He wrote mystery and horror tales. If you ask around about the great short fiction writers, his name will appear. His fans have such devotion that make homages to him, like the famed band Metallica. One of their songs is called as one of his fiction pieces, "The Call of Cthulhu."
Here we can read the piece. Some people can't get enough words in their head, and want bad dreams. Howard Phillips L. is one of the masters of fiction. Read on.
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Here we can read the piece. Some people can't get enough words in their head, and want bad dreams. Howard Phillips L. is one of the masters of fiction. Read on.
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The Call of Cthulhu
By H. P. Lovecraft
------=-O-=------
(Found Among the Papers of the Late
Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great
powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a
hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in
shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . .
. forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called
them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon
Blackwood.
I.
The Horror in Clay.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the
inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own
direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of
our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation
or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists
have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and
human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in
terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is
not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which
chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing
together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes
of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out;
certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a
chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the
part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death
seized him.
My knowledge of
the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle
George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown
University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an
authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the
heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be
recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the
cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the
Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by
a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the
precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the
deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible
disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the
heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was
responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this
dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
As my
grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was
expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose
moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the
material which I correlated will be later published by the American
Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly
puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been
locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the
personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I
succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater
and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer
clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I
found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most
superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor
responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.
The bas-relief
was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in
area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in
atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are
many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks
in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs
seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the
papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this
particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these
apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its
impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to
be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a
diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant
imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human
caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy,
tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings;
but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly
frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean
architectural background.
The writing
accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in
Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style.
What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters
painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of.
The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed
“1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”,
and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St.,
New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s
Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts
of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from
theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis and the
Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and
hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and
anthropological source-books as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s
Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half
of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March
1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called
upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then
exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and
my uncle had recognised him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island
School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that
institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great
eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange
stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself
“psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city
dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had
dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small
group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to
preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion
of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for
the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying the
hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which
suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed some sharpness in
replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with
anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle
enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic
cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since
found highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it
last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre,
or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that
he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and
won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor
the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and
Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an
unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung
monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.
Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined
point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which
only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the
almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.
This verbal
jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor
Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with
almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself
working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when waking had stolen
bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for
his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of
his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which
tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could
not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in
exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly
religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was
indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor
with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after
the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during
which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was
always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a
subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical
sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently
repeated are those rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.
On March 23d,
the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his
quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and
taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the
night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since
then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once
telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case;
calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be
in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange
things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They
included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched
wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or lumbered about. He at
no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as repeated
by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the
nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference
to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man’s
subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above
normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever
rather than mental disorder.
On April 2nd at
about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in
bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had
happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by
his physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor
Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had
vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts
after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first
part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes
gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained
scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of
the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of
various persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had
his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a
prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he
could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their
dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception
of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have
received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a
secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed
a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and
business—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost
completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23d and April
2nd—the period of young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were little more
affected, though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of
strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something
abnormal.
It was from the
artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would
have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their
original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading
questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he
had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox,
somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a
disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had
dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the
stronger during the period of the sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those
who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which
Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the
gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note
describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect
with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date
of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired several months later after incessant
screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred
to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted
some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in
tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I
have often wondered if all the objects of the professor’s questioning felt as
puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach
them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated,
touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period.
Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of
extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here
was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a
window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a
paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he
has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning
white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst
items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of
March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous
mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome
about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on
the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and
legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous
“Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the
recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical
fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions.
A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage
the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced
that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.
II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and
bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of
his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the
hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as
“Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is
small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
The earlier
experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American
Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell,
as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in
all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several
outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct
answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of
these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire
meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the
way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any
local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an
Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque,
repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a
loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least
interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was
prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or
whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps
south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so
singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could
not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them,
and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo
circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted
from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety
of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the
frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector
Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created.
One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science
into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him
to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely
abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No
recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries
and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of
unplaceable stone.
The figure,
which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study,
was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic
workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with
an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking
body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.
This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was
of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched
the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long,
curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and
extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The
cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers
brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated
knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly
fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and
incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known
type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time.
Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy,
greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations
resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the
base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of
half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of
even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material,
belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it;
something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which
our world and our conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the
members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s
problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre
familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with
some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William
Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an
explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years
before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions
which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had
encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a
curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness
and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and
which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from
horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites
and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a
supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful
phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in
Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the
fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the
aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very
crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic
writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential
features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
This data,
received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly
exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with
questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp
cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as
best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There
then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed
silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the
phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in
substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had
chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions
being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
“Ph’nglui
mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Legrasse had one
point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had
repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text,
as given, ran something like this:
“In his house at
R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
And now, in
response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as
possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I
could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams
of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic
imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to
possess it.
On November 1st,
1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp
and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but
good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror
from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo,
apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and
some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom
had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no
dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling
chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the
people could stand it no more.
So a body of
twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late
afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable
road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible
cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of
Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of
a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which
every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the
squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical
dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled
beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek
came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too,
seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest
night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters
refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship,
so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into
black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now
entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially
unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake
unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous
thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew
up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had
been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before
even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and
to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep
away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this
abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place
of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and
incidents.
Only poetry or
madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed
on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms.
There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to
beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the
other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac
heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through
those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and
then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a
well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous
phrase or ritual:
“Ph’nglui
mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were
thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled,
one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of
the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
In a natural
glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of
trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable
horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void
of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a
monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional
rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet
in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the
noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular
intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the
oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was
inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general
direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal
between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been
only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men,
an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual
from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry
and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he
proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint
beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous
white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much
native superstition.
Actually, the
horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came
first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in
the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into
the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond
description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made;
but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners,
whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of
policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were
carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on
the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at
headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all
proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most
were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or
Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the
heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest
that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded
and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to
the central idea of their loathsome faith.
