object:1f.lovecraft - The Descendant
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He
lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call
him harmlessly mad. His room is filled with books of the tamest and
most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in
their feeble pages. All he seeks from life is not to think. For some
reason thought is very horrible to him, and anything which stirs the
imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and grey and
wrinkled, but there are those who declare he is not nearly so old as he
looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon him, and a sound will make him
start with staring eyes and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and
companions he shuns, for he wishes to answer no questions. Those who
once knew him as scholar and aesthete say it is very pitiful to see him
now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one feels sure whether he
left the country or merely sank from sight in some hidden byway. It is
a decade now since he moved into Gray’s Inn, and of where he had been
he would say nothing till the night young Williams bought the
Necronomicon.
Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into
the ancient house he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind
about the grey wizened man in the next room. He forced his friendship
where old friends dared not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright
that sat upon this gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the
man always watched and listened no one could doubt. He watched and
listened with his mind more than with his eyes and ears, and strove
every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay,
insipid novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears
and scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would howl in unison
till the last peal died reverberantly away.
But try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of
anything profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his
aspect and manner, but would feign a smile and a light tone and prattle
feverishly and frantically of cheerful trifles; his voice every moment
rising and thickening till at last it would split in a piping and
incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and thorough, his most
trivial remarks made abundantly clear; and Williams was not surprised
to hear that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that
he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle
on the Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when Williams
tried to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he
refused to admit that there was anything unusual about it. He even
tittered shrilly when the subject of the supposed under crypts, hewn
out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea, was brought up.
So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the
dreaded volume since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the
bizarre had led him to ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in
Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why men paled when they
spoke of it. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies were
known to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and lawgivers
against it and that all of these were locked up with frightened care by
custodians who had ventured to begin a reading of the hateful
black-letter. But now, at last, he had not only found an accessible
copy but had made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a
Jew’s shop in the squalid precincts of Clare Market, where he had often
bought strange things before, and he almost fancied the gnarled old
Levite smiled amidst tangles of beard as the great discovery was made.
The bulky leather cover with the brass clasp had been so prominently
visible, and the price was so absurdly slight.
The one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into
transports, and some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text
excited the tensest and most disquieting recollections in his brain. He
felt it was highly necessary to get the ponderous thing home and begin
deciphering it, and bore it out of the shop with such precipitate haste
that the old Jew chuckled disturbingly behind him. But when at last it
was safe in his room he found the combination of black-letter and
debased idiom too much for his powers as a linguist, and reluctantly
called on his strange, frightened friend for help with the twisted,
mediaeval Latin. Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked
cat, and started violently when the young man entered. Then he saw the
volume and shuddered wildly, and fainted altogether when Williams
uttered the title. It was when he regained his senses that he told his
story; told his fantastic figment of madness in frantic whispers, lest
his friend be not quick to burn the accursed book and give wide
scattering to its ashes.
add-column2log.sh addlist addlist2 addlist3 Agenda_header Agenda_Vol_1 Agenda_works1 allpoetry_authors allpoetry_authors2 allpoetry_authors3 aplayer.sh asay_loop.sh author_sampler.sh BACKUPS bashrc-BACKUP bind_arrowkeys.sh black_wallpaper.jpg book_editting.sh center.sh changedir.sh checkcrontemp.sh chiktemp chiktemp2 chiktemp3 chiktemp4 cw.sh date-2-masslog.sh Desktop docprocessor.sh Documents Downloads eth96l ethnow.sh for_newfull getaddress.sh getbook.sh getchik.sh getlovecraft.sh getsource.sh history_su ifempty.sh if.sh infinite_alarm.sh infinite_sav.sh keys_authoring.sh lambda2.sh lambda.sh lesserlog.sh lesslog.sh majlog.sh map-math.sh map.sh mem_encoder.sh mem_player.sh Music mypoeticside new_subject.sh new_texts organism-quotes Pictures poe-poems POS_file.sh Public quicklisp quotes_switcher.sh randomfooterwp.sh random_sentence.sh random-test.sh read.sh result2.png result.png