Efficiut
Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus
exhibeant.(1)
- Lacantius (2)
I was far from home, and the
spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it
pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting
willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening.
And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on
through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely
up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient
town I had never seen but often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men
call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem
and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide,
and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt
and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where
also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century,
that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were
an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred
years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark
furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another
tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And
now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that
none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that
night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the
lonely remember.
Then beyond the hill's crest
I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with
its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and
small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep,
narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time
durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered
at all angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering
on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights
and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join
Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the
sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had
come in the elder time.
Beside the road at its crest
a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was
a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow
like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless
road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible
creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen
of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.
As the road wound down the seaward
slope I listened for the merry sounds of a village at evening, but did
not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and felt that these
old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to me, and full
of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment
or look for wayfarers, kept on down past the hushed lighted farmhouses
and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns
creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways
glistened along deserted unpaved lanes in the light of little, curtained
windows.
I had seen maps of the town,
and knew where to find the home of my people. It was told that I
should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long; so I hastened
through Back Street to Circle Court, and across the fresh snow on the one
full flagstone pavement in the town, to where Green Lane leads off behind
the Market House. The old maps still held good, and I had no trouble;
though at Arkham they must have lied when they said the trolleys ran to
this place, since I saw not a wire overhead. Snow would have hid
the rails in any case. I was glad I had chosen to walk, for the white
village had seemed very beautiful from the hill; and now I was eager to
knock at the door of my people, the seventh house on the left in Green
Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second storey, all built
before 1650.
There were lights inside the
house when I came upon it, and I saw from the diamond window-panes that
it must have been kept very close to its antique state. The upper
part overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly met the over-hanging
part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a tunnel, with the
low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk,
but many houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with
iron railings. It was an odd scene, and because I was strange to
New England I had never known its like before. Though it pleased
me, I would have relished it better if there had been footprints in the
snow, and people in the streets, and a few windows without drawn curtains.
When I sounded the archaic iron
knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been gathering in me, perhaps
because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the bleakness of the evening,
and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of curious customs.
And when my knock was answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard
any footsteps before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid
long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face
that reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote
a quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.
He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit
room with massive exposed rafters and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of
the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there, for not an attribute
was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel
at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back
toward me, silently spinning despite the festive season. An indefinite
dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be
blazing. The high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows
at the left, and seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I
did not like everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had
had. This fear grew stronger from what had before lessened it, for
the more I looked at the old man's bland face the more its very blandness
terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too much like
wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly
cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially
on the tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to
the place of the festival.
Pointing to a chair, table, and
pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I sat down to read
I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old
Morryster's wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus
Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia
of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable
Necronomicon
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation;
a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things
whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of signs
in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman
continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the
books and the people very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition
of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect
queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed
by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and
a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness, but I disliked it when
I fancied I heard the closing of one of the windows that the settle faced,
as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring
that was not of the old woman's spinning-wheel. This was not much,
though, for the old woman was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had
been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were persons
on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old man
came back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on
that very bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous
waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so.
When eleven struck, however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive
carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned,
and the other of which he draped round the old woman, who was ceasing her
monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer door; the
woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking lip the very book
I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over that unmoving
face or mask.
We went out into the moonless
and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town; went out as the lights
in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered
at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every
doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past
the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned
windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and
crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards where the
bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.
Amid these hushed throngs I followed
my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows that seemed preternaturally soft,
and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing
never a face and hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns
slithered, and I saw that all the travellers were converging as they flowed
near a sort of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the centre
of the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from
the road's crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had
made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment
on the ghostly spire.
There was an open space around
the church; partly a churchyard with spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved
square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely
archaic houses having peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires
danced over the tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing
to cast any shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were no houses,
I could see over the hill's summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the
harbour, though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in
a while a lanthorn bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way
to overtake the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church.
I waited till the crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all
the stragglers had followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve,
but I was determined to be the last. Crossing the
threshold into the swarming
temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the outside world
as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on the hilltop pavement.
And as I did so I shuddered. For though the wind had not left much
snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the door; and in that fleeting
backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they bore no mark of passing
feet, not even mine.
