It was with a distinct shock that I realized suddenly that there was nothing—nothing at all—in this Eibonic material that the professor and I did not already have recorded in our notes, and that the only explanation for my being sent on this false errand was to get me out of the way while the professor did—what?
SEIZED by a nameless premonition, I snatched up the papers on which I had copied the passages from Eibon, returned the old book to the clerk, and left the grounds of the library. Dark clouds had come boiling up over the horizon, drowning the long narrow streets in gloom. The wind blew from the north, cold and dank as the panting breath of some predatory beast.
Abandoning the notion of waiting for the streetcar, I hailed a passing taxi and rode back to the University Club. I had the horrible feeling that every moment might count against life or death, and yet I could not have told you what it was that I feared. There are certain times in our lives when knowledge comes to us by unknown paths, and woe unto him who ignores the warnings explicit in that foreknowing!
Tossing a crumpled bill at the driver, I sprang from the cab and raced into the building. Plunging up the staircase, I entered the rooms assigned to us, only to find no sign of the professor.
Even as I turned to descend the stair and to seek for Mayhew in the club library, there came to my ears a weird, ragged, chanting ululation from the roof directly above our rooms, and among the weird vocables I recognized certain words—
“Iä! Iä! Groth-golka! Groth-golka Antarktos! Yaa-haa Quumyagga! Quumyagga! Quumyagga nug’h aargh—”
These were the opening words of one of the summoning litanies to the shantaks, for I clearly recalled them from the manuscript of Professor Mayhew's tentative translation of what he called the "Zimbabwe Rituals." Then I knew, with a surge of cold fear that closed like a vise about my heart, that the professor had employed a mere subterfuge to get me out of the way while he went up to the roof and cried out the summoning litany ... and I cried out; I cursed the unholy curiosity of the scholar that would dare such an enormity.
Up to the roof I ran, stumbling over the stairs, and burst out upon the rooftop to see before me a scene of horror!
A dome of leaden clouds hid the sky as if some immense lid of gray metal had been clamped down upon the world from horizon to horizon. The wan luminance that filtered through the roiling vapors was a lurid, unnatural, phosphoric, sulfurous yellow. For a fleeting instant I was reminded of the skies over Zimbabwe in my dreams—the flaring bale-fires, the drifting smokes, the bird-masked priests, the leering moon—then I shrieked and saw—and saw—
Down they came, the semi-avian hurtling shapes, all slimy scales where feathers ought by rights to be, hippocephalic clubbed heads hideously grinning ... and hovered on scaly, translucent wings: hovered and swooped and dipped, to tear and tear at the shrieking scarlet-splattered thing that jerked and jiggled prone on the rooftop, wallowing in a bath of blood—that shrieking thing that I could never have distinguished as having once been human, had it not been for the one detail to which my shuddering gaze clung with unbelieving terror—the blood-spattered pince-nez on their sodden ribbon of black silk, about the crimson ruin of a hat had once been a man's head.
HERE is the first of a pair of tales which are more or less direct sequels to August Derleth’s seminal Mythos story “The Return of Hastur.” In fact, so close is the relation between them that “Behind the Mask” (which appeared originally in Crypt of Cthulhu #47, Roodmas 1987) almost fails to stand on its own unless “The Return of Hastur“ is pretty fresh in the reader’s mind. Here we begin to sense Lin Carter having said about all he had to say in the Cthulhu Mythos subgenre.
Too often Carter’s stories have the failing of merely rehearsing hackneyed Mythos gimmicks which are just too familiar by now to frighten. When the veil is drawn aside and we see the same old stuff, well, the story kind of falls flat. Such stories are written with a strange obliviousness to reader response. The implied reader (i.c., the audience who seems to be in view) of such tales is a first-time reader, a Mythos novice. Did Lin (or Derleth, etc.) really believe the bulk of their readers fell into that category? I doubt it. Rather, what has happened is that the author is working too hard to open up an ironic gap between the reader and the narrator/protagonist. The wide-eyed recitation of Mythos data by the narrator/character who has just discovered it (Paul Tuttle, Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins, etc.) is not intended to educate us, the readers, about the Mythos. Just the opposite: These seemingly inevitable Mythos catechisms are intended to show us what novices these characters are, otherwise it would not be plausible for them to come to the nasty ends they do. They are ill-prepared for the challenge (even, apparently, after having learned all the Mythos data they throw at us!).
Tedious as these Mythos lectures are, they may be necessary; it may work. But what if the bulk of the tale is taken up with it, and even the climactic revelation is old news to us? I suppose we are being asked to see something familiar through new eyes, those of this Mythos greenhorn, and maybe we will experience a small share of vicarious horror. But this does not often seem to work. Instead, we are tempted to conclude: “Too bad! He should have checked with me first! I could have saved him some sanity points.”
You will form your own judgment concerning this particular story, but I think Lin just manages to avoid the pitfall, or at lease to climb back out of it momentarily, at the point of his description of the masked hierophant of Leng. Here he has taken the traditional picture just enough farther to make us do a double-take.
Behind the Mask
by Lin Carter
IN July of 1928, the library of Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, received a rare and unusual gift. It arrived as part of the Tuttle bequest, one of a number of suppressed works of occultism and demonology. The book to which I refer was known as the R'lyeh Text.
Dr. Cyrus Llanfer, the director of the library at that time, looked over the collection in a cursory manner before handing the volumes over to one of the junior librarians, a young man named Bryant Hoskins, for cataloguing. Some of the books were in printed form, such as the sinister De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn and von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, while others were manuscript copies, often in fragmentary condition, such as the obscure Book of Eibon, the mysterious Pnakotic Manuscripts, and the R'lyeh Text itself.