Joshua Reynolds's Blog, page 22

He Still Lives

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Two bullets in his heart. But he still lives.

– Wolf Von Frankenstein

Son of Frankenstein, released in 1939, is a step in a darker direction for the Monster. In Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Boris Karloff’s nuanced performance built the beast up as a sympathetic character, a child of misfortune, driven into the wilderness and savagery by a hateful world.

But the Monster of Son… is a different beast entirely. Karloff’s savage performance is jarring, akin to watching a beloved pet suddenly turn vicious.

Perhaps that was the point. The Monster has learned, you see.

Once poor, misguided Wolf Frankenstein returns him to full strength, healing his ravaged flesh and rendering him capable once more of movement, the Monster goes into action.

For the first time, Karloff’s creature is not simply reacting. He’s acting out, ostensibly following the directives of the loathsome Ygor, but it’s obvious that he’s deriving an immense satisfaction from wringing the necks of his victims.

The Monster has learned that the only good human is a dead human. He knows now that none of them are to be trusted, especially a Frankenstein, and he acts accordingly, killing them as one would vermin. The individuals don’t matter. They are simply wet, red playthings for a creature that has, at last, transcended its former handicaps.

Here is the Monster in full flower. A fallen angel. Something that could have been beautiful, kind, wonderful, is instead at last become ugly, hateful and terrible in its rage. It shakes the foundations of Heaven, Grendel ravaging Heorot, not out of hunger, but out of hate.

For the first time, the Monster does not kill because it is driven to do so, but because it desires the death of all that is not itself.

Even the psychopathic Ygor displays some trepidation at its savagery, soothing it with his music from a safe distance. Lugosi makes it very clear in his performance that he does not control the Monster, but is, instead, merely influencing it. For him, the Monster is a tool that could very easily turn on its wielder. And it soon does, choosing its own path when Ygor meets his (temporary) fate.

The Monster at last comes for Frankenstein, stealing his child, in order to punish via proxy, an act which displays the true depth of the rot that has overtaken the creature’s once innocent soul. But like Milton’s Lucifer, Karloff’s Monster is sent spinning to Hell by his creator – or his creator’s son, rather; shades of Lucifer’s defeat by the Archangel Michael. His rage is at last abated by defeat.

By the next film, the Monster, bereft of Karloff’s animating spirit, is burnt-out husk. Bled white, its fiendish intellect replaced by dull clumsiness, and eventually, blindness.

It’s to Lugosi’s credit that with Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, he gives us a glimpse of that old infernal drive at the climax, but it’s not the same. Lugosi’s Monster is not Karloff’s. The brain, the soul is different.

Instead of a terrible angel of science, it is just another beast of low lusts, fodder for the arena.

A sad fate for any monster.

We’re all dead here.

– Ygor

The Great Sage of Mortlake

Today’s instalment of the Royal Occultist Compendium takes a look at the first person to hold the office – Dr. John Dee.

Dr. John Dee. Cosmologist, cartographer, alchemist, philosopher, scientist, mathematician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I – and the first holder of the offices of the Royal Occultist.

A polymath, Dee at one time might have possessed one of the largest occult libraries in the western world. He claimed to speak the language of angels, and may have been a spy.

Dee, alongside his first assistant, Edward Kelley, earned Elizabeth’s patronage after his investigation into a case of witchcraft involving a poppet made in the queen’s likeness. Dee and Kelley went on to confront various supernatural threats to the crown before an unspecified incident in Bohemia brought a sudden end to their partnership.

Returning to Mortlake after an absence of several years, Dee found his home vandalised and his library ransacked by persons unknown. Some whispered that the culprit was Edward Kelley, while others blamed various secret societies, including the nascent Order of the Cosmic Ram.

Dee himself ventured no opinions on the matter – at least not publicly – and resumed his duties with a new assistant, one William Sly – an aspiring thespian and agent of the Crown. Dee acted as Royal Occultist until his death in 1608 or 1609.

Dee was an interesting character, and one I’ve long had a fascination with. And like his fellow Elizabethan, Christopher Marlowe, he’s had his share of fictional adventures. In particular, I recommend Donald Tyson’s collection, The Ravener & Others, as well as Phil Rickman’s ‘John Dee Papers’ series.