The church was scarce lighted
by all the lanthorns that had entered it, for most of the throng had already
vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the high pews to
the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the
pulpit, and were now squirming noiselessly in. I followed dumbly
down the foot-worn steps and into the dark, suffocating crypt. The
tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as
I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still.
Then I noticed that the tomb's floor had an aperture down which the throng
was sliding, and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase
of rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous,
that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls
of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking
descent, and I observed after a horrible interval that the walls and steps
were changing in nature, as if chiselled out of the solid rock. What
mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls made no sound and set
up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw some side passages
or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to this shaft of
nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous, like impious
catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour of decay grew quite
unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through the mountain
and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should
be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.
Then I saw the lurid shimmering
of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping of sunless waters.
Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night had brought,
and wished bitterly that no forefather had summoned me to this primal rite.
As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard another sound, the thin,
whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before
me the boundless vista of an inner world - a vast fungous shore litten
by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river
that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest
gulfs of immemorial ocean.
Fainting and gasping, I looked
at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water,
and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar.
It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal
rite of the solstice and of spring's promise beyond the snows; the rite
of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the stygian grotto
I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into
the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered
green in the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously
squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the
thing piped I thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid
darkness where I could not see. But what frightened me most was that
flaming column; spouting volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable,
casting no shadows as healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone
with a nasty, venomous verdigris. For in all that seething combustion
no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death and corruption.
The man who had brought me now
squirmed to a point directly beside the hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial
motions to the semi-circle he faced. At certain stages of the ritual
they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he held above his head that
abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances
because I had been summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers.
Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness,
which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone
in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected.
At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread
not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.
Out of the unimaginable blackness
beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the tartarean leagues
through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected,
there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things
that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember.
They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor
vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must
not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet
and half with their membranous wings; and as they reached the throng of
celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one
by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries
of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.
The old spinning woman had gone
with the throng, and the old man remained only because I had refused when
he motioned me to seize an animal and ride like the rest. I saw when
I staggered to my feet that the amorphous flute-player had rolled out of
sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently standing by. As
I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that
he was the true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in
this ancient place; that it had been decreed I should come back, and that
the most secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this
in a very ancient hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose
robe a seal ring and a watch, both with my family arms, to prove that he
was what he said. But it was a hideous proof, because I knew from
old papers that that watch had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather
in 1698.
Presently the old man drew back
his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his face, but I only
shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a devilish waxen
mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the
lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself.
When one of the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned quickly
to stop it; so that the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen mask
from what should have been his head. And then, because that nightmare's
position barred me from the stone staircase down which we had come, I flung
myself into the oily underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves
of the sea; flung myself into that putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors
before the madness of my screams could bring down upon me all the charnel
legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.
At the hospital they told me
I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport Harbour at dawn, clinging to
the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told me I had
taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night before, and fallen over
the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints found in the
snow. There was nothing I could say, because everything was wrong.
Everything was wrong, with the broad windows showing a sea of roofs in
which only about one in five was ancient, and the sound of trolleys and
motors in the streets below. They insisted that this was Kingsport,
and I could not deny it. When I went delirious at hearing that the
hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me to
St Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked
it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me their influence
in obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's objectionable Necronomicon
from the library of Miskatonic University. They said something about
a "psychosis" and agreed I had better get any harassing obsessions off
my mind.
So I read that hideous chapter,
and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not new to me. I had seen
it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it was I had
seen it were best forgotten. There was no one - in waking hours -
who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because
of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put
into such English as I can make from the awkward Low Latin.
"The
nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of
eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed
the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the
mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that
happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night
whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul
of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs
the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs,
and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous
to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores
ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."
________________________________________________________________________________
1. Demons work things which
are not real so that they appear real to men. 
2. Lucius Caecilius Firmianus
Lactantius (A.D. 240 ca.- 320). A Christian apologist of the fourth
century. Born a pagan (?) in Numidia, Africa, Lactantius was born a moved
to the Greek city of Nicomedia, where he converted to Christianity, witnessed
Emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians and spent the end of
his life as the tutor of Emperor Crispus (who was put to death in 326).
