And I saw in my dream that I now stood in a great and open space surrounded by pinnacles of crumbling stone. As my eyes became accustomed to the twilight, I saw the pinnacles were great ruins of masonry, five of them, and in between were strewn the colossal wreck that had once made them a united whole. I asked the one who stood with me, who was at once very near and very far, and whose height one minute soared to the heavens, and the next minute was a few scant inches above my own what it meant, and who had broken down this once mighty building. And he answered with a voice like a storm in the wasteland: "It was once a mighty church, but four men came and broke it down with hammers, each intending to rebuild it, greater and truer than before, but a fifth came in with many followers and stole the fallen stones and scattered others so that no one was able to rebuild it. And the names of the four men are these: Ignatius, Martin, Desiderius, and John. The fifth man who came with all his followers was named Francois-Marie." And I said: "Surely, the first four ought not to have broken it!" But the one who stood with me replied: "How do you know what they ought or ought not to have done, oh man? You cast judgment on them for you see the ruins and can only imagine what it looked like in their time. I have told you that fifth man came with his followers and scattered and plundered the stones, but there was no one to tell them. Indeed, these are not mere men, but also five types of men. Do not forget that this is but a dream, having no more truth or lie than what a dream may tell!" And I replied: "Must it forever remain a ruin then?" The one who was with me answered: "It will not, but the time and manner of its rebuilding is not for you to know." I had much more to ask him, but even then the sun shone through the curtain and I awoke, taking from our speech together no more than the shadow of a dream.
I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard. This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane. The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up. I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all. Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser. Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong. I h...
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And then there are those who would question and reject any stone that Francois-Marie had unsettled, simply because he touched it...