Dee was the obvious choice when I was looking for the original Royal Occultist. He fits the bill better than most historical figures from the same time period, and he adds a bit of needed weight to the concept, in the same way that Carnacki does.

While there’s only one story directly dealing with Dee’s adventures during his tenure as the Royal Occultist (“A Tiger’s Heart, A Player’s Hide”) his influence is felt throughout the series, especially in regards to the mysterious artefact known as the Monas Glyph. That said, having written one story, I hope to write others.

Next time, we’ll take a look at some of the Royal Occultist’s deadliest foes, the Order of the Cosmic Ram. And if you’d like to check out some of the Royal Occultist stories for free, head over to my Curious Fictions page. For more general updates, be sure to check the Royal Occultist Facebook page.

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Werewolf Mass

In my mad and werewolf heart, I have howled a century away.

In despair and rage:

The bread and wine of werewolf Mass.

– Robert Anton Wilson, Werewolf Bridge

I’m not a big Robert Anton Wilson fan. I barely made it through the Illuminatus! trilogy.

Nonetheless, some of his incidental writings hit the mark with me in some undefinable way. I don’t necessarily agree with the ideas put forth, but they make me think, anyway.

Then, maybe that’s the point.

Until defiance builds of its own ruin,

a truth more brave than the truth of death,

my werewolf heart shall rage

against both werewolf god and werewolf man.

– Robert Anton Wilson, Werewolf Bridge

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A Doctor, Darkly

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I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life.

– Dr. Martin Hesselius

Doctor Martin Hesselius was dead the first time Sheridan Le Fanu put pen to page and began writing the first piece in his 1872 collection, In A Glass, Darkly. Hesselius was dead and buried, with only his carefully jotted notes for the reader to judge him by.

It’s an interesting way to introduce a character, to say the least. He’s the ghost of a memory, his faint handwriting spider-scrawled across battered notebooks, detailing over 243 cases of supernatural mischief and malice; the ghost-breaker as ghost, in a sense.

It’s a shame Le Fanu documented only five of those hundreds of cases, and only one that Hesselius was actually physically present for. It’s these five cases that make up the collection in question.

Introduced as a German medical doctor with an extremely open mind and a more than abiding interest in the occult, Doctor Hesselius is first mentioned in the introduction to the aptly titled “Green Tea”.

According to the narrator, Hesselius is an avuncular man, blessed with easy circumstances. Well-off enough to fund his travels, it’s obvious from his notes that he’s travelled the width and breadth of Europe and possibly Asia.

He’s depicted as an enthusiastic spiritualist, immensely knowledgeable about both medicine and the occult. To Hesselius, it is obvious that the natural world and the spirit world are inextricably linked.

He’s said to have published numerous papers in his career, including ‘Mortis Imago: An Essay on the Drugs of the Dark and Middle Ages’ and ‘The Interior Sense and the Conditions of the Opening Thereof’. Le Fanu includes some reference to one or more of these essays in every one of the Hesselius stories, bringing them into the same realm as Lovecraft’s various obscene grimoires or Hodgson’s Sigsand Manuscript.  

The introduction to the character is a posthumous one, as mentioned above. Hesselius, a man of advanced years, has passed on only recently according to the prologue of “Green Tea”, though we’re never told exactly how. The introduction is made by an unnamed narrator, ostensibly Hesselius’ assistant and the executor of his estate.

We know that this assistant was a surgeon himself, though his career was cut disastrously short by an accident involving a scalpel and his fingers. And he claims that it was Hesselius who helped him overcome his disability. Other than that, we have only his obvious, Watson-like devotion to Hesselius to judge him by. A phantom biographer for the phantom fighter, in other words.

Of the five stories in the collection (“Green Tea”, “The Familiar”, “Mr. Justice Harbottle”, “The Room in the Dragon Volant”, and “Carmilla”), Hesselius appears onstage only in the first, his involvement in the others being limited to pre-and-postscripts with his analysis and thoughts on the phenomena described.

However, it’s that very analysis that gives us a window into Hesselius’ character. For Hesselius, the occult is a science. He is a rational man in an irrational world, attempting to make that which he studies fit into its proper place. The unnatural explained as natural.

That said, Hesselius doesn’t do much in the way of face-to-face confrontation with the unnatural. He only investigates the proceedings after the fact, acting less as an investigator, and more a dedicated archaeologist of the extraordinary.

