The Horror in the Museum
By H. P. Lovecraft
ONE
It was languid curiosity which first brought
Stephen Jones to Rogers’ Museum. Someone
had told him about the queer underground place
in Southwark Street across the river, where
waxen things so much more horrible than the
worst effigies at Madame Tussaud’s were
shewn, and he had strolled in one April day
to see how disappointing he would find it.
Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was
something different and distinctive here,
after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces
were present—Landru, Dr. Crippen, Madame
Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey, endless maimed
victims of war and revolution, and monsters
like Gilles de Rais and Marquis de Sade—but
there were other things which had made him
breathe faster and stay till the ringing of
the closing bell. The man who had fashioned
this collection could be no ordinary mountebank.
There was imagination—even a kind of diseased
genius—in some of this stuff.
Later he had learned about George Rogers.
The man had been on the Tussaud staff, but
some trouble had developed which led to his
discharge. There were aspersions on his sanity
and tales of his crazy forms of secret worship—though
latterly his success with his own basement
museum had dulled the edge of some criticisms
while sharpening the insidious point of others.
Teratology and the iconography of nightmare
were his hobbies, and even he had had the
prudence to screen off some of his worst effigies
in a special alcove for adults only. It was
this alcove which had fascinated Jones so
much. There were lumpish hybrid things which
only fantasy could spawn, moulded with devilish
skill, and coloured in a horribly life-like
fashion.
Some were the figures of well-known myth—gorgons,
chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their
shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from
darker and more furtively whispered cycles
of subterranean legend—black, formless Tsathoggua,
many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar
Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from
forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the
Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten
of von Junzt. But the worst were wholly original
with Rogers, and represented shapes which
no tale of antiquity had ever dared to suggest.
Several were hideous parodies on forms of
organic life we know, while others seemed
taken from feverish dreams of other planets
and other galaxies. The wilder paintings of
Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few—but
nothing could suggest the effect of poignant,
loathsome terror created by their great size
and fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by
the diabolically clever lighting conditions
under which they were exhibited.
Stephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur
of the bizarre in art, had sought out Rogers
himself in the dingy office and workroom behind
the vaulted museum chamber—an evil-looking
crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like
and horizontal in the brick wall on a level
with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden
courtyard. It was here that the images were
repaired—here, too, where some of them had
been made. Waxen arms, legs, heads, and torsos
lay in grotesque array on various benches,
while on high tiers of shelves matted wigs,
ravenous-looking teeth, and glassy, staring
eyes were indiscriminately scattered. Costumes
of all sorts hung from hooks, and in one alcove
were great piles of flesh-coloured wax-cakes
and shelves filled with paint-cans and brushes
of every description. In the centre of the
room was a large melting-furnace used to prepare
the wax for moulding, its fire-box topped
by a huge iron container on hinges, with a
spout which permitted the pouring of melted
wax with the merest touch of a finger.
Other things in the dismal crypt were less
describable—isolated parts of problematical
entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms
of delirium. At one end was a door of heavy
plank, fastened by an unusually large padlock
and with a very peculiar symbol painted over
it. Jones, who had once had access to the
dreaded Necronomicon, shivered involuntarily
as he recognised that symbol. This showman,
he reflected, must indeed be a person of disconcertingly
wide scholarship in dark and dubious fields.
Nor did the conversation of Rogers disappoint
him. The man was tall, lean, and rather unkempt,
with large black eyes which gazed combustively
from a pallid and usually stubble-covered
face. He did not resent Jones’s intrusion,
but seemed to welcome the chance of unburdening
himself to an interested person. His voice
was of singular depth and resonance, and harboured
a sort of repressed intensity bordering on
the feverish. Jones did not wonder that many
had thought him mad.
With every successive call—and such calls
became a habit as the weeks went by—Jones
had found Rogers more communicative and confidential.
From the first there had been hints of strange
faiths and practices on the showman’s part,
and later on these hints expanded into tales—despite
a few odd corroborative photographs—whose
extravagance was almost comic. It was some
time in June, on a night when Jones had brought
a bottle of good whiskey and plied his host
somewhat freely, that the really demented
talk first appeared. Before that there had
been wild enough stories—accounts of mysterious
trips to Thibet, the African interior, the
Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska,
and certain little-known islands of the South
Pacific, plus claims of having read such monstrous
and half-fabulous books as the prehistoric
Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol chants attributed
to malign and non-human Leng—but nothing
in all this had been so unmistakably insane
as what had cropped out that June evening
under the spell of the whiskey.
To be plain, Rogers began making vague boasts
of having found certain things in Nature that
no one had found before, and of having brought
back tangible evidences of such discoveries.
According to his bibulous harangue, he had
gone farther than anyone else in interpreting
the obscure and primal books he studied, and
had been directed by them to certain remote
places where strange survivals are hidden—survivals
of aeons and life-cycles earlier than mankind,
and in some cases connected with other dimensions
and other worlds, communication with which
was frequent in the forgotten pre-human days.
Jones marvelled at the fancy which could conjure
up such notions, and wondered just what Rogers’
mental history had been. Had his work amidst
the morbid grotesqueries of Madame Tussaud’s
been the start of his imaginative flights,
or was the tendency innate, so that his choice
of occupation was merely one of its manifestations?
At any rate, the man’s work was very closely
linked with his notions. Even now there was
no mistaking the trend of his blackest hints
about the nightmare monstrosities in the screened-off
“Adults only” alcove. Heedless of ridicule,
he was trying to imply that not all of these
daemoniac abnormalities were artificial.
It was Jones’s frank scepticism and amusement
at these irresponsible claims which broke
up the growing cordiality. Rogers, it was
clear, took himself very seriously; for he
now became morose and resentful, continuing
to tolerate Jones only through a dogged urge
to break down his wall of urbane and complacent
incredulity. Wild tales and suggestions of
rites and sacrifices to nameless elder gods
continued, and now and then Rogers would lead
his guest to one of the hideous blasphemies
in the screened-off alcove and point out features
difficult to reconcile with even the finest
human craftsmanship. Jones continued his visits
through sheer fascination, though he knew
he had forfeited his host’s regard. At times
he would try to humour Rogers with pretended
assent to some mad hint or assertion, but
the gaunt showman was seldom to be deceived
by such tactics.
The tension came to a head later in September.
Jones had casually dropped into the museum
one afternoon, and was wandering through the
dim corridors whose horrors were now so familiar,
when he heard a very peculiar sound from the
general direction of Rogers’ workroom. Others
heard it, too, and started nervously as the
echoes reverberated through the great vaulted
basement. The three attendants exchanged odd
glances; and one of them, a dark, taciturn,
foreign-looking fellow who always served Rogers
as a repairer and assistant designer, smiled
in a way which seemed to puzzle his colleagues
and which grated very harshly on some facet
of Jones’s sensibilities. It was the yelp
or scream of a dog, and was such a sound as
could be made only under conditions of the
utmost fright and agony combined. Its stark,
anguished frenzy was appalling to hear, and
in this setting of grotesque abnormality it
held a double hideousness. Jones remembered
that no dogs were allowed in the museum.
