To Arkham and the Stars

"To Arkham and the Stars" is a short Cthulhu Mythos story by American author Fritz Leiber. It revisits H. P. Lovecraft's Miskatonic University setting and many of his characters in an affectionate tribute to a writer who served as a mentor to Leiber when he was just setting out on his literary career.
==Synopsis==
An unnamed narrator revisits Arkham and Miskatonic University--as it turns out, to lay a wreath on the grave of Henry Armitage, the hero of "The Dunwich Horror", accompanied by Albert Wilmarth from "The Whisperer in Darkness". Along the way we see a version of the town and school updated to the 1960s, and meet many of the characters from Lovecraft's fiction--most of whom have been given happy endings.
Pulling into at the "Arkham station of the Boston and Maine Railroad", our narrator finds that a "suburb of quite tasteful Modern Colonial homes now covers most of Meadow Hill," where Herbert West once experimented. He remembers that the Witch-House was pulled down in 1931, and the "moldering tenements of the Polish Quarter have largely been replaced by a modest housing development in Colonial urban style." 
Miskatonic has gained a new Administration Building and the Pickman Nuclear Laboratory--both designed, along with the Polish Quarter apartment development, by Daniel Upton (from "The Thing on the Doorstep"), who "has had a distinguished career ever since he was given a clean bill of mental health and discharged with a verdict of ‘justified homicide’". (The college buildings are deemed "magnificent structures, wholly compatible with the old quadrangle."
The lab is funded, like the expedition in At the Mountains of Madness, by the Nathaniel Pickman Derby Foundation. It's run by Professor Ellery, who discovered unidentifiable elements in a statuette brought back by Walter Gilman in "The Dreams in the Witch-House".
Other professors sighted include Upham of the Mathematics Department (from "The Dreams in the Witch-House"); Nathaniel Peaslee of of Economics and Psychology, and his son Wingate Peaslee, in Psychology ("The Shadow Out of Time"); and William Dyer of Geology (At the Mountains of Madness). Dyer is said to be "well through his ninth decade" and the oldest academic present, save for the elder Peaslee.
Francis Morgan, professor of Medicine and Comparative Anatomy, is "now the sole living survivor of the brave trio who had slain the Dunwich Horror"--meaning that Rice as well as Armitage are now dead. Morgan’s "research in mescaline and LSD" has led to the creation of anti-hallucinogens that allowed Danforth, insane since At the Mountains of Madness, to leave the asylum and become a professor of Psychology at Miskatonic.
==Publication History==
"To Arkham and the Stars" was first published in the Arkham House anthology The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces, for which it was written, in 1966. It has since appeared in The Book of Fritz Leiber (DAW, 1974), Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (Fedogan & Bremer, 1992), and Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark (Wildside Press, 2003).
Category:Fritz Leiber works
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works