Minutes of the Lovecraft Studies Institute (# 1) [Cthulhu]

LOVECRAFT STUDIES INSTITUTE

xxx WELLESLEY STREET EAST, # xxxx (BUZZ xxx)

TORONTO, ON M4Y 1H5

MINUTES OF APRIL 10, 2010 MEETING

ATTENDANCE: Patrick, Bloch, King, Joshi, Cannon (Members)
Five Guests

6:02 P.M. Meeting Convened

6:04 P.M. Approval of Minutes for Meeting of March 3, 2010

6:05 P.M Chair proposes reading of “Harbinger” manuscript Prologue (“Red on the Rails”) and Chapter 1 (“The Old Farmhouse”)
UNANIMOUS

7:03 P.M. Reading Concludes

7:05 P.M. Chair proposes open discussion
UNANIMOUS

[FULL TRANSCRIPT FROM AUDIO]

PATRICK:

Members of the Institute and Honoured Guests, that was quite a treat. I’m sure we all have something to say about the first authentic Lovecraft manuscript to be discovered in decades, so I’d like to organize our discussion around key scenes in the story. Let’s start with the first scene of the Prologue, which takes place at a train station. Here we have a crowd assembled to travel to various stops (real and fictional) in the northwest part of Massachusetts, along the border to New Hampshire. The main drama in this scene is provided by the apple seller. Taunted by children, he grows frustrated and either reckless or intentionally suicidal, and appears to be in danger of being hit by an oncoming locomotive.

JOSHI:

I’d just like to add that Boston’s North Station is a real train station, one still in service today.

KING:

Save it for the annotated version, Joshi.

[snickering]

KING:

Two things surprised me about this scene. First, this priest character simply talks the man down—somewhat anticlimactic, and one of the few times Lovecraft presents religious authority figures in such a positive light. Second, this British character (who we later learn is a manservant) gives the bum fifty dollars. Later on in Chapter One, he gives a hearse driver a hundred bucks! Even today that’s a lot of money to be throwing around. If this were my book set in the Great Depression, I would have had other passengers mob the butler for handouts.

CANNON:

To be fair, we haven’t seen the whole story. Perhaps there’s more to this Matheson than meets the eye, and Lovecraft is setting something up. I was more disappointed in the portrayal of the bum. A stockbroker who has lost his fortune, now selling apples just seems so . . . clichéd.

JOSHI:

It only seems clichéd because we’re viewing the manuscript through eighty years of portrayals of the Depression. Lovecraft is writing in the early thirties, so this character may have seemed fresh at the time.

PATRICK:

Let’s move on to the next scene, where we see all the main protagonists of the novel (so far) together for the first time, placed together in a First-Class/Bereaved Class cabin. We have an elegantly dressed woman, Scarlet Warren, who offers only vague hints at her background. The aforementioned Catholic priest, an Irishman named Patrick Murphy. A travelling salesman named Hoyt Symmes. The British manservant, Harleigh Matheson. And an extraordinarily handsome, but mysterious, fellow named Jacob Blackstone.

BLOCH:

I thought maybe the opening scene needed work, but here it seems we’re really starting to get the story started, as we learn that they’re each travelling to the same place because they’ve received a mysterious telegram that has something to do with this dead farmer, Abraham Gilmore.

JOSHI:

The “place” that they’re travelling to, Mr. Bloch, is none other than the famous village of Dunwich from The Dunwich Horror. Although we obviously don’t yet know what happens in Chapter Two, I strongly suspect that Lovecraft plans to revisit one of his most famous settings (other than Arkham and Kingsport, of course).

BLOCH:

I knew that.

JOSHI:

If you knew that, why didn’t you say it?

PATRICK:

Gentleman, please remember decorum.

[general assent]

PATRICK:

Through dialogue, the ostensible motivations for each of these characters to be on the train become apparent. The woman, Scarlet Warren, drops vague hints that Mr. Gilmore may have bequeathed her a picture collection. Similarly for Mr. Symmes, but with a rare book collection. Father Murphy has been asked to preside at Gilmore’s funeral. The last two characters, however, have more complex motives. The butler, Matheson, hints that his “Master” has gone missing and might be found at the Gilmore farm. Blackstone seems quite reticent to explain his purpose for being there, but eventually implies that he plans to investigate or perhaps even debunk some sort of supernatural claims once made by Old Man Gilmore.

KING:

Well, it’s Lovecraft, so the debunker is the one who’ll be debunked!

[laughter]

CANNON:

It’s certainly an interesting collection of characters, more diverse in both nationality and occupation than most of Lovecraft’s previous works. Usually he writes about professionals like academics, explorers, archaeologists, etc.

BLOCH:

And what about this Scarlet Warren character? If I didn’t know better, I’d think Lovecraft was implying she had an . . . unsavoury profession for a young woman.

JOSHI:

Veiled hints is all we’re ever likely to see. Anything more explicit would render the work unpublishable.

BLOCH:

But it wasn’t ever published.

