object:1f.lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
(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since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity .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.
II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so
significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his
long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the
hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered
only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion
that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and
demands for data.
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.
III.
The Madness from the Sea.
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing
of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray
piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have
stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of
an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had
escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance
been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called
the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New
Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note.
Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd
picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the
Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend 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.
Return to “The Call of Cthulhu”
questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or via the comments below
or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers