"The Statement of One John Gibson" is a short story by Brian Lumley in the Cthulhu Mythos genre. It serves as a sequel to "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", a story that H. P. Lovecraft revised for William Lumley (no known relation). It was originally published in Crypt of Cthulhu Candlemas 1984 (February), an issue dedicated to Brian Lumley.
Plot[]
The story is presented as a transcript made by John Gibson, born April 30, 1957, of Surrey, England. On his father's side he is descended from the "Typers of New Hampshire," originally from Ulster County, New York, "known for the coarse, almost greenish cast of their features." On his mother's side he is from an old Dutch family, the Sleghts--thus linking him on both sides of his family tree to the narrator of Alonzo Typer, the narrator of the Lovecraft revision tale.
John's father was an obsessive student of "all manner of Earth’s elder horrors and mysteries", a "delver in obscure myths and myth-cycles, a searcher of nighted crypts and beneath desert mastabas, and a pursuer of all things esoteric and exciting to his sort of super-imaginative mind." After the father's death, some time in 1982, from "some creeping organic malfunction which aged him well before his time", John inherits the contents of his locked bureau. Despite a dying warning from his father's solicitor, James Ogilvy--his last words, after inexplicably crashing into an oak tree on the Gibson estate, were “Glub . . . glub . . . look in . . . bureau . . . destroy . . . glub . . .”--John opens the forbidden cabinet of mystery and finds a collection of Mythos-related literature, specifically:
| “ | The Cthaat Aquadingen, Von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon and that same author’s study of the Book of Dzyan, and a musty, leather-jacketed volume whose spine bore the faded and conjectural legend Ghorl Nigral. | „ |
Perhaps more surprisingly, the father's secret texts include old copies of Weird Tales, a set of the Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, and a copy of the Arkham House revisions anthology The Horror in the Museum, which reprinted "The Diary of Alonzo Typer".
The father's effects also included a medallion (later found to have originated in Yian-Ho) , "not quite circular, perhaps two inches across at its widest point." Despite its small size, the medallion bears a fantastically detailed engraving depicting "a burst of light beyond a horizon of strangely angled architectural structures, windowless towers and turrets whose unbalanced geometry made them seem both concave and convex." In the foreground are a host of figures who seem to be fleeing "the approach of some awesome event or Being":
| “ | One of them, anthropomorphic, the air elemental, strode above, his great feet hidden in the clouds, whilst the other—a vaguely octopoid shape, and yet also having features loosely manlike—slithered or flopped below. Both had faces, the expressions demoniac. | „ |
He later identifies these as the entities Ithaqua and Cthulhu; others are left as an exercise for the reader:
| “ | There was a black goat shape, satanic in its bipedal, upright flight; a mass of surging bubbles; a seething something that boiled forward upon the earth; a spider-thing of many jointed legs; a featureless, leathery slug thing; a heaving monstrosity of tossing tentacles, claws and eyes, oh, and others quite beyond my limited powers of description. | „ |
There is as well a letter to the father from his great-uncle Victor Gibson (c. 1835-1920), who was "a Professor of Anthropology, specializing in Ethnology and Mythology, at Heidelberg" until he retired in 1895. It turns out that Typer was a student of his, and that he is the V__ mentioned in Typer's diary as the source of forbidden knowledge. Uncle Victor warned his nephew, "There’s that in your blood which is bad," and that if he feels an attraction to the Yian-Ho medallion--"the soul-symbol of Those Who Wait and Whisper in Darkness and in Dreams, Those Who are Chained but will be Free"--then he should "destroy it at once if you can, and once and for all turn your eyes from the course of dark learning." Though he reflects, sensibly enough: "If the blood runs true in your veins my warning will be of little use. It may well have the opposite effect."
The culminating revelation is that John's parents made their own visit to the van der Heyl house outside Attica, New York, where they had their own encounter with an eldritch horror--an encounter that occurred nine months before Gibson's own birth.
Putting two and two together, John travels to the Hammersmith Institute for the Mentally Disturbed, where his mother Evangeline Gibson has been an inmate, to confront her with what he has deduced about his parentage. Left with no choice, she uses the Runes of Exorcism on him, which kills her and reduces him to "sticky stains".
Publication History[]
- Crypt of Cthulhu Candlemas 1984
- The New Lovecraft Circle (1996, 2004)
External Link[]
- "The Statement of One John Gibson" review at Cthulhery