Sunday, January 3, 2016

Crossover of the Week

September 4, 1935
THE TIME TRAVELERS’ EX-WIFE
In Kingsport, the former Alice Peaslee is wished a happy sixtieth birthday by her son Wingate, who has just returned from an expedition in Australia with his father. Alice is brought cake and lemonade by her grandson John, the son of her daughter Hannah and Samuel Beckett. Looking in a photo album, she sees a picture of herself in London on June 5, 1931, alongside author Olaf Stapledon and the latter’s young protégé, the poet Paul Tregardis. Another picture, taken on September 2, 1924, shows the members of Hannah’s wedding party. Among them is Hannah’s husband’s supervisor at Brooklyn’s Museum of Fine Arts, Dr. Halpin Chalmers, a graduate of Miskatonic University, with whom Alice reminisces about the faculty and Arkham. Chalmers is friends with a private detective named Charles. Alice marries Chalmers, and on weekends and holidays they travel to Partridgeville where he was raised. In 1910, Alice divorces her husband, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, having experienced strange visions of the past and future when she touched him. In 1912, her son Robert finds the notebooks in which she described her visions. Robert takes large portions of the text and reorganizes them into narratives, which Alice rewrites and has published in Whispers magazine. The periodical forwards her a letter of praise from a man named Randolph Carter. Alice spent six years with a distant relative named Alice the Elder, wandering time and space, having breakfast in Hyperborea, dancing in Irem, and reading books in Celeano.
Short story by Pete and Mandy Rawlik in The Lovecraft eZine #29, Mike Davis, ed., February 2014. Kingsport, Miskatonic University, Arkham, and Randolph Carter appear in a number of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories. Alice Peaslee; her husband, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee; and their children, Wingate, Hannah and Robert, are from Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time.” Irem is from Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City.” The magazine Whispers appears in Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable”; it is believed by many Lovecraft scholars the Carter that narrates that story is Randolph Carter. John Beckett is the father of time traveler Sam Beckett on the television series Quantum Leap. Paul Tregardis is from Clark Ashton Smith’s story “Ubbo-Sathla.” Hyperborea appears in “Ubbo-Sathla” and many other works by Smith. Dr. Halpin Chalmers and Partridgeville are from Frank Belknap Long’s story “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Chalmers’ private detective friend is Nick Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man. Celeano (or Celaeno) is mentioned in several Mythos stories by August Derleth.

3 comments:

  1. How many links are there to Quantum Leap? I know there was an episode that linked to Tales of the Golden Monkey that Win included in Crossovers.

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  2. Besides this story and the episode with the Tales of the Gold Monkey connection, Stallions Gate, New Mexico, the fictional site of the project in the show, is mentioned in two of Edward M. Erdelac's Merkabah Rider tales, including the novel Once Upon a Time in the Weird West, which I covered in a previous post.

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