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object:1f.lovecraft - The Diary of Alonzo Typer
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


for William Lumley
EDITOR’S NOTE: Alonzo Hasbrouck Typer of Kingston, N.Y., was last seen
and recognised on April 17, 1908, around noon, at the Hotel Richmond in
Batavia. He was the only survivor of an ancient Ulster County family,
and was fifty-three years old at the time of his disappearance.
Mr. Typer was educated privately and at Columbia and Heidelberg
Universities. All his life was spent as a student; the field of his
researches including many obscure and generally feared borderlands of
human knowledge. His papers on vampirism, ghouls, and poltergeist
phenomena were privately printed after rejection by many publishers. He
resigned from the Society for Psychical Research in 1902 after a series
of peculiarly bitter controversies.
At various times Mr. Typer travelled extensively, sometimes dropping
out of sight for long periods. He is known to have visited obscure
spots in Nepal, India, Thibet, and Indo-China, and passed most of the
year 1899 on mysterious Easter Island. The extensive search for Mr.
Typer after his disappearance yielded no results, and his estate was
divided among distant cousins in New York City.
The diary herewith presented was allegedly found in the ruins of a
large country house near Attica, N.Y., which had borne a curiously
sinister reputation for generations before its collapse. The edifice
was very old, antedating the general white settlement of the region,
and had formed the home of a strange and secretive family named van der
Heyl, which had migrated from Albany in 1746 under a curious cloud of
witchcraft suspicion. The structure probably dated from about 1760.
Of the history of the van der Heyls very little is known. They remained
entirely aloof from their normal neighbours, employed negro servants
brought directly from Africa and speaking little English, and educated
their children privately and at European colleges. Those of them who
went out into the world were soon lost to sight, though not before
gaining evil repute for association with Black Mass groups and cults of
even darker significance.
Around the dreaded house a straggling village arose, populated by
Indians and later by renegades from the surrounding country, which bore
the dubious name of Chorazin. Of the singular hereditary strains which
afterward appeared in the mixed Chorazin villagers, several monographs
have been written by ethnologists. Just behind the village, and in
sight of the van der Heyl house, is a steep hill crowned with a
peculiar ring of ancient standing stones which the Iroquois always
regarded with fear and loathing. The origin and nature of the stones,
whose date, according to archaeological and climatological evidence,
must be fabulously early, is a problem still unsolved.
From about 1795 onward, the legends of the incoming pioneers and later
population have much to say about strange cries and chants proceeding
at certain seasons from Chorazin and from the great house and hill of
standing stones; though there is reason to suppose that the noises
ceased about 1872, when the entire van der Heyl household—servants and
all—suddenly and simultaneously disappeared.
Thenceforward the house was deserted; for other disastrous
events—including three unexplained deaths, five disappearances, and
four cases of sudden insanity—occurred when later owners and interested
visitors attempted to stay in it. The house, village, and extensive
rural areas on all sides reverted to the state and were auctioned off
in the absence of discoverable van der Heyl heirs. Since about 1890 the
owners (successively the late Charles A. Shields and his son Oscar S.
Shields, of Buffalo) have left the entire property in a state of
absolute neglect, and have warned all inquirers not to visit the
region.
Of those known to have approached the house during the last forty
years, most were occult students, police officers, newspaper men, and
odd characters from abroad. Among the latter was a mysterious Eurasian,
probably from Cochin-China, whose later appearance with blank mind and
bizarre mutilations excited wide press notice in 1903.
Mr. Typer’s diary—a book about 6 × 3½ inches in size, with tough paper
and an oddly durable binding of thin sheet metal—was discovered in the
possession of one of the decadent Chorazin villagers on Nov. 16, 1935,
by a state policeman sent to investigate the rumoured collapse of the
deserted van der Heyl mansion. The house had indeed fallen, obviously
from sheer age and decrepitude, in the severe gale of Nov. 12.
Disintegration was peculiarly complete, and no thorough search of the
ruins could be made for several weeks. John Eagle, the swarthy,
simian-faced, Indian-like villager who had the diary, said that he
found the book quite near the surface of the debris, in what must have
been an upper front room.
Very little of the contents of the house could be identified, though an
enormous and astonishingly solid brick vault in the cellar (whose
ancient iron door had to be blasted open because of the strangely
figured and perversely tenacious lock) remained intact and presented
several puzzling features. For one thing, the walls were covered with
still undeciphered hieroglyphs roughly incised in the brickwork.
Another peculiarity was a huge circular aperture in the rear of the
vault, blocked by a cave-in evidently caused by the collapse of the
house.
But strangest of all was the apparently recent deposit of some foetid,
slimy, pitch-black substance on the flagstoned floor, extending in a
yard-broad, irregular line with one end at the blocked circular
aperture. Those who first opened the vault declared that the place
smelled like the snake-house at a zoo.
