THE THING IN THE CRYPT

"How can you kill a thing that is already dead?"

"The Thing in the Crypt" is a short story by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, published in 1967 in the generically-named book Conan. It's the second de Camp / Carter story in a row and picks up very briefly after the conclusion of "Legions of the Dead." I hadn't read this story before, nor had I read any adaptions of it, but it certainly didn't disappoint. Of the few texts I've read for the chronology so far, "The Thing in the Crypt" is by far the best. 

At the end of "Legions of the Dead," Conan is being hauled off to be sold to Hyperborean slavers, and this story picks up just after having escaped their clutches by using his own chains as a weapon. After reading "Legions of the Dead," I had hoped we would see more of Vammatar the Cruel, but we're not so lucky. Conan begins this story being chased by ravenous wolves, with only his length of chain for protection, escaping south through the mountains toward Brythunia.

In an attempt to escape the wolves, Conan ducks into a space carved out of the mountain, with a further chamber inside that is initially pitch black. The chamber is clearly full of items wasting away by age, which he uses to build a campfire. What Conan then sees is an excellent image. My first love of genre fiction has always been horror: most of my favorite movies are horror movies, I have a few horror-themed tattoos, I love when any genre weaves horror elements into it, and that's exactly what we get here. Conan comes face to face with an unfathomably ancient king on a throne of stone, long dried out. His crown is still atop his head and his teeth are fanged, and his void eyes stare into Conan's soul. Throughout his life, Conan is distrustful of magic and the paranormal, so we actually get to see him paralyzed with fear for a bit. de Camp and Carter do a great job building tension with some of these descriptions, yielding banger after banger of imagery.

"And then the hair lifted from the nape of his neck, and the boy felt his skin roughen with a supernatural thrill. For there, enthroned on a great, stone chair at the further end of the chamber, sat the huge figure of a naked man, with a naked sword across his knees and a cavernous skull-face staring at him through the flickering firelight."

"Like all barbarians, he dreaded the supernatural terrors of the grave and the dark, with all its dreads and demons and the monstrous, shambling things of Old Night and Chaos, with which primitive folk people the darkness beyond the circle of their campfire. Much rather would Conan have faced even the hungry wolves than remain here with the dead thing glaring down at him from the rocky throne, while the wavering firelight painted life and animation into the withered skull-face and moved the shadows in its sunken sockets like dark, burning eyes."

"Grinning jaws moved open and shut in a fearful pantomime of speech. But the only sound was the creaking that Conan had heard, as if the shriveled remains of muscles and tendons rubbed dryly together. To Conan, this silent imitation of speech was more terrible than the fact that the dead man lived and moved."

There is a sword across the knees of the terrifying, ancient mummy, and seeing as Conan is a little too young to resist the temptation, he of course takes the sword and brings the Thing to life. You could see it coming from a mile away, of course, but it's really fun to see him fight this bag of bones.

There is a ton of great art of the Thing which is in The Crypt, and I didn't even realize until writing this post that there was a Conan TV show in the late 90s that used part of this story as part of its first two-part episode, "The Heart of the Elephant." I watched the episode and this is a pretty darn goofy show (especially the PS1-looking version of Crom who emerges from the sword). It reminds me a lot of Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules, and Highlander: The Series from my childhood. Ralf Moeller is clearly cast as more of a Dollar General Arnold Schwarzenegger than anything else. The Thing is a lot more alien than the original text; more like the ultraterrestrials from the end of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull than what de Camp and Carter wrote about. The action doesn't really land, but it's kind of fun to see what a TV budget version of Conan would yield. In terms of other adaptions, Robert Eggers apparently borrowed from Conan for a few scenes in The Northman, and de Camp and Carter apparently were inspired by an Icelandic myth with similar plot points.

This is an excellent Conan story, a classic that can compete with much of Howard's work, though I won't go as far to say it's one of the best. My only gripe with it is a very, very small one. Sometimes I forget that these stories were mostly written over 45 years ago for an audience of 15 year-old boys, so sometimes it catches me off guard when you read a line like, "his questing fingers told him that here were chisel marks on the stone, forming cryptic glyphs in some unknown writing. Unknown, at least, to the untutored boy from the barbarous northlands, who could neither read nor write and who scorned such civilized skills as effeminate." It takes me out of it a bit to read lines saying, "Conan couldn't read because that shit's for girls." I can't recall if Conan can ever read in stories in which he's older, but I hope he grows in his maturity. If anything, Conan is definitely a power fantasy who we cast ourselves into, so I don't exactly love that part.

[Update: Hey, this is Dan writing a month or so later. Conan does learn to read. In fact, Conan learns to read and speak in many languages. Much later on, when Conan is in his late forties, stories will say that Conan becomes so adept at languages that linguists would be impressed with him. Seeing as being able to read a word may be the difference between life and death, Conan becomes quite the polyglot! Love it.]

In terms of progression through the map of the Hyborian age, it looks like Conan has ultimately left northwest Cimmeria, through Vanaheim in "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," toured around with the Aesir raiders in Venarium where they sieged the city, returned at some point to his tribe, traveled with the Aesir again in "Legions of the Dead," and is now headed south. He must have been taken by the Hyperborean slavers east toward (or into) Hyperborea, because he seems to be in the mountains of Brythunia in this story, and will be in the city of thieves in Zamora next time in "The Tower of the Elephant." If I'm making a mistake here, I'd love to be made aware of it, because I'm already a little confused about Conan's exact movements and might have left something out or confused the order.

Honestly, that seems like quite the long way to go on foot from northern Brythunian mountains to the city of thieves (which may or may not be named Arenjun and may be on the west side of Zamora, maybe the east side of Zamora... we'll get to that next time).

I read this short story with help of the Internet Archive, which has all of the Conan book available to borrow for free. If you're like me and you watch lots of older films for whom the copyright has lapsed or foreign movies that never got a release at all, the IE is really useful. You can watch most everything for free, or, in the case of this book, I just borrowed it for as many hours as I needed it.

This was a total banger of a story and I'm really jazzed to move into the thief stories with "The Tower of the Elephant" next, which is an undisputed classic.

★★★★☆