Lord of the Trees Read online

  Later, when Caliban has descended below the surface into a labyrinthine series of miles-deep caverns, in search of the extra-dimensional entity known as Shrassk, a being which had been invoked and then imprisoned by the Nine in the eighteenth century, Caliban has another vision of The Other: “The Other was standing at the entrance to a cave. He was smiling and holding up one huge bronze-skinned hand, two fingers forming a V.”

  “One huge bronze-skinned hand.”

  The Other is Doc Wildman, communicating to Caliban across the dimensional void.

  Dennis Power takes a different view: “In this fragment, Farmer seemed to indicate that Doc Caliban and the Nine lived in an alternate universe from [Doc Wildman]. While Shrassk, the... monster, was most likely extra-dimensional, Doc Caliban of course was not, although he may have become trapped in other-dimensional space by the machinations of the Nine. I think that Farmer may have made the assertion that Doc Caliban, Grandrith, etc., resided in a different universe for a few reasons. First of all was the safety of his family. Having learned that the Nine were not entirely wiped out, he wanted to demonstrate that he was not a threat to them. By placing them in another universe, it is as if he was saying that not only were they fictional, but also that no true life counterparts ever existed in the real world. Also, he may have been trying to forever end the controversial theory that Grandrith and Caliban were [Greystoke] and [Doc Wildman]. This theory still raises the hackles today among casual readers of Farmer’s works who have only read A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, or The Mad Goblin, and not his biographies or authorized novels about the real [Greystoke] and Doc.”

  Nonetheless, if one disagrees with Power, the parallel universe explanation begs the question how Farmer came into possession of Grandrith’s memoirs.

  Could Farmer have received Grandrith’s and Caliban’s manuscripts from an alternate universe? Assuming that Farmer’s recounting of meeting Grandrith in Kansas City is accurate—at least from Farmer’s perspective—how might this have occurred? And how did Grandrith subsequently deliver Volume X of his memoirs (which became Lord of the Trees) to Farmer? How did Farmer receive Doc Caliban’s manuscript for The Mad Goblin?

  Perhaps Grandrith learned how to cross the dimensional gate and delivered his manuscripts and that of Caliban to a noted writer of science-fiction in an alternate universe who would understand it? Probably not, as Doc Caliban does not seem to have any knowledge of the parallel universe in 1977 and 1984 (the dates of the two known fragments of Caliban’s further adventures, “Down to Earth’s Centre” and The Monster on Hold); presumably, if Grandrith had learned to traverse the dimensions in the late 1960s, he would have informed his half-brother Caliban.

  Could someone else have passed through the dimensional gate and given the manuscript to Farmer? It would not have been hard to pose as Lord Grandrith (or rather, “James Claymore”) during their one meeting, since Farmer had never met him, and indeed had never heard of him. But Farmer, with his fascination with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of a jungle lord raised by “apes,” would have been instantly hooked by the story of a real-life feral man brought up under such unusual circumstances, and it would not have been hard to convince him that Grandrith was the real-life inspiration for Burroughs’ tales—which, in fact, was largely true; they just happened to be Burroughs’ tales in an alternate universe.

  Much later, when Doc Caliban conveyed to Farmer the events of The Monster on Hold—presumably Caliban later learned how to travel across the dimensional nexus held open by Shrassk—Farmer realized he had been duped back in the late 1960s. Or at least partially duped. For the man who had delivered the manuscripts to him had not been Lord Grandrith, but someone who had had other reasons for making the manuscripts public in Farmer’s universe.

  The presence of Doc Wildman in the caverns deep beneath New England, at the gate held open by the Shrassk entity, as observed by Doc Caliban across the dimensional nexus, strongly indicates that there also exists a secret organization of the Nine in Farmer’s universe (i.e., Wildman and Greystoke’s dimension, known as the Wold Newton Universe). Depending on whether the two universes diverged at some common point in the distant past, or whether they have always been coexistent, the Nine in each universe might conceivably have some members in common, members who were alive when the universes divided.

