object:1f.lovecraft - The Moon-Bog
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry
has gone. I was with him the last night he lived among men, and heard
his screams when the thing came to him; but all the peasants and police
in County Meath could never find him, or the others, though they
searched long and far. And now I shudder when I hear the frogs piping
in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places.
I had known Denys Barry well in America, where he had grown rich, and
had congratulated him when he bought back the old castle by the bog at
sleepy Kilderry. It was from Kilderry that his father had come, and it
was there that he wished to enjoy his wealth among ancestral scenes.
Men of his blood had once ruled over Kilderry and built and dwelt in
the castle, but those days were very remote, so that for generations
the castle had been empty and decaying. After he went to Ireland Barry
wrote me often, and told me how under his care the grey castle was
rising tower by tower to its ancient splendour; how the ivy was
climbing slowly over the restored walls as it had climbed so many
centuries ago, and how the peasants blessed him for bringing back the
old days with his gold from over the sea. But in time there came
troubles, and the peasants ceased to bless him, and fled away instead
as from a doom. And then he sent a letter and asked me to visit him,
for he was lonely in the castle with no one to speak to save the new
servants and labourers he had brought from the north.
The bog was the cause of all these troubles, as Barry told me the night
I came to the castle. I had reached Kilderry in the summer sunset, as
the gold of the sky lighted the green of the hills and groves and the
blue of the bog, where on a far islet a strange olden ruin glistened
spectrally. That sunset was very beautiful, but the peasants at
Ballylough had warned me against it and said that Kilderry had become
accursed, so that I almost shuddered to see the high turrets of the
castle gilded with fire. Barry’s motor had met me at the Ballylough
station, for Kilderry is off the railway. The villagers had shunned the
car and the driver from the north, but had whispered to me with pale
faces when they saw I was going to Kilderry. And that night, after our
reunion, Barry told me why.
The peasants had gone from Kilderry because Denys Barry was to drain
the great bog. For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him
untouched, and he hated the beautiful wasted space where peat might be
cut and land opened up. The legends and superstitions of Kilderry did
not move him, and he laughed when the peasants first refused to help,
and then cursed him and went away to Ballylough with their few
belongings as they saw his determination. In their place he sent for
labourers from the north, and when the servants left he replaced them
likewise. But it was lonely among strangers, so Barry had asked me to
come.
When I heard the fears which had driven the people from Kilderry I
laughed as loudly as my friend had laughed, for these fears were of the
vaguest, wildest, and most absurd character. They had to do with some
preposterous legend of the bog, and of a grim guardian spirit that
dwelt in the strange olden ruin on the far islet I had seen in the
sunset. There were tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon, and
of chill winds when the night was warm; of wraiths in white hovering
over the waters, and of an imagined city of stone deep down below the
swampy surface. But foremost among the weird fancies, and alone in its
absolute unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him who should dare
to touch or drain the vast reddish morass. There were secrets, said the
peasants, which must not be uncovered; secrets that had lain hidden
since the plague came to the children of Partholan in the fabulous
years beyond history. In the Book of Invaders it is told that these
sons of the Greeks were all buried at Tallaght, but old men in Kilderry
said that one city was overlooked save by its patron moon-goddess; so
that only the wooded hills buried it when the men of Nemed swept down
from Scythia in their thirty ships.
Such were the idle tales which had made the villagers leave Kilderry,
and when I heard them I did not wonder that Denys Barry had refused to
listen. He had, however, a great interest in antiquities; and proposed
to explore the bog thoroughly when it was drained. The white ruins on
the islet he had often visited, but though their age was plainly great,
and their contour very little like that of most ruins in Ireland, they
were too dilapidated to tell the days of their glory. Now the work of
drainage was ready to begin, and the labourers from the north were soon
to strip the forbidden bog of its green moss and red heather, and kill
the tiny shell-paved streamlets and quiet blue pools fringed with
rushes.
After Barry had told me these things I was very drowsy, for the travels
of the day had been wearying and my host had talked late into the
night. A manservant shewed me to my room, which was in a remote tower
overlooking the village, and the plain at the edge of the bog, and the
bog itself; so that I could see from my windows in the moonlight the
silent roofs from which the peasants had fled and which now sheltered
the labourers from the north, and too, the parish church with its
antique spire, and far out across the brooding bog the remote olden
ruin on the islet gleaming white and spectral. Just as I dropped to
sleep I fancied I heard faint sounds from the distance; sounds that
were wild and half musical, and stirred me with a weird excitement
which coloured my dreams. But when I awaked next morning I felt it had
all been a dream, for the visions I had seen were more wonderful than
any sound of wild pipes in the night. Influenced by the legends that
Barry had related, my mind had in slumber hovered around a stately city
in a green valley, where marble streets and statues, villas and
temples, carvings and inscriptions, all spoke in certain tones the
glory that was Greece. When I told this dream to Barry we both laughed;
but I laughed the louder, because he was perplexed about his labourers
from the north. For the sixth time they had all overslept, waking very
slowly and dazedly, and acting as if they had not rested, although they
were known to have gone early to bed the night before.
