An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Van Keulen, Dr. Cornelius.

In “Winged Death,” a coroner’s physician who discovers the dead body of Dr. Thomas Slauenwite in a hotel room in Bloemfontein, South Africa, as well as Slauenwite’s strange diary. Verhaeren, M.

In “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” a Belgian agent at a trading post in the Congo who sends Arthur Jermyn a box containing a curious specimen he has found among the N’bangus—a specimen that impels Jermyn to kill himself.

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“Vermont—A First Impression.”

Essay (1,630 words); probably written in the fall of 1927. First published in Driftwind(March 1928); rpt. MW

A brief account of HPL’s first visit to New Hampshire in the summer of 1927. It speaks in glowing terms of the beauty of the countryside as well as of the city of Brattleboro, and concludes with a paean to “Vermont’s gentle poet,” Arthur Goodenough. Several paragraphs of the essay were incorporated, with significant revision, into “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930).

“Very Old Folk, The.”

Short story (2,500 words); written on November 3, 1927. First published (in this form) in ScientiSnaps(Summer 1940); corrected text in MW

In the Roman province of Hispania Citerior (Spain), the proconsul, P.Scribonius Libo, summons a provincial quaestor named L.Caelius Rufus to the small town of Pompelo because of strange rumors in the hills above the town. There, a shadowy group of hill-dwellers, perhaps not fully human, named the Very Old Folk customarily kidnap a few villagers on the day before the Kalends of Maius (May Eve) and the Kalends of November (Halloween). But this year, it is the day before the Kalends of November and no villager has been taken. This very lack of activity is suspicious, and Rufus is concerned that something far graver is afoot. He argues with the military tribune Sextus Asellius and with the legatus Cn. Balbutius, urging that the Roman army take strong action to suppress the Very Old Folk once and for all; after much debate, Rufus wins Libo to his side and prevails. As a cohort of Roman soldiers ascends the hills, the atmosphere becomes increasingly sinister; then some of the horses scream,the stars are blotted out of the night sky, a cold wind sweeps down upon the cohort, and the stoic Libo, facing some nameless horror, intones ponderously: “Malitia vetus—malitia vetus est…venit…tandem venit”(“The old evil—it is the old evil…it comes…it comes at last”). The “story” is in fact an account, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, of a remarkably vivid and longlasting dream that HPL had on Halloween night, inspired by the time of the year and by his reading of James Rhoades’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid(1921). HPL recounted the dream (with slight variations in each account) to at least two other correspondents: Bernard Austin Dwyer (see SL 2.189–97) and Frank Belknap Long. HPL frequently mentioned that he hoped to use the kernel of the dream in a story, but he never did so; in 1929, Long received HPL’s permission to borrow the text of his dream-account for his novel, The Horror from the Hills( WT,January and February–March 1931; Arkham House, 1963), where it comprises the central section of chapter 5. HPL states that the events of the dream “must have been in the late republic”; i.e., prior to the commencement of Augustus’ reign as emperor of Rome (27 B.C.E.).

“Vivisector, The.”

Column appearing in five installments in the Wolverine(March, June, November 1921; March 1922; Spring 1923), all as by “Zoilus.”

Much confusion has existed as to which of the columns—if any—were written by HPL; but examination of correspondence by Horace L.Lawson (editor of the Wolverine) to HPL (at JHL) clarifies the matter. These documents testify that HPL wrote the columns for March and June 1921, March 1922, and Spring

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