“The Goddess of Loss of life” was the very first story that Hodgson ever revealed in any kind. Following the demise of his gymnasium enterprise, the imaginative physique builder determined to show to writing as a type of earnings, and cranked out this homicide thriller set in British-held India in the course of the late Victorian interval. It has been virtually universally scathed by critics, however I worry that they’ve been overly harsh on a valiant try from a freshman author.
The story actually has its weaknesses, however it will likely be exceptional to followers of Thomas Carnacki in it has practically all the hallmarks of a Ghost-Finder thriller: a lonely outpost is plagued with murders presupposed to be supernatural in origin (victims of the Hindu goddess of demise, Kali), and is about to be deserted when a skeptical outsider decides to research the killings. Whether or not they’re supernatural or foul play, the detective is decided to settle issues proper.
There’s additionally – as in most of Carnacki’s tales – an impossible-to-miss relationship to Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of thriller – not simply to Sherlock Holmes, but in addition fearsome supernatural tales reminiscent of “Lot No. 249,” “The Silver Hatchet,” “A Pastoral Horror,” “The Brown Hand,” “The Ring of Thoth,” “John Barrington Cowles,” and “The Striped Chest.”
Holmes himself encountered equally themed issues in adventures reminiscent of these chronicled in The Signal of the 4, The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The Pink Headed League,” “The 5 Orange Pips,” “Silver Blaze,” “The Crooked Man,” “The Speckled Band,” “The Empty Home,” “Black Peter,” “The Lion’s Mane,” “The Satan’s Foot,” “Woman Frances Carfax,” and others.
A skeptical traveler arrives within the English city of T_____worth late in November to find its residents within the grip of terror. Practically a dozen individuals have been strangled after encounters with what locals insist is a marble statue that descends from its pedestal every night time to hunt the residing.
Dismissing the story as rustic superstition, the narrator jokes that he had anticipated to listen to the French had been invading as a substitute, assuming that “some murderous rogue” has exploited the townspeople’s credulity. His confidence is bolstered when he reunites together with his previous pal William Turner, who likewise rejects the notion of a strolling statue, although he admits the unexplained murders have baffled everybody.
The 2 buddies determine to spend the night time watching the statue within the close by park. Their bravado rapidly evaporates when moonlight briefly illuminates the clearing and divulges that the pedestal is empty. Moments later they glimpse “an enormous, white, carven face” rising silently from the darkness.
The big determine, carrying what seems to be a twisted black material, relentlessly pursues them by the park. Solely by reaching the brightly lit streets do they escape, whereupon the apparition abruptly vanishes. Humiliated by what Will calls their “blue funk,” they nonetheless resolve to proceed the investigation.
The next morning they uncover the marble determine as soon as once more standing immobile atop its pedestal. Anticipating to seek out footprints within the contemporary snow proving that somebody has moved it, they as a substitute discover the snow completely undisturbed. In daylight the statue seems to be nothing greater than an imposing marble goddess practically eight ft tall, with a merciless expression, black headdress, flowing robes, and a darkish sash round her waist.
The narrator even wonders whether or not it represents a goddess slightly than the god everybody assumes. Their examination yields no clues, though Will secretly chips off a fraction to reassure himself that it’s certainly abnormal marble.
Dialog turns to the property’s former proprietor, Colonel Whigman, a retired officer from India who had been mysteriously strangled alongside his Hindu servant months earlier earlier than leaving the property as a public park.
Because the current victims have all likewise been strangled, the narrator suspects the deaths are linked, although neither man can clarify the lengthy interval separating the colonel’s homicide from the newest assaults.
Their fears are confirmed when one other sufferer—a resort waitress—is discovered lifeless exterior their lodgings, her throat scored with the “furious weal” of a strangler’s garotte. This time contemporary snow preserves the killer’s tracks, permitting the narrator, Will, and a number of other volunteers to pursue the towering white determine. Throughout the chase they repeatedly glimpse what seems to be the marble goddess herself racing by the darkness with not possible velocity.
Cornered close to the lake, the apparition escapes by plunging into the water. Returning by the park, the investigators are horrified to find that the statue has as soon as once more vanished from its pedestal. Shortly afterward, workmen report that the complete statue has disappeared with out hint.
Shaken however unwilling to give up, the narrator searches Colonel Whigman’s library for something referring to the mysterious idol. There he discovers the colonel’s diary describing his marketing campaign towards the Thuggee cult in India. Throughout one expedition he captured a wierd marble picture not like any deity he had beforehand encountered, surviving an assault by its gigantic excessive priest earlier than bringing the statue again to England.
The diary identifies it as “one other—and, to Europeans, unknown—type of Kali, the Goddess of Loss of life,” worshipped inside a secret temple serving as “a form of Holy of Holies of Thugdom.” Because the narrator finishes studying, a free sheet falls from the diary, revealing the essential clue that explains the complete thriller.
Racing again to the park, he manipulates a hid mechanism beneath the pedestal, inflicting the supposedly supernatural statue to rise mechanically from beneath the bottom. Opening a hidden door within the pedestal, he and Will descend right into a spacious underground chamber affected by on a regular basis objects, proving that “somebody’s been residing right here!” Two tunnels department from the chamber. One has collapsed, however the different leads beneath the park lake. There the narrator notices a pale form beneath the water and, reaching in, pulls out a big marble masks similar to the statue’s face.
The ultimate items now fall into place. Workmen get better from the submerged tunnel the physique of “an infinite Hindoo,” dressed completely in white and bearing the bullet wounds inflicted in the course of the chase. The lifeless man is presumed to be the identical fanatical excessive priest who had as soon as opposed Colonel Whigman in India. Utilizing the key passages beneath the property, he had lived unseen beneath the pedestal, elevating and decreasing the statue mechanically whereas donning the immense marble masks and white robes to impersonate the horrible goddess herself.
