“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long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing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. . . .”
Part 1:
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.
Part 2:
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.
Part 3:
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.