  Or, the makeup of the Nine could be completely different in each universe.

  Either way, if one of the Nine learned how to cross the dimensions, he may have posed as Lord Grandrith and delivered the manuscript for A Feast Unknown to Farmer with the intent of causing much disruption and consternation among the members of the Nine in the Wold Newton Universe. These members of the Nine, upon reading A Feast Unknown (for surely the book would be quickly brought to their attention and they would intently analyze it) would recognize much of themselves, and would also see a great many differences, but the overriding questions posed among them would be how? and why?

  It would take someone of a Trickster’s mentality to conceive of such a stunt. Someone with a long reputation for causing chaos, someone who is capricious and cunning, someone who changes his shape—or changes identities—as easily as others change their clothing.

  As Christopher Paul Carey pointed out, when discussing Escape from Loki: Doc Savage’s First Adventure in his “The Green Eyes Have It—Or Are They Blue? Or, Another Case of Identity Recased,”3 “One thing is for certain, and that is that [Baron] von Hessel presented himself to Doc in the role of the Norse All-father god Odin to Doc’s Siegfried. Odin is the cynical god who gave up his left eye for a look at the future.”

  One member of the immortal Nine fits this description, and in fact is understood to be the person who was the historical basis for Odin: XauXaz.

  Of course, as the 1968 events of A Feast Unknown unfold, XauXaz is recently deceased.

  Deceased in the Nine’s Universe, at any rate.4

  Win Scott Eckert

  Denver, Colorado

  July 2012

  Win Scott Eckert is the coauthor with Philip José Farmer of the Wold Newton novel The Evil in Pemberley House, about Patricia Wildman, the daughter of a certain bronze-skinned pulp hero (Subterranean Press, 2009). In 1997, he launched the first Wold Newton website, The Wold Newton Universe (www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Pulp.htm). He is the editor of and contributor to Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe (MonkeyBrain Books), a 2007 Locus Awards finalist. He has also coedited three Green Hornet anthologies for Moonstone Books, and his short fiction about adventurous characters such as Zorro, The Green Hornet, The Avenger, The Phantom, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Hareton Ironcastle, The Green Ghost, Honey West, T.H.E. Cat, Captain Midnight, Doc Ardan, and Sherlock Holmes, can be found in the pages of various anthologies from Moonstone Books and Black Coat Press. His critically acclaimed, encyclopedic Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World 1 & 2 was recently released by Black Coat Press. His latest project is the Wold Newton Origins series of interconnected short stories found in several volumes of Meteor House’s annual anthology The Worlds of Philip José Farmer. Win holds a B.A. in Anthropology, a Juris Doctorate, and lives with his wife Lisa and a menagerie of three cats and two dogs near Denver, Colorado. Find him on the web at www.winscotteckert.com.

  _________________

  1 “An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke.” (Originally published as “Tarzan Lives” in Esquire, April 1972; reprinted in Farmer’s Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke, University of Nebraska Press Bison Books, 2006.)

  2 Reprinted in Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Win Scott Eckert, ed., MonkeyBrain Books, 2005; and in Pearls from Peoria, Paul Spiteri, ed., Subterranean Press, 2006. An additional fragment of the novel, entitled “Down to Earth’s Centre,” has since been located in Mr. Farmer’s “Magic Filing Cabinet,” and was published in Farmerphile: The Magazine of Philip José Farmer no. 12, Paul Spiteri and Win Scott Eckert, eds., April 2008.


  3 Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Win Scott Eckert, ed., MonkeyBrain Books, 2005.

  4 For more on this, see the Wold Newton Origins tale “The Wild Huntsman” by Win Scott Eckert in The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3: Portraits of a Trickster, Michael Croteau, ed., Meteor House, 2012.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  Although the editors of this book insist upon publishing this work as a novel under my by-line, it is actually Volume X of the Memoirs of Lord Grandrith, as edited by me for publication. The British spellings and the anglicisms of Lord Grandrith have been changed by me for an easier understanding by American readers.

