Ultimate Spoiler Thread Quire 3 (Part 2) (Patreon)

Spoiler Thread for Quire 3, part 2.

Page 121 is an allegorical view of the journey of the Elect to discover Kadath, and a chance to tie in the concept of Eihort as the God of the Labyrinth.

Page 122 once more the mark of the Ghouleh proves useful, and Abdel is reunited with Houda and Ayiz. Again the political tension within the Barrow is touched upon, and the fact that Ibn Schacabac uses magical protections such as the symbol shown (as well as other things revealed later). Iogash (Yogash) the Ghoul comes from Lovecraft’s tongue-in-cheek family tree. As the only named Ghoul (other than Pickman) I have used him as a basis for creating the other Ghoul names we encounter.

Page 123 has Abdel again doubting even his closest allies, before learning of the origin of the Tenebrae. Hsan and his Seven Cryptical Books were first mentioned by Lovecraft in his 1921 store “The Other Gods”. They may exist primarily in the Dreamlands, but as Ghouls have access to that realm I felt it was a good place to mention them. We then learn about the living quarters of the Pnathic Sect, and how the customs of Ghouls differ. In Robert Bloch’s The Grinning Ghoul (1936) there is mention of orgies, so I have a reference to “rash foining” as a nod to this, but with the caveat that they can not conceive in this way. More on that soon. We also learn that Houda, Akili, and Ayiz are sharing quarters, but Abdel is not receptive to her offer to join them.

Page 124 Abdel comes face to face the Host, the most ancient of the Ghouls in the barrow. They were first introduced back on page 120 and are meant to show the stratification of Ghoul society by age, origin, and (to some extent) gender, although this last point is tricky as the Ghouleh is separate from female Ghouls in a somewhat different manner. Ibn Schacabac’s comment about Ghouls not knowing Nyarlathotep even as they once frolicked in the tomb of Nephren-ka is me having fun referencing both The Outsider and Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Martlemas is a Shakespearean insult from Henry IV. Dark Han is a Robert Bloch creation that I had fun reverse engineering into Hebrew in the margin note.

Page 125 has the summoning ritual to Dark Han, inspired by similar scenes in the 1796 novel The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, and the 1786 novel Vathek by William Beckford, both of which Lovecraft mentions in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. Dark Han hints at Ibn Schacabac’s history along a different Path of the Mystery, and of the waning of his power.

Page 126 gives us the origin of the conflict with Yiban-nu (Tomeron) as Ibn Schacabac understands it, and the Call for Abdel to become Ibn Schacabac’s heir. Lengroot is my own creation, and I will admit was probably influenced by garlic and vervain and protections against vampires. My inspiration for Ibn Schacabac has always been the author Philip K. Dick who had an infamous temper, fits of paranoia, the belief that he was living multiple lives simultaneously and could communicate with an entity named "VALIS" (Vast Active Living Intelligence System). The woodcut art I am using for him all show the likeness of as well.

Page 127 has a rather nasty experiment performed by Houda that was inspired by actual discoveries made by Isaac Newton when he probed the space between his eyeball and eye socket with a blunted wooden needle. Google it and you will even find helpful illustrations made by Newton (but please don’t try this at home). Whether squishing your eye makes you see as a Shoggoth would is debatable, but it was fun to write!

Page 128 gives us a graph of Abdel’s findings, and an illuminating dinner conversation with Tomeron. The description of the envoy from the Cult of Tsathoggua being covered in toads references the 15th century Lazurus pageant of the Towneley Corpus Christi Cycle, in which Lazarus warns “a sheet shall be your royal robe / Toads shall be your brooch”, followed by “And the eyes out of your head / Thusly shall toads pick”. Unblinking sailor-folk who serve Cthulhu should be easy to identify, although Bahamut may be unfamiliar. We will be covering all of that in the next Book of the Necronomicon, starting with the Sixth Quire.

