𝓦𝐓
"The Children of the Night" is a horror and and science fiction short story by Robert E. Howard, first published in Weird Tales in the April-May issue of 1931.
This story introduced the recurring characters of John Kirowan and John Conrad, and directly links them to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
The story is explicitly racist, asserting and celebrating the idea of innate racial enmity.
Synopsis[]
The story is narrated by a man called John O'Donnel. He is part of a group of men at the home of John Conrad, among them Professor John Kirowan. (Both Conrad and Kirowan appear in other Howard tales, such as "Dig Me No Grave". As the men talk, the conversation turns to cults. Various Mythos entities are namechecked, among them Cthulhu. The cult of Bran the Blessed is mentioned--a reference to Bran Mak Morn, another of Howard's barbarian heroes. Talk then turns to the Picts, and to what degree the legends mentioning them might be accurate. A flint stone is produced, to discuss whether or not it is Pictish.
Two of the men present try the flint weapon out, swinging it around. As they do so, one of them, Ketrick, accidentally strikes O’Donnel on the head with the flint. He loses consciousness and experiences a vision of a past life. In this previous incarnation, O’Donnel was Aryara, a member of the tribe known as the Sword People.
In the past life O'Donnel is experiencing while he is unconscious, Aryara and his group have been attacked by the Children of the Night, a degenerate race that has fallen into subhuman savagery. They are considered beneath contempt by both Sword People and Picts.
Aryara had fallen asleep on watch. When he awoke, he discovered that the rest of his group had been slaughtered by the Children of the Night. Disgraced by his failure to keep watch, Aryara becomes an exile who dedicates the rest of his life to hunting down and exterminating the Children of the Night. As O'Donnel regains consciousness, he understands that Aryara died in battle against the Children of the Night.
Awake once more, O'Donnel sees Ketrick, the man who accidentally struck him, as a descendant of, and throwback to, the Children of the Night. The other men present intercede, and stop O'Donnel as he tries to kill Ketrick. As the story ends, O'Donnel has vowed to hunt the man down and destroy him.
Characters[]
John O'Donell: The story's narrator, he is knocked out by an oddly balanced neolithic tool and has a vision of a past life when he was Aryara of the Sword People.
Conrad: The story is set at his home. He has a "bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world." He believes that "the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.” His library is stocked with horror fiction as well as "works on witchcraft and demonology...Voodoo and dark magic," including von Junzt's Nameless Cults.
Clemants: Described as "a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity." He is an author whose "swashbuckling novels furnish...him a generous income," and also an editor on a bohemian poetry magazine called The Cloven Hoof, which gives him "full artistic expression."
Professor Kirowan: He argues rather snappishly about racial categorization and skull types, then scoffs at von Junzt. His theory about the Picts is disproved by O'Donell's vision. He has read the Necronomicon, though, and acknowledges the former existence of "such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like."
Taverel: He has read Nameless Cults, and thinks von Junzt "a maniac."
Ketrick: He has "always seemed strangely alien." "comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex." His eyes are "a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique," and sometimes "seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s." His personality displays a "slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference," and he has a "slight and occasional lisping of speech." Professor Hendrik Brooler holds that "Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood."
The Children of the Night[]
The gathering turns to discussing the identity of the people known as the Picts. Taverel maintains that while “the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic—a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements," there was an "older race" that shared their name, the first settlers of Britain, "who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.” Von Junzt, he says, describes them as "small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the neolithic culture into Britain."
Conrad disagrees, saying that the legends of little people "ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances" that precludes their being based on these Mediterranean migrants. To "excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples," the legends must based on "a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development."
Kirowan assents that "those early Mongoloids” had to "have been of extremely inhuman aspect," but denies that they preceded the Picts into Britain. "We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent," and from there the tales were brought by "both the Mediterranean and Aryan people."
When O'Donell has his vision, he sees the people under discussion, which his own tribe refers to as the Children of the Night:
They were short and stocky, with broad heads too large for their scrawny bodies. Their hair was snaky and stringy, their faces broad and square, with flat noses, hideously slanted eyes, a thin gash for a mouth, and pointed ears.... [T]hey conversed in a speech as hideous as themselves, a hissing, reptilian speech....
These Children of the Night seemed not human to us, with their deformed dwarfish bodies, yellow skin, and hideous faces. Aye—they were reptiles—vermin.
When O'Donell awakens, he realizes that a surviving member of the Children of the Night must have mated with one of Ketrick's ancestors, marking him "with the brand of the beast—the reptile—the vermin we exterminated centuries ago!" He vows to destroy his "ancient enemy."