{"id":91,"date":"2008-09-13T00:00:26","date_gmt":"2008-09-13T04:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/?p=91"},"modified":"2022-11-28T19:20:08","modified_gmt":"2022-11-29T00:20:08","slug":"the-mound-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mound\u2014Part&nbsp;I"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"serial-posts-wrapper\">\n<h3 class=\"serial-posts-heading\"><span class=\"serial-post-text\">Read more from this serial.<\/span><\/h3>\n<ul class=\"serial-posts\">\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item current-inactive\">The Mound\u2014Part I<\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-ii\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part II\">The Mound\u2014Part II<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-iii\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part III\">The Mound\u2014Part III<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-iv\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part IV\">The Mound\u2014Part IV<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-v\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part V\">The Mound\u2014Part V<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-vi\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part VI\">The Mound\u2014Part VI<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-vii\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part VII\">The Mound\u2014Part VII<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n<h3 align=\"center\">I.<\/h3>\n<p class=\"section\"><span class=\"dc\"><strong>I<\/strong><\/span>t is only within the last few years that most people have stopped thinking of the West as a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground because our own especial civilisation happens to be new there; but nowadays explorers are digging beneath the surface and bringing up whole chapters of life that rose and fell among these plains and mountains before recorded history began. We think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts us when archaeologists put the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000 B.C. We hear rumours of still older things, too\u2014of primitive man contemporaneous with extinct animals and known today only through a few fragmentary bones and artifacts\u2014so that the idea of newness is fading out pretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense of immemorial ancientness and deep deposits from successive life-streams better than we do. Only a couple of years ago a British author spoke of Arizona as a \u201cmoon-dim region, very lovely in its way, and stark and old\u2014an ancient, lonely land\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying\u2014almost horrible\u2014ancientness of the West than any European. It all comes from an incident that happened in 1928; an incident which I\u2019d greatly like to dismiss as three-quarters hallucination, but which has left such a frightfully firm impression on my memory that I can\u2019t put it off very easily. It was in Oklahoma, where my work as an American Indian ethnologist constantly takes me and where I had come upon some devilishly strange and disconcerting matters before. Make no mistake\u2014Oklahoma is a lot more than a mere pioneers\u2019 and promoters\u2019 frontier. There are old, old tribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits of men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things. I am white and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to know that the rites of Yig, Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me any day. I have heard and seen too much to be \u201csophisticated\u201d in such matters. And so it is with this incident of 1928. I\u2019d like to laugh it off\u2014but I can\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghost tales which were current among the white settlers, but which had strong Indian corroboration, and\u2014I felt sure\u2014an ultimate Indian source. They were very curious, these open-air ghost tales; and though they sounded flat and prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they had earmarks of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology. All of them were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the western part of the state, and all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange aspect and equipment.<\/p>\n<p>The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after horse-thieves and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air between great armies of invisible spectres\u2014battles that involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal, the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine bodies. These things happened by moonlight, and frightened his horse as well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time; vivid, but subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpse of the armies themselves. Later on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriously haunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warring horsemen in the sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the ghostly fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes and weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the horses were really horses.<\/p>\n<p>The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as kinsfolk. They referred to them as \u201cthose people\u201d , \u201cthe old people\u201d , or \u201cthey who dwell below\u201d , and appeared to hold them in too great a frightened veneration to talk much about them. No ethnologist had been able to pin any, tale-teller down to a specific description of the beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them. The Indians had one or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying that \u201cmen very old, make very big spirit; not so old, not so big; older than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh; those old people and spirits they mix up\u2014get all the same\u201d .