IBC123 The Warder of Knowledge

Join us in Innsmouth Library as we look at an excellent mythos story from Lovecraft circle member Richard F. Searight.  We talk those dreadful Eltdown Shards, TV pyschics, genres, libraries and the end of everything.
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Innsmouth Literary Festival   JB Lee Art

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:11

Welcome to Musmoth.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Greetings, travellers, and welcome to episode 123 of the Insmith Book Club. As you can see, we have brought you directly here to the library because we're going to be delving into a dusty old tome today. We're going to be examining the work of one of the lesser-known members of the Lovecraft Circle. I'm one of your hosts, Tim Mendes. And I'm now the one, Rob Poyton.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Yes, and this author, Richard F. Seawright, is um probably not that familiar a name to the casual delver into the mythos. But uh, I think he had around seven stories published in Weird Towers and something.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Yeah, something like along those lines. And then his son sort of carried on after and finished a bunch of his stuff. Uh, there's a bit there was quite a lot of stuff he left unfinished when he died. So yeah, there's a there's quite a lot of his stuff floating around out there, but yeah, a lot of people, whenever I mention him to people, people are like, who?

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Yes, and and I was confused. Well, I'm easily confused anyway. I mean, that goes without saying. But I was confused by C right or C Bright. Wow. Because on one website I was looking at, it was C Bright. But uh, I'm taking the uh the published word as the final one that so definitely C right.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

It is indeed, yes. Uh yeah, he also corresponded with Lovecraft a lot. There's actually a collection of his letters, I believe. I think it's another one of the hippocampus jobs, but I've not been able to track it down uh as yet, but it is something I'm gonna look into. But uh yeah, letters from Howard Howard Phillips Lovecraft to Richard Franklin Seawright, uh I believe it's called. I don't know if there's another title to it, but there you go.

SPEAKER_02 2:00

Very nice, very nice. However, before we go a delving and a dig in, just a couple of news items. Just to remind you again, September the 19th in Oddly Moist Bedford is the home of this year's Innsmouth Literary Festival. Of course, we've already had our guests of honour announced, Les Edwards and Stephen Jones, but we're starting to get more of our guest authors confirming now, including David Hambling, CJ Hooper, Simon Bleakin, Alexandra Beaumont, and many others. So we looked forward to seeing them and you there. Tickets are available via the Innsmouth Gold website, and there'll be a page going up on Eventbrite very soon as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yes, and uh the latest episode of the Monster in My Bed podcast, the podcast I do, the other other podcast I do with Zoe Burgess, all about uh Monster Erica and romance in movies, has just gone up. And this episode where we went all the way back to 1946 to the first ever adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, uh La Belle et Labette. Nice, 1946. Hmm. Has some really good effects in it for its time because the the director Jean Cocteau is like a big name in surrealist films, and oh man, some of some of the effects he's done in it. It's like they look they'd look good if you did them now, right? In fact, they probably look better than a lot of CGI.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Well, we were talking about this recently on Strange Shadows, weren't we, with um the dark eyed Olon. How Smith in his day said, Why are no filmmakers picking this up because they could put some great effects into this? And that was what in the 30s, and uh yeah, we mentioned a couple of films then that look amazing for the time and for now as well. And as we you know repeatedly say, that real life effect has a certain weight and substance to it that CGI just can't match, can it? Yeah, no, totally totally agree. Yeah. So Richard F. Seawright, there's not a lot known about him. He was born in June 1902 and passed away in September 1975, one of the Lovecraft Circle, as we mentioned, though not as well known as the more prolific writers such as Bloch or Derlith. He wrote seven stories, mostly for Weird Towels, and eleven poems for the pulpes. And the general consensus is that he actually thought of himself more as a poet than an author. So I'm gonna see if I can track down some of those poems as well, because uh we do like a bit of poetry, don't we? We do. Well, I can help you with that in a bit when I get to the publication history. I'll be helping you out with that straight on. Lovely, lovely. And actually, I have to say, one of my first thoughts with this and poetry was Eltdown rhymes with meltdown. I'll just leave that out there.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Oh, nice.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah. C. Wright wrote a few stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos. He was the creator of the ancient mystic writings known as the Eltdown Shards, which were later used by Lovecraft himself in The Challenge from Beyond, although with uh a divergent history, which is uh, well, we can read HPL's own words on that as well in a in a moment.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Well, we'll also get into that as well, because he also used it in Shadow Out of Time and the Diary of Alonzo Typer.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

And as you mentioned earlier, Richard was the father of the late Franklin Sea Wright, who wrote a significantly larger proportion of mythos pieces than his father, and attempted to complete some of the elder Sea Wright's unfinished works. And as far as anyone knows, this is only the example of uh uh a sort of generational mythos lineage, father to son, which is quite nice, isn't it? I like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Yeah, it is, it's interesting. Yeah, because I'll I'll talk about a little bit about that in a moment as well. But yeah, it's nice that here, son. Here's your birthright.

SPEAKER_02 5:57

Yeah, imagine. Uh I I guess the only parallel I can think of is Christopher Tolkien who took on the Herculean task of sorting through his father's papers. And if you've ever seen Tolkien's handwriting, you'll understand what an undertaking that was. Oh, is it a scroll? Oh, it's a spider in English. Oh god. And it's a little bit like you know, you see some of those Lovecraft pages of his writings where you go across, but then you go down the side as well. Because you know, papers a bit scarce, probably, and and or you just got to get it out. So, yeah, incredibly dense pages of scribbly text. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Yeah, that would be a hell of an undertaking, wouldn't it? Bloody hell. My uh my partner's notebook. Ah, she doesn't so much write in letters as hieroglyphs. Righty ho, let's have a quick look at the publication history then. Right, the Warder of Knowledge, today's story, was written in 1935 before being lost for half a century, something like that. Yeah, it didn't appear in print until 1992, when it was rediscovered by his son. And it was printed, it was snapped up as soon as it was like rediscovered and printed in the Fedigan and Bremer anthology Tales from the Lovecraft Mythos, which was edited by Robert M. Price. Now, is that what you're going from today?

SPEAKER_02 7:26

Yes, that's what I've got here, and um, I think this is one of those books that I had quite a while ago and then it disappeared. Right. But I managed to track down a copy off of I think it was Abe Books or something like that for about six, seven quid. So it's out there, and for once it's reasonably priced, and it's a very good collection.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Nice, yeah. I've got a copy of that somewhere. But um, I'm going from a collection that came out in 2016 um from H. Harkson Productions. Um, it was published with Franklin Cright, called Those Dreadful Elk Down Shards. I love that name. Yeah, I know. Oh, those dreadful elk down shards. It's absolutely brilliant, isn't it? It's it's kind of done like the you know, the Chaossium Cycle books.

