"The Fishers from Outside" is a Cthulhu Mythos short story by Lin Carter, first published in 1988 in the magazine Crypt of Cthulhu. It reappeared in the anthology The New Lovecraft Circle, and in the collection The Xothic Legend Cycle. In the latter, the identity of the story's Great Old One is changed from Gol-goroth to Groth-Golka, a correction that Carter himself intended to make before his death.
Although "The Fishers from Outside" marks the first actual appearance of the titular creatures (previously mentioned by H. P. Lovecraft in "The Outpost" and "Winged Death", and by Frank Belknap Long in The Horror from the Hills), Carter actually identifies them as being just another name for the Shantaks. While Chaosium's depiction of the Fishers is derived from Carter's, the company has instead opted to keep Fishers and Shantaks as distinct species in their bestiaries.
Synopsis[]
Professor Mayhew has spent 20 years of his career studying the mysterious Fishers from Outside: alien creatures that colonized Earth in prehistory and built megalithic outposts in central Uganda. From the Necronomicon, he learns that the Fishers from Outside are servants of an old god (Gol-goroth in the original version, Groth-Golka in the revised version) worshiped in the island of Bal-Sagoth.
In 1946, the story's narrator, Harlow Sloan, is hired as Mayhew's assistant in the archaeological site of Great Zimbabwe. Among several idols shaped like monstrous birds, they also find the Black Stone: an object shaped like a dodecahedron with mysterious inscriptions, including, again, strange avian creatures. That night, Sloan has a nightmare in which he sees Great Zimbabwe as it was in prehistory, and witnesses humans being offered as sacrifices to winged reptilian creatures summoned from the skies, which would brutally tear the sacrifices apart with their beaks.
Mayhew recognizes the inscriptions of the Black Stone as being similar to some he had seen in the Ponape Scripture, discovered by Abner Exekiel Hoag and translated by his manservant Yogash, who was a Deep One hybrid. Back in the United States, he studies the book and has access to other papers of Hoag and Yogash. The same symbols are present, and refer to the same pantheon of gods, which seem therefore to have been worshiped in both the Pacific and Africa. When they manage to translate the Black Stone's inscriptions, Mayhew and Sloan find that they are instructions for summoning the Fishers from Outside, a.k.a. Shantaks.
Two days later, Mayhew sends Sloan away to the Kester Library to make some annotations from the Book of Eibon, claiming he will need them that same night. Once there, however, Sloan quickly realizes that the order was just a pretense to get him away. He returns just in time to hear Mayhew reciting the summoning, and sees the Fishers from Outside descend from the skies and tear the Professor apart, to the point that the body is only identifiable by his pince-nez glasses.
Behind the Mythos[]
"The Fishers from Outside" features a tip of the hat to "Winged Death" by having a main character named Sloan, and mentioning a posthumous character named Slauenwite. In "Winged Death", the main character is named Slauenwite, and a posthumous character named Sloane is mentioned.