two
corpses are found laid out in the undertaking establishment; and it is discovered that the corpse of
Jake
has been very efficiently embalmed....
1
This is the same story outlined among Smith’s papers as “The Undertakers:”
Two undertakers, one of whom has a poor opinion of his partner’s abilities, particularly as an embalmer. He tells him, ‘If I die before you do, and you try to embalm me, by God, I’ll get up and embalm
you
!’ Years later he dies suddenly. His partner takes charge of the body, and is about to begin professional operations, when the corpse suddenly sits up. The living partner drops dead through shock. The next morning, two corpses are found laid out in the parlor; and the one that
died last
has been carefully
embalmed
.
2
Smith spent three days working on the story before completing it on February 7, 1931. He remained dubious of its merits, telling August Derleth that it “may not even have the dubious merit of being salable.”3 Part of the problem was that Smith knew “next to nothing about the subject; so you might warn me if I have ‘pulled any boners.’ Anyway, it didn’t seem necessary or advisable to dwell on the technical side.”4 (Lovecraft reassured him “No—I can’t pick any flaws in the embalming tale; for despite my authorship of the banned ‘In the Vault’ I have not a shred of inside knowledge of the profession! One has to bluff beyond one’s scholastic means now & then….”5) Derleth wrote that “the plot is okeh, but I don’t think you were feeling particularly good when you wrote it. It seems disconnected, and somehow you do not hit the end right. It is the kind of story Wright might take in a pinch but a reader would forget it the moment he had read the last word,” adding “Of course, it does not at all compare with anything else of yours I have recently seen.”6
CAS almost managed to sell the story to ST. According to editor Harry Bates, “I liked it myself, and would have bought it, but Mr. Clayton thought we had better not. I did not support it very strongly, for I just as leave have something of greater length to represent you next time.”7 Smith then appears to have given the story to Charles D. Hornig for his fanzine The Fantasy Fan, since an announcement for a story called “The Embalmers of Ramsville,” by Michael Weir, appears on page 96 of the February 1934 issue. “Michael Weir” is almost certainly a pseudonym of Smith’s, probably derived from Poe’s poem “Ulalume.” The story remained unpublished until 1989, when Steve Behrends included it in Strange Shadows: The Uncollected Fiction and Essays of Clark Ashton Smith. Our text is based upon the original holograph manuscript at JHL.
1. CAS, letter to HPL, November 16, 1930 (SL 136).
2. SS 159.
3. CAS, letter to AWD, February 7, 1931(ms, SHSW).
4. CAS, letter to HPL, c. February 15-23, 1931 (ms, JHL).
5. HPL, letter to CAS, March 26, 1931 (Arkham House Transcripts 31.77).
6. AWD, letter to CAS, May 20, 1931 (ms, JHL).
7. Harry Bates, letter to CAS, July 7, 1931 (ms, JHL).
The Testament of Athammaus
Smith completed this, the third of his tales of Hyperborea, on February 22, 1931, although he had conceived of the plot as early as April 1930: “Athammaus, the public executioner of Commoriom, beheads the outlaw, Nicautal Zhaun, and afterwards oversees his entombment. The next day, Nicautal Zhaun reappears on the streets of Commoriom, is again captured, beheaded, and interred. Seven times is this repeated, till all the people flee from Commoriom, taking it as an evil and supernatural portent. The baffled Athammaus, mocked by Nicautal Zhaun, reluctantly follows them.”1 He elaborated on this to Lovecraft, explaining how “this outlaw (who was connected with Tsathoggua on his mother’s side) managed to leak or ooze from the tomb on each occasion,” concluding that “The tale should make a rollicking hell-raiser.”2 After completing the story, Smith wrote that “I really think he (or it) is about my best monster to date,” after admitting “In my more civic moods, I sometimes think of the clean-up which an entity like Knygathin Zhaum would make in a modern town.”3
Smith wrote that he would “be rather peeved if Wright turns [‘Athammaus’] down; since it is about as good as I can do in the line of unearthly horror.”4 Wright wrote Smith on March 21, 1931 that “if is with real reluctance that I am returning ‘The Testament of Athammaus,’ for it is an ingenious and well-told tale. However, our readers have shown a dislike for stories of cannibalism,” adding “It may be, if the story remains vividly in my mind for six months, as did ‘Satampra Zeiros,’ that I will sometime ask you to send this to me again.”5
Lovecraft offered this assessment: “Wright is... just old Farnsworth. Eternally the same! He’ll be asking for ‘Athammaus’ all over again before long. It probably never occurred to him that the ‘cannibalism’ connected with prehistoric anthropophagous monsters is something entirely different in its emotional implications from such realistic cannibalism as might occur among actual human beings in a contemporary setting.”6 Smith remarked to Derleth that “Wright seems to have lost what little nerve he ever had. He has returned my two best horror tales, on the plea that they would be too strong for his readers. I think, though, that he will take ‘The Testament of Athammaus’ later on—it seems to have impressed him greatly. But ‘Helman Carnby’ is quite beyond the pale. This latter tale really seems to be something of a goat-getter.”7
The story apparently remained very vivid in Wright’s memory, since Smith bragged to Donald Wandrei “Have I mentioned Wright’s final acceptance of ‘The Testament of Athammaus’, a month after he had declined it?”8 Smith’s memory may have been slightly off, since he mentions its rejection by Bates and ST to AWD in May 1931.9 “The Testament of Athammaus” was the second most popular story in the October 1932 issue of WT, being beaten out by Jack Williamson’s “The Wand of Doom.” Smith included it in OST. The present text is from a typescript given to R. H. Barlow and later presented by him to the Bancroft Library.
Following his assessment of Knygathin Zhaum as his “best monster to date,” Smith offered the following commentary upon his conception of Hyperborea:
This primal continent seems to have been particularly subject to incursions of “outsideness”—more so, in fact, than any of the other continents and terrene realms that lie behind us in the time stream. But I have heard it hinted in certain obscure and arcanic prophecies that the far-future continent called Gnydron by some and Zothique by others, which is to rise millions of years hence in what is now the South Atlantic, will surpass even Hyperborea in this regard and will witness the intrusion of Things from galaxies not yet visible; and, worse than this, a hideously chaotic
breaking-down
of dimensional barriers which will leave
parts
of our world in other dimensions, and vice versa. When things get to that stage, there will be no telling where even the briefest journey or morning stroll might end. The conditions will shift, too; so there will be no possibility of charting them and thus knowing when or where one might step off into the unknown.
1. SS 157-158.
2. CAS, letter to HPL, April 2, 1930 (SL 112 ).
3. CAS, letter to HPL, c. February 15-23, 1931 (SL 149).
4. Quoted by Steve Behrends, “An Annotated Chronology of the Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith.” In FFT 340.