SPEAKER_02 8:16

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

And the they did like the Book of Iborn and the Necronomicon. It's kind of done like that. It's a similar kind of thing. So it's got all of Richard C. Wright's stories containing the El Down Shards, like the Seal Casket, this story, The Water of Knowledge, and then the Challenge from Beyond is in there in full, which is quite nice to have, because often you get the bits, don't you, in each writer's thing. You'll get their their portion of the round robin, but the full thing's in here. It's got the diary of e diary of Alonzo Typer from HP Lovecraft and William Lumley, and the Shadow Out of Time. It's also got four posthumous collaborations between father and son. Ah, yeah, which is they're they're really good stories, actually. So it's got the coming of Uran Uton, The Horror from the Shards, The Mists of Death, and Admonition from the Past.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

Nice. Excellent titles. The Mists of Death is excellent.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Yeah, it's a nice little collection. It's also got a nice little thing that I'm going to have a look at in a minute that um Franklin did. The fabricated history of the Eld Down Shards. So he's collected the history of this tome or well, collection of clay tablets, basically. So we'll get into that in a bit. But Warder of Knowledge was also published in a tome I'm holding here in my grubby mitts, which I actually bought, I think it wasn't last year, it was probably the year before at the Insmouth Literary Festival from Brown Jenkin Books. It's a numbered edition, 71 of 100. And it's called The Cosmic Horror and Others. And it was published by J Publications. It's got some lovely cover and ill cover art and illustrations by Alan Kazowski, which is very cool. But this is basically most of Richard Seawright's work. So it's got a lot of lot of the stories, and it's also got a lot of the poetry in here as well. Ah, excellent, excellent. So yeah, I don't know if there's ever been another ver another print of this. If there hasn't, there should be because it's a really nice little collection. There's some great stuff in here. And as I was saying before, it's a real shame that a lot of people don't really know Richard C. Wright's work because it's it's definitely worth reading. There's some really good stuff.

SPEAKER_02 10:38

Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, going off of this story, it's it's a very it's uh what I call a good solid myth of story, this one, isn't it? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

Why it's the I was saying about the illustrations in the book when we get to the bit with the you know, when he gets grabbed by the tentacle, that's one of the illustrations. And I had to say it like that, sorry. Grabbed by the tentacle. Oh right, so yeah, before we get into the story, let's have a have a look at this fabricated history of the shards because there's some cool stuff in here. Apparently, the Eldown shards were discovered in 1882 when Professor Newman Bennett and his team of excavators accidentally unearthed the clay shards on a farm in Sussex near Eltdown. That's not far from me. Yeah, they were found in a stratum identified as the Triassic period. And yeah, the furrow created in the scientific world by this discovery lasted for months. The shards were hastily sent to the museum at a small midwestern school called Beloyne College, situated near the Wisconsin town of Weston. I wonder if this was a nod to Mr. Derlith.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Ah, Wisconsin, yeah, because I was trying to trace that because as I said, you know, because of course we always check the names in these stories. And Beloyne was, yeah, a a fictitious place, but yeah, Wisconsin, that makes sense now.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

Especially if you think Comte de Urlet.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? Eventually, these disturbing shards were decoded and found to mention, among other things, the planet Yith and the Great Race. Years later, they were transferred on loan from Boulogne College to the library at Miskatonic in Arkham. So there we have it. Um description of the shards. They consist of twenty-three primeval slabs of iron-hard slate-coloured clay as adamantine as any known substance. All the sides are completely covered except for approximately one inch margins around the edges, with a cryptic network of indented symmetrical characters considered astonishingly puzzling. They were apparently pressed into the clay when it was soft and fresh. Most of the tablets are chipped and some are missing pieces, which uh is a plot point in the story we're gonna be reading.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Yes, indeed it is.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

Yeah, it's quite a very pertinent plot point, isn't it? Yeah. They vary in size from the fifth shard, the smallest, an oblong piece about four by eight inches, that tells at some length of the revolting habits of the fiendish Avaloth, to the fourteenth shard, the largest, a jagged triangular slab of about twenty inches wide. Okay, so we've got net it goes on now to say about the appearances of the L down shard, so I'm just gonna list off a couple of things now. I've mentioned the Sea Wright stories, and of course it mention it appears in the challenge from Beyond, the Diary of Alonzo Typer, The Shadow Out of Time, The Coming of Iran Atun, The Horror from the Shards, The Sealed Casket, The Mists of Death, Seized by the Warder, which sounds painful, and admonition from the past. There we go. Yeah, and then it also goes on to mention who people who have uh translated it and things like this. I'm just gonna read you this one paragraph here before we get into it. The work of Winters Hall informs us that there dwelt on countless worlds a mighty order of giant worm-like beings, the spawn of Yekub, whose attainments surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination. It tells also of the capability of those beings to transfer their minds between universes. They have mastered the art of interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every inhabitable planet in their own galaxy, killing off the races they found. Winters Hall recalled the dire and incredible tales of the fabled elder gods in the Book of Ibon, the frightful illusions in the Necronomicon regarding Dread Cthulhu, the unspeakable practices of the Sarthogua cult, and the revolting habits of the fiendish Avaloth. Nice, nice. Yeah, fiendish habits of Aboloth. That sounds like an album, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 15:03

Yeah, let's yeah, we're getting into that territory, aren't we? Yeah, yeah. Yes, and as we mentioned, Lovecraft was a fan of this story. He wrote in a letter to C Wright, November the 4th, 1935. I like the story exceedingly, and hope you will not let Farnsworth Wright's rejection discourage you. A familiar towel to anyone who listens to our Clark Ashton Smith podcast. Oh god. The references to the Outdown shards are fascinating, but woe is me. I've given a lot of dope in that composite story, The Round Robin the Challenge from Beyond, which conflicts directly with the true facts as here revealed. I also fear that I describe the shards in a conflicting way. Oh well, in sober truth, relatively few people will ever see the complete yarn anyhow. How wrong he was. Yes, yes. Little could he imagine that years later people would be pouring over this stuff, whether for uh from a literary angle or for their role-playing games. Yeah, or even in academic studies, you know. I mean, yes, absolutely. Yeah, but I I think this just plays into the whole Lovecraft method of there is no canon. Yeah, we've got some names, and we're back to that idea again. Having those inconsistencies actually makes it feel more real. Uh, because uh look how many versions of the you know, the apostles and and all the rest of it, and any religious text is so open to interpretation, depending on who's got the biggest beard and all that kind of stuff, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

Now, straight away in the first paragraph of the story here, I thought there there was something interesting that I actually missed on first reading, and I've only just picked up. So the story opens with this. The following record has been compiled from various sources, of which the most important are Dr. Whitney's elaborate journal and the remarkable psychic impressions received in Whitney's bedroom by Professor Turkoff of the University Psychology Department. So we've got that very Lovecraftian thing of we've found a manuscript, diary of a madman. And I was thinking this is the the found footage of its day, isn't it, really? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, of course it is.

SPEAKER_03 17:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

So that's very uh academic. The guy's left a journal, he's a scientist, is he's made notes of everything. But then we've got the this the psychic impressions of Professor Turkhov, who presumably has gone into the room and and absorbed the ether. Yeah just built this narrative out of his impressions. That's quite odd for a Lovecraft story, isn't it? In a way.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

It is, it kind of reminds me of you know, do you remember poltergeist when they get that that little lady come in to read to read the house?

