Tomorrow is Win's birthday, so in honor of my friend and mentor, here's a write-up of a story by him that has strong ties to the Wold Newton event. Happy early birthday, Win.
December
11–13, 1795
THE
WILD HUNTSMAN
In
1720, XauXaz of the Nine is killed by a man who appears through a
mirror-like portal and is almost identical to himself, and who takes
his place. XauXaz’s Other has a pocket watch embossed with a
sapphire representing the star Capella. In 1795, at Blakeney Hall,
the lord of the mansion, Sir Percy Blakeney, along with two of his
guests, General Sir Hezekiah Fogg and Dr. Siger Holmes, are the first
to discover a corpse, followed by Colonel Bozzo-Corona, his man
Albert Lecoq, Sir Hugh Drummond, and Honoré Delagardie. John
Gribardsun, who is known to them as Sir John Gribson, cuts down the
body. Sir Percy identifies the dead man as Iain Bond, aide-de-camp to
William de Winter, the king’s representative at his conclave. This
is the second murder in as many days; both were accompanied by the
sound of nine bells clanging. Delagardie complains about the previous
victim, Gerolstein’s advances towards Philippa, Delagardie’s wife
and Drummond’s sister. Gribardsun, investigating the grounds,
catches a familiar scent. Peering upside-down through a window, he
listens in on the men gathered inside a room, including Blakeney;
Fitzwilliam Darcy; Fogg; George Edward Rutherford, the 11th
Baron Tennington; Holmes; de Winter; and John Clayton, the 3rd Duke
of Greystoke. Apart from Fogg, Holmes, and de Winter, all of the men
in the room are Gribardsun’s ancestors. Sir Percy summoned all
these people to Blakeney Hall to strategize about ending the Reign of
Terror in France. Holmes witnessed Lecoq’s meeting with Countess
Nadine Carody at the Calyx Bar last month. Sir Percy implies
Marguerite and Alice have assured him Carody prefers the company of
her own gender. Colonel Bozzo-Corona and his Brothers of Mercy
provided Marguerite and Alice with the Heart of Ahriman, so they and
Percy could use it to defeat Baron de Musard. Gribardsun shifts his
attention to the women present at the gathering: Alice Clarke
Raffles, Lady Blakeney, Elizabeth Darcy, Countess Carody, Miss
Caroline Bingley, Philippa Delagardie, Alicia, Lady Greystoke, Lady
Tennington, Violet Clarke Holmes, Elizabeth de Winter and Lady
Drummond. Gribardsun remembers killing another Baron de Musard in the
late 1500s in France. Gribardsun later looks in on the Continental
group, which includes Gerolstein’s brother, Gustavas Kramm, and
Carody. The following day, Miss Bingley is discovered dead. Sir Percy
remarks Darcy will have a hard time writing a condolence letter to
her brother. Gribardsun later spies on Lecoq playing cards with Louis
Lupin, Delagardie’s coachman. He finds no sign of the other two
coachmen, Arthur Blake and Etienne Austin. However, he finds Blake is
also spying on them, and watches him report to Sir Hezekiah and Sir
Percy. Sir Percy, who calls Blake “cousin,” believes someone at
the gathering is a Capellean. Sir Hezekiah believes that person
suspects not only that Blakeney is an Eridanean agent, but that Fogg
himself is an Old Eridanean, and also believes the clanging comes
from a distorter. Gribardsun, considering the distorter, thinks that
his own ship, the H.
G. Wells I,
was a sort of teleportation device. He also considers whispers
throughout the ages of a group called the Nine, which in turn leads
to associations in his mind with the nine bells and the significance
of the number nine in Khokarsan culture, including the nine-sided
temple of Kho and the Door of Kho that leads into the temple, and
Kho’s nine primary aspects. Gribardsun wonders if the Capelleans
and the Eridaneans could be extraterrestrials, remembering his past
experiences in Africa with exotic plants and a massive crystalline
root system, both obviously alien in origin, which devastated the
continent of Khokarsa. On December 13, the members of the party set
out on their coach ride. Holmes’ friend Dr. Sebastian Noel
accompanies them. Dr. Jacob Moishe, the head of the team that
invented the time machine utilized by Gribardsun, had proven the
actions of time travelers merely spurred historical events.
