Written in 1926
The Call of
Cthulhu 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withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity...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 chidhood 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 ocassion 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 imaginery 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 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 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 fulfiment" 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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:
"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 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 ecstacies
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: "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 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
surrection 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, 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 olonial 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. 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 ofhis
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 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. Persuad-g 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 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 faithfull 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 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 lintel began to give inward at the top;
and they saw that it was balauced 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 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. 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.
|