This image of Hesselius as the curious practitioner dominates the brief glimpses we get of him in Le Fanu’s writing. In “Green Tea”, the story is told in epistolary form, via Hesselius’ letters to a colleague on the strange events surrounding the opening of a hapless country vicar’s ‘third eye’ and the demonic incursion that results.

Hesselius approaches the case as a medical issue first, then, later, as a psychological one. Despite his belief – or perhaps because of it – that an infernal force is at work, Hesselius contends that the problem can be dealt with as easily as any other physical or mental ailment. With the right type of treatment, even demonic possession can prove curable.

It is this belief on the part of the character that truly sets him apart from other occult investigators. For Hesselius, spirits, demons, vampires, are all merely categories of disease, albeit of the soul, rather than body or mind, and can be combated as such.

Hesselius strips the glamour from the supernatural, rendering it natural, and thus no longer frightening to either its victims or the reader.

The style in which Le Fanu composed the Hesselius stories does much to add to this sensation of the unnatural as natural. There’s a particular dryness to the stories, as if they were being recounted from a distance, by a disinterested third party.

The supernatural occurrences are given full shrift, but never amplified. Le Fanu, and by extension Hesselius, was seemingly less interested in chilling the reader’s marrow, as merely making them aware of the happenings themselves as points of intellectual curiosity.

While this has the effect of limiting the visceral excitement of the stories, this approach also makes Hesselius and his strange cases seem altogether more credible. Unlike other, later occult investigators, Hesselius never gives the impression that he views his world in terms of good and evil. Rather, merely in terms of health and illness.

That makes him a more comforting figure than his literary descendants. If Van Helsing and his ilk are the paladins of night’s shadowed reaches, fearlessly plunging into the dark to combat the horrors therein, then Hesselius is the kindly old man who thinks to merely bring a torch and show the reader that things aren’t really as bad as all that, after all.

*Author’s Note: This essay originally appeared in 2011, at Black Gate Magazine.*

Halloween 2020

Every October, I like to throw myself an impromptu Halloween film festival. One horror film a day, every day for thirty-one days. This year, I wanted to include a mix of old favourites and films I’ve never seen, but I also wanted to be spontaneous about it. That meant picking films at random, on the day, rather than watching films in some sort of prearranged order.

The only exception to this was today – October 31st. I have a long standing tradition of watching Halloween (1978) and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) on Halloween itself, largely because both films take place on Halloween night.

I might do something different next year – I’m toying with the idea of one horror short story a day, rather than films – but I’ve long associated horror film marathons and Halloween. The two things just seem to go together in my mind.

I wound up watching about ten new films, with the rest being old favourites. Normally I binge-watch the old Universal monster films, plus a few other black and white favourites, but this year I wanted to be a bit more eclectic. There’s a few more modern films in the mix this time, as well as some films I hadn’t seen for quite some time, such as Maniac Cop (1988) and The Tingler (1959).

Here’s this year’s list, with the films I’d never seen before in bold:

The Night Stalker (1972)The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968)Dracula’s Daughter (1936)Halloween (2018)The Creeping Flesh (1973)Maniac Cop (1988)Scream Blacula Scream (1973)Cold Ground (2017)The Fog (1980)Tremors (1990)Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)The Dark (2018)Pumpkinhead (1988)Them! (1954)Prince of Darkness (1987)The Tingler (1959)Son of Dracula (1943)Werewolf of London (1935)Nomads (1986)The Deadly Mantis (1957)Savageland (2017)The Beast Must Die (1974)Maggie (2015)The Mummy’s Curse (1944)The Reptile (1966)Nosferatu a Venezia (1988)The Church (1989)Night of the Eagle (1962)Dead of Night (1945)Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)Halloween (1978)/Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) double bill

A fun time all around. The highlights this year were Night of the Eagle and Dead of Night, both of which were new to me, and both of which I’ll be adding to my regular rotation.

Anyway, Happy Halloween, folks. Remember to check your candy for razorblades and your closets for masked killers.

The Vordenburg Papers

Today’s instalment of the Royal Occultist Compendium takes a look at the Styrian monster-hunter, Baron Palman Vordenburg. 