rip_pic.sh sav_wp.sh say_loop.sh screenshot2.sh screenshot.sh sed1JnlSk sent_compressor.sh simple_az_loop.sh simple_for_loop.sh simple_for_savitri.sh simple_infinite_loop2.sh simple_infinite_loop3.sh simple_infinite_loop.sh SITEMAP sourcerer.sh Steam subject_grouping.sh subject_tagging_keys.sh subject_tagging_newfull.sh subject_tagging.sh T1_wp.sh temp temp4 temp_christ Templates temp-wordlist temp-wordlist2 terminal_colors2.sh terminal_colors.sh test15.sh test_for_loop.sh test.sh timestamp.sh Videos walt-poems when.sh wikipedia-extractor.sh will-wordsworth-poems WORDLIST wordlist-backup-daily.sh wordlist-backup.sh wordlisteditcode.sh wordlistedit.sh wordlisteditxed.sh wp_maker.sh xdo_download_agenda_audio.sh xdo_grab_agenda.sh add-column2log.sh addlist addlist2 addlist3 Agenda_header Agenda_Vol_1 Agenda_works1 allpoetry_authors allpoetry_authors2 allpoetry_authors3 aplayer.sh asay_loop.sh author_sampler.sh BACKUPS bashrc-BACKUP bind_arrowkeys.sh black_wallpaper.jpg book_editting.sh center.sh changedir.sh checkcrontemp.sh chiktemp chiktemp2 chiktemp3 chiktemp4 cw.sh date-2-masslog.sh Desktop docprocessor.sh Documents Downloads eth96l ethnow.sh for_newfull getaddress.sh getbook.sh getchik.sh getlovecraft.sh getsource.sh history_su ifempty.sh if.sh infinite_alarm.sh infinite_sav.sh keys_authoring.sh lambda2.sh lambda.sh lesserlog.sh lesslog.sh majlog.sh map-math.sh map.sh mem_encoder.sh mem_player.sh Music mypoeticside new_subject.sh new_texts organism-quotes Pictures poe-poems POS_file.sh Public quicklisp quotes_switcher.sh randomfooterwp.sh random_sentence.sh random-test.sh read.sh result2.png result.png rip_pic.sh sav_wp.sh say_loop.sh screenshot2.sh screenshot.sh sed1JnlSk sent_compressor.sh simple_az_loop.sh simple_for_loop.sh simple_for_savitri.sh simple_infinite_loop2.sh simple_infinite_loop3.sh simple_infinite_loop.sh SITEMAP sourcerer.sh Steam subject_grouping.sh subject_tagging_keys.sh subject_tagging_newfull.sh subject_tagging.sh T1_wp.sh temp temp4 temp_christ Templates temp-wordlist temp-wordlist2 terminal_colors2.sh terminal_colors.sh test15.sh test_for_loop.sh test.sh timestamp.sh Videos walt-poems when.sh wikipedia-extractor.sh will-wordsworth-poems WORDLIST wordlist-backup-daily.sh wordlist-backup.sh wordlisteditcode.sh wordlistedit.sh wordlisteditxed.sh wp_maker.sh xdo_download_agenda_audio.sh xdo_grab_agenda.sh *
There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the
start; but it would never have come to a head if he had not explored
too far. He was the nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginnings went
uncomfortably far back into the past—unbelievably far, if vague
tradition could be heeded, for there were family tales of a descent
from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Cnaeus Gabinius Capito, military
tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum in Roman
Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for participation
in certain rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the
rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met
together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the
Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a
great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the
raths and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest.
There was no certainty, of course, in the legend that Gabinius had
built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden cave and founded a
line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to
obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the
bold companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third
created Baron of Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were
often told; and in truth the stonework of Northam Keep did look
alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian’s Wall. As a child Lord Northam
had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older parts of the castle,
and had acquired a constant habit of looking back through his memory
for half-amorphous scenes and patterns and impressions which formed no
part of his waking experience. He became a dreamer who found life tame
and unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and relationships once
familiar, yet lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth.
Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a
fabric vast and ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and
permeate the sphere of the known at every point, Northam in youth and
young manhood drained in turn the founts of formal religion and occult
mystery. Nowhere, however, could he find ease and content; and as he
grew older the staleness and limitations of life became more and more
maddening to him. During the ’nineties he dabbled in Satanism, and at
all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemed to
promise escape from the close vistas of science and the dully unvarying
laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly’s chimerical account of
Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of
Charles Fort enthralled him with their vagaries. He would travel
leagues to follow up a furtive village tale of abnormal wonder, and
once went into the desert of Araby to seek a Nameless City of faint
report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within him the
tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one
found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled
so dimly at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world,
yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his
own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to
elder and future lives in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to
the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them.
Return to “The Descendant”
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