Beyond the Gates of Dream, page 1
Beyond the Gates of Dream
Lin Carter
www.sfgateway.com
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
A Sort of Introduction, Called Here, and Back Again
Masters of the Metropolis
Chapter I: The Journey Begins
Chapter II: Aboard the ‘Subway Train’
Chapter III: Through the Vast Metropolis
Chapter IV: The Threat of the Mind Masters
Owlstone
Keru
The Hand of Nergal
1. Black Shadows
2. Field of Blood
3. Hildico
4. The House of Atalis
5. The Hand of Nergal
6. The Heart of Tammuz
7. Heart and Hand
Harvey Hodges, Veebelfetzer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Uncollected Works
The Mantichore from a Work-in-Progress
4. They Join in a Round of Converse
5. Of Darkling and Ominous Things
6. Wherein they Speak of the Woman
7. Aviathar Telleth his Tale
A Few Last Words
Website
Also by Lin Carter
Dedication
About the Author
Copyright
A Sort of Introduction, Called
HERE, AND BACK AGAIN
I AM an addict. I have a 164-page, Bok-covered, staple-fastened monkey on my back. And it’s been there, more or less, since I was nine or ten or like that, way back before the Flood. …
When I was a kid, back in the middle of the 1930’s, I was the sort of kid who thought it was more fun to poke around the back-corner shelves of the public library than to be out catching flies on second base (or whatever it is you do on second base). Now, I do not mean to put down those of you who would rather be out catching flies on second base: there isn’t anything wrong with fly-catching: it just isn’t my bag, that’s all.
I had already eaten my way through the Oz books, Mary Poppins, The Wind in the Willos, Tom Swift, and the now-neglected works of a gentleman called Roy Rockwood. (… as you can see, the infection had already set in …) And I had (so I thought at the time) exhausted all the nourishment there was to be found in Jules Verne—did you know, by the way, that his name isn’t really supposed to be pronounced the way it looks to American readers, JOOLZ VERN? Nupe. Being as he’s a Frog, it should be vocalized something like ZHOOL PHAIRN, more nor less. Sounds like wicked Jeddak …
Anyway, there I was prowling the shelves in search of succulent nutriment, half-deciding to go back and venture with Ojo in Oz once again … and I stumbled into a big fat shelf loading with plumpish books by some gink with the rather unlikely name of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Well, what the hell: I picked out one that looked fairly promising, checked it out at the big desk under the painting of Our Benefactor, Andrew Carnegie, and caught the streetcar home … and I can’t honestly say that I remember much of what else happened that afternoon … I was too busy riding my trusty thoat across the dead sea-bottoms, my longsword slapping my naked thigh, the two moons hurtling through the void above, with stout old Tars Tarkas loping along at my side …
I was a goner from that moment on.
*
IT WAS great being a kid in the days when I was a kid. My folks lived in St. Petersburg, Florida: a medium-sized town, clean, sleepy, sunny, nice. Nothing much ever happened there. We lived on a quiet side-street off Tangerine Avenue; there weren’t many kids around for me to play with, and the few who did live nearby were the type who preferred catching flies out on second base, so I just hung around the backyard most of the time, reading, playing with my dog Tip.
To anyone watching me as a kid, it must have looked like the nether extremities of Dullsville. But it wasn’t: I was having the time of my life; more excitement, more color, more magic, more thrills, more pure satisfaction was packed into those lazy, summery years than in the rest of my life rolled up in one big fat bundle of days. There was, literally, so much to do that there was hardly time enough to do it all. There were, of course, the drab necessities of life to be hurried through: school, homework, that sort of thing. But the rest of my time was one continuous voyage of discovery through the most enchanted worldful of wonders and perils ever set before a kid …
Here’s how it was. Every afternoon after you got home from school there was the big Philco cabinet in the alcove between the dining room and the living room. You remained hunched over next to it for several enchanted hours, drinking in the fascinating adventures of Jack, Doc and Reggie on I Love a Mystery (and to this day I can draw a multithroated sigh of simultaneous nostalgia from a room of slightly balding businessmen in their forties, by pitching my voice to a high, nasal Texas accent and drawling, in imitation of the unforgettable Barton Yarborough, “Lookee here, son, honest to my grandma …”), and Lights Outs by Arch Oboler, and Latitude: Zero, to see if the Skipper and Simba, aboard the supersubmarine Omega, had yet penetrated the lava wall around the mystery isle to confront the villainous Madame Shark and recover the stolen idol of Kali …
Later in the afternoon, you might go down to the store around the corner to pick up some groceries for your mother, ostensibly. Actually, you wanted to check, the drugstore to see if the latest issue of Planet Comics was out yet, and to peek at the Big Little Books in McCrory’s five-and-dime, hoping to find another just as good as Maximo, the Amazing Superman or of Buck Rogers, 25th Century A.D., and the Overturned World …
But Saturday was really the Big Day of the week. You started out early in the morning; you went downtown to Red Ackerman’s big newsstand and checked to make sure whether the latest issues of Startling Stories with that long-awaited new Leigh Brackett novel, Sea-Kings of Mars, was in yet … then you went down Central Avenue to your spiritual home, Haslam’s second-hand book and magazine store. There was eighty-five cents burning a hole in your pocket, and no telling what might have turned up in the stacks of dog’s-eared, dilapidated old pulps since last week … maybe another coveted issue of Doc Savage with Seven Agate Devils or The Whisker of Hercules in it … or another antediluvian copy of wonderful Weird Tales with yet another one of those enthralling Conan stories by Robert E. Howard … or a back issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, with a bewilderingly gorgeous Finlay cover, and A. Merritt’s The Snake Mother therein …