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah, and she's going, Oh, there was a terrible fate in this room.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

She had a great voice.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

And there's the great Clinton Baptiste who uh if you go on YouTube and do a search for Clinton Baptiste, and he's got an excellent, I think it's like about a 30-40 minute sort of upload on there called Clinton Baptiste Psychic Hunt. I'll just leave it at that. Nice, it's very funny, very funny.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Well, while we're on that, it would be funny. We've got we've got to mention Derek Accorer. Well, yeah, that that liver puddle and fraud, but um, but the best one about that was one of the most haunted things, right? And apparently the one of the ghosts was a woman called Mary, and her husband, Richard, had uh had uh he could she couldn't find him, and he went into one of his possessions and yeah, just type in Derek Accora, Mary loves dick. Me and my mate sampled it.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Mary loves dick. Mary loves dick.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

Excellent. So it's uh very love crafty and set up. We've got the journal, and uh no one can take this stuff seriously, right? Because it's so out there, even though Dr. Whitney is a respected scientist, is the chair of chemistry at Belloin uh College. I thought this goes back to our last story we covered, Shaft No. 247, the Basil Copper story, which was all about that quest for knowledge for its own sake, because this guy is absolutely obsessed with finding out the truth from a very young age.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Yeah. Not satisfied by sketchy outlines of facts, his craving was for the most complete and detailed information available on every subject that his busy mind encountered. Even at this early age, he was harassed by a restless, driving urge, without motive or practical goal, to crowd into one mind all the vast aggregation of discovered scientific fact, as well as the limitless secrets still unclosed to research. Yeah, so an obsessive.

SPEAKER_02 20:13

Yeah, and also that idea as well of he's a scientist, so although he he sort of uh branches off into chemistry, he's looking at uh physics and biology and botany and everything. And it seems to be this is still probably the last time when as a scientist you could do all of that. Where now I I think I read somewhere no one now can grasp the whole of mathematics because it has become such a huge subject. So now, even if you say I'm a mathematician, then you have to qualify that with I'm a this type of mathematician or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Well, physics, there's so many different branches of physics, and because you've got your practical and then you've got your your theoretical, and then underneath each one, you've got several different offshoots, haven't you?

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Yeah. I mean it's it's just uh it's the same in genres, right? We've spoken about this before. Where here everything is fantasy with the pH, or we get into speculate speculative fiction, uh, and and now we're into uh YA romanticity uh sword and sword. You know, it's categories of categories of categories like death metal, cult metal, speed metal, slow metal, yeah, dark metal, light metal, yeah, yeah, metal metal, plastic metal.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because there was a uh a genre popped up the other day. A book just popped up in my feed. I I can't remember what it was now, but I had to look it up. I was like, what does that even mean? Basically, it was like health rumpy.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

Oh dear, marvelous, marvelous. Dr. Whitney throws himself into scientific research. At the same time, he's obviously lecturing at the college. But he seems to have uh a lot of time and energy, this guy. Once he reaches the bounds of sort of scientific knowledge, he turns to the occult. Is it the occult or the occult? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

The occult.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

And you know, as soon as you see that, we're heading for a fall, right? He's gonna now he's gonna start digging where he shouldn't be digging.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Oh, yeah, because as soon as yeah, because it does say here he spent shuddering, horror-ridden hours perusing the Latin version of the dreaded Necronomicon. So, yeah, that's not gonna end well, is it? Nope, nope, certainly not.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

And we get the the book of Ibon as well, the incredible inferences of the book of Ibon. This is very Lovecraftian as well, because something else he very rarely did would say, all right, Necronomicon, page 327, it is written. I think maybe once or twice you you get that, possibly. Yeah, but it's always inference, isn't it? Or uh dreadful hints of awful ghastliness.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Yeah, I think that's something modern authors do more, is say, on page 273, Abdul al-Hazrid rights, you know, it's yeah, it's more specific where it was it was very vague, like yeah, but by design, and I think that makes it feel more real to me, the fact that it is so vague, you know. Because it probably would be, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:37

Because a this is uh a cult, therefore it's hidden knowledge. So although having said that, well, we see later on there's this very straightforward uh evocation, yeah. So that seems quite plain and straightforward if you can get your lips around the syllables. But yeah, everything seems to be hints and whispers and not step one, find a goat, step two, you know.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Well, I like the the fact that he sort of makes a point of saying, now that that's all nonsense, but we'll we'll get to that when it gets comes to it, because it's all without any of the trappings, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 24:18

Well, that's yeah, yeah, that's another interesting point, I think. In this, yes, yeah, yeah. So although he is doing this, I say he still has time to become the chair of chemistry at the college, and we get this nice line here. And so at the age of 45, Gordon Whitney entered unreservedly upon his great quest for omniscience, in fact. Part of this monomania is there's a a certain hubris, isn't there? I I'm gonna learn and understand absolutely everything.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:49

It's uh classic pride before the four, I guess. Yeah, definitely. And we get another nice little hint here. Yeah, after five years of intensive research, he had not realized his objective, although he had achieved a number of radical developments in the field of mental stimulants. Profound familiarity with cellular structure and characteristics, coupled with a minute knowledge of pertinent drugs and compounds, had given him a great advantage. So this ties in with our Lau, the hounds of Tinder loss and all these other things, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 25:24

Oh, yeah, definitely. And I like the fact that he's put his knowledge of chemistry to good use by becoming essentially a proto Timothy Leary. Expand your mind, open the doors of perception.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Yeah, yeah, which is I think why this stuff hit so well in the 60s as well, when there was that sort of uh the first Lovecraft boom and weird fiction boom, obviously tied in with the rise of the paperback and everything, but yeah, directly that expand your consciousness. Yes, but even this doesn't really get him the results he needs because he he works out well, it's very temporary and possibly dangerous as well. I can just imagine him on uh amphetmins, it's it's like an handful of bombers of purple purple arts that he's done a 20-hour read of the Necronomicon from cover to cover, and then and then and then and then and then that's not going to be good for you on any level, is it? No, it's not, no. And this is where we get our first mention of the 19th of the carefully catalogued Out Down Shards, which uh has an ambiguous reference to what freely translated he believed meant the warder of knowledge. So this sounds like if you're searching for knowledge, you want to go and speak to this guy, right? Well, I say guy, entity, person, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

It's interesting. There's good there's parallels here with is it Thoth in Egypt, who is the keeper of knowledge? The keeper of knowledge, yes, the book of Thoth was Book of Thoth.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Yeah, Cody did a tarot deck, I think, didn't he, based on yeah, the book of Thoth. Yeah. And uh it's quite short on characters, this story. Again, it's very Lovecraft in that sense, but the ones he puts in are very nicely drawn with uh a minimum of description because having hit on this idea of ah right, the 19th shard, that's what I need to look at. He he sort of takes a few days off. In the morning, he hurried across the undulating campus, drab and grey and swept by the winds of late autumn to the small red brick museum, whose ivy clad walls sat back amongst ancient towering oaks in an obscure corner of the grounds. So a a short description, but very vivid, very picturesque.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

Yeah, he was very comes the same when he comes to the curator, because it's he doesn't really describe him how he looks, but his mannerisms, you know, his usual reluctance when opening the cabinet. You can just picture the dusty old creator going, Are you sure you want to look in here? You know, is no digging here, innit?