They worshipped,
so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and
who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now,
inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their
secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.
This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always
would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until
the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city
of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his
sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult
would always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no
more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract.
Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for
shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the
Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great
Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him.
No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth.
The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only
whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu
waits dreaming.”
Only two of the
prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to
various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that
the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from
their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious
allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract,
came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have
sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the
mountains of China.
Old Castro
remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists
and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been
aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities.
Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be
found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs
of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the
stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity.
They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with
Them.
These Great Old
Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They
had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was
not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to
world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But
although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in
stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty
Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once
more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to
liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented
Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and
think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was
occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought.
Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first
men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding
their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered
Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones
shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never
die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great
Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The
time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old
Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside
and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old
Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy
themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and
freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory
of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder
time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then
something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and
sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one
primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the
spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the
city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the
black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up
in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not
speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he
curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre
lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars,
dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and
was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it,
though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as
they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Legrasse, deeply
impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the
historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when
he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could
shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the
highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale
of Professor Webb.
The feverish
interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by
the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who
attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the
society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional
charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor
Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his
possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and
unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle
was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts
must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the
cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact
hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had
come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula
uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor
Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was
eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of
the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to
heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives
and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration;
but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me
to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly
studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and
anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to
Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so
boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still
lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian
imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed
front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very
shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his
rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius
is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from
as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day
mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in
prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
Dark, frail, and
somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my
business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest;
for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had
never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this
regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became
convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner
none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art
profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me
shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen
the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines
had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant
shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden
cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made
clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
received the weird impressions.
He talked of his
dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the
damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all
wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling
from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed
part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone
vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I
was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it
amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of
its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in
the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture
upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once
slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I
was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave
of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of
the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal
fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans,
talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the
frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still
survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now
heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a
detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I
felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient
religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude
was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I
discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream
notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I
began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far
from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient
waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro
sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the
cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret
methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic
rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but
in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper
inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to
sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or
because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains
to be seen, for I have learned much now.
III.
The Madness from the Sea.
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total
effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray
piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled
in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian
journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the
cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting
material for my uncle’s research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into
what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned
friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a
mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on
the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd
picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney
Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all
conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous
stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing
the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was
disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however,
was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it
out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT
FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives
With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and
Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle
and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman
Refuses
Particulars of
Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in
His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.
The Morrison Co.’s
freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in
Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam
yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34°
21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead man aboard.
The Vigilant
left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of
her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the
derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding
to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had
evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a
horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose
nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in
College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he
found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
This man,
after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and
slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had
been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for
Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was
delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st,
and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered
the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes.
Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the
strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with
a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s
equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the
schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave
alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the
yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly
superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather
clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the
Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the
remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured
yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their
ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on
a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and
six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about
this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm.
Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage
her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his
rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when
William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause,
and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin
report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an
evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of
half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no
little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and
earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her
crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy
man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning
tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more
freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of
the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were
new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange
interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to
order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the
unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died, and about which the
mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought
out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of
all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a
malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so
carefully noted by my uncle?
March 1st—our
February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm
had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth
as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and
artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young
sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d
the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on
that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and
darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect
had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this
storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and
Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and
of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their
coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering
on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be
horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop
to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
That evening, after
a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train
for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I
found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the
old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though
there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during
which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland
I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a
perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his
cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his
stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the
admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I
went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the
vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular
Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The
crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and
hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied
it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and
with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of
material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the
curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world
held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told
Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had
brought Their images with Them.”
Shaken with such
a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate
Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian
capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the
Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold
Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the
greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and
knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with
plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was
stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf
Johansen was no more.
He had not
survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken
him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long
manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English, evidently in
order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through
a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an
attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his
feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no
adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened
constitution.
I now felt
gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am
at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion
with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his
manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat.
It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto
diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt
to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell
its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s sides
became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank
God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I
shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk
ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed
blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by
a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another
earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen’s
voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in
ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of
that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the
horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making
good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the
mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends
on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly
abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty,
and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought
against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven
ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men
sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9',
W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy
Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of
earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in
measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down
from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green
slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts
that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the
faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this
Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that
only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great
Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the
extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself
forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this
dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that
it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of
the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith,
and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the
queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every
line of the mate’s frightened description.
Without knowing
what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he
spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or
building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone
surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this
earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk
about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful
dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal,
non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from
ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the
terrible reality.
Johansen and his
men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered
slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase.
The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising
miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and
suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where
a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very
like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than
rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the
scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly,
as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
It was Rodriguez
the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he
had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved
door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like
a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate
lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it
lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox
would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure
that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of
everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places
without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing
each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque
stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after
all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so
vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward
at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled
himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched
the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of
prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the
rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was
black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive
quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been
revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment,
visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on
flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was
intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty,
slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still
when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous
green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that
poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen’s
handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never
reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed
instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of
shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter,
force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that
across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever
in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of
the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an
age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by
accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and
ravening for delight.
Three men were
swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be
any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker
slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of
green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an
angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but
behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and
pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down
the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not
been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the
shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and
down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the
distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal
waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the
titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the
fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu
slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes
of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept
on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst
Johansen was wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing
that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he
resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran
lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and
foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the
brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose
above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head
with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but
Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding
bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand
opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an
instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then
there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered
plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful
original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained
impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all.
After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a
few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not
try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken
something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of
the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling
through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes
on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from
the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the
distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of
Tartarus.
Out of that
dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of
Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He
could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before
death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could
blot out the memories.
That was the
document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief
and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this
test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never
be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold
of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever
afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle
went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still
lives.
Cthulhu still
lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him
since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the
Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth
still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places.
He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else
the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end?
What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and
dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time
will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not
survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see
that it meets no other eye.