Pages 129 and 130 cover the source of Ghouls. This is very much based on the Clark Ashton Smith story The Nameless Offspring (1932) in which a woman suffering from cataleptic seizures is prematurely buried, and is visited by a Ghoul. She then dies after the birth of the titular offspring. At first glance this seems to be a case of a Ghoul fathering a child on a comatose woman, but on close examination the circumstances are left quite vague, and since we will already be dealing with Deep One/human cross breeding in Book Two, I thought it would be far more interesting to spin this incident in the tomb into a larger (and largely ritualized) story of how and why Ghoul children are swapped with human children. In his story Pickman’s Model Lovecraft has his narrator Thurber reference the myth of the changeling, and I am incorporating that while at the same time implying that something more unique has also occurred. So wronged women can summon the Ghouleh (with a “pin prick and a pledge”) and have their unborn child made one with the skulk of Ghouls. The trade off for this is that some of the women must remain in the Barrow, while the rest are returned to their homes to raise the Ghouls as their own kin. In the margin John Dee references the Cuckoo bird and takes umbrage at this deception. The man at the Gate of Ghouls crying for the return of his bride (page 116) may now be fully understood. The Ghouls with their lips sealed in gold leaf was inspired by a line in the works of Herodotus, but is more of a symbolic reminder of the pledge taken not to harm the women.

So the offspring who are returned to the human world must eventually make their way back to the skulk, but are only admitted if they bring a human with them. This is a reference to the plot of The Grinning Ghoul by Bloch (in which a Ghoul tries to trick a man into accompanying him into a Ghoul nest), and the Pickman painting “The Lesson” (in which a young child is taught to feed like a Ghoul). The Pickman painting to my mind contradicts the true Changeling myth, for if the child had been switched as a newborn it would surely know how to feed like a Ghoul by the time it was mobile. In any case, there are actions that must be performed, and traditions to be upheld. We will meet a Ghoul who experienced the hardship of being raised outside the Skulk in Quire 4.Dee’s comment about “leading apes in hell” was a strange and often repeated Elizabethan era curse on women who chose not to wed. I had fun making Dee be horrified by all of this. The real thrust of all of this twofold: I wanted to make a more interesting origin for where Ghouls come from, and at the same time add some choice in the matter to the women who birth them. 

Pages 131 and page 132 covers an equally heavy topic: the nature and use of Ghoul souls. Souls in general are a surprisingly consistent element in Lovecraft’s writing. In Dreamquest we are told Ghouls are doglike and soulless, which is interesting as they are also said to be descended from humans. Luckily, Lovecraft offers an explanation for this in his early tale The Hound. There we learn of an object (a jade amulet) that is both an “obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead”, and “about the relation of ghouls’ souls to the objects it symbolised”. From this I have run with the idea of totems or periapt that represent defensive entities comprised of the combined souls of multiple Ghouls. The Hound then is one of these entities, having been stolen from the corpse-eating cult of Leng, and having fallen into the hands of a warlock. The idea of the skull being that of a Gug comes from Dream-Quest, where Ghouls were said to eat the corpses of Gugs. That a living Gug could be seen as a fearsome threat while a dead Gug was a bounty that could feed a skulk for a year is a fun dichotomy. Then I decided to take the periapt concept to the extreme and make the carven mountains of the northward border between Leng and Kadath actually the repository of untold thousands of Ghoul souls, culled in ancient times, and said to be the gods of the Ghouls.  

Pages 133 and 134 are the attack on the Barrow by their enemies, and draws from the story The Graveyard Rats (1936) by Henry Kuttner for the nature of the creatures who break into the inner sanctum to steal and slay. The reference to bats ties back to The Hound where the Dutch warlock was able to command bats and other birds.

Page 135 the description of the abandoned graveyard Abdel and the Ghouls emerge into was partially inspired by a line in The Death of Halpin Frayser (1891) by Ambrose Bierce. 