SPEAKER_02 28:00

You know, yeah. And I I thought that idea of ancient towering oaks was interesting because that puts me in mind like a druidic oak and grove somewhere. This is where the forbidden knowledge is, you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Yeah, I like the fact that the museum where they're kept is set back from the rest of campus, almost like it's shunned, you know, and there's the the trees occluding it from the site of the lay people, only people who know know where it is, kind of thing. It's got that sort of air of mystery to it, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 28:31

That's nice, yeah. And that's something I think that is often missed with the miscatonic, where you just go in the library and you look at the Necronomicon. Yeah, you know, it's like I can wander into a Bedford library and just have you got the Necronomicon? Oh, here it is. Yes, you know, it takes away some of the power of it, doesn't it? I think.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah. Well, it it's like I have a I'm a bit of a library snob. I'm not a fan of these new modern libraries. I'm just not. I don't like with all the screens and all that. It takes all the mystery out of it, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:02

Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that. Uh as as I kid, I used to frequent Ilford Library, which at the back of Ilford Town Hall, which was a big sort of Victorian, classic Victorian town hall, yeah. With warrants and corridors and the library rooms. I mean, obviously they had shelves and that, but then there was just lots of tables with books stacked on them. That's it. Yeah, yeah. And the old library card system, you look through those little cards in the filing cabinets.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Indeed. So have you ever been to the library libraries like Cambridge and Oxford and places like that? Oh, incredible. Like proper old wooden stacks and all that. It's great, really great stuff.

SPEAKER_02 29:43

Unless you've read the Tractate Midoth, then it's a bit concerning. Indeed, indeed. So yeah, we get this nice description of the shards, as you you've already mentioned there, these uh tablets, some are fragments, some are cracked and split off. The nineteenth shard, which Whitney presently selected and laid on a scarred oak table. There's that oak again by the window, presented an odd exception to the others. Its lower edge had been sheared away as cleanly as if by the stroke of a scimitar. I thought that was oddly specific. The stroke of a scimitar. Are we getting shades of uh Al Azrad there? Do you think? That's what yeah, that's kind of what I took from it. Yeah. And also, as as as we find out, just jumping ahead a little bit, the bit that is broken off is so you got the evocation to summon the warder, but the bit that's broken off is the banishment part. And as we all know, do not raise up that which you cannot put down.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

So why was this bit broken off? Do you think? Yeah, it's an interesting thought, isn't it? Was it done to trap people? Well, I don't know. You know, it depends who did the cutting, I assume, you know.

SPEAKER_02 30:55

And we get a very nice description. Uh again, this is quite specific. So this is something that we don't get in many of the books, as we mentioned, but we do get here. They consisted of intricate, delicately proportioned characters confined within a surrounding margin about an inch wide. A style of delineation followed in all 23 of the shards. Fine symmetrical symbols writhed over the entire space within this border. Examinations had revealed that the writing surface was sunk slightly below the marginal level. A circumstance which, together with the extreme hardness of the material, probably accounted for the specimens being found in as legible a state as they were. So the material they're made of, it seems to be some sort of clay, but this isn't your normal stuff, is it? I I'm trying to think archaeologically of what clay tablets have been found in places and uh not coming up with much. I thought the Dead Sea scrolls were were parchments, weren't they, or or whatever, or some sort of scrolls. I'm sure some listeners can educate us as to what clay tablets from antiquity have been found.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

I just had a thought as you were saying that. You were you were saying about the Elkdown being fictitious. I wonder if it's a play on Piltdown.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

Oh, of course. Of course. When was Piltdown Man discovered? I think that was Vict Victorian era, wasn't it? I'm just gonna have a look.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

I know because we've got Sutton Who would have been not long after this, that was around that the war was on, wasn't it? When Sutton Who was discovered. Yes, burial mounds. This is kind of the the one of the golden eras of archaeology, isn't it? This yes.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

Um the Piltdown Man 18th December 1912.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

Oh, well, there we go, then that's got to be a reference, isn't it? Yes, yeah. Pilt down, elk down, Marlon Brando, Susan Dando, isn't it? That is definitely yeah. Uh you mentioned Triassic earlier, one of our favorite periods. Uh, I think Cretaceous is still the favorite. Jurassic is just boring now, right? Everyone knows Jurassic. That's Hollywood, man. Yeah, yeah. Mainstream, mainstream. Uh Triassic, we're looking at about 250 million years ago. So hence the scientific interest, outrage, uh, speculation, and probably some amount of incredulity as well. Because obviously, this is way, way, way, way before any humans appeared on the planet. Well, I suppose in a way they described how humans appeared on the planet.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

Well, there we go. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if uh the old unbegotten source appears in there, you know.

SPEAKER_02 33:40

And we find out that the shards were discovered 40 years ago by Dalton and Woodford. You sound like a sort of firm of solicitors, don't they? Or a or a removal company or something. It does, doesn't it? Or shoes, a shoe seller for yeah, yes. That's like, yeah, bespoke, those sort of posh brogues or something.

SPEAKER_01 33:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably found in somewhere like Cambridge or Oxford, you know. Yeah, would be, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_02 34:04

You know. For the chap. Yes. And they proclaimed these shards as being untranslatable, but they've not reckoned with Dr. Whitney and his amazing intellect and determination. And he has a go, doesn't he? Translation was made possible only by the suggestive similarity of various symbols to certain primitive Amoraic and Arabic word roots whose prototypes they appear to be. So there's that nice uh idea of what we have now is the uh has its roots way back in pre-human history. Yeah, and this is where he he gets his real lead on what he believes is the phrase the water of knowledge. But there's warnings already, right? Because we we get but further deciphering has proved disquieting. The character of the eon old entity or principle to which the term was applied was apparently of a most disturbing nature.

SPEAKER_01 35:08

It would be, wouldn't it? It would, yeah. Yeah, it's for that moment you close the book and put it back on the shelf, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 35:16

Yeah, I think I think I'm gonna take up model railways or something instead of uh we get a nice mention of a fountain pen as well. He repressed a shudder as he reviewed the fine script, covering several sheets we had which he had written with his fountain pen. I think Lovecraft probably went, yes, at that point.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

Oh, yeah. No, Lovecraft probably wrote him a wrote him a letter saying, Well, what what is it? What type of pen? What type of nip? It's like like later you had the yuppies comparing philafaxes and them big brick mobile phones and stuff. Lovecraft are comparing pens.

SPEAKER_02 35:51

Oh, the world of pens. And we get mention here of a word that I had to look up. I I I sort of guessed what it was, but I did look it up anyway, which is cartouche. So a cartouche is basically an oval with a line at one end that you see in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and it usually indicates that the text enclosed is a royal name. So there's an implication there that anything written in a cartouche is something special. And the term cartouche was first applied by French soldiers who fancied that the symbol they saw so frequently repeated on the pharaonic ruins they encountered resembled a muzzle-loading firearms paper powder cartridge, which was known as a cartouche in French.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Now you see, I did know what that was, and do you know why I knew what that was? Because I've had to look it up for Clark Ashton Smith.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

Ah, right. Oh, I'd forgotten that one.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Yeah, it was I think it was really early on. I think it was one of the first ones we covered, but it was one I picked, and so I did that. Research built it.

SPEAKER_02 36:59

Mind you, to be fair, there's been so many with Mr. Smith, isn't there? Oh, God. I think last time there was about 10, wasn't there, in the in the dark eyedolon?

SPEAKER_01 37:09

Yeah, no, there was a few, there was a few I didn't do because we rap because we'd been there at there all week.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

And this is where he he gets to the formula near near the bottom of the shard was a formula of evocation, which, according to the preceding text, would call the warder to the presence of whomever would recite it. And as we said, the bit underneath has been broken off or cut off with a scimitar for reasons unknown, but uh it's gonna, of course, he's gonna do it, isn't he? At this point, he's not thinking, oh, but what if I call this up but can't put it back down? And there is still uh there's a little hint here about superstition as well. There's a little mention, well, perhaps this is just all sort of old superstition anyway, which I thought was an interesting take because you've got something here that's 250 million years old that has got writing on it. It's got a very specific set of instructions about how to call up this entity. I don't know, just his his existence sort of either goes against the whole idea of superstition because you've got something concrete in your hands that's surely scientific proof of something other than what we know.