<\/p>\n<p>Now all of this, of course, is \u201cold stuff\u201d to an ethnologist\u2014of a piece with the persistent legends of rich hidden cities and buried races which abound among the Pueblo and plains Indians, and which lured Coronado centuries ago on his vain search for the fabled Quivira. What took me into western Oklahoma was something far more definite and tangible\u2014a local and distinctive tale which, though really old, was wholly new to the outside world of research, and which involved the first clear descriptions of the ghosts which it treated of. There was an added thrill in the fact that it came from the remote town of Binger, in Caddo County, a place I had long known as the scene of a very terrible and partly inexplicable occurrence connected with the snake-god myth.<\/p>\n<p>The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred in a huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third of a mile west of the village\u2014a mound which some thought a product of Nature, but which others believed to be a burial-place or ceremonial dais constructed by prehistoric tribes. This mound, the villagers said, was constantly haunted by, two Indian figures which appeared in alternation; an old man who paced back and forth along the top from dawn till dusk, regardless of the weather and with only brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw who took his place at night with a blue-flamed torch that glimmered quite continuously till morning. When the moon was bright the squaw\u2019s peculiar figure could be seen fairly plainly, and over half the villagers agreed that the apparition was headless.<\/p>\n<p>Local opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of the two visions. Some held that the man was not a ghost all, but a living Indian who had killed and beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her somewhere on the mound. According to these theorists he was pacing the eminence through sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his victim which took visible shape after dark. But other theorists, more uniform in their spectral beliefs, held that both man and woman were ghosts; the man having killed the squaw and himself as well at some very distant period. These and minor variant versions seemed to have been current ever since the settlement of the Wichita country in 1889, and were, I was told, sustained to an astonishing degree by still-existing phenomena which anyone might observe for himself. Not many ghost tales offer such free and open proof, and I was very eager to see what bizarre wonders might be lurking in this small, obscure village so far from the beaten path of crowds and from the ruthless searchlight of scientific knowledge. So, in the late summer of 1928 I took a train for Binger and brooded on strange mysteries as the cars rattled timidly along their single track through a lonelier and lonlier landscape.<\/p>\n<p>Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a flat windy region full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500 inhabitants besides the Indians on a neighbouring reservation; the principal occupation seeming to be agriculture. The soil is decently fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My train drew in at twilight, and 1 felt rather lost and uneasy\u2014cut off from wholesome and every-day things\u2014as it puffed away to the southward without me. The station platform was filled with curious loafers, all of whom seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to whom I had letters of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main street whose ruled surface was red with the sandstone soil of the country, and finally delivered at the door of my prospective host. Those who had arranged things for me had done well; for Mr. Compton was a man of high intelligence and local responsibility, while his mother\u2014who lived with him and was familiarly known as \u201cGrandma Compton\u201d\u2014was one of the first pioneer generation, and a veritable mine of anecdote and folklore.<\/p>\n<p>That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among the villagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study was indeed a baffling and important one. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost as a matter of course by everyone in Binger. Two generations had been born and grown up within sight of that queer, lone tumulus and its restless figures. The neighbourhood of the mound was naturally feared and shunned, so that the village and the farms had not spread toward it in all four decades of settlement; yet venturesome individuals had several times visited it. Some had come back to report that they saw no ghosts at all when they neared the dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel had stepped out of sight before they reached the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep slope and explore the flat summit. There was nothing up there, they said\u2014merely a rough expanse of underbrush. Where the Indian watcher could have vanished to, they had no idea. He must, they reflected, have descended the slope and somehow managed to escape unseen along the plain; although there was no convenient cover within sight. At any rate, there did not appear to be any opening into the mound; a conclusion which was reached after considerable exploration of the shrubbery and tall grass on all sides. In a few cases some of the more sensitive searchers declared that they felt a sort of invisible restraining presence; but they could describe nothing more definite than that.<\/p>\n<p>It was simply as if the air thickened against them in the direction they wished to move. It is heedless to mention that all these daring surveys were conducted by day. Nothing in the universe could have induced any human being, white or red, to approach that sinister elevation after dark; and indeed, no Indian would have thought of going near it even in the brightest sunlight.