Page 136 the two named Ghouls Kovash and Arkush came out of my brain remembering the name Arkosh Kovash, a Hungarian gangster from the film The Usual Suspects (1995) because I remember Giancarlo Esposito’s intonation as he reads the name off a medical report

Page 137 is the start of Chapter 4. The title The Black Pilgrimage is a reference to Count Magnus (1904) by M.R. James. I have referenced this story before as it is a personal favorite, but I will be going beyond the Christian associations of an Antichrist etc.that James drew upon for the Pilgrimage.

Page 138 begins a break from the narrative in order to describe the larger conflict with the Hidden Dwellers, the Black Spirits, etc. As I have noted before, the Black Spirits of Earth are shadowy and untrustworthy entities mentioned in The Call of Cthulhu, but here I tie them to the Slippery Blasphemies mentioned in The Strange High House in the Mist. The reason for creating an adversary for the Elect is twofold: first, it creates some much needed conflict, but more importantly I needed a way to square the tone of the Necronomicon quote from The Festival (coming up in just a few pages) with the rest of the book. When looking at Lovecraft’s two extant quotes (The Festival and The Dunwich Horror) one can’t help but see a difference in tone. The Festival quote shows repulsion and horror at the things being described, while the Dunwich Horror quote is so ecstatic with fervor over the imminent demise of humanity that he interjects a “Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” in the middle of a paragraph. To my mind the Dunwich version of the author’s outlook is much more interesting (by contrast, Lin Carter chose to follow the Festival lead in his Necronomicon fragments and has his Alhazred constantly horrified by everything he witnesses). So by creating an adversarial party Abdel and Ibn Schacabac can have disdain or revulsion for a particular group of squirming nether-beasts, while simultaneously living with an equally odious group of squirming nether-beasts.

Pages 139 and 140 describe how the Black Spirits seek to seduce solitary practitioners. I feel strongly that there is a connection between The Strange High House in the Mist and The Music of Erich Zann. If the unnamed resident of that House had answer the knock from the furtive shadow (“For there are strange objects in the great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up or meet the wrong ones”), he might have ended up in the same dire situation as Herr Zann. These corrupted practitioners are known as the Hidden Dwellers (or Hidden Masters) and examples of them include the resident of the Florida sepulcher from The Statement of Randolph Carter, the ancient wizard in Bloch’s Secret in the Tomb (1935), and the unseen ancestor who summons the narrator in The Festival.

Page 141 features the Necronomicon quote from Clark Ashton Smith’s Nameless Offspring. He sent an early draft to Lovecraft with some variant lines, so I have incorporated these here, then my version of his quote, and finally a few lines again from his letter to Lovecraft which (Robert M. Price astutely points out) sound like they are a continuation of the quote. The eyeless, web-fingered offspring are a reference to the Vincent Price film The Haunted Palace (1963) in which the evil influence of Joseph Curwen (another Hidden Dweller, especially in the film version) has corrupted the offspring of the surrounding village. This is a novel concept in the film and I really enjoyed the idea of it, even with the primitive makeup effects.

Page 142 has the first mention of the Black Winged Ones. I do not use the term Byakhee for the creatures in The Festival as this is either a Derleth invention or a Chaosium invention. Instead I have linked them with the creatures who come out to worship with the Cthulhu Cult in the swamp. 

Page 143 features the Lovecraft quote from The Festival, which is a hard act to lead up to as well as to follow. It is such a great bit of writing on Lovecraft’s part and I still have picked out all the plot threads he packed into those five lines.

Page 144 further describes the way the Hidden Dweller feeds on his own descendants, tying the plots of the Bloch and Lovecraft stories together. By my way of thinking Harley Warren was drawn to the grave by the same compulsion that brought The Festival’s narrator home to Kingsport or Bloch’s narrator out to the hidden crypt. It is a compulsion nearly impossible to deny, and keeps the torporous wizards fatted in their tombs. The exploration of how the Hidden Dwellers and the Black Spirits relate to the larger cosmology will be expanded upon in Quire 4.

Thank you for reading! Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments, or send me a private message.