The diary, which was apparently designed solely to cover an
investigation of the dreaded van der Heyl house by the vanished Mr.
Typer, has been proved by handwriting experts to be genuine. The script
shews signs of increasing nervous strain as it progresses toward the
end, in places becoming almost illegible. Chorazin villagers—whose
stupidity and taciturnity baffle all students of the region and its
secrets—admit no recollection of Mr. Typer as distinguished from other
rash visitors to the dreaded house.
The text of the diary is here given verbatim and without comment. How
to interpret it, and what, other than the writer’s madness, to infer
from it, the reader must decide for himself. Only the future can tell
what its value may be in solving a generation-old mystery. It may be
remarked that genealogists confirm Mr. Typer’s belated memory in the
matter of Adriaen Sleght.
THE DIARY
April 17, 1908
Arrived here about 6 p.m. Had to walk all the way from Attica in the
teeth of an oncoming storm, for no one would rent me a horse or rig,
and I can’t run an automobile. This place is even worse than I had
expected, and I dread what is coming, even though I long at the same
time to learn the secret. All too soon will come the night—the old
Walpurgis Sabbat horror—and after that time in Wales I know what to
look for. Whatever comes, I shall not flinch. Prodded by some
unfathomable urge, I have given my whole life to the quest of unholy
mysteries. I came here for nothing else, and will not quarrel with
fate.
It was very dark when I got here, though the sun had by no means set.
The storm-clouds were the densest I had ever seen, and I could not have
found my way but for the lightning flashes. The village is a hateful
little backwater, and its few inhabitants no better than idiots. One of
them saluted me in a queer way, as if he knew me. I could see very
little of the landscape—just a small, swampy valley of strange brown
weed-stalks and dead fungi surrounded by scraggly, evilly twisted trees
with bare boughs. But behind the village is a dismal-looking hill on
whose summit is a circle of great stones with another stone at the
centre. That, without question, is the vile primordial thing V——— told
me about at the N——— estbat.
The great house lies in the midst of a park all overgrown with
curious-looking briers. I could scarcely break through, and when I did
the vast age and decrepitude of the building almost stopped me from
entering. The place looked filthy and diseased, and I wondered how so
leprous a bulk could hang together. It is wooden; and though its
original lines are hidden by a bewildering tangle of wings added at
various dates, I think it was first built in the square colonial
fashion of New England. Probably that was easier to build than a Dutch
stone house—and then, too, I recall that Dirck van der Heyl’s wife was
from Salem, a daughter of the unmentionable Abaddon Corey. There was a
small pillared porch, and I got under it just as the storm burst. It
was a fiendish tempest—black as midnight, with rain in sheets, thunder
and lightning like the day of general dissolution, and a wind that
actually clawed at me. The door was unlocked, so I took out my electric
torch and went inside. Dust was inches thick on floor and furniture,
and the place smelled like a mould-caked tomb. There was a hall
reaching all the way through, and a curving staircase on the right. I
ploughed a way upstairs and selected this front room to camp out in.
The whole place seems fully furnished, though most of the furniture is
breaking down. This is written at eight o’clock, after a cold meal from
my travelling-case. After this the village people will bring me
supplies—though they won’t agree to come any closer than the ruins of
the park gate until (as they say) later. I wish I could get rid of an
unpleasant feeling of familiarity with this place.
Later
I am conscious of several presences in this house. One in particular is
decidedly hostile toward me—a malevolent will which is seeking to break
down my own and overcome me. I must not countenance this for an
instant, but must use all my forces to resist it. It is appallingly
evil, and definitely non-human. I think it must be allied to powers
outside earth—powers in the spaces behind time and beyond the universe.
It towers like a colossus, bearing out what is said in the Aklo
writings. There is such a feeling of vast size connected with it that I
wonder these chambers can contain its bulk—and yet it has no visible
bulk. Its age must be unutterably vast—shockingly, indescribably so.
April 18
Slept very little last night. At 3 a.m. a strange, creeping wind began
to pervade the whole region—ever rising until the house rocked as if in
a typhoon. As I went down the staircase to see to the rattling front
door the darkness took half-visible forms in my imagination. Just below
the landing I was pushed violently from behind—by the wind, I suppose,
though I could have sworn I saw the dissolving outlines of a gigantic
black paw as I turned quickly about. I did not lose my footing, but
safely finished the descent and shot the heavy bolt of the dangerously
shaking door.
I had not meant to explore the house till dawn; yet now, unable to
sleep again and fired with mixed terror and curiosity, I felt reluctant
to postpone my search. With my powerful torch I ploughed through the
dust to the great south parlour, where I knew the portraits would be.
There they were, just as V——— had said, and as I seemed to know from
some obscurer source as well. Some were so blackened, mouldy, and
dust-clouded that I could make little or nothing of them, but from
those I could trace I recognised that they were indeed of the hateful
line of the van der Heyls. Some of the paintings seemed to suggest
faces I had known; but just what faces, I could not recall.