SPEAKER_01 38:21

Yeah, well, I wonder if it's that, because I mean, uh, people who are determined to do something are very good at self-deception. So telling themselves, oh, it's fine, you know, you know, it'll be fine. Just just plug that bomb in over there, it will it won't go off. It's fine. It's I you're just being paranoid, you know. It's that self-deception. If somebody's really set on doing something, they'll find a way of talking themselves into it.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose I suppose it's come too far to back out now, isn't he? As well, yeah. You'd yeah, it is a bit like that. Oh, but what if you had do you want to spend the rest of your life thinking, oh, but what if I had done that? Yeah. Because it's just gonna sink into obscurity in this sort of Midwestern college. It's not at Cambridge or Oxford or Harvard or something, is he, you know? No, which uh given his his apparent intellect, it seems like he's destined for a life of just mundane scholarship, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Yeah, that's probably one of the drives behind it, isn't it? It's probably a case of keeping up with the Joneses. He sees these less worthy people having more success, so he's determined to show the world wrong, you know.

SPEAKER_02 39:37

And I thought this was nice as well. He was impelled as he had been years before to the belief that a genuine understanding of the Shards would require a background of culture and tradition profoundly at variance to any he had ever encountered. So it is that idea of uh you can interpret it in a sense, but to understand it, you have to understand the culture and background that it's from, which is sort of refreshingly non-colonial in a story from this era, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Yeah, it sort of ties in with anthropology and things like that, doesn't it? It's um and I like the fact that yeah, he doesn't just assume that it's gonna be his way of doing things, you know. That is quite refreshing. Yeah. Something else I found refreshing was this, because he's talking about the the um the incantation, the formula, saying the faithfulness with which the evocator was able to rip reproduce the intended sound waves to which the written formula occupied the relation of a semi-musical score. I like that, but it's it's not it that goes back to what we've seen in quite a few of these tales, that it's not about what's said so much as how it's said.

SPEAKER_02 40:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

So it's making the same the right notes, the right ululations at the right points rather than you know actual words or knowing what they mean.

SPEAKER_02 41:01

Yeah, it talks about the vibrations, doesn't it? I instantly thought good vibrations, right? It it is that, yeah. Yes. Which plays nicely into that. Well, we we sort of touched on this earlier. There's no ritual attached to this. He just basically has to it's quite a while, I think, isn't it? It's a couple of hours or a whole evening doing this invocation, but yeah, he's not drawing a circle on the floor, he's not lighting sensors and burning incense and doing things to goats or rabbits or something. All he has to do is get this invocation right, and and that's it. So that is almost more again, Lovecraftian science and magic, magical science, scientific magic kind of area, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Yeah, well something else I like is the fact that he's had to practice this. I wouldn't want to be his neighbour. Could you imagine? Yeah, yeah, you can imagine, right? Yeah, exactly. He's there about about the wolf you dinner down, and somebody starts going through the wall.

SPEAKER_02 42:13

I wonder if anyone's written this invocation out.

SPEAKER_01 42:19

I'll give it a go. I'll give it a go.

SPEAKER_02 42:21

Yeah, we'll we'll do that. That'll be the opening at the next ILF. But then if we do call something up, then you know, mind you, we've got a lot of experienced people there who'll be able to put it back down again. Well, I imagine. Yeah, yeah. And I I like we get our other little mention here again because it he sort of goes back to his old uh his uh his normal books, so I can put it like that, just to check. And he recalled the dire and incredible tales of the fabled elder gods in the book of Ibon, and the frightful illusions in the Necronomicon, Dread Kulu, the unspeakable practices of the Sotogar cult, and the revolting habits of fiendish Avaloth, of which latter, the fifth shard, are treated at some length. So it's nice to see Thoggy in there, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 43:04

It's always nice to see old Toadie in there. It is, yeah. Yeah, he was obviously quite fond of Smith's work because Smith gets quite a lot of mentions with the book of Iborn and old Toadie and all that kind of thing. Yes, yeah, yeah, it's true, yeah. Which actually makes sense because um Clark Ashard Smith actually commented on one of Richard Seabright's poems in 1934. I've got a little quote here. A poem of yours, which I saw some time ago in Fantasy Fan, impressed me by its eerie imaginative touch, and the impression seems to persist with uncommon vividness. So there you go. That's a high praise coming from Smith, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:49

Yeah, uncommon vividness. Even in his writing a letter, he can pull phrases like that. I mean, your poem was right good. Oh, I know, he can't help himself, can he? Yeah, so that was nice.

SPEAKER_03 44:01

Cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Yeah. That was a banger, that was. So yes, it's got the time. It's uh it's a wild November night again. I'm not sure uh if that's uh relevant in any way at all. It was sort of close on Halloween-y sort of season, maybe. Uh and I like this phrase as well. At times the incubus of impending disaster weighed so heavily on him that he half resolved to dabble no further in the unholy revelations of the shards. The incubus of impending disaster. That's nice.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

It's amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:33

He has his dinner, of course, because you know, you don't want to be stopping for a snack part way through, do you?

SPEAKER_01 44:41

You get the munchies halfway through that to get a kick out.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

And uh he goes into the dining room with a calm and confident stride, and off he goes. I did like this as well that he uh every writer will get this, I'm sure. You sit down to write, and you think, Oh, I think I'll have some music on now. Let's have a quick look on here. And this, this, oh, look, there's a YouTube video on oh, and an hour later, you know, you're not written a bloody word, but you've decided what song you're gonna listen to, and you've adjusted the lighting, and you've plumped your cushions up, and you've gone and made a cup of tea, you know. It feels very much like that here.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Yeah. Well, I like the fact that he lingered over his coffee longer than usual, then lit a second Siggy and returned to the study. So yeah, he's he's procrastinating at this point, isn't he?

SPEAKER_02 45:32

But finally, he can put this moment off no longer. He began the evocation. He did not rise and wave his arms and chant, nor light sensors, nor enclose himself in a pentacle. He was attempting to draw to his presence an entity from so far back in the dawn of existence that these questionable appenances of later wizardry would have been meaningless to it. He was dealing in the crudely forceful elements of all theurgy stripped of latter-day trappings and embellishments. So, yeah, that idea that this being, this force is so primordial that anything from our history has no meaning to it at all. Uh, we get quite a long description of not what he's saying, because of as we mentioned, the words are meaningless anyway, but how he's saying it the combination of vibrations propelled into the ether.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:25

And um it's a bit of a sort of anticlimax, isn't it? Because nothing happened. And he he does a bit more, he goes on for longer, nothing happens. He could almost hear his heart thumping wildly in the contrasting silence, and traffic noises from the distant street, mingled with the rushing wind, seem oddly unreal. After a moment he thrust the translation into a drawer of the desk and sat down tense and strained in a deep leather chair beside the fireplace. They just sort of sits and waits, and nothing happens.

SPEAKER_01 47:01

Yeah, I like I like this this reasoning though, because it's it makes sense. He was prepared to wait. Somehow an instantaneous response would have surprised him. The endless eons which must have passed since those syllables had been pronounced made it seem plausible that a little time, at least a few minutes, might elapse before an answer came, if it came at all. That makes sense, doesn't it? This thing's been asleep for eons.