PATRICK: We get the first hints of something strange happening aboard the train when the conductor character appears. He’s described as a gaunt man, with wet gray hair plastered to his head, and palms that always seem moist. Later, he seems to indicate to the Symmes character that he knows more about him than he should.

KING:

I loved the conductor—very creepy, and I can imagine him in one of my movies with a strange, over-friendly accent, too intimate gestures, and so forth.

PATRICK:

Soon after, Blackstone leaves for the lavatory, and when he returns he reports having found a dead body—one of the porters, if I remember correctly. At this point, the butler pulls a large rifle, complete with bayonet, from his luggage, much to the shock and dismay of his fellow travelers.

JOSHI:

This foreshadows Matheson’s aggressive tendencies in the following chapter—he’s the driving force behind the ill-fated attack on the breeding queen, despite the great personal risk to himself. I suspect that, perhaps, Lovecraft was influenced when he wrote this by the highly popular (and profitable) trend towards pulp action heroes—two-fisted men of adventure, quick to leap into action. Doc Savage, for example, appeared in March of 1933. Although this novel was set in 1931, we don’t know precisely when Lovecraft wrote it.

CANNON:

An interesting theory, my friend. More research will be needed to confirm it, however.

PATRICK:

The protagonists investigate the body and learn that the porter has a strange injury around his ear, with blood and greyish-greenish manner splashed around the wound. Before they can take further significant action, three of the five suddenly faint and envision themselves submerged deep in an airless abyss, trying desperately to reach the surface yet feeling that something is trying to hold them down. The three each dream of suffering a painful wound in their back before awakening. Yet they awaken to a reality that may be just as terrifying as the dream, because after the train enters a dark tunnel, its interior lighting is replaced with a strange, reddish glow.

KING:

The next scene is my favourite of the manuscript so far. The protagonists enter the next car to see that all of the passengers are unconscious, and that the two ladies running the concession cart are feeding on them. They take turns, one sucking cerebral fluid from a victim’s ear through a ghastly proboscis, while the other regurgitates the fluid into a fluted glass vial.

CANNON:

And here, it is not the heavily-armed butler who fires—but instead the shakened, would-be debunker, Mr. Jacob Blackstone. Three shots are fired from the man’s revolver, two of which strike the unworldly, hound-like women (with little effect). The third, alas, strikes an innocent passenger in the forehead. I especially liked Lovecraft’s portrayal of the fear and guilt this character feels throughout the rest of the story.

BLOCH:

We also get the first mention of what I assume will be a major theme of the novel: the concession women advance menacingly towards the protagonists, but do not attack because the protagonists are “Harbingers.” Harbingers of who, or what? Later we suspect that only the three who fell unconscious and bear the three-serpent brand are properly called Harbingers, but these brain-sucking creatures seem not to make a distinction among the five.

JOSHI:

That may simply be an editing issue—Lovecraft often rewrote large portions of his manuscripts, even after they were accepted for publication.

PATRICK:

In any event, the protagonists retreat to the first-class car and soon thereafter the train leaves the tunnel—except the conductor announces Aylsbury as their next stop. The protagonists are shocked that they somehow missed several hours and stops, and Blackstone’s watch confirms that something strange has happened with the flow of time.

KING:

And here the priest character, Father Murphy, and the butler, Harleigh Matheson, continue to establish themselves as the dominant characters of the story. They go to great lengths to ensure that the train remains at the station until the Aylesbury County Sheriff arrives to investigate the dead porter. I always tend to skip these types of scenes in my own work as it’s scarier if the protagonists feel no one is out there to help them.

PATRICK:

Still, it is a realistic response to an unrealistic phenomenon. Blackstone, it should be noted, returns to the passenger car only to find that the passenger he thought he shot is missing. The others, in a very creepy way, cock their heads and smile at him in unison.

JOSHI:

The reluctance of the cab driver, Joe Bicks, to take them all the way to Dunwich fits in well with the village’s reputation as established in The Dunwich Horror. It’s supposed to be an insular, backwards village with a reputation for strange things going on there. But even Joe Bicks won’t turn down the amount of money that Matheson offers.

PATRICK:

Just to be clear on the timeline, the protagonists actually spend the night in a local inn and head to Dunwich itself the following morning. Before they leave, however, a couple of important events happen that may be important later in the book. First, Father Murphy comes across a startling ad in the Classified section of the Aylesbury Transcript:

Feeling Trapped?
Marked?
Harbinger?
Call NO-416-A873

Murphy makes his way to Aylesbury’s small Catholic church, St. Mary’s. There he talks a Father William Bell into allowing him to use the phone and call the number. The man on the other end (a New Orleans number) is quite cryptic, but he’s surprised “that it’s spread so far” and claims to be working on the problem. Second, that same morning, Murphy, Matheson, and Symmes travel to the Aylesbury post office and talk a clerk into divulging the name of the woman who sent each of them the telegram that lured them on board the train: a “Ms. Dunham” of Dunwich. That could be a pseudonym, however.

BLOCH:

Can we move this along? It’s getting late . . .

