The Xothic Legend Cycle

INSPIRED in large measure by Lovecraft’s poem “The Outpost” and his revision tale “Winged Death”, “The Fishers from Outside” (which first appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu #54, Eastertide 1988) is a fine instance of its type, the story of a seeker alter ancient knowledge who experiments at the cost of his life to discover whether old legends may speak truly after all. Like its fellows in the genre, "The Fishers from Outside" creates the impression of a death wish on the part of its doomed protagonist. While other characters may scoff, the protagonist seems not merely to want to know one way or the other, but rather, like Heinrich Schliemann, to prove. Like Ouspensky, Professor Mayhew is “in search of the miraculous.” This in full knowledge of the fact that, if the hoped-for revelation proves our, it will surely mean his own death! How can we explain this? Is it an inherent and irredeemable implausibility that must rend the fabric of verisimilitude in any and every such Faustian tale? No, not at all, though some unimaginative school marms may think so.

Dénis de Rougement (Love in the Western World) explains what’s going on here, though I am extending and adapting his point somewhat. Faustian seekers in horror tales do not merely blunder into their fates. They are seeking an imagined "realer reality" higher than this mundane world. This is what Arthur Machen’s character Ambrose (in “The White People”) calls “real sin”, the storming of heaven. What is the sharper, brighter, realer world "beyond this illusion" (Kansas, “Carry On My Wayward Son”, 1975)? It is death. That is also the crucial key to the attraction of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, I suspect. File shadowy existence of the vampire, life lived on the edge, at the extreme, ironically makes the waking world of the living seem like dusty death by contrast. The chic of the vampire is, like traditional religious faith in an afterlife, a wishful denial of Epicurus’ truth: “When death comes, we are not.” Both afterlife belief and vampire fiction posit that when we are dead we will be aware of it, and that in this way death will be the elevation of life. Life was the tedious rehearsal; death is the real thing.

Even so, Professor Mayhew (like so many others) seeks a truth that, once known, must necessarily translate him from this dull sphere into the rarefied atmosphere of what lies outside, and that is death. Ironically, it is he, not the giant vultures, who is the “fisher.” He is casting his line out into the void, hoping to find the greater existence that overcomes the world: death. He might not know to put it into those words, bur his actions speak louder than words. Like Richard Pickman, horror delvers such as Professor Mayhew finally slip back into that darkness they loved to haunt, because for them, like the avatar in "The Haunter of the Dark", darkness is as radiant light.

In the original version of this story, Lin had confused Golgoroth, the amorphous god of darkness, and Groth-Golka. the bird-god, both of whom appear in Robert E. Howard's “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth.” He had intended to make the change to Groth-Golka, but did not get to it. In this publication of the story I have made the correction.