<\/p>\n<p>But it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the chief terror of the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience been typical, the phenomenon would have bulked far less prominently in the local legendry. The most evil thing was the fact that many other seekers had come back strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not come back at all. The first of these cases had occurred in 1891, when a young man named Heaton had gone with a shovel to see what hidden secrets he could unearth. He had heard curious tales from the Indians, and had laughed at the barren report of another youth who had been out to the mound and had found nothing. Heaton had watched the mound with a spy glass from the village while the other youth made his trip; and as the explorer neared the spot, he saw the sentinel Indian walk deliberately down into the tumulus as if a trap-door and staircase existed on the top. The other youth had not noticed how the Indian disappeared, but had merely found him gone upon arriving at the mound.<\/p>\n<p>When Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery, and watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at the shrubbery atop the mound. Then they saw his figure melt slowly into invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till after the dusk drew on, and the torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the distant elevation. About two hours after nightfall he staggered into the village minus his spade and other belongings, and burst into a shrieking monologue of disconnected ravings. He howled of shocking abysses and monsters, of terrible carvings and statues, of inhuman captors and grotesque tortures, and of other fantastic abnormalities too complex and chimerical even to remember. \u201cOld! Old! Old!\u201d he would moan over and over again, \u201cgreat God, they are older than the earth, and came here from somewhere else\u2014they know what you think, and make you know what they think\u2014they\u2019re half-man, half-ghost\u2014crossed the line\u2014melt and take shape again\u2014getting more and more so, yet we\u2019re all descended from them in the beginning\u2014children of Tulu\u2014everything made of gold\u2014monstrous animals, half-human\u2014dead slaves\u2014madness\u2014I\u00c3\u00a4! Shub-Niggurath!\u2014<em>that white man\u2014oh, my God, What they did to him!<\/em>&#8230;\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Heaton was the village idiot for about eight years, after which he died in an epileptic fit. Since his ordeal there had been two more cases of mound-madness, and eight of total disappearance. Immediately after Heaton\u2019s mad return, three desperate and determined men had gone out to the lone hill together; heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes. Watching villagers saw the Indian ghost melt away as the explorers drew near, and afterward saw the men climb the mound and begin scouting around through the underbrush. All at once they faded into nothingness, and were never seen again. One watcher, with an especially powerful telescope, thought he saw other forms dimly materialise beside the hapless men and drag them down into the mound; but this account remained uncorroborated. It is needless to say that no searching-party went out after the lost ones, and that for many years the mound was wholly unvisited. Only when the incidents of 1891 were largely forgotten did anybody dare to think of further explorations. Then, about 1910, a fellow too young to recall the old horrors made a trip to the shunned spot and found nothing at all.<\/p>\n<p>By 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry of \u201991 had largely faded into the commonplace and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving\u2014that is, had so faded among the white people. On the nearby reservation were old Indians who thought much and kept their own counsel. About this time a second wave of active curiosity and adventuring developed, and several bold searchers made the trip to the mound and returned. Then came a trip of two Eastern visitors with spades and other apparatus\u2014a pair of amateur archaeologists connected with a small college, who had been making studies among the Indians. No one watched this trip from the village, but they never came back. The searching-party that went out after them\u2014among whom was my host Clyde Compton\u2014found nothing whatsoever amiss at the mound.<\/p>\n<p>The next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneer who had helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never been there since. He had recalled the mound and its fascination all through the years; and being now in comfortable retirement, resolved to have a try at solving the ancient riddle. Long familiarity with Indian myth had given him ideas rather stranger than those of the simple villagers, and he had made preparations for some extensive delving. He ascended the mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11, 1916, watched through spy glasses by more than twenty people in the village and on the adjacent plain. His disappearance was very sudden, and occurred as he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter. No one could say more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a week no tidings of him reached Binger, and then\u2014in the middle of the night\u2014there dragged itself into the village the object about which dispute still rages.<\/p>\n<p>It said it was\u2014or had been\u2014Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely <em>younger<\/em> by as much as forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound. Its hair was jet black, and its face\u2014now distorted with nameless fright\u2014free from wrinkles. But it did remind Grandma Compton most uncannily of the captain as he had looked back in \u201989. Its feet were cut off neatly at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly healed to an extent almost incredible if the being really were the man who had walked upright a week before. It babbled of incomprehensible things, and kept repeating the name \u201cGeorge Lawton, George E. Lawton\u201d as if trying to reassure itself of its own identity. The things it babbled of, Grandma Compton thought, were curiously like the hallucinations of poor young Heaton in \u201991; though there were minor differences. \u201cThe blue light!\u2014the blue light!