Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Everybody dies, don't they? Everybody come back, don't they? Isn't that so? You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you? How do the dead come back, mother? What's the secret?
The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith Narrated by Tony Walker
Chapter 2: What tragic history surrounds the Larcombe House?
The old Larcombe House was a mansion of considerable size and dignity, set among oaks and cypresses on the hill behind Auburn's Chinatown, in what had once been the aristocratic section of the village. At the time of which I write, it had been unoccupied for several years and had begun to present the signs of desolation and dilapidation which untenanted houses so soon display.
The place had a tragic history and was believed to be haunted. I had never been able to procure any first-hand or precise accounts of the spectral manifestations that were accredited to it, but certainly it possessed all the necessary antecedents of a haunted house. The first owner, Judge Peter Larkham, had been murdered beneath its roof back in the 70s by a maniacal Chinese cook.
One of his daughters had gone insane, and two other members of the family had died accidental deaths. None of them had prospered. Their legend was one of sorrow and disaster. Some later occupants who'd purchased the place from the once surviving son of Peter Larkham had left under circumstances of inexplicable haste, after only a few months moving permanently to San Francisco.
They did not return even for the briefest visit, and beyond paying their taxes, they gave no attention whatever to the place. Everyone had grown to think of it as a sort of historic ruin when the announcement came that it had been sold to Jean Evereaux of New Orleans.
My first meeting with Evereaux was strangely significant, for it revealed to me, as years of acquaintance would not necessarily have done, the peculiar bias of his mind. Of course, I had already heard some odd rumours about him. His personality was too signal, his advent too mysterious to escape the usual fabrication and mongering of village tales.
I had been told that he was extravagantly rich, that he was a recluse of the most eccentric type, that he made certain very singular changes to the inner structure of the old house, And last but not least, that he lived with a beautiful mulatress who never spoke to anyone, and was believed to be his mistress as well as his housekeeper.
The man himself had been described to me by some as an unusual but harmless lunatic, and by others as an all-round Mephistopheles. I had seen him several times before our initial meeting. He was a sallow, saturnine Creole with the marks of race in his hollow cheeks and feverish eyes.
I was struck by his air of intellect and by the fiery fixity of his gaze, the gaze of a man who is dominated by one idea to the exclusion of all else, Some medieval alchemist who believed himself to be on the point of attaining his objective after years of unrelenting research might have looked as he did. I was in the Auburn Library one day when Everot entered.
I had taken a newspaper from one of the tables and was reading the details of an atrocious crime, the murder of a woman and her two infant children by the husband and father, who had locked his victims in a clothes closet after saturating their garments with oil. He had left a woman's apron string caught in the shut door with the end protruding, and had set fire to it like a fuse.
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Chapter 3: Who is Jean Evereaux and what is his purpose?
It seemed significant that he should have chosen me for a confidant. All others who met him found him uncommunicative and taciturn to an extreme degree. I suppose he'd felt the ordinary human need of unburdening himself to someone, and had selected me as the only person in the neighbourhood who was potentially sympathetic. I saw him several times during the month that followed.
He was indeed a strange psychological study, and I encouraged him to talk without reserve, though such encouragement was hardly necessary. There was much that he told me, a strange medley of the scientific and the mystic. I assented tactfully to all that he said, but ventured to point out the possible dangers of his evocative experiments, if they should prove successful.
To this, with the fervour of an alchemist or a religious devotee, he replied that it did not matter, that he was prepared to accept any and all consequences. More than once he gave me to understand that his invention was progressing favourably, and one day he said, with abruptness, "'I will show you my mechanism if you care to see it.'
I protested my eagerness to view the invention, and he led me forthwith into a room to which I had not been admitted before." The chamber was large, triangular in form, and tapestried with curtains of some sullen black fabric. It had no windows.
Clearly the internal structure of the house had been changed in making it, and all the queer village tales emanating from carpenters who had been hired to do the work were now explained. Exactly in the centre of the room there stood, on a low tripod of brass, the apparatus of which Averroes had so often spoken.
The contrivance was quite fantastic, and presented the appearance of some new, highly complicated musical instrument. I remember that there were many wires of varying thickness stretched on a series of concave sounding boards of some dark, unlustrous metal, and above these there depended from the horizontal bars a number of square, circular and triangular gongs.
Each of these appeared to be made of a different material. Some were bright as gold or translucent as jade. Others were black and opaque as jet. A small hammer-like instrument hung opposite each gong at the end of a silver wire. Averro proceeded to expound the scientific basis of his mechanism.
the vibrational properties of the gongs he said were designed to neutralize with their sound pitch all other cosmic vibrations than those of evil he dwelt at much length on this extravagant theorem developing it in a fashion oddly lucid He ended his peroration. I need one more gong to complete the instrument, and this I hope to invent very soon.
The triangular room, draped in black and without windows, forms the ideal setting for my experiment. Apart from this room, I have not ventured to make any change in the house or its grounds, for fear of deranging some propitious element or collocation of elements. More than ever I thought that he was mad.
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Chapter 4: What theories about evil does Averroes propose?
So, Manichaeism was condemned as the great Christian heresy because of this concept that evil is an equal force. And it's not a deficiency. It's a positive force or it's a negative force, but it has presence. It is real. And in this story, we have Beau Subra's monograph on Manichaeism and his library, Smith, placed it there deliberately. And this matters because, as I said, it was condemned.
If evil is a co-equal force, then the physical world, matter, bodies, decay, belongs to the dark principle. This is what the Manichaeists and the Gnostics both said, that the world is essentially evil. So, and Averroes says that he scientifically looks at it, and he says evil in that case is chemical reactions of growth and decay of trees, flowers, and minerals.
And it's a straight Manichaeism cosmology, but I think what he's making a big mistake there is he is equating entropy with evil. I'm going to come back to that. Entropy and evil to me are very different things. They're different ways of looking at this process.
Then we have, as I said, Orthodox Christianity did not like this, and Orthodox with a small o. I don't mean the Orthodox Church of Romania and Greece and Russia these days, although they did evolve into that. So Augustine, St. Augustine, the great theologian, he was a Manichean for nine years before his conversion to Christianity. And he was a great mind and he counter-argued.
So basically the Orthodox Christian view of evil is this, that... Evil cannot be a thing, because to be a thing it must be created. And only God can create, and God cannot create a bad thing. He can only create good things. Therefore, what we call evil is a corruption of a good thing. It's a turning away from being towards non-being.
So the technical term is the privacio, however you want to say it in Latin, bony, the deprivation of good. So evil is only the absence of good. It is not a thing in its own right. So there is no power of evil. Evil is only where good is not, if that makes sense. I think it can be attacked, that philosophical view, but that's what it was.
Because to say that evil is a thing on its own is to admit that God created evil. And from a Christian point of view, you can't have that. Because in Christian terms, there is no equal and opposite evil and good. It's not the exorcist. And I think I did put a piece in this note about folk theology, and I took it out.
But if you speak to many folk Christians these days, what I mean is the common understanding, the people's understanding. They often verge into a view of the world where evil and good are equal, and that is a heresy. They cannot be evil. God only has power. Evil only exists in that God allows it to exist. It is not equal. It cannot overcome good. That's the orthodox view.
But the folk view is pretty much a Manichean view. It's still prevalent. Many people still believe in the power of evil and that it could win. Although the orthodox position is that of course it can't win. It's only what God allows. But Our man, Evero here, is not an orthodox Christian. He clearly believes in a tangible power of evil, which he then will constellate.
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