(Found
Among the Papers of the Late Francis
Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“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perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing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 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.
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.”
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.
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:
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.
[The End]
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