SPEAKER_02 47:28

Well, I don't know if you're like me, but getting me up in the morning requires, you know, uh a bugle call, several alarm clocks, getting kicked out the bed, and you know.

SPEAKER_01 47:38

Yeah, yeah. I need a block and tackle to get my ass out of bed most mornings.

SPEAKER_02 47:45

So that's where he goes after sitting around for a little longer. It it feels like something is possibly going to happen. He he still has this vague dread that rested heavily on his heart. But you know, it's been a long day. He writes all up, he writes all this up in his journal, then he goes to bed, tired and uneasy, with a growing sense of nameless menace weighing on his spirits. And I thought this was interesting how now, well, here we go: reliable narrator, unreliable narrator, real or dream. We're firmly in that territory again.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Yeah, and obviously, I think having the psychic who's got the impressions, that's how he can have this. Because obviously he's just finished writing, so that's his notes done. This is all going to be the psychic impressions of what this mystic dude, this well, whatever he was, a psychologist or something like that, parapsychologists, I guess you call them now. Turkov, yeah. Yeah, Turkhov. Um, so I'm assuming, so yeah, we might have an unreliable narrator narrating the narration of an unreliable narrator.

SPEAKER_02 48:54

Ah, nicely dancer. Yeah, I hadn't picked up on that at all. But yes, of course. Yeah, yeah. Uh uh, we mentioned Mr. Smith earlier. I think this this is a Smithian bit as well, because we're in a very Smithian alien landscape with uh exotic, overgrown plant life and strange furtive rustlings and uh little pathways and sibilant whispers. It does feel very smithian, this landscape.

SPEAKER_01 49:20

It does, yeah. Even some of the descriptions from all about came sibilant whispers alternating with uncouth, deep-toned gutturals, and occasionally he heard the rustling of unseen bodies through the fern-like stalks. But they were always out of sight in the dense profusion of vegetation, and he steered a torturous course trying to avoid them. So, yeah, you do get that sort of Smith influence, but again, he's another poet, isn't he? Yes, so he comes from a very similar starting point. It'd be interesting if we we knew if anybody knows any more about Mr. Seawright. Was he into the same stuff, like you know, your borderline and your sterling and all that? Does he come from that end of it as well? Because I can see a direct influence, a shared influence with Clark Ashton Smith.

SPEAKER_02 50:08

Yeah, and even the mention of the drugs and the mind expanding and all that kind of stuff as well ties in with that, doesn't it? It does, it does. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. And this is very dreamlike now because we're getting the chase. Something's chasing him, he can't see it, but he has a sense of a gigantic stalking thing. It's a nightmare, isn't it? Yes. And uh again, this is very uh evocative, I think, because he's is he plunged on, panting and ploughing his way through the mocking barrier with labouring effort. Then suddenly he had broken away from the primeval forest upon a broad, bare, undulating plain stretching away to a hazy horizon without a possibility of hiding places. So again, very nightmarish. Yes, and then he sees the thing behind him. Well, it it's a shrouded visage, it's just a uh a huge figure, nothing particularly described about it at first, and as he turns to flee in the dream, this is where we get our long snake-like tentacle that encircles his waists and jerks him to a halt. You ever been jerked by a tentacle? Don't kiss and tell, darling. Marvel. And um I I started getting in in this next section because we go into the unfolding of time and space and everything else. Now I'm getting House on the Borderlands.

SPEAKER_01 51:41

Oh, yes, same, same. Yeah, I I instantly thought of that.

SPEAKER_02 51:45

And I thought actually, here we go from Smith to Hodgson, then we get into Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as well, because we we go through the cycles of human history, uh, which is all the the Howard stuff, Atlantis and Mu and Lemuria and all that stuff. But of course, we go back before that with the old ones and Amigo and the the Shogoths, the whole at the mountains of madness kind of scene, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Yeah, it is. It's like we get actually get a mention of barbarians as well, which I thought had to be a direct nod to two gun bar, but it had to be. No, but something I just want to mention here because I love this description of the tentacle before we move on. The tentacle was grey and rugose and semi-scaled, and its grip was like a loop of tensile steel about his middle. See again, yeah, this is that's very Lovecraftian, isn't it? Rugose.

SPEAKER_02 52:39

Yes. Rugos, yes, especially. Yes, yes. And he's lifted up to face this thing. Whitney turned in the loose grasp and gazed up at the figure looming shadowy and monstrous high above his head. Its face was exposed now, and he saw a great broad impassive visage, vaguely suggestive of human mould, but with shocking and blasphemous differences. Cold impersonal eyes met his own, long, narrow green orves in which pity or hate or any human emotion seemed impossible. So this this is kind of I don't know, I was put in mind like sort of Greek myths as well, like Zeus or something like that as well, Titans or your Asgardian gods, Odin or something. Yeah, or even your Nephilim. Oh, yeah, you know, fields of yes, indeed. Uh and then we get the whole psychedelic trip where he uh uh he sees giant gaseous globes flaming endlessly through boundless reaches of space, and after untold millions of years, beheld a stupendous explosion which scattered blazing gas across the universe. This is at the Big Bang, basically, has gone back to here.

SPEAKER_01 53:48

I thought this might m has to be a nod to Edgar Allen. Like a dream within a dream. That has to be a nod to Mr. Poe, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_02 53:57

Yeah, absolutely. So maybe it starts with the Poe, then goes into the Lovecraft.

SPEAKER_01 54:04

Oh, because then it goes into the Bob Howard.

SPEAKER_02 54:10

And we get basically the history of the old ones, which will be familiar to Mr. Lovecraft's fans, of course. And we we we get something of uh mythos roundup here, don't we? He viewed the flight from other worlds of the Migo, the spawn of Cthulhu and their building of the terrible stone city of Rilier, and the terrific struggle waged between them and the old ones for supremacy. He shuddered at their unspeakable slaves, the shogoths, the existence of which on this earth was so fervently denied in the Necronomicon. There's a nice little touch there, fervently denied in the Necronomicon. No, no, Shogoths, no, no, no. Too much even for old uh Abdullah. No, no, no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

Hmm. No shogoths here. But like that because again he's putting his own kind of spin on it. You know, that's his interpretation of the mythos and and all the rest of it. It sort of lies somewhere from what I've gleaned reading his other stories. His interpretation of it lies somewhere between Lovecraft and Derleth. It's almost in the middle.

SPEAKER_02 55:14

Yeah. Because I could say that we we uh we I don't think it's fair to call this a shopping list, this one. No, in the way we get the Derlethian shopping list, it's more a reference to, isn't it? Yes, it feels in keeping. It's not like I went into his library, oh, there was a Necronomica, look De Vermis Mysterious, uh, Book of Iborn, Ulnaus, and Colton, and then there's nothing else attached to that, it's just yeah the names. Here is researching those as a way to get into the shards.

SPEAKER_01 55:43

Yeah. To use a musical analogy, it's like a remix, is how you see it. Because he's it's all the bits, but they're in slightly different places.

