Of
such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival
of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps,
in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity...
forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and
called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...
- Algernon Blackwood
I. The Horror In Clay
The most merciful thing in the world, I think,
is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live
on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining
in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the
piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying
vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace
and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur
of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.
They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood
if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came
the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it
and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses
of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated
things - in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.
I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if
I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I
think that the professor, too intented to keep silent regarding the part
he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death
seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter
of 1926-27 with the death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor
Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions,
and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums;
so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally,
interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor
had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly;
as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro
who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside
which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in
Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but
concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart,
induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was
responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this
dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.
As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for
he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with
some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and
boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated
will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there
was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse
from showing to other eyes. It had been locked and I did not find the key
till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor
carried in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when
I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked
barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and
the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my
uncle, in his latter years become credulous of the most superficial impostures?
I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent
disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than
an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern
origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion;
for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they
do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly
to be; though my memory, despite much the papers and collections of my
uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint
at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure
of evident pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade
a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or
symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could
conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous
pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted
a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general
outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind
the figure was a vague suggestions of a Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside
from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand;
and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document
was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid
the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was divided
into two sections, the first of which was headed "1925 - Dream and Dream
Work of H.A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.", and the second,
"Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans,
La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg. - Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's Acct." The
other manuscript papers were brief notes, some of them accounts of the
queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical
books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot's Atlantis and the Lost
Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies
and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and
anthropological source-books as Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's
Witch-Cult
in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript
told a very particular tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin,
dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor
Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly
damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my
uncle had recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island
School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that
institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity,
and had from chidhood excited attention through the strange stories and
odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself "psychically
hypersensitive", but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed
him as merely "queer." Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped
gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group
of esthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to
preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
On the ocassion of the visit, ran the professor's
manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archeological
knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of the bas-relief. He spoke
in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy;
and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness
of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archeology. Young Wilcox's
rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record
it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified
his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic
of him. He said, "It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream
of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative
Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon."
It was then that he began that rambling tale
which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest
of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before,
the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's
imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented
dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths,
all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics
had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below
had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy
could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost
unpronounceable jumble of letters: "Cthulhu fhtagn."
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection
which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor
with scientific minuteness; and studied with frantic intensity the bas-relief
on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in
his night clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
blamed his old age, Wilcox afterwards said, for his slowness in recognizing
both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly
out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the
latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand
the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an
admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious
body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed
ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor
with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for
after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young
man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imaginery
whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in
enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds
frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu"
and "R'lyeh."
On March 23, the manuscript continued, Wilcox
failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been
stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family
in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other
artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations
of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family,
and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often
at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge.
The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and
the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not
only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on
a gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or lumbered about.
He at no time fully described this object but
occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor
that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to
depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added,
was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His
temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole
condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental
disorder.
On April 2 at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's
malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself
at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality
since the night of March 22. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned
to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery,
and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless
and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended,
but references to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material
for thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then
forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist.
The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons
covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange
visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously
far-flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the friends whom he could
question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams,
and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception
of his request seems to have varied; but he must, at the very least, have
received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without
a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes
formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society
and business - New England's traditional "salt of the earth" - gave an
almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but
formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March
23 and and April 2 - the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific
men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest
fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned
a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the
pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had
they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters,
I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of
having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently
resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant
of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the
veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes told disturbing tale.
From February 28 to April 2 a large proportion of them had dreamed very
bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger
during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of those who
reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which
Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of
the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the
note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known
architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently
insane on the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months
later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen
of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely
by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation;
but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however,
bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the the objects
of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It
is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched
on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor
Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts
was tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was
a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window
after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of
a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions
he has seen. A dispatch from California describes a theosophist colony
as donning white robes en masse for some "glorious fulfiment" which never
arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest
toward the end of March 22-23.
The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour
and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous
Dream
Landscape in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the
recorded troubles in insane asylums that only a miracle can have stopped
the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified
conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date
scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside.
But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters
mentioned by the professor.
II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor's
dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the
second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor
Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled
over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can
be rendered only as "Cthulhu"; and all this in so stirring and horrible
a
connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries
and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen
years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual
meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority
and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and
was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took
advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and
problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short
time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking
middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain
special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John
Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With
him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently
very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine.
It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in
archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by
purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever
it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south
of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular
and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not
but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them,
and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo
circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted
from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence
the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them
to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its
fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for
the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been
enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement,
and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive
figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted
so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture
had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of
years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly
from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight
inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented
a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head
whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious
claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing,
which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of
a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block
or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings
touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst
the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the
front edge and extended a quarter of the way clown toward the bottom of
the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of
the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the
croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like,
and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown.
Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link
did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation's youth
- or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material
was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent
flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.
The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present,
despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this field,
could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship.
They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote
and distinct from mankind as we know it. something frightfully suggestive
of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions
have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their
heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector's problem, there was one man
in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous
shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd
trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor
of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note.
Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of
Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed
to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered
a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious
form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness
and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little,
and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down
from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless
rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals
addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor
Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest,
expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now
of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and
around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs.
It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising
a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell,
it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing
now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment
by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse;
and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted
and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had
arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables
taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive
comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective
and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two
hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both
the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their
kindred idols was something very like this: the word-divisions being guessed
at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl fhtagn."
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor
Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what
older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran
something like this:
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu
waits dreaming."
And now, in response to a general and urgent demand,
Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the
swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached
profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker
and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination
among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess
it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the
New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country
to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants
of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing
which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but
voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their
women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun
its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller
ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling
chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the
people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages
and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering
squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and
for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where
day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss
beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting
wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every
malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the
squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical
dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled
beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling
shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare,
too, seemed to filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues
of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the
cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the
scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues
plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had
ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one
of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by
white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight,
in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes;
and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in
inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before
d'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome
beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was
to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The
present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred
area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of
the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and
incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to
the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black
morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities
peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible
to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and
orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls
and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted
woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the
less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled
chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase
or ritual:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh
wgah'nagl fhtagn."
Then the men, having reached a spot where the
trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four
of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which
the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp
water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly
hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy
island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On
this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality
than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this
hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped
bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain
of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on
top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven
statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals
with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly
marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside
this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general
direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal
between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may
have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard,
to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and
unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror.
This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly
imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great
wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond
the remotest trees but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was
of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must
have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police
relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout.
For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild
blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the
end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom
he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen.
Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried
away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the
monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense
strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low,
mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling
of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from
the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous
cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something
far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant
as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central
idea of their loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old
Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young
world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and
under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to
the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult,
and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden
in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when
the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh
under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway.
Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult
would always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a
secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely
alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark
to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man
had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none
might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could
read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted
ritual was not the secret - that was never spoken aloud, only whispered.
The chant meant only this: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough
to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All
denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been
done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial
meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent
account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly
from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed
to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains
of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend
that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world
seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things
ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he
said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before
men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had
come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They
had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with
Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were
not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape - for did not
this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that shape was not made of matter.
When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through
the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although
They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone
houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty
Cthulhu for a glorious surrection when the stars and the earth might once
more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve
to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact likewise
prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake
in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They
knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was
transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities
of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive
among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language
reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed
the cult around tall idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought
in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came
right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb
to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be
easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones;
free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside
and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated
Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy
themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and
freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the
memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with
the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something happened. The great
stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath
the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through
which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse.
But memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise
again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits
of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns
beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much.
He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could
elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously
declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay
amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams
hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and
was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted
of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings
in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated
might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal
lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered,
had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult.
Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly
secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either
cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities
in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor
Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting
by Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed
in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant
mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the
first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture.
Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's
death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed
it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to
the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the
sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after
a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young
man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics
of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in
his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula
uttered alike by Esquimaux diabolists and mongrel Louisianans?. Professor
Angell's instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was
eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having
heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series
of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The
dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course,
strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance
of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions.
So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the
theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse,
I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke
I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys
Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth
century Breton Architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the
lovely olonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of
the finest Georgian steeple in America, I found him at work in his rooms,
and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius
is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard
from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and
will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur
Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and
in painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect,
he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising.
Then I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had
excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained
the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard,
but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became
convinced ofhis absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner
none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced
his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost
made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall
having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief,
but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was,
no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew
nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless catechism
had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way
in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic
fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city
of slimy green stone - whose geometry, he oddly said, was all
wrong - and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental
calling from underground: "Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn."
These words had formed part of that dread ritual
which told of dead Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh,
and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure,
had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst
the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of
its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams,
in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his
imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of
a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could
never like, but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his
honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his
talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate
me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its
origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and
others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even
questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro,
unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically
at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation
of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I
was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion
whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was
still one of absolute materialism, as l wish it still were, and I discounted
with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes
and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now
fear I know, is that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell on
a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with
foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not
forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana,
and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and rites and beliefs.
Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a
certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of
my uncle after encountering the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears?.
I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was
likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen,
for I have learned much now.
III. The Madness from the Sea
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will
be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye
on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would
naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an
old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April
18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time
of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into
what Professor Angell called the "Cthulhu Cult", and was visiting a learned
friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist
of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture
in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin
I have mentioned, for my friend had wide affiliations in all conceivable
foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image
almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious
contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it
of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous
significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate
action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed
New Zealand Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale
of Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars
of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.
