Strange Eons Read Online Free PDF Page A

the dealer who sold it to you.”
    “Is that what the police say?”
    “The police say nothing.” Waverly tugged at his beard. “There hasn’t been a follow-up story on the murder—not a line in three days—and I don’t think there will be. The killer left no clues. If we hadn’t found that scrap of paper—”
    “It proves nothing. Neither does the painting.” Keith took a sip of brandy. “Many artists paint monsters, but this doesn’t mean such things actually exist. Many people indulge in weird forms of worship; there might even be some sort of mysterious underground cult like the one in Lovecraft’s stories. But what they worship is a superstition, pure and simple.”
    “I don’t think it’s pure, and I don’t think it’s simple.” Waverly reached for the brandy decanter and refilled his glass. “Neither did Lovecraft—and all his biographers agree he was a strict materialist. I’m convinced he wrote fantasy to cloak fact.”
    “What sort of fact?”
    “The fact of miscegenation.” Waverly nodded. “Lovecraft had a puritan attitude toward sex, and yet this theme threads through his stories. Even in the early tales, his morbid dislike of ‘foreigners’ hints at something evil in the mingling of bloodlines, something that would debase civilized attitudes and drag mankind down to prehuman level.
    “Remember the degenerate underground race he describes in The Lurking Fear and The Rats in the Walls? In Arthur Jermyn he told of the offspring of ape and human, but I think he was really getting at something far worse. Then, in Pickman’s Model, he openly spoke of ghouls—creatures who feast on the dead and presumably are born from a necrophilic union.
    “But all this was only a prelude to the real horror—not the mating of superior with inferior, of man with animal, of the living with the dead, but something even more disturbing—the mating of man and monster.
    “Consider Wilbur Whateley and his twin brother in The Dunwich Horror —children of Yog-Sothoth and a human mother. Think about the villagers in The Shadow over Innsmouth, worshipping the Kanaka gods of Polynesia with sexual rites which spawned a race of beings that lived on land until they developed the ‘Innsmouth look’—fish-eyed, frog-faced mutations who finally wriggled back into the sea to join Great Cthulhu in the deep.” Waverly gulped his brandy. “That’s what Lovecraft was trying to tell us in his stories—there are monsters in our midst.”
    Keith set his glass down upon the table. “If Lovecraft really believed in such superstitious nonsense, then why did he write fiction?”
    Waverly pursed his lips beneath the beard. “Your choice of wording supplies its own answer. From the beginning of time there have been accounts of such beings. Greek and Babylonian mythology gave us the Hydra, the Medusa, the Minotaur, dragon-men with wings. In the lore of Africa we find leopard-men and lion-men; the Eskimos speak of bear-creatures, the Japanese have their fox-woman, the Tibetans tell of the Yeti, the so-called Abominable Snowman. Europe knew the werewolf, the lycanthrope; our own Indians feared Big Foot and the snake-people who whispered in the woods. Always a few have warned and some have worshipped as well—but the majority continued to speak in your voice. The voice of reason, which damns all this as superstition, and damns those who believe it as ignorant or insane. Lovecraft knew their fate and had no wish to share it. But he couldn’t keep utterly silent; consequently he chose to hide behind the mask of fantasy.”
    Keith’s hands formed the steeple to a temple of disbelief. “You keep saying Lovecraft knew,” he murmured. “The implication is that he had access to some sort of forbidden lore, and spent years investigating the subject.”
    “Right,” said Waverly.
    “But that’s absurd! The facts of Lovecraft’s life are fully documented.”
    “Not all of them.”
    “What about the biographies I read, and