Volume 1

July, 1934 Number 11

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

AN APOLOGY

On page 143 of our May issue, we published an article entitled "About H. G. Wells." According to the byline, it was written by Daniel McPhail. The author was R. H. Barlow. We wish to apologize to R. H. Barlow, Daniel McPhail, and our readers, for this mistake, and suggest that contributors always sign their articles in the future to avoid these mixups.

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OUR READERS SAY

"Some will perhaps wonder what I precisely meant, in my dialog in the May issue, when my character, Sidney, exclaimed, "And if scribes could only emulate Smith or Lovecraft or Howard!" I meant, of course, that writers should strive to these three in _greatness_--but a greatness of a different sort. For there can only be _one_ Clark Ashton Smith, _one_ H. P. Lovecraft, _one_ Robert E. Howard. But the aspiring writer can always form himself on a good model; and in time, he will find his _own_ individuality. I wish to see another tale by Eando Binder, as well as a story by J. Harvey Haggard, and more poetry by William Lumley."--Robert Nelson

"I find the June FANTASY FAN interesting. This story is really good, the one by H. P. Lovecraft. Science in a weird atmosphere, 'From Beyond;' interesting, and the story worked out completely satisfactorily. This will probably horrify a number of readers, but as far as I know, this is the first story I have ever liked by Lovecraft; but I like it very well. The word wanderings of 'Prose Pastels' number three are a bit entrancing. F. Lee Baldwin seems worth his increased column."--Forrest J. Ackerman

"The June FANTASY FAN contained everything that goes to make a magazine successful--I need not list the splendid array of stories and articles that you have somehow condensed into one issue."--Duane W. Rimel

"The June number was very well done. In addition to my old stand-bys Lovecraft and Smith, I was pleased with Haggard's little note on 'Books of the Weird.' I'd like to see more of such articles. 'Weird Whisperings' is one of my favorite columns."--H. Koenig

"Enjoyed the latest FANTASY FAN--an excellent issue. The cover of different colour adds to the effect."--H. P. Lovecraft

"Please print only short stories, the shorter the better, and no serials. Also give us a greater variety of authors. Let's have poetry in every issue, but not too much of Smith's heavy ones. All eight pieces printed so far have been fine! Very glad to see the way you're encouraging amateurs."--William H. Dellenback

"I wish to commend Mr. Lumley's remarkable poem, 'Shadows,' in the May TFF. This poem seems to have in it all the mystic immemorial anguish and melancholy of China. The quatrain, 'Dragons,' is a vivid picture too. I enjoyed 'Phantom Lights,' 'The Flower God,' and the various departments--in fact, the entire contents of the magazine."--Clark Ashton Smith

"The June issue of THE FANTASY FAN was great! I enjoyed immensely the fine tale by H. P. Lovecraft, 'From Beyond.' It was extremely well-written and lacked nothing in my estimation. I hope that I shall enjoy many more of Mr. Lovecraft's splendid stories."--Fred John Walsen

"I note in 'Weird Whisperings' that Seabury Quinn gets most of his plots while shaving. According to the looks of things in 'Weird Tales,' Mr. Quinn is sporting a long, long beard. Also in 'Weird Whisperings' the nassysnoopers are revealing the real names of authors. Now--febbensake--why do writers use _nom-de-plumes_ if they let the readers know their real names? What can be the use of pen-names in such a case? As for 'Prose Pastels,' I must say I'm going to offer my first criticism to Clark Ashton Smith. After reading 'The Muse of Hyperborea,' I sez to myself, 'I'll bite! What is it?' You tell me--I can't figure it out. Another thing I must slam Mr. Smith for is his use of obsolete and rare words. Not that I don't enjoy them--they make the stories so much more--so-so--but I dunno what they mean--my dictionary is pretty big--but doesn't contain all those words."--Gertrude Hemken

