“But I had never met Sir John, had never visited Tremoth Hall, till the time of those happenings which formed the final tragedy. My father had taken me from England to Canada when I was a small infant; he had prospered in Manitoba as an apiarist; and after his death the bee ranch had kept me too busy for years to execute a long-cherished dream of visiting my natal land and exploring its rural by-ways.”
Today’s Beekeepers are from a short story from 1933 called “The Unnamed Offspring” by Clark Ashton Smith and it is part of the “Cthulhu Mythos” of stories, which means it shares a lineage with the unnamed Greek Beekeeper I have reviewed before. In that story the Beekeeper was offhandedly mentioned and never showed up. In this one of the Beekeepers is the protagonist, though his beekeeping is only offhandedly mentioned. Well, still better than nothing.
Henry Chaldane is our protagonist. His father, Arthur Chaldane, was the one who originally “prospered in Manitoba as an apiarist” but his father is dead by the time our story begins. Henry took over the “bee ranch” after that and, while it kept him busy for years, he eventually got to a point where either he had enough help running the place he could take some time off, or he just sold it. In either case, Henry is not actively keeping bees at this time, but it is theoretically possible that he has people doing it for him back in Canada while he travels. We know that Arthur was good at beekeeping and Henry seems to have followed in his footsteps, so that’s all good.
But what of the extras of being a Beekeeper? The Chaldanes have no supernatural abilities. We only spend time with Henry and he seems nice enough. He rides a motorcycle, which is unsafe but undeniably cool. When thrust into a horror story scenario, he understands what is going on around him almost immediately. And he’s not necessarily combat-focused by nature, but when given a gun and asked to help fight off a monstrous Ghoul, he does his best. His best fails, but it’s a brave kind of failure.
I’d love to be able to give him more, but we’re just not given enough information to work with.
