The Double Shadow by Clark Ashton Smith

Today we discuss another Clark Ashton Smith story. Let’s dive right in without any delay.

There is much to like about “The Double Shadow”, but the one thing that struck me more than anything is the incredible sense of place it manages to convey in a mere 14 pages. The story may be short, but you get the sense of a living, breathing world full of history. I’m not sure what other writer I have read that can do this.

The plot is fairly basic: An apprentice and his sorcerer-necromancer master find an ancient tablet purported to contain some primeval lore. They attempt to figure out what is written on the tablet and, of course, this leads to horrific consequences. The story itself isn’t bad; however, CAS has a way of turning this basic story into something memorable. CAS manages this by injecting a sense of history into it. Here is the third paragraph where the apprentice speaks of his master and mentor, Avyctes:

All men have heard the fame of Avyctes, the sole surviving pupil of that Malygris who tyrannized in his necromancy over Susran from a tower of sable stone; Malygris, who lay dead for years while men believed him living; who, lying thus, still uttered potent spells and dire oracles with decaying lips. But Avyctes lusted not for temporal power in the manner of Malygris; and having learned all that the elder sorcerer could teach him, withdrew from the cities of Poseidonis to seek another and vaster dominion.

The story did not need any mention of Avyctes’ master and what he did back in the day. However, CAS puts it in and immediately, you get a sense of a wider world in this story. A city named Susran where the necromancer Malygris ruled from a sable tower, a place called Poseidonis containing multiple cities. The world seems huge from that paragraph alone and, yet, CAS is not done yet. A page later, CAS continues:

Well had it been for Avyctes–and for me–if the master had contented himself with the lore preserved from Atlantis and Thule, or brought over from Mu and Mayapan. Surely this should have been enough; for in the ivory-sheeted books of Thule there were blood-writ runes that would call demons of the fifth and seventh planets, if spoken aloud at the hour of  their ascent; and the sorcerers of Mu had left record of a process whereby the doors of far-future time could be unlocked; and our fathers, the Atlanteans, had known the road between the atoms and the path into far stars, and had held speech with spirits of the sun. But Avyctes thirsted for a darker knowledge, a deeper empery; and in his hands, in the third year of my novitiate, there came the mirror-bright tablet of the lost serpent-people.

Details like this are sprinkled lavishly throughout the story without another mention anywhere else in the story. Now, they may not be essential to the plot, but it illustrates the power of showing and not telling. A single paragraph is all it took to make this fantastical world come alive and feel a thousand times bigger. We have a place called Thule that produces books full of runes written in blood, Atlanteans conversing with spirits from the sun, demons summoned from the fifth and seventh planets, and sorcerers from a place called Mu that have unlocked time-travel. All of this crammed into a single, almost throw-away paragraph. The crazy thing is that CAS throws out tons of these details. This is almost poetry in prose form. Then again, CAS was a poet so it shouldn’t be very surprising.

It’s a shame CAS isn’t more widely known because he clearly had skill. CAS wields words like a painter wields paintbrushes and paints vibrant stories with them. The “The Double Shadow” is proof of this.