He was about to go to the door leading into
the workroom, when the dark attendant stopped
him with a word and a gesture. Mr. Rogers,
the man said in a soft, somewhat accented
voice at once apologetic and vaguely sardonic,
was out, and there were standing orders to
admit no one to the workroom during his absence.
As for that yelp, it was undoubtedly something
out in the courtyard behind the museum. This
neighbourhood was full of stray mongrels,
and their fights were sometimes shockingly
noisy. There were no dogs in any part of the
museum. But if Mr. Jones wished to see Mr.
Rogers he might find him just before closing-time.
After this Jones climbed the old stone steps
to the street outside and examined the squalid
neighbourhood curiously. The leaning, decrepit
buildings—once dwellings but now largely
shops and warehouses—were very ancient indeed.
Some of them were of a gabled type seeming
to go back to Tudor times, and a faint miasmatic
stench hung subtly about the whole region.
Beside the dingy house whose basement held
the museum was a low archway pierced by a
dark cobbled alley, and this Jones entered
in a vague wish to find the courtyard behind
the workroom and settle the affair of the
dog more comfortably in his mind. The courtyard
was dim in the late afternoon light, hemmed
in by rear walls even uglier and more intangibly
menacing than the crumbling street facades
of the evil old houses. Not a dog was in sight,
and Jones wondered how the aftermath of such
a frantic turmoil could have completely vanished
so soon.
Despite the assistant’s statement that no
dog had been in the museum, Jones glanced
nervously at the three small windows of the
basement workroom—narrow, horizontal rectangles
close to the grass-grown pavement, with grimy
panes that stared repulsively and incuriously
like the eyes of dead fish. To their left
a worn flight of steps led to an opaque and
heavily bolted door. Some impulse urged him
to crouch low on the damp, broken cobblestones
and peer in, on the chance that the thick
green shades, worked by long cords that hung
down to a reachable level, might not be drawn.
The outer surfaces were thick with dirt, but
as he rubbed them with his handkerchief he
saw there was no obscuring curtain in the
way of his vision.
So shadowed was the cellar from the inside
that not much could be made out, but the grotesque
working paraphernalia now and then loomed
up spectrally as Jones tried each of the windows
in turn. It seemed evident at first that no
one was within; yet when he peered through
the extreme right-hand window—the one nearest
the entrance alley—he saw a glow of light
at the farther end of the apartment which
made him pause in bewilderment. There was
no reason why any light should be there. It
was an inner side of the room, and he could
not recall any gas or electric fixture near
that point. Another look defined the glow
as a large vertical rectangle, and a thought
occurred to him. It was in that direction
that he had always noticed the heavy plank
door with the abnormally large padlock—the
door which was never opened, and above which
was crudely smeared that hideous cryptic symbol
from the fragmentary records of forbidden
elder magic. It must be open now—and there
was a light inside. All his former speculations
as to where that door led, and as to what
lay behind it, were now renewed with trebly
disquieting force.
Jones wandered aimlessly around the dismal
locality till close to six o’clock, when
he returned to the museum to make the call
on Rogers. He could hardly tell why he wished
so especially to see the man just then, but
there must have been some subconscious misgivings
about that terribly unplaceable canine scream
of the afternoon, and about the glow of light
in that disturbing and usually unopened inner
doorway with the heavy padlock. The attendants
were leaving as he arrived, and he thought
that Orabona—the dark foreign-looking assistant—eyed
him with something like sly, repressed amusement.
He did not relish that look—even though
he had seen the fellow turn it on his employer
many times.
The vaulted exhibition room was ghoulish in
its desertion, but he strode quickly through
it and rapped at the door of the office and
workroom. Response was slow in coming, though
there were footsteps inside. Finally, in response
to a second knock, the lock rattled, and the
ancient six-panelled portal creaked reluctantly
open to reveal the slouching, feverish-eyed
form of George Rogers. From the first it was
clear that the showman was in an unusual mood.
There was a curious mixture of reluctance
and actual gloating in his welcome, and his
talk at once veered to extravagances of the
most hideous and incredible sort.
Surviving elder gods—nameless sacrifices—the
other than artificial nature of some of the
alcove horrors—all the usual boasts, but
uttered in a tone of peculiarly increasing
confidence. Obviously, Jones reflected, the
poor fellow’s madness was gaining on him.
From time to time Rogers would send furtive
glances toward the heavy, padlocked inner
door at the end of the room, or toward a piece
of coarse burlap on the floor not far from
it, beneath which some small object appeared
to be lying. Jones grew more nervous as the
moments passed, and began to feel as hesitant
about mentioning the afternoon’s oddities
as he had formerly been anxious to do so.
Rogers’ sepulchrally resonant bass almost
cracked under the excitement of his fevered
rambling.
“Do you remember,” he shouted, “what
I told you about that ruined city in Indo-China
where the Tcho-Tchos lived? You had to admit
I’d been there when you saw the photographs,
even if you did think I made that oblong swimmer
in darkness out of wax. If you’d seen it
writhing in the underground pools as I did.
. . .
“Well, this is bigger still. I never told
you about this, because I wanted to work out
the later parts before making any claim. When
you see the snapshots you’ll know the geography
couldn’t have been faked, and I fancy I
have another way of proving that It isn’t
any waxed concoction of mine. You’ve never
seen it, for the experiments wouldn’t let
me keep It on exhibition.”
The showman glanced queerly at the padlocked
door.
“It all comes from that long ritual in the
eighth Pnakotic fragment. When I got it figured
out I saw it could have only one meaning.
There were things in the north before the
land of Lomar—before mankind existed—and
this was one of them. It took us all the way
to Alaska, and up the Noatak from Fort Morton,
but the thing was there as we knew it would
be. Great Cyclopean ruins, acres of them.
There was less left than we had hoped for,
but after three million years what could one
expect? And weren’t the Esquimau legends
all in the right direction? We couldn’t
get one of the beggars to go with us, and
had to sledge all the way back to Nome for
Americans. Orabona was no good up in that
climate—it made him sullen and hateful.
“I’ll tell you later how we found It.
When we got the ice blasted out of the pylons
of the central ruin the stairway was just
as we knew it would be. Some carvings still
there, and it was no trouble keeping the Yankees
from following us in. Orabona shivered like
a leaf—you’d never think it from the damned
insolent way he struts around here. He knew
enough of the Elder Lore to be properly afraid.
The eternal light was gone, but our torches
shewed enough. We saw the bones of others
who had been before us—aeons ago, when the
climate was warm. Some of these bones were
of things you couldn’t even imagine. At
the third level down we found the ivory throne
the fragments said so much about—and I may
as well tell you it wasn’t empty.
“The thing on that throne didn’t move—and
we knew then that It needed the nourishment
of sacrifice. But we didn’t want to wake
It then. Better to get It to London first.
