The Dream Lurker

By Philip Herrera

The Dream Lurke

THE TOMB; AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS; THE LURKING FEAR; THE SHUTTERED ROOM by H.P. LOVECRAFT Ballantine Books. $.95 each.

Along with Ballantine Books' new edition of horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft and his disciples, TIME came into possession of the following self-explanatory document.

I write this as much to soothe my trembling nerves as to leave a record of the horror that threatens to pitch me into the final abyss of madness. The dreams, if they are indeed dreams, have long since passed nightmarish intensity, though they began innocently enough. The first took me to a benighted, strange city of shuttered houses with sway-backed gambrel roofs that I dimly recognized as Providence, R.I. As I moved through the maze of twisting, whisper-haunted streets, I realized that I seemed to be inexplicably pulled to a preordained destination--the Swan Point Cemetery. There I was drawn in particular to one granite tomb, on which the human eye could discern under the fungoid moon these chiseled letters:

HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT 20 August 1890-17 February 1937 Since I was born after Lovecraft died, I knew of him only through seeing his books' lurid covers on paperback stands in airports and bus waiting rooms. The usual dust-jacket photograph of the author shows a youngish man with a lantern jaw and a rather startled expression. A bit of research at my university library revealed that his entire oeuvre consists of some 53 stories, plus assorted fragments and collaborations. Yet the writer has become a sort of cult figure and his books sell both consistently and well--over 1,000,000 copies since 1970 alone.

About Lovecraft's life, surprisingly little has yet been recorded. He was the only son of a traveling salesman who died when Howard was but eight, leaving the boy in the cloying clutches of a genteel but overbearing mother. Sickly, precocious, reclusive, Howard began writing eerie fiction early, nuzzling in imagination up to decay, decomposition and other horrors softer and stickier than a mother's kisses. After a hiatus, he resumed writing in his late 20s, finding a ready market in the cheap magazines of the day--mainly Weird Tales --and becoming the center of a small cadre of writers of similar bent.

Open Sepulcher. My second dream, six days later, brought me once again into that cemetery. This time, however, I noticed that the trees were unnaturally large and gnarled, as if they sucked some secret vitality from the inner earth. To my ears came a faint, loathsome piping, like the whining, thin mockery of a single feeble flute that was to start an unwholesome elfin celebration. Just before I awoke, feverish and gasping, I noticed a cowled figure Who beckoned slowly to me, and with a gaunt finger pointed into Lovecraft's open sepulcher.

The effect was such that I hastened to read some of Lovecraft's stories. I admit I disliked his stylistic mannerisms. He tells his tales through a troubled, dim, first-person narrator, and he saves the grisly denouement for the last sentence and then prints it in italics, as though that gives it greater shock value. Also repellent at first is the man's habit of stuffing his leisurely, Latinate sentences to repletion with adjectives and adverbs to modify, often tautologically, a stark noun or gruesome verb.

One example from the famous Shadow Over Innsmouth will suffice. The plot concerns a doomed Massachussetts fishing town whose population is obscenely corrupted by intermingling with a race of fiendish undersea creatures. Learning all this, the narrator attempts to flee. On the outskirts of town, he looks back and sees his pursuers "in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating, surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare."

Yet Lovecraft had real talent too. After a while his reverberant prose seems mesmeric. Well did he know that true terror lies in the tension between our scientific age's rationalism and our primordial sense of individual powerlessness--of being enmeshed in something vast, inexplicable and appallingly evil. For this reason, he eschewed the stock devices of werewolves and vampires for a more intimate horror. In stories like Arthur Jermyn and Rats in the Walls, he exploited the rich theme of contaminated blood as it percolates implacably through successive generations. In The Lurking Fear, an entire upstate New York clan degenerates into thunder-crazed, shocking creatures with the hideous habits of man-eating moles.

Though I tried to remain awake after reading such tales, I felt an overpowering anomalous drowsiness quite akin to being sated with green chartreuse. Once asleep, I found myself again in the cemetery. A minatory wind scuttled through the silent tombstones, and Charonian shadows leapt and grimaced with unspeakable frenzy. What was most unusual for a dream was that my nose was active, wrinkling in disgust at the fetor of rotten grass and the ichor of freshly overturned earth. This time the enshrouded figure spoke to me in hollow tones: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." I woke up screaming.

Mindless Azagoth. University specialists in strange languages could not place--much less decipher--the grim words I had heard so distinctly. I had no recourse, therefore, but to revert to Lovecraft's own works, where I discovered that the sentence means, "In his house at R' lyeh dread Cthulu waits dreaming." It seems Lovecraft created a whole mythology, complete with guttural Asiatic incantations, to support his twelve best stories. The basic notion was that countless eons ago, Earth had been taken over by an extraterrestrial race which, in the practice of black magic, had lost its hegemony, but lay dormant and dreaming, awaiting a second chance to overwhelm the planet.

Obviously, Lovecraft here was exploring those tenebrific estuaries of the occult that had barely been mapped by Jung, Fraser and Arthur Machen. He even equipped the ancient demons with names -- mindless Azagoth, Soggoth, Ib, Nyarlathotep and, above all, the great dread Cthulu who, in his sole appear ance, seems to be a "gelatinous green immensity" that slobbers. To recall these alien creatures from their hideous hiding places (the arctic wastes, unfathomable submarine chasms, New Eng land), the intrepid have but to practice rituals recorded in dusty, blasphemous old tomes like the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred and Von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten.

It is true that some of Lovecraft's stories on the Cthulu Mythos -- The Call of Cthulu, At the Mountains of Madness -- rank high among the horror sto nes of the English language. But Great Cthulu only knows why perfectly good, independent writers from the late Au gust Derleth to Colin Wilson have seized and elaborated on the Mythos in their work.

Of course I dreaded retiring that night, for I knew that sleep would bring fulsome terrors anew. But neither caf feine nor amphetamines had any effect and I nodded. I dozed.

The graveyard bristled with baleful intensity. Strangely colossal bats beat the air around my face, and chittering hordes of toadlike things chortled in infandous rhythms of ululation in dissonances of extreme morbidity and cacodemonial ghastliness. As I somehow anticipated, the cowled figure, his face ever hidden, approached and tugged my pajama sleeve, pulling me toward the open Lovecraft tomb. Forgetting danger, cleanliness and reason, I ventured into the yawning Stygian recesses of the inner earth, down inclined passageways whose walls were coated with the detestable slimy niter of the earth's bow els. My whole being choked on the stinking confluence of incense fumes, and a cancerous terror clutched my chest with strangling tendrils. Penultimately we reached a vast vaulted room lit with a gangrenous green glare from an unknown source, while all around pulsed and crashed a monstrous noise not unlike a machine malevolently crunching great living trees to pulp.

Just before I howled myself awake, I saw something in the faint phosphorescent light. It is that pallid vision that causes me to write this report, for whether my heart can stand one more night of dreams is most uncertain. As the cowled figure grinned and gibbered, I saw his unmistakable prognathous jaw and wide, habitually surprised eyes. And I knew why so many writers have so assiduously emulated How ard Phillips Lovecraft, for hidden in the glistening convolutions of the eldritch imagination, he lives and he commands!

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