Gribardsun catches the familiar scent again, and flashes back to
Khokarsa in 10,814 B.C. In that time, he also smells a familiar
scent. Gribardsun has enlisted a tribe of the Neanderthaloid Gokako
to perform excavations in his attempt to find the source of the
crystalline root system running through Central Africa, which will
some day destroy Khokarsa, and whose devastating effects he first
encountered in 1918. His current location is the future site of a
city, founded by Lupoeth, priestess of Kho, which is very important
to him. He turns to face an old acquaintance. When Gribardsun last
met him, in Africa in 1912, he resembled an African witch doctor, and
Gribardsun saved his life. The grateful man offered Gribardsun a
concoction that granted him everlasting life. The man before him now
looks very different, and identifies Gribardsun as Sahhindar, the
Gray-Eyed Archer God, and also the god of plants, bronze, and Time.
He states he has realized Gribardsun is an immortal time traveler,
like himself. This individual states he wants Gribardsun’s secret
of eternal life, having not yet met him in his own future. Gribardsun
performs the ritual upon the man, who calls himself Kethnu, which
means “head man.” In 1795, Gribardsun finds himself face-to face
with the man once known as Kethnu. The blue sapphire on the former
Kethnu’s pocket watch reminds Gribardsun of the nethkarna,
the seed of the Tree of Kho, which the oracles of Khokarsa used to
tap into the root system. Greystoke’s fellow immortal gives his
current name as XauXaz. XauXaz has used a time distorter to travel to
the year 1795. The duo battles and XauXaz boasts he is Gribardsun’s
grandfather several times over. Finally, XauXaz persuades Gribardsun
to let him turn on the distorter. The coachmen, recognizing the
sound, turn the carriages around, just as a meteor falls from the
sky. XauXaz reveals he hopes a descendant of one of the individuals
present at the gathering will be able to assist him someday, and
comments many of those descendants will have remarkable talents, such
as Gribardsun’s ability to survive his jungle upbringing. He adds
he had received an elixir from “my friends who are also my enemies”
before he first met Gribardsun that was less effective than the one
the jungle lord shared with him, but even the second elixir he took
is beginning to wear off. About one hundred years ago from XauXaz’s
perspective, he was impersonating a seal-hunting schooner captain
named Larsen, and began experiencing debilitating headaches as a
result of the failure of the second elixir, causing him to fake his
death. He believes the meteor’s effect on his ancestors was
responsible for the elixir’s efficacy upon Gribardsun, and hopes
direct exposure to the meteor will have a similar effect upon him. If
that doesn’t work, he hopes a descendant will uncover the key to
the perfect elixir. He mentions the elixirs that have already been
created by descendants of those present by his native time, including
a Royal Jelly treatment whose vital elements include a shard of the
Wold Newton meteor. In both 1917 and a few years afterward, XauXaz
will attempt to steal such a shard, and battled with Sherlock Holmes
over it. Another elixir, the “Oil of Life,” will be created by a
Mastermind from the Far East, who will be the 3rd Duke of Greystoke’s
grandson. XauXaz has high hopes his grandson, James Clarke Wildman,
will be able to perfect the elixir. XauXaz, disguised as a German
Baron, clashed with him near the end of the Great War, and sparked
his interest in such an elixir. He states Wildman and his wife have
not been seen for many years, but he is convinced Wildman is as young
as ever. XauXaz tells Gribardsun the British Secret Service were
interested in the latter’s instances of the “human magnetic
moment.” XauXaz wonders before returning to his own time if the
meteor would not have landed in Wold Newton if Gribardsun had not
been right there to guide it to that very spot. Back in 1972, XauXaz
reflects on his discovery of the Capellean distorter in the 1930s. In
the 1940s, he discovered how to suppress its clangings if he so
wished, and used it to puzzle the Gray Man of Ice with his impossible
comings and goings. In 1972, hearing of similar advances, XauXaz has
modified his distorter to travel through time as well as space. He