Orabona and I went to the surface for the
big box, but when we had packed it we couldn’t
get It up the three flights of steps. These
steps weren’t made for human beings, and
their size bothered us. Anyway, it was devilish
heavy. We had to have the Americans down to
get It out. They weren’t anxious to go into
the place, but of course the worst thing was
safely inside the box. We told them it was
a batch of ivory carvings—archaeological
stuff; and after seeing the carved throne
they probably believed us. It’s a wonder
they didn’t suspect hidden treasure and
demand a share. They must have told queer
tales around Nome later on; though I doubt
if they ever went back to those ruins, even
for the ivory throne.”
Rogers paused, felt around in his desk, and
produced an envelope of good-sized photographic
prints. Extracting one and laying it face
down before him, he handed the rest to Jones.
The set was certainly an odd one: ice-clad
hills, dog sledges, men in furs, and vast
tumbled ruins against a background of snow—ruins
whose bizarre outlines and enormous stone
blocks could hardly be accounted for. One
flashlight view shewed an incredible interior
chamber with wild carvings and a curious throne
whose proportion could not have been designed
for a human occupant. The carvings on the
gigantic masonry—high walls and peculiar
vaulting overhead—were mainly symbolic,
and involved both wholly unknown designs and
certain hieroglyphs darkly cited in obscene
legends. Over the throne loomed the same dreadful
symbol which was now painted on the workroom
wall above the padlocked plank door. Jones
darted a nervous glance at the closed portal.
Assuredly, Rogers had been to strange places
and had seen strange things. Yet this mad
interior picture might easily be a fraud—taken
from a very clever stage setting. One must
not be too credulous. But Rogers was continuing:
“Well, we shipped the box from Nome and
got to London without any trouble. That was
the first time we’d ever brought back anything
that had a chance of coming alive. I didn’t
put It on display, because there were more
important things to do for It. It needed the
nourishment of sacrifice, for It was a god.
Of course I couldn’t get It the sort of
sacrifices which It used to have in Its day,
for such things don’t exist now. But there
were other things which might do. The blood
is the life, you know. Even the lemurs and
elementals that are older than the earth will
come when the blood of men or beasts is offered
under the right conditions.”
The expression on the narrator’s face was
growing very alarming and repulsive, so that
Jones fidgeted involuntarily in his chair.
Rogers seemed to notice his guest’s nervousness,
and continued with a distinctly evil smile.
“It was last year that I got It, and ever
since then I’ve been trying rites and sacrifices.
Orabona hasn’t been much help, for he was
always against the idea of waking It. He hates
It—probably because he’s afraid of what
It will come to mean. He carries a pistol
all the time to protect himself—fool, as
if there were human protection against It!
If I ever see him draw that pistol, I’ll
strangle him. He wanted me to kill It and
make an effigy of It. But I’ve stuck by
my plans, and I’m coming out on top in spite
of all the cowards like Orabona and damned
sniggering sceptics like you, Jones! I’ve
chanted the rites and made certain sacrifices,
and last week the transition came. The sacrifice
was—received and enjoyed!”
Rogers actually licked his lips, while Jones
held himself uneasily rigid. The showman paused
and rose, crossing the room to the piece of
burlap at which he had glanced so often. Bending
down, he took hold of one corner as he spoke
again.
“You’ve laughed enough at my work—now
it’s time for you to get some facts. Orabona
tells me you heard a dog screaming around
here this afternoon. Do you know what that
meant?”
Jones started. For all his curiosity he would
have been glad to get out without further
light on the point which had so puzzled him.
But Rogers was inexorable, and began to lift
the square of burlap. Beneath it lay a crushed,
almost shapeless mass which Jones was slow
to classify. Was it a once-living thing which
some agency had flattened, sucked dry of blood,
punctured in a thousand places, and wrung
into a limp, broken-boned heap of grotesqueness?
After a moment Jones realised what it must
be. It was what was left of a dog—a dog,
perhaps of considerable size and whitish colour.
Its breed was past recognition, for distortion
had come in nameless and hideous ways. Most
of the hair was burned off as by some pungent
acid, and the exposed, bloodless skin was
riddled by innumerable circular wounds or
incisions. The form of torture necessary to
cause such results was past imagining.
Electrified with a pure loathing which conquered
his mounting disgust, Jones sprang up with
a cry.
“You damned sadist—you madman—you do
a thing like this and dare to speak to a decent
man!”
Rogers dropped the burlap with a malignant
sneer and faced his oncoming guest. His words
held an unnatural calm.
“Why, you fool, do you think I did this?
Let us admit that the results are unbeautiful
from our limited human standpoint. What of
it? It is not human and does not pretend to
be. To sacrifice is merely to offer. I gave
the dog to It. What happened is Its work,
not mine. It needed the nourishment of the
offering, and took it in Its own way. But
let me shew you what It looks like.”
As Jones stood hesitating, the speaker returned
to his desk and took up the photograph he
had laid face down without shewing. Now he
extended it with a curious look. Jones took
it and glanced at it in an almost mechanical
way. After a moment the visitor’s glance
became sharper and more absorbed, for the
utterly satanic force of the object depicted
had an almost hypnotic effect. Certainly,
Rogers had outdone himself in modelling the
eldritch nightmare which the camera had caught.
The thing was a work of sheer, infernal genius,
and Jones wondered how the public would react
when it was placed on exhibition. So hideous
a thing had no right to exist—probably the
mere contemplation of it, after it was done,
had completed the unhinging of its maker’s
mind and led him to worship it with brutal
sacrifices. Only a stout sanity could resist
the insidious suggestion that the blasphemy
was—or had once been—some morbid and exotic
form of actual life.
The thing in the picture squatted or was balanced
on what appeared to be a clever reproduction
of the monstrously carved throne in the other
curious photograph. To describe it with any
ordinary vocabulary would be impossible, for
nothing even roughly corresponding to it has
ever come within the imagination of sane mankind.
It represented something meant perhaps to
be roughly connected with the vertebrates
of this planet—though one could not be too
sure of that. Its bulk was Cyclopean, for
even squatted it towered to almost twice the
height of Orabona, who was shewn beside it.
Looking sharply, one might trace its approximations
toward the bodily features of the higher vertebrates.
There was an almost globular torso, with six
long, sinuous limbs terminating in crab-like
claws. From the upper end a subsidiary globe
bulged forward bubble-like; its triangle of
three staring, fishy eyes, its foot-long and
evidently flexible proboscis, and a distended
lateral system analogous to gills, suggesting
that it was a head. Most of the body was covered
with what at first appeared to be fur, but
which on closer examination proved to be a
dense growth of dark, slender tentacles or
sucking filaments, each tipped with a mouth
suggesting the head of an asp. On the head
and below the proboscis the tentacles tended
to be longer and thicker, and marked with
spiral stripes—suggesting the traditional
serpent-locks of Medusa. To say that such
a thing could have an expression seems paradoxical;
yet Jones felt that that triangle of bulging
fish-eyes and that obliquely poised proboscis
all bespoke a blend of hate, greed, and sheer
cruelty incomprehensible to mankind because
mixed with other emotions not of the world
or this solar system. Into this bestial abnormality,
he reflected, Rogers must have poured at once
all his malignant insanity and all his uncanny
sculptural genius. The thing was incredible—and
yet the photograph proved that it existed.