Later, after a glorious hour of turning over heaps of mouldering pulps and getting your hands filthy, reeking with the delicious smell of book-dust, you went down to the Roxy Theatre to see Chapter Four (“Death Takes the Wheel”) of The Adventures of Captain Marvel, to see if the big red cheese had finally gotten one of those dang lenses away from the sinister henchmen of The Scorpion yet. And, if you were lucky, the picture that played right after the serial might not be another dreary Roy Rogers in rust-and-blue Trucolor, but something scrumptious and yummy like Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr., in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, with Patric Knowles and Ilona Massey …
And if the serial that week happened to be, as rarely was the case, something crummy like a Western, you could always skip the popcorn-redolent darkness of the Roxy and go down to The Playhouse two blocks away, where they might be reviving Errol Flynn in Robin Hood, with Olivia de Haviland as Maid Marian, Claude Rains as Prince John, Alan Hale as Little John and Eugene Palette as Friar Tuck … or way downtown to The Cameo, where Tyrone Power might be playing in The Mark of Zorro, with Basil Rathbone and Linda Darnell …
After the thrill-drenched adventures of Saturday, Sunday was always a bore. But at least there was the Sunday funnies you could count on, and a delicious hour spent over the gorgeous, richly colored full page of Alex Raymond art. You had been waiting all week to see how Flash Gordon made it over the snowfields, and what happened when the flying snow-serpent attacked his party, and to find out
With all this going on every week, week after week, who could possibly be bored? And what kind of a clunkhead wants to waste time catching flies on second base?
*
THOSE who are kids today have, honestly, no conception of how they have been gypped by not having been kids twenty-five years ago. What can they possibly do with their time? They have no movie serials to watch, no Big Little Books to read, no radio melodramas to listen to, no pulp magazines to devour all the way through to the letter-columns tucked amid Ruptured? Throw Away That Smelly Old Truss! ads. They have nothing much worthy of their attention in the Sunday funnies (with the lone exception of Prince Valiant, of course, for Hal Foster is still going strong, God bless ’im and preserve him at least till the age of 2501); and while there are still comic books around, the ones you get these days have been carefully sanitized, deodorized, and approved by the gimlet-eyed Comics Code. That means no nekkid wimmen tied up being whipped, and no nekkid wimmen strapped down to operating tables at the mercies of giggling fiends, no jolly gory torture or seduction episodes …
In fact, about the best there is these days is sleazy, also carefully de-juiced, television serials like Lost in Space or Star Trek, which are, believe me, pretty skimpy fare to feed growing young minds on.
All in all, and not that I wouldn’t like to be ten or fifteen years younger, now that I find myself in the last couple of years before hitting the dreaded age of forty, I would not for any price have missed being a kid in the golden era when I was a kid. Thank God I had my mind thoroughly rotted with all that golden, priceless trash! Thank God my morals were wrecked, my ethics perverted, my taste forever tainted with a thirst for the gloriously fourth-rate! Thank God nobody worried about what loathsome effect all those junky comic books, movie serials, pulp magazines, horror movies, and other magnificent garbage were doing to our tender young minds! Of course we all became sadistic young perverts, the whole starry-eyed, Lovecraft-loving, Shadow-collecting generation! And damn few of us would have had it any other way …
And (especially) I thank whatever Gods may be that during these tender, impressionable years of my youth I was carefully kept away from Good Books, Wholesome Literature, Deathless Poetry, Enduring Drama, and Approved Beloved Classics! That stuff can really rot the mind, folks, and I know whereof I speak, for I have met people whose entire childhoods were passed among Fine Literature, avoiding entirely the infectious Trash Syndrome: people who turn an unbelieving eye toward me when I frankly state that I Love a Mystery was the greatest show in the history of radio, that Rafael Sabatini can write rings around Jean Genet and Sartre and Camus, that King Kong is thirty times as great a movie as Juliet of the Spirits or Blow-Up, that there is more pure Magic for me in the single word “SHAZAM!” than in any given half-a-book by William Burroughs or thirty solid minutes of listening to Bob Dylan or Brahms.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with Literature, but for the love of all that’s holy, you better come to it no earlier than your early twenties, or you can be ruined for life. During those golden years when my tastes were being permanently formed (or deformed, maybe), my mind permanently warped, and the horizons of my imagination permanently stretched to the boundaries of the Emerald City to the north, the ochre sea-bottoms of Barsoom to the east, the Spanish Main to the south, and Yu-Atlanchi, the forgotten city of Kor, the kingdoms of the Hyborean Age, and the peril-thronged, marvel-filled landscapes of Mongo to the west, the whole shape and style and flavor and direction of my future life was being set. And I would not now alter it by a hair.
