A Study In Emerald Read online

  The city of the Old Ones got it in the neck. They hated the dry and the cold, as did their creatures. All of a sudden they were in the Antarctic, dry as a bone and cold as the lost plains of thrice-accursed Leng.

  Here endeth the lesson for today, Whateley.

  And will you please get somebody to feed that blasted shoggoth?

  III.

  (Professors Armitage and Wilmarth are both convinced that not less than three pages are missing from the manuscript at this point, citing the text and length. I concur.)

  The stars changed, Whateley.

  Imagine your body cut away from your head, leaving you a lump of flesh on a chill marble slab, blinking and choking. That was what it was like. The party was over.

  It killed us.

  So we wait here below.

  Dreadful, eh?

  Not at all. I don't give a nameless dread. I can wait.

  I sit here, dead and dreaming, watching the ant-empires of man rise and fall, tower and crumble.

  One day—perhaps it will come tomorrow, perhaps in more tomorrows than your feeble mind can encompass—the stars will be rightly conjoined in the heavens, and the time of destruction shall be upon us: I shall rise from the deep and I shall have dominion over the world once more.

  Riot and revel, blood-food and foulness, eternal twilight and nightmare and the screams of the dead and the not-dead and the chant of the faithful.

  And after?

  I shall leave this plane, when this world is a cold cinder orbitting a lightless sun. I shall return to my own place, where the blood drips nightly down the face of a moon that bulges like the eye of a drowned sailor, and I shall estivate.

  Then I shall mate, and in the end I shall feel a stirring within me, and I shall feel my little one eating its way out into the light.

  Um.

  Are you writing this all down, Whateley?

  Good.

  Well, that's all. The end. Narrative concluded.

  Guess what we're going to do now? That's right.

  We're going to feed the shoggoth.

  © Neil Gaiman 1986

  A "follow-up" letter appeared in Dagon #17 , April, 1987:

  Nice to see "I Cthulhu" in print at last: the only other Lovecraftian article I plan on doing at some point is annotating some correspondence that has come into my hands relatively mysteriously. Which is to say, it is not generally known that the H.P. Lovecraft letters we know and love are incomplete in one important respect.

  In the late twenties and early thirties a young English writer—who, like Lovecraft, thought little of writing twenty thousand word letters—was in New York , working on his own books and writing the librettos to musicals.

  That Lovecraft, a devoted anglophile, was a fan of the man's work is unsurprising. That P.G. Wodehouse was a fan of Weird Tales is perhaps more so. How their lengthy correspondence got into my grubby little hands I do not wish to go into at this point. Suffice it to say that I possess not only their only collaborative novel (alternatively titled The What Ho! On The Threshold and It's the Call of Cthulhu, Jeeves ) but also fragments of their musical, Necronomicon Summer , in which the heroine is called upon to sing those immortal lines:

  I may be just a bird in a gilded cage

  A captive like a parakeet or dove,

  But when a maiden meets a giant lipophage

  Her heart gets chewed and broken, like that old adage—

  —I'm just a fool who

  Thought that Cthulhu

  Could fall in love!

  The similarities between the two authors—not only in names, but also biography, both of them having been brought up by aunts for example (one of a legion of similarities) leads one to ponder why the collaborations were a failure and covered up by both men, and why they conducted their work together in such secrecy. Certainly the novel throws a fascinating light on both their obsessions (the sequence in which Aunt Agatha is revealed to be Nyarlathotep, and the Wooster-Psmith expedition to the thrice accursed plains of Leng, enlivened by their running battle over Bertie Wooster's bow-tie, spring to mind immediately).

  When it is fit for publication; when copyright is cleared; and when the significant question of whether these are the Wodehouse-Lovecraft Letters, or the Lovecraft-Wodehouse Letters (or whether, as been suggested, one should compromise into, for example, the Lovehouse-Wodecraft Letters) has been fully sorted out: then I can assure you that your publication shall be the first to know about it.

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