The outlines of that frightful hybrid Joris—spawned in 1773 by old
Dirck’s youngest daughter—were clearest of all, and I could trace the
green eyes and the serpent look in his face. Every time I shut off the
flashlight that face would seem to glow in the dark until I half
fancied it shone with a faint, greenish light of its own. The more I
looked, the more evil it seemed, and I turned away to avoid
hallucinations of changing expression.
But that to which I turned was even worse. The long, dour face, small,
closely set eyes, and swine-like features identified it at once, even
though the artist had striven to make the snout look as human as
possible. This was what V——— had whispered about. As I stared in
horror, I thought the eyes took on a reddish glow—and for a moment the
background seemed replaced by an alien and seemingly irrelevant scene—a
lone, bleak moor beneath a dirty yellow sky, whereon grew a
wretched-looking blackthorn bush. Fearing for my sanity, I rushed from
that accursed gallery to the dust-cleared corner upstairs where I have
my “camp”.
Later
Decided to explore some of the labyrinthine wings of the house by
daylight. I cannot get lost, for my footprints are distinct in the
ankle-deep dust—and I can trace other identifying marks when necessary.
It is curious how easily I learn the intricate windings of the
corridors. Followed a long, outflung northerly “ell” to its extremity,
and came to a locked door, which I forced. Beyond was a very small room
quite crowded with furniture, and with the panelling badly worm-eaten.
On the outer wall I spied a black space behind the rotting woodwork,
and discovered a narrow secret passage leading downward to unknown
black depths. It was a steeply inclined chute or tunnel without steps
or hand-holds, and I wondered what its use could have been.
Above the fireplace was a mouldy painting, which I found on close
inspection to be that of a young woman in the dress of the late
eighteenth century. The face is of classic beauty, yet with the most
fiendishly evil expression which I have ever known the human
countenance to bear. Not merely callousness, greed, and cruelty, but
some quality hideous beyond human comprehension seems to sit upon those
finely carved features. And as I looked it seemed to me that the
artist—or the slow processes of mould and decay—had imparted to that
pallid complexion a sickly greenish cast, and the least suggestion of
an almost imperceptibly scaly texture. Later I ascended to the attic,
where I found several chests of strange books—many of utterly alien
aspect in letters and in physical form alike. One contained variants of
the Aklo formulae which I had never known to exist. I have not yet
examined the books on the dusty shelves downstairs.
April 19
There are certainly unseen presences here, even though the dust as yet
bears no footprints but my own. Cut a path through the briers yesterday
to the park gate where my supplies are left, but this morning I found
it closed. Very odd, since the bushes are hardly stirring with spring
sap. Again I had that feeling of something at hand so colossal that the
chambers can scarcely contain it. This time I feel more than one of the
presences is of such a size, and I know now that the third Aklo
ritual—which I found in that book in the attic yesterday—would make
such beings solid and visible. Whether I shall dare to try this
materialisation remains to be seen. The perils are great.
Last night I began to glimpse evanescent shadow-faces and forms in the
dim corners of the halls and chambers—faces and forms so hideous and
loathsome that I dare not describe them. They seem allied in substance
to that titanic paw which tried to push me down the stairs night before
last—and must of course be phantoms of my disturbed imagination. What I
am seeking would not be quite like these things. I have seen the paw
again—sometimes alone and sometimes with its mate—but I have resolved
to ignore all such phenomena.
Early this afternoon I explored the cellar for the first
time—descending by a ladder found in a storeroom, since the wooden
steps had rotted away. The whole place is a mass of nitrous
encrustations, with amorphous mounds marking the spots where various
objects have disintegrated. At the farther end is a narrow passage
which seems to extend under the northerly “ell” where I found the
little locked room, and at the end of this is a heavy brick wall with a
locked iron door. Apparently belonging to a vault of some sort, this
wall and door bear evidences of eighteenth-century workmanship and must
be contemporary with the oldest additions to the house—clearly
pre-Revolutionary. On the lock—which is obviously older than the rest
of the ironwork—are engraved certain symbols which I cannot decipher.
V——— had not told me about this vault. It fills me with a greater
disquiet than anything else I have seen, for every time I approach it I
have an almost irresistible impulse to listen for something. Hitherto
no untoward sounds have marked my stay in this malign place. As I left
the cellar I wished devoutly that the steps were still there—for my
progress up the ladder seemed maddeningly slow. I do not want to go
down there again—and yet some evil genius urges me to try it at night
if I would learn what is to be learned.
April 20
I have sounded the depths of horror—only to be made aware of still
lower depths. Last night the temptation was too strong, and in the
black small hours I descended once more into that nitrous, hellish
cellar with my flashlight—tiptoeing among the amorphous heaps to that
terrible brick wall and locked door. I made no sound, and refrained
from whispering any of the incantations I knew, but I listened—listened
with mad intentness.
