Richard Shaver

*First published on June 1945*
January 18, 1945
To my fellow men:
“I, Richard Shaver, want your attention. I must get to you somewhat of the
knowledge I have gained in strange ways; so that the mighty hidden wisdom I
have unearthed does not perish with me, but becomes instead a part of the
general living mind of man. If you have intelligence you will read between
the lines of my writings of what may seem at first glance to be the wildest
fiction, and find certain immediately useful information as well as the
answers to age-old puzzles such as apparently occult and spiritual
phenomena; things men fear to speak of but know are true; terrible agonies;
hidden secret pleasures spoken only as “forbidden fruit”; ways of life that
powerful and often foolish social and religious organizations have hidden
since earliest times because of a worm-like fear of things they could not quite
understand.
“Such students will be able to read between the lines of my stories and in
their minds build a true picture of the life-that-was in ancient, unwritten-of
days. They will realize that I have indeed fathomed many a great lost secret
of power such as the medieval sorcerers who for fear of being burned at the
stake, wrote in obscure codes. Even you who read this tale as fiction will
assuredly sense within yourselves the stirring of something that will whisper
and call to you to seek further.
“The things of which I write will be touched upon in literature more and
more frequently in the future by students that realize that mankind should be
wakened, even if rudely, to the realities underlying surface life; since those
realities wield more influence upon earth people that is generally known,
even to the average student of secret things.
“Abraham Merrit, in “The Snake Mother,” “The face In The Abyss,” “The
Moon Pool” and other of his tales, has given those of us who know and seek
for more information of the hidden ways of life, some of the secrets of the
antique mechanisms and their hidden places of concealment.
“Yet I think he did not know that these caverns lie in a great network under
all of earth’s surface and are actually still inhabited by wretched descendants
of the Ancient Ones. His books betray to me certain lacks in his information
which I will attempt to make up for the sake of those who seek the truth
about these ancient, unspoken-of remnants of the vast super-science so ably
described as the property of the Snake Mother.
“For instance, in “The Snake Mother,” Lantlu and his followers are evil,
but retain their beauty and a certain cleverness as well as the method of
eternal life. But in the actual life in the caverns today, the evil ones are
neither beautiful nor clever nor do they live much longer than normal men.
The more intelligent, well-meaning members of these cavern people are
sometimes as beautiful and all-wise as Merritt’s immortals, but although they
have some knowledge of the methods of the Ancients to obtain near-immortal
existence, they are not able to use the methods effectively because of their
constant struggles with the degenerate, evil members of the race.
Among those remnants of the Ancients there has been degeneration to a
degree that would seem incredible did not the creatures still exist, living
proofs of the efficacy of the ancient generators of beneficial life force. For in
no other way than by constant flows of beneficial force from those
indestructible mechanisms could such manifestly unfit creatures as the evil
members of the life in the caverns continue to exist. You who read may
unwittingly meet one of the less hideous evil beings at any time on the
surface. Those who come up from the caves for commercial or less honest
reasons are, naturally, of the higher grades among them; for the degenerates
are idiotic devils who only to be seen would be recognized as malevolence
incarnate.
“I will try to tell you something of them, for they everlastingly obstruct and
bedevil mankind. It is their chief satisfaction to wreak pain and damage and
death upon human beings. It is well to be able to recognize such enemies, for
they are possessed of mighty weapons such as surface people have not yet
conceived, despite the many instruments of destruction fabricated for earth
wars. It is ghastly, but perhaps better for surface people in the final analysis,
that these horrible beings have no actual brain power that can be used for
intellectual pursuits or abstract theorizing; brain in them has been usurped by
a continual questing for something to torment, to ray the life out of. They are
like leeches in human form, wholly parasitic and destructive.
Merritt knew much of such things and gave it to you. I can add a great
deal to what he has told you and I shall do so, nor shall any craven fear of the
hidden powers stop me. For in those still existent mechanisms lie many
infinitely valuable methods of making life bloom and become a vastly more
beautiful and longer lasting thing than the present treadmill routine of war
and work that it is.
“I also address myself to those higher beings of the underworld, those who
have kept the ancient virtues alive by breeding with stolen women from the
surface, and for other reasons are well-intentioned and closer to mankind than
the inbred degenerates peopling many of the caves. Such higher beings are as
maliciously plagued as we by the idiot beings who hate everything that is
noble and beautiful. The need of those kindlier beings for awareness of
certain things which I have woven into my work is as great as is the need of
surface people for knowledge of their ancient enemies.
“Merritt did not make quite clear the fact that the ancient weapons and
mechanisms were, many of them, still intact in a great many places on earth.
In confining his ancient, still living race to a hidden section of the Andes
mountains, he inadvertently concealed the general dispersion of these
underground cities. Concealed in monstrous caverns of unbelievable breadth
and space, these wondrous works of the ancient God—race are being used by
the evil ones whom Merritt concepts as Nimir and Lantlu and his followers,
but whom I picture more nearly to the facts of the case as degenerate men
with a mind more in tune with such forms of life as a fluke or leech than to
man. There are many such, protected from man on the surface by those
hidden, inaccessible caverns whose walls are of such impenetrably hardened
rook that the finest tools of miners are broken against them. On guard also at
the few existent entrances are the ancient weapons whose great range render
it impossible for any living thing to approach within a radius of thirty miles
unless permitted by the watchers in the caves.
“The power of Nimir’s evil is not shackled as Merritt would have it in “The
Face In The Abyss.” On the contrary, it works havoc through its wretched
dupes and hereditary morons, obstructing the good that the scattered Wise of
the caverns would do for mankind; as well as blocking in subtle, long
practiced and undetected ways the progress of surface science. On both
counts the reason for this mischief is not alone the hateful intent of these
dero, but their fear lest surface science wakens to their existence and
discovers some way of reaching them in the caverns and freeing the planet
from their age-old deviltry.
“It is a grievous thing to learn how much of beauty and ecstasy life can
offer and yet be obliged to live on day after day in the wretched misery which
life in modern ways is to one who knows how the Ancients lived. In reading
these tales, compare your life with the ancient ways one may learn in the
caverns. You surface folk know nothing better than your present
circumscribed existence, but I tell you that your lives are imprisoned hells
from which modern science could free you overnight if your learned men
would so overcome prejudices as to accept the fact of the existence of the
ancient science and acquire but one piece of the marvelous mechanisms for
study. And here let me add, for open, general study; not that secret abortive
study that such ancient science has had in the past.
“My strength is dedicated to informing you of the key and the way to the
kind of life that produced the beauty and wisdom of those immortal beings of
the past, beings whose actual existence has been proved a thousand times to
those who, like myself, have had actual experience in the caverns. For we
have seen and touched and used those antique mechanisms and we know
whereof we speak. But until today, those who knew have feared to broadcast
their knowledge, for in olden times it would have meant being burnt at the
stake, and today most certainly the insane asylum.
“Merritt well knew, as do I, that the Ancients had conquered death. I have
set myself to tell you what I know of how they did so; and how plans carried
out intelligently and with care can bring victory over death to modern surface
men as it did to those Elders of long ago. It is not easy to achieve
immortality, but a real start toward eventual success can be made.
I am forced to tell you that the work of such writers as Merritt contains
much that is not fiction, but must be presented as fiction because no one
would print it in any other form. Thus you readers who have not met the dark
and unfathomable life of the hidden pits may take this bit of explanation as an
effort to make an incredible story credible; in which case I hope the effort is
successful. It is to those of you who either know, or who believe me, that I
more significantly address myself.
Very sincerely yours, Richard S. Shaver.