"The June 1934 FANTASY FAN is pleasing to the eyes with its bright yellow cover. Please make Lovecraft's 'Supernatural Horror in Literature' at least four pages long. 'Side Glances' and 'Weird Whisperings' are interesting. You ought to discontinue 'Your Views,' since it offers nothing of value."--Charles H. Bert

"I was sure pleased with this month's TFF, and I especially liked 'Prose Pastels' by Clark Ashton Smith; also 'From Beyond' by H. P. Lovecraft. Glad to see you are going to print such fine material as is unjustifiably rejected by other magazines. Some of the real gems of literature are sometimes never printed professionally, but thanks to semi-amateur magazines like TFF, the efforts of an author is not entirely lost. Let's have more by Mr. Lovecraft. Schwartz and Weisinger have certainly been around quite a bit lately. Their stuff is brand new and very interesting as well as amazing."--F. Lee Baldwin

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WEIRD WHISPERINGS

by Schwartz and Weisinger

Seabury Quinn returns to _Weird Tales_ in the September issue with the latest Jules de Grandin thriller, "The Jest of Warburg Tantavul".... In prospect for publication in _Weird_ in the near future, but not as yet scheduled, are two stories of brain transplantation by Bassett Morgan, entitled "The Vengeance of Fi Fong" and "Black Bagheela," with great apes and sinister Chinamen springing out of every corner to horrify and amaze the reader.... All of H. P. Lovecraft's tales are sold to WT with the understanding that nothing whatever is to be changed in them.... "The Waning of a World" by W. Elwyn Backus, an old _Weird Tales_ serial, was reprinted in _Aviation & Mechanics_ under the title "A Leap to Mars."

The "Weird Tales" radio program announced some time ago in the Eyrie, has not been given up, but the Hollywood Radio Attractions, Inc., which is handling the broadcasts and the making of the electrical transcriptions, ran into difficulties in trying to get sponsors for the program. However, they are pressing forward in a drive to obtain sponsors in all the various districts.... Paul Ernst, who is about 33 years old, has sold over 300 stories to more than 50 magazines since 1926.... A serial novel set in the Sahara Desert, entitled "Rulers of the Future," written by Ernst, is slated for publication in _Weird_ next winter.... The tale of a mild-appearing, bespectacled American physicist who in a few days forced the world to destroy its armaments and agree to perpetual peace is narrated in S. Gordon Gurwitt's next _Weird Tales'_ story "The Golden Glow."

Mysterious letters postmarked from Washington, D. C., consisting of two mimeographed pages bearing the title "The Battle that Ended the Century" have been received by several well-known fantasy authors, editors and fans. It is a satire, and the character's names are those of popular people in the fantasy field, being thinly veiled. Seabury Quinn wrote Farnsworth Wright that if he didn't know that he lived in Chicago he'd swear that Wright had written them. Frank Belknap Long, Jr. feels confident that they were authored by H. P. Lovecraft who is now touring in the South. "I'm too well acquainted with Howard's (Howard Lovecraft) style," he declared, "to mistake it. It's just a gag...."

"The Distortion out of Space" by Francis Flagg, an ingenious tale of the fourth dimension to appear in the August WT, has a very strange illustration by Harold R. Hammond.... The same number will contain a weird-scientific story by Frank Belknap Long Jr., entitled "The Beast-Helper," a story based on the craze for dictatorships that is epidemic in Europe just now.... Long, Jr., has crashed _Astounding Stories_ with "The Last Men," to appear in the August number.... On hand for a coming issue of _Weird_ is "Yellow Doom" by Robert H. Leitfred, a smashing, quick-moving tale on the old theme of an oriental despot who by his mastery of science tries to make himself ruler of the world.

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THE END OF "SCOOPS"

Hugo Gernsback recently received the following letter from L. B. Silvester, the founder of "Scoops," the first English all-stf magazine that we've been hearing so much about.

"In October of last year, I got at the board of Messrs. C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., of London, one of our big publishing houses. With your magazine as an example, I strove to convince the powers that be. They finally made a compromise--they would turn out an ambiguous sort of cheap weekly which could assume definite adult or juvenile characteristics upon receipt of those indications which a few months of circulation would give.

