Re: Nemesis of the Unfinished?
Posted by:
casofile (IP Logged)
Date: 14 December, 2010 02:28PM
Good to hear from you, Leigh. It's easy to understand why you are interested in this alternate version; it seems to me a more satisfying conclusion. We would certainly have used it if only it was complete. The following paragraphs are not only quintessential CAS, they create a fascinating and unforgettable image:
"In one of the dreams, he was Guillaume de la Coudraie, sitting in his tower with the time-fretted chart, stained with nameless corruption, unrolled before him. He was girt for the journey to the hidden tomb; his scrip was packed with such impediments of magic as he might require; and the arthame, the wizard sword of consecrated metal, potent for defense against demons and liches and phantoms, glittered unsheathed on the table close to his right hand. But still he lingered, pondering the chart, whose lines and drawings and letterings, inscribed in the blood of vipers, seemed to shift and change beneath his anxious scrutiny till the route they indicated was another than the one that he had longed yet feared to follow.
By this sign, La Coudraie knew that the powers he had sought to control were working against him. He was mocked by those whom he had dreamt to dominate. He trembled, and peered fearfully about his chamber, seeing now that other signs had begun to manifest themselves. Curious red and nacarat flames, in the form of reptilian salamanders, had sprung up from the unlit, cinder-choked brazier that the wizard used in his incantations. They seemed to lengthen and lean toward him in uncoiled menace, with heads whitening to intolerable brightness. Pallid vapors, flat as papery tongues, issued from the piled grimoires and swelled interminably, darkening and thickening to the semblance of malign genii whose eye-sockets seethed with lurid fire under night-black brows.
Lowering his gaze in terror, the necromancer saw that the changing lines and ciphers had been wholly erased from the chart before him. In their stead, on the blank surface, appeared the lineaments of a baleful and infernal visage. Though the livid eyelids were shut, the face was that of Alastor, demon of vengeance . . . . Slowly, dreadfully, it emerged from the flatness of the parchment, rearing on a python-like neck till it confronted La Coudraie on a level with his own face. Slowly, horribly, the eyes opened ....
La Porte awakened, or seemed to awaken, from his necromantic nightmare. At least, he was conscious of being back in his cabin, seated before the typewriter just as he had fallen asleep. The profound terror of the sorcerer La Coudraie still possessed him; nor, in the circumstances of his awakening, was there anything to mitigate the terror.
By the light of the oil-lamp, burning stilly beside his Remington, he found himself stating into the same Satanic face that had risen from the sorcerer's chart and had opened its basilisk eyes upon him in his dream. The face was mounted on the same scaled ophidian neck. Algae-green, with ashen mottlings, the neck thickened downward, seeming to issue from the blank sheet of paper, newly inserted, that curved back across the Remington's roller. Clear and rigid as icicles, twin shafts of light poured from the unpupilled eyes, transfixing his very marrow, filling the darkest cells of his brain with their searching, searing illumination.
Inch by tedious inch, like one half-paralyzed, he turned from the direct gaze of the apparition—only to confront the shapes and faces of Pandemonium. Like those that had sprung from the wizard's brazier, burning elementals rose amid the charred logs in his fireplace, breathing smoke and heat as they serpentined outward into the room. Endless vapory scrolls unfurled from between the leaves of his massed manuscripts, dilating into Powers and Dominations. Bloated incubi swam toward him on the air, levitating themselves pronely, quivering like obscene jellies, and lolling their fulsome vermilion tongues from taurine mouths.
Out of all these shapes, that seethed and fumed in perpetual agitation, there pulsed an insufferable horror that centered upon La Porte: a horror older than man, older than the world, deeper than the earth's caverns or the crypts of the brain."
I liked your theory that CAS intentionally left this tale unfinished, so I dug out my photocopy and examined the last page of the alternate version. I thought we might be on to something when I realized the page was in fact a few lines short. However, further examination showed no real consistency in the number of lines per page; anywhere from 27-31, with 29 being pretty much the average. And, as it turned out, the page in question had 29 lines.
It seems to me that the final page of the TMS being a full page rather than otherwise tends to support the incomplete theory; this and the fact that "Nemesis of the Unfinished" did not appear on Smith's own list of completed stories.
As Scott mentions, it's entirely possible the missing page (or pages) may turn up someday . . . we can only continue looking, and hoping.
-Ron