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long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity .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