Rogers interrupted his reveries.
“Well—what do you think of It? Now do
you wonder what crushed the dog and sucked
it dry with a million mouths? It needed nourishment—and
It will need more. It is a god, and I am the
first priest of Its latter-day hierarchy.
Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand
Young!”
Jones lowered the photograph in disgust and
pity.
“See here, Rogers, this won’t do. There
are limits, you know. It’s a great piece
of work, and all that, but it isn’t good
for you. Better not see it any more—let
Orabona break it up, and try to forget about
it. And let me tear this beastly picture up,
too.”
With a snarl, Rogers snatched the photograph
and returned it to the desk.
“Idiot—you—and you still think It’s
all a fraud! You still think I made It, and
you still think my figures are nothing but
lifeless wax! Why, damn you, you’re a worse
clod than a wax image yourself! But I’ve
got proof this time, and you’re going to
know! Not just now, for It is resting after
the sacrifice—but later. Oh, yes—you will
not doubt the power of It then.”
As Rogers glanced toward the padlocked inner
door Jones retrieved his hat and stick from
a nearby bench.
“Very well, Rogers, let it be later. I must
be going now, but I’ll call around tomorrow
afternoon. Think my advice over and see if
it doesn’t sound sensible. Ask Orabona what
he thinks, too.”
Rogers actually bared his teeth in wild-beast
fashion.
“Must be going now, eh? Afraid, after all!
Afraid, for all your bold talk! You say the
effigies are only wax, and yet you run away
when I begin to prove that they aren’t.
You’re like the fellows who take my standing
bet that they daren’t spend the night in
the museum—they come boldly enough, but
after an hour they shriek and hammer to get
out! Want me to ask Orabona, eh? You two—always
against me! You want to break down the coming
earthly reign of It!”
Jones preserved his calm.
“No, Rogers—there’s nobody against you.
And I’m not afraid of your figures, either,
much as I admire your skill. But we’re both
a bit nervous tonight, and I fancy some rest
will do us good.”
Again Rogers checked his guest’s departure.
“Not afraid, eh?—then why are you so anxious
to go? Look here—do you or don’t you dare
to stay alone here in the dark? What’s your
hurry if you don’t believe in It?”
Some new idea seemed to have struck Rogers,
and Jones eyed him closely.
“Why, I’ve no special hurry—but what
would be gained by my staying here alone?
What would it prove? My only objection is
that it isn’t very comfortable for sleeping.
What good would it do either of us?”
This time it was Jones who was struck with
an idea. He continued in a tone of conciliation.
“See here, Rogers—I’ve just asked you
what it would prove if I stayed, when we both
know. It would prove that your effigies are
just effigies, and that you oughtn’t to
let your imagination go the way it’s been
going lately. Suppose I do stay. If I stick
it out till morning, will you agree to take
a new view of things—go on a vacation for
three months or so and let Orabona destroy
that new thing of yours? Come, now—isn’t
that fair?”
The expression on the showman’s face was
hard to read. It was obvious that he was thinking
quickly, and that of sundry conflicting emotions,
malign triumph was getting the upper hand.
His voice held a choking quality as he replied.
“Fair enough! If you do stick it out, I’ll
take your advice. But stick you must. We’ll
go out for dinner and come back. I’ll lock
you in the display room and go home. In the
morning I’ll come down ahead of Orabona—he
comes half an hour before the rest—and see
how you are. But don’t try it unless you
are very sure of your scepticism. Others have
backed out—you have that chance. And I suppose
a pounding on the outer door would always
bring a constable. You may not like it so
well after a while—you’ll be in the same
building, though not in the same room with
It.”
As they left the rear door into the dingy
courtyard, Rogers took with him the piece
of burlap—weighted with a gruesome burden.
Near the centre of the court was a manhole,
whose cover the showman lifted quietly, and
with a shuddersome suggestion of familiarity.
Burlap and all, the burden went down to the
oblivion of a cloacal labyrinth. Jones shuddered,
and almost shrank from the gaunt figure at
his side as they emerged into the street.
By unspoken mutual consent, they did not dine
together, but agreed to meet in front of the
museum at eleven.
Jones hailed a cab, and breathed more freely
when he had crossed Waterloo Bridge and was
approaching the brilliantly lighted Strand.
He dined at a quiet café, and subsequently
went to his home in Portland Place to bathe
and get a few things. Idly he wondered what
Rogers was doing. He had heard that the man
had a vast, dismal house in the Walworth Road,
full of obscure and forbidden books, occult
paraphernalia, and wax images which he did
not choose to place on exhibition. Orabona,
he understood, lived in separate quarters
in the same house.
At eleven Jones found Rogers waiting by the
basement door in Southwark Street. Their words
were few, but each seemed taut with a menacing
tension. They agreed that the vaulted exhibition
room alone should form the scene of the vigil,
and Rogers did not insist that the watcher
sit in the special adult alcove of supreme
horrors. The showman, having extinguished
all the lights with switches in the workroom,
locked the door of that crypt with one of
the keys on his crowded ring. Without shaking
hands he passed out the street door, locked
it after him, and stamped up the worn steps
to the sidewalk outside. As his tread receded,
Jones realised that the long, tedious vigil
had commenced.
TWO
Later, in the utter blackness of the great
arched cellar, Jones cursed the childish naiveté
which had brought him there. For the first
half-hour he had kept flashing on his pocket-light
at intervals, but now just sitting in the
dark on one of the visitors’ benches had
become a more nerve-racking thing. Every time
the beam shot out it lighted up some morbid,
grotesque object—a guillotine, a nameless
hybrid monster, a pasty-bearded face crafty
with evil, a body with red torrents streaming
from a severed throat. Jones knew that no
sinister reality was attached to these things,
but after that first half-hour he preferred
not to see them.
Why he had bothered to humour that madman
he could scarcely imagine. It would have been
much simpler merely to have let him alone,
or to have called in a mental specialist.
Probably, he reflected, it was the fellow-feeling
of one artist for another. There was so much
genius in Rogers that he deserved every possible
chance to be helped quietly out of his growing
mania. Any man who could imagine and construct
the incredibly life-like things that he had
produced was surely not far from actual greatness.
He had the fancy of a Sime or a Doré joined
to the minute, scientific craftsmanship of
a Blatschka. Indeed, he had done for the world
of nightmare what the Blatschkas with their
marvellously accurate plant models of finely
wrought and coloured glass had done for the
world of botany.
At midnight the strokes of a distant clock
filtered through the darkness, and Jones felt
cheered by the message from a still-surviving
outside world. The vaulted museum chamber
was like a tomb—ghastly in its utter solitude.
Even a mouse would be cheering company; yet
Rogers had once boasted that—for “certain
reasons”, as he said—no mice or even insects
ever came near the place. That was very curious,
yet it seemed to be true. The deadness and
silence were virtually complete. If only something
would make a sound! He shuffled his feet,
and the echoes came spectrally out of the
absolute stillness. He coughed, but there
was something mocking in the staccato reverberations.