Baron Palman Vordenburg is the last in a line of Styrian noblemen, formerly of Graz, Upper Styria, and later of Piccadilly, London. Vordenburg comes from a long line of vampire hunters, stretching back through the centuries, and carries on his family legacy with a single-minded aplomb.

Prior to WWI, he held a position similar to that of the Royal Occultist, albeit acting on behalf of the Hapsburg Monarchy. In this capacity, he hunted and dispatched any number of continental horrors, including vampires, werewolves and ghouls. During the war, he continued this service, dealing with the horrors which haunted the battlefields of Europe.

In the years following the war, Vordenburg was captured by British forces in Istanbul and remanded to the custody of the nascent Ministry of Esoteric Observation. The Ministry is known to have employed him for a limited period before suddenly giving him his parole in return for his silence regarding the particulars of an unrecorded incident.

St. Cyprian and Gallowglass first met Vordenburg during the events of the so-called ‘Coventry Street Terror’ in April of 1922, where his assistance in eliminating the undead monstrosity known as the ‘Wolf of Styria’ proved invaluable. Following this incident, Vordenburg became something of a consulting monster-hunter, offering his services to clients both in England and abroad.

As a freelance monster-hunter, Vordenburg encountered creatures as varied as winged horrors in the Aegean Sea, an alchemical homunculus in Venice, and even a cannibalistic wendigo near Thunder Bay. During this period, he fought alongside the Royal Occultist several more times, and even consulted with the vampire-hunters of the Westenra Fund on at least one occasion.

Originally intended to be a spin-off character for a publication that has since ceased to be, Baron Vordenburg is based loosely on the actor Horst Janson, of Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974) fame, as well as Captain Kronos himself.

He took his name from the aristocratic vampire hunter who appeared in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novel, Carmilla. Is there a link between the three characters? I like to think so, if only because I’m an inveterate Wold Newtonian, and I enjoy dropping hints like that in even the most innocuous stories.

The Baron is also one of the first examples of the Royal Occultist’s international peers to appear in the stories. The British Empire isn’t alone in needing regular occult consultation. France, Russia, even the United States, all have their version of the office. Other characters like the Baron have appeared here and there throughout the series, both as allies and as enemies, including Andre du Nord and the enigmatic Indrid Cold.

“The Coventry Street Terror”, the novella in which the Baron makes his first appearance, was to be a backdoor pilot of sorts, appearing in the first issue of the aforementioned publication. Ideally, the story would have introduced the character to existing fans of the Royal Occultist and new readers alike. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be and I wound up serialising the story on the old Royal Occultist site  a few years back.

But, I like the good baron too much to let him vanish into obscurity. Vordenburg offers the chance to write a different sort of story. He’s a more forthright character than St. Cyprian, less inclined to investigation and more than capable of going toe-to-toe with the monster of the week. Only fitting, given that he’s a monster-hunter, rather than an occult detective.

Vordenburg also isn’t saddled with the same self-imposed geographical limitations as the Royal Occultist stories (i.e. they can only happen in Great Britain or the territories thereof). He can be in Italy for one story, Canada for the next, and Australia for a third. He can fight yetis, harpies and kelpies with nary an issue, story-wise.

Since his first appearance in “The Coventry Street Terror”, Vordenburg has gone on to appear in a handful of short stories of his own. I have plans to write many more, time and inspiration willing.

If you’re interested in reading “The Coventry Street Terror” or any of the other Baron Vordenburg stories, head over to my Curious Fictions page, where you can also read a number of Royal Occultist stories for free. For more general updates on the Royal Occultist and Baron Vordenburg, be sure to check the Royal Occultist Facebook page.

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Seven Jackals Howl

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Children of the night, they howl about the Hill of the Seven Jackals when Kharis must be fed.

– The High Priest

I like mummy movies.

That sounds like an admission of guilt, doesn’t it? The phrase ‘mummy movies’ brings to mind certain images – the lumbering hulk in his soggy bandages, chanting priests, exotic sets that could be Cairo, Marrakesh or Istanbul. A worsening series of films, stumbling on as if in imitation of the eponymous monster, regardless of studio, actor or era. If there’s really a curse on poor old Kharis’ tomb, there it is.

And yet…and yet.