That morning and afternoon I wandered alone through the sun-gilded
village and talked now and then with idle labourers, for Barry was busy
with the final plans for beginning his work of drainage. The labourers
were not as happy as they might have been, for most of them seemed
uneasy over some dream which they had had, yet which they tried in vain
to remember. I told them of my dream, but they were not interested till
I spoke of the weird sounds I thought I had heard. Then they looked
oddly at me, and said that they seemed to remember weird sounds, too.
In the evening Barry dined with me and announced that he would begin
the drainage in two days. I was glad, for although I disliked to see
the moss and the heather and the little streams and lakes depart, I had
a growing wish to discern the ancient secrets the deep-matted peat
might hide. And that night my dreams of piping flutes and marble
peristyles came to a sudden and disquieting end; for upon the city in
the valley I saw a pestilence descend, and then a frightful avalanche
of wooded slopes that covered the dead bodies in the streets and left
unburied only the temple of Artemis on the high peak, where the aged
moon-priestess Cleis lay cold and silent with a crown of ivory on her
silver head.
I have said that I awaked suddenly and in alarm. For some time I could
not tell whether I was waking or sleeping, for the sound of flutes
still rang shrilly in my ears; but when I saw on the floor the icy
moonbeams and the outlines of a latticed Gothic window I decided I must
be awake and in the castle at Kilderry. Then I heard a clock from some
remote landing below strike the hour of two, and I knew I was awake.
Yet still there came that monotonous piping from afar; wild, weird airs
that made me think of some dance of fauns on distant Maenalus. It would
not let me sleep, and in impatience I sprang up and paced the floor.
Only by chance did I go to the north window and look out upon the
silent village and the plain at the edge of the bog. I had no wish to
gaze abroad, for I wanted to sleep; but the flutes tormented me, and I
had to do or see something. How could I have suspected the thing I was
to behold?
There in the moonlight that flooded the spacious plain was a spectacle
which no mortal, having seen it, could ever forget. To the sound of
reedy pipes that echoed over the bog there glided silently and eerily a
mixed throng of swaying figures, reeling through such a revel as the
Sicilians may have danced to Demeter in the old days under the harvest
moon beside the Cyane. The wide plain, the golden moonlight, the
shadowy moving forms, and above all the shrill monotonous piping,
produced an effect which almost paralysed me; yet I noted amidst my
fear that half of these tireless, mechanical dancers were the labourers
whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy
beings in white, half indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale
wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of the bog. I do not know how
long I gazed at this sight from the lonely turret window before I
dropped suddenly in a dreamless swoon, out of which the high sun of
morning aroused me.
My first impulse on awaking was to communicate all my fears and
observations to Denys Barry, but as I saw the sunlight glowing through
the latticed east window I became sure that there was no reality in
what I thought I had seen. I am given to strange phantasms, yet am
never weak enough to believe in them; so on this occasion contented
myself with questioning the labourers, who slept very late and recalled
nothing of the previous night save misty dreams of shrill sounds. This
matter of the spectral piping harassed me greatly, and I wondered if
the crickets of autumn had come before their time to vex the night and
haunt the visions of men. Later in the day I watched Barry in the
library poring over his plans for the great work which was to begin on
the morrow, and for the first time felt a touch of the same kind of
fear that had driven the peasants away. For some unknown reason I
dreaded the thought of disturbing the ancient bog and its sunless
secrets, and pictured terrible sights lying black under the unmeasured
depth of age-old peat. That these secrets should be brought to light
seemed injudicious, and I began to wish for an excuse to leave the
castle and the village. I went so far as to talk casually to Barry on
the subject, but did not dare continue after he gave his resounding
laugh. So I was silent when the sun set fulgently over the far hills,
and Kilderry blazed all red and gold in a flame that seemed a portent.
Whether the events of that night were of reality or illusion I shall
never ascertain. Certainly they transcend anything we dream of in
Nature and the universe; yet in no normal fashion can I explain those
disappearances which were known to all men after it was over. I retired
early and full of dread, and for a long time could not sleep in the
uncanny silence of the tower. It was very dark, for although the sky
was clear the moon was now well in the wane, and would not rise till
the small hours. I thought as I lay there of Denys Barry, and of what
would befall that bog when the day came, and found myself almost
frantic with an impulse to rush out into the night, take Barry’s car,
and drive madly to Ballylough out of the menaced lands. But before my
fears could crystallise into action I had fallen asleep, and gazed in
dreams upon the city in the valley, cold and dead under a shroud of
hideous shadow.
Probably it was the shrill piping that awaked me, yet that piping was
not what I noticed first when I opened my eyes. I was lying with my
back to the east window overlooking the bog, where the waning moon
would rise, and therefore expected to see light cast on the opposite
wall before me; but I had not looked for such a sight as now appeared.