[general assent]

PATRICK:

Point taken—I needn’t repeat every detail of the story. Moving onto Chapter One, the furthest we’ve yet deciphered of the manuscript. At the Gilmore farmhouse, which appears to be midway between Dunwich and Aylesbury, the protagonists encounter a housekeeper named Mrs. Masbry. She claims to have found the body of Mr. Gilmore just last night, which shocks the protagonists as they received telegrams confirming the man’s death the prior morning. In any event, the group is made quite at home by Mrs. Masbry and begin to explore the old farmhouse.

KING:

This portion of the story seemed more like a mystery novel, and is something I don’t remember Lovecraft doing before in quite this way. We have the debunker, Blackstone, finding a torn piece of paper in dead Gilmore’s clenched fist (which must have been clichéd even back then!) and coming across two mysterious books in a locked box—one in German, one in Latin. We have one or two characters, I forget which, coming across Gilmore’s recently-deceased dog in a trunk in the attic. We even have a comical attempt by Matheson to break down the cellar door, with the housekeeper in the very next room! Fortunately, Father Murphy is able to obtain the key simply by asking. In the cellar, Murphy finds another scrap of paper underneath a massive workbench and notices strange grooves on the dirt floor in front of the bench.

CANNON:

And throughout this, I think Lovecraft does a nice job of gradually, and in a non-threatening way at first, making it clear that this entire farmhouse is infested by hundreds, even thousands of rats.

JOSHI:

Very true—in a way, this portion of the story may have been a conscious attempt to rework The Rats in the Walls as a chapter in a novel. What’s below the tunnel in the cellar, however, is quite different!

KING:

If time-travel were real, I would think Lovecraft stole this from me—but I guess the idea of an elephant-sized, bloated, immobile breeding queen rat must have just been one of those ideas bound to independently come to more than one author—even if they are separated by fifty years.

PATRICK:

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, gentlemen. Before the climax, remember, the protagonists are startled to see the corpses of three horses in the barn being devoured by thousands of rats. In true Lovecraftian fashion, the encyclopedia salesman, Hoyt Symmes, collapses into hysteria, while Blackstone (courageous debunker!) flees for his life.

BLOCH:

I really loved the irony of the next part—they narrowly save the barn from being engulfed by Symmes’ dropped lantern, and then a scene or two later Matheson and Father Murphy decide to put the barn to the torch!

PATRICK:

And at this point, we’ve still seen very little of the Scarlet Warren character. Perhaps she’ll factor in more later on. Maybe Lovecraft was unsure of how to write a young, fashionable woman? In any event, we now have the characters quite spread out. Symmes has started walking back to Aylesbury, where the others eventually join him to hash out whether they should all leave or go back. The housekeeper, Mrs. Masbry, has been trundled off, accompanying the body of Gilmore in a hearse summoned by Matheson.

JOSHI:

You’ve probably forgotten the most important discovery of this scene. The three marked characters, the “Harbingers” as it were, are unable to separate from one another to a significant distance without immediately falling ill. I suggest that their search for the cause and removal of this affliction will drive the reminder of the manuscript.

PATRICK:

Thank you for noting my oversight.

KING:

Now can we talk about the conclusion of the chapter?

BLOCH:

Please god, do.

KING:

At first, only Matheson is willing to face this brood queen of a rat. Now, his motives for doing so aren’t quite clear to me, but he certainly goes at it with fervour, hacking and slashing into the monstrosity with a World War I bayonet.

JOSHI:

Somewhat more graphically, I might add, than most of Lovecraft’s previous work. The scene where he goes temporarily mad, and sucks on the giant rat’s teat, would have, I’m sure, been redacted by any competent editor of the time period.

KING:

I loved it!

JOSHI:

You would.

PATRICK:

Gentlemen. As Matheson attacks the brood queen, Father Murphy is suddenly seized with a crisis of conscience and decides to come to his aid. Murphy attempts to cast an occult spell, something he’ll certainly have to talk about during his next confession.

[laughter]

PATRICK:

I believe we haven’t yet mentioned the Orobourus Purgotae spell, labelled To turn spawn against that which beget them. This was discovered by placing the two torn pieces of paper together, and was quite expertly deciphered by Symmes. We start to get a sense from this that perhaps the man has more knowledge of occult things than a mere encyclopaedia salesman should. In any event, Murphy rushes to the tunnel under the cellar to find Matheson being swarmed by dozens, hundreds, thousands of rats. The priest tries to cast the spell, but stumbles over the words and the incantation has no effect. However, quite heroically I might add, he manages to drag the unconscious Matheson out of the tunnel and perform first aid to keep the man from dying.

KING:

And then everything gets very The Fall of the House of Usher.

JOSHI:

An apt remark. As the protagonists flee the scene, thousands and thousands of rats climb the walls and roof of the farmhouse, until eventually the whole building collapses under their weight.

PATRICK:

So with Matheson badly hurt and unconscious, Symmes & Blackstone panicked, and Warren & Murphy mostly unharmed, the chapter ends.

KING:

I’m quite curious where Lovecraft plans to go with this.

BLOCH:

A great topic for next month. Motion to adjourn?
UNANIMOUS

1:02 a.m. MEETING ADJOURNED