HOW strange that the works of H. P. Lovecraft should include a “canon” of unfinished fragments, a phenomenon reminiscent of A Canticle for Liebowitz. How much stranger that August Derleth, he of the "posthumous collaborations" with Lovecraft (something reminiscent of Herbert West), never ventured to finish up any of these tantalizing bits and pieces, these Pnakotic fragments. That didn’t stop other writers from forcing HPL to participate in a necromantic round-robin.
Brian Lumley undertook a continuation of “The Thing in the Moonlight”, though, strictly speaking, this one wasn’t originally even a fragment, at least not in the same sense, since it began as an excerpt from a letter in which HPL described one of his dreams. Editor Jack Chapman Miske added the three opening mini-paragraphs and the last two closing ones, publishing it as a makeshift tale in his magazine Bizarre Vol. 4, #1, January 1941. (He had first called the mag Scienti-Snaps, if you can believe it!).
“The Book” represents Lovecraft's abortive attempt to make the “Fungi from Yuggoth” sonnet “The Book” into a prose tale. Martin Warnes picked up where HPL left off and finished it up as “The Black Tome of Alsophocus” (which, forgive me!, always makes me think of “esophagus”, as if the tome were a monograph on the Heimlich maneuver!). You may find this line story in Ramsey Campbell’s New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Lin Carter decided to try his hand at “The Descendent.” The present tale, “The Bell in the Tower”, is the result. He had planned to include it in a collection to be called The Black Brotherhood, a volume of marginal Lovecraft revision tales and posthumous collaborations. After his death I tried to press on with the project with the cooperation of Ted Dikty, but the Grim Reaper took Starmont House away along with Ted, and that was that for The Black Brotherhood.
A related idea, also regrettably cut short by the scythe, was for Lin Carter to finish up August Derleths own Celaeno fragment "The Watchers out of Time", which would have been not only poetic justice, but terrific fun. (Derleth had already incorporated some of Lin’s Mythos lore into the story.) Lin’s eyes widened with the possibility when I mentioned it to him one afternoon at a meeting of our New Kalem Club, but he never got around to it. I have a feeling, however, that someone yet may.
The first appearance of “The Bell in the Tower” was in Crypt of Cthulhu #69, Yuletide 1989.
The Bell in the Tower
H. P. Lovecraft and Lin Carter
THERE was a man in London once who screamed when the church bells rang. He lived all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people called him harmlessly mad. His room was filled with books of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tried to lose himself in their feeble pages. All that he apparently sought from life was not to think. For some strange reason, thought was very horrible to him, and anything that stirred the depths of the imagination he fled as from the plague.
He was very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there were those who declared that he was not nearly so old as he looked. Fear had its grisly claws upon his heart, and any sudden sound would make him start with staring eyes and a sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions, if in truth he possessed any, he shunned, for he wished to answer no questions regarding his strange condition. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete said that it was very pitiful to see him in this state. He had dropped them all years before, and no one of them knew for certain whether or not he had left the country or had merely sunk from sight in some hidden byway.
At the time of which I write, it had been a decade since he had taken rooms in Gray’s Inn, and of where he had been in the interval he would say nothing—until the night when young Williams bought the Necronomicon.
This Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when first he had moved into the ancient house he had felt a strangeness and the chill breath of cosmic winds about the grey, wizened man who dwelt in the next room. Curious, he forced his friendship upon his neighbour, where old friends dared not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the man always watched and listened no one could doubt. He watched and listened with his mind more than with his ears and eyes, and strove every waking moment to drown something with his ceaseless poring over gay, insipid, popular novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would yowl in unison until the last peal would die reverberantly away.
Try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect or his manner, but would feign a smile and a light tone and would prattle feverishly and frantically of cheerful trifles, his voice every moment rising and thickening until at last it would break in a piping and incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and thorough, his most trivial remarks made abundantly clear; Williams was not surprised to discover that he had attended Harrow and Oxford.
Later, it developed that he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshire coast so many odd tales were told; but when Williams tried to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman and even pre-Roman origin, the old man refused to admit that there was anything unusual about the edifice. And he but tittered shrilly when the subject of the supposed under-crypts, believed hewn out of the solid granite crags which frown on the stormy waters of the North Sea, was raised by his young visitor.
So matters went between the two until that night when Williams brought home the infamous Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to ask certain questions of a bent and furtive old bookseller who kept a queer and dusty little shop in Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why men went pale when it was mentioned. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies were rumoured to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and the rigid suppression of the lawgivers, and that all of these were believed safely locked away with frightened care by those custodians or archivists who had dared to glimpse into the hateful black-letter.
But now, at last, Williams had not only found an accessible copy of the notorious volume but had made it his own at a price so low that it seemed ridiculous. He had purchased the old book at a Jew’s shop in the more squalid precincts of Clare Market, where he had occasionally purchased odd curios and obscure artifacts before; and he almost fancied that the gnarled old Levite had smiled as if with relief amidst the tangles of his beard, when Williams discovered the volume and announced his desire to purchase it. Indeed, the flaking leather bindings with their verdigris-eaten clasps of brass had been placed on the shelf so prominently, and the price was set at such an absurdly slight figure, as to almost make him suspect that the bookseller was eager—even anxious—to be rid of the accursed tome.