Stories from the Borderland 6.4: “The Whistling Well” by Clifford D. Simak
By Scott Nicolay; see also Illustration by Michael Bukowski (here)
Simak as pictured in Wonder Stories in 1931. Artist uncredited. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.
Have you ever pondered the existence of dinosaur ghosts? The mighty saurians inhabited this Earth for over 100 million years, far longer than any of our ancestors in the genus Homo, and certainly many of them died violent deaths with unfinished business. If you believe that your dog might go to heaven, what of the titanosaurs, the largest animals ever to walk our world? And what of all the great squiggly things of the ancient seas, the belemnites and ammonites, the vast kraken that left its meter-wide beak in the Nevada hills where it once snapped the backs of ichthyosaurs for snacks? As a New Mexican, living in a land where the very stones are permeated with bone and shell and the delicate imprints of ancient ferns, I have considered this possibility often enough, and I know I am not alone. The Internet, of course, offers some wild ideas: dinosaur ghosts are fallen angels, or they are only visible in the ultraviolet, or the more wholesome possibility that they have had time to right their wrongs and move on. One would think there would be more stories by now, but I only know of two. The first I read to my daughters when they were small, before we moved on to Narnia, Edgar and Ellen, and the Baudelaire orphans: A Night in the Dinosaur Graveyard: A Prehistoric Ghost Story with Ten Spooky Holograms, by A. J. Wood. I was personally fond of this one because it lent itself to dramatic readings and it takes place in a cave. And the holograms are spooky! The second is “The Whistling Well” by Clifford D. Simak. It doesn’t come with any holograms, but it is genuinely spooky. And Weird.
A Night in the Dinosaur Graveyard by A.J. Wood; Illustrated by Wayne Anderson (Templar Publishing, 1984).
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) is a lifelong favorite of mine, and after Michael Bukowski and I started Stories from the Borderland almost 10 years ago, I looked Simak’s oeuvre up and down for a candidate, but to no avail. This is not to say that Simak did not write Weird fiction, however. One of his earliest short stories, “The Street that Wasn’t There” (a.k.a. “The Lost Street”), first published in 1941 in the short-lived pulp magazine Comet, is a bona fide Weird Tale in every sense, cowritten with Carl Jacobi no less. But alas, no creatures roam its pages for Michael to draw, so it does not suit our purposes.1 A few other early stories, such as “The Call from Beyond” from 1950, get Weird but ultimately aren’t especially good. However, Simak’s literary career, which began with “The World of the Red Sun” in 1931, overlapped with H.P. Lovecraft’s for the better part of a decade. The young author from Wisconsin was clearly reading the old gentleman from Rhode Island’s work. In fact, Simak’s writing is replete with elements of genuine weirdness, of both cosmic horror and cosmic joy, and at least one of his novels, his 1982 Tolkien-esque fantasy Where the Evil Dwells, incorporates a straight-up homage to Lovecraft, but as with “The Street that Wasn’t There,” none of these fit our specifications:
Stories/novelettes/novellas only; no novel excerpts;
No alternate world fantasy settings;
Must include a creature for Michael to draw.
The original hardcover edition of Dark Forces (Viking Press, 1980).
Eventually though, I found what I was looking for, right there in plain sight—or what should have been plain sight, in literary agent/editor Kirby McCauley’s legendary anthology Dark Forces, with the next-to-last piece of short fiction that Simak published during his lifetime. I confess, that when I think of Dark Forces, I generally think of little else than Stephen King’s novella “The Mist,” a Weird masterpiece of its own stuffed with all the creatures anyone could ask for, and a work that I can actually say “changed my life,” as the cliché goes. My myopic view of McCauley’s blockbuster literary assemblage also stems from the fact that I never owned my own copy, and “The Mist” was the only thing I read when my coworker Nancy Gleason loaned me her copy for the specific purpose of reading King’s new novella in 1983. I doubt Nancy has any idea how much impact she had on my life. For instance, I doubt that I would, without her, now be writing this 29th installment of Stories from the Borderland. Although you probably don’t know her, and we have long since lost touch, if you are enjoying this series, perhaps you might all like to tip your hats (to Nancy and to Kirby McCauley and to S. King [not to you Frank Darabont]).
