“The Secret of Sebek” (Weird Tales, November 1937)

Bloch, Robert. “The Secret of Sebek.” Weird Tales, November 1937, pp. 576-587.
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v30n05_1937-11_ATLPM-Urf/page/n65/mode/2up

This story is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. An outsider, a writer, spends Mardi Gras feeling alienated and alone amongst the celebrating crowds in New Orleans. While research ancient Egypt for a writing project, he decides to get drunk so he can feel a bit of the revelry that others seem to be enjoying. He meets a man dressed as an ancient Egyptian priest who invites him to a party. There are costumed attendees who do not impress him, but he is invited into the inner circle of true believers and is asked his opinion on some artifacts that they reveal to him. The relics all concern Sebek, an ancient god of fertility who has the body of a man and the head of a crocodile. The man, still drink from his earlier excesses, sees someone in the assembly dressed as this god, but the person disappears from view. The inner circle reveals the mummy of a priest of Sebek and also the warning they found in the burial chamber promising death to anyone who defiles the grave. Soon the man dressed as the priest of Sebek is attacked and devoured by the partygoer with the crocodile head. The incident so unnerved him that he fled the party and New Orleans without contacting the police or seeking any further information. in the story’s final moment, he relates that when he tried to intervene in the murder, he felt not a costume, not a crocodile mask, but the actual, living reptile flesh of the incarnated god.

This story returns again to Bloch’s mashup of ancient Egypt and horror, dealing again with the fatal ramifications of a mummy’s curse. The man dressed as the priest of Sebek had an occultist’s bookshelf, with holdings including the familiar Mysteries of the Worm, Book of Eibon, and Cultes des Goules. Bloch has not yet achieved a full marriage between the Cthulhu Mythos and ancient Egypt, but that will come soon. By now, Lovecraft has been dead for months, and so the pain of the loss is still fresh. I didn’t want to go further with this blog without noting the profound event in Bloch’s life. In the June 1937, issue of Weird Tales, Bloch provided an elegy: “Now that Lovecraft’s gone it’s strange; I don’t think so much about his wonderful work, his imaginative genius, and preeminence as WT’s first and finest author. I just remember what he meant to me personally—you know how I wrote him a fan note so long ago; how he got into a correspondence with me, encouraged me to write, helped, criticized. If it weren't for him, I'd never have hit WT or any other magazine. And there are so many others that owe him a similar debt of gratitude. I wonder what they’ll all do now—the fan magazines that depended on him for support and encouragement, the many aspiring correspondents that looked to him for help and advice, and all the others that knew and so greatly admired him. He was a great writer, but an even greater friend; a real New England gentleman of the old school. I think we ought to count ourselves proud to have known him. Of course there ought to be a memorial volume, with stories chosen by the readers. That’s the smallest tribute one can pay. But there’s an end of the world—the world of Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport; the world of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathorep, and Abdul Alhazred; the finest world of fantasy I know.” (Bloch “From” 763-764)