The Nameless Offspring

"The Nameless Offspring" is a short story by Clark Ashton Smith that first appeared in the June 1932 issue of Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. It begins with a quote from the Necronomicon--about "that spawn which the hidden dweller in the vaults has begotten upon mortality"--identifying the story as belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos.
==Characters==
*Henry Chaldane: The story's narrator. Born in England, he was taken to Canada as an infant. He returns to take a "motorcycle tour of the English counties" in order "to execute a long-cherished dream of visiting [his] natal land and exploring its rural by-ways." He ends up at Tremoth Hall, home of his father's childhood friend, by coincidence.
*Arthur Chaldane: A schoolmate of Sir John Tremoth, he moves to Manitoba, Canada, to become a beekeeper. He dies some years before the story begins.
*Sir John Tremoth: The master of Tremoth Hall. He is "scarcely beyond middle life," but his "cadaverous pallor and feeble tottering walk were those of a man who is stricken with some fatal malady."
*Lady Agatha Tremoth: Within a year of marrying Sir John, she becomes "the victim of cataleptic seizures," and the third such attack apparently kills her. She is placed in the family vaults, but is discovered alive in her open coffin, with "recollections of a pale, hideous, unhuman face...stooping over her." The creature was "large and white, and ran like an animal on all fours, though its limbs were semihuman." Nine months later, she dies after giving birth to a monstrous child.
*The Unnamed Monstrosity: The child of Lady Agatha and her tomb assailant, he is identified as a "corpse-devouring demon of Oriental tales and legends…the ghoul." He is described as "a huge, whitish, hairless and semi-quadruped body, of canine teeth in a half-human face, and long hyena nails at the end of forelimbs that were both arms and legs.
*Harper: Tremoth Hall's "only servant—a combination of valet, butler, housekeeper and chef." He has loyally looked after Sir John and his offspring for 28 years. He is described as an old man whose "fingers trembled with palsy or decrepitude."
==Inspiration==
In a 1931 letter to H. P. Lovecraft outlining the plot of "The Nameless Offspring," Smith noted that he got the basic idea for the story from Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan,"Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos, by Bobby Derie (Hippocampus Press, 2014). which similarly deals with the offspring of a daemonic creature. 
==Publication History==
After its initial appearance in Strange Tales, "The Nameless Offspring" has been included in several collections of Smith's work, The Abominations of Yondo (Arkham House, 1960), The Emperor of Dreams (Gollancz/Orion, 2002), The Maker of Gargoyles and Other Stories (Wildside Press, 2004), A Vintage From Atlantis: Volume Three of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith (Night Shade Books, 2007), and The Klarkash-Ton Cycle: Clark Ashton Smith's Cthulhu Mythos Fiction (Chaosium, 2008). It is also available in The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (Wildside Press, 2012).Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Title: The Nameless Offspring". 
==External Link==
*"The Nameless Offspring" full text at Eldritch Shadows
==References==
Category:Clark Ashton Smith works
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works