He could not, he vowed, begin talking to himself.
That meant nervous disintegration. Time seemed
to pass with abnormal and disconcerting slowness.
He could have sworn that hours had elapsed
since he last flashed the light on his watch,
yet here was only the stroke of midnight.
He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally
keen. Something in the darkness and stillness
seemed to have sharpened them, so that they
responded to faint intimations hardly strong
enough to be called true impressions. His
ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive
susurrus which could not quite be identified
with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets
outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant
things like the music of the spheres and the
unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions
pressing on our own. Rogers often speculated
about such things.
The floating specks of light in his blackness-drowned
eyes seemed inclined to take on curious symmetries
of pattern and motion. He had often wondered
about those strange rays from the unplumbed
abyss which scintillate before us in the absence
of all earthly illumination, but he had never
known any that behaved just as these were
behaving. They lacked the restful aimlessness
of ordinary light-specks—suggesting some
will and purpose remote from any terrestrial
conception.
Then there was that suggestion of odd stirrings.
Nothing was open, yet in spite of the general
draughtlessness Jones felt that the air was
not uniformly quiet. There were intangible
variations in pressure—not quite decided
enough to suggest the loathsome pawings of
unseen elementals. It was abnormally chilly,
too. He did not like any of this. The air
tasted salty, as if it were mixed with the
brine of dark subterrene waters, and there
was a bare hint of some odour of ineffable
mustiness. In the daytime he had never noticed
that the waxen figures had an odour. Even
now that half-received hint was not the way
wax figures ought to smell. It was more like
the faint smell of specimens in a natural-history
museum. Curious, in view of Rogers’ claims
that his figures were not all artificial—indeed,
it was probably that claim which made one’s
imagination conjure up the olfactory suspicion.
One must guard against excesses of the imagination—had
not such things driven poor Rogers mad?
But the utter loneliness of this place was
frightful. Even the distant chimes seemed
to come from across cosmic gulfs. It made
Jones think of that insane picture which Rogers
had shewed him—the wildly carved chamber
with the cryptic throne which the fellow had
claimed was part of a three-million-year-old
ruin in the shunned and inaccessible solitudes
of the Arctic. Perhaps Rogers had been to
Alaska, but that picture was certainly nothing
but stage scenery. It couldn’t normally
be otherwise, with all that carving and those
terrible symbols. And that monstrous shape
supposed to have been found on that throne—what
a flight of diseased fancy! Jones wondered
just how far he actually was from the insane
masterpiece in wax—probably it was kept
behind that heavy, padlocked plank door leading
somewhere out of the workroom. But it would
never do to brood about a waxen image. Was
not the present room full of such things,
some of them scarcely less horrible than the
dreadful “IT”? And beyond a thin canvas
screen on the left was the “Adults only”
alcove with its nameless phantoms of delirium.
The proximity of the numberless waxen shapes
began to get on Jones’s nerves more and
more as the quarter-hours wore on. He knew
the museum so well that he could not get rid
of their usual images even in the total darkness.
Indeed, the darkness had the effect of adding
to the remembered images certain very disturbing
imaginative overtones. The guillotine seemed
to creak, and the bearded face of Landru—slayer
of his fifty wives—twisted itself into expressions
of monstrous menace. From the severed throat
of Madame Demers a hideous bubbling sound
seemed to emanate, while the headless, legless
victim of a trunk murder tried to edge closer
and closer on its gory stumps. Jones began
shutting his eyes to see if that would dim
the images, but found it was useless. Besides,
when he shut his eyes the strange, purposeful
patterns of light-specks became more disturbingly
pronounced.
Then suddenly he began trying to keep the
hideous images he had formerly been trying
to banish. He tried to keep them because they
were giving place to still more hideous ones.
In spite of himself his memory began reconstructing
the utterly non-human blasphemies that lurked
in the obscurer corners, and these lumpish
hybrid growths oozed and wriggled toward him
as though hunting him down in a circle. Black
Tsathoggua moulded itself from a toad-like
gargoyle to a long, sinuous line with hundreds
of rudimentary feet, and a lean, rubbery night-gaunt
spread its wings as if to advance and smother
the watcher. Jones braced himself to keep
from screaming. He knew he was reverting to
the traditional terrors of his childhood,
and resolved to use his adult reason to keep
the phantoms at bay. It helped a bit, he found,
to flash the light again. Frightful as were
the images it shewed, these were not as bad
as what his fancy called out of the utter
blackness.
But there were drawbacks. Even in the light
of his torch he could not help suspecting
a slight, furtive trembling on the part of
the canvas partition screening off the terrible
“Adults only” alcove. He knew what lay
beyond, and shivered. Imagination called up
the shocking form of fabulous Yog-Sothoth—only
a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous
in its malign suggestiveness. What was this
accursed mass slowly floating toward him and
bumping on the partition that stood in the
way? A small bulge in the canvas far to the
right suggested the sharp horn of Gnoph-keh,
the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice,
that walked sometimes on two legs, sometimes
on four, and sometimes on six. To get this
stuff out of his head Jones walked boldly
toward the hellish alcove with torch burning
steadily. Of course, none of his fears was
true. Yet were not the long, facial tentacles
of great Cthulhu actually swaying, slowly
and insidiously? He knew they were flexible,
but he had not realised that the draught caused
by his advance was enough to set them in motion.
Returning to his former seat outside the alcove,
he shut his eyes and let the symmetrical light-specks
do their worst. The distant clock boomed a
single stroke. Could it be only one? He flashed
the light on his watch and saw that it was
precisely that hour. It would be hard indeed
waiting for morning. Rogers would be down
at about eight o’clock, ahead of even Orabona.
It would be light outside in the main basement
long before that, but none of it could penetrate
here. All the windows in this basement had
been bricked up but the three small ones facing
the court. A pretty bad wait, all told.
His ears were getting most of the hallucinations
now—for he could swear he heard stealthy,
plodding footsteps in the workroom beyond
the closed and locked door. He had no business
thinking of that unexhibited horror which
Rogers called “It”. The thing was a contamination—it
had driven its maker mad, and now even its
picture was calling up imaginative terrors.
It could not be in the workroom—it was very
obviously beyond that padlocked door of heavy
planking. Those steps were certainly pure
imagination.
Then he thought he heard the key turn in the
workroom door. Flashing on his torch, he saw
nothing but the ancient six-panelled portal
in its proper position. Again he tried darkness
and closed eyes, but there followed a harrowing
illusion of creaking—not the guillotine
this time, but the slow, furtive opening of
the workroom door. He would not scream. Once
he screamed, he would be lost. There was a
sort of padding or shuffling audible now,
and it was slowly advancing toward him. He
must retain command of himself. Had he not
done so when the nameless brain-shapes tried
to close in on him? The shuffling crept nearer,
and his resolution failed. He did not scream
but merely gulped out a challenge.
“Who goes there? Who are you? What do you
want?”
