This post is brought to you by “The Box”, a Book Collector story appearing at Anotherealm this month. Like “Big Man” that appeared last November, this is a new story not gathered in The Book of the Black Sun II: The Book Collector. “The Box” has the notoriety of being, chronologically, the first Book Collector tale. I currently have four stories, including these two, so a second collection is a ways off. I have been toying with doing a short novel, say 30,000 words for such a book.
I’m having such fun with the Monsters of the Hyborian Age, it is only natural I should do the Mythos beasties as well. (Both series feature monsters from different authors, not just one.) Not approaching this in any particular order I have chosen the Byakhee for the first one. It might have been the silhouette from my old Call of Cthulhu rulebook that made me think of this creature.
It first appeared in “The Festival” (Weird Tales, January 1925) by H. P. Lovecraft, so it is an original Mythos monster though as we will see, it was actually August Derleth who does some of the heavy lifting. HPL describes it thus:
Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membraneous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.
“The Festival” is a Christmas story with a lost traveler falling in with a band of occultists who call forth the terrible byakhee. Lovecraft has the worshippers jumping on the monsters’ backs and flying to a cave, so use as a mount is also original to Lovecraft. For a full detailing of the tale, go here.
August Derleth waited twenty years to revisit the weird mount in “The Trail of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales, March 1944) with the first of five pastiches that will form the novel The Trail of Cthulhu (1962). The magazine cover shows Professor Shrewsbury riding on a byakhee. The Canadian version, which had cover art of its own, also does. Both look like pterodacyls.
In this series of five interlocking segments, professor Shrewsbury then later his assistants use the byakhee to fly not to a cave but through outer space to the distant star system of Celaeno. They do this to escape a murderous bunch of Deep Ones and cultists from Innsmouth. To accomplish space flight, the rider must drink a space mead that allows them to suffer the vacuum of space. The beasts are called with an enchanted whistle (lovingly borrowed from M. R. James, no doubt.)
Derleth describes the monster more casually than Lovecraft:
There, silhouetted against the red-hued sky over Innsmouth, I saw a great flying thing, a great bat-like bird that came sweeping down and was lost briefly in the darkness—the Byakhee! Then it rose up again, and it was not alone—something more was there be-tween its great wings where it mounted swiftly out of sight….
Derleth in the final story reveals a secret about the Byakhee when Nayland Colum sees the frozen corpses of his previous assistants in the Nameless City, fearing he will be the fourth:
“…No, they are not dead; but, paradoxical as it may seem, they are not alive either. They are deposited here to wait for that time when their life essence, their souls, their astrals—name it what you will—are brought back. For this is the secret of the Byak-hee birds; they do not fly to Celaeno, but here, to this domain of Hastur, where the bodies of these young men are thus preserved. Soon now they themselves will return from Celaeno, and together all of us will make the final journey of this incredible search which has now come to the threshold of the secret.”
Shrewsbury admits he himself was frozen thus for twenty years and that he is of an incredible age now. He then pulls a Doctor Who “I’ll explain later!” and they are off exploring the city.
The byakhee belongs to the group of Winged Mythos Monsters, along with the Shantak and the Hunting Horrors (both will get their own posts, of course). Others can fly, too, such as Ithaqua, but he doesn’t have wings but winds. The monster that can attack from above has strong potential for good monster fights. Lovecraft may have been a fan of Samuel Hopkins Adams “The Flying Death” (McClure’s Magazine, January 1903) or better yet the book version from 1908. Phil Robinson’s “The Last of the Vampires” (1902) also feels right, though I have no proof HPL read either. Of those that followed HPL, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Three Miles Up” (We Are for the Dark, 1951) comes to mind.
The best comic book version of “The Festival” is Alberto Brecca’s from Il Mago #24, 1972. He never shows a clear image of the byakhee, preferring to keep them mysterious.
Conclusion
There are two distinct phases of enjoyment for me with this creature. First, to read Lovecraft’s original story is refreshing since the Mythos has yet to get crowded. Everything is still vague and probably more scary because of that. The second stage is really the age of Derleth, where we get to see a more adventure-oriented kind of tale using the same creatures. For the HPL purists, this is disagreeable but for someone like myself who writes adventure-oriented Mythos, it is a welcome first example. (I had a byakhee rip off the top of a sports car in “Body of Work”, for instance.)
Another early example was Robert E. Howard’s “The Fires of Asshurbanipal” (Weird Tales, December 1936) where old Cthulhu shows up . Go here for that one. Later still, we get Basil Copper’s masterwork, The Great White Space (1975). These extrapolations from Lovecraft don’t work for everyone but I can only encourage the reluctant to read them. They have rewards, like the Shrewsbury tales, of their own.
Mythos Horror at RAGE m a c h i n e
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