It was later, much later, that I discovered the Good Stuff—Cabell, Dunsany, Eddison, Vathek, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Doyle, Kim, Pound, Perse, Dylan Thomas, The Sword in the Stone, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Graves, the Tang dynasty poets, Salammbô, Hafiz, Quintus Smyrnaeus, Chauras, Moby Dick, Anatole France, Baron Corvo, E. Nesbit, Paradise Lost, Malarmé, Ronald Firbank, John Dickson Carr, Cannery Row, Aleister Crowley, H.L. Mencken, Shirley Jackson, Tristram Shandy, Keats, e.e. cummings, C.S. Lewis, The Elder Edda, Thomas Burke, Arthur Machen, G.K. Chesterton, Amadis of Gaul, Costain, Shellabarger, Waltari, and Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.
By then I was ready for ’em.
*
THIS BOOK contains a lot of science fiction short stories, but they aren’t all short stories, and they aren’t all science fiction. You’ll find a little of everything here: some odds and ends of wacky humor, a satire, a pastiche, etc.
There’s fantasy here, three different kinds, in fact: an example of good old-fashioned Sword & Sorcery, a straight Neo-Classical horror story, and a fragment of Dunsanian-cum-Eddisonian-cum-Tolkienian epic fantasy, or imaginary-world fantasy, or whatever, and various assorted other Curiosa.
I’m not much of a short story writer. It is a very demanding artform, and not at all my dish of bourbon. Lin Carter is a novelist. He thinks like a novelist. His mind automatically works in terms of 60,000 words and fifteen chapters. Short stuff comes hard to me, when it comes at all. And the kind of short stuff I really want to write is the stuff that just don’t sell no more, not nohow, not nowhere. That’s why a number of these stories have no prior magazine credit. This one is a nostalgic harkening-back to the gore-splattered pages of Farnsworth Wright’s Weird Tales, and that one is a nutty, slapstick space opry like Startling Stories or TWS used to print, and this one was written in fond memories of Unknown Worlds.
And what do you do with yarns written out of love and memories that Pohl and Campbell and Avram Davidson wouldn’t touch? You stick ’em all in your first short story collection, of course!
So caveat emptor, folks, and …
Happy Magic!
LIN CARTER
Hollis, Long Island, New York.
February 1, 1969.
*
I HAVE a warm affection for this first yarn, an affection that is probably not justified in terms of its, ha ha, literary merit.
Back in 1956 I was living in a furnished room on Morningside Heights and taking a few classes at Columbia with Uncle Sam footing the bill. I had come back from a year with the infantry in Korea unscathed, gotten my Hon. Discharge, and come to New York for two years of collitch on the G.I. Bill.
Two blocks due west of where I lived was a mammoth residence hotel that the New York science fiction community called “Idiots’ Castle.” Therein dwelt, at various times, Bob Silverberg, Randy Garrett, Harlan Ellison, Ron and Cindy Smith (then editing Inside, which had yet to win its fanzine Hugo) and other good people. It was quite a place.
One Sunday afternoon, low in the pocket and low in spirits, I dropped over to squander a couple hours talking with Randy Garrett and sharing a couple quarts of beer. The conversation soon swerved in the direction of that redoubtable historian of Old Time Science Fiction, Sam Moskowitz. Moskowitz had been editing, briefly, a magazine called Science Fiction Plus, and he had been contributing things to fanzines, arguing that science fiction these dull days had lost its zing and moxie: gone were the Golden Days of Hugh Gernsback and such novels as Ralph 124C41+ … and whither had evanished the Sense of Wonder sf writers and readers used to have?
Well sir, two mighty mind’s found themselves playing with an idea-seed from which could grow, with a little judicious sampling of the product of the Messrs. Schaefer, a delicious and witty morsel of science fiction satire …
Chortling and snickering, writing alternate paragraphs, we occupied the rest of the afternoon and half of the night by tapping away at Randy’s typewriter, producing the following yarn. It is a slight piece, mildly amusing, but we had so much fun working over it, that we went downstairs, woke Ron Smith out of a sound sleep, read it to him, and he promptly accepted it for Inside, wherein, in the fullness of time, it was published. But it seems Ron liked it a hellova lot more than he let us two egoists know, for he surreptitiously snuck a copy of that issue to Tony Boucher, then editor of The Magazines of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and, by gum, Boucher liked it too, and printed it, and even paid for it. Hence this slim little in-joke became the first thing to which my name was attached which appeared professionally, and that explains the fond spot that it holds in my affections.