"A putrid sort of thing suffering under the name of SCOOPS was what resulted. Together, Mr. F. Hadyn Dimock and myself tried to do what was right and what the board wanted at the same time. I wrote a story and some short articles every week; he did the editing. Finally we got the board's consent for this form, but it was too late. The frivolous name condemned it and the fact that in fifteen weeks it had picked up a reputation for blood-and-thunder which it could never have lived down. We asked for more money to re-launch it in the form we had first visualized, but we were refused! The paper had failed. Britain's first and only scientifiction paper had failed within four months of its inception, and this in face of the fact that nowadays science has an interest, to some extent, for everyone, and is to be found on the screen and stage, and in the daily press."

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WITHIN THE CIRCLE

by F. Lee Baldwin

R. H. Barlow is a very talented youth. He is a pianist, painter, sculptor in clay, landscape gardener and book collector. He has completed a clay bas-relief of Cthulhu and a statuette of Ganesa, the Hindoo Elephant God. One of his favorite bindings for his books is snake skin. He shoots many snakes around his home in Florida and tans the skin.

"The Last Hieroglyph" by Clark Ashton Smith, which is scheduled in WT is the last of a series of stories of the fabulous land of Zothique. The first of the series was "The Empire of Necromancers." WT has on hand another story of Zothique--"The Dark Eidolon".... William Crawford, Editor of Marvel Tales, holds for publication "The Coming of the White Worm." It may be issued in a separate booklet. This is the first chapter of The Book of Eibon.

Do you remember Loretta Burrough who wrote "Creeping Fingers"? She has a yarn titled "What Waits in Darkness" slated for a future WT.

H. P. Lovecraft is touring the South. He is making Savannah, St. Augustine, Charleston, and other places that were founded in the _early_ days of this country, and also visiting R. H. Barlow of De Land, Fla.

Clark Ashton Smith wrote and published at 17 a book of poems called "The Star Trader."

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The Epiphany of Death

by Clark Ashton Smith

(Dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft)

I find it peculiarly difficult to express the exact nature of the sentiment which Tomeron had always evoked in me. However, I am sure that the feeling never partook, at any time, of what is ordinarily known as friendship. It was a compound of unusual esthetic and intellectual elements, and was somehow closely allied in my thoughts with the same fascination that has drawn me ever since early childhood toward all things that are remote in space and time, or which have about them the irresolvable twilight of antiquity. Somehow, Tomeron seemed never to belong to the present; but one could readily have imagined him as living in some bygone age. About him, there was nothing whatever of the lineaments of our own period; and he even went so far as to affect in his costume an approximation to the garments that were worn several centuries ago. His complexion was extremely pale and cadaverous, and he stooped heavily from poring over ancient tomes and no less ancient maps. He moved always with the slow, meditative pace of one who dwells among far-off reveries and memories; and he spoke often of people and events and ideas that have long been forgotten. For the most part, he was apparently unheedful of present things; and I felt that for him the huge city of Ptolemides, in which we both dwelt, with all its manifold clamor and tumult, was little more than a labyrinth of painted vapors. Oddly enough, there was a like vagueness in the attitude of others toward Tomeron; and though he had always been accepted without question as a representative of the noble and otherwise extinct family from which he claimed descent, nothing appeared to be known about his actual birth and antecedents. With two servants, who were both deaf-mutes, who were very old and who likewise wore the raiment of a former age, he lived in the semi-ruinous mansion of his ancestors, where, it was said, none of the family had dwelt for many generations. There he pursued the occult and recondite studies that were so congenial to his mind; and there, at certain intervals, I was wont to visit him.