Light indeed glowed on the panels ahead, but it was not any light that
the moon gives. Terrible and piercing was the shaft of ruddy refulgence
that streamed through the Gothic window, and the whole chamber was
brilliant with a splendour intense and unearthly. My immediate actions
were peculiar for such a situation, but it is only in tales that a man
does the dramatic and foreseen thing. Instead of looking out across the
bog toward the source of the new light, I kept my eyes from the window
in panic fear, and clumsily drew on my clothing with some dazed idea of
escape. I remember seizing my revolver and hat, but before it was over
I had lost them both without firing the one or donning the other. After
a time the fascination of the red radiance overcame my fright, and I
crept to the east window and looked out whilst the maddening, incessant
piping whined and reverberated through the castle and over all the
village.
Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and
pouring from the strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of
that ruin I cannot describe—I must have been mad, for it seemed to rise
majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured, the
flame-reflecting marble of its entablature piercing the sky like the
apex of a temple on a mountain-top. Flutes shrieked and drums began to
beat, and as I watched in awe and terror I thought I saw dark saltant
forms silhouetted grotesquely against the vision of marble and
effulgence. The effect was titanic—altogether unthinkable—and I might
have stared indefinitely had not the sound of the piping seemed to grow
stronger at my left. Trembling with a terror oddly mixed with ecstasy I
crossed the circular room to the north window from which I could see
the village and the plain at the edge of the bog. There my eyes dilated
again with a wild wonder as great as if I had not just turned from a
scene beyond the pale of Nature, for on the ghastly red-litten plain
was moving a procession of beings in such a manner as none ever saw
before save in nightmares.
Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were
slowly retreating toward the still waters and the island ruin in
fantastic formations suggesting some ancient and solemn ceremonial
dance. Their waving translucent arms, guided by the detestable piping
of those unseen flutes, beckoned in uncanny rhythm to a throng of
lurching labourers who followed dog-like with blind, brainless,
floundering steps as if dragged by a clumsy but resistless daemon-will.
As the naiads neared the bog, without altering their course, a new line
of stumbling stragglers zigzagged drunkenly out of the castle from some
door far below my window, groped sightlessly across the courtyard and
through the intervening bit of village, and joined the floundering
column of labourers on the plain. Despite their distance below me I at
once knew they were the servants brought from the north, for I
recognised the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very
absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The flutes piped
horribly, and again I heard the beating of the drums from the direction
of the island ruin. Then silently and gracefully the naiads reached the
water and melted one by one into the ancient bog; while the line of
followers, never checking their speed, splashed awkwardly after them
and vanished amidst a tiny vortex of unwholesome bubbles which I could
barely see in the scarlet light. And as the last pathetic straggler,
the fat cook, sank heavily out of sight in that sullen pool, the flutes
and the drums grew silent, and the blinding red rays from the ruins
snapped instantaneously out, leaving the village of doom lone and
desolate in the wan beams of a new-risen moon.
My condition was now one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether I
was mad or sane, sleeping or waking, I was saved only by a merciful
numbness. I believe I did ridiculous things such as offering prayers to
Artemis, Latona, Demeter, Persephone, and Plouton. All that I recalled
of a classic youth came to my lips as the horrors of the situation
roused my deepest superstitions. I felt that I had witnessed the death
of a whole village, and knew I was alone in the castle with Denys
Barry, whose boldness had brought down a doom. As I thought of him new
terrors convulsed me, and I fell to the floor; not fainting, but
physically helpless. Then I felt the icy blast from the east window
where the moon had risen, and began to hear the shrieks in the castle
far below me. Soon those shrieks had attained a magnitude and quality
which cannot be written of, and which make me faint as I think of them.
All I can say is that they came from something I had known as a friend.
At some time during this shocking period the cold wind and the
screaming must have roused me, for my next impression is of racing
madly through inky rooms and corridors and out across the courtyard
into the hideous night. They found me at dawn wandering mindless near
Ballylough, but what unhinged me utterly was not any of the horrors I
had seen or heard before. What I muttered about as I came slowly out of
the shadows was a pair of fantastic incidents which occurred in my
flight; incidents of no significance, yet which haunt me unceasingly
when I am alone in certain marshy places or in the moonlight.
As I fled from that accursed castle along the bog’s edge I heard a new
sound; common, yet unlike any I had heard before at Kilderry. The
stagnant waters, lately quite devoid of animal life, now teemed with a
horde of slimy enormous frogs which piped shrilly and incessantly in
tones strangely out of keeping with their size. They glistened bloated
and green in the moonbeams, and seemed to gaze up at the fount of
light. I followed the gaze of one very fat and ugly frog, and saw the
second of the things which drove my senses away.
Stretching directly from the strange olden ruin on the far islet to the
waning moon, my eyes seemed to trace a beam of faint quivering radiance
having no reflection in the waters of the bog. And upward along that
pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow slowly writhing; a
vague contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen daemons. Crazed
as I was, I saw in that awful shadow a monstrous resemblance—a
nauseous, unbelievable caricature—a blasphemous effigy of him who had
been Denys Barry.
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