There was no answer, but the shuffling kept
on. Jones did not know which he feared most
to do—turn on his flashlight or stay in
the dark while the thing crept upon him. This
thing was different, he felt profoundly, from
the other terrors of the evening. His fingers
and throat worked spasmodically. Silence was
impossible, and the suspense of utter blackness
was beginning to be the most intolerable of
all conditions. Again he cried out hysterically—“Halt!
Who goes there?”—as he switched on the
revealing beams of his torch. Then, paralysed
by what he saw, he dropped the flashlight
and screamed—not once but many times.
Shuffling toward him in the darkness was the
gigantic, blasphemous form of a black thing
not wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its
hide hung loosely upon its frame, and its
rugose, dead-eyed rudiment of a head swayed
drunkenly from side to side. Its fore paws
were extended, with talons spread wide, and
its whole body was taut with murderous malignity
despite its utter lack of facial expression.
After the screams and the final coming of
darkness it leaped, and in a moment had Jones
pinned to the floor. There was no struggle,
for the watcher had fainted.
Jones’s fainting spell could not have lasted
more than a moment, for the nameless thing
was apishly dragging him through the darkness
when he began recovering consciousness. What
started him fully awake were the sounds which
the thing was making—or rather, the voice
with which it was making them. That voice
was human, and it was familiar. Only one living
being could be behind the hoarse, feverish
accents which were chanting to an unknown
horror.
“Iä! Iä!” it was howling. “I am coming,
O Rhan-Tegoth, coming with the nourishment.
You have waited long and fed ill, but now
you shall have what was promised. That and
more, for instead of Orabona it will be one
of high degree who had doubted you. You shall
crush and drain him, with all his doubts,
and grow strong thereby. And ever after among
men he shall be shewn as a monument to your
glory. Rhan-Tegoth, infinite and invincible,
I am your slave and high-priest. You are hungry,
and I provide. I read the sign and have led
you forth. I shall feed you with blood, and
you shall feed me with power. Iä! Shub-Niggurath!
The Goat with a Thousand Young!”
In an instant all the terrors of the night
dropped from Jones like a discarded cloak.
He was again master of his mind, for he knew
the very earthly and material peril he had
to deal with. This was no monster of fable,
but a dangerous madman. It was Rogers, dressed
in some nightmare covering of his own insane
designing, and about to make a frightful sacrifice
to the devil-god he had fashioned out of wax.
Clearly, he must have entered the workroom
from the rear courtyard, donned his disguise,
and then advanced to seize his neatly trapped
and fear-broken victim. His strength was prodigious,
and if he was to be thwarted, one must act
quickly. Counting on the madman’s confidence
in his unconsciousness he determined to take
him by surprise, while his grasp was relatively
lax. The feel of a threshold told him he was
crossing into the pitch-black workroom.
With the strength of mortal fear Jones made
a sudden spring from the half-recumbent posture
in which he was being dragged. For an instant
he was free of the astonished maniac’s hands,
and in another instant a lucky lunge in the
dark had put his own hands at his captor’s
weirdly concealed throat. Simultaneously Rogers
gripped him again, and without further preliminaries
the two were locked in a desperate struggle
of life and death. Jones’s athletic training,
without doubt, was his sole salvation; for
his mad assailant, freed from every inhibition
of fair play, decency, or even self-preservation,
was an engine of savage destruction as formidable
as a wolf or panther.
Guttural cries sometimes punctured the hideous
tussle in the dark. Blood spurted, clothing
ripped, and Jones at last felt the actual
throat of the maniac, shorn of its spectral
mask. He spoke not a word, but put every ounce
of energy into the defence of his life. Rogers
kicked, gouged, butted, bit, clawed, and spat—yet
found strength to yelp out actual sentences
at times. Most of his speech was in a ritualistic
jargon full of references to “It” or “Rhan-Tegoth”,
and to Jones’s overwrought nerves it seemed
as if the cries echoed from an infinite distance
of daemoniac snortings and bayings. Toward
the last they were rolling on the floor, overturning
benches or striking against the walls and
the brick foundations of the central melting-furnace.
Up to the very end Jones could not be certain
of saving himself, but chance finally intervened
in his favour. A jab of his knee against Rogers’
chest produced a general relaxation, and a
moment later he knew he had won.
Though hardly able to hold himself up, Jones
rose and stumbled about the walls seeking
the light-switch—for his flashlight was
gone, together with most of his clothing.
As he lurched along he dragged his limp opponent
with him, fearing a sudden attack when the
madman came to. Finding the switch-box, he
fumbled till he had the right handle. Then,
as the wildly disordered workroom burst into
sudden radiance, he set about binding Rogers
with such cords and belts as he could easily
find. The fellow’s disguise—or what was
left of it—seemed to be made of a puzzlingly
queer sort of leather. For some reason it
made Jones’s flesh crawl to touch it, and
there seemed to be an alien, rusty odour about
it. In the normal clothes beneath it was Rogers’
key-ring, and this the exhausted victor seized
as his final passport to freedom. The shades
at the small, slit-like windows were all securely
drawn, and he let them remain so.
Washing off the blood of battle at a convenient
sink, Jones donned the most ordinary-looking
and least ill-fitting clothes he could find
on the costume hooks. Testing the door to
the courtyard, he found it fastened with a
spring-lock which did not require a key from
the inside. He kept the key-ring, however,
to admit him on his return with aid—for
plainly, the thing to do was to call in an
alienist. There was no telephone in the museum,
but it would not take long to find an all-night
restaurant or chemist’s shop where one could
be had. He had almost opened the door to go
when a torrent of hideous abuse from across
the room told him that Rogers—whose visible
injuries were confined to a long, deep scratch
down the left cheek—had regained consciousness.
“Fool! Spawn of Noth-Yidik and effluvium
of K’thun! Son of the dogs that howl in
the maelstrom of Azathoth! You would have
been sacred and immortal, and now you are
betraying It and Its priest! Beware—for
It is hungry! It would have been Orabona—that
damned treacherous dog ready to turn against
me and It—but I give you the first honour
instead. Now you must both beware, for It
is not gentle without Its priest.
“Iä! Iä! Vengeance is at hand! Do you
know you would have been immortal? Look at
the furnace! There is a fire ready to light,
and there is wax in the kettle. I would have
done with you as I have done with other once-living
forms. Hei! You, who have vowed all my effigies
are waxen, would have become a waxen effigy
yourself! The furnace was all ready! When
It had had Its fill, and you were like that
dog I shewed you, I would have made your flattened,
punctured fragments immortal! Wax would have
done it. Haven’t you said I’m a great
artist? Wax in every pore—wax over every
square inch of you—Iä! Iä! And ever after
the world would have looked at your mangled
carcass and wondered how I ever imagined and
made such a thing! Hei! And Orabona would
have come next, and others after him—and
thus would my waxen family have grown!
“Dog—do you still think I made all my
effigies? Why not say preserved? You know
by this time the strange places I’ve been
to, and the strange things I’ve brought
back. Coward—you could never face the dimensional
shambler whose hide I put on to scare you—the
mere sight of it alive, or even the full-fledged
thought of it, would kill you instantly with
fright! Iä! Iä! It waits hungry for the
blood that is the life!”