learned of the divergent parallel universe, which was created tens of
thousands of years ago, in 1720 when the Shraask entity touched his
mind, and his allies-enemies in the Nine, Anana and Iwaldi, also
existed in that reality. In 1972, the time distorter and Shraask, who
had been invoked by the other world’s Nine in 1720, enabled him to
travel to that particular time and reality, where he killed his
counterpart. XauXaz traveled back and forth between his own universe
and the parallel world, where he impersonated his counterpart. On his
counterpart’s Earth, XauXaz’s brothers Ebnaz XauXaz and Thrithjaz
died before Shraask’s advent, whereas the brothers of the XauXaz
who encountered Gribardsun had died due to his refusal to share
Sahhindar’s elixir with them. When the otherworldly Nine became
suspicious in 1968, XauXaz faked his death. Impersonating an elderly
man named Mister Bileyg, XauXaz injected himself into the bloodline
of John Cloamby, Lord Grandrith and his half-brother, Doctor James
Caliban, becoming their grandfather. Now, he intends to begin the
next phase of his plan, having read in a newspaper about the alleged
death of Doctor Wildman and his wife, following the disappearance of
Greystoke and his own wife. He thinks of his prior battles with his
grandson, who had known him as Baron von Hessel. Wildman’s last
known location is a private clinic in New York. XauXaz considers
extracting information from Wildman’s daughter Patricia.
Short
story by Win Scott Eckert in
The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3: Portraits of a Trickster,
Michael Croteau, ed., Meteor House, 2012; reprinted in Tales
of the Wold Newton Universe,
Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey, eds., Titan Books, 2013.
This story explains the reason why so many people were at the remote
village of Wold Newton when a meteor fell there in 1795. XauXaz, the
Nine, Anana, Iwaldi, Ebnaz XauXaz, Thrithjaz, John Cloamby, Lord
Grandrith; and Doctor James Caliban are featured in Farmer’s
trilogy of novels consisting of A
Feast Unknown,
Lord
of the Trees,
and The
Mad Goblin.
In these novels, XauXaz is portrayed as the inspiration for legends
of the Norse god Wotan. In Tarzan
Alive,
Farmer noted Wotan was an ancestor of the jungle lord, and suggested
he may have been responsible for the meteor coming to Earth in Wold
Newton. Shraask is from the unpublished fourth book in the
Grandrith/Caliban series, The
Monster on Hold.
The latter novel implies, and this story confirms, Grandrith and
Caliban’s exploits occur in a parallel universe to the CU.
Characters from Farmer’s Tarzan
Alive
and Doc
Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
include: Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife Violet Clarke, ancestors of
Sherlock Holmes; Albert Lecoq, father of Lecoq of the Black Coats and
grandfather of Monsieur Lecoq; Sir Hugh Drummond and his wife, Lady
Georgia Dewhurst, ancestors of Bulldog Drummond; Honoré Delagardie
and his wife Philippa Drummond, ancestors of Lord Peter Wimsey; Alice
Clarke Raffles, companion of Sir Percy and Marguerite Blakeney, and
Sir Percy’s future second wife; George Edward Rutherford, 11th
Baron Tennington and his wife Elizabeth Cavendish, ancestors of the
jungle lord; John William Clayton, 3rd Duke of Greystoke, and his
wife Alicia Rutherford, also ancestors of the jungle lord; and Arthur
Blake, ancestor of Sexton Blake. The Capelleans and the Eridaneans
are warring alien races from Farmer’s novel The
Other Log of Phileas Fogg,
which is also the source of the distorter. Another time distorter,
albeit operating on different principles, is used by Farmer himself
in stories by Paul Spiteri. General Sir Hezekiah Fogg was mentioned
as the great-grandfather of Phileas Fogg (from Jules Verne’s Around
the World in Eighty Days)
in
the Have
Gun–Will Travel episode
“Fogg Bound.” However, according to The
Other Log of Phileas Fogg,
Phileas’ stepfather Sir Heraclitus Fogg was an Old Eridanean, a
native member of the race rather than an adoptee. Therefore, Eckert
proposed in “A Chronology of Major Events Pertinent to The
Other Log of Phileas Fogg”
(found in the 2012 Titan Books edition of Other
Log)
Sir Hezekiah was a prior alias used by Sir Heraclitus himself, who
later posed as his own descendant. John Gribardsun, the H.
