THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT by Robert E. Howard

HOWARD'S CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

By G. W. Thomas

Robert E. Howard is best known as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian who fights, wenches and eventually rules in the ancient land of Hyboria. What may not be known is that Howard wrote many pulp horror tales. These supernatural stories were written early on in his career, along with fantasy stories like the King Kull and Solomon Kane tales also darkly tinted with the macabre. Being a young writer, only nineteen when he made his first sales to Weird Tales, his horror fiction are imitative at best. Tales of werewolves, gypsy curses and giant snakes are all stock props of the pulp era. Howard’s influences are often transparent, copying those writers he admired: Lovecraft, Sax Rohmer and Jack London. As Howard continued to write and sell his stories, his own style of magic took over, as he mixed graphic fantasy-adventure with macabre creatures.

One of Howard’s earliest and best creations was the Serpent Men, who appeared in “The Shadow Kingdom”(Weird Tales, August 1929). The evil reptiles hover menacingly behind the political intrigues of Kull’s court in ancient Valusia. These shape-shifters infiltrated his government in the form of human visiers and officials. Kull swears to wipe out the Serpent scourge from the Earth.

Howard appears to have abandoned his creation after “The Shadow Kingdom” but if we look closer we’ll see this isn’t so. A degenerate form of the Serpent People have taken on the role of fairy folk, legends and stories changing them over the centuries into trolls and goblins. The idea, as Howard tells us in “The Little People” (Coven 13, January 1970) is borrowed from Arthur Machen’s “The Shining Pyramid”. Using the Welsh master’s concept of primitive remnants dwelling under the earth, Howard turns the Serpent Men into the race that dwelt in Europe and in other parts of the Stone Age world, a breed part human, part snake. The first of these stories, “The Children of the Night” (Weird Tales, April-May 1931), is half of a saga of reincarnation. The sequel “Dagon Manor” would have to wait fifty-five years to reach print.

The plot of “Children of the Night” revolves around Professor Kirowan, James Conrad, Clemants, Tavarel and John O’Donnell, a group of men who dabble in the occult. The domestic help, Ketrick, a strange looking fellow with almond-shaped, yellow eyes, also has a part in the story. John O’Donnell along with his fellows are in Conrad’s study, discussing racial descendants. (Howard has a chance to speak on Aryan purity, repeating many of the dated and no longer popular ideas of Jack London.) O’Donnell, while looking at some artifacts, gets hit in the head with an ancient flint mallet. He wakes up in the past, in the body of Aryara of the Sword People, one of the Aryan tribes featured in a later series of stories about James Allison. The enemy of the Sword People is the Children of the Night as O’Donnell/Aryara tells us:

“Kirowan was wrong. The little fierce, dark Picts were not the first men in the Isles. There were beings before them -- aye, the Children of the Night. Legends -- why, the Children were not unknown to us when we came into what is now the isle of Britain. We had encountered them before, ages before. Already we had our myths of them. But we found them in Britain. Nor had the Picts totally exterminated them.

Aryara battles these hated fiends, dies with a multitude at his feet. O’Donnell wakes from this vision, back in the study, a lump on his head, where he attacks Ketrick, the butler. The manservant’s strange appearance is due to his having Serpent blood. The story ends with O’Donnell promising the reader he will kill Ketrick, even if it means being hung.

Next in chronology, “The People of the Dark” (Strange Tales, June, 1932) is a rare sale to another magazine other than Weird Tales. It is an important story for Howard, since it is the one that features his proto-Cimmerian, in the character of Conan of the reavers, an Irish Gael. Again, using the devise of racial memory/flashback, John O’Brien, an Irish-American in England, comes to Dagon’s Cave to kill another suitor for the hand of Eleanor Bland.

O’Brien falls while descending a strange staircase, too small for human feet. Like O’Donnell he hits his head and awakes not as himself but as the mighty swordsman Conan (not of course, the Cimmerian Conan, though this Conan also swears “by Crom!”) Eleanor, and her other suitor, Richard Brent have also been transformed, into Tamera and Vertorix.

Conan and Vertorix begin by fighting for Eleanor, who falls prey to the Children of the Night. Both men stop their duel long enough to go in search of her. Vertorix is faster and is also captured. Forgetting the feud, Conan rescues the both of them from sacrifice before the arcane Black Stone, battles through Serpent hordes to help them escape, only to see them die together by diving into an underground river. Conan, like Aryara, goes down battling against the inhuman vermin, to awake back in modern day England.

Once back in the present, O’Brien remembers his life as Conan only as a vague dream, which he re-lives as he works his way through Dagon’s Cave, after breaking down a wall of recent construction. Inside, he comes across the two lovers, while Eleanor is declaring her love for Brent. O’Brien finally sees the error of his way, and accepts that she loves the other man. At that same moment, the last surviving Child of the Night, now degenerated into a legless serpent, attacks the two lovers. O’Brien (though more successfully than he had as Conan) plays the savior, shooting the monster and saving the pair.

“The People of the Night” is an important story because it gives us the only full description of the Children, who are seen only briefly and in shadow in other stories.

Erect, it could not have been five feet in height. Its body was scrawny and deformed, its head disproportionately large. Lank snaky hair fell over a square inhuman face with flabby writhing lips that bared yellow fangs, flat spreading nostrils and great yellow slant eyes. I knew the creature must be able to see in the dark as well as a cat. Centuries of skulking in dim caverns had lent the race terrible and inhuman attributes. But the most repellent feature was its skin: scaly, yellow and mottled, like the hide of a serpent. A loincloth made of a real snake’s skin girt its lean loins, and its taloned hands gripped a short stone-tipped spear and a sinister-looking mallet of polished flint.

