Dero
Deros, also known as "Detrimental Robots" (not because they are mechanical machines, but because they are a humanoid race which have become robot-like slaves to their own sadism and hedonism); comparable to H.G. Wells' Morlocks from The Time Machine
Deros first appear in the work of Richard Sharpe Shaver ("I Remember Lemuria" and others).
Introduction
Deros are a creation (or, allegedly, a discovery) of Richard Sharpe Shaver in books that were promoted as "The Shaver Mystery"; Shaver, who "discovered" the truth about this race before he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, claimed that his weird fiction stories were based on reality.
Shaver described Deros as an ancient race of aliens living in caverns under the earth who, taking shelter from the harmful effects of the Sun's radiation (which interferes with the Deros' immortality), have slowly gone insane in the dark, damp caverns and vaults deep in the earth, and are responsible for tragedies, insanities, bad luck, nightmares, hauntings, demonic oppression, and alien abduction on the surface world, because sadism is the last pleasure left to these degenerate beings.
Description
'E' is for Elevator People. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement. When you have pressed the basement button and reached the bottom, you must press the basement button twice more. The elevator doors will close and you will hear the sound of special relays being thrown, and the elevator will descend. Into the caverns. Chance has not looked favorably on occasional voyagers in those five hundred cages. They have pressed the wrong button, too many times. They have been seized by those who shuffle through the caverns, and they have been … treated. Now they ride the cages. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. They stare up at the numbers as they light and then go off, riding up and down even after night has fallen. Their clothes are clean. There is a special dry cleaner who does the work. Once you saw one of them, and her eyes were filled with screams. London is a city filled with narrow, secure stairways.
— Harlan Ellison, From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet
The word "Dero" is constructed from the words "Detrimental Robot" - the word "detrimental" in this sense refers to poisonous rays of the sun which have damaged the brain, and "robot" refers to the psychological/behavioral result of this damage, as explained by Shaver: "robotism, or the inability to think constructively".
In I Remember Lemuria!, Shaver describes Deros as ragged, filthy, albino dwarfs; this description has been used in the depiction of Derros in Dungeons and Dragons (there is also some overlap with the thematically identical Drow Elves in Dungeons and Dragons).
As twisted, dwarfish, shape-shifting, subterranean creatures who kidnap, torment, and breed with surface-dwellers, Deros might be identified with Machen's protean faerie folk, who beget wizened, deformed, mentally-defective, olive-skinned, black-haired, black-eyed changelings with slurred, guttural voices on terrified rural families. Similarly, there seems to be some overlap with the subterranean, deformed, rubbery-faced Ghouls as a degenerate, troglodytic race that haunts and torments surface-dwellers at night.
UFOlogists sometimes associate Deros with shape-shifting "Reptilian Alien" aliens, which may be taken as identifying Deros with Serpent People, Deep Ones, the crocodile-seal-people from "The Nameless City", and other such subterranean reptilian beings from the works of Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft.
Deros seem to have some overlap with Men in Black, which have variously been described as strangely-shaped men in dark suits and hats obscuring most of their features; the men seem to have disturbingly smooth pale or albino skin, have no hair, are unnaturally thin, don't seem to be shaped like normal people, waddle on stilt-like legs, have expressionless mask-like faces, have wires attached to their limbs or necks, communicate threateningly by what seems to be telepathy, and seem to demonstrate an unnatural control over time and space and supernatural knowledge of activities they couldn't have seen directly.
Deros might also appear as the "Shadow People" in the hallucinatory nightmares of Sleep Paralysis.
Culture
The Dero civilization has long ago collapsed into a degenerate, nightmare decadence. Fleeing the sun's life-draining rays in Earth's distant past into caverns and vaults deep in the Earth, the immortal Deros have been slowly degenerating in the dark and damp among their rusting machinery into twisted, sadistic, insane cannibal gnomes whose last source of pleasure is torture and mayhem inflicted upon those mortal creatures who enjoy the sunlight.
The array of deteriorating machinery left in Earth's shadowy vaults for the Deros to amuse themselves with include flying saucers and a bewildering variety of surgical machines and rays for manipulating matter and minds from a distance. The ray machines include technology that the Deros use to cause disasters and start wars, kidnap surface-dwellers via levitation, cause people to hear voices and see hallucinations, control minds and moods through remote hypnosis, spy on conversations, cause instant deaths and slow and painful deaths, mutilate cattle, contact and conspire with other alien races, and many other hostile, disturbing and upsetting interactions with surface-dwelling humans.
Blasphemies and Heresies
- Deros are thematically similar to a number of standard Call of Cthulhu races and entities and occult creatures which they might be used interchangeably with, including:
- Tcho-Tchos
- Ghouls
- Deep Ones
- Lloigor
- Denizens of K'n-yan
- Robert E. Howard's Serpent People, Worms of the Earth, and Children of the Night
- Machen's Little People, and any of a variety of mischievous, hideous, and twisted trolls, goblins, elves, dwarfs, imps, demons, and spirits from folklore (the Scottish word "trow", the Scandinavian troll, and the undead, cairn-dwelling Nordic "draugr", might be said to all be related etymologically to the word "dero".)
- Mi-Go
- The Deros can be directly linked with the Mothman, Men in Black, Reptilian Aliens and/or Grey Aliens, and other UFO phenomenon (the "Shaver Mystery" stories seem to have been the direct precursor to the modern Alien Abduction culture, introducing such elements as flying saucers, alien abductions, medical experiments, thought-control rays, cover-ups, underground bases, etc.)
- Counter-culture artist Jermain Rogers has portrayed Deros in rock concert memorabilia as 6-foot tall, sinister, leering creatures with bulging eyes, wearing teddy bear costumes; Rogers explains that this is just one of many "masks" worn by Deros as they torment mortal surface-dwellers.
Appearances
- I Remember Lemuria! - Richard Sharpe Shaver
- Marebito (2004 film)
Quotes
- "Clothed in rags and dirt, hung all over with hand weapons, their hair long and matted, were the strangest, most disgusting creatures I had ever seen in my life. They were dwarfs, some of them white-haired, from the Gods know what hidden hole in Mu's endless warren of caverns." - Richard Sharpe Shaver, I Remember Lemuria!
- "They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement. When you have pressed the basement button and reached the bottom, you must press the basement button twice more. The elevator doors will close and you will hear the sound of special relays being thrown, and the elevator will descend. Into the caverns. Chance has not looked favorably on occasional voyagers in those five hundred cages. They have pressed the wrong button, too many times. They have been seized by those who shuffle through the caverns, and they have been... treated. Now they ride the cages. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. They stare up at the numbers as they light and then go off, riding up and down even after night has fallen. Their clothes are clean. There is a special dry cleaner who does the work. Once you saw one of them, and her eyes were filled with screams...." - Harlan Ellison, "From A to Z in the Chocolate Alphabet"