I cannot recall the precise date and circumstances of the beginning of my acquaintance with Tomeron. Though I come of a hardy line that is noted for the sanity of its constitution, my faculties have been woefully shaken by the horror of the happening with which that acquaintance ended. My memory is not what it was, and there are certain lacunae, for which my readers must contrive to forgive me. The only wonder is, that my powers of recollection have survived at all, beneath the hideous burden they have had to bear; for, in a more than metaphoric sense, I have been as one condemned to carry with him at all times and in all places the loathsome incubus of things long dead and corrupt.

I can readily recall, however, the studies to which Tomeron had devoted himself, the lost demonian volumes from Hyperborea and Mu and Atlantis with which his library shelves were heaped to the ceiling, and the queer charts, not of any land that lies above the surface of the earth, on which he pored by perpetual candle-light. I shall not speak of these studies, for they would seem too fantastic and too macabre for credibility; and that which I have to relate is incredible enough in itself. I shall speak, however, of certain strange ideas with which Tomeron was much pre-occupied, and concerning which he so often discoursed to me in that deep, guttural and monotonous voice of his, that had the reverberation of unsounded caverns in its tones and cadences. He maintained that life and death were not the fixed conditions that people commonly believed them to be; that the two realms were often intermingled in ways not readily discerned, and had penumbral borderlands; that the dead were not always dead, nor the living, as such terms are habitually understood. But the manner in which he spoke of those ideas was extremely vague and general; and I could never induce him to specify his meaning or to proffer some concrete illustration that would render it intelligible to a mentality such as mine, that was unused to dealing in the cobwebs of abstraction. Behind his words, there hovered, or seemed to hover, a legion of dark, amorphous images that I could never formulate or depict to myself in any way, till the fatal denouement of our descent into the catacombs of Ptolemides.

I have already said that my feeling for Tomeron was never anything that could be classified as friendship. But even from the first, I was well aware that Tomeron had a curious fondness for me--a fondness whose nature I could not comprehend, and with which I could hardly even sympathize. Though he fascinated me at all times, there were occasions when my interest was not un-alloyed with a sense of actual repulsion. At whiles, his pallor was _too_ cadaverous, too suggestive of fungi that have grown in the dark, or of leprous bones by moonlight; and the stoop of his shoulders conveyed to my brain the idea that they bore a burden of centuries through which no man could conceivably have lived. He aroused always a certain awe in me; and the awe was sometimes mingled with an indeterminate fear.

I do not remember how long our acquaintance had continued; but I do remember that he spoke with increasing frequency, toward the end, of those bizarre ideas at which I have hinted. Also, I felt that he was troubled about something, for he often looked at me with a mournful gleam in his hollow eyes; and sometimes he would speak, with peculiar stress, of the great regard that he had for me. And one night he said:

"Theolus, the time is coming when you must know the truth--must know me as I am, and not as I have been permitted to seem. There is a term to all things, and all things are obedient to inexorable laws. I would that it were otherwise, but neither I nor any man, among the living or among the dead, can lengthen at will the term of any state or condition of being, or alter the laws that decree such conditions."

Perhaps it was well that I did not understand him, and that I was unable to attach much importance to his words or to the singular intentness of his bearing as he uttered them. For a few more days, I was spared the knowledge which I now carry. Then, one evening, Tomeron spoke thus:

"I am now compelled to ask an odd favor of you, which I hope you will grant me, in consideration of our long friendship. The favor is, that you accompany me this very night to those vaults of my family which lie in the catacombs of Ptolemides."

Though much surprised by the request, and not altogether pleased, I was nevertheless unable to deny him. I could not imagine the purpose of such a visit as the one proposed; but, as was my wont, I forebore to interrogate Tomeron, and merely told him that I would accompany him to the vaults if such were his desire.

"I thank you, Theolus, for this proof of friendship," he replied earnestly. "Believe me, I am loath to ask it; but there has been a certain deception, an odd misunderstanding which cannot go on any longer. Tonight, you will know the truth."