At last I heard the sounds from beyond those barred plates of sheet
iron—the menacing padding and muttering, as of gigantic night-things
within. Then, too, there was a damnable slithering, as of a vast
serpent or sea-beast dragging its monstrous folds over a paved floor.
Nearly paralysed with fright, I glanced at the huge rusty lock, and at
the alien, cryptic hieroglyphs graven upon it. They were signs I could
not recognise, and something in their vaguely Mongoloid technique
hinted at a blasphemous and indescribable antiquity. At times I fancied
I could see them glowing with a greenish light.
I turned to flee, but found that vision of the titan paws before me—the
great talons seeming to swell and become more tangible as I gazed. Out
of the cellar’s evil blackness they stretched, with shadowy hints of
scaly wrists beyond them, and with a waxing, malignant will guiding
their horrible gropings. Then I heard from behind me—within that
abominable vault—a fresh burst of muffled reverberations which seemed
to echo from far horizons like distant thunder. Impelled by this
greater fear, I advanced toward the shadowy paws with my flashlight and
saw them vanish before the full force of the electric beam. Then up the
ladder I raced, torch between my teeth, nor did I rest till I had
regained my upstairs “camp”.
What is to be my ultimate end, I dare not imagine. I came as a seeker,
but now I know that something is seeking me. I could not leave if I
wished. This morning I tried to go to the gate for my supplies, but
found the briers twisted tightly in my path. It was the same in every
direction—behind and on all sides of the house. In places the brown,
barbed vines had uncurled to astonishing heights—forming a steel-like
hedge against my egress. The villagers are connected with all this.
When I went indoors I found my supplies in the great front hall, though
without any clue to how they came there. I am sorry now that I swept
the dust away. I shall scatter some more and see what prints are left.
This afternoon I read some of the books in the great shadowy library at
the rear of the ground floor, and formed certain suspicions which I
cannot bear to mention. I had never seen the text of Pnakotic
Manuscripts or of the Eltdown Shards before, and would not have come
here had I known what they contain. I believe it is too late now—for
the awful Sabbat is only ten days away. It is for that night of horror
that they are saving me.
April 21
I have been studying the portraits again. Some have names attached, and
I noticed one—of an evil-faced woman, painted some two centuries
ago—which puzzled me. It bore the name of Trintje van der Heyl Sleght,
and I have a distinct impression that I once met the name of Sleght
before, in some significant connexion. It was not horrible then, though
it becomes so now. I must rack my brain for the clue.
The eyes of these pictures haunt me. Is it possible that some of them
are emerging more distinctly from their shrouds of dust and decay and
mould? The serpent-faced and swine-faced warlocks stare horribly at me
from their blackened frames, and a score of other hybrid faces are
beginning to peer out of shadowy backgrounds. There is a hideous look
of family resemblance in them all—and that which is human is more
horrible than that which is non-human. I wish they reminded me less of
other faces—faces I have known in the past. They were an accursed line,
and Cornelis of Leyden was the worst of them. It was he who broke down
the barrier after his father had found that other key. I am sure that
V——— knows only a fragment of the horrible truth, so that I am indeed
unprepared and defenceless. What of the line before old Claes? What he
did in 1591 could never have been done without generations of evil
heritage, or some link with the outside. And what of the branches this
monstrous line has sent forth? Are they scattered over the world, all
awaiting their common heritage of horror? I must recall the place where
I once so particularly noticed the name of Sleght.
I wish I could be sure that these pictures stay always in their frames.
For several hours now I have been seeing momentary presences like the
earlier paws and shadow-faces and forms, but closely duplicating some
of the ancient portraits. Somehow I can never glimpse a presence and
the portrait it resembles at the same time—the light is always wrong
for one or the other, or else the presence and the portrait are in
different rooms.
Perhaps, as I have hoped, the presences are mere figments of
imagination; but I cannot be sure now. Some are female, and of the same
hellish beauty as the picture in the little locked room. Some are like
no portrait I have seen, yet make me feel that their painted features
lurk unrecognised beneath the mould and soot of canvases I cannot
decipher. A few, I desperately fear, have approached materialisation in
solid or semi-solid form—and some have a dreadful and unexplained
familiarity.
There is one woman who in fell loveliness excels all the rest. Her
poisonous charms are like a honeyed flower growing on the brink of
hell. When I look at her closely she vanishes, only to reappear later.
Her face has a greenish cast, and now and then I fancy I can spy a
suspicion of the squamose in its smooth texture. Who is she? Is she
that being who must have dwelt in the little locked room a century and
more ago?
My supplies were again left in the front hall—that, clearly, is to be
the custom. I had sprinkled dust about to catch footprints, but this
morning the whole hall was swept clean by some unknown agency.