Rogers, propped against the wall, swayed to
and fro in his bonds.
“See here, Jones—if I let you go will
you let me go? It must be taken care of by
Its high-priest. Orabona will be enough to
keep It alive—and when he is finished I
will make his fragments immortal in wax for
the world to see. It could have been you,
but you have rejected the honour. I won’t
bother you again. Let me go, and I will share
with you the power that It will bring me.
Iä! Iä! Great is Rhan-Tegoth! Let me go!
Let me go! It is starving down there beyond
that door, and if It dies the Old Ones can
never come back. Hei! Hei! Let me go!”
Jones merely shook his head, though the hideousness
of the showman’s imaginings revolted him.
Rogers, now staring wildly at the padlocked
plank door, thumped his head again and again
against the brick wall and kicked with his
tightly bound ankles. Jones was afraid he
would injure himself, and advanced to bind
him more firmly to some stationary object.
Writhing, Rogers edged away from him and set
up a series of frenetic ululations whose utter,
monstrous unhumanness was appalling, and whose
sheer volume was almost incredible. It seemed
impossible that any human throat could produce
noises so loud and piercing, and Jones felt
that if this continued there would be no need
to telephone for aid. It could not be long
before a constable would investigate, even
granting that there were no listening neighbours
in this deserted warehouse district.
“Wza-y’ei! Wza-y’ei!” howled the madman.
“Y’kaa haa bho—ii, Rhan-Tegoth—Cthulhu
fhtagn—Ei! Ei! Ei! Ei!—Rhan-Tegoth, Rhan-Tegoth,
Rhan-Tegoth!”
The tautly trussed creature, who had started
squirming his way across the littered floor,
now reached the padlocked plank door and commenced
knocking his head thunderously against it.
Jones dreaded the task of binding him further,
and wished he were not so exhausted from the
previous struggle. This violent aftermath
was getting hideously on his nerves, and he
began to feel a return of the nameless qualms
he had felt in the dark. Everything about
Rogers and his museum was so hellishly morbid
and suggestive of black vistas beyond life!
It was loathsome to think of the waxen masterpiece
of abnormal genius which must at this very
moment be lurking close at hand in the blackness
beyond the heavy, padlocked door.
And now something happened which sent an additional
chill down Jones’s spine, and caused every
hair—even the tiny growth on the backs of
his hands—to bristle with a vague fright
beyond classification. Rogers had suddenly
stopped screaming and beating his head against
the stout plank door, and was straining up
to a sitting posture, head cocked on one side
as if listening intently for something. All
at once a smile of devilish triumph overspread
his face, and he began speaking intelligibly
again—this time in a hoarse whisper contrasting
oddly with his former stentorian howling.
“Listen, fool! Listen hard! It has heard
me, and is coming. Can’t you hear It splashing
out of Its tank down there at the end of the
runway? I dug it deep, because there was nothing
too good for It. It is amphibious, you know—you
saw the gills in the picture. It came to the
earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities
are under the warm deep sea. It can’t stand
up in there—too tall—has to sit or crouch.
Let me get my keys—we must let It out and
kneel down before It. Then we will go out
and find a dog or cat—or perhaps a drunken
man—to give It the nourishment It needs.”
It was not what the madman said, but the way
he said it, that disorganised Jones so badly.
The utter, insane confidence and sincerity
in that crazed whisper were damnably contagious.
Imagination, with such a stimulus, could find
an active menace in the devilish wax figure
that lurked unseen just beyond the heavy planking.
Eyeing the door in unholy fascination, Jones
noticed that it bore several distinct cracks,
though no marks of violent treatment were
visible on this side. He wondered how large
a room or closet lay behind it, and how the
waxen figure was arranged. The maniac’s
idea of a tank and runway was as clever as
all his other imaginings.
Then, in one terrible instant, Jones completely
lost the power to draw a breath. The leather
belt he had seized for Rogers’ further strapping
fell from his limp hands, and a spasm of shivering
convulsed him from head to foot. He might
have known the place would drive him mad as
it had driven Rogers—and now he was mad.
He was mad, for he now harboured hallucinations
more weird than any which had assailed him
earlier that night. The madman was bidding
him hear the splashing of a mythical monster
in a tank beyond the door—and now, God help
him, he did hear it!
Rogers saw the spasm of horror reach Jones’s
face and transform it to a staring mask of
fear. He cackled.
“At last, fool, you believe! At last you
know! You hear It and It comes! Get me my
keys, fool—we must do homage and serve It!”
But Jones was past paying attention to any
human words, mad or sane. Phobic paralysis
held him immobile and half-conscious, with
wild images racing phantasmagorically through
his helpless imagination. There was a splashing.
There was a padding or shuffling, as of great
wet paws on a solid surface. Something was
approaching. Into his nostrils, from the cracks
in that nightmare plank door, poured a noisome
animal stench like and yet unlike that of
the mammal cages at the zoölogical gardens
in Regent’s Park.
He did not know now whether Rogers was talking
or not. Everything real had faded away, and
he was a statue obsessed with dreams and hallucinations
so unnatural that they became almost objective
and remote from him. He thought he heard a
sniffing or snorting from the unknown gulf
beyond the door, and when a sudden baying,
trumpeting noise assailed his ears he could
not feel sure that it came from the tightly
bound maniac whose image swam uncertainly
in his shaken vision. The photograph of that
accursed, unseen wax thing persisted in floating
through his consciousness. Such a thing had
no right to exist. Had it not driven him mad?
Even as he reflected, a fresh evidence of
madness beset him. Something, he thought,
was fumbling with the latch of the heavy padlocked
door. It was patting and pawing and pushing
at the planks. There was a thudding on the
stout wood, which grew louder and louder.
The stench was horrible. And now the assault
on that door from the inside was a malign,
determined pounding like the strokes of a
battering-ram. There was an ominous cracking—a
splintering—a welling foetor—a falling
plank—a black paw ending in a crab-like
claw. . . .
“Help! Help! God help me! . . . Aaaaaaa!
. . .”
With intense effort Jones is today able to
recall a sudden bursting of his fear-paralysis
into the liberation of frenzied automatic
flight. What he evidently did must have paralleled
curiously the wild, plunging flights of maddest
nightmares; for he seems to have leaped across
the disordered crypt at almost a single bound,
yanked open the outside door, which closed
and locked itself after him with a clatter,
sprung up the worn stone steps three at a
time, and raced frantically and aimlessly
out of that dank cobblestoned court and through
the squalid streets of Southwark.
Here the memory ends. Jones does not know
how he got home, and there is no evidence
of his having hired a cab. Probably he raced
all the way by blind instinct—over Waterloo
Bridge, along the Strand and Charing Cross,
and up Haymarket and Regent Street to his
own neighbourhood. He still had on the queer
mélange of museum costumes when he grew conscious
enough to call the doctor.
A week later the nerve specialists allowed
him to leave his bed and walk in the open
air.