Recently, I was talking to my friend and fellow monster movie enthusiast, David Annandale, about horror films, as we tend to do at ever available opportunity. Somehow or other, we got on the subject of the various mummy films, including the 1940 Universal classic, The Mummy’s Hand. I use the term ‘classic’ loosely, of course. It’s a fun film, and likely the antecedent of Stephen Sommers’ 1999 reboot of the franchise.

Directed by Christy Cabanne, and starring Tom Tyler, Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, George Zucco and Wallace Ford, The Mummy’s Hand is less a sequel to the 1932 Karloff film than the start of an entirely new franchise. Even the eponymous creature is a different beast entirely. Karloff’s Imhotep is a sinister, cosmic evil – a sorcerer and fiend. But Tyler’s Kharis is a lumbering automaton – a drug-fuelled titan, rather than a subtle menace.

Despite that, I prefer Kharis to Imhotep. While Karloff plays the character with all the malign charisma you might expect, the script itself does him no favours. It’s solid, but Karloff’s Imhotep is almost a pastiche of Lugosi’s Dracula – they’re remarkably similar menaces, dealt with in remarkably similar ways. By the same actor, no less, as Edward Van Sloan played a remarkably similar character to Van Helsing in The Mummy.

Kharis, on the other hand, is something unique – an engine of destruction, seemingly with no mind or will of his own, save in the film’s final moments. For most of the film, he’s the tool of George Zucco’s Andoheb – a lurching shadow, wreaking havoc wherever he goes.

The priests of the Hill of Seven Jackals employ Kharis as an attack dog, to guard the tomb of the princess he loved in life. There’s pathos in that – in death, Kharis now protects what he desired in life, but can no longer have.

Too, the tana which controls Kharis is akin to the potion which turns Griffin into an invisible lunatic, or the flower which transforms Wilfred Glendon. But where those potions unleash the beast within their imbibers, the tana keeps Kharis in check.

A small dose allows him to walk and kill, but little else. But give him enough, and the chain slips. The monster may be free to do as he wishes. Andoheb lives in terror of this possibility – often jerking the tana away from his lumbering servant, when he’s judged the creature to have had enough.

At the film’s climax, there’s a moment where Kharis is on the cusp of becoming something more. The stiff, awkward machine transforms and becomes something more graceful, more monstrous. Just for an instant. A brief moment. And then…a gunshot.

The tana spills.

And Kharis, desperate, sinks down to lap, animal-like, at the spreading liquid on the stone floor. He groans, trying to force the dark liquid past his frayed lips. All to no avail. Freedom, so close, is snatched away at the final moment, but not for the last time.

In that instant, Kharis is a man, again. Not a machine of meat, stiff and unaware, but a man, seeking his freedom from the curse that grips him, even as the flames from a fallen brazier engulf him. It’s a subtle thing. A brief thing, over all too quickly.

There are hints here and there, in the films that follow The Mummy’s Hand, that this independence is growing – or at least undimmed. That Kharis chafes in his bonds, and seeks to escape his fate. He twists and writhes in alchemical chains, testing his limits, waiting for his moment.

Kharis is more than what he seems. A tool, but an unwilling one. One that might turn in the hands of his wielders, if given half a chance.

For me, the horror of Kharis is not what he does. It is what he might do, if freed from the control of petty men. There’s a story there, never told, but always teased. What might the monster do, if he was free?

Only the gods know. And they’re not talking.

But never, for any reason, must you brew more than nine leaves at one time.

– The High Priest

Swamp Session

Scape Ore Swamp is a foul old place. A fen worthy of a Grendel. Congaree Swamp is bigger, but Scape Ore is nastier. I used to pass over it on the regular, going to school, but never saw anything noteworthy save swarms of mosquitoes that would drain you dry if you stood still for too long.

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I never saw the Lizardman, though I did have a t-shirt with his scaly mug on it. But I dig him, even now. Nothing finer than Caroline-r, especially when it comes to monsters. Who needs Bigfoot, we got us a genuine Lizardman. He’s even better than that mummy they brought to the state fair that one time. Though that mummy was awesome, no lie.

I like the Lizardman so much, I even wrote a novella about him once. I might do so again, if the mood strikes me. He’s such an interesting fellow. And there’s nowhere better for such a creature to hide than Scape Ore Swamp.

In Scape Ore, the trees rise wild and the water is so dark it swallows up the light. Time stops in places like that, or at least slows to a crawl. It’s an easy place to get lost in, even if you’re just passing through.