Carrying torches, we left the mansion of Tomeron and sought the ancient catacombs of Ptolemides, which lie beyond the walls and have long been disused, for there is now a fine necropolis in the very heart of the city. The moon had gone down beyond the desert that encroaches toward the catacombs; and we were forced to light our torches long before we came to the subterranean adits; for the rays of Mars and Jupiter in a sodden and funereal sky were not enough to illumine the perilous path we followed among mounds and fallen obelisks and broken graves. At length we discovered the dark and weed-choked entrance of the charnels; and here Tomeron led the way with a swiftness and surety of footing that bespoke long familiarity with the place.

Entering, we found ourselves in a crumbling passage where the bones of dilapidated skeletons were scattered amid the rubble that had fallen from the sides and roof. A choking stench of stagnant air and of age-old corruption made me pause for a moment; but Tomeron scarcely appeared to perceive it, for he strode onward, lifting his torch and beckoning me to follow. We traversed many vaults in which mouldy bones and verdigris-eaten sarcophagi were piled about the walls or strewn where desecrating thieves had left them in bygone years. The air was increasingly dank, chill and miasmal; and mephitic shadows crouched or swayed before our torches in every niche and corner. Also, as we went onward, the walls became more ruinous and the bones we saw on every hand were greener with the mould of time.

At last we rounded a sudden angle of the low cavern we were following. Here we came to vaults that evidently belonged to some noble family, for they were quite spacious and there was but one sarcophagus in each vault.

"My ancestors and my family lie here," said Tomeron.

We reached the end of the cavern and were confronted by a blank wall. At one side, was the final vault, in which an empty sarcophagus stood open. The sarcophagus was wrought of the finest bronze and was richly carven.

Tomeron paused before the vault and turned to me. By the flickering uncertain light, I thought that I saw a look of strange and unaccountable distress on his features.

"I must beg you to withdraw for a moment," he said, in a low and sorrowful voice. "Afterwards, you can return."

Surprised and puzzled, I obeyed his request and went slowly back along the cavern for some distance. Then I returned to the place where I had left him. My surprize was heightened when I found that he had extinguished his torch and had dropped it on the threshold of the final vault. Also, Tomeron himself was not visible anywhere.

Entering the vault, since there was no other place where he could have hidden himself, I looked about for him, but the room was empty. At least, I deemed it empty till I looked again at the richly carven sarcophagus and saw that it was now tenanted, for a cadaver lay within, shrouded in a winding sheet of a sort that has not been used for centuries in Ptolemides.

I drew nigh to the sarcophagus, and peering into the face of the cadaver, I saw that it bore a fearful and strange resemblance to the face of Tomeron, though it was bloated and puffed with the adipocere of death and was purple with the shadows of decay, as after long ages in a charnel air. And looking again, I saw that it was indeed Tomeron.

I would have screamed aloud with the horror that came upon me; but my lips were benumbed and frozen, and I could only whisper Tomeron's name. But as I whispered it, the lips of the cadaver seemed to part, and the tip of its tongue protruded between them. And I thought that the tip trembled, as if Tomeron were about to speak and answer me. But gazing more closely I saw that the trembling was merely the movement of worms as they twisted up and down and to and fro, and sought to crowd each other from Tomeron's tongue.

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SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE

(A True Experience)

by Kenneth B. Pritchard

I chanced to be alone at the time. I was just about to enter the kitchen of the house. I opened the door and went in.

I glanced over toward the gas stove near a window. Close to it a cloud of smoke streamed upward. It had the appearance of an easy rolling mass just expelled from the lungs of a smoker. I also compared it to a match that had just been extinguished. In fact, I thought that a mouse had lit one.

I went to the stove, which had not been used for some hours, and looked for a match recently ignited, or even for some oily substance which the sun might have caused to smoke.

Everything was cold. The sun had not warmed anything. No match had been lit. But, I had seen smoke rising!

A friend of mine saw smoke rise in front of her, also. She too, could ascertain no reason or source.

What then really happened? Is it some indigenous quality of the air that was the cause?

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SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

by H. P. Lovecraft