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