The Morrison Co.'s freighter Vigilant,
bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour,
having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert
of Dunedin, N.Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34°21',
W. Longitude 152°17', with one living and one dead man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and
on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally
heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted;
and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one
survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been
dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone
idol of unknown origin, about foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities
at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street
all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in
the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told
an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen,
a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted
schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th
with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown
widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March
22nd, in S. Latitude 49°51' W. Longitude 128°34', encountered the
Alert,
manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being
ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the
strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner
with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht's
equipment. The Emma's men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though
the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the water-line they managed
to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage
crew on the yacht's deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number
being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate
though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma's men, including Capt.
Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under
Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead
in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back
had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small
island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and
six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent
about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock
chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried
to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd, From that
time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does
not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death
reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure.
Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known
there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront,
It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings
and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had
set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March
1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent
reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty
will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which
every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than
he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the
hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were
new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange
interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew
to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol?
What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma's crew had
died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the
vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious
cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural
linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance
to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
March 1st - or February 28th according to the
International Date Line - the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin
the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously
summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun
to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had
moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew
of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that
date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened
with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had
gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of
this storm of April 2nd - the date on which all dreams of the dank city
ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever?
What of all this - and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born
Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery
of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's
power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some
way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had
begun its siege of mankind's soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling
and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco.
In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little
was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns.
Waterfront scum was far too common for special mentnon; though there was
vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which
faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland
I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white
after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter
sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home
in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than
he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give
me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly
with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert,
now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained
nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish
head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved
in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it
a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery,
terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted
in Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found
it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like
it. Then I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse
about the Old Ones; "They had come from the stars, and had brought Their
images with Them."
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had
never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing
for London, I reembarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn
day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen's
address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which
kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city
masqueraded as "Christiana." I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked
with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered
front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung
th disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen
was no more.
He had not long survived his return, said his
wife, for the doings sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more
than he told the public, but had left a long manuscript - of "technical
matters" as he said - written in English, evidently in order to guard her
from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk rough a narrow lane near
the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had
knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but
before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate
cause the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave
me till I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise. Persuad-g the
widow that my connexion with her husband's "technical matters" was sufficient
to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to
read it on the London boat.
It was a simple, rambling thing - a naive sailor's
effort at a post-facto diary - and strove to recall day by day that last
awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness
and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound the
water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped
my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all,
even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly
again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in
time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars
which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready
and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall
heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told
it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland
on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest
which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's
dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when
held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's
regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends
on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly
abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost
a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness
brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry.
Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's
command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and
in S. Latitude 47°9', W. Longitude l23°43', come upon a coastline
of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing
less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror - the nightmare
corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history
by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There
lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending
out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to
the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithfull to
come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did
not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top,
the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried,
actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that
may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen
and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of
elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing
of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish
stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and
at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with
the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly
visible in every line of the mates frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen
achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead
of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad
impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong
to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images
and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something
Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the
dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent
of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt
the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank
on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy
blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven
seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out
from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked
leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second
glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all
the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed
was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others,
and it was only half-heartedly that they searched - vainly, as it proved
- for some portable souvenir to bear away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed
up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest
followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the
now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great
barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel,
threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it
lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As
Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could
not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative
position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places
without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing
each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque
stone moulding - that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not
after all horizontal - and the men wondered how any door in the universe
could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great lintel began
to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balauced
Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down
or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer
recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic
distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules
of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost
material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for
it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed,
and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly
darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on
flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths
was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard
a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was
listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly
squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into
the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out
when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks
two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot
be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial
lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a
great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic
instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars,
had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old
cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by
accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and
ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws
before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe.
They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other
three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock
to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry
which shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved
as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and
pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity
flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of
the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely,
despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of
only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines
to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors
of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst
on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing
from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing
ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu
slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising
strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly
as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the
cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing
that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully
up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full
speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty
eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher
and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing
jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon.
The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit
of the sturdy yacht, but johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting
as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish,
a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler
could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid
and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern;
where - God in heaven! - the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn
was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst
its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from
its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded
over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself
and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the
first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul.
Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his
consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs
of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comets tail,
and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back
again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted,
hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue-the Vigilant,
the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back
home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell - they would think
him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife
must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have
placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor
Angell. With it shall go this record of mine - this test of my own sanity,
wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together
again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror,
and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward
be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went,
as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still
lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again
in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young.
His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the
spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and
prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must
have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else
the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the
end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness
waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities
of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray
that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution
before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
