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Pth’thya-l’hi.
In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” she is the wife of Obed Marsh and great-great-grandmother of Robert Olmstead. According to HPL’s notes, she was born 78,000 B.C. Olmstead meets her in the dream that convinces him to join his forebears and to live forever in Y’ha-nthlei under the ocean. Purdy, Marjorie.
In “Ashes,” the secretary of the scientist Arthur Van Allister. Her lover, Malcolm Bruce, thinks she has been reduced to ashes by a formula invented by Van Allister, but in fact she is merely locked in a closet.
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Q
“Quest of Iranon, The.”
Short story (2,800 words); written on February 28, 1921. First published in the Galleon(July–August 1935), edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach; rpt. WT(March 1939); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D;annotated version in TD.
A youthful singer named Iranon comes to the granite city of Teloth, saying that he is seeking his faroff home of Aira, where he was a prince. The men of Teloth, who have no beauty in their lives, do not look kindly on Iranon and force him to work with a cobbler. He meets a boy named Romnod, who similarly yearns for “the warm groves and the distant lands of beauty and song.” Romnod thinks that nearby Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, might be Iranon’s Aira. Iranon doubts it, but goes there with Romnod. It is indeed not Aira, but the two of them find welcome there for a time. Iranon wins praises for his singing and lyre-playing, and Romnod learns the coarser pleasures of wine. Years pass; Iranon seems to grow no older, as he continues to hope one day to find Aira. Romnod eventually dies of drink, and Iranon leaves the town and continues his quest. He comes to “the squalid cot of an antique shepherd” and asks him about Aira. The shepherd looks at Iranon curiously and states that he had heard of the name Aira, but that it was merely an imaginary name invented by a beggar’s boy he had known long ago. This boy, “given to strange dreams,” provoked laughter by thinking himself a king’s son. At twilight an old, old man is seen walking calmly into the quicksand. “That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.”
“The Quest of Iranon” is among the best of HPL’s Dunsanian imitations, although there is perhaps a hint of social snobbery at the end (Iranon kills himself because he discovers he is of low birth). HPL wished to use it in his own Conservative(whose last issue had appeared in July 1919), but the next issue did not appear until March 1923, and HPL had by then evidently decided against
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using it there. It was rejected by WTand does not appear to have been submitted elsewhere until HPL sent it to the Galleon
See Brian Humphreys, “Who or What Was Iranon?” LSNo. 25 (Fall 1991): 10–13; Donald R.Burleson, “A Textual Oddity in ‘The Quest of Iranon,”’ LS No. 34 (Spring 1996): 24–26. Quinn, Seabury [Grandin] (1889–1969).
American writer and editor; prolific author of tales about psychic detective Jules de Grandin in WT HPL enjoyed his early tale, “The Phantom Farmhouse” ( WT,October 1923), but felt other tales to be formula-ridden hackwork, as evinced in a delightful parody of Quinn’s work (see SL4.162–63). HPL first met Quinn at Wilfred B.Talman’s apartment in New York City on July 6, 1931 (see SL3.382); they met again in early January 1936, during HPL’s last New York visit. Quinn is parodied as “Teaberry Quince” in “The Battle That Ended the Century” (1934). His best Jules de Grandin stories were collected in The Phantom-Fighter(Arkham House, 1966); another collection is Is the Devil a Gentleman?(Mirage Press, 1970).
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R
“Rats in the Walls, The.”
Short story (7,940 words); written late August or early September 1923. First published in WT(March 1924); rpt. WT (June 1930); first collected in O; corrected text in DH;annotated version in An1and CC
A Virginian of British ancestry, a man named Delapore (his first name is not given), decides to spend his latter years in refurbishing and occupying his ancestral estate in southern England, Exham Priory, whose foundations extend to a period even before the Roman conquest of the first century C.E. Delapore spares no expense in the restoration and proudly moves into his estate on July 16, 1923. He has reverted to the ancestral spelling of his name, de la Poer, despite the fact that the family has a very unsavory reputation with the local population for murder, kidnapping, witchcraft, and other anomalies extending to the time of the first Baron Exham in 1261. Associated with the house or the family is the “dramatic epic of the rats—the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent.”
All this seems merely conventional ghostly legendry, and de la Poer pays no attention to it. But shortly after his occupancy of Exham Priory, odd things begin to happen; in particular, he and his several cats seem to detect the scurrying of rats in the walls of the structure, even though such a thing is absurd in light of the centuries-long desertion of the place. The scurrying seems to descend to the basement of the edifice, and one night de la Poer and his friend, Capt. Edward Norrys, spend a night there to see if they can discern the mystery. De la Poer wakes to hear the scurrying of the rats continuing “ still downward,far underneath this deepest of sub-cellars,” but Norrys hears nothing. When they come upon a trapdoor leading to a cavern beneath the basement, they decide to call in scientific specialists to investigate the matter. As the explorers descend into the nighted crypt, they come upon an awesome and horrific sight—an enormous expanse of bones: “Like a foamy sea they stretched, some fallen apart, but others wholly or
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partly articulated as skeletons; these latter invariably in postures of daemoniac frenzy, either fighting off some menace or clutching some other forms with cannibal intent.” When de la Poer finds that some bones have rings bearing his own coat of arms, he realizes the truth—his family has been the leaders of an ancient cannibalistic witch-cult that had its origins in primitive times—and he experiences a spectacular evolutionary reversaclass="underline" speaking successively in archaic English, Middle English, Latin, Gaelic, and primitive ape-cries, he is found crouching over the half-eaten form of Capt. Norrys.