&#8230;\u201d muttered the object, \u201calways down there, before there were any living things\u2014older than the dinosaurs\u2014always the same, only weaker\u2014never death\u2014brooding and brooding and brooding\u2014<em>the same people, half-man and half-gas<\/em>\u2014the dead that walk and work\u2014oh, those beasts, those half-human unicorns\u2014houses and cities of gold\u2014old, old, old, older than time\u2014came down from the stars\u2014Great Tulu\u2014Azathoth\u2014Nyarlathotep\u2014waiting, waiting&#8230;.\u201d The object died before dawn.<\/p>\n<p>Of course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the reservation were grilled unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had nothing to say. At least, none of them had anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain whose more than a century of age put him above common fears. He alone deigned to grunt some advice.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou let um \u2019lone, white man. No good\u2014those people. All under here, all under there, them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is Yig. Tir\u00c3\u00a1wa, big father of men, he there. Tir\u00c3\u00a1wa is Tir\u00c3\u00a1wa. No die. No get old. Just same like air. Just live and wait. One time they come out here, live and fight. Build um dirt tepee. Bring up gold\u2014they got plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. You let um \u2019lone, you have no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get catch. White man meddle, he no come back. Keep \u2019way little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken the old chief\u2019s advice, they would probably be here today; but they didn\u2019t. They were great readers and materialists, and feared nothing in heaven or earth; and they thought that some Indian fiends had a secret headquarters inside the mound. They had been to the mound before, and now they went again to avenge old Capt. Lawton\u2014boasting that they\u2019d do it if they had to tear the mound down altogether. Clyde Compton watched them with a pair of prism binoculars and saw them round the base of the sinister hill. Evidently they meant to survey their territory very gradually and minutely. Minutes passed, and they did not reappear. Nor were they ever seen again.<\/p>\n<p>Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only the excitement of the Great War served to restore it to the farther background of Binger folklore. It was unvisited from 1916 to 1919, and would have remained so but for the daredeviltry of some of the youths back from service in France. From 1919 to 1920, however, there was a veritable epidemic of mound-visiting among the prematurely hardened young veterans\u2014an epidemic that waxed as one youth after another returned unhurt and contemptuous. By 1920\u2014so short is human memory\u2014the mound was almost a joke; and the tame story of the murdered squaw began to displace darker whispers on everybody\u2019s tongues. Then two reckless young brothers\u2014the especially unimaginative and hard-boiled Clay boys\u2014decided to go and dig up the buried squaw and the gold for which the old Indian had murdered her.<\/p>\n<p>They went out on a September afternoon\u2014about the time the Indian tom-toms begin their incessant annual beating over the flat, red-dusty plains. Nobody watched them, and their parents did not become worried at their non-return for several hours. Then came an alarm and a searching-party, and another resignation to the mystery of silence and doubt.<\/p>\n<p>But one of them came back after all. It was Ed, the elder, and his straw-coloured hair and beard had turned an albino white for two inches from the roots. On his forehead was a queer scar like a branded hieroglyph. Three months after he and his brother Walker had vanished he skulked into his house at night, wearing nothing but a queerly patterned blanket which he thrust into the fire as soon as he had got into a suit of his own clothes. He told his parents that he and Walker had been captured by some strange Indians\u2014not Wichitas or Caddos\u2014and held prisoners somewhere toward the west. Walker had died under torture, but he himself had managed to escape at a high cost. The experience had been particularly terrible, and he could not talk about it just then. He must rest\u2014and anyway, it would do no good to give an alarm and try to find and punish the Indians. They were not of a sort that could be caught or punished, and it was especially important for the good of Binger\u2014for the good of the world\u2014that they be not pursued into their secret lair. As a matter of fact, they were not altogether what one could call real Indians\u2014he would explain about that later. Meanwhile he must rest. Better not to rouse the village with the news of his return\u2014he would go upstairs and sleep. Before he climbed the rickety flight to his room he took a pad and pencil from the living-room table, and an automatic pistol from his father\u2019s desk drawer.<\/p>\n<p>Three hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay had put a bullet neatly through his temples with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving a sparsely written sheet of paper on the rickety table near his bed. He had, it later appeared from the whittled pencil-stub and stove full of charred paper, originally written much more; but had finally decided not to tell what he knew beyond vague hints. The surviving fragment was only a mad warning scrawled in a curiously backhanded script\u2014the ravings of a mind obviously deranged by hardships\u2014and it read thus; rather surprisingly for the utterance of one who had always been stolid and matter-of-fact:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For gods sake never go nere that mound it is part of some kind of a world so devilish and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker went and was took into the thing just melted at times and made up agen and the whole world outside is helpless alongside of what they can do\u2014they what live forever young as they like and you cant tell if they are really men or just gostes\u2014and what they do cant be spoke about and this is only 1 entrance\u2014you cant tell how big the whole thing is\u2014after what we seen I dont want to live aney more France was nothing besides this\u2014and see that people always keep away o god they wood if they see poor walker like he was in the end.