“And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of Earth.”—Clark Ashton Smith
Strictly
speaking, The Beast of Averoigne is
not a snake, though the creator of this monster clearly emphasizes its
serpentine qualities. Clark Ashton Smith
published this story in Weird Tales
in May of 1933. That issue also
contained stories by Donald Wandrei, (Spawn
of the Sea) and Robert E. Howard, (Moonlight
on a Skull).
The setting
of the story and the origin and manifestation of the monster is unusual. The plot—which involves Benedictine monks
teaming up with a renowned sorcerer—is original and imaginative. Smith employs archaic language effectively to
create the experience of a medieval society, its people certain of the existence
of miracles, magic and demons. He might
as well be writing about the life and works of some forgotten medieval saint,
except that the hero of the story is a sorcerer. The language is never intrusive or
encumbering—not the leaden King James Bible-ese that Lovecraft sometimes
employed.
In
the summer of 1369, the Abbey of Perigon and its surrounding towns are besieged
by a terrible pestilence. The creature appears
just as a mysterious red comet approaches Earth and illuminates the sky above. Though its movements are snake-like, it has
numerous appendages, with which it extracts the bone marrow of its victims, who
suffer an awful death. It comes out at
night, “a black and slithering foulness clad in changeable luminescence…” About its head is a “hellish nimbus”, a mark
of its otherworldly spiritual power.
The
death toll soon mounts. The beast first
preys on wild animals and livestock, then corpses, and finally begins to attack
people, consuming more than forty of the local townspeople and several of the monks. Piety, prayers, and holy water are completely
ineffective. In desperation, the monks turn to Luc le Chaudronnier, “sometime
known as astrologer and sorcerer.” Can
he deliver them all from this awful menace?
They offer him gold and “a guarantee of immunity from all inquisition
which your doings might otherwise invite.”
It
being the Middle Ages, the wizard has a powerful array of sorcerer
paraphernalia, not the least of which is a jeweled ring containing an
imprisoned demon. You never know when a
ring of Eibon might come in handy; it is best to keep one in the sack at all
times. The wizard and two men-at-arms
hide outside the Abbey and wait for the creature. Lately the monster seems to focus its
attention and activity in or around the monastery. The wizard’s ministrations are effective, but
reveal a disturbing connection between the comet above, ‘the beast of Averoigne’,
and the Abbey.
The
story contains an interesting twist on the theme of deliverance from an evil
predator. The characters cannot rely on
a strong human hero, or the trappings of the local traditional religion for
divine intervention. Instead, the malevolent
creature from beyond our world is dispatched by an evil demon from this one. Clark Ashton Smith uses an overtly religious
setting to show that the race is not necessarily ‘to the swift or the battle to
the strong’, but it might be to the clever
and resourceful.
This concludes
a brief survey of snakes and their depiction in horror fiction. Snakes take many roles, from the sublime to
the hideously malevolent. Whether a marauding
predator, ally of the gods, or spiritual enemy of mankind, the serpent is
wonderfully versatile for a creature without arms or legs.
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