  The location of the caves of the Nine and several other places have purposely been made inexact. This is for the benefit of any reader who might try to find these places.

  The Nine must have marked me off as dead beyond doubt.

  I don’t know whether or not the pilot of the fighter jet saw me fall into the ocean. If he did, he probably did not fly down for a closer look. He would have assumed that, if the explosion of my amphibian did not kill me, the fall surely would. After hurtling twelve hundred feet, I should have been smashed flat against the surface of the Atlantic off the coast of the West African nation of Gabon. The waters would be as hard as Sheffield steel when my body struck.

  If the pilot had known that men had survived falls from airplanes at even greater heights, he might have swooped low over the surface just to make certain that I was not alive. In 1942, a Russian fell twenty-two thousand feet without a parachute into a snow-covered ravine and lived. And other men have fallen two thousand feet or higher into water or snow and lived. These were freak occurrences, of course.

  The pilot would have reported that the twin-engine propellered amphibian I was flying to the Parc National du Petit Loango had gone up in a ball of flame at the first pass. The .50 caliber machine guns or rockets or whatever he had used had hit the fuel tanks and burning bits of wreckage had scattered everywhere. Among the bits was my body.

  I recovered consciousness a few seconds later. Blue was screaming around me. My half-naked body was as cold as if the wind were ripping through my intestines. The explosion had ripped off most of my clothing or else they had been torn off when I went through the nose of the craft. I was falling toward the bright sea, though, at first I sometimes thought I was falling toward the sky. I whirled over and over, seeing the rapidly dwindling silvery jet speeding inland and the widely dispersed and flaming pieces describing smoky arcs.

  I also saw the white rim of surf and flashing white beaches and, beyond, the green of the bush jungle.

  There was no time or desire to think ironic thoughts then, of course. But if there had been, I would have thought how ironic it was that I was going to die only a few miles from my birthplace. If I had thought I was going to die, that is. I was still living, and until the final moment itself that is what I will always tell myself. I live.

  I must have fallen about two hundred feet when I succeeded in spreading out my legs and arms. I have done much sky diving for fun and for survival value. It was this that enabled me to flatten out and gain a stable attitude. I was slowing down my rate of descent somewhat by presenting as wide an area as possible to the air, acting as my own parachute. And then I slipped into the vertical position during the last fifty feet, and I entered the water like a knife with my hands forming the knife’s tip.

  I struck exactly right. Even so, the impact knocked me out. I awoke coughing saltwater out of my nose and mouth. But I was on the surface, and if I had any broken bones or torn muscles, I did not feel them.

  There was no sign of the killer plane or of my craft. The sky had swallowed one and the sea the other.

  The shore was about a mile away. Between it and me were the fins of at least two sharks.

  There wasn’t much use trying to swim around the sharks. They would hear and smell me even if I made a wide detour. So I swam toward them, though not before I had assured myself that I had a knife. Most of my clothing had been ripped off, but my belt with its sheathed knife was still attached to me. This was an American knife with a five-inch blade, excellent for throwing. I left it in the sheath until I saw one of the fins swerve and drive toward me. Then I drew it out and placed it between my teeth.

  The other fin continued to move southward.

  The shark may have just happened to turn toward me in the beginning, but an increase of speed showed that it had detected me. The fin stayed on the surface, however, and turned to my right to circle me. I swam on, casting glances behind me. It was a great white shark, a species noted for attacking men. This one was wary; it circled me three times before deciding to rush me. I turned when it was about twenty feet from me. The surface water just ahead of it boiled, and it turned on its side just before trying to seize my leg. Or perhaps it only intended to make a dry run to get a closer look at what might be a dangerous prey.