For those of you unfamiliar with the works of Clifford D. Simak, which today retain only a tenuous hold on their position within the spec-lit canon, please allow me to provide some highlights. During the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Simak published 30-plus novels and more than 100 short stories. Among these are several genuine masterpieces. The first of these is City, his 1952 Stapledonian mosaic (or “fix-up”) novel of a group of connected stories: “City,” “Desertion,” “Huddling Place,” and “Census” (all from 1944), “Paradise” and “Hobbies” (both from 1946); “Aesop” (1947; here read by Simak himself); and “The Trouble with the Ants” (a.k.a. “The Simple Way”; 1951). The stories in City are the tales that the dogs tell their pups after the end of human civilization. Later editions add a final story, “Epilog,” first published in 1973. Although cosmicism pervades the whole of City, the novel enters fully into The Weird in later sections as the dogs contend with the “cobblies,” malevolent predators from either parallel worlds or other dimensions, and an ever-expanding civilization of ants (PHASE IV, anyone?).
Simak’s second masterpiece is Way Station (1963), the story of Enoch Wallace, a veteran of the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg, still alive in the 1960s and unaged for almost a century. CIA operatives attempt to recon Wallace’s house, but find it impenetrable by any means. The story reads like an especially good episode of The X-Files, with the main difference being that Simak’s aliens, while profoundly alien, are nevertheless interesting characters with whom Wallace develops actual friendships. Such unlikely connections represent a defining aspect of much of Simak’s work, and I will never not feel sadness over the departure of Hoot in Destiny Doll (1971). It continues to surprise me that Way Station has not yet been adapted into a film or television mini-series, although it has been optioned at least twice, most recently by Netflix in 2019. I don’t know how much I want to see an adaptation, but there is no question that this novel has cinematic potential.
The first edition of City, in its mosaic novel form (Gnome Press, 1953). Cover by Frank Kelly Freas.
Several of Simak’s stories remain evergreen and continue to be anthologized, including “Desertion” (1944), “The Big Front Yard” (1958), and “Grotto of the Dancing Bear” (1980). The latter revisits the longevity/immortality theme of Way Station and received both the Hugo and Nebula awards. “Desertion” is a key story in City, but the others stand alone. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer included “Desertion” in their massive 2016 anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection, and that is not even its most recent reprint.
Even though he never—quite—produced another City or Way Station, every one of Simak’s novels offers at least a bit of that magic that makes his best work great, and all the novels in his strong “second tier” will very much reward the reader. In this I would include The Werewolf Principle, The Goblin Reservation, Destiny Doll, and Cemetery World. All of these contain major moments that are Weird, or at least “Weird-adjacent.”
In 1976, Simak retired from his career in journalism, and most of his subsequent works display a certain improvement in quality, especially 1980’s The Visitors, arguably a third masterpiece, though less well-known. The simple and elegant premise of this novel involves an invasion of monoliths much like those from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on the Arthur C. Clarke novel. Simak’s monoliths, however, turn into vehicles with the potential to solve the energy crisis. The twist at the ending of the book is quite disturbing and goes full-on Weird.
Simak is known as one of the few science fiction authors writing prior to the 1960s to address religion in his work, which probably helped to earn him an invitation to Harlan Ellison’s cursed anthology Last Dangerous Visions. His contribution was called “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air.” It was first published posthumously in 2015 in I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories, the initial volume of a projected four-volume set of Simak’s short fiction. The story shares some themes with another late-career story, “Rautavaara’s Case” by Philip K, Dick, an author much better known than Simak for exploring religion in his fiction.
The 1975 Berkeley paperback edition of Destiny Doll was one of many Simak covers featuring Richard Powers’ iconic artwork.
In “The Whistling Well,” Simak goes beyond the question of dinosaur ghosts to tackle a topic that I have not seen any other author address: dinosaur religion. The story has a distinctly Lovecraftian flavor, though without the bad archaeology and elaborate pseudo-mythological baggage (i.e. the influence of Madame Blavatsky) that encumbered much of Lovecraft’s work. The most detailed passages in Simak’s story are descriptions of interior spaces and landscapes, especially of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, a large section of the state that remained uncovered by glaciers during the last Ice Age. The geological history of this area plays a crucial role in both the atmosphere and the plot of the story.