But he had not told the specialists much.
Over his whole experience hung a pall of madness
and nightmare, and he felt that silence was
the only course. When he was up, he scanned
intently all the papers which had accumulated
since that hideous night, but found no reference
to anything queer at the museum. How much,
after all, had been reality? Where did reality
end and morbid dream begin? Had his mind gone
wholly to pieces in that dark exhibition chamber,
and had the whole fight with Rogers been a
phantasm of fever? It would help to put him
on his feet if he could settle some of these
maddening points. He must have seen that damnable
photograph of the wax image called “It”,
for no brain but Rogers’ could ever have
conceived such a blasphemy.
It was a fortnight before he dared to enter
Southwark Street again. He went in the middle
of the morning, when there was the greatest
amount of sane, wholesome activity around
the ancient, crumbling shops and warehouses.
The museum’s sign was still there, and as
he approached he saw that the place was open.
The gateman nodded in a pleasant recognition
as he summoned up the courage to enter, and
in the vaulted chamber below an attendant
touched his cap cheerfully. Perhaps everything
had been a dream. Would he dare to knock at
the door of the workroom and look for Rogers?
Then Orabona advanced to greet him. His dark,
sleek face was a trifle sardonic, but Jones
felt that he was not unfriendly. He spoke
with a trace of accent.
“Good morning, Mr. Jones. It is some time
since we have seen you here. Did you wish
Mr. Rogers? I’m sorry, but he is away. He
had word of business in America, and had to
go. Yes, it was very sudden. I am in charge
now—here, and at the house. I try to maintain
Mr. Rogers’ high standard—till he is back.”
The foreigner smiled—perhaps from affability
alone. Jones scarcely knew how to reply, but
managed to mumble out a few inquiries about
the day after his last visit. Orabona seemed
greatly amused by the questions, and took
considerable care in framing his replies.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Jones—the twenty-eighth
of last month. I remember it for many reasons.
In the morning—before Mr. Rogers got here,
you understand—I found the workroom in quite
a mess. There was a great deal of—cleaning
up—to do. There had been—late work, you
see. Important new specimen given its secondary
baking process. I took complete charge when
I came.
“It was a hard specimen to prepare—but
of course Mr. Rogers has taught me a great
deal. He is, as you know, a very great artist.
When he came he helped me complete the specimen—helped
very materially, I assure you—but he left
soon without even greeting the men. As I tell
you, he was called away suddenly. There were
important chemical reactions involved. They
made loud noises—in fact, some teamsters
in the court outside fancy they heard several
pistol shots—very amusing idea!
“As for the new specimen—that matter is
very unfortunate. It is a great masterpiece—designed
and made, you understand, by Mr. Rogers. He
will see about it when he gets back.”
Again Orabona smiled.
“The police, you know. We put it on display
a week ago, and there were two or three faintings.
One poor fellow had an epileptic fit in front
of it. You see, it is a trifle—stronger—than
the rest. Larger, for one thing. Of course,
it was in the adult alcove. The next day a
couple of men from Scotland Yard looked it
over and said it was too morbid to be shewn.
Said we’d have to remove it. It was a tremendous
shame—such a masterpiece of art—but I
didn’t feel justified in appealing to the
courts in Mr. Rogers’ absence. He would
not like so much publicity with the police
now—but when he gets back—when he gets
back—“
For some reason or other Jones felt a mounting
tide of uneasiness and repulsion. But Orabona
was continuing.
“You are a connoisseur, Mr. Jones. I am
sure I violate no law in offering you a private
view. It may be—subject, of course, to Mr.
Rogers’ wishes—that we shall destroy the
specimen some day—but that would be a crime.”
Jones had a powerful impulse to refuse the
sight and flee precipitately, but Orabona
was leading him forward by the arm with an
artist’s enthusiasm. The adult alcove, crowded
with nameless horrors, held no visitors. In
the farther corner a large niche had been
curtained off, and to this the smiling assistant
advanced.
“You must know, Mr. Jones, that the title
of this specimen is ‘The Sacrifice to Rhan-Tegoth’.”
Jones started violently, but Orabona appeared
not to notice.
“The shapeless, colossal god is a feature
in certain obscure legends which Mr. Rogers
has studied. All nonsense, of course, as you’ve
so often assured Mr. Rogers. It is supposed
to have come from outer space, and to have
lived in the Arctic three million years ago.
It treated its sacrifices rather peculiarly
and horribly, as you shall see. Mr. Rogers
had made it fiendishly life-like—even to
the face of the victim.”
Now trembling violently, Jones clung to the
brass railing in front of the curtained niche.
He almost reached out to stop Orabona when
he saw the curtain beginning to swing aside,
but some conflicting impulse held him back.
The foreigner smiled triumphantly.
“Behold!”
Jones reeled in spite of his grip on the railing.
“God!—great God!”
Fully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching
attitude expressive of infinite cosmic malignancy,
a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was shewn
starting forward from a Cyclopean ivory throne
covered with grotesque carvings. In the central
pair of its six legs it bore a crushed, flattened,
distorted, bloodless thing, riddled with a
million punctures, and in places seared as
with some pungent acid. Only the mangled head
of the victim, lolling upside down at one
side, revealed that it represented something
once human.
The monster itself needed no title for one
who had seen a certain hellish photograph.
That damnable print had been all too faithful;
yet it could not carry the full horror which
lay in the gigantic actuality. The globular
torso—the bubble-like suggestion of a head—the
three fishy eyes—the foot-long proboscis—the
bulging gills—the monstrous capillation
of asp-like suckers—the six sinuous limbs
with their black paws and crab-like claws—God!
the familiarity of that black paw ending in
a crab-like claw! . . .
Orabona’s smile was utterly damnable. Jones
choked, and stared at the hideous exhibit
with a mounting fascination which perplexed
and disturbed him. What half-revealed horror
was holding and forcing him to look longer
and search out details? This had driven Rogers
mad . . . Rogers, supreme artist . . . said
they weren’t artificial. . . .
Then he localised the thing that held him.
It was the crushed waxen victim’s lolling
head, and something that it implied. This
head was not entirely devoid of a face, and
that face was familiar. It was like the mad
face of poor Rogers. Jones peered closer,
hardly knowing why he was driven to do so.
Wasn’t it natural for a mad egotist to mould
his own features into his masterpiece? Was
there anything more that subconscious vision
had seized on and suppressed in sheer terror?
The wax of the mangled face had been handled
with boundless dexterity. Those punctures—how
perfectly they reproduced the myriad wounds
somehow inflicted on that poor dog! But there
was something more. On the left cheek one
could trace an irregularity which seemed outside
the general scheme—as if the sculptor had
sought to cover up a defect of his first modelling.
The more Jones looked at it, the more mysteriously
it horrified him—and then, suddenly, he
remembered a circumstance which brought his
horror to a head. That night of hideousness—the
tussle—the bound madman—and the long,
deep scratch down the left cheek of the actual
living Rogers. . . .
Jones, releasing his desperate clutch on the
railing, sank in a total faint.
Orabona continued to smile.