G. Wells I,
Project Chronos, and Jacob Moishe are from Farmer’s novel Time’s
Last Gift;
Gribardsun is actually the jungle lord, who received an immortality
elixir from a grateful witch doctor according to Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ novel Tarzan
and the Foreign Legion.
The timeline was split into two divergent realities when the H.
G. Wells I’s
second trip to 14,000 B.C. was diverted to 26,000 B.C. by
Gribardsun’s presence in their intended time period, as chronicled
by John Allen Small in his story “Into Time’s Abyss” (The
Worlds of Philip José Farmer 2: Of Dust and Soul,
Michael Croteau, ed., Meteor House, 2011). Sir Percy Blakeney and his
wife Marguerite are from Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novels.
Percy, Alice and Marguerite battled Baron de Musard in Eckert’s
story “Is He in Hell?” (Tales
of the Shadowmen Volume 6: Grand Guignol,
Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Black Coat Press, 2010). The
Baron de Musard in that story is an ancestor of the Baron de Musard
referred to in Farmer’s Doc Wildman novel Escape
from Loki.
Gribardsun’s battle with a member of that family in the 1500s was
alluded to in Farmer and Eckert’s novel The
Evil in Pemberley House.
Colonel Bozzo-Corona and his Brothers of Mercy are from Paul Féval’s
novels about the criminal conspiracy known as the Black Coats. Iain
Bond is an ancestor of British Secret Service agent James Bond.
William de Winter and his wife Elizabeth Richmond are from Jean-Marc
Lofficier’s articles “Will There Be Light Tomorrow?”
(Shadowmen:
Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction,
Black Coat Press, 2003) and “The Tangled Web: Genealogies of the
Members of the French Wold Newton Families–Rocambole and Fantômas”
(found at The
French Wold Newton Universe
website); William is descended from Milady from Alexandre Dumas’
The
Three Musketeers.
Gustavas Kramm is the ancestor of Dr. Cornelius Kramm from Gustave Le
Rouge’s Le
Mystérieux Docteur Cornelius,
while the surviving Gerolstein brother is the father of Rodolphe de
Gerolstein from Eugène Sue’s The
Mysteries of Paris;
both were identified as present at the meteor strike by Lofficier
in“Will There Be Light Tomorrow?,” which also first proposed the
reason why those present at the meteor strike were gathered together.
Fitzwilliam Darcy, his wife, the former Elizabeth Bennet; Elizabeth’s
sister-in-law, Miss Caroline Bingley; and Caroline’s brother
Charles are from Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice.
Countess Nadine Carody is from the film Vampyros
Lesbos.
The Calyx Bar is from Louis Feuillade’s film serial Judex.
The Heart of Ahriman is from Robert E. Howard’s Conan novel The
Hour of the Dragon.