April 22
This has been a day of horrible discovery. I explored the cobwebbed
attic again, and found a carved, crumbling chest—plainly from
Holland—full of blasphemous books and papers far older than any
hitherto encountered here. There was a Greek Necronomicon, a
Norman-French Livre d’Eibon, and a first edition of old Ludvig Prinn’s
De Vermis Mysteriis. But the old bound manuscript was the worst. It was
in low Latin, and full of the strange, crabbed handwriting of Claes van
der Heyl—being evidently the diary or notebook kept by him between 1560
and 1580. When I unfastened the blackened silver clasp and opened the
yellowed leaves a coloured drawing fluttered out—the likeness of a
monstrous creature resembling nothing so much as a squid, beaked and
tentacled, with great yellow eyes, and with certain abominable
approximations to the human form in its contours.
I had never before seen so utterly loathsome and nightmarish a form. On
the paws, feet, and head-tentacles were curious claws—reminding me of
the colossal shadow-shapes which have groped so horribly in my
path—while the entity as a whole sat upon a great throne-like pedestal
inscribed with unknown hieroglyphs of vaguely Chinese cast. About both
writing and image there hung an air of sinister evil so profound and
pervasive that I could not think it the product of any one world or
age. Rather must that monstrous shape be a focus for all the evil in
unbounded space, throughout the aeons past and to come—and those
eldritch symbols be vile sentient eikons endowed with a morbid life of
their own and ready to wrest themselves from the parchment for the
reader’s destruction. To the meaning of that monster and of those
hieroglyphs I had no clue, but I knew that both had been traced with a
hellish precision and for no namable purpose. As I studied the leering
characters, their kinship to the symbols on that ominous lock in the
cellar became more and more manifest. I left the picture in the attic,
for never could sleep come to me with such a thing nearby.
All the afternoon and evening I read in the manuscript book of old
Claes van der Heyl, and what I read will cloud and make horrible
whatever period of life lies ahead of me. The genesis of the world, and
of previous worlds, unfolded itself before my eyes. I learned of the
city Shamballah, built by the Lemurians fifty million years ago, yet
inviolate still behind its walls of psychic force in the eastern
desert. I learned of the Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters
antedate the earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came
through space in their ships to civilise our planet. And I saw recorded
in writing for the first time that name which others had spoken to me
in whispers, and which I had known in a closer and more horrible
way—the shunned and dreaded name of Yian-Ho.
In several places I was held up by passages requiring a key.
Eventually, from various allusions, I gathered that old Claes had not
dared to embody all his knowledge in one book, but had left certain
points for another. Neither volume can be wholly intelligible without
its fellow; hence I have resolved to find the second one if it lies
anywhere within this accursed house. Though plainly a prisoner, I have
not lost my lifelong zeal for the unknown; and am determined to probe
the cosmos as deeply as possible before doom comes.
April 23
Searched all the morning for the second diary, and found it about noon
in a desk in the little locked room. Like the first, it is in Claes van
der Heyl’s barbarous Latin; and it seems to consist of disjointed notes
referring to various sections of the other. Glancing through the
leaves, I spied at once the abhorred name of Yian-Ho—of Yian-Ho, that
lost and hidden city wherein brood aeon-old secrets, and of which dim
memories older than the body lurk behind the minds of all men. It was
repeated many times, and the text around it was strown with crudely
drawn hieroglyphs plainly akin to those on the pedestal in that hellish
drawing I had seen. Here, clearly, lay the key to that monstrous
tentacled shape and its forbidden message. With this knowledge I
ascended the creaking stairs to the attic of cobwebs and horror.
When I tried to open the attic door it stuck as never before. Several
times it resisted every effort to open it, and when at last it gave way
I had a distinct feeling that some colossal, unseen shape had suddenly
released it—a shape that soared away on non-material but audibly
beating wings. When I found the horrible drawing I felt that it was not
precisely where I had left it. Applying the key in the other book, I
soon saw that the latter was no instant guide to the secret. It was
only a clue—a clue to a secret too black to be left lightly guarded. It
would take hours—perhaps days—to extract the awful message.
Shall I live long enough to learn the secret? The shadowy black arms
and paws haunt my vision more and more now, and seem even more titanic
than at first. Nor am I ever long free from those vague, unhuman
presences whose nebulous bulk seems too vast for the chambers to
contain. And now and then the grotesque, evanescent faces and forms,
and the mocking portrait-shapes, troop before me in bewildering
confusion.
Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be
left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with
man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity;
cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind,
and cause him to walk alone on earth. Likewise are there dread
survivals of things older and more potent than man; things that have
blasphemously straggled down through the aeons to ages never meant for
them; monstrous entities that have lain sleeping endlessly in
incredible crypts and remote caverns, outside the laws of reason and
causation, and ready to be waked by such blasphemers as shall know
their dark forbidden signs and furtive passwords.