SPEAKER_03 55:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:51

So we get that whole sort of mythos history or prehistory, we get Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria, and scores of others of which no faintest memory has descended to the modern world. Very Hawadian. And then we get the Grecian heroes of the Golden Age, we get Rome, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, uh, all the way up to our own age. And I thought this was interesting in a way, in that the deeds of the Grecian heroes of the Golden Age, etc., etc., get kind of pretty much equal billing with everything else. Yet in chronological terms, that's like a second, isn't it? The old ones were around for, I don't know, top of your head 10 million years or something. Yeah. Greece was around for it's like nothing. But he he gives them, I suppose that's that's coming from his perspective of our culture, uh, and the importance we attach to that. Whereas the reality is in cosmic terms, it's the blink of an eye.

SPEAKER_01 56:51

Well now, eventually he actually gets what he came for, doesn't he? Because uh yeah, then leisurely, inexorably, he passed on into time, thrilling to behold, one after another, the solution of the great problems towards which science had been turning. One by one he beheld the secrets of the universe captured and harnessed, and their fundamental simplicity made clear. Through endless eons to an aged world, rolling cold and desert like beneath a dying sun, to the ultimate black frigidity of interstellar space and final annihilation, he followed. I love that passage. That was really nicely written. That's very cool, isn't it? Yeah, that's that's the end that awaits everything.

SPEAKER_02 57:38

We're back to the conqueror worm again, aren't we? Even the worm goes in this one, right? Yeah, that's true. This is uh total annihilation. In the last darkness, enveloped in the cosmic cold, his senses reeled and the whirling nausea again engulfed him. He opened his eyes to find himself suspended high in the air by the great tentacle still wrapped around his waist, and his gaze opened full on the cold inhuman stare of the green eyes. There was something magnetic yet revolting, something utterly alien yet supremely fascinating in those long green eyes. He could not swerve his head nor wrench his gaze away from that effortlessly hypnotic stare. And this is where he he sort of thinks what comes into his mind is Yeah, that spell of exorcism, yeah, might have been handy. Might have been useful. Oh well. So he feels himself pulled in. It's it felt to me like he gets merged with the water. He gets drawn in and just becomes a part of it. Where his intellect and ego would be absorbed and become one with their host.

SPEAKER_01 58:53

Yeah, I love this little description here. The eyes seemed growing, great lakes of mystic green shot with tiny dancing sparks. It's being engulfed, isn't he, in this gaze? It's uh a tremendously vivid story. Because it's quite I I think you could call it quite a low-key story in in terms of it doesn't really leave one, it's all in one room except the dream sequence and yeah, oh yeah, and all this, but that but it's incredibly visual the way it's written.

SPEAKER_02 59:23

Yeah, I mean, yeah, bloke goes into a room and reads out some words at the end, is basically it, isn't it? But yeah, uh a lot of very nice description within that. And uh again, this is the weird tale thing, the concepts that that then brings up uh, you know, leads us to all sorts of speculations. And I like this this is very cinematic as well. So that's the the the scene fades to black, right, or green, perhaps. And then we get a new scene. The sun shone and a crisp wind blew bracingly over a new washed world the next morning when Gordon Whitney's housekeeper found the professor's bedroom door locked and the inmate unresponsive to her knocks. So they basically break in. Whitney was quite dead. Although an autopsy failed to establish any cause, he would have seemed asleep had it not been for that shocking expression of horrified despair, which, as Professor Turkov privately observed afterwards, harmonized so strangely with the realization of a life's dream.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:32

The moral of the story, be careful what you wish for.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:36

Yes, and once again the pursuit of knowledge leads to dire consequences. Yes, curiosity killed the uh chemist. That was that's a Lovecraftian tribute band to Curiosity Killed a Cat.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

Oh god. Oh god, Curiosity Killed a Cat. They were dreadful. Sorry, they were terrible.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:03

So yeah, I like that what you said. We've got unreliable narrator saying, Ah, I think what this unreliable narrator was saying was he witnessed the the yeah, the heat death of the universe, and now he's merged with the water. That's what happened. And everyone else is saying, Oh, perhaps he just had heart attack, or you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:23

Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? That basically, yeah, yeah. The water of knowledge is essentially showed him entropy and action. Nice, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:32

Which I suppose, if you think about it, is the ultimate truth. Uh, we know that scientifically now, or as far as I know, speaking as someone whose knowledge of science uh means I'm boy legs, and yeah, that's about it. Uh yeah, the universe at one time is gonna be a cold, the sun's gonna be a cold cinder and everything's gonna be gone. Does it then recycle around to another big bang and all that? I suppose that's then the speculation, isn't it? But uh is that what the warder does is does he press the start button every time?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:09

Well, there you go.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

Yeah, so yeah, and I think we had a bit of everything in that one, pretty much. Uh we got the ultimate futility of everything. We got lots of nice book mentions, uh, a little bit of a cultish kind of knowledge, and uh uh a driven obsessed scholar that ticks all the Lovecraftian boxes, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:30

Oh, it certainly does, yeah. Certainly does. Yeah, I I definitely recommend to readers checking out more of Mr. C. Wright's work. Uh and his son's stuff is equally good. Yeah, it's a shame that not not as widely known.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:47

Yeah, it's quite surprising, but I I suppose if that story wasn't published, but then other stories of his were published in Weird Towns. So Yeah, like the Seal Casket was and things like that, and that has the Eldown Shards in it. So yeah, and I I was familiar with the Eld Down Shards, but not the author. So that that might have been through um Call of Cthulhu RPG, possibly.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:07

Oh, possibly.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:08

Yeah. Or maybe I'll pick obviously where Lovecrafts mention it, maybe I'll picked it up through that.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:12

But uh yeah, because I know it's mentioned in um Shadow Out of Time along with the narcotic um manuscripts and all that kind of thing. So yeah, I think that's the first time I heard of the outdown shards.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:26

Yeah, yeah. Those naughty outdown shards.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:29

Those naughty outdown shards. You've got that good in my head now. We'll have to do a music hall version of it, won't we? Uh John Shawnby.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:39

Yeah, naughty out down shards when I'm cleaning windows.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:44

I think I've got a battered ukulele in the cupboard somewhere. I'll have to dig it out and have a have a probably needs a new set of strings, but I'll have a I'll have a look.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:52

We look forward, that's something else you'll be able to see at the ILF, no doubt. Jim's debut on ukulele. Accompanied by myself on the Sousa phone.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:05

Yes. Oh, wonderful. Or maybe a theramin. That would be fun. Chaps in Tweed, that's what we'll be known as. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:14

Yeah, we should do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:15

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:19

So there we go, folks. Is that a story you're familiar with? Is that an author you're familiar with? Where would you position that in Mythos Towels? I think that's a solid one. I I think I can see where this leads to Derleth in a sense. Oh, yeah. Uh, this to me is like a uh going that way. I think, like you said before, it's somewhere between Lovecraft and Derleth with those really nice nods to Smith and Howard and everything as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

Yeah, it's it's pastiche in the best possible way, I think is how I would describe it. It is a very pastiche, it's a love crafty and pastiche, but there's something more to it than just a straight rehashing of everything we know or we've read before. He's definitely put his own spin on it, which is basically what what I do, what you do.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:08

Well, you know, and nice to see as always that HPL picks up on that and uses it the same as he did with Sarthogua and etc. etc. And uh Bob Alwood's using the book of Ibon and mentions Dagon and all the rest of it. So yeah, incre incredibly productive, I think, and creative that circle of writers.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:27