Maybe that’s what the Lizardman is…just something passing through, that got lost.

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Death Rides the Moonbeams

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The werewolf is neither man nor wolf, but a Satanic creature with the worst qualities of both.

– Dr. Yogami

The first mainstream Hollywood werewolf film stalked into theatres in 1935, courtesy of Universal Studios. It was another six years before they tried again. Directed by Stuart Walker, and starring Henry Hull, The Werewolf of London is, like the eponymous lycanthrope, neither one thing, nor another. Where it’s successor, The Wolf Man (1941), is a fairy tale writ large, The Werewolf of London is as much a Wodehouse farce as it is a tale of lycanthropic madness.

Maybe that’s why no one really remembers Wilfred Glendon, and Larry Talbot gets all the copy. There’s something of the whipped dog about Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man – all instinct and fury. A murderous engine, much like Frankenstein’s creation. But Glendon’s monster is a different sort of beast altogether. He’s more calculating; almost slyly malign. A man’s cunning, married to a wolf’s instinct.

From his first scene, Glendon is damned by his own hubris. Where Talbot is sympathetic, Glendon is a son of a bitch. And yet…there’s something charming about such a charmless man. His transformation is more subtle than his predecessor’s agonised contortions – Glendon’s wolf isn’t buried very deeply at all. A bit of moonlight, and the beast slips right out. Glendon fights, he struggles, but even the juice of the marifasa lupina is but a stopgap measure. Blood will tell, and Glendon’s blood is as black as night.

There’s something hideously gleeful about the beast’s savagery – a calculating pleasure, quite at odds with the unfocused fury of the Wolf Man. Glendon is a man of icy calm, of almost inhuman restraint (save, notably, when in pursuit of a goal – there, the beast is all too visible in his eyes). But his alter-ego is Id run wild. Glendon is a man of sharp angles and precision, but his other self is almost…fluid. A shadow-self, a night-sending, loosed to visit terror and pain on those unlucky enough to cross his path.

Unlike Talbot, who has little memory of his other self, Glendon seems fully, painfully cognisant of these nocturnal perambulations. As with the Invisible Man, the curse is not just an imposition from outside but also something that has long been boiling away within Glendon. Once it takes hold, he is, in a sense, free to act on his worst impulses. The werewolf is a tulpa, born of frustration.

This frustration is the heart of the film, for me. Glendon is perennially frustrated – an adventurer, who would rather be in the foothills of Tibet than the drawing rooms of London; the jealous husband of a wife many years his junior; a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough that never seems to come; a man who demands solitude, but desires love; and finally, a beast who yearns to destroy that which he loves most. It all builds in soft layers, wrapping ever more tightly about him, until he finally gives in.

The wolf slips its leash.

Death rides the moonbeams.

Thanks for the bullet. It was the only way. In a few moments now, I shall now why all this had to be.

– Wilfred Glendon

Master and Apprentice

Welcome to the first instalment of my look into the Royal Occultist universe. Today we’re taking a look at our main characters, Charles St. Cyprian and Ebe Gallowglass.

Charles St. Cyprian is a slim man in his early thirties, with a Mediterranean complexion, an Old College Oxford intonation and an inordinate fondness for the sartorial creations of Savile Row. He is also the current holder of the offices of the Royal Occultist of the British Empire and its associated territories.

Prior to assuming the responsibilities of the foremost occult office in the Empire, St. Cyprian was, at best, an uninspiring candidate. A stereotypical example of the ‘idle rich’ with an attention span limited to the retention of cricket scores and the occasional bout of auto-polo, a fresh-from-university St. Cyprian became involved with the ‘Cheyne Walk set’ in the year prior to commencement of hostilities on the Continent.

It was during the so-called Gogmagog Incident of 1914 that St. Cyprian met Thomas Carnacki, and the former aided the latter in exorcising the titanic spectral monstrosities which lurked in the crypts beneath the Guildhall, London. By all accounts, St. Cyprian impressed Carnacki with his quick-thinking as well as his ability to wield a xiphos.

Following this, St. Cyprian joined Arkwright, Dodgson and the others in Carnacki’s clique; in reality, St. Cyprian was the last addition to the roster for consideration of the position of Carnacki’s assistant. Despite the apparent suitability of several of the other candidates, Carnacki chose St. Cyprian on the eve of war.

