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perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the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 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 eons 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 intented 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 great-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 great-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 showing 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 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 the
papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify
this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident 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
suggestions 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
pretense 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. This 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 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 illness and outbreaks of group folly
or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular
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 recognized 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 esthetes 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 archeological
knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of the bas-relief. He
spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the
conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything
but archeology. 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 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 afterwards said, for
his slowness in recognizing 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 imaginary 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 frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu"
and "R'lyeh."
On March 23, 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 the whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest
true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2 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 22. 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 skepticism 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 inquires 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 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 23 and and April 2 - 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 cognizant of the old data which my uncle had
possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These
responses from esthetes told disturbing tale. From February 28 to
April 2 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 screaming
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 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 dispatch from California
describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for
some "glorious fulfillment" which never arrives, whilst items from
India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of
March 22-23.
The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumor 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 connection that it is small wonder he
pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
This 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 realize 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 recognized 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 clown 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 civilization'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 Esquimaux
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:
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 pale undergrowth beyond the
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 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 license 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 organized 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:
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 hypnotized
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 in 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 fetishism 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 the 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 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, for 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 tall
idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras
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 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 the 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 desert 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 Esquimaux 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 crystallized in clay and will one day mirror in marble those
nightmares and fantasies 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. Then 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
connections. 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 l 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
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 had 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 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 water-line 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 - or 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 23rd 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 mentnon;
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 Old 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
reembarked 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 th
disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf
Johansen was no more.
He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings
sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he told the
public, but had left a long manuscript - of "technical matters" as
he said - written in English, evidently in order to guard her from
the peril of casual perusal. During a walk rough 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 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. Persuade the widow that my connection
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 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 upon 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
l23°43', come upon a coastline 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 mates 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 anything 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 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 polarizing 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 lintel 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 fantasy 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 rising 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 Angstrom. 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 could 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 comets 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.
Cthulhustill 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.
