Valzain, the young voluptuary, weary of feasting and debauchery leaves the house of a friend when the revels are at their height, and wanders forth from Umbri, city of the Delta, to an old necropolis on a mound-like hill half-way between Umbri and Psiom, the twin city. Here, in the moonlight, he meets a beautiful being who calls herself Morthizza, lamia and spirit of the tombs. Half-believing, half-disbelieving, in his weariness of mortality and of fleshly things, he falls in love with her. They meet night after night. His desires begin to revive, but she tantalizes him, refusing corporeal contact. One night, as playful proof that she is a vampire, Morthylla wounds him in the throat with her teeth, saying that this is the only kiss permitted between them. But, as proof of her love, she will not suck his blood. Valzain pleads for a further consummation. Wistfully, she tells him that he must know and love her as she really is before such a consummation would be possible. A day or two later Valzain, visiting the twin city Psiom, sees a woman in the street who has the very features of Morthylla. A friend tells him that she is Beldith, a woman of pleasure, who lately has been absenting herself from the orgies of Psiom, and has been seen going forth at night toward the old necropolis that was once common to both of the cities of the Delta. Valzain, disillusioned, realizes that she is identical with Morthylla, and that she has been playing a game with him. He seeks her out and taxes her with the deception, which she readily admits, at the same time asking if he cannot love her as a mortal woman, since she, all the time, had loved him as a man. Valzain, fearful of the revulsion of the flesh which, for him, has ensued from every carnal contact, tells her sorrowfully of his disenchantment, and without reproaches, bids her farewell. Later, unable to bear the tedium of existence, he commits suicide, stabbing himself in the throat with a sharp poignard at the same spot were Morthylla’s teeth had wounded him. After death, he finds himself at that point in time where he had first met Morthylla among the tombs, and the illusion begins to repeat itself for him, presumably with no danger of an awakening. The woman Beldith grows old and grey among the revelries of Psiom; but her intimates note that she seems often absent-minded between the wine-cups; and her young lovers sometimes complain that she is distrait and unresponsive in their arms.

²

A poetic couplet that was entered a few entries before the above-quoted entry would appear in hindsight to have provided the germ of this idea:

For in your voice are voices from beyond the tomb.

And in your face a shadow risen from vast vaults.

³

The Relationship of Valzain and Famurza resembles that of CAS and his mentor, George Sterling.

Weird Tales snatched this story up and published it in the May 1953 issue. The magazine would soon be reduced to digest size and would cease publication in little over a year. Smith included the story in TSS. Only a couple of pages of the typescript for “Morthylla” survive among Smith’s papers at JHL; most of the typescript perished in the September 1957 fire that destroyed Smith’s cabin.

1. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 371 [misdated 1953 in this appearance]).

2. BB item 99.

3. BB item 94.

Schizoid Creator

Psychoanalysis and psychiatrists were not subjects near to Clark Ashton Smith’s heart. In his 1934 essay “On Fantasy” he listed “Freudianism” as one of the chief forces working against the imagination in modern life, and in a 1949 symposium on science fiction he offered the quip “Sometimes I suspect that Freud should be included among the modern masters of science fiction!”² One of his epigrams states that “One can postulate anything, and people will accept it as religion, philosophy—or psychoanalysis.”³

Smith gave full vent to his contempt for Freud’s minions in one of two stories he wrote early in the autumn of 1952, “Schizoid Creator.” As he described the tale to L. Sprague de Camp, it was “a fantastic satire that mixes black magic with psychiatric shock-treatment (the patient being a demon!).”⁴ The “black magic” to which Smith refers is the use of the names of God to compel entities both demonic and divine to do the sayer’s will. Two consecutive items in Smith’s Black Book illuminate this further:

According to Jewish tradition, when Lilith refused to yield obedience to Adam, she uttered the Shemhamphorash, the ineffable name of Jehovah, and, by virtue of this, instantly flew away. This utterance gave her such power that even Jehovah could not coerce her.

According to widespread belief, the gods have kept their true names secret but other gods, or even men, should be able to conjure with them. To the Mohammedan, Allah is but an epithet in place of the Most Great Name; and the secret of the latter is committed to prophets and apostles alone. Those who know the Most Great Name can, by pronouncing it, transport themselves from place to place at will, can kill the living, raise the dead to life, and work other miracles.

⁵

Smith refers to “Shem-hamphorash, the nameless name,” in his last poem, “Cycles.”⁶

The image of Satan caressing a flayed girl is a homage to his mentor, George Sterling. In his poem “A Wine of Wizardry” Sterling included the following lines:

But Fancy still is fugitive, and turns

To caverns where a demon altar burns,

And Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,

Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed,

Ere Lilith come his indolence to greet,

Who leads from hell his whitest queens, arrayed

In chains so heated at their master’s fire

That one new-damned had thought their bright attire

Indeed were coral, till the dazzling dance

So terribly that brilliance shall enhance.⁷

Smith submitted the story to Fantasy Fiction, a digest-sized competitor of Weird Tales that emulated the model of Unknown Worlds, where it appeared in the November 1953 issue. Only burned fragments survive of the typescript for this story, and what parts can still be read would seem to indicate that it was an earlier draft—there are differences with the published text, but the differences are cruder and less polished than what finally appeared. The current text is based upon the Fantasy Fiction text.

1. PD 38: “In short, all pipe-dreams, all fantasies not authorized by Freudianism, by sociology, and by the five senses, are due for the critical horse-laugh.…”

2. CAS, letter to AWD, February 11, 1949 (SL 358).

3. CAS, The Devil’s Notebook. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Don Herron (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990): p. 71.

4. CAS, letter to L. Sprague de Camp, October 21, 1952 (SL 370). This letter is misdated 1953.

5. BB items 21 and 22.

6. CAS, “Cycles.” In The Wine of Summer: The Complete Poetry and Translations Volume 2. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008): p. 642.

7. George Sterling, “A Wine of Wizardry.” The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror. Ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003): 150–151.

Monsters in the Night

Anthony Boucher (pseudonym of William A. P. White [1911–1968]) had given Clark Ashton Smith’s first two Arkham House collections favorable reviews, so when he became one of the founding editors of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, he would appear to have been a reliable new market for Smith’s stories. Boucher even lived in nearby Berkeley, California, where Smith visited frequently to visit his friend George Haas, with whom Boucher was also acquainted.