Yeah. We have another little nice little quote um from Lovecraft from a letter to Richard Seawright, dated the 25th of September 33, speaking about one of his other stories. So he he he thought quite highly of his work. I have read the haunted relay with much interest and certainly think it has the touch of originality that fiction needs. The atmosphere of suspense and uncertainty is very well sustained, and the actual growth of madness is wholly a surprise, despite. The ample preparation. Nice. Nice. Again, high praise indeed.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:06

Well, that that idea of preparation, that's something that's quite prominent in Lovecraft, is it? There's very little that comes of a surprise at the end because he signposts everything so much, and yet it's still a shock. Somehow.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:20

Well, it is that inevitability of death is just how grim and grisly it's going to be when it happens, especially if you're reading Clark Ash and Smith, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:30

So yeah, do let us know what you think, dear listener, through the usual channels. Don't write it on a clay tablet and leave it around for 250 million years, because I doubt if we'll see that. I mean, I'm bad enough with emails, you know, let alone clay tablets. But uh, we have had some missives in, mostly talking about our last episode where we covered Shaft No. 247 by Basil Copper. On Patreon, JB Lee writes, I first read it in New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. It's a great tale, finding the Lovecraftian while jettisoning the mythos paraphernalia. My first Copper towel though was Camera Obscura in Alfred Hitchcock's Stories That Scared Even Me. And boy, did Night Gallery do it justice. Wonderful episode. And maybe I can post a link to an illustration that I did to his story Amber Print, which has nothing to do with Cthuloid stuff, but is certainly a fine horror tale. And uh we've got a link there to JB Lee's Deviant Art page, which we'll put in the show notes below. Thank you, JB.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:35

Oh, wonderful stuff. Yeah, I've not got around to watching the camera obscure adaptation yet. I might have to rectify that. I mean, I'm I'm off away on on a mini tour, but when I get back, I'm gonna watch that. I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:49

Yes, me too. Perhaps we'll we'll look at that for an episode at some point then. Oh, maybe we could double up and do a couple. We could do the which is the block one, is it the Weird Taylor?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:58

The Weird Taylor, I think, yeah. Okay, yeah, we'll we'll we'll pencil that. Because they're sort of half an hour episodes, aren't they? We can do a do a couple of night gallery episodes. That's not a bad idea. Right, yeah. Next in we have from Ralph Grasso, friend of the show and longtime correspondent. Uh, greetings, old chap. I for one read this story in an Arkham House Cthulhu mythos collection. After reading, I wondered what it had to do with the mythos. Laugh out loud. The Great White Space, on the other hand, was a good pastiche of Lovecraft slash Poe. Yeah, I agree. I'm a big fan of the Great White Space.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:33

And our old friend Niels writes in, thank you for introducing me to Basil Copper. I'd never heard of him before. I'll definitely keep an eye out for his books. Anytime a work has overly bureaucratic overtones, I reminded of Stalislav's memoir Found in a Bathtub. Definitely not a weird tale, but an excellent critique of government inefficiencies. I'd recommend giving it a read. Speaking of Daleks, which I think we mentioned, of course, who did. Probably me. Speaking of Daleks as sci-fi Nazis, I remember also in the Dalek Invasion of Earth, they rolled through Trafalgar Square, I think it was, with their toilet plungers in the air. The commentary I listened to about that did say the Daleks intentionally did that to make the Nazi illusion. Director who told them to do that, or if the Dalek operators did it themselves. I like to think it was the extras inside who said uh wouldn't it be a good idea if we elevated our toilet plungers? No, it was the director. Oh, it was, was it? Oh, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:44

It was. It was the yeah, it was the it was the director because there's a great shot by Nelson's column, and it's shot from the ground up, and you've got them giving it the whole salute with the plungers. It's incredi, incredible, because obviously black and white. Do you got the the grey, the the sky behind it, and the just the silhouettes of these Daleks giving the old Zeke Heil? And yeah, it's incredibly effective photography. It's great.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:11

Nice. And Nils concludes here's one for Tim's naughty gnarly night at the ILF. I can't remember if I shared it with you before. It's based on Clark Ashton Smith's The Dead or Cuckold you play. There once was a king cuckolded, his queen had a lover all moulded. She wore a frown when a zombie went down because his tongue was all freezing colded. Lovely stuff. And if if that isn't enough, Lil's finishes finishes with, and finally, as you signed off, Tim took offense to you calling him homogenous balls. I'm not sure if that was that the phrase I can't remember. Homogenous ball. All right, homogenous ball. Obviously, that's not correct since homogenous balls was the Renaissance artist who specialized in mediocre softcore erotica. I stand corrected. I stand corrected, Neils. Thank you very much for those. Oh, bravo, sir.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:11

Brilliant.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:12

Very good.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:13

Love it. Absolutely brilliant. Okay, we're gonna finish up with zooming back an episode to the episode where we had Heather Miller on for a chat. This is from Patreon from Stephen Wall. Living in Newfoundland for 18 years as an outsider has led to some intense feelings for myself and locals on the sense of place spectrum. TV is one thing as it often has wide audience. But I find running tabletop RPGs trickier. I think that's because audiences, i.e. players, can be entirely made up of locals or contain a single local who up-ends the vibes and lived experience. Also, I really dig Heather Miller's notion of the Lovecraftian gaze. It's all coming full circle for me. My Abdul al-Hazred is Michelle Foucault. I see now I was doomed from the moment I could first perceive. Thank you for that, Stephen. That's great.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:12

Nice, very nice. Yeah, that's um, I mean, for writers, it's the thing as well, isn't it? To well, we've said it before, you can tell if a person hasn't been to London or Manchester or whatever. Not always, not always, but quite often. Where if you get someone like Alan Moore who writes about Northampton and you think, yeah, yeah, that's Northampton or whatever it is, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:40

Yeah, definitely. Well, we're back to the whole Ramsey Campbell-Arkham thing again, aren't we? And Dirler saying, Well, go and write about somewhere you know, which which is so evident in the Dailoff trilogy.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:50

I mean, it just steeps in the locale, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:54

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:56

So, yeah, thanks very much for all those messages. You can get in touch with us via our YouTube channel, on the Innsmouth Forum, on Facebook, via email at insmuthbookclub atoutlook.com, or of course on our Patreon page. And while you're on our Patreon page, take a look at subscribing and supporting the show. And a big Innsmouth welcome to our latest patrons to sign up, Heather Miller, Carter Torvald, and Watchek Copsa. Thanks very much, folks. Which I think might be out next week, the spring edition. We've got some interesting articles in there and uh some other bits and pieces, and free entry to the Innsmouth Literary Festival, of course.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

Speaking of bonus content. Yes, we're gonna do a patron exclusive next time, aren't we? I'm not sure we've decided exactly what we're doing yet, but it might include readings or something or other.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:00

Yeah, I I thought, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna try our hand at some readings, I think. I'm not sure what we'll be reading yet. This this is gonna be possibly the start of a new little mini-series. Maybe some poetry or some stories as well. So uh, yeah, this is partly due to me deciding I'm gonna be putting out some audiobooks of my works, probably starting with my Wolf Who Would Be King Sword and Sorcery series, but then looking at some of my short stories as well. I thought it's time to cast them out into the ether and see what effects the vibrations have. Nice, nice. So thanks again for joining us, folks. We'll see you next time. In the meantime, it's goodbye for me, Rob Poynton. And it's goodbye for me, Tim Mendys.