The Tomb From Beyond – Lovecraftian Legacy I

“The Tomb From Beyond” by Carl Jacobi is that unusual item, a weird tale in a Science Fiction magazine. Hugo Gernsback published it in Wonder Stories in November 1933. Gernsback had published H. P. Lovecraft earlier, back in his Amazing Stories days, “The Colour Out of Space”, September 1927. He also published a good many Lovecraftian pieces by Clark Ashton Smith until a disagreement over editing. Gernsback lost Lovecraft’s pen over lack of payment. HPL dubbed him “Hugo the Rat”. Despite this, Gernsback liked the Horror/Science Fiction hybrid and used it when he could.

Enter the young Carl Jacobi. “The Tomb From Beyond” was only his sixth professional sale. He had sold Science Fiction once before. T. O’Conor Sloane bought “Moss Island”, a revision of an earlier juvenile effort for Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1932. All his other sales had been Horror fiction at Weird Tales.

“The Tomb From Beyond” is that most Lovecraftian of things, a story by a new writer wanting to borrow some of the old master’s style and magic. Lovecraft has his shadow all over this one, as does another master, Edgar Allan Poe. The story begins with the narrator coming to Opal Lake near the abandoned town of Flume, to get a contract signed. (Shades of Bram Stoker and Jonathan Harker.) The man who will sign the contract is Julian Trenard, a famous archaeologist. The man had discovered a lost civilization known as Dras, which he wrote about in The Mysteries of Sunken Dras. He also took an ancient temple from the sea floor and re-assembled it in the wilds near Opal Lake. The old temple is partly-submerged due to the failure of a local dam.

The narrator comes to Trenard’s castle-like home, finding it cold and impersonal. His host is anything but gracious. The man largely ignores his guest, putting off the business of contracts to the following day. Most Usher like, Trenard has stepped out of the pages of “The Fall of the House of Usher”. To cap that similarity, Jacobi has the man’s dead sister, Sylvia, interred in the temple. Trenard and his guest have a veiled conversation around the Fourth Dimension and the terrors that lurk there. (This is probably the only spot where Gernsback can work in some Science, referring to The Theory of Relativity, a style of SF/Horror that Frank Belknap Long also used.)

As his host makes dinner, having no servants, the narrator looks at a photograph of ancient Dras. There is a bright spot on the image that is obscured. The spot mesmerizes him, filling him with supernatural dread. Only the return of Trenard snaps him out of the funk. Later our storyteller borrows a boat and has a paddle on the lake without his host knowing. He feels there is great evil in the temple and flees back to bed. Whatever force was in the photograph seems to be lurking in the old temple.

The next day there is a storm and the narrator is stuck in Trenard’s house. The logging road that brought him there is flooded. The weather and the conversations around the Fourth Dimension send Trenard over the edge. He sneaks off to the lake and pours seven drums of oil onto the lake’s surface. (Our narrator surreptitiously follows.) Trenard then opens the gate on the temple and returns with his sister’s coffin. Something is chasing him and he can not relock the gate in time. He flees.

And finally we get to see our Lovecraftian horror:

It was utterly bestial. It was a sight so undescribably loathsome and repulsive that it held me there in the boat, rigid and unable to believe my eyes, doubting my very sanity. (In the rpg Call of Cthulhu, we call that losing your SAN roll. )

The narrator begins with the Lovecraftian “undescribability” of stories like “The Unnameable”. Then he proceeds to give a pretty good description:

Creeping over the water-covered steps, past the carved columns, came a huge, bloated, semi-saurian monster, a giant sea serpent, an enormous water reptile, and yet a creature with eight jointed, hairy spider-legs like some hybrid insect…The body, sliding endlessly from the inner recesses of the vault, was a gleaming black, the head, a flat, pointed, featureless maw…something akin to a Mosasaur, the giant sea snake that infested the prehistoric seas of the late Mesozoic…

A giant spider-serpent. Not so indescribable as first supposed. Frank R. Paul has no trouble drawing it for the illustration. Trenard lights a match and man and monster burn as the narrator runs away. He knows that the professor brought stones from ancient Dras that created a gateway from the Fourth Dimension. He wants nothing to do with Trenard, Opal Lake or Flume.

The story, despite any scientific references, is clearly a Weird Tales story. I don’t know if Carl tried to sell it to Farnsworth Wright but was rejected, or if he tried Gernsback first and got accepted. It is one of those wonderfully Lovecraftian tales without being a direct tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Like Donald Wandrei’s “The Tree-Men of M’Bwa” from Weird Tales, it has all the right elements without references to The Necronomicon or other such cliches.) Carl would write an actual Mythos tale in “The Aquarium” in later years.

Science Fiction fans aren’t always receptive to cosmic horror. When Lovecraft published “At the Mountains of Madness” in Astounding Stories in 1936, some fans complained. The readers of Wonder Stories are a little more open-minded. (January 1934) Morris Miller of New York said he liked the story, found it “instructive and full of imagination.” (February 1934) Joseph Dockweiler of Queens  said the story “didn’t appeal to me”. Jack Darrow listed the contents with “The Tomb From Beyond” in last place. Over-all, most letter writers ignored it.

Carl Jacobi did not become a hopeless Lovecraft imitator (like Robert Bloch for a few years). He enjoyed weird tales about haunted objects and ghosts as much as creepy crawlers. Stories like “The Face in the Wind.” (Weird Tales, April 1936) and “Spawn of Blackness” (aka “A Study in Darkness”) (Strange Stories, October 1939) show the HPL touch. Being friends with Donald Wandrei, August Derleth and later Clifford D. Simak, Jacobi’s group were all fans of Lovecraft. For Derleth and Wandrei that meant creating Arkham House but for Clifford D. Simak, a writer associated more often with the Golden Age of SF, there was “The Call From Beyond” (Super Science Stories, May 1950) perhaps an even more Lovecraftian SF tale.

Conclusion

H. P. Lovecraft’s influence on writers of the weird is pretty well documented. What is often forgotten is that HPL also wrote works with strong SF elements. His influence also affected some writers in that genre as well. Not as often. Some writers like Damon Knight would laugh at that. (He called him “The Tedious Mr. Lovecraft”.) Others, like J. Vernon Shea, felt differently. Back in 1933, the differences between Horror and SF weren’t as distinct as they have become over the decades. I still think we need a label for such stuff. I love it. I will keep looking for the best of the Science Fiction/Horror hybrids.

Next time… “The Cosmic Horror” by Richard F. Searight…