This story also provides the first connection with the Mythos tale “The Black Stone” (Weird Tales, November 1931). In this story, a man visits a village in Hungary that has a mysterious monolith outside its border. The local legend is that any one who sleeps near the black stone on Midsummer night will see terrifying visions (which of course, the protagonist does).

The name of the village is Stregoicavar, which means “witch-town”, though the original inhabitants called it Xuthltan, claiming its location to be older than recorded history. The residents are the descendents of recent immigrants who came after Suleyman’s general, Selim Bahadur and the Turks, destroyed the village and the evil inhabitants. The original cultist-villagers are said to have “mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation.” Howard then goes on to mention a similar people in England who dwelt there before the Picts. There can be little doubt that the Serpent folk had residents in Hungary and elsewhere. The name Xuthltan is also similar to Xuthal in the Conan story, “The Slithering Shadow”, which features the same frog-like monster and dwells in The Temple of the Toad in another Mythos tale, "The Thing on the Roof " (Weird Tales, February 1932).

The Black Stone of this story and that mentioned in “The People of the Dark” differ in that the Black Stone is a huge monolith, and perhaps, as the story suggests, just the tip of an immense castle buried beneath the mountain. The Black Stone of “The People of the Dark” is a small black tablet worshipped by the Children of the Night as their holiest treasure. Both have the same strange, black writing that is also mentioned in "The Thing on the Roof " as adorning an archaic chain from the temple built by a race that predated the Indian and the Spaniard (guess who?). Though different, the similarities suggest that both black stones and the necklace chain are Mythos relics.

The next story to feature the Children of the Night and the Black Stone was “The Worms of the Earth” (Weird Tales, November 1932), a third euphemism for the degenerate Serpent folk, and a Howard tour-de-force. This tale features Bran Mac Morn, the king of the remnants of Brule the Spear-Slayers’ people from the Kull stories, the Picts. They have have grown small and secretive in the age of Roman Britain. The governor, Titus Sulla, callously cruxifies one of Bran’s men before his eyes. Bran’s reply is: “... Black gods of R’lyeh, even you would I invoke to the ruin and destruction of those butchers! I swear by the Nameless Ones, men shall die howling for that deed ..”

Since the Picts are so few in number, Bran turns to supernatural methods to strike at Titus Sulla, namely stealing the Black Stone and coercing the “Worms of the Earth” to capture him. Bran takes the tablet to Dagon’s Mire, and throws it into the murky water. The strange beast that lives there is never seen but the reference is not hard to make. “He had discounted the ancient legend which made Dagon’s Mere the lair of a nameless water-monster, but now he had a feeling as if his escape was narrow ...” Also mentioned are Dagon’s Ring, Dagon’s Barrow and Dagon-moor. These places may be related to Dagonia in the Conan tale “The Devil in Iron”.

When the Worms of the Earth deliver the heavily-guarded Titus Sulla, the governor is mad with the terrors he has witnessed. Bran mercifully kills him, cursing the days he ever thought to employ the inhuman Children of the Night.

“The Valley of the Lost” (Magazine of Horror, Summer 1966) is a Howard story that was published many years after it was written. The basic plot is not dissimilar to the other Children of the Night tales, except that it is set in the American South-West. “Little John” Reynolds is a Texan fleeing the enemies of a blood-feud. He escapes by entering a cave where he is attacked and captured by the Children of the Night. Upon escaping, he finds his hair has turned white from the shock. The story has little to offer other than a new location.

“Dagon Manor” (Different Worlds May-Jun. 1986) is another Howard story published decades later. Finished by C. J. Henderson, “Dagon Manor” is the sequel to “The Children of the Night”, though it has some inconsistencies. The group of students of the occult, O’Donnell, Kirowan, Conrad and others go to the home of Tavarel, who owns Dagon Manor. Instead of being Conrad’s butler, Ketrick is now Tavarel’s servant. His name is also spelled without the second “k”, Ketric.

Ketric, in this second story, is no longer the innocent victim, but an evil villain deserving of O’Donnell’s hatred. Through the course of the story he maneuvers the party of occultists into the basement, where they are to be fed to the forgotten Old One, Gol-Goroth, a monster from Howard’s “The Gods of bal-Sagoth” (Weird Tales, October 1931). Surrounded by his evil followers, all of Serpent-tainted blood, Ketric leads a wild, frenzied dance of summoning. O’Donnell, who has not forgotten his experience as Aryara, shoots the villainous Ketric in the throat with his revolver. A similar fate awaits the other cultists.

The Children of the Night, The People of the Dark, and The Worms of the Earth are all human euphemism for a race that once ruled the world in the time of the dinosaurs, used ancient sorceries and fought wars with other outre races, such as the Great Race of Yith. Sadly, they dwindled to mere crossbreeds, then later into limbless reptiles. By what name they call themselves in their whispering tongue we do not know. Karl Edward Wagner in his 1976 Bran Mac Morn pastiche, The Legion from the Shadows, tells how the Serpent folk crossbred with humankind as well as the devil-worms of Howard’s “Red Nails”, creating a third race known as “The Crawlers”. But no matter the name, they remain Howard's best addition to the Cthulhu Mythos.