April 24
Studied the picture and the key all day in the attic. At sunset I heard
strange sounds, of a sort not encountered before and seeming to come
from far away. Listening, I realised that they must flow from that
queer abrupt hill with the circle of standing stones, which lies behind
the village and some distance north of the house. I had heard that
there was a path from the house leading up that hill to the primal
cromlech, and had suspected that at certain seasons the van der Heyls
had much occasion to use it; but the whole matter had hitherto lain
latent in my consciousness. The present sounds consisted of a shrill
piping intermingled with a peculiar and hideous sort of hissing or
whistling—a bizarre, alien kind of music, like nothing which the annals
of earth describe. It was very faint, and soon faded, but the matter
has set me thinking. It is toward the hill that the long, northerly
“ell” with the secret chute, and the locked brick vault under it,
extend. Can there be any connexion which has so far eluded me?
April 25
I have made a peculiar and disturbing discovery about the nature of my
imprisonment. Drawn toward the hill by a sinister fascination, I found
the briers giving way before me, but in that direction only. There is a
ruined gate, and beneath the bushes the traces of the old path no doubt
exist. The briers extend part way up and all around the hill, though
the summit with the standing stones bears only a curious growth of moss
and stunted grass. I climbed the hill and spent several hours there,
noticing a strange wind which seems always to sweep around the
forbidding monoliths and which sometimes seems to whisper in an oddly
articulate though darkly cryptic fashion.
These stones, both in colour and in texture, resemble nothing I have
seen elsewhere. They are neither brown nor grey, but rather of a dirty
yellow merging into an evil green and having a suggestion of
chameleon-like variability. Their texture is queerly like that of a
scaled serpent, and is inexplicably nauseous to the touch—being as cold
and clammy as the skin of a toad or other reptile. Near the central
menhir is a singular stone-rimmed hollow which I cannot explain, but
which may possibly form the entrance to a long-choked well or tunnel.
When I sought to descend the hill at points away from the house I found
the briers intercepting me as before, though the path toward the house
was easily retraceable.
April 26
Up on the hill again this evening, and found that windy whispering much
more distinct. The almost angry humming came close to actual speech—of
a vague sibilant sort—and reminded me of the strange piping chant I had
heard from afar. After sunset there came a curious flash of premature
summer lightning on the northern horizon, followed almost at once by a
queer detonation high in the fading sky. Something about this
phenomenon disturbed me greatly, and I could not escape the impression
that the noise ended in a kind of unhuman hissing speech which trailed
off into guttural cosmic laughter. Is my mind tottering at last, or has
my unwarranted curiosity evoked unheard-of horrors from the twilight
spaces? The Sabbat is close at hand now. What will be the end?
April 27
At last my dreams are to be realised! Whether or not my life or spirit
or body will be claimed, I shall enter the gateway! Progress in
deciphering those crucial hieroglyphs in the picture has been slow, but
this afternoon I hit upon the final clue. By evening I knew their
meaning—and that meaning can apply in only one way to the things I have
encountered in this house.
There is beneath this house—sepulchred I know not where—an ancient
forgotten One who will shew me the gateway I would enter, and give me
the lost signs and words I shall need. How long It has lain buried
here—forgotten save by those who reared the stones on the hill, and by
those who later sought out this place and built this house—I cannot
conjecture. It was in search of this Thing, beyond question, that
Hendrik van der Heyl came to New-Netherland in 1638. Men of this earth
know It not, save in the secret whispers of the fear-shaken few who
have found or inherited the key. No human eye has even yet glimpsed
It—unless, perhaps, the vanished wizards of this house delved farther
than has been guessed.
With knowledge of the symbols came likewise a mastery of the Seven Lost
Signs of Terror—and a tacit recognition of the hideous and unutterable
Words of Fear. All that remains for me to accomplish is the Chant which
will transfigure that Forgotten One who is Guardian of the Ancient
Gateway. I marvel much at the Chant. It is composed of strange and
repellent gutturals and disturbing sibilants resembling no language I
have ever encountered—even in the blackest chapters of the Livre
d’Eibon. When I visited the hill at sunset I tried to read it aloud,
but evoked in response only a vague, sinister rumbling on the far
horizon, and a thin cloud of elemental dust that writhed and whirled
like some evil living thing. Perhaps I do not pronounce the alien
syllables correctly, or perhaps it is only on the Sabbat—that hellish
Sabbat for which the Powers in this house are without question holding
me—that the great Transfiguration can occur.
Had an odd spell of fright this morning. I thought for a moment that I
recalled where I had seen that baffling name of Sleght before, and the
prospect of realisation filled me with unutterable horror.
April 28
Today dark ominous clouds have hovered intermittently over the circle
on the hill. I have noticed such clouds several times before, but their
contours and arrangements now hold a fresh significance. They are
snake-like and fantastic, and curiously like the evil shadow-shapes I
have seen in the house. They float in a circle around the primal
cromlech—revolving repeatedly as though endowed with a sinister life
and purpose. I could swear, too, that they give forth an angry
murmuring. After some fifteen minutes they sail slowly away, ever to
the eastward, like the units of a straggling battalion. Are they indeed
those dread Ones whom Solomon knew of old—those giant black beings
whose number is legion and whose tread doth shake the earth?