  I pulled my legs up and stabbed at it with both hands holding the hilt of the knife. The skin of the shark is as tough as cured hippo hide and covered with little jags—placoid scales—that can tear the skin off a man if he so much as rubs lightly against it. My only experience in fighting sharks was during World War II when my boat was sunk in the waters of the East Indian Ocean. The encounter with a freshwater shark in an African lake is fictional, the result of the sometimes over-romantic imagination of my biographer. Fortunately, my arms were out of the water and so unimpeded by the fluid. I heaved myself up to my waist and drove down with the knife and rammed it at least three inches into the corpse-colored eye. Blood spurted, and the shark raced away so swiftly that it almost tore the knife loose from my hands.

  Its tail did curve out enough to scrape across my belly, and my blood was mingling with its blood.

  I expected the shark to come back. Even if my knife had pierced that tiny brain, it would be far from dead, and the odor of blood would drive it mad.

  It came back as swiftly as a torpedo and as deadly. I dived this time and was enclosed in a distorted world the visible radius of which was a few feet. Out of the distortion something fast as death almost hit me, and went by, and I shoved the knife up into the belly. But the tip only penetrated about an inch, and this time the knife was pulled from my grip. I had to dive for it at once; without it I was helpless. I caught it just before it sank out of reach of eye and hand, and I swam to the surface. I looked both ways and saw a shadow speeding toward me. Then another shadow caught up with it, and blood boiled out in a cloud that hid both sharks. I swam away with as little splash as possible, hoping that other sharks would not be drawn in by the blood and the thrash of the battle.

  Before I had gone a half-mile, I saw three fins slicing the water to my left, but they were intent on following their noses to where the blood was flowing, where, as the Yanks say, the action was.

  It was a few minutes to twelve P.M. when my plane blew up. About sixteen minutes later, according to my wristwatch, I reached the shore and staggered across the beach to the shade and a hiding place in a bush. The fall, the fight with the shark, and the swimming for a mile at near top speed, had taken some energy from me. I walked past thousands of sea gulls and pelicans and storks, which moved away from me without too much alarm. These would be the great-great-great-grandchildren of the birds that I had known when I was young. The almost completely landlocked lagoon on the beach was no longer there. It had been filled in and covered over years ago by the deposit of sand and dirt from the little river nearby and by the action of the Benguela Current. The original shore, where I had roamed as a boy, was almost two miles inland.

  The jungle looked unchanged. No humans had settled down here. Gabon is still one of the least populated countries of Africa.

  Inland were the low hills where a broad tongue of the tall closed-canopy equatorial forest had been home for me and The Folk and the myriad animals and insects I knew so well. Most of the jungle in what is now the National Park of the Little Loan
go is really bush. The rain forest grows only on the highlands many miles inland except for the freakish outthrust of high hill which distinguishes this coastal area.

  After resting an hour, I got up and walked inland. I was headed toward the place where the log house of my human parents had once been, where I was born, where the Nine first interfered with my life and started me on that unique road, the highlights of which my biographer has presented in highly romanticized forms.

  The jungle here looks like what the civilized person thinks of as jungle, when he thinks of it at all. His idea, of course, is mostly based on those very unrealistic and very bad movies made about me.

  Knife in hand, I walked quietly through bush. Even if it wasn’t the true jungle of my inland home, I still felt about ten times as happy and at ease as I do in London or even in the comparatively unpopulated, plenty-of-elbow-room environs of my Cumberland estate. The trees and bushes here were noisy with much monkey life, too many insects, and an abundance of snakes, water shrews, mongooses, and small wild cats or long-necked servals. I saw a scale-armored anteating pangolin scuttling ahead of me and glimpsed a tiny furry creature which might or might not have been a so-called “bushbaby.” The bird life made the trees colorful and the air raucous. The salt air blowing in from the sea and the sight of the familiar plants made me tingle all over.

  As I neared the site of the buildings my father had built eighty-two years ago, I saw that the mangrove swamp to the north had spread out. Its edge was only a quarter of a mile to my left.