he eyed this panel. It was conspicuously different from the rest of the wall, being an oval-shaped inlay of some reddish metal that was neither gold nor copper—a metal that displayed an obscure and fleeting fluorescence of rare colors when one peered at it through half-shut eyelids. But somehow it was impossible even to remember with open eyes the colors of this fluorescence.

Morghi—who, perhaps, was cleverer and more perspicacious than Eibon had given him credit for being—conceived a suspicion that was apparently baseless and absurd, since the wall containing the panel was the outer wall of the building, and could give only on the sky and sea.

He climbed upon the writing-table and struck the panel with his fist. The sensations which he felt, and the result of the blow, were alike astounding. A sense of icy cold so extreme that it was hardly distinguishable from extreme heat, ran along his hand and arm through his whole body as he smote the unknown reddish metal. And the panel itself swung easily outward, as if on unseen hinges, with a high sonorous clang that seemed to fall from an incomputable distance. Beyond it, Morghi saw that there was neither sky nor sea nor, in fact, anything he had ever seen or heard of, or had even dreamt of in his most outrageous nightmares...

He turned to his companions. The look on his face was half amazement, half triumph.