I have been rehearsing the Chant that will transfigure the Nameless
Thing, yet strange fears assail me even when I utter the syllables
under my breath. Piecing all evidence together, I have now discovered
that the only way to It is through the locked cellar vault. That vault
was built with a hellish purpose, and must cover the hidden burrow
leading to the Immemorial Lair. What guardians live endlessly within,
flourishing from century to century on an unknown nourishment, only the
mad may conjecture. The warlocks of this house, who called them out of
inner earth, have known them only too well, as the shocking portraits
and memories of the place reveal.
What troubles me most is the limited nature of the Chant. It evokes the
Nameless One, yet provides no method for the control of That Which is
evoked. There are, of course, the general signs and gestures, but
whether they will prove effective toward such an One remains to be
seen. Still, the rewards are great enough to justify any danger—and I
could not retreat if I would, since an unknown force plainly urges me
on.
I have discovered one more obstacle. Since the locked cellar vault must
be traversed, the key to that place must be found. The lock is
infinitely too strong for forcing. That the key is somewhere hereabouts
cannot be doubted, but the time before the Sabbat is very short. I must
search diligently and thoroughly. It will take courage to unlock that
iron door, for what prisoned horrors may not lurk within?
Later
I have been shunning the cellar for the past day or two, but late this
afternoon I again descended to those forbidding precincts. At first all
was silent, but within five minutes the menacing padding and muttering
began once more beyond the iron door. This time it was loud and more
terrifying than on any previous occasion, and I likewise recognised the
slithering that bespoke some monstrous sea-beast—now swifter and
nervously intensified, as if the thing were striving to force its way
through the portal to where I stood.
As the pacing grew louder, more restless, and more sinister, there
began to pound through it those hellish and unidentifiable
reverberations which I had heard on my second visit to the cellar—those
muffled reverberations which seemed to echo from far horizons like
distant thunder. Now, however, their volume was magnified an
hundredfold, and their timbre freighted with new and terrifying
implications. I can compare the sound to nothing more aptly than to the
roar of some dread monster of the vanished saurian age, when primal
horrors roamed the earth, and Valusia’s serpent-men laid the
foundation-stones of evil magic. To such a roar—but swelled to
deafening heights reached by no known organic throat—was this shocking
sound akin. Dare I unlock the door and face the onslaught of what lies
beyond?
April 29
The key to the vault is found. I came upon it this noon in the little
locked room—buried beneath rubbish in a drawer of the ancient desk, as
if some belated effort to conceal it had been made. It was wrapped in a
crumbling newspaper dated Oct. 31, 1872; but there was an inner
wrapping of dried skin—evidently the hide of some unknown reptile—which
bore a Low Latin message in the same crabbed writing as that of the
notebooks I found. As I had thought, the lock and key were vastly older
than the vault. Old Claes van der Heyl had them ready for something he
or his descendants meant to do—and how much older than he they were I
could not estimate. Deciphering the Latin message, I trembled in a
fresh access of clutching terror and nameless awe.
“The secrets of the monstrous primal Ones,” ran the crabbed text,
“whose cryptic words relate the hidden things that were before man; the
things no one of earth should learn, lest peace be forever forfeited;
shall by me never suffer revelation. To Yian-Ho, that lost and
forbidden city of countless aeons whose place may not be told, I have
been in the veritable flesh of this body, as none other among the
living has been. Therein have I found, and thence have I borne away,
that knowledge which I would gladly lose, though I may not. I have
learnt to bridge a gap that should not be bridged, and must call out of
the earth That Which should not be waked or called. And what is sent to
follow me will not sleep till I or those after me have found and done
what is to be found and done.
“That which I have awaked and borne away with me, I may not part with
again. So is it written in the Book of Hidden Things. That which I have
willed to be has twined its dreadful shape around me, and—if I live not
to do the bidding—around those children born and unborn who shall come
after me, until the bidding be done. Strange may be their joinings, and
awful the aid they may summon till the end be reached. Into lands
unknown and dim must the seeking go, and a house must be built for the
outer Guardians.
“This is the key to that lock which was given me in the dreadful,
aeon-old, and forbidden city of Yian-Ho; the lock which I or mine must
place upon the vestibule of That Which is to be found. And may the
Lords of Yaddith succour me—or him—who must set that lock in place or
turn the key thereof.”
Such was the message—a message which, once I had read it, I seemed to
have known before. Now, as I write these words, the key is before me. I
gaze on it with mixed dread and longing, and cannot find words to
describe its aspect. It is of the same unknown, subtly greenish frosted
metal as the lock; a metal best compared to brass tarnished with
verdigris. Its design is alien and fantastic, and the coffin-shaped end
of the ponderous bulk leaves no doubt of the lock it was meant to fit.