Etienne Austin was identified as present at the Wold Newton meteor
strike by Cheryl L. Huttner in her creative mythographic essay “Name
of a Thousand Blue Demons” (Myths
for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe,
Win Scott Eckert, ed., MonkeyBrain Books, 2005); he is an ancestor of
Professor Challenger’s chauffeur-butler Austin as well as Seabury
Quinn’s occult detective Jules de Grandin. Dennis E. Power revealed
Sexton Blake was related to the Scarlet Pimpernel in his series of
articles “The Wold, Wold West” (found at the Wold
Newton Universe: A Secret History website),
a theory that was adopted by Eckert for his essay “The Blakeney
Family Tree” (The
Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions, Michael
Croteau, ed., Meteor House, 2010). Khokarsa is featured in three
novels by Farmer, collected in the omnibus Gods
of Opar.
The Gokako are also from the Opar books, and Greystoke/Gribardsun
appears in the series under the name Sahhindar. The Temple of Kho
also appears in the Opar books. The nethkarna
and the Door and Tree of Kho appear in Christopher Paul Carey’s
novella Exiles
of Kho.
Lupoeth is mentioned in the Opar books, and her founding of Opar is
depicted in Exiles
of Kho.
The city founded by Lupoeth is Opar itself, which is originally from
the Lord Greystoke books. Dr. Sebastian Noel is from Rick Lai’s
essay “The Secret History of Captain Nemo” (Myths
for the Modern Age);
he is the father of Dr. Noel from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The
Suicide Club” and the grandfather of Professor Moriarty. The
crystalline root system is from Eckert and Carey’s story “Iron
and Bronze” (Tales
of the Shadowmen Volume 5: The Vampires of Paris,
Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Black Coat Press, 2009). The
root system is an extension of the star-shaped mineral-vegetable king
from J.-H. Rosny aîné’s novel L'Étonnant
Voyage d'Hareton Ironcastle,
translated and adapted by Farmer as Ironcastle,
and is also related to the Crystal Tree of Time, which the jungle
lord encountered in 1918 during the events of Farmer’s The
Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel (based
on ideas from “Crystal Corridors in the Farmerian Monomyth,”
presentation by Christopher Paul Carey and Dennis E. Power, FarmerCon
III, Peoria, Illinois, July 26, 2008). Wolf Larsen is from Jack
London’s The
Sea Wolf,
and was identified as Doc Wildman’s grandfather in Tarzan
Alive.
Baron von Hessel is from Escape
from Loki;
Christopher Carey identified Larsen and von Hessel as aliases for
XauXaz in his essay “The Green Eyes Have It–Or Are They Blue? or
Another Case of Identity Recased” (Myths
for the Modern Age).
The Royal Jelly treatment was created by Sherlock Holmes, as revealed
in William S. Baring-Gould’s biography Sherlock
Holmes of Baker Street.
XauXaz’s attempt to retrieve a shard of the Wold Newton meteor was
chronicled in Watson and Eckert’s story “The Adventure of the
Fallen Stone” (Sherlock
Holmes: The Crossovers Casebook,
Howard Hopkins, ed., Moonstone Books, 2012), which also revealed the
British Secret Service’s interest in the “human magnetic moment,”
first identified in Tarzan
Alive.
The Oil of Life was created by Dr. Fu Manchu, who was identified by
Farmer as the grandson of the 3rd Duke of Greystoke in Doc
Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
Wildman’s wife is Adélaïde Johnston Lupin, who appears in
Eckert’s stories “The Eye of Oran” (Tales
of the Shadowmen Volume 2: Gentlemen of the Night,
Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Black Coat Press, 2005) and “Les
Lèvres Rouges” (Tales
of the Shadowmen Volume 3: Danse Macabre,
Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, eds., Black Coat Press, 2006). Their
daughter is Patricia Clarke Lupin Wildman, the protagonist of The
Evil in Pemberley House.
The Gray Man of Ice is Paul Ernst’s avenging pulp hero; Eckert has
chronicled his battles with XauXaz in a trilogy of stories for
Moonstone Books’ anthologies featuring the character. The private
clinic is Doc Wildman’s Crime College.