From 1914 to 1918, St. Cyprian served as Carnacki’s aide-de-camp in England and abroad, learning the ins and outs of the duties of the Royal Occultist with commendable speed. With Carnacki’s death at the Kemmelberg during the Fourth Battle of Ypres in 1918, St. Cyprian was given a battlefield commission to Captain and assumed the duties of the Royal Occultist.

After the War, St. Cyprian returned to England and attempted to re-assume his old life with mixed success, establishing questionable ties to the Runcible and Wooster social sets as well as the Order of the Cosmic Ram. It was also during this period that St. Cyprian first encountered his future assistant, Ebe Gallowglass.

In contrast to her employer, Ebe Gallowglass is a short, slender woman of Egyptian descent in her early twenties, with a propensity for dressing like a cross between a Parisian street-Apache and a newsboy.

Little is known about Gallowglass’ life prior to her involvement in the Shooter’s Hill Incident and her current association with Charles St. Cyprian. But what is known is altogether unpleasant.

She is the daughter of the Irish revolutionary, mercenary and occultist, Donal Gallowglass, and an as-yet unidentified Cairo woman believed to be the high priestess of an outlawed religious sect.

Gallowglass’ childhood was spent within the secretive confines of her mother’s cult; of said cult and its high priestess, little is known save that the experience left Gallowglass with a lifelong abhorrence of cats.

Donal, who, in his sordid and violent career, came into conflict with not one, but two of St. Cyprian’s predecessors, was not present for his daughter’s youth and indeed, seems not to have been aware of her until shortly before he met his death during the Britannic Affair (1916).

The only keepsake she possesses of the late, unlamented Donal is his signature Webley-Fosbery revolver with the Seal of Solomon on the butt, picked out in ivory. The weapon was delivered to her via courier, prior to her departure from Cairo. Why the reportedly unsentimental Donal did so died with him in the boiler room of the Britannic.

Some time in the closing months of 1918, Gallowglass’ mother was murdered by rivals within her sect, leading to Gallowglass’ subsequent pursuit of said individuals across two continents, before tracking the last of them to London in 1919. This led directly to her subsequent apprenticeship to Charles St. Cyprian.

Currently, St. Cyprian performs his duties with commendable diligence, and even enthusiasm, aided by Gallowglass. But dark times are ahead, and they will find themselves sorely tested in the coming days…

I’ve already gone into a bit of detail about how I came to create St. Cyprian and Gallowglass in my previous post. As I mentioned, the pair were initially bit players in a novel that never quite came to fruition, before leaping off the page and demanding more attention. Obviously, I was only too happy to oblige.

As originally conceived St. Cyprian was an older man, in his forties or fifties, more akin to Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence – a contemplative figure, with potent psychic abilities but little interest in throwing punches or car chases. Gallowglass too was quite different – the first version resembled an occult-orientated expy of Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher.

These versions gradually evolved into the ones we have now as I wrote those first few stories. You can see traces of the original concepts in stories such as “Krampusnacht” and “Sign of the Salamander”, but by that point I had the characters pretty well fixed in my mind – St. Cyprian turned into Rudolph Valentino by way of Bertie Wooster, while Gallowglass became Louise Brooks by way of an alley-cat.

As I started writing, I knew I wanted to avoid the usual master and apprentice dynamic, and I wanted both characters to be relatively new to the world they found themselves in. From there, I decided that rather than aping the acknowledged masters of the form, like the aforementioned Algernon Blackwood or William Hope Hodgson, I would draw on other material for inspiration…namely, Seabury Quinn and his Jules de Grandin stories.

While the de Grandin stories are of highly variable quality, they all possess a pacey enthusiasm that’s hard to deny. Lots of shooting and running, car chases, crashes, magic, weird science and the like. That was the sort of flavour I wanted to capture for my Royal Occultist stories. They wouldn’t be horror tales, not really – but they’d damn sure be fun.

Next time, we’ll take a look at one of the Royal Occultist’s most stalwart allies, the monster-hunter Baron Palman Vordenburg. And if you’d like to check out some of the Royal Occultist stories for free, head over to my Curious Fictions page. For more general updates, be sure to check the Royal Occultist Facebook page.

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