“The Whistling Well” does contain one somewhat cringey, even racist moment: the essentialist depiction of a black former preacher in Alabama, who describes himself and other Black Americans as “only a few lifetimes out of Africa.” Here we encounter a portrayal close to the “magic Negro” trope for which Stephen King himself has been justly criticized. Although not the outright racism of Lovecraft and others, this remains a sour note. While Simak presents this character positively, as a close friend and even mentor of the protagonist, the language has not dated well and it sticks out. The old preacher’s message is crucial to the story, however.
For better or worse, in this passage, and in “The Whistling Well” overall, we encounter what are probably Simak’s last moments of homage to Lovecraft. The latter’s insinuation that “primitive” BIPOC retain some knowledge or sense of remote antiquity that “civilized” northern Europeans do not is a central premise of “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) with its cultists and “nautical negro,” and the explicitly racist “The Horror of Red Hook” (1925). The passage in Simak’s story describing Thomas Parker’s conversation with the unnamed “old black man” in Alabama repeats this ugly trope, albeit in a gentler and less overtly racist form.
The strangely-inscribed dinosaur gastrolith that Parker pockets in a shallow rock shelter on the abandoned homestead of his ancestor almost certainly derives from Lovecraft’s “Elder Sign,” a relationship that becomes even more obvious during the denouement of the story. Finally, Simak describes the “wriggling, climbing shapes” that Parker encounters at the story’s climax during his attempt to escape using Lovecraftian language (though without resort to any of the now-cliché buzzwords such as eldritch, cyclopean, or squamous): “There was about them a drippiness, a loathsomeness, a scaliness that left him gulping in abject terror.” And of course there is the whole idea of elder gods. As much as these final pages echo Lovecraft overall, the presentation of the increasingly ominous scenes from Parker’s nighttime camp of vague shapes in the dark distinctly evokes Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” arguably the ur-Weird Tale.2
First page of “The Street That Wasn’t There,” by Simak and Carl Jacobi, as it appeared in the July 1941 issue of the pulp magazine, Comet; illustration by John R. Forte, Jr.
Curiously, Simak’s deliberately vague description of the ghosts or gods or monsters also recalls a passage in his own novel Destiny Doll, a personal favorite, wherein the protagonists are attempting to escape a horde of creatures that had been living inside a giant tree: “Pouring out of the great rents in the wood were crawling, creeping things, gray and even from that distance, with a slimy look to them. There were great piles of them heaped along the fallen trunk and more were crawling out and others of them were crawling down the trail, humping in their haste. From them came a thin and reedy wailing that set my teeth on edge.” In both cases, the creatures are blocking the only path, but the protagonist(s) manage(s) to pass nonetheless. The similarity between these two passages show how deeply The Weird—and Lovecraft’s influence—was embedded in Simak’s work. Even though “The Whistling Well” is one of his few stories that I can confidently describe as a Weird Tale, as previously noted, moments of weirdness pervade much of his oeuvre from beginning to end. What are not so common are moments of explicit horror: Simak’s cosmicism almost always leans closer to science fiction’s essential “sensawunda.” Only in this one late-career story did he choose to combine The Weird with horror. Even then, the product is still recognizably on-brand for Simak: rural Wisconsin setting, strange survivals of an ancient time, and communication with utterly unhuman beings.
Please visit Michael Bukowski’s blog to see his interpretation of a creature from “The Whistling Well,” an elder god of the dinosaurs themselves. Meanwhile, with this story, we have arrived at the penultimate installment of the sixth series of Stories from the Borderland, and we hope that you have enjoyed the images and discussion that we have offered thus far. Our final offering in this sequence comes from an author best known for her Weird poetry, but who did publish a few stories. This one is a sort of muck-man tale, but perhaps not quite exactly. If you dare to guess the author and title, comment below and a prize might await you.
Notes
[1]Strangely, this did not stop editor Terry Carr from including it in his 1975 anthology Creatures from Beyond, alongside such iconic and canonic monster-centric Weird tales as Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mimic” and Theodore Sturgeon’s “IT.”
[2]Lovecraft himself argued essentially this case in his posthumously-published critical study, Supernatural Horror in Literature. His own homages to “The Willows” are obvious in the introductory passages of two of his own greatest stories, “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Dunwich Horror” (1929).