Wielding the black strangling material as his weapon, he systematically murdered the colonel and later the townspeople in an act of long-delayed non secular vengeance. Though the supernatural rationalization proves false, the revelation that an infinite avenger devoted many years to pursuing his sacred revenge leaves the story with an unsettling conclusion wherein human fanaticism proves scarcely much less terrifying than the strolling marble goddess itself.
It’s a story older even than The Legend of Sleepy Hole: a spiteful foe terrorizes his enemies by feigning the presence of a ghost—besides that this villain goes a step additional by leaving corpses in his wake. Variations on this plot machine famously seem in The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Phantom of the Opera, practically each Scooby-Doo thriller, W. W. Jacobs’ tragic “Jerry Bundler,” and—precisely 100 years earlier than “The Goddess of Loss of life” was revealed—the real-life Hammersmith Ghost homicide case. In that infamous incident, native pranksters had been terrifying the London district of Hammersmith by dressing as ghosts, till an harmless plasterer, whose white work garments had been mistaken for a spectral shroud, was fatally shot by a frightened patrolman.
Hodgson, nevertheless, additionally attracts upon one other venerable custom: the legend of the strolling statue. From the stone visitor in Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Edith Nesbit’s haunting “Man-Measurement in Marble,” readers had lengthy been accustomed to tales wherein sculpted figures actually awaken to mete out supernatural judgment. “The Goddess of Loss of life” intentionally invitations exactly this expectation. The picture repeatedly vanishes from its pedestal, stalks victims beneath the duvet of darkness, and returns earlier than daybreak as if nothing had occurred.
But Hodgson finally subverts the acquainted trope by revealing that the marble goddess has by no means moved in any respect. As a substitute, the phantasm is sustained by ingenious mechanical contrivances and the obsessive revenge of a residing man, changing supernatural inevitability with human crafty whereas preserving each little bit of the story’s mounting dread.
The story additionally occupies an necessary place in Hodgson’s personal improvement as a author. In keeping with Sam Moskowitz’s Out of the Storm, it originated from a statue that stood within the middle of a pond in Blackburn Park, the place the younger Hodgson lived. As remembered by his brother Christopher, Hodgson imagined a city terrorized by murders dedicated by one thing resembling that peaceable statue. In its earliest conception the determine was Flora, the classical goddess of flowers, however by the point the story reached print she had change into Kali, reworking an idyllic piece of park ornamentation into the sinister emblem of a overseas demise cult that had seemingly taken root within the tranquil English countryside.
The substitution not solely heightened the horror but in addition mirrored many late Victorian anxieties about imperialism, cultural intrusion, and the unsettling chance that Britain’s abroad empire may at some point return dwelling in surprising and terrifying kinds. The story additionally anticipates the adventures of Thomas Carnacki, significantly the equally themed “The Home Among the many Laurels,” wherein an apparently supernatural menace is finally revealed to have an all-too-human origin.
Hodgson’s racially charged depiction of the murderous Hindu priest could unsettle fashionable readers, however it nonetheless attracts on a real historic precedent: the Thuggee, or “thugs,” a free community of robbers and assassins that operated throughout India for hundreds of years. British colonial writers usually claimed that the Thuggee murdered as an act of devotion to Kali, the Hindu goddess related to demise, destruction, and the relentless passage of time, however fashionable scholarship means that such non secular motivations had been incessantly exaggerated.
In Hindu custom, Kali shouldn’t be merely a bloodthirsty deity but in addition a protecting mom determine whose terrifying look symbolizes the destruction of evil and the triumph of divine justice. Victorian audiences, nevertheless, largely encountered her by colonial literature that emphasised unique violence and ritual homicide, making her an excellent image for Gothic fiction.
The cultural popularity of the Thuggee themselves have additionally been formed by Victorian simplifications — of their case, maybe for the higher: in actuality, they had been much less fanatical holy warriors (zealous Hindu-ninja-crusaders dedicated to defending their religion with passionate violence) than organized criminals, pushed mainly by greed, revenge, and opportunism.
For hundreds of years they preyed upon vacationers all through the Indian subcontinent, infiltrating caravans earlier than attacking their companions in remoted locations, normally by garroting them, after which secretly burying each the victims and the proof in order that total events—and their valuables—may vanish with no hint.
Though the British marketing campaign towards the Thuggee in the course of the nineteenth century largely dismantled the group, sensational accounts of their crimes remained immensely fashionable in Britain and have become a part of the Victorian creativeness. Like Arthur Conan Doyle, whose tales often counsel that Britain’s colonial adventures imported surprising risks again into England, Hodgson exploits modern anxieties that the empire’s distant conflicts may finally discover their manner dwelling. Right here, the idyllic English park turns into the stage upon which an historic vendetta, born in colonial India, is lastly performed out.
Though Sam Moskowitz dismissed the story as “far-fetched, inconceivable, however moderately competent,” later critics have considered it extra generously. Sam Gafford, as an example, argues that whereas the characters should not particularly advanced, the narrative’s brisk pacing, environment, and sustained sense of journey make it certainly one of Hodgson’s extra pleasant minor tales. That evaluation appears justified.
“The Goddess of Loss of life” shouldn’t be amongst Hodgson’s deepest psychological research, nor does it aspire to the cosmic terror of The Home on the Borderland or the Carnacki tales, however it’s a vigorous and creative thriller that efficiently blends Gothic environment, detective fiction, imperial journey, and the basic “defined supernatural” thriller right into a totally entertaining complete.