<\/p>\n<p>Yrs truely<br \/>\nEd Clay<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>At the autopsy it was found that all of young Clay\u2019s organs were transposed from right to left within his body, as if he had been turned inside out. Whether they had always been so, no one could say at the time, but it was later learned from army records that Ed had been perfectly normal when mustered out of the service in May, 1919. Whether there was a mistake somewhere, or whether some unprecedented metamorphosis had indeed occurred, is still an unsettled question, as is also the origin of the hieroglyph-like scar on the forehead.<\/p>\n<p>That was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight intervening years no one had been near the place, and few indeed had even cared to level a spy glass at it. From time to time people continued to glance nervously at the lone hill as it rose starkly from the plain against the western sky, and to shudder at the small dark speck that paraded by day and the glimmering will-o\u2019-the-wisp that danced by night. The thing was accepted at face value as a mystery not to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the subject. It was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited in every direction, and community life always follows beaten trails. The mound side of the village was simply kept trailless, as if it had been water or swampland or desert. And it is a curious commentary on the stolidity and imaginative sterility of the human animal that the whispers with which children and strangers were warned away from the mound quickly sank once more into the flat tale of a murderous Indian ghost and his squaw victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation, and thoughtful old-timers like Grandma Compton, remembered the overtones of unholy vistas and deep cosmic menace which clustered around the ravings of those who had come back changed and shattered.<\/p>\n<p>It was very late, and Grandma Compton had long since gone upstairs to bed, when Clyde finished telling me this. I hardly knew what to think of the frightful puzzle, yet rebelled at any notion to conflict with sane materialism. What influence had brought madness, or the impulse of flight and wandering, to so many who had visited the mound? Though vastly impressed, I was spurred on rather than deterred. Surely I must get to the bottom of this matter, as well I might if I kept a cool head and an unbroken determination. Compton saw my mood and shook his head worriedly. Then he motioned me to follow him outdoors.<\/p>\n<p>We stepped from the frame house to the quiet side street or lane, and walked a few paces in the light of a waning August moon to where the houses were thinner. The half-moon was still low, and had not blotted many stars from the sky; so that I could see not only the weltering gleams of Altair and Vega, but the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way, as I looked out over the vast expanse of earth and sky in the direction that Compton pointed. Then all at once I saw a spark that was not a star\u2014a bluish spark that moved and glimmered against the Milky Way near the horizon, and that seemed in a vague way more evil and malevolent than anything in the vault above. In another moment it was clear that this spark came from the top of a long distant rise in the outspread and faintly litten plain; and I turned to Compton with a question.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYes,\u201d he answered, \u201cit\u2019s the blue ghost-light\u2014and that is the mound. There\u2019s not a night in history that we haven\u2019t seen it\u2014and not a living soul in Binger that would walk out over that plain toward it. It\u2019s a bad business, young man, and if you\u2019re wise you\u2019ll let it rest where it is. Better call your search off, son, and tackle some of the other Injun legends around here. We\u2019ve plenty to keep you busy, heaven knows!\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"section\">\u2014 End Part I \u2014<\/p>\n<div id=\"serial-posts-wrapper\">\n<h3 class=\"serial-posts-heading\"><span class=\"serial-post-text\">Read more from this serial.<\/span><\/h3>\n<ul class=\"serial-posts\">\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item current-inactive\">The Mound\u2014Part I<\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-ii\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part II\">The Mound\u2014Part II<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-iii\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part III\">The Mound\u2014Part III<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-iv\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part IV\">The Mound\u2014Part IV<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-v\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part V\">The Mound\u2014Part V<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-vi\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part VI\">The Mound\u2014Part VI<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"serial-posts-list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/articles\/the-mound-part-vii\/\" title=\"The Mound\u2014Part VII\">The Mound\u2014Part VII<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The works of H.P. Lovecraft are typically set in modern day (for him) New England. There are a few notable exceptions. One of them is <em>The Mound<\/em> co-written with Zelia Bishop, which we&rsquo;re presenting here in 7-part serial form (the final part scheduled to be published the week of Halloween). There&rsquo;s just something attractive to the idea of infinite cosmic horror and the wild, wild west. <em class=\"nobr\">&mdash; ed, N.E. Lilly<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5],"tags":[136,137],"media":[299],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1139,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/1139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"media","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spacewesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}