Again, the dreary waste, the opaque skies, the uncanny stars! Nearer than ever have I drifted, unto the very portal of the stone tower. The doorway looms before me, the lintel thereof inscribed with signs carved into the crumbling stone ... signs which I cannot read, but which I have seen in the frightful pages of the Necronomicon.
The door itself is a massive slab of stone through which I pass unopposed, and unwilling, as if helplessly borne along by some invisible current of force. Unresistingly, I enter a dark chamber whose gaunt, bare walls are hung with woven tapestries depicting hideous shapes lording it over groveling naked human slaves.
Against the further wall of this chamber (which is frigid as the Pole, and pervaded by an unclean stench of indescribable foetor) a Being sits, or squats, or lolls, in an ancient chair of carved black wood. Larger and more corpulent than the common run of humankind, its curiously misshapen limbs and torso are swathed in robes of lustrous silk. Behind these garments I sense a body oddly deformed, perhaps with more limbs than are normal, or with limbs of multiple jointage.
The face of the being is entirely hidden behind a veil or mask of yellow silk, through which nothing of the visage thus concealed can be discerned. But I notice, even in the paralysis of ultimate horror which freezes my mind and will, that the silken mask twitches oddly, and bulges in the wrong places. ...
I do not wish to know what the face of the Tcho-Tcho lama looks like. But, against my numb and frozen will, the hands of my dream sell reach out to pluck the mask aside—
Those were the last words written by Bryant Hoskins.
BY mid-November, it was discovered that the R’lyeh Text had been purloined from the locked shelves of the Miskacunic Library, and that another volume from the Tuttle bequest, one known as the Celaeno Fragments, was also missing, In light of the fascination these two books had exerted on Hoskins, it did not take Dr. Cyrus Llanfer very long to deduce who had appropriated the two books. Hoskins' landlady, Mrs. Mullins, quickly divulged the location of his cabin in the woods; as the priceless volumes were the lawful possessions of the Library, Dr. Llanfer had no other recourse but to inform the local authorities of the theft.
Two constables were dispatched to recover the stolen property. They found the country roads nearly impassable due to the heavy snows, but managed to reach the cabin.
What they found within was then immured in the County Sanitarium, safely locked up in a padded cell. It laughs and howls and sometimes weeps, but when it speaks, which is seldom, it only repeats the same phrases over and over.
"... The face! the face! ... Those putrid holes where eyes are wont to be! ... that pink and squirming tentacle-like proboscis, where a face should have a nose and mouth and chin ... and the laughter, the mocking and malignant, gurgling laughter ... God! God! How can a thing laugh without a mouth?"
The thing in the cell died raving the following spring, in early March of 1929. The stolen books were returned to the locked shelves of the Miskatortic University Library, and very, very seldom does Dr. Llanfer permit even established scholars to consult them.
In explanation of this, he says, quite simply, "There are some things man is not meant to know, and some books man is not meant to read." Perhaps he is right, after all.
SURELY the must outrageous absurdity in the history of weird fiction (and let’s hope it is history by now) is the story which ends with the narrator writing his last words as he is being dragged away by a monster. I don’t know which ending is more stupidly hilarious, that of Lovecraft’s "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", Frank Belknap Long’s “The Hounds of Tindalos”, or Robert Bloch’s "Notebook Found in a Deserted House." All commit the same mortal sin: When the narrator finds himself abruptly overtaken by the horror, his last act is to continue to write, even if he finds himself so petrified as to be unable to flee. Had the doomed narrator actually been writing down the tale up to that point, surely the narrative would have broken earlier, and we would be left to guess why. Since the author (e.g., Lovecraft, not Alonzo Typer) fears that would not allow for sufficiently definitive closure, “the sense of an ending” (Frank Kermode), he must venture some way of letting the reader hear the other shoe drop. There are better ways. Hence the kindred device of a subjoined note from the authorities: "The foregoing narrative was found rightly rolled and scuffed up the rear of the late occultist Poindexter P. Poe."
A genuine effort to maintain the suspension of reader disbelief would leave the jagged edge of the “unfinished” account, thus keeping open the vital ambiguity of “the fantastic” (Tzvetan Todorov), whereby we are left forever suspended between the mundane possibility and a suggested but unverified supernatural explanation. For an example of a Lovecraftian tale that does dare to go the way Todorov has marked out, see Jorge Luis Borges’ "There Are More Things" in his collection The Book of Sand or in my forthcoming anthology Acolytes of Cthulhu (Fedogan & Bremer). The general reluctance to leave the loose ends dangling strikes me as yet another confirmation of Käte Hamburger’s contention that first-person narrative fiction is essentially a deceptive attempt (formally if not intentionally, of course) to hijack the literary form proper to autobiographical nonfiction. The fictive character of the work finally betrays itself by insistence upon a resolution within the text, something characteristic of fiction and notoriously absent from reality, which is why we love to take refuge in fiction and try to model our lives on this or that particular story (Don Cupitt, What is a Story?).
It is this same anxiety for a finale that has led many writers to try their hand at supplying an ending for a fragment left unfinished by an author. Why did Lin Carter leave “The Strange Doom of Enos Harker” dangling? Perhaps he just never got around to finishing it. Perhaps he felt he had come to a dead end. Nonetheless, proverbially, the author’s own judgment is often the last we should accept about his work, and reading the substantial fragment, I can see a number of arteries severed that may be sewn back together, so that the story may live again. So now let us see if we can rescue “Enos Harker" from a premature burial and keep him going long enough to meet with the doom appointed him. For those purists among you, Lin’s fragment ends with section 5, and my continuation picks up with section 6.
The fragment in its unfinished state was first published in Crypt of Cthulhu #69, Yuletide, 1989.
The Strange Doom of Enos Harker
by Lin Carter and Robert M. Price
IN 1931 I graduated, with modest honors, from Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and for some months thereafter sought gainful employment without success. It was my intention to continue my studies and seek a degree upon the completion of my thesis, which was concerned with obscure cult survivals in certain parts of the East. Very much research remained undone, however, and employment in those Depression years was scarce and seldom remunerative; since I required part-time employment, my search was futile.
At length, however, I noticed an item in the personal columns of the Arkham Advertiser, placed therein by Dr. Enos Harker. He offered a comfortable subsistence and free room and board in his home for a private secretary able to organize his notes and prepare a manuscript for publication. The opportunity seemed nothing less than a godsend, and I applied forthwith.