The handle roughly forms a strange, non-human image, whose exact
outlines and identity cannot now be traced. Upon holding it for any
length of time I seem to feel an alien, anomalous life in the cold
metal—a quickening or pulsing too feeble for ordinary recognition.
Below the eidolon is graven a faint, aeon-worn legend in those
blasphemous, Chinese-like hieroglyphs I have come to know so well. I
can make out only the beginning—the words “my vengeance lurks”—before
the text fades to indistinctness. There is some fatality in this timely
finding of the key—for tomorrow night comes the hellish Sabbat. But
strangely enough, amidst all this hideous expectancy, that question of
the Sleght name bothers me more and more. Why should I dread to find it
linked with the van der Heyls?
Walpurgis-Eve—April 30
The time has come. I waked last night to see the sky glowing with a
lurid greenish radiance—that same morbid green which I have seen in the
eyes and skin of certain portraits here, on the shocking lock and key,
on the monstrous menhirs of the hill, and in a thousand other recesses
of my consciousness. There were strident whispers in the air—sibilant
whistlings like those of the wind around that dreadful cromlech.
Something spoke to me out of the frore aether of space, and it said,
“The hour falls.” It is an omen, and I laugh at my own fears. Have I
not the dread words and the Seven Lost Signs of Terror—the power
coercive of any Dweller in the cosmos or in the unknown darkened
spaces? I will no longer hesitate.
The heavens are very dark, as if a terrific storm were coming on—a
storm even greater than that of the night when I reached here, nearly a
fortnight ago. From the village—less than a mile away—I hear a queer
and unwonted babbling. It is as I thought—these poor degraded idiots
are within the secret, and keep the awful Sabbat on the hill. Here in
the house the shadows gather densely. In the darkness the key before me
almost glows with a greenish light of its own. I have not yet been to
the cellar. It is better that I wait, lest the sound of that muttering
and padding—those slitherings and muffled reverberations—unnerve me
before I can unlock the fateful door.
Of what I shall encounter, and what I must do, I have only the most
general idea. Shall I find my task in the vault itself, or must I
burrow deeper into the nighted heart of our planet? There are things I
do not yet understand—or at least, prefer not to understand—despite a
dreadful, increasing, and inexplicable sense of bygone familiarity with
this fearsome house. That chute, for instance, leading down from the
little locked room. But I think I know why the wing with the vault
extends toward the hill.
6 p.m.
Looking out the north windows, I can see a group of villagers on the
hill. They seem unaware of the lowering sky, and are digging near the
great central menhir. It occurs to me that they are working on that
stone-rimmed hollow place which looks like a long-choked tunnel
entrance. What is to come? How much of the olden Sabbat rites have
these people retained? That key glows horribly—it is not imagination.
Dare I use it as it must be used? Another matter has greatly disturbed
me. Glancing nervously through a book in the library I came upon an
ampler form of the name that has teased my memory so sorely: Trintje,
wife of Adriaen Sleght. The Adriaen leads me to the very brink of
recollection.
Midnight
Horror is unleashed, but I must not weaken. The storm has broken with
pandaemoniac fury, and lightning has struck the hill three times, yet
the hybrid, malformed villagers are gathering within the cromlech. I
can see them in the almost constant flashes. The great standing stones
loom up shockingly, and have a dull green luminosity that reveals them
even when the lightning is not there. The peals of thunder are
deafening, and every one seems to be horribly answered from some
indeterminate direction. As I write, the creatures on the hill have
begun to chant and howl and scream in a degraded, half-simian version
of the ancient ritual. Rain pours down like a flood, yet they leap and
emit sounds in a kind of diabolic ecstasy.
“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!”
But the worst thing is within the house. Even at this height, I have
begun to hear sounds from the cellar. It is the padding and muttering
and slithering and muffled reverberations within the vault. . . .
Memories come and go. That name of Adriaen Sleght pounds oddly at my
consciousness. Dirck van der Heyl’s son-in-law—his child old Dirck’s
granddaughter and Abaddon Corey’s great-granddaughter. . . .
Later
Merciful God! At last I know where I saw that name. I know, and am
transfixed with horror. All is lost. . . .
The key has begun to feel warm as my left hand nervously clutches it.
At times that vague quickening or pulsing is so distinct that I can
almost feel the living metal move. It came from Yian-Ho for a terrible
purpose, and to me—who all too late know the thin stream of van der
Heyl blood that trickles down through the Sleghts into my own
lineage—has descended the hideous task of fulfilling that
purpose. . . .
My courage and curiosity wane. I know the horror that lies beyond that
iron door. What if Claes van der Heyl was my ancestor—need I expiate
his nameless sin? I will not—I swear I will not! . . .
[Writing here grows indistinct]
Too late—cannot help self—black paws materialise—am dragged away toward
the cellar